David Vogelpohl (00:04)
Hello everyone and welcome to Growth Stage by FastSpring where we talk about how digital product companies can increase the value of their business. I’m your host David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community through my role at FastSpring and I love to bring the best of the community to you here on Growth Stage. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about how to scale playable and interactive ad strategies and joining us is someone who knows quite a bit about that topic.

welcoming the CEO of Quicksave Elina Arponen. Elina, welcome to Growth Stage.

Elina Arponen (00:39)
Thank you, David. Thank you. It’s great to be here.

David Vogelpohl (00:42)
I’m so excited to have you to talk about this topic. And I know you were just kind of nerding out about this a little bit there at PocketGamer Connect in Helsinki with someone else who’s joining us here, Chip Thurston. Chip, you want to say hi? Chip’s head of gaming here at FastSpring.

Chip Thurston (00:58)
Yeah, hey David. Thank you. Hi Elina Happy to be here chatting with you today. I’m the as David mentioned, I’m the head of gaming here at fast spring really focused on helping our customers market monetize directed consumer. But before past spring I was at scope Lee for a few years and there I worked pretty closely with playable and interactive ads myself. So I hope I have some interesting thoughts to share here too.

David Vogelpohl (01:21)
Well, it’s such a cool topic and I think such an opportunity. And I think there’s a lot of folks out there who are thinking, like, how can I leverage playable and interactive ads in a scalable and really an effective way? And that’s what I’m really looking forward to talking about with both of you today. So for those listening and watching, really what we’re going to cover here are Elina’s thoughts on why playable interactive ads are so compelling to begin with. What makes them hard to produce?

how creative teams can accelerate the production of those ads and other insights into why WebGL is ⁓ revolutionizing ad production, publisher websites, web stores, and beyond. So it’s a bunch of topics here, but really focused on the interactive playable ad strategy. So really excited to kind of dig in here. Now, Elina, I’ve asked this question of Chip, so I’m not going to ask it of him this time, but I’m going to ask it of you as I ask many of our guests.

What was the first game or in game item that you bought with your own money? Not like a, you know, holiday gift or birthday gift, but like you took money that you had and spent money on a game. What was that game?

Elina Arponen (02:31)
This is actually a great question, although I’m going to dodge it a little bit because I don’t remember my own first purchase, I remember very vividly when I was talking to a person who had made their first purchase, because that was the first purchase that I ever heard anyone do. I was at Digital Chocolate and one of our colleagues had made a purchase. I think it was Zynga’s Mafia Wars game in Facebook. She had bought this virtual sword there.

And it was a lunch break and she comes in like, hey, I bought this weapon in this game. And everyone’s like, what, like shocked or confused or excited? And it was because it was a new thing. It was like the very beginning, like the very first games that introduced the in-game purchases. And so it became like this big rumor, like, did you hear, she actually made a purchase already? And like, have you done it? And then I guess we all started from, you know, soon after did our own purchases. But somehow that, because we were already in the industry, we were game developers.

And then it was like a massive thing to happen that someone had made a purchase. So that I remember very vividly. I think my own game sometime after. Yeah. Yeah.

David Vogelpohl (03:35)
Oh, that’s an interesting moment. I hadn’t really thought about when the first time I was exposed to in-game purchases was, you know, you just kind of shifted from like this premium game model to now all of a sudden, you know, in-app purchases are available. But I hadn’t thought about like the moment I might’ve discovered that. That’s super interesting.

What about you Chip? I’m just curious, do you remember the first in app? Your answer was the you’d spent a bunch of quarters on like some sort of like X-Men game and the arcade or something. But what about in app purchases? Do you remember the first time that you were exposed to that?

Chip Thurston (04:10)
You know the first place my mind goes with that is when they debuted Horse Armor as an additional purchase option in one of the Elder Scrolls games and there was this uproar about like, what? doesn’t even do anything! Why would people buy this cosmetic item?

They’re just trying to get more money out of their players. this was before, know, purchases obviously became such a common feature of games as they are today. But it’s funny looking back on that now and how that’s just so in a dime compared to anything that we see in gaming today. But I think that was the first moment I was like, there can be purchases within the game in addition to purchasing the game itself.

David Vogelpohl (04:48)
Yeah, I do remember my kids back in the day coming like, I want to go buy this skin or whatever. And I’m like, why would you pay money for design? And this is in a point in my career where I was really involved with like e-commerce and web store themes. And I’m like, wait a minute, I’m charging for designs on this front and they want to go pay for designs on that front. I felt a little disingenuous, but it’s so interesting how the world has changed. Of course I’ve spent plenty of my money on in game items since then. All right. Well,

Elina, next question is for you. ⁓ I kind of teed up Quicksave a little bit before we got started, but could you tell me about Quicksave and what you do there and what your role is at Quicksave?

Elina Arponen (05:29)
Yeah, yeah. So I’m one of the founders. We have three founding members in the company who’ve all been ⁓ in the gaming industry for quite a long time, like 20 plus years now. But right now what we are focused on is the tool. So what we have is the QS app tool. It’s a tool to do interactive ads without coding. So it’s kind of like a Photoshop for interactive content, you could say. And now what we’ve done lately is also we brought AI into it. So you can also prompt

for the interactive content. If you are not fully satisfied with what the AI did, you can still open it up in the editor and you can still manually perfect what you building, whether it’s an interactive ad or whether it’s something else. But now we are fully focused on this technology on how to bring interactive ads to be more accessible.

David Vogelpohl (06:21)
Yeah, it’s such an interesting point. And prior to tools like QS app, how would people create interactive ads? Is this like a hand coded thing? Help me understand that.

Elina Arponen (06:32)
Yeah, I mean, it is often a hand-coded thing. mean, when we talk about interactive content, is HTML5 or WebGL. I mean, technically it’s WebGL, but some people talk about HTML5, so either way. ⁓ And that is a technology that is available everywhere, like in your mobile, in your TV, in your car, a desktop. I mean, it’s available for the end user, but the actual creation of the WebGL content is often coding.

For interactive ads specifically, there are some tools that also offer kind of template-based solutions. So if the template has the interactive part that you are looking for, then that might be enough. But usually it’s coding. And even the kind of AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT or maybe Lovable they don’t work as well because of the ⁓ kind of formats that are required for interactive ads. Like you need to be specific format, specific size. So if you don’t do some massive coding project,

Even if it’s automated, it may not work in the end result.

David Vogelpohl (07:34)
Yeah, it’s kind of interesting, right? Because with AI, with a few prompts, you can potentially make these interactive experiences. And I kind of like how you’re merging in the AI aspect of that with the ability to, it sounds like, edit it and manipulate it. Because like, just producing AI slop is, I’m guessing, not good enough. You still need that kind of informed human hand. Is that why you’re merging the two together?

Elina Arponen (08:01)
Yeah, well, that’s one reason, but also ⁓ how the tool for us works is that it’s actually producing data. ⁓ So it’s not even doing code, which is like a data format for the interactive ads. And so now what we’ve done is we’ve the AI to use the same, build the same data format so that it kind of keeps the structure, it uses the same validators for the content that we have. And it’s kind of more structured and it’s easy to…

to do iterations and variations of it as well. It doesn’t get out of hand with that because you can modify certain components of yeah, mean, actually working with the AI has been a really fun and actually really fast process because something that we discovered while working with the AI and the tool is like if the AI doesn’t do something correctly, like it’s using some features or filter or something, like a shader incorrectly,

what it boils down to is that probably the inline help in the tool was missing something, like it wasn’t clear. So actually training the AI is pretty much the same as improving your tools documentation now. So which is good for the human user as well, you have better help texts and then the AI, know, the humans don’t always read all that, but the AI does. And then the AI can use that information quite efficiently.

And I do think we’re going to get actually quite good results, especially if you have your game assets and you give that as a starting point. And so the AI can be a massive help, but it’s definitely coming strong. And I don’t think there will be any tools left soon that don’t have a solid AI kind of assistance as well.

David Vogelpohl (09:41)
That makes a lot of sense. Sure. There’s a lot of opportunity there for you and other other platforms like like Quicksave . So let me kind of zoom out for a minute here though, a little bit. And I’m just curious, like why bother with things like playable and interactive ads? Like why not just have a static ad that links to an interactive landing page for my sake of example?

Elina Arponen (10:05)
Yeah, well, I can start, but I think she probably has a lot of info on this as well. I mean, it is pretty well researched that playable ads or interactive ads, work like three times better than video. So it goes for ⁓ the conversion, the retention, how memorable the content is. And it’s quite intuitive because if you get the person kind of interacting with the ad, it helps. You’re actually clicking or tapping the content, not just watching it passively.

Chip Thurston (10:31)
Yeah,

I agree with that. That’s well said. And I would say also it’s a few things about basically meeting players where they are. You’re giving them a native experience to whatever platform it is that they’re on, where they’re doing something and then they encounter this playable ad. They don’t need to go to a third party, like a landing page, to go engage with whatever it is they’re doing.

⁓ You’re giving them obviously an engaging experience. That’s something that’s a bit more than a traditional ad, so the playable nature of it is appealing. And the third part that I always thought of from the game development side is like, so much in game development, we talk about removing friction, right? Whether it’s friction for a new player and getting them into the game easily and installing the game, whether it’s friction through the UA process and the clicks it takes to get from a UA ad to the install to playing the game.

whether it’s friction in the purchase funnel and how you serve and offer in the game and get players through checkout and then back into the game. there’s all these ways we look at friction. Of course, we look at it in the direct-to-consumer space and getting players from the game to a direct-to-consumer purchase platform and then back into the game. But I think it extends to these playable ads as well. It’s really saying, is, you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing and you will experience this playable ad and it is right there.

you’re removing any friction from that process to get players that experience. And then that extends into the install and then playing the game and everything else. So I think it has a really nice role in aligning so much with the strategy of game development too.

Elina Arponen (12:08)
It’s true that you kind of give a piece of the fun, the experience already there in the ad so that you can get the kind of taste of it. ⁓ And although you were kind of comparing it to like landing pages, so I would say like on the websites and web stores, there should be more engaging content as well. That’s kind of another talking point then as well.

David Vogelpohl (12:32)
Yeah, I like that idea of meet the player where they’re at, removing friction. ⁓ I also was interested to hear you, Elina, talk about giving the player kind of a taste. ⁓ Are you do you think most of the people, publishers leveraging Quicksave to make playable ads, are they making like the WebGL, the playable ad version of the game like easier or in some way more enticing than they might experience in the full game? Kind of like how

Some games will make kind of those introductory levels super easy to kind of get you like hooked on playing the game. Is that a common strategy? You see publishers when they make these playable ads with Quicksave Elina.

Elina Arponen (13:14)
Yeah, well, I’d say that you might want to make it easy in the sense that the player needs to, or the person needs to understand the kind of rules of the game on what’s happening here. So playable ad is only like 15, 30 seconds snippet. But in that time, you should still give them a sense of like, what this game is about, how does it function?

And ideally like a little bit of sense of progress, like some kind of a-ha moment that, I achieved something and that kind of is a hook. And it might be that in the game, that kind of a-ha comes a little bit later than in the first 30 seconds, but it might not. It depends on the game and how fast it comes. So sometimes in the ad you might speed it up a little bit, but it definitely needs to be truthful to the game. So you don’t kind of do things that are not in the game.

David Vogelpohl (14:08)
player spending like a good amount of time. Like I walked up to my daughter the other day and she’d been messing around on this iPad for a little bit. like, what are you doing? And she goes, I’m playing an ad. And I was like, okay. but if she had been playing it for a while, like her people are these playable ads. You want to like engage with them for like a long period of time.

Chip Thurston (14:24)
Yeah,

think ⁓ strategically it can be the case where it really depends on how you build your ad. You could build a really closed loop playable ad and say like you step one, step two, step three, and then that’s it. And there’s nothing further to do or you could make it. So it is just this kind of endlessly engaging experience. It depends on what the goal is and the strategy of the game using that playable ad. But I think you’re keying in on a really important point here, David, which is ⁓ what makes a good

playable ad is sometimes different from what makes a good game, right, in terms of the gameplay. And so you do need to think about how you represent that. Sometimes it does need to be made easier or something where you streamline the process a little bit such that you can engage players through that playable ad, which is a much more bite-sized form of content, and then get them into the game where it’s this much more long tail, much more…

engaging over a longer period of time and experience. But Elina, what are your thoughts on the endless experience versus having a more closed loop system there?

Elina Arponen (15:31)
Yeah, no, I think I agree. It depends on a little bit on the game. And ⁓ I would actually, ⁓ with your particular game, who doing the ads, like test it out, like do iterations. Like in a true kind of performance marketing manner, you should have multiple, ⁓ always like ⁓ creatives in the testing. So if you are producing like, I don’t know, hundreds of images, hundreds of videos, why not have…

similarly a lot of playable ads to test that. you could also, I would kind of try different lengths if the gameplay seems to be some such that it kind of lends itself to either option. It’s more often short than long that I’ve discovered, but yeah, there are the long options as well.

David Vogelpohl (16:17)
Yeah, and I like your point about testing and making sure you’re leveraging strategies that work best for you, your game and your players. So let’s get back to like producing these ads. I often describe WebGL as like it’s the new flash. Basically, maybe that’s a bad way to frame it. But I’m just curious, like if you could do a double click, Elina, unlike

Why are the ads so hard to produce? mean, maybe you could like vibe code something, but like in general producing a good ad, why is that so hard to do ⁓ currently?

Elina Arponen (16:52)
I guess it’s to do with the process. If you are coding it, if it’s quite manual to produce the ad, like make a game snippet in WebGL, ⁓ then your iteration speed is also ⁓ slower. We want to bring the most value, like increasing the iteration speed, which means that you can also create more of the variations. And then you can…

actually do this performance marketing where you have a lot of options to test out. If it takes many weeks to do the ad and if it’s very costly, then you’re less likely to have multiple copies and so forth.

David Vogelpohl (17:37)
If I’m a UA specialist and I’m trying to get new players into my game and I have an idea for a new ad unit and it’s playable and I have developers and designers that are helping me create these WebGL interactive playable ads and I kind of give the idea to them, they go off, take a week or so to make the ad and then I can deploy it. This sounds like

what you’re describing is like this process can even just a couple of weeks can be way too slow and you’re not able to iterate and test different variations quickly. You’re kind of sitting around and like waiting on the backlog to get resolved. So your idea can be made a reality. ⁓ it sounds like what you’re saying is like when you’re manually creating them, relying heavily on designers and developers, it can be slow to produce.

and reduce the number of variations that you can test. Does that sound about right?

Elina Arponen (18:39)
Yeah, yeah. So with ⁓ like a good tool and a faster process, even if the first ad, let’s say the first ad, takes hours or even like, let’s say days to make the first one. But then if you are able to kind of iterate and make variations quickly, that can be a huge, benefit as well. And the wipe coding has been mentioned a few times, but that is kind of difficult with the, you cannot have… ⁓

But obviously, needs to be very error-free. It needs to be quite small packets that you are delivering to the ad network. So there are all these kind of ⁓ restrictions on the output, technically how the output needs to be, especially if you are doing the interactive ad for these ad networks. All right.

David Vogelpohl (19:25)
It sounds like what you’re saying is that when I create these ads or when my team creates them, if it’s this manual process, of course it can slow me down. But you also kind of pointed out that maybe if I’m using templates or reusing and iterating on assets, this might be one way where I can speed up the process. I could also, of course, use a platform like QS app by Quicksave .

QS app usable by non-technical or least non-developers? Like as a marketer, can I go in and create these ads?

Elina Arponen (19:57)
Yeah, that’s the aim of it. So it’s being developed for artists and designers to be used by them. It’s actually ⁓ coming out from our ⁓ game development ⁓ editor originally and then we’ve repackaged it. So it’s an editor that’s been built over actually many years to be usable by non-technical people. And now with AI, ⁓ it is ⁓ obviously becoming even easier to use.

because you can get that AI help. ⁓ Right now though, we also can help a team to get started and maybe even make the first ad and so forth. So if you are not looking to use the tool, but you just for now want to get the ad and we can help with that too. ⁓ But yeah, mean, this is the goal on making it so fast that it’s anyone’s…

⁓ Anyone can do it and it’s really accessible. Right now it is the most effective ad format, but it’s still not used by everyone. It’s kind of out of reach for smaller companies, for the public. That’s how I’ve ⁓ kind of discovered.

David Vogelpohl (21:09)
that’s an interesting point. So it’s not just like I’m a UA or whatever marketer inside a publisher and I’m stuck waiting on developers. So I might use something like QS app to free myself from the developers backlog jail, but it’s also for smaller publishers who just don’t even have the resources to facilitate that. It sounds like by providing this type of service, it allows you to open up the possibility of interactive playable ads to more folks.

That sounds really helpful. then you said this is how kind of Quicksave helps achieve this with QS app. sounds like you’re also like working with them to create their first ads. Is that correct?

Elina Arponen (21:51)
Yeah, we can also work on the ads and help the team to kind of get started or even like, yeah, just be the users of the tool either way. Yeah.

David Vogelpohl (22:05)
Awesome. Now Chip, at your time at Scopely and before that, I guess at SciPlay or whatever, ⁓ when you created or had interactive playable ads that you were leveraging for the games you were working on, ⁓ were these hand coded? mean, were you waiting in line for the developers to make the ads for you?

Chip Thurston (22:26)
Yeah, it was cumbersome. I would say we used a third party agency. When we would do that, we would send them the brief and here’s what we’re looking for from the playable ad, get that back. Effective UA requires iteration, right? So then we would have back and forth. And I think if you ask why do playable ads take so long, I would have to say like, I’m part of the problem here because whenever I would get that ad, would…

really poke holes in it and say, okay, we need to change this part, let’s change that part. I was working on a game ⁓ with ⁓ IP-based, very famous characters. So that meant these characters had to be represented effectively in line with that IP. Not only that, after I would go through my rounds of feedback and iteration, which to your point would take weeks of back and forth, we then have to go to the licensor.

say, okay, licensor, do you approve this creative? And they might say, this character needs to be doing that instead of this, right? So then we take that back to the agency. And so you just have all these feedback loops. So yeah, it would take a long time. And it was really an uphill battle for us to leverage playable ads, as opposed to more traditional static or video ads, where just the cycle was so much quicker. And so that’s where I kind of wish I would have known about Quicksave back then, because that would have streamlined so much of our processes.

Elina Arponen (23:46)
This is pretty new. I don’t think this tool existed with us back then. ⁓ At least for us like this has ⁓ become available this year only. ⁓ Actually since August. So it’s a pretty new thing.

David Vogelpohl (24:05)
So the value then it sounds like for you Chip is like there’s always going to be this back and forth, right? You’re always going to poke holes and whatever the thing is, the licensors are always going to have their point of view. And so by reducing some of the technical complexity, it can help just draft, you just drastically across the board, shorten the cycles, but you’re still going to have the cycles, but by enabling your creative teams to produce more of this content.

versus having to have developers or outsource much of it seems like it could be incredibly valuable.

Chip Thurston (24:39)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I would say the extension of that is also giving me more shots on goal, right? Like I’m able to crank out a lot more volume of playable ads because we are lessening those feedback cycles, right? So we’ll still have the iterations, we’ll have the cycles, but as a result, therefore I can crank out more playable ads and then I can optimize better. And that was the part that always fell short for me trying to leverage playable ads was I had this very mature

a static and video ad section of my user acquisition strategy. Then I playable ads where I was confident in the theory behind it and everything we talked about about meeting players where they are and the engaging experience you give them. But it takes time. It takes time to find the right creative, what resonates with your potential players, what works in what forums.

That takes a lot of iteration and cycles of running different types of ads. And so I think just the volume is a critical piece, but at the end of the day, being able to get more volume is a function of being able to do that more quickly, like you can with a Quicksave platform.

David Vogelpohl (25:47)
Yeah, Elina pointed this out as well, like the idea of like number of iterations and variations and the ability to produce more of them. And I think it’s kind of interesting because I often think of like the world of advertising has shifted away from kind of like the madman era where ⁓ advertising people go in a room and drink a bunch of scotch and smoke cigarettes and come out with the perfect idea.

to where now we can iterate and test and understand, then I still feel like in gaming writ large, you kind of have this moment of like, I’m going to spend a lot of time somewhere and come back with like the perfect thing. And I have less ability to iterate, especially if I’m like doing a big release, like it’s out there and people are playing it and being exposed to it. And it’s affecting my reputation in the long run. But it sounds like with these ads, have more abilities to iterate and play around.

⁓ Is that a fair way to look at it?

Chip Thurston (26:44)
Yeah, I think so. Because you don’t… I shouldn’t say you. I was surprised a lot of the time with what UA would tend to break through. I would say, okay, I have this ad, I’m very confident in, I love this concept. And then we have this other one that maybe it’s a spin-off of that or it’s taking some weird feature in our game and really putting the spotlight on that. And we’ll try and add around it, why not? And then we try that and for whatever reason it outperforms the other creative.

So we’ll go lean into that, right? But that’s so much of what UA strategy is about is just throwing so many different things against the wall, seeing what sticks and then running with that and iterating on that. And that’s the way to finding a very impactful UA strategy.

David Vogelpohl (27:29)
Excellent. All right, Elina, the last question is for you. ⁓ So we’ve talked about WebGL a lot in the context of playable and interactive ads, but what else can WebGL be used for?

Elina Arponen (27:43)
Yeah, this is great question. mean, as I said, the, yeah, we’ve been doing like the playable ads, like since, since August, but we’ve actually done other WebGL content since, since earlier. So if you have like a, well, any website really, but you have a web shop, you have a web store, you probably want to have the visitors that come there to be engaged and stay on the site longer.

So now that lot of mobile game companies are also building their kind of site stores, ⁓ I would see that they should be a little bit more of a destination so that the players going to that store would find it engaging, exciting, to be more like a continuation of the game experience as well. So you can definitely have WebGL content. mean, normal website builders.

⁓ don’t use WebGL, they use HTML. You can do a lot of nice things. You can have videos and can have sparkly images, but to use WebGL content, ⁓ you can make it more engaging and you can have a continuation of the stories or the games even there. And ⁓ I think that would be quite beneficial in the end. So definitely I see that using WebGL content.

elsewhere as well. Of course, you can build whole web apps, just embedding ⁓ smaller things, of like in the sense that it’s a playable ad is embedded inside an app where it’s being advertised. You can embed WebGL content on a website.

David Vogelpohl (29:16)
I like this idea of like a playable web store. Maybe that’s a topic for another time. I had not thought about the implications of things like that, but it is really interesting. And you know, when we optimize web experiences in general, I like to think of it as like the balance between suffering and joy, the joy of new experiences and interactive content and the suffering of page load time.

And meaning that the more we add, the slower the page will load. But there’s such an opportunity here, I feel with such an engaged user base of players who are interested in playing and interacting and bringing that to life in unique and interesting ways on the web. Now my brain is like twisting with ideas around this. I’m going to have to go play this on WebVue.

Elina Arponen (30:05)
long times can really be kind of worked around with, it doesn’t have to become an issue. ⁓

David Vogelpohl (30:10)
Yeah, maybe we’ll do a different episode on page load time with WebGL and otherwise. But this was super interesting. Thank you so much for joining us today, Elina.

Elina Arponen (30:20)
Thank you. Thank you for having me. mean, it was a great topic, conversation. And yeah, good times. Yeah.

David Vogelpohl (30:28)
And Chip, thanks for joining again as well.

Chip Thurston (30:32)
Always a pleasure.

David Vogelpohl (30:33)
Awesome. And thanks everyone else for watching and listening today. If you’d like to learn more about what Elina is up to, you can visit quicksave.fi. Thanks for joining the Growth Stage podcast. Again, I’m your host, David Vogelpohl I support the digital product community as part of my role at FastSpring . And I love to bring the best of the community to you here on Growth Stage.

Jesse Paliotto (00:04)

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Growth Stage podcast by FastSpring, where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products, increase the value of their business. I’m your host, Jesse Paliotto. I love being part of the community, and I love bringing the best of the community to you here on the podcast. Today we have with us Hank Hoffmeier from Kickbox. I’m so pumped to have him here. Email marketing is often hailed as the highest ROI channel for marketing, especially in SaaS and digital businesses.

But what happens when your emails don’t even make it to the inbox? So in this episode, we’re going to talk with Hank. He’s Director of Operations, but the email deliverability evangelist, more importantly, at Kickbox, about how authentication, verification, deliverability impacts your bottom line. So we’re going to learn why deliverability is no longer a set it and forget it process and how to fix common mistakes that could be silently killing your campaigns and communications. Hank, thanks so much for being here today, man. I really appreciate it.

Hank Hoffmeier (00:59)

Yeah, thanks for the invite. It’s exciting to be here and talk about email marketing and how it’s a crucial role for any type of company.

Jesse Paliotto (01:06)

Absolutely. I know we were joking for a second before we hit record that it can sometimes feel like the dark art off in the corner of like, how does that all happen? So today we’re gonna reveal the dark arts or whatever. I don’t know. Something like that. ⁓ Can you just to get us kind of into it, can you talk a little bit, why is email still such a high R— ROI channel? If I can spit that out, especially for SaaS companies or digital companies.

Hank Hoffmeier (01:31)

Interestingly enough, I like to do videos almost every day on various social media platforms, short form, and I did one this morning and it was a, did you know, and it was, did you know that email marketing, the first marketing email was sent in 1978 and made $13 million. And I was encouraging people, it’s Monday, but you might not make $13 million, but send an email. Yes, it is the marketing channel of choice by people that know what they’re looking at when it comes to numbers. Just the most affordable, provides the highest ROI,

and most importantly, and this is coming out more and more, I’ve heard it over the last few years, but more importantly, I’ve heard it in the last few months at conferences is it’s an owned audience. You own your audience. Of course you have to upload it to a platform to send emails, but you can take— it’s portable. If you’re on social media and you do something wrong or don’t do something wrong, but you get reported, you can have your account suspended, banned, or killed. You just lost that audience. It’s called rented land. A lot of people do marketing on rented land. On Facebook,

you know, if you’re running ads and then doing posts and boosting your posts and you get your account suspended, you just lost that audience. With email marketing, Like I said, you own that audience. You could stay in touch with them. You can make it feel like a personalized one-on-one conversation through the use of personalization and merge data. And it just, to me, it’s a no brainer to either just get started or go back and revisit what you’re doing. If you feel like that has fell off of a cliff or something.

more more I have these conversations and get people excited about bringing email back into their platforms and their marketing efforts again.

Jesse Paliotto (03:06)

Yeah, I’m curious like, has there been any changes over the last few years? Has anything kind of modified or is it still the same game as it was from 10 years ago? And is there anything that like founders or marketers should be thinking about like, hey, this is how.

Hank Hoffmeier (03:23)

there’s been changes and then there’s a lot of fundamentals that people don’t even know about. mentioned like dark arts and people don’t know. And oftentimes I go to conferences and I talk about the basics and getting things set up and doing it right so that you are successful right away. And it amazes me how many people in the audience are new to email marketing or have been doing it for a while, but just don’t know some of the things that I end up talking about. And when I started at,

Eye Contact, which is a sister company to Kickbox, both owned by Ziff Davis. You know, I went into account management. said, I know how email works, right? You get a list of subscribers, you create an email, you send it you make money. It’s not that easy. You mentioned it. First, your email needs to get to the inbox. It needs to be viewed. And first and foremost, you need to have a valid email address to send to. And that’s where Kickbox comes in is we validate email addresses.

Now lot of times people say, OK, I’ll upload a list where I’ll connect it to my HubSpot and validate my email addresses or HubSpot said, hey, my list is old, may have a lot of email addresses that are no longer valid, and they’re going to recommend that I go to kickbox to clean my list. And that happens. And sure, by all means, do that. But the missing link, as I call it, is verifying it when it first comes in. Let’s say you have a sign up form.

A lot of your audience probably have has a website. Maybe you have a sign up form or you’re looking to add one. You should be doing that on the fly. If I fill out my the form on your website and I put hank at g nail dot com and I spell it with an N by mistake. I finger it right. The form, if set up correctly with an API, can say, did you mean Gmail and automatically allow them to correct it? Or if I type in Hank FG.

At gmail.com and I didn’t mean to put the FG and it’s an invalid email address. It’ll say this is an invalid email. Just please try again. Custom like Citibank Major League Baseball and Reddit use us in that manner. Not saying only big companies can do that. We also have some partners that work with us to work with WordPress forms with gravity forms, small companies, and they’re able to do that. You can use the API. Anybody can use the API, but first and foremost.

Validate your email addresses, then decide if you want to use what’s called risky email addresses like disposable email addresses. Those are on the rise. That’s one thing that’s changing. Then there’s role email addresses like admin at and marketing at now. Why is that dangerous? If somebody signed up for marketing at whatever company.com, maybe I signed up for your email using that email address. And then three months later I leave the organization and then you, Jesse, you’re checking the emails because you got that new.

responsibility and you say I didn’t sign up for this email. I don’t remember it. You market a spam or you know unsubscribe from it. It’s up to you and the type of business you’re in whether or not that’s important and it also depends on other things as far as your engagement rates. But those are things to look for. Disposables, the role addresses and then there’s the free like do you want to accept Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft or do you not? Do you only want B2B domains? You might see that you may fill out a form and will say please provide a business email because you tried using a Gmail.

That’s another thing that providers like kickbox and other ones that do validation offer is the ability to filter those out on the fly if you want to, or in a report. Next is email authentication. And a lot of people forget this and years ago, maybe it wasn’t as important and you didn’t really have to do that. What is email authentication? It is basically showing these email providers or the recipient servers that you are safe, secure and trustable.

Jesse Paliotto (07:05)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (07:06)

And I’m to go into detail here because the first one is SPF and it’s not something you put on your skin to protect you from sun damage, right? It’s called sender policy framework. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (07:10)

Yeah, bring it.

I wanted to ask you about this because I feel like these terms

get thrown around and I’m not sure people always know truly what they are. So yeah, do this. This is great.

Hank Hoffmeier (07:21)

Let’s go through this and try to make it understandable. SPF is sender policy framework. This means let’s say I’m sending emails from hankhoffmeyer.com, but I’m using MailChimp. The recipient server is going to say, this email is being sent by Hank, but MailChimp’s actually sending it. Does MailChimp have permission to send us emails? What it’s asking for. Now MailChimp and other providers, they’re automatically going to do this SPF set up for you. And I contact our sister company who I worked for for 13 years.

Jesse Paliotto (07:43)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (07:51)

They do this automatically. Now you may have another provider or you have your own server. Just make sure you have SPF set up and that would be in say your hosting provider like GoDaddy. I always mention X it’s well known. You go into GoDaddy and you go into your DNS. If you’re technical, you know what I’m talking about. If not use chat GPT, right? Or ask your email provider. How do I set this up?

And then you’re to go in and put a text record in and it’s going to be the SPF record. It’s going to identify, say MailChimp as a sender for me is what it’s doing to dumb it down. Then there’s DKIM, Domain Keys Identified Mail. Simply said, this means that the email has not been altered or changed during transmission. It hasn’t been hacked. It hasn’t been injected with malware. There’s end-to-end encryption. This is something that your provider, email provider, or you need to set up. Most times your provider will send you this information or it’ll be in your control panel.

Go to GoDaddy, whatever hosting provider you have, enter these DNS records and validate it and you can check it and make sure it’s valid. And then the last one is called DMARC, Domain Based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance. That’s a mouthful. Really, even though it’s the longest acronym, it basically says, do you have SPF and DMARC set up? mean, DKIM set up. And if you don’t, what do we do with this email? What I always recommend is setting it up and then there is pass, fail, and ignore, right? Kind of.

And I would recommend just doing ⁓ doing no, none ⁓ fail and quarantine is what it would be right. None, rejecting quarantine is the correct terms set up as none. What this does is allow you to see if anybody is actually spoofing your emails. Maybe some company from a foreign country is sending emails on your behalf, trying to steal information from people. You can actually see this.

Jesse Paliotto (09:20)

Yes, ⁓

Hank Hoffmeier (09:35)

And a fun thing is you’ll actually see, Oh, it looks like the dev team is actually sending out a newsletter. We didn’t even know about it. And, know, cause you could see that they’re doing that and what email address they’re using and what domain they’re using, but then you can send it to quarantine or reject. And this is going to be something that’s required. The reason why I mentioned these three is these are required right now from Yahoo, Microsoft, and Gmail. If you don’t have this pretty much your emails are going to going to go to spam.

Now you might have a listener that’ll say, well, Hank, some of my recipients are still getting the email and they’re replying to it. I know they’re getting my email. What do you mean? Sure. If somebody is highly engaged and they’re opening, clicking your emails, they’ll continue to get the email. Now somebody going and going to your website and filling out a form and you’re using authentication for a kickbox. Then what happens is they don’t get that welcome email. They don’t get subsequent emails because it’s going to spam.

Another item you can add, and this is not required, optional, it’s called BIMI, brand indicators for message identification. Now, if you look and say Gmail is the perfect way to describe this, you may see either a logo or like a K for kickbox in a circle, like a red circle. The reason why it would be a logo is because BIMI is set up. Again, you have to have SPFD, Kim, and DMARC. You do have to have a verified domain.

There’s a couple options and it does cost some money anywhere from $800 to $1,500. You may need to have a what’s called a VMC certificate and then to go through this process of verifying you own the domain, right? Which is critical for this. And really what that does is it provides a way for users to trust you in the inbox that your domain showing up. OK, this is Best Buy. This is their subject line. I probably can trust them. I’ll open it. Whereas if it’s just Hank Hoffmeier and Assistant H, can you trust that? Maybe, maybe not.

But those are the authentication methods and things that you need to worry about when it comes to sending emails. Right. And I mentioned Microsoft, Yahoo and Gmail. like to call them “Yahooglesoft,” but we can also say MAGY, which would be Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Yahoo, because Apple and I can mean my phones right here. And let’s say I put it face down. I’m not even looking at it, Jesse, and you send me an email and I’m using the built in email

Jesse Paliotto (11:41)

Mm. Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (11:54)

app from Apple, right? And I can use that with Gmail, Yahoo, et cetera. It’s going to count as an open whether or not even looked at my email or not. I mean, never look at your email, but it’s going to count as an open. lot of people like to look at opens as a metric of success. In other words, at 20, 30, 40 % open rate where that’s kind of a almost a dead metric. It’s still OK to look at it. Realistically, you want to look at clicks and make sure that people are clicking your email

Jesse Paliotto (12:19)

Well, let me let me let me go back a paragraph. I just want to make sure that I grabbed that, because that was a lot of sort of dense definitions. But I this is my simplistic way that I heard you. So a ⁓ the SPF is a text file. In your. Domain settings the. Or. It’s the host and then.

Hank Hoffmeier (12:39)

or host that mostly most times is the host. But it could be

on the domain. It just depends on how your website set up nine times out of 10. It’s the host.

Jesse Paliotto (12:48)

And the DKIM is an encryption that’s running in order to make sure that contents are not altered during send, right? Okay, DMARC is essentially a policy that runs sort of if-thens, that if it sees these signals, do this with the email, either let it go through, possibly quarantine it, possibly put it into the spam folder. And then BIMI, in my weird brain, it’s the blue check mark on Twitter.

Hank Hoffmeier (12:54)

It’s making sure there’s encryption, yes.

Yes.

Jesse Paliotto (13:15)

You’re paying in order to get a brand trust signal that shows up right next to your message in the inbox. Is that Jesse’s dummy dumbing it down? is that where? The clip notes version. OK, so this is ⁓ before the Apple thing on the 30 % is a really interesting thing. Let me ask you really quick on a sidetrack before we come back to that. What do you see companies messing up? That’s that’s too negative. What’s the biggest opportunity you see that companies have when it comes to?

Hank Hoffmeier (13:16)

Yes.

Yes. Yeah, I like it. What do we call those Cliff Notes? Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (13:45)

getting what you just said with all those settings.

Hank Hoffmeier (13:49)

When it comes to getting the settings right is they’re not actually implementing it. They don’t have it. They don’t know that they need to implement it and then making sure it’s correct.

Jesse Paliotto (14:01)

Yeah. So just straight up awareness, just knowing that there’s these pieces that need to be put into place. Is the obstacle. Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (14:08)

Yep. And there’s a tool. Let me, this is important about my dot email.

If you go there and you recently set up or you want to check your authentication, that’s a good tool about my.email. It will tell you if you have SPF, DMARC and DKIM and even BIMI set up and set up correctly.

Jesse Paliotto (14:27)

that’s a great tip. ⁓ if you’re, you know, shout out to anybody that’s new to the marketing team on the operations team, trying to get a quick read on things, you could go to there and get an immediate readout on your own or potentially even competitors or somebody.

Hank Hoffmeier (14:41)

Yeah, somebody could start in a marketing team and they’re head of marketing and they were told, yeah, we set up authentication years ago or last month. You may want to verify that.

Jesse Paliotto (14:50)

Yeah, does it change over time? Is there anything that would alter ⁓ those settings or once they’re set up they’re permanent?

Hank Hoffmeier (14:57)

Maybe you change the, ⁓ the domain you’re sending from or something like that, usually they’re kind of permanent or maybe you moved from MailChimp to Constant Contact and you never updated your records, right? ⁓ that could be a huge red flag and cause it to fail. And then a lot of people tend to use Microsoft email still.

A lot of times sometimes it’s hard to set up something with what’s called IP lookups because every domain has one or more IPs and I believe that the SPF record holds only about 10. So in other words, if you use it in Microsoft, I think it automatically uses like six to eight, I think. And then if you’re adding five more, it’s going to put you over that limit and it will fail. And there’s workarounds for that. We won’t get into that because it’s like highly technical.

Jesse Paliotto (15:42)

Yeah, interesting. And I know from my experience in SaaS companies, the entire company is often not using the same email platform. So you may have marketing team using MailChimp. You may be having the product team using Railgun or something to shoot out ⁓ system messages. You could be having sales team using other outreach techniques for outbound. So I would say that’s the thing that also strikes me with that is

It’s not just validating one system. It should be across the company, I would guess.

Hank Hoffmeier (16:14)

Yeah, and if you’re using many platforms, make sure you’re synchronizing your unsubscribes because you don’t want to get in trouble there.

Jesse Paliotto (16:20)

Yeah, that’s ⁓ interesting. Yeah. Okay, let’s go back then. Thanks for letting me kind of like circle around for a second there. ⁓ Can you get us back into, so Apple with ⁓ open rates, you’re, and this is going, I’ve seen this in a number of articles, people will talk about this, that your open rate as a metric is no longer as meaningful as it was because your phone is auto opening anything it gets. ⁓ So what do we do with open rate?

Do people still quote benchmarks and say, oh, know, if you’re in this type of business, you should be having a 40 % open rate? Or do you even think about that, or do just throw the whole thing out?

Hank Hoffmeier (16:56)

You can eyeball it and it’s a good way. You know, if your list isn’t holistically changing a lot as a, you know, an informal metric, you know, if you’re steadily in the twenties or going up, then you’re doing well. But if all of a sudden there’s a big drop or a big spike, you might want to look into why that happened. Um, you know, if you added a bunch of, uh, people that may be using Apple, then you obviously know there be some jumps, but most people don’t usually steady grow over time because you should be.

using permission based email marketing. In other words, never buying a list and adding your million email addresses that you purchased because there’s a lot of issues there because not only does Yahoo Google soft require that you have this authentication, they’re also looking at your spam complaint levels. If they’re over 0.3 % or 3 % per thousand of each of these domains, not overall, you will be dinged again. And also

cause what’s called IP or domain reputation damage. The same thing with your bounces, right? And that’s why kickbox is important and validating emails. If you send too many emails to too many emails that are invalid and they bounce again, that hurts your ⁓ reputation as well. And what I’m talking about here is every time you send an email, let’s say I’m using hankhofmeyer.com and I send to a hundred Gmail subscribers. I like to use Gmail cause they’re the most strict with their algorithms, et cetera.

And then over time, 50 % or 50 of them are either bouncing, mark me a spam or worse unsubscribing and even ignoring my emails. That is a bad signal and people don’t realize that. That’s why list hygiene is important. If that starts happening and my credit score is 50, again, I’m going to run into trouble and Gmail, Yahoo, whatever server is going to say, Hank’s not a really reputable sender. Let’s send more and more of your emails.

his emails to the spam folder and that’s what happens. And you mentioned like, what is the biggest thing that marketers either have an opportunity for with authentication, but the biggest overall opportunity is value, right? Making sure that you’re sending emails that your subscribers want that they opted into that’s. Educative, informative or helpful in some way, not what you as a marketer saying, I have the best email in the world and I love it. Everybody else should love it too.

Jesse Paliotto (18:56)

Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (19:16)

Make sure you’re sending relevant emails and testing, know, split testing. A lot of these platforms have ways of taking a portion of your list and testing it to see if it’s going to do well because yeah, authentication is important. Verification is important and your IP and your domain reputation is important. I don’t mention IP a lot because usually smaller senders are going to be on what’s called a shared IP like MailChimp constant contact. They have a bunch of IPs that all their customers share.

Jesse Paliotto (19:38)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (19:43)

But if you’re a huge center and you’re sending millions of emails a day, it might be worth looking into what’s called a dedicated IP, having your own IP address, then you’re holistically responsible for the reputation of that IP address. And how I meant like to mention this is years and years and years ago when spammers would sign up for a service, they would send out spam and it would be the IP reputation that made it an issue, right? Okay. They’re on this IP address. They’re sending spam. Any emails coming from this IP leads block.

Jesse Paliotto (19:51)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (20:12)

Then they would just say, okay, well I’m leaving this ESP and I’m gonna go over here to this one now and burn their IPs. Then they burn those IPs and they go somewhere else. What happened is there’s been a change. Number one, these providers start blocking people. And then two is the powers that be said, well, let’s start looking at the domain. Okay, if they use this provider and they’re sending crappy emails, that domain reputation is gonna follow you over to this other provider. And that’s what’s happened over time.

Jesse Paliotto (20:40)

Oh, interesting. Thank you. That was a helpful summary because I know I’ve looked at that in the past and tried to track like, why did this reputation, you know, why did it persist? Can you talk a little bit about list hygiene? Because I feel like this kind of gets us into like, if I’ve got 10,000 member list or 100,000 or million, it doesn’t really matter. And I want to make sure that what you’re describing isn’t happening, that people aren’t ignoring, spamming, just throwing in junk.

then know my I’ve heard that you know well you want to clean your list and take away people that are actively not engaged but I’m getting false signals now from my phone or from their phone rather that are auto opening that how do I approach ⁓ hygiene on my list in light of all of that.

Hank Hoffmeier (21:25)

And the advice can be generic and it could also depend on what industry you’re in and how many times you’re sending an email. If you send an email once a quarter versus once a month versus once a week, your timeframes can be different. let’s say average, you want to look at six months. If somebody hasn’t opened and clicked an email in six months, it might be good to put them into a sequence and asking people if they still want to receive your emails.

Now I’ve seen this done well on people that are in our space because we all know marketers know what’s happening. And there’s a newsletter I belong to that every now and then they’ll say, Hey, we all know that Microsoft Yahoo and all these other providers want to see engagement. Please click this link if you want to still receive our emails. I actually got one from a well-known brand doing something similar saying, we noticed that you may not have engaged with our emails in a while.

If you still want to receive our emails, please click this link to let us know to keep sending you emails. Now that was great. Wonderful. The thing I think the mistake they made is I clicked on the link and I went to their homepage. That’s it. Like just dropped on their homepage. You should have a, think in my opinion, have a specific landing page. That’s simple. That just says, thank you for clicking on the link in the email or thank you for letting us know you still want to receive emails from us. Now, if you want to put an offer on that page or put something else, picture of a clown, whatever you want.

Jesse Paliotto (22:31)

Yeah, missed opportunity.

Hank Hoffmeier (22:48)

Just make it so that, like I said, it’s valuable, right? Don’t just drop somebody to homepage and maybe they’re gonna buy something or you were just lazy to set something up. Maybe you do something where you sell something that people don’t buy too often. Like you sell, I used to work with a client that sold reading glasses and also regular glasses. I don’t know if you wear glasses at all or not, but I do. How often would I buy glasses? Maybe the most once a year. Why should I be sending somebody an email once a week, which is what this client was doing?

Jesse Paliotto (23:13)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (23:17)

We moved to once a month, but then we also started limiting how much promotion was in there. Started providing information like blog posts about organic health for your eyes, how to clean your glasses, repair them, gave them more value to stay in touch with them. So basically my, guess I want to give some advice. Like if you don’t send the emails too often because you say we only send once a quarter because that’s the industry we’re in.

find ways to keep in touch with them and send them an email a little bit more often so that you do have that data and those metrics. And then you use that sequence of emails, send them one email asking if they still want to receive it, waiting a week, two weeks. If they didn’t open that first email, send them a second one. It’s kind of like, are we breaking up question mark, the first one, right? Then they don’t open that. The next one’s like, here’s the divorce papers, right? And then you have some information in there. And then the last one, if they didn’t open the previous two is,

Sign sealed and delivered. We will remove you from now. Hey, maybe email is not your thing. Follow us on Facebook. Follow us on LinkedIn. You know, whatever you want to do. Try to promote that as well, because maybe they’re getting them or they got that last one and they opened it, but they still don’t want to engage with your emails. Maybe social media is their thing. Then follow through and then you can use automation to automatically remove them or manually remove them. The beauty is folks, you can add them back at any time. That’s the thing is they can come back at any time. Some companies just

Jesse Paliotto (24:37)

Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (24:41)

Some marketers want to hold onto those email and say, they’re going to open up at some time and we need to be in their inbox even if they don’t open. Because now we also have the AI summaries where Apple is automatically summarizing these emails for you as well. You have to fight that battle too.

Jesse Paliotto (24:56)

Can you talk about that for a second? What does that look like for people that may not have experienced that?

Hank Hoffmeier (25:01)

Right. And there’s no telltale way as to exactly how it’s going to look for each individual person. I can look at my phone right now and any emails that I’ve gotten while we’ve been talking, it would summarize it for me. And it can even summarize that one specific email if I open it at the top. Play around with your copy. Your copy is more important than ever, making sure it’s concise and valuable. This way the summary is going to reflect what you have in your content.

If you’re using a lot of fluff words and you’re not really getting to the point, keep in mind that that could be pulled into the AI summary. And, you know, there’s a lot of jokes going around because some of it’s kind of funny or, know, there’s always there’s been like two I’ve heard where somebody had a death in a family and the summary was just hilarious. And it’s still a work in progress and they’re not going to be perfect, but that is something that we’re all going to have to learn together because it’s kind of newer.

Gmail starting to summarize emails now. If I gave you my work email address and you’re sending me emails, it’s going to summary at the top. Make sure that you’re optimizing for that. It’s almost like SEO and almost.

Jesse Paliotto (26:08)

Yeah, the AI summary with the death of the family, which is very, I mean, it was probably tragic for the person experiencing that. It reminds me of the story from years ago of, I think it was Target’s auto coupons, where I think it was the woman was pregnant and that coupon or something showed up, said, looks like you’re pregnant. Do you need these products? And the husband or somebody didn’t know and that’s how they found out. And it was just like the system is trying to be so smart.

you’ve got to, it can follow you up, you’ve to be smarter than the system.

Hank Hoffmeier (26:42)

Exactly.

Jesse Paliotto (26:44)

The ⁓ with sending. I’m curious because I’ve read recently around long form being making a bit of a comeback and a lot of different channels. Have you seen that with email? know kickbox probably has access to a lot of data. I’m not sure how much of that you can share, but do you have any insights on like in terms of getting engagement so that you do have a list that stays good and people are excited to or at least accepting of receiving your emails?

Is long form back for email marketing or is that largely other content forms?

Hank Hoffmeier (27:18)

It depends. It depends on what industry you’re in, your audience. I do a monthly newsletter and it’s tools I found that made me productive. If I’m going to be speaking somewhere or takeaways from conferences I’ve been to another blog posts I’ve read, that’s a little bit more long form. And I find that people tend to like that. But if it’s something where you’re selling a product and service and it’s you only sell one or two products and service and not like Macy’s where you can put a bunch of products.

Jesse Paliotto (27:48)

Yeah. Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (27:48)

It’s not worth having long form. It’s not worth

putting a full product review in an email, maybe put the first two sentences and getting the click to get them to read more. I still think that FOMO wins out, especially with email because we have to get that click through to show engagement, right? Whereas we’re not looking at opens much anymore. ⁓ You could say, Hey, we recently wrote a blog post with the top three ways to whatever.

Right. you can say number one, number two, and then say to read number three, head over to our blog and get them to go over to the blog. Right. You’re giving them the summary, not AI summary, your summary, and then click here to get the third one, which helps with that engagement. I think that people are willing to do that. But to specifically answer the question, it really depends. And also make sure you’re testing and finding out if that’s what and I’m always a fan of polling your audience. Do a survey once a year and ask people.

Jesse Paliotto (28:32)

Yeah.

Hank Hoffmeier (28:39)

Hey, do you generally like longer form content or shorter form content and let them decide. And people tend to say, Oh, well, we know what our subscribers want. No, you don’t. And a lot of times you might get mixed. Then what you can do is say, okay, 50 % of our audience or 49 % of our audience wants long form and 51 want short form. Then you split that audience into two and you put them on two different lists and you react accordingly.

Jesse Paliotto (29:03)

Yeah, testing is always the answer. Like asking and testing. Yes, 100 percent. ⁓ I wanted to ask for a second about regulation or changes or anything you may see coming up in the market around this. I GDPR has been with us for a long time. For those who may not be aware of it, that’s the Europe started ⁓ legal process or not legal process, legal requirement.

For people to opt in and not get spammed to their CCPA, which is the California one which has been more recent I’m curious if you see any other kind of changes standards or whatever else coming down the pike for the world of email

Hank Hoffmeier (29:40)

I think it’s all going to move towards like what GDPR is. And I would just ⁓ plan for that. And the best advice I’ve ever heard from somebody on a legal team was always follow the most strict there is, even if it’s not in your country. In other words, follow GDPR because then you’re covered for CCPA. You’re covered for, you know, Castle Now and, ⁓ and all the other ones that are out there and every state can come up with theirs because the thing is

I can market to someone in the European Union without knowing it. And then I’m on the hook for that same thing with California is if you’re emailing somebody that resides in California and you didn’t follow the CCPA, you can get in trouble. And the punishment’s pretty serious. I would say just make sure you’re doing the right things and make sure that you’re getting those options. I mentioned in beginning, don’t ever buy a list. And more importantly to not more importantly, but also important if you go to say a conference.

and you sponsored the conference and they say, we’ll give you a list for $2,000 of everybody who’s attended. Now, how many of those are going to actually come to your table if you have a table? Not all of them, right? But then you do have the ability to email all of them. But did they specifically opt in to get your emails? Probably not, unless the conference is doing it right. Then you run into the they don’t know who you are. They don’t remember your brand.

They may mark that message as spam, ignore it, or, you know, and all those things and it may bounce. It may have provided a bad email address. That’s why it’s always good to make sure that you have the best possible quality list you can. And with those folks that you meet at conferences too, most times what I recommend is emailing them one off or reaching out through LinkedIn and asking if you can add them to your email newsletter. Not every marketer wants to hear that if they’ve been going to shows and collecting lists of hundreds and hundreds of people.

Jesse Paliotto (31:22)

Mm.

Hank Hoffmeier (31:28)

⁓ I did a talk in Birmingham, UK, and I got the list of people who opted in. I sent them a personalized email video and I personalized each one, 120 people that I got the opt in from. And I just said who I was, gave them the key takeaways and a copy of the deck and a recording of the session afterwards. And I asked them, I have a newsletter. Would you want to sign up for that? I asked them to stay in touch. It was a one and done. And I asked them to stay in touch.

I’m not saying everybody wants to do that, but that is a good tech.

Jesse Paliotto (32:00)

So those were folks that they, because you were a speaker, the event had probably had something that said, you know, if you tick this box, maybe we pre tick this box, you’re giving permission for our sponsors to email market you. But you said, I want more permission than that. And so I’m to do this video tag.

Hank Hoffmeier (32:16)

Yes.

Cause I mean, if I just said, thank you for coming to the IREX conference, the name of the conference, wanted to follow up and tell you more about what kickbox does. They might not remember all that. They may have came to my session, sat in the back and been on their phone the whole time. And they probably might not have remembered me, but majority of them may have. they, and I got a lot of replies, you know, saying it was great and all this, and he appreciated the followup, but there will be those handful that.

Don’t remember who you are. Don’t care who you are. And they’re going to market a spam, unsubscribe, ⁓ ignore it, which hurts your domain reputation, which is what we mentioned. That’s what you’re looking out for most first and foremost, staying legal price. You don’t get fined and then making sure that you are keeping your domain health in check so that your emails get to the inbox.

Jesse Paliotto (33:03)

I love that in the sense that or in multiple sense one is just that it’s true permission marketing because once somebody says actively yes no I want to hear from you I’m going to be more likely now to open your emails because I kind of made this mental decision that I want to hear from you. Also I feel like SaaS companies digital product companies are so many venues where you get that you know when you somebody registers for ⁓ filling out a review they fill out a trial they fill out they attend a trade show they do something where they’re kind of.

kind of giving third party sponsors permission to market to them, but they don’t really want it. And so there’s so many scenarios that, you know, a company may find itself where they technically have GDPR opt in, but do they really have the actual buy in to not get burned in the relationship? And so I really respect, you know, kind of going out and doing the hard work to confirm the relationship.

Hank Hoffmeier (33:54)

Yeah, I like to always say, know, if you’re using a purchase list or using these conference lists, of course you’re to get the flash in a pan moment, right? You may get some sales, you may get some opens, but you’re hurting yourself for the future. Your domain and your IP reputation and your brand reputation is going to start to sink in. Your email marketing efforts will slope downwards and you might even start wondering why, unless you’re listening to this episode, you know why, but if you didn’t, you’ll

Jesse Paliotto (34:01)

Mm-hmm.

Hank Hoffmeier (34:20)

It will start saying, why are open rates so low? Why is nobody clicking our emails? It’s because they’re not getting them.

Jesse Paliotto (34:25)

Yeah. OK, this is a big question. So you can answer to the extent you want. If you could wave a magic wand ⁓ and fix kind of one thing with how most SaaS software, digital companies, do their email, what would that one thing be?

Hank Hoffmeier (34:41)

It’s going to be looking at the program and making sure you’re providing value while sending authenticated emails. That’s simply what it is. And it’s not one simple thing, but yes, just making sure you’re looking at your program and you’re set up correctly as far as setting yourself up for success. First thing is authentication. know, I’m not, mean, sure. Verification is important, but authentication is the king. And then your content and the value you offer is going to be the queen. And after that,

Hopefully everything just goes smoothly after.

Jesse Paliotto (35:14)

Yeah, I love that. ⁓ I think you can we talk for a second. I think you’ve got an offer for the growth stage audience today. We were just chatting for a second before we hopped onto the call. Do you want to talk about that for a second?

Hank Hoffmeier (35:27)

Right. People that come to kickbox and they sign up, they get a hundred free test credits. What I’d like to offer is using growthstage as a coupon code. When you go to purchase credits, maybe after you use the a hundred, if you want to up to you, I want to offer 1000 free credits. In other words, especially if you’re a small company, it would take you a while to get through a thousand free credits. You can test out our integrations, our API upload list. There’s a way to do one. We call it single verification. You can go in and just do one at a time.

Test it out, but yeah, use the code growthstage and get 1000 free credits. I have that set through the end of the year, which is the end of December of 2025.

Jesse Paliotto (36:05)

Awesome. Thank you, man. So much for doing that for the audience. And just to kind of poke at a little bit, because I haven’t used Kickbox yet, although now I’m going to have a thousand free credits to do. The credit is the API validation of the email. So somebody is filling out my free trial form and it double checks. This is a legit email and all of that. that’s actually especially for some for a company that may be either smaller or on the B2B side where there tends to be less volume of lead generation. Yeah, that’s a that could be a substantial runway to get somebody

testing this whole methodology, right?

Hank Hoffmeier (36:36)

Yeah. And we don’t charge for unknown results. There are some servers that may be temporary issues, servers down, or they just flat out refuse to talk to us. It’s called unknown. We don’t charge for those. We also do email deliverability consulting. And if you feel like you have a domain reputation issue or you you think your authentication is not set up correctly and you feel like majority of your, or you know, a majority of your emails are going to spam. We can provide a success plan and strategy to get you back on track.

Jesse Paliotto (37:06)

Man, that is so valuable and I’m not just buttering you up because you’re on the podcast. I’ve just been in numerous scenarios where ⁓ like email deliverability for the marketing operations or sales team can be, you never think about it till it’s wrong. And then all of a sudden it’s a fire and you’re trying to figure out how do I put this out? And so that’s a great shout out for folks that may run into that in the future.

Hank Hoffmeier (37:32)

Yeah, think of it like the credit score, right? You tank your credit score. It takes a long time to come back, right? It takes a while to get down to a low level and it takes a long time to climb back up that mountain. Same thing with email deliverability. Once you know there’s a problem, it’s hard to get back on track again.

Jesse Paliotto (37:37)

Mm-hmm.

That’s so good. Where can people catch up with you, Hank, if they want to ⁓ try and catch you somewhere online after this?

Hank Hoffmeier (37:56)

I always like to say if you search Hank Hoffmeier on Google, I have really good SEO. I show up probably for like the first two pages of results with everything that has to do with me, all my social media channels. The only thing I ask if you’re going to connect on LinkedIn, just make sure you personalize the invite. I have this rule where I don’t accept blind invites, but I’m a marketer, so I will reply and ask you if we’ve met before because I have a bad memory or I’ll offer to have a call with you.

And what’s funny is I keep track of that and I think the metrics still around. I only get a 40% response to that. In other words, it’s just a lot of salespeople trying to pitch me. I even get responses to my reply saying, thank you for accepting my invite. Here’s my sales pitch when I didn’t even accept it. But if you reach out and you say, I met you on the show, I still may actually want to have a call with you because I really covet having a valuable network where I can help you. You can help me and we can have a wonderful LinkedIn relationship together. Otherwise follow me on TikTok, Instagram, all the social channels. I’m always putting stuff out. It’s not all related to email. I do a lot of tips around digital marketing. I’m still trying to get my podcast going again. Hank’s Marketing and Business Tips. There’s probably about almost 300 episodes that are there historically. I hope to definitely get that back up and running and Jesse I’ll have you on too as well.

Jesse Paliotto (39:15)

Oh, I would love that, man. Well, thanks for being here today. I really appreciate it. Thanks everybody else for joining us, for being with us here on Growth Stage. Again, Hank Hoffmeier from Kickbox. Really glad to have him here. I’m Jesse Paliotto. I’m your host. I get to be a part of the digital product community by doing this today, and I’m so pumped about that. And I hope you all have a good week, and we will catch you next time on the Growth Stage.

Jesse Paliotto (00:04)

Hello everyone and welcome to Growth Stage podcast by FastSpring where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build good products, increase the value of their companies. I’m your host Jesse Paliotto I get to be a part of this community as part of my role at FastSpring and I love bringing the best of the community to you guys today. So today with us I’m excited to have with us Amber Hinds. Amber is the CEO of Equalize Digital, a company specializing in WordPress accessibility, maker of the Accessibility Checker plugin, lead organizer for the WordPress Accessibility Meetup and…

Board? What was it Amber?

Amber Hinds (00:36)

President for WP Accessibility Day nonprofit.

Jesse Paliotto (00:40)

I knew I was gonna mess up the phrasing. Thank you for helping me. Through work at Equalize Digital, Amber is striving to create a world where all people have equal access to information and tools on the internet. So important, regardless of ability. Since 2010, she’s been leading teams, building websites, web applications for nonprofits, K through 12, higher education, government, businesses of all sizes. And she’s a passionate advocate for accessibility. Amber, I’m so glad you’re here today. Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it.

Amber Hinds (01:06)

Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Jesse Paliotto (01:09)

Just to give folks some context, can you briefly describe what Equalize Digital does as an agency?

Amber Hinds (01:18)

Yeah, so we specialize in website accessibility. We do a lot with WordPress, but we also do work outside of the WordPress world. So we have a software product called Accessibility Checker, which audits WordPress websites for accessibility problems, puts reports in the editor, and helps with some of the larger governance, does full bulk scanning, and…

Then we also have a services side where we do audits and we do some audits and remediation. And our audits are full WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which I’m gonna call WCAG testing by certified professionals. And we also do user testing with people who are blind and native screen reader users.

Jesse Paliotto (02:09)

I wanted to ask about that in a few minutes about people versus machine testing. maybe first, like to ask the very obvious question or maybe the question I’m sure you have answered 1,000 times, can you talk about what accessibility is? I’m sure people that are listening have maybe a personal answer in their mind or some particular thing that, yeah, it’s color coding on websites or something. Can you talk a little bit more like what do you think of when you think of what accessibility is?

Amber Hinds (02:38)

So from a bottom line perspective, accessibility is about ensuring that all people of all abilities who use all different kinds of devices can access your website and do whatever it is you want people to do. So like buying your products, adding them to a cart, going to a checkout page, entering all their credit card information, and then completing the purchase.

That’s probably what most of your listeners want people to do on their website. So accessibility is about ensuring that people can do that on your website. There are a wide variety of different people who use websites. Based on stats from the World Health Organization and the CDC, it’s about 25 % of the population in the world has one or another type of disability.

And so some of the people that we commonly think of are blind people who use assistive technology called screen readers, which read out all of the code on the website to them. And it needs to be formatted properly in the backend, behind the scenes, so that it can be read out properly and they can then use the website with their screen reader. But also captions for people who are deaf, if you have videos on your website.

There’s things with color contrast or making sure that it’s appropriately mobile responsive so that if somebody who has low vision zooms in or somebody who’s just out using their mobile phone or sitting on their couch using their mobile phone can also use the website. And accessibility is something that a lot of us sometimes think, people are born with disabilities. And yes, that is a group. But it is one of these groups that almost all of us are going to join at some point in time.

some sooner than others unfortunately, but you know as we get older our vision maybe isn’t as good or we might experience an accident or an injury that results in a disability. A lot of veterans for example might have mobility challenges or limb losses where maybe they can’t use a mouse and they can only use a keyboard and they can see just fine, but if the website doesn’t work well with a keyboard then it doesn’t work well for them.

So there’s a lot of different people and it’s really just about making sure that they can buy your stuff on your website.

Jesse Paliotto (05:03)

It’s the vision thing is immediate when I thought of when you said, most of us will join kind of this group at some point because yeah, using reading glasses, you suddenly realize like, yeah, like I’m zooming on stuff and you get into sites where it doesn’t work properly and becomes very frustrating actually. and you get, you get, if you have not been a part of that group and had to deal with that before you quickly become aware of the gap that people experience.

Amber Hinds (05:21)

Mm-hmm.

Captions on videos too is very

big. You know, it’s interesting because even 10 or 15 years ago, you didn’t see captions reliably on YouTube videos or social media videos. And nowadays it’s very commonplace. And there’s actually a lot of stats that say most people consume more videos muted with captions than they do actually listening to the sound on the video on the Internet.

Jesse Paliotto (05:33)

you

Yeah.

Yeah, I would love a stat that showed, because I hear the other side too, like especially for music and stuff, people listen but don’t watch or as you’re suggesting, watch but don’t listen. I wonder how many people are truly watching videos in a full kind of experience mode. I’m sure you could piece together some stats out there. That, you know, with accessibility, I was going to ask a very obvious question, but you’ve kind of already kind of given some of the answer. was going to say, why is accessibility important? I think the obvious point that comes to me

Amber Hinds (06:14)

Yeah, I don’t know.

Jesse Paliotto (06:28)

is that it’s just the right thing to do. It’s about equality, it’s about treating people with dignity, making sure that it’s equal access. But you’ve of already, I think, answered a secondary or maybe a of a sub point, which is it’s also good for business. Is that a fair point?

Amber Hinds (06:46)

It definitely is. The interesting thing about accessibility improvements is that there’s a lot that you do to the underlying HTML code that is also very good for search engine optimization. If you think about it, Google Duck Duck Go, Yahoo, whichever your preferred search engine is, is probably one of the most common

blind or non-seeing users of a website. They come in, they crawl the code, they interpret that code to understand what the website is about, and then they try to match it with search results. So we’ve actually seen sometimes where we’ve done some website remediations where there’s no design changes and there’s no content changes. It’s just the underlying architecture. And we’ve seen six months later a 15 % increase in traffic to that website from Google search.

Jesse Paliotto (07:39)

wow.

Amber Hinds (07:41)

Yeah, so it can really help on bringing more people to the website. It also can reduce bounce rates because if a website doesn’t work well and someone finds it and they just can’t navigate around it, they can’t find the product or they try to add something to the cart and check out, but maybe, you know, something confuses them about the process, then they will abandon.

So it can help with reducing abandonment rates on websites or just getting more people to add products to the cart. You know, get them out of your blog posts and over to where they actually buy, that kind of thing. It’s also good from a legal perspective for businesses. There are laws around the world that require websites to be accessible, particularly for e-commerce websites.

Here in the United States where I live, that’s the Americans with Disabilities Act. In most places, websites alone have to be accessible. There’s a couple of jurisdictions where they say only if you also have a brick and mortar e-commerce store, but it’s not consistently that way across the entire United States. So even a business that only has an e-commerce and no brick and mortar is required to do that.

Jesse Paliotto (08:47)

Mm-hmm.

Amber Hinds (08:56)

The big one that a lot of people are talking about is the European Accessibility Act, which is beginning enforcement in June of this year, June 2025. And that’s requiring that all e-commerce businesses that have more than 2 million euro in revenue or 10 employees or more. So either one of those, you hit the box. It applies to you and that requires accessibility.

Different countries in Europe handle the enforcement of that different ways. It could mean that the business will get fined. In Ireland, there’s jail time involved if it goes far enough. Yeah, in addition to fines. There’s also instances where businesses, there have been airlines that were getting subsidies and they lost their government subsidy, which almost is worse than the fine because so much more extra money.

Jesse Paliotto (09:38)

Really?

Yeah, right.

Amber Hinds (09:56)

So there’s a lot on the business side for doing it beyond the obvious benefits of serving all of your customers. There’s also maybe a stick involved too.

Jesse Paliotto (10:10)

Yeah, and with the regulations, I my experience with regulations is that essentially you have to perform at the most stringent level and then it takes care of everything else. It’s very hard, especially in a digital world where potentially anybody’s interacting with your site or with potentially your SaaS product. Like you basically get held to the highest standard in order to be able to meet everybody else underneath it, which sounds like it may be the European one.

Amber Hinds (10:34)

and that’s the thing. Well, actually, you know, one of the ones that is most strict is in Manitoba, Canada. Their requirement is any business with one employee or more. There’s no revenue threshold. There’s not. And they all they all require that you meet what I mentioned previously.

is the web content accessibility guidelines level double A. So there’s three different levels for that. Single A, double A, triple A, and double A is kind of in the middle. And that’s all laws reference that. The current version is 2.2. So you hear people say web content accessibility guidelines 2.2. Double A. And all the laws reference that. But the thing that’s so interesting about digital businesses

is that if you advertise in a market or you ship products to a market, then you have, or you have employees there, then you have what’s considered nexus. And this is like people come to FastSpring to help you with the tax, because once you sell enough stuff there, guess what? Now you have to pay tax. Well, once you sell enough stuff or advertise enough times in a certain market, you now need to meet their accessibility laws.

Jesse Paliotto (11:26)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Amber Hinds (11:45)

So where I mentioned there might be some states in the United States where if you don’t have a brick and mortar store, it doesn’t matter. But if you sell to a place like California where they don’t care if you have a brick and mortar store, you now need to comply with California accessibility requirements. And it’s the same thing if you go global, right? Then you’re looking, if you ship to Manitoba, Canada and you have one employee, you have to be accessible.

Jesse Paliotto (11:56)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

As soon as you said the word nexus, it triggered because that is such a key concept for what FastSpring does with tax handling for folks is that idea that you’ve kind of become liable is probably the wrong way to phrase that, but you’ve become legally responsible in that environment. I I’m curious. it’s I think anybody with a human heart would admit that it is the right thing to do to serve your people.

I think anybody with a business mind would say, okay, it actually makes sense. Why do people not do this though? Do you run into reasons why companies or even individuals who running their own businesses don’t kind of put the work in? Is it just ignorance or is there kind of myths or anything or what’s the obstacles there?

Amber Hinds (12:55)

some degree the interesting thing about the web and web developers maybe in general is that there’s there’s no certification there’s no one path many web developers and even marketing agencies are started by people who are self-taught and I don’t know that the the W3C which is the international group of volunteers that

created the web content accessibility guidelines, which have been around for more than 20 years. So this isn’t a new concept, but I don’t know that they’ve done a great job of marketing it maybe historically. And so I think there are a lot of self-taught developers that just don’t know. And even store owners, people who are starting an e-commerce business, there’s so much that you have to learn. And if you…

hire a web developer or web agency that’s never heard of accessibility or doesn’t say to you, hey, this is important, just like privacy policies. If no one tells you that, you might not realize, hey, I have to have a privacy policy on my website. So to some degree, I think there is or has been historically some just like ignorance or not knowing.

that accessibility is a thing or not having explained to them. Because I’ve heard people be like, well, I understand why you have to have a curb cut so a wheelchair can get up on a curb or why you need an elevator instead of stairs. But I don’t even know what this means on the internet. A lot of us haven’t seen a blind person use a screen reader. And so it’s hard to envision, well, what would the challenges be for them? Because we just don’t have that personal experience in the same way that we might have seen a person in a wheelchair and we can visualize that.

Jesse Paliotto (14:23)

Yeah, right.

Amber Hinds (14:41)

So I think there is some of that. In the more recent years, I want to say like four or five, right around COVID time is when I really started to see more of the news media picking up on this. We also saw a big acceleration on accessibility lawsuits against e-commerce businesses in the United States. And so the news picked up on it this year in

Jesse Paliotto (14:55)

Mm-hmm.

Amber Hinds (15:06)

February the FTC in the United States, the Federal Trade Commission fined one of the overlay providers a million dollars for lying about how they saw about solving accessibility because they don’t actually they’re like an AI solution and they got fined a million dollars for misrepresenting their ability to fix problems without a human, which we could probably go into in a minute. so I think

Jesse Paliotto (15:27)

Wow.

Amber Hinds (15:32)

There just hadn’t been a lot, but there’s a lot more news about it now and education. And so it does sometimes at this point, I think, come a little bit down to cost. There are ways to do accessibility cheaply or less expensive, but it is always going to be more expensive than if it was started from the beginning. If you have a website that’s already built out and no one thought about accessibility, well, now you have to put…

Jesse Paliotto (15:43)

Mm-hmm.

Amber Hinds (16:01)

some developer time into fixing that, which if you were just starting out and building it that way, might not be the case. So I do think sometimes there are some cost objections and some people have a harder time, like I was saying, of just visualizing it and understanding and being able to connect that with their customer base.

Jesse Paliotto (16:22)

Yeah, one other thought that just you provoked when you were describing that, have you ever seen this meme? It goes around on Twitter all the time of the World War II bomber with the bullet holes in the wings. But there’s certain areas that don’t have wings. And it’s supposed to be this kind of like logic insight of, do you put the, do you try and add extra armor where there’s the bullet holes in the wings of the bomber that came back to the base? You’re like, no, actually it’s counterintuitive. The ones that made it back flew fine. The ones that

didn’t make it back or the ones that got hit in those other places that you’re not seeing. And I’m giving that a bad description. Hopefully I can add a link in the show notes and give people the picture because the picture is worth a thousand words there. But the idea being that companies are very usually receptive to complaints and if they get customer feedback, they’ll respond to it. But I would imagine in the case of accessibility, you’re not getting the complaints from the people that are not being served. so sort of an out of sight, out of mind mentality, I would imagine could be happening there as well.

Amber Hinds (16:55)

Mm-hmm.

I think definitely, like I mentioned, they might just bounce right away, particularly if the navigation menu doesn’t work. How are they even going to find your contact page? Or I’ve seen them where the contact form doesn’t work. Or maybe they have a complaint about all of your products, explainer videos don’t have captions, and the only way that you have for them to contact you is to call you on the phone.

Jesse Paliotto (17:27)

Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yep.

Amber Hinds (17:48)

How is a deaf person going to call you on the phone to complain about your videos not having captions because you didn’t provide an email address or a form for them to submit, right? So there are definitely situations like that where someone with disabilities might want to complain, but they literally cannot. The other thing I’ll say is to some degree that puts a little bit of a burden on people with disabilities.

Jesse Paliotto (17:55)

It’s just illogical. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Amber Hinds (18:11)

And when they encounter so many websites, the unfortunate reality is that over 95 % of websites have at least some accessibility barriers and some have many accessibility barriers. And they’re dealing with that every day. At some point, it’s just easier for them to be like, I’m gonna leave this one and go to the other one that I know works, instead of trying to complain, because otherwise they’d be complaining all day long.

Jesse Paliotto (18:34)

So we’ve referenced a couple of times. I need to ask the question about human testing versus machine testing. And it may be a good way to frame this is if somebody is wondering themselves like, okay, Amber, I get it. Like this is important and I don’t know that I was aware and I would like to see how I’m doing and maybe make some improvements and see if it’s effective. Can you talk about like using machine methodology versus using actual people? I can you give us a picture of that?

Amber Hinds (19:04)

Yeah, there are some really reliable testing tools that are a phenomenal place to start. So like I mentioned, our accessibility checker WordPress plugin, includes, which has a free version that you can download if you have a WordPress website and install on it totally for free. That is a great tool. There’s also a browser extension that’s pretty popular called Wave. People can go to wave.webaim.org. It comes out of a university in Utah.

You can install that browser extension or just use it right on their website and scan like the home page of your website and then you’ll get some information.

the automated tools are a really phenomenal place to start. They’ll tell you some things that are very major blockers, like an empty button. Like your add to cart button doesn’t have add to cart text on it. It just had a little picture or something. That would literally stop someone from being able to do those are a good place to start, but they are not the end solution because there are some things that just require

context and AI is just not there yet and can’t identify the issues. You can also sometimes with automated testing tools get false positives. So I’ve seen instances where it flags color contrast only because it has a hard time telling where the background color is because the background color is maybe like four divs above where the font color is being set and it just can’t find it and tell. So it’ll think the background is white.

and the text is white and it will say you fail contrast but you’re like no there’s a black background on this right so you always need a human to sort of assess those and then there’s some manual tests that anyone can do you do not have to be a web developer or an expert and what this is is you take your mouse and you turn it off and you put it in a drawer and you go to the home page of your website and you tab use your tab key on your keyboard

Jesse Paliotto (20:38)

Mm-hmm.

Amber Hinds (21:03)

and you wanna make sure that you can reach every button and every link and every form field just using the tab key. And if there is a link, you’d press return to go follow it. If it’s a button, you should be able to press the space bar or the return key to trigger the button, do whatever it does. You should see a little outline around each item as you tab to it. If you ever hit tab and you’re like, I have no idea where I am, that’s a problem, right? So,

Jesse Paliotto (21:29)

Yeah, right.

Amber Hinds (21:32)

There’s just some manual stuff that requires a human to be able to do. And then I would say you definitely want to bring in someone who is an experienced accessibility professional because they’re really gonna understand web content accessibility guidelines, especially if you are in one of those businesses that is legally required to meet WCAG 2.2 AA. You want someone who can understand those because…

It is a long list of what’s called success criteria, where you pass or fail for different things. And some of them, if you’re new to it, can feel very overwhelming reading it. It’s not just like this little simple checklist. So I would highly recommend bringing in a trained professional. then the next thing would be potentially doing some user testing with actual users, which gives you a sort of different take. It gives you some accessibility.

Jesse Paliotto (22:14)

Right.

Amber Hinds (22:28)

but it also gives you general usability. Sometimes you learn that the name of your product doesn’t make sense to anyone except for you. And they’ll, oh yes. Or like the way you expect someone to come and search is, or the terms that they might search for to find something.

Jesse Paliotto (22:36)

It sounds like it happened with a client or something.

Amber Hinds (22:51)

is very different. And so that’s the thing that’s really neat about user testing is you get accessibility feedback, but you also get general usability feedback and you can watch people navigate and you’ll be sitting there being like, but it’s right there. It’s right there. And they’ll just let go circles around the thing you expect them to do. And then you might look at it and think, wait a minute, I’ve seen enough people do this now that I realize it should just be designed the way the people go. So, yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (23:02)

Yeah.

Yeah, there’s

a term for that. I’m blanking out on it, but it’s it’s like unguided paths or something. And it’s the idea. one of the famous examples is a photo down on a university campus in winter and there’s the sidewalks and then there’s the actual paths that are walked in the snow. And so you can see visually, this is obviously the, the, unguided path that people want to take to get from point A to point B across campus. And these sidewalks do not match what people want to do.

Amber Hinds (23:28)

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (23:44)

very, very you actually type of a thing. How would if somebody wanted to do user testing and is there services or groups or how do you go to a place where you’re to have somebody who have groups of people that have maybe different types of impairment that could test for visual versus audio or how do you go about doing that? Or do they work with equalized digital? Is that one of the ways to do that?

Amber Hinds (24:06)

Yeah, so we do do user testing and we have different people with different types of abilities. And I would say, typically most people start with somebody who is blind or visually impaired, but we also have people with cognitive disabilities or mobility challenges or limb differences, those sorts of things that can do testing for us. And.

So you could come to us, you could go to someone else, you could also email your email list and say, hey, we’re looking to do a couple of user test user testing sessions with our customers who use assistive technology. If you are them and you would be interested, offer to pay people for their time. You know, like it’ll be fifty dollars for an hour of your time on Zoom. Right. Because obviously we want.

to get good feedback and you want people to be compensated for the effort that they’re going to put in. But you could email out to your email list and you might find customers that are already in your network that use assistive technology and would be happy to give you feedback. But when we do it, we spend a lot of time talking about what are the goals, what are the paths that we wanna test or that we think people might do. And then basically we write prompts.

You don’t want to say go here, click this, then click that, then do that, right? Instead you want to give them ideas like go learn about how we make our custom t-shirts. Okay, now you’ve decided you want to buy one, what would you do? Right, like that. So then you can find out, okay, do they find the shop page? Do they go to search? Like what do they do to go figure out how to buy a t-shirt after they’ve learned about it? Okay, now you’re on the t-shirt page.

Jesse Paliotto (25:33)

Mm-hmm.

Right. Yeah. Can you do it?

Amber Hinds (25:51)

What sizes do we have available?

Right? Like thinking about those kinds of questions that you would guide them through and then you observe what they do, figure out where they get hung up.

And a lot of times when I run them, I actually have the code inspector up and I’m looking at the website also and I’ll be looking at the code and I might direct them back and ask them to replay something with the screen reader. And a lot of times our testers aren’t they’re not accessibility professionals. They’re not web.

developers, they’re just average people. So they won’t know what’s going on with the HTML, but because I’m an accessibility professional, right, then I can look at that and then I will come back later and we’ll give a report and then we’ll say, hey, this is why they missed this thing and here’s how the code needs to change, which is sort of the benefit of doing that. If you run your own and you’re not super technical, you might not understand why they got hung up.

You might have to then send a video to like a developer or somebody who understands about screen readers and say, why did the screen reader say this thing? So, but yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (26:53)

Yeah, yeah, just that level of fluency

with the technology to be able to be like, I see exactly what’s going on. Yeah.

Amber Hinds (26:59)

But that’s basically how you run one, and you might have people in your network, or you could hire a professional like us.

Jesse Paliotto (27:07)

I love the idea of hiring a professional like you. I also love the idea of the email. I think that’s such a brilliant idea in the sense that you get what you need, which is testers, but also you create awareness for people that this is something to be doing. All of a sudden your entire email list that you email is now like, oh, accessibility. Yeah, maybe I should think about that. And then I would imagine as a brand, I mean, it just furthers your brand’s presence as somebody who’s trying to serve the entire kind of spectrum of people. So it feels like a triple win to go down that route.

I love that.

Amber Hinds (27:38)

It really

can be beneficial to a lot of organizations have corporate values and putting out that you are working on accessibility is a way to show that you might be living your corporate values. If it’s like we serve everyone in our community, whatever that might be, a lot of times you can connect accessibility efforts with your corporate values, which also might be helpful if you’re trying to sell this to internal stakeholders. But it is a way to show that you’re practicing what you preach.

Jesse Paliotto (27:44)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I love that. One question I’d had is for a lot of what we’re talking about is websites. so definitely any company who’s, every company is going to have a website. So this at least applies to that marketing, potentially to more of their services that take place through a website. Does a lot of this apply or how much does this apply also to software, to people that are designing a SaaS application?

Is a lot of this kind of the same thing or how do you think about that? Have you worked with clients that are doing both?

Amber Hinds (28:38)

Yeah, we actually, a large part of our auditing business is with software products. So people who build components that get added into websites, not necessarily the website owners themselves. The laws are a little dicey on whether or not they apply to the maker of a software product that is used on a website versus the website owner, if that makes sense. However,

Jesse Paliotto (29:06)

interesting.

Amber Hinds (29:08)

However, what you really want to think about if you are the maker of a software product is that it could impact your procurement process if your software is not accessible because an e-commerce store that is in Europe or a government agency in the United States, they are only going to want to buy things that allow them to comply with the law and

So if your software product is not accessible, it’s going to reduce your market because you might not be able to sell to them. The other thing that we’re seeing a lot more requests, especially with regards to the European Accessibility Act, is we’re seeing a lot of software developers come to us for something that is called a voluntary product accessibility template or a VPAT, which is a standardized international format report.

that goes through the accessibility of a software product in relation to web content accessibility guidelines and some of the European accessibility requirements and the Section 508 accessibility requirements in the United States. And it maps it all out and says on line by line, either this product supports, partially supports, or does not support.

accessibility on this line with notes. And this is something where increasingly we’re seeing a lot of software developers realize they need these because their customers are asking for them. So we’ve had multiple people who have come to us and they said, our customers are saying, hey, we really want to buy your WordPress plugin, but we can’t unless you give us a VPAT. And they’re like, I don’t have a VPAT.

Jesse Paliotto (30:45)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Amber Hinds (31:00)

So they have to go get one. And really what that entails is you first have to have a complete audit. And you could write a VPAT from the audit, but most people say pause. I want to fix my problems first because it doesn’t look great to put out a VPAT that’s like bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Right. So so you have an audit, you have some amount of time where you then remediate the software products and improve things. And then you have a retest.

Jesse Paliotto (31:12)

Yeah. Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Amber Hinds (31:29)

where an accessibility professional confirms that it is accessible or the problems that were identified are fixed, and then the VPAT is generated. And the document that’s actually created from that is called an accessibility conformance report. Most people call them a VPAT, but that’s what it is, an accessibility conformance report.

Jesse Paliotto (31:48)

For those of you who live in California like me, this is just like getting your car smogged. You take it in, they smog it, you quickly go fix whatever you can to bring it back to get it to pass a second time. Yes. That is, that rings a lot.

Amber Hinds (31:57)

You

Jesse Paliotto (32:02)

I’m curious, is there anyone who’s, and I hesitate to ask a little bit, but I’ll ask it anyway, is there anybody who’s doing it right? Like if somebody was right now listening and they’re like, this all sounds great, I get it, I wanna do it, if you could point out and be like, you know somebody or a place or a set of an industry or anybody who’s like really kind of nailing this or just a good example you could model on, is there anybody you could point to like that?

Amber Hinds (32:29)

boy, you put me right on the spot.

Jesse Paliotto (32:30)

Hahaha!

government agencies I would suspect just by dent of needing to be regulation compliant.

Amber Hinds (32:34)

Well, I’ll say…

Yeah, it’s interesting. think in historically in the US, we were seeing a lot more effort being put into getting more of the older federal websites updated. There’s a whole Web Modernization Act and accessibility has been part of it. We actually were the auditing team on the new NASA website, and I know they were putting a lot of effort into accessibility on.

that front. Some of the state and local government are not as good, but I expect to see that ramping up because there was a mandate from the Justice Department last year under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act that gave them all a deadline. Sort of like the European Accessibility Act deadline. I will say there’s a few…

Plugin companies in the WordPress space that have really started to prioritize accessibility stellar. WP is one of those. They own like an event calendar plugin and an LMS plugin. And they’ve been doing auditing of all of their stuff and remediating everything largely because they’re hoping to meet the deadlines before the European Accessibility Act. And because like I was saying, they have customers that are saying, hey, we really want to buy your stuff.

So I think there are some. You know, it’s funny. I can think of incidental like pages I’ve seen. that I like HubSpot is interesting because there’s some stuff that’s not as great about their website. But if you ever want to see a really great pricing table, the HubSpot pricing table is really accessible. So they’ve done a phenomenal job of

When there’s a check mark, there’s screen reader text that says, this is included. It’s not just like blank or an image that doesn’t explain what the check mark means to someone who can’t see the check mark. There’s a whole bunch of hidden code there. So if you’re developer savvy and you love that, I always would say, go check out their pricing table. It’s really interesting. So I can think of like little things like that. I don’t know if that’s helpful.

Jesse Paliotto (34:39)

Right.

Actually, I think that’s super helpful. It’s also interesting insight into, you know, to your point earlier when we were talking about, you know, there’s a value to your business for this. And of course, one of the most valuable pages for any business is the pricing page. so like if you’re, and you can think of it two ways. One is the commerce side. One is just the amount of visits, the amount of people trying to engage with that content. So like, you know, could imagine being in a seat where you’re saying, I want to roll this out. What am I going to prioritize first?

Amber Hinds (35:12)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (35:27)

Pricing page, I should probably go check out HubSpot as an example. Also, I love NASA because my inner nerd comes awake and I’m like, just go hang out on the NASA site. You can see it done well. Plus they do, they have so much multimedia that I feel like that would be a really interesting site to look at that through that lens of so much video, so much photo, so much different types of stuff.

Amber Hinds (35:47)

Yeah, and there’s a lot of interesting articles that were written a couple years ago about their approach to alt text, which is really interesting. So people who are not familiar, alt text or alternative text is an attribute that’s added to an image tag that describes the image visually for someone who is blind. And a lot of us kind of just err on the short side. But the thing is, is when you’re NASA, every picture is stars in a nighttime sky.

That’s not very helpful, right? Like, how do you distinguish all these different ones? So they put a lot of effort into thinking, how do we describe, like, what part of the galaxy is being shown or what’s being featured or how does it look with the different colors? Or I don’t know, it’s very interesting. you can find if you just Google like NASA alternative text, you can find some interesting articles that talk about how they did that. There’s some.

Jesse Paliotto (36:16)

Right.

Yeah.

Amber Hinds (36:42)

some art galleries as well that have put some really interesting effort into how they describe their art in alternative text. Because, you know, sometimes we think blind people don’t buy art or blind people don’t buy cars or whatever. But the thing is, is just because the purchaser can’t see it, it doesn’t mean that they might not want to give a gift to someone. Right. Or they might.

Jesse Paliotto (36:49)

Mm-hmm.

Amber Hinds (37:07)

be the person who cares the most about gas mileage. They’re not gonna drive the car, but they live in the household and they really wanna know the facts about the car before they go with their partner to buy it. So a lot of that does matter even though you think, this isn’t the user of this product. It very frequently can be.

Jesse Paliotto (37:24)

Yeah, and that’s an interesting, just to connect, adopt back to, know, for companies that are selling SaaS or software into, especially at an enterprise level, so a larger business level, you are always dealing with groups of people. is very rare that you’re selling a large software sale to a single person and no one else reviews it. There isn’t a CFO or a controller or somebody in the background that’s reviewing things on it. And so yeah, that’s a really interesting point like,

Amber Hinds (37:47)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (37:54)

that may not be the primary person that you’re even talking to, but there’s another person back there that could need this type of access.

Amber Hinds (38:01)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (38:02)

I am like, I’m going to go look up the NASA alt tags, because I can imagine that being so difficult. Like, what are going to put? It’s just 20 names of stars. That doesn’t help. I mean, maybe it does. don’t know.

Amber Hinds (38:11)

Another picture of the moon.

Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (38:19)

I’m I’m have some really interesting Google search patterns after this. For folks that wanna get started, can you just recommend first steps? If somebody, we’re gonna walk away from this, I wanna do something today. You gave some great tips on tools that could be, but maybe if you had to tell somebody one thing, you wanted to get started today, do this. Any advice?

Amber Hinds (38:42)

Yeah, so I would say first have a discussion internally and determine what your internal capabilities are. So if you don’t have a solid dev team that can fix problems like I mentioned before going through tabbing through your website. Well, if you’re missing all those outlines, but you don’t have someone who knows how to add all those outlines, that’s probably your first step. So figure out how comfortable are you in-house doing some basic testing or

trying out one of those tools and do you think that you might be able to fix some of those problems? You can do a lot of that without bringing in an accessibility professional. And then you’ll get to a point where you want to start identifying an accessibility professional to help you really finesse things and figure out about the more difficult problems and how to fix it. But that’s where I’d recommend getting started, figuring out if you have a developer and if not, start there.

And then if you do try out some of those tools and keyboard testing that I mentioned and start trying to fix some of those problems. And also I think you should assess your processes a little bit around how you publish new blog content or add new products to your website because you will start to see even just using automated tools you can start to catch some patterns like, our marketing team always forgets to write alternative text or

the headings are always out of order. For some reason, someone on our team really likes to use that H5, right? Like it’s the smallest heading and they always use that when it really should be a different one. And so you might need to start thinking about what are our processes around the QA for the content that we’re creating or that we’re adding to the website? What can we do to try and catch problems sooner so that they get identified and fixed before we hit publish?

Jesse Paliotto (40:18)

Right. Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Do you find that if you’re following SEO guidelines rigorously that you’re also meeting accessibility guidelines or is there extra stuff? Cause good alt tags and all that stuff are part of good SEO. And I’m wondering if, you know, if people do that checklist thoroughly, are they really doing everything good enough on content in particular? I know that’s a very deep dive into SEO. maybe maybe a too, too nerdy of a deep dive there.

Amber Hinds (41:08)

No, so there is a lot that helps. A major problem for both SEO and accessibility is missing an H1 heading. Like a literal title of the page, very important for both of them. So there is a lot of sort of basics, like SEO really cares about heading order, the alt text, those sorts of things.

Jesse Paliotto (41:18)

Yeah, right.

Yes.

Yes, this is where you’re saying that

I’m like, a lot of what you’re saying is like, that’s good SEO if you’ll do it right.

Amber Hinds (41:32)

It’s good SEO. Yeah.

But but that said there there’s definitely a lot of accessibility that goes beyond what any SEO crawler like if you’re using PageSpeed. PageSpeed Insights has some accessibility and it has a little accessibility score. But what I’ll tell you is that you can get a 100 on PageSpeed Insights accessibility score and have a very inaccessible unusable website. So because.

Jesse Paliotto (41:42)

Mm-hmm.

Okay, so yeah, good SEO is not

good enough.

Amber Hinds (42:01)

Yeah, so it is a good place to start, but it is not going to guarantee that you’re legally compliant or that your website is usable for people with disabilities.

Jesse Paliotto (42:11)

Yeah, yeah, totally makes sense. Is there anything you didn’t get a chance to share today that you would want? I was going to wrap up, but I just want to give a quick spot if there’s anything that we didn’t get a chance to talk through where you’re like, don’t forget this or anything. And if not, no worries.

Amber Hinds (42:25)

Yeah, I mean the one thing I would say is we put out a lot of educational content both on our blog if you just go to equalizedigital.com, but also I run the WordPress Accessibility Meetup, which is a free Zoom webinar. We do have live captions so we have a human who comes in captions if that’s something someone needs. It is the first Thursday of the month at 10 a.m. Central Time in the U.S. and the

third Monday at 7 p.m. Central Time. And there’s a whole variety of topics. Some are developers, some are designers, some are content focused. And so there’s a lot of learning resources available. So even if you don’t have the budget yet, or are a professional, you could learn a lot just by coming to those free webinars.

Jesse Paliotto (43:14)

I love that. And so if people want to find you, equalizedigital.com. Is that right? And then if they want to find you in particular, any socials or anything you want to drop really quick.

Amber Hinds (43:18)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so on X I am at heyamberhinds and then I’m also on Bluesky, just amberhinds, which is H-I-N-D-S. Those are probably the two most common social media platforms that I’m on. I am on LinkedIn, but it might take me a while to respond to you. So, yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (43:29)

Ha

I love the honesty.

Thank you so much for sharing today. Amber, really great to have you here. Really appreciate you taking the time, explaining so much, and more important than I think just doing the long and ongoing work of really raising awareness and helping so many people kind of get better access to so much information. Thank you.

Amber Hinds (44:08)

Thank you for having me.

Jesse Paliotto (44:09)

Absolutely. Thanks everybody for joining us on the Growth Stage podcast. I’m your host, Jesse Paliotto. I get to support digital product community by doing this and that’s an awesome thing. I love being able to do what we did today, which is hang out with Amber and talk about this sort of thing. Thanks for being with us. Have a great week and we will catch you next time. Cheers everybody.

Jesse Paliotto (00:04)

Hello everyone and welcome to Grow Stage podcast by Fast Spring where we discuss how digital product companies can grow revenue, build good products, increase their value. I’m your host, Jesse Paliotto I get to be part of the digital product community as part of my role with Fast Spring and I love bringing the best of the community to you here. So I’m excited today to have with us Rachel Gogos, CEO at Brand ID. Rachel is a true web pioneer, founder of Brand ID. She started her impressive career.

actually at the United Nations headquarters in New York, helping create their first website. Later held positions at Wall Street, dowjones.com. With over 15 years of marketing and communications experience, Rachel now channels her passion for people and the web into building strong personal brands for her clients. Her entrepreneurial journey includes multiple companies, which is amazing, including Brand ID, My Path 101, co-founding an internet incubator in the 90s. So honored, Rachel, to have you here today. Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it.

Rachel Gogos (00:59)

it’s great to be here.

Jesse Paliotto (01:01)

Just to give folks context, can you briefly describe what brand ID is? We were just talking about this before we started the episode, even maybe what the name means and what the company does that you lead right now.

Rachel Gogos (01:07)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely. So brandiD is a web agency and we are, I like to say brand led, meaning that the majority of our work always starts out with brand and business strategy. And then it goes into web, all the things needed for websites from copywriting, design, development, to pushing out WordPress websites is the majority of the work that we do.

We build sales pages, courses, membership sites, e-commerce sites, podcasts, podcasts for other clients as well. So yeah, that is the primary part of our work. In terms of the name, brandiD was launched in 2007, late 2007, and it was really so hard to come up with a name for your company.

But somehow I came up with brandiD. I think it could have been divine intervention. That’s usually where my names come from. I pray about it a lot. And finally, God dropped something hopefully good in there. So brandiD, the ID stands for identity, because we’re building business identities and personal brand identities. And also for id, which in Freud’s analysis of personality, the id is the part of the personality that we’re actually born with.

And for our work, we want to tap into the most authentic side of a person. In fact, our framework is called the Sole ID Framework because that is the way to differentiate yourself on the web and really grow and scale your business, I believe.

Jesse Paliotto (02:53)

That is awesome. I love kind of like the it’s very kind of Deep it can come off as just brand did but no there’s a lot of meaning and layers and and true applicability to like what the company does How did you get into this is there a particular point where you realize like This is what’s needed in the world or you know this is just something I’m natural like what was the impetus? How did you get into this?

Rachel Gogos (03:02)

Yeah.

Yeah.

So funny story, when I lived in Manhattan, it was in the 90s, and I was working at Dow Jones, but also started a business with two business partners called Silicon Fish. And with Silicon Fish, we were an internet incubator, but to make money to keep living, right? And covering our expenses besides our day job, one of my business partners is an incredible designer.

And we literally were going door to door to brick and mortar companies, again, the 90s, and being like, hey, do you need a website? Because the internet was just starting to become a thing. And so fast forward, that was late 90s, like I said, and I launched brandiD in 2007. So I moved to Boston, worked in internet consulting for a while, also worked with the mayor on bridging the digital divide, so still technology.

between low income and technology, bridging the digital divide for low income families and in the Boston public schools. Then I moved to Pittsburgh and I was working at an organization as a vice president of marketing and I read an article in Time Magazine that was about this new thing called personal branding. And the article was all about a particular founder of a company called Reach Personal Branding.

And it described how personal branding was like bringing the stories and the marketing of people to, you know, bring the human element, which I found fascinating because I had this passion for people and their stories and what made them tick and how they figured out what to do with their lives. So I, I joined the, a certification program and personal branding from this person I read about in time magazine. So I worked directly with him for three months. And then that business partner from New York city,

We were still in touch. I said, hey, I’m thinking of starting a business. Why don’t we do it together? And he’s like, no, we’re not going to do it together. You can do it on your own, but I’m going to work with you. So I always wanted to have web design as part of brandiD, because as I was sharing before, think coming up with a strategy is great and necessary. But if you can’t implement that strategy and so many people get stuck in that, you have nothing.

and you’ve paid a lot of money for something with no results. If you just go into implementation mode without being strategic, chances are that’s going to fail too. So I always wanted brandiD to do both, which is why we always start out with strategy and why the implementation part is about building the web presence. And we get really tactical besides websites. We also do a lot of content marketing retainers for clients or build out, like I said, podcasts for them.

Everything we do is about building the visibility of the founder or the thought leader behind the personal brand.

Jesse Paliotto (06:11)

Yeah, and I want to ask a little bit more about implementation and like how do you actually do it. But let me, I want to ask a little bit more kind of maybe conceptually. What makes up a personal brand, especially for someone who’s a CEO or a business leader or an entrepreneur? Like I feel like that different people may interpret that phrase differently. And like for you, what is it, what are the components of that? What makes up a personal brand?

Rachel Gogos (06:15)

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Well, I like to say it’s a cocktail and it’s a three-part cocktail. It’s part personality, right, which we all have. It’s part marketing because we have to get that personal brand out there. And it’s part like our true reputation. That’s the third part, which again, we all have. And part of the personality piece again is like, what is your true essence? Like what is your true DNA?

Tapping, so if you tap into that piece, that personality and the reputation piece, but then market that. And by marketing, I don’t mean you have to like brag about it or be really loud about it, but just finding ways that are aligned with your personality to express what you do in the world. So everybody has a personal brand, right? We all have a reputation and we all have a personality. So that third part of the cocktail is the part that we

we really tap into after we’ve helped a person get clear on uncovering their personal brand? Because it’s a very common question what you ask. People don’t think they have a personal brand, but again, we all do.

Jesse Paliotto (07:47)

How does somebody uncover their personal brand or how do you help people do that?

Rachel Gogos (07:53)

Yeah, we have a process it’s called the like I mentioned the sole sole ID framework. The S in sole stands for strategize. And so that first part of our process is where we really dig deep with a person, whether it’s a business brand or a personal brand. We ask that I’d like to say their basic questions that once we hit adulthood and probably even in our teenage years, we never

never take the time to ask ourselves are just introspective questions like, you know, what’s your mission in life and what’s your vision and what kind of legacy do you want to leave behind and what makes you different? You know, even of other people doing the same thing you are, how are you different and what are your passions and what are your strengths? Again, like these are not difficult questions, but you know, once we get on the hamster wheel of life, like we’re not really sitting around pondering who we really are at our core.

But if we take the time to do that, first of all, the answers to those questions don’t shift a whole lot. Like our values are really our values. Maybe our vision changes or our mission as we gain experience, right? And we live different experiences. Some things can shift for us. They can make a great impact on us and cause those things to shift. And of course we all evolve as humans and that’s really important. We all hopefully progress and develop.

Jesse Paliotto (09:12)

Yeah.

Rachel Gogos (09:17)

But again, just getting clear on those fundamental, basic foundational questions really, I like to say it really helps set the GPS of what you’re building. It really helps you get clear on the direction that you want to go in. And getting clear on those answers can help you identify like what type of company am I building? Is it a lifestyle brand or do I really want an exit? know, do I want to take on investors?

do I want to just grow it on my own? You do I want to have employees or do I want to just have 1099s or is this a solo business? Right? Because again, when we understand who we are and what makes us tick, then we can answer those types of questions.

Jesse Paliotto (09:44)

Interesting.

Yeah, that’s interesting. And just to kind of make sure I got what you said, there’s sort of there’s your personality. There is the actual marketing of it. And then there is your reputation. And so kind of using questions to refine maybe number one and number three there, but then using some of the tools to share that through some good marketing. And you actually started I wanted to ask and you may have started to answer there like what why is developing it important? I realize that’s probably the dumb question in the room. Like you’re like, you know, this is

Rachel Gogos (10:06)

Yeah. Yes, exactly.

Correct.

No, not at all.

It’s a great question.

Jesse Paliotto (10:27)

This is assumed maybe

at some level, but what does the impact really look like? It sounds like part of that impact could be helping a business leader or anybody really define goals, which is hugely valuable. Is there anything to add to that or is that kind of the probably the big home run that you get when you work on your personal brand?

Rachel Gogos (10:38)

Yeah. Yes.

Defining goals is definitely very important in a big output of it, but it’s also getting clear on your differentiators as well, right? And the other thing is like, it’s actually a big confidence boost, believe it or not, because when we know what we stand for, we can talk about those things in a way, you know, with conviction. And those also can be very sticky points, both in a positive and negative way.

Jesse Paliotto (10:54)

Hmm. Yeah.

Rachel Gogos (11:16)

to attract our ideal clients, right? So that values piece, or again, like just getting clear on, know, think of some brands you might support. The founder may also be articulate about some causes that are really important to them. And in today’s world, the consumers are so much more savvy around companies they’re supporting or not supporting, right? And they’re really using their dollars to kind of like,

Jesse Paliotto (11:19)

Interesting.

Yeah.

Rachel Gogos (11:45)

vote or support the growth of a company, right, or not. And so getting that clarity about ourselves, again, brings that confidence. It can also be polarizing in a positive way to attract our ideal people towards us. But it also, I think, builds resilience for those times in life and in every owner faces this when you’re like, man, it’s been really hard for a couple of months.

whatever it is, like is it cash flow? Is it employee turnover? Is it, you know, your just not your inability to scale or a project gone south or a client that’s unhappy, whatever it is. But sometimes we go through these periods where you stop and you say like, why am I really doing this? And again, if you’re clear on those questions, those basic questions, it can really help you just, you know, refresh and stay on track.

Jesse Paliotto (12:13)

Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Rachel Gogos (12:42)

Right, we need resilience as entrepreneurs. think it’s one of the top three qualities we need to be successful.

Jesse Paliotto (12:42)

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah, 100%. You will run into obstacles. It’s not a question of if, it is when. It occurs to that also there’s probably a benefit, and if I’m off base, please tell me, but I’m guessing there’s a benefit in that it allows you to maybe, even in promoting your business, to cut through a little bit. Because I think one of the things that my observation is that as a consumer, as I’ve witnessed other consumers, we’re much more tuned into people. so connecting with a person who’s promoting something is much more valuable than

Rachel Gogos (12:53)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (13:20)

or just it’s available now with social media and the different things. And so I’m guessing that would be valuable too. Like it’s a way for me to kind of bring my company out into the marketplace better.

Rachel Gogos (13:25)

Yes.

Yeah, absolutely it is. you’re spot on, Jesse. People, no matter how large the company or, you know, I know there’s a lot of software companies that you all work with, people still want to know who’s behind the brand, right? That’s part of their buying decision.

Jesse Paliotto (13:40)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it’s, I talk about this with people fairly frequently about like influencer culture and how it’s interesting that so much has flipped from I’m buying this thing to I’m buying this person’s recommendation. That’s really kind of, even interestingly your story, not to connect too many dots here, but with the Times, I think it was the Times Magazine article you said, which is how you started Brand ID, right? There was that personal connection. You’re like, I want to do something like what this person’s talking about.

Rachel Gogos (13:54)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah,

it brought it to life for me in a whole new way than just reading about what the company did. Having read about that, the person behind the company and what they stood for and just what their story was to starting that company also just brought it to life in a whole new way. And for your founders listening, the more that they can put their, even parts of their personal story,

Jesse Paliotto (14:26)

Yeah.

Rachel Gogos (14:44)

that are relevant to what they’re doing or if it talks about their struggle to what they’re doing. Ultimately, I think people are good and they want to support good people doing good things. But it’s up to us to communicate that.

Jesse Paliotto (14:44)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah, people don’t know what they don’t know. Sort of a, I’m just gonna swing kind of hard to a very practical question or a check-in point here. What is, is there a way that somebody could get a sense of where their personal brand is right now? If somebody’s listening to this or they’re like, oh, I haven’t, you know, I know about this, I haven’t thought about it a lot. How am I doing? Like, what would they, how would they go suss that out?

Rachel Gogos (15:01)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, so the gentleman in the Time Magazine article actually started something called, I think it was called the Online ID Calculator. I think that’s gone away, but we don’t need the calculator to figure it out. You go to Google and you type in your first name and last name and see what your results are on your first three pages in particular.

Jesse Paliotto (15:41)

Mm-hmm.

Rachel Gogos (15:46)

and identify how relevant those results are to what you’re doing right now or how you want to be perceived right now. If they’re not very relevant to the way you want to be positioned out in the world today, then you got some work to do. If the results on those top three pages are like totally on brand for what you’re doing, for what your beliefs are, positioning you authentically but in a positive light,

then you’re in a great place. But there is work where you can do in between those two extremes, right? I know, right? Totally.

Jesse Paliotto (16:21)

Yeah. I love that. Such a simple test, the Google test.

I mean the great thing about it too is you know that’s what anybody else is going to see. any if you know if you’re trying to sell to a client or anything like that and they wonder who is this person they’re going to do exactly that. So.

Rachel Gogos (16:33)

Yes.

Yeah,

yeah, exactly. And one other thing I like to tell people, because so many people don’t do this, but buy your vanity URL. So buy your first name, last name, and the .com. And even if you have a company, it’s not so you don’t feel like it’s about building your personal brand, you should still point that vanity URL to your about page on your corporate site.

Jesse Paliotto (17:03)

okay, nerdy, very nerdy web person question. With a name like Jesse Paliotto, my vanity URL is probably very easy to come by. If my name was whatever, something very common, it would be less hard. What would you tell somebody who’s like, somebody already has Bob Stewart, what do they do?

Rachel Gogos (17:15)

Yeah, John Smith.

Yeah,

so I actually just had a call today with a woman named, her name was Melinda Johnson, which is actually a pretty common name, right? Yeah. So her vanity URL is not available, but she is a specialist in a particular type of social work or psychotherapy. So I said to her, just buy your vanity.

Jesse Paliotto (17:30)

Okay, pretty common.

Rachel Gogos (17:45)

your vanity and add the abbreviation of that particular psychological behavior or psychological type of therapy that you do on the end of your name because that’s what you want to be associated with. So yeah, so there’s typically a way to find a variation or use your middle initial even if you don’t use it a lot but that could just be like enough variation where the domain is available, right?

Jesse Paliotto (17:49)

Man.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Rachel Gogos (18:12)

But I say stay away from hyphens I think those get lost and really you want to invest in the dot-com and I think it’s nice if You really built your personal brand even buying some of the extensions just so somebody doesn’t buy those out from under you like the dot org or the dotnet

Jesse Paliotto (18:19)

Mm-hmm.

Mm hmm.

Yeah, probably even more valuable with common names where people will be looking as well. So I’m. Coming away from that tactical thing, thank you that I love those kind of small small insights into like practical things you can do like right now. I’m curious, so let’s say someone says OK, I want to tackle this. What do you think are the most important things to focus on?

Rachel Gogos (18:33)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, so true.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (18:55)

to do this and I’m kind of curious around this idea of there’s easy wins and then there’s important wins. Like there’s some things like buying that domain might probably be an easy win. Like just go out and get it. It doesn’t take long. But there’s other stuff that’s like it’s it may not be easy but it’s super important. I know if you have any thoughts around that.

Rachel Gogos (19:01)

Hmm.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Good question, Jessie. That one’s getting me really thinking.

Jesse Paliotto (19:18)

Or it may be even like a way to come at it is from like if if I were a client with brand ID today What might be the first things that like we need to solve this or we? Typically start at this end of kind of our to-do list in order to get you on on track

Rachel Gogos (19:23)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, so thank you. I would say like doing those exercises in that strategize phase, they’re actually not, they’re easy, simple questions, but they’re not easy to answer. So, but they’re important, they’re very important for sure. So taking the time to do that, really taking the time to think about where you want to be five years from now, and it doesn’t have to be super granular, but just high level enough.

Jesse Paliotto (19:40)

Hmm.

Right. Yeah.

Rachel Gogos (20:00)

And I do believe that even just having that clarity in your mind, even if you don’t put it out there, helps you get there. It’s not something that you need to share. Being clear on target audience, very important, because you want to really dive deep into the psychology of your consumer and really understand what makes them tick, what their pain points are, and how your solution can help them, what those results are and how they can help them.

Jesse Paliotto (20:08)

Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Rachel Gogos (20:29)

So again, very important. I would say knowing the type of way that you like to work and the type of content you like to create because that marketing piece is very important whether you outsource it or if you do it yourself, but just pick a path that you really enjoy. Like if podcasting is your thing, pick it and stick with it.

Jesse Paliotto (20:41)

Mm-hmm.

interesting.

Yeah.

Rachel Gogos (20:58)

doing Instagram stories or reels or any of that is something you love doing, perfect. Just pick it and stick with it because you have to be consistent. And that’s also very important and not easy actually, the consistency piece.

Jesse Paliotto (21:14)

Yeah, consistency. think, you know, all of our energy levels and distraction levels goes up and down. And so like staying on, on target, I resonate with that. That is always a challenge is you do have to just stick to discipline. is I’m curious, like if there’s any, you know, a podcast, Instagram, LinkedIn would be an obvious go-to for a very, you know, for people that are in business, definitely in SaaS or software or something like that. Is there any other interesting things people have chosen to go do as they’re like,

Rachel Gogos (21:18)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (21:44)

marketing a channel or expression.

Rachel Gogos (21:48)

Yeah, like in the software world specifically.

Jesse Paliotto (21:51)

Yeah, or any.

just I’m kind of curious even just for the like from sort of the wide angle lens of what kind of stuff do people do in order to kind of once they say, OK, I know where my personality is at. I went to Google. I know my reputation is I want to start expressing who I am. Yeah, what kind of stuff do people go for?

Rachel Gogos (21:59)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah,

yeah. So be clear on your target audience and where they are. So you don’t have to be visible on every platform. You do need to be visible on the platforms where your ideal customer will be looking for you or looking for your thought leadership and opinions. And the second thing I would say is don’t underestimate the value of in-person connection, especially these last couple of years. think there’s, it’s…

Jesse Paliotto (22:15)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Rachel Gogos (22:35)

you know, back on track to like pre 2020 and people I feel really appreciate the in-person way more than we did say in like 2019 because having lost it for a little while, we really understood the value of it in a whole different way and just connecting to someone deeper. And the third thing I would say, which isn’t like a direct answer to your question, but I think it’s important to share in this part, which is networking.

Jesse Paliotto (22:47)

Yeah.

Rachel Gogos (23:05)

But networking in a way that feels really comfortable and again like really honest. So I’m a big fan of like fewer deeper conversations than like the broad hit that feels like very superficial and like you know probably what speed dating would feel like because it just takes like one amazing connection to really grow, expand, whatever, grow into a partnership, whatever it might be.

Jesse Paliotto (23:05)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Rachel Gogos (23:33)

And people feel that sincerity, that true connection right off the bat. So I would say those three things are really key. Get out from behind your desk, right? mean.

Jesse Paliotto (23:35)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I love everything you just said. Particularly that, you you said even that last part maybe doesn’t directly, but I think it does answer the question in the sense that I can imagine somebody saying, okay, I want to do my personal brand. And for better or for worse, a lot of times our go-to assumption is I’m going to go on social media. I’m going to have to go blast out LinkedIn posts three times a day.

Rachel Gogos (23:51)

Thank you.

Jesse Paliotto (24:11)

seven days a week and put it on autopilot and make it AI generated. And we kind of go to these mass multiplier methods, but I really love that last point that so much good stuff happens just having one great conversation with the right person. And I totally agree. Like we see this in our business. It resonates in different conversations. I’ve had that, you know, we’re COVID, it was very hard to figure out when COVID tailed off for different.

Rachel Gogos (24:18)

Mm-hmm.

Mm, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (24:39)

parts of the world and how different communities

Rachel Gogos (24:39)

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (24:40)

really gauge that. But we are at a place right now where people are fully like doing the in-person thing. And that feels so good after not having been able to. yeah, that’s taking advantage of that and like using that I think is very, very relevant.

Rachel Gogos (24:47)

Yes.

Yeah, yeah it does.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, totally.

Jesse Paliotto (25:00)

So on the flip side, what would be typical mistakes? if somebody, maybe I was giving one, which is to rush off and make a bunch of AI LinkedIn content. If somebody, has you seen clients go into this and maybe stumble a little bit? Is there anything that somebody should watch out for if they’re trying to build their personal brand?

Rachel Gogos (25:02)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, totally. A couple things. So one, watch oversharing on the personal side. You know, sometimes people, you want to always be professional. Like, yes, be authentic and share personal stories, but don’t overshare to the point where someone’s gonna doubt your stability, let’s say, or your ability, right? That’s one thing.

Um, second thing is the overuse of AI or even the use of know, AI is a big thing, obviously, and I have not been a huge fan on personal brands. And the reason is AI lacks soul and we can train it to talk like us and sound like us, but you can read AI text.

Jesse Paliotto (25:58)

Mm.

Rachel Gogos (26:07)

and know that it’s AI because you don’t feel the emotion. And I don’t know, maybe I’m just like a sensitive person when it comes to that and I have an extensive copywriting background, but I do think there’s something felt in the written word and it’s a great shortcut. Use it for brainstorming, use it for a better title or headline, but don’t use it to write your personal brand.

Jesse Paliotto (26:24)

Yeah.

Rachel Gogos (26:35)

copy. You can use it for products, you can use it to market software, but if you’re trying to convey a thought or a feeling from you, the personal brand, don’t use it.

Jesse Paliotto (26:38)

Yeah.

Hmm. I guess all I can think of right now. There’s somebody I work with. Katie shout out to you who I think it was you. Can you said like you can tell when somebody uses the word crucial likes for some reason AI loves to use the word crucial and most people don’t naturally use that in their conversation. Yeah, so there’s just.

Rachel Gogos (27:03)

Yeah, you know what else about

AI? It’s like technically perfect writing, which makes it read robotic. And I think that’s a big giveaway too.

Jesse Paliotto (27:09)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s not to go too far down the AI rabbit trail, because I know it can be quite a rabbit trail. I think most people right now concede that AI is detectable in most formats. And most people’s fear is that one day it won’t be. And I don’t know, nobody knows what will happen, but I’d say for now I’m 100 % with you. You can feel the lack of.

Rachel Gogos (27:31)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (27:43)

reality to it. And I would think like a big value with personal brand is giving your perspective. It is you. It feels like you. When I go talk to you in person, it sounds like you. Right. So that sort of maybe congruity or integrity of your presence is is a big thing.

Rachel Gogos (27:44)

Mm-hmm.

Correct.

Right.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, totally. Yeah, getting back to the id, right? You can’t put your

id into the AI.

Jesse Paliotto (28:07)

Not yet. Isaac Asimov said we might do it someday, but not yet. I’m curious, like, as people grow, you know, people get into this, they start, they have clarity on themselves, they’re putting themselves out there, they’re doing this. Is there anything that’s more for the long haul worth thinking about? Like if you’re already doing this, some things that might be worth thinking about as you’re kind of growing in your personal brand?

Rachel Gogos (28:10)

I hope not. I hope that’s not in our lifetime,

you

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (28:36)

This is a very open-ended question. I’m not even sure what I would think on this matter, but I just imagine there’s people that are ahead of me in putting themselves out in the marketplace who maybe have some different concerns than I would, where I’m just trying to think about getting jessipaleotto.com registered.

Rachel Gogos (28:39)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. So you’re wondering what can people do like after some of the basics are done or okay? So it

Jesse Paliotto (28:58)

Yeah.

Or even maybe pitfalls that they run into later on once they kind of get into this and they’ve been doing it for a year or two. But yeah, like what do they do after the basics? And then are there any common obstacles they run into long term?

Rachel Gogos (29:06)

Yeah. Yeah.

So some of the obstacles are again, longevity and that consistency piece. does get tiring, especially if you’re not really seeing immediate results. And we’re living in a time where immediate results are what most people are looking for. So just stick with things. It takes people time now and more time to make a purchasing decision.

Jesse Paliotto (29:22)

Mm.

Yeah.

Rachel Gogos (29:36)

And of course, higher the price point on that purchasing decision, the longer it takes them to make. But if people can find some of your thought leadership, even if it’s old stuff, you never know what somebody is going to find about you on a Google search. And so just know that the more content you have out there, again, that’s relevant to what you’re doing or trying to sell, the better it is. That’s one thing.

Jesse Paliotto (29:41)

Hmm.

Yeah.

Rachel Gogos (30:01)

Another thing is creating thought leadership. So if you are in an industry and you want to be perceived as a leader over time in that industry, start writing for other, like, influencer blogs or publications.

besides just your own companies. And also, particularly on LinkedIn, those long form posts on LinkedIn, I think are a great way to exhibit strong thought leadership. And again, connecting with influencers on there, commenting on influencers content in a way that shows that you have your own opinion about something too is over time. really helps. It’s like accumulative interest. It works the same way as money does, right?

Jesse Paliotto (30:22)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Rachel Gogos (30:50)

And also, again, like being at events that are important, key to your industry, that’s another way to really improve your thought leadership. Authoring a book, even if it’s just a digital book, but a book is like a huge way to show your thought leadership and get your opinions out there and start creating some influential work under your personal brand.

Jesse Paliotto (30:59)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Rachel Gogos (31:19)

Those are the primary things that come to mind. Because in that we got speaking, we have the authoring, content, whether online or like a physical book. again, that consistency in producing content.

Jesse Paliotto (31:25)

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s great. And something you said kind of early in that paragraph, I don’t know why, it just fired a neuron for me of the equation should be if you’re a SaaS or CEO or executive or salesperson or anything in a company, that your commitment to producing consistent content should be at least equal to your product sales cycle. So if your product takes six months to sell,

Rachel Gogos (31:43)

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (32:05)

You should be

out there. You should commit to doing six months worth of consistent communication if you’re trying to get in front of people and get to that point. And that’s best case scenario that somebody saw you talking on day one and immediately started considering your product and getting to a place of purchase in six months. Reality is, your brand presence is gonna grow. So actually it should be probably some multiple of that. But I don’t know why, I’ve just never thought of it in equation terms before.

Rachel Gogos (32:12)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, no, that’s really interesting. That is really interesting. I remembered the other thing I wanted to share, which is people’s attention spans nowadays is so minimal. You know, we have something like three to five seconds to really grab somebody’s attention on the web with content that we’re producing. So that’s the other thing to be mindful of is if you’re a true thought leader, over time, people will start seeking out your content. It’s not that you’re gonna have to be

Jesse Paliotto (32:35)

Maybe.

Hmm.

Rachel Gogos (33:02)

Of course you’re fighting for attention always, but if you kind of prove yourself within your industry and what you’re doing and you’re saying the thing that maybe not everybody is saying, because you truly believe it, not just because you’re trying to be provocative, but because you really believe the thing that you’re saying, people will start seeking your content out. And that’s when you know that you’ve really kind of hit a sweet spot, when you can cut through the noise that’s out there and really capture people’s attention.

Jesse Paliotto (33:05)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, I’m sure all of us, I know I can certainly think of people that I follow that I do that. I’m like, I want to know what this person says about this topic or I don’t care what they’re talking about. I want to listen to them because I love the stuff that they say. Yeah. So that’s a very real thing. There’s a quote too, which I’m going to totally butcher, but it makes me think of, believe…

Rachel Gogos (33:39)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (33:56)

I’ll try and grab the true quote and throw it in the show notes. But basically it’s what’s most personal is what is most universal. So there’s this idea that, which I think is just trying to capture what you’re saying. Like if you’ll truly say what you really think it’d be you, not some provocative kind of stuff, that actually goes the most distance in connecting with people truly.

Rachel Gogos (34:05)

Mmm.

Yeah, right.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Because again, it’s felt, right? You can feel authenticity.

Jesse Paliotto (34:24)

Yeah, 100%. This has been so good. I wanted to ask just where people can connect with you. So if there’s folks out here that like, I love this, and maybe brandiD could help me. What are the best ways for people to get in touch with you or with the company or to follow up?

Rachel Gogos (34:34)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, so you can visit our company site, which is the brandid.com, so T-H-E-B-R-A-N-D-I-D.com, or reach out to me personally on LinkedIn. I’m just under my vanity name, Rachel Gogos over there.

Jesse Paliotto (34:59)

Awesome. Anything that we didn’t get to touch on or like last thoughts or anything where you’re like, Jesse, I was going to say this and you didn’t give me a chance to say it. And if not, no worries.

Rachel Gogos (35:07)

Yeah, one thing that comes to mind is repetition. Just because you’ve said something once, twice, three times, don’t be afraid to say it over and over and over again, even if you’re using slightly different language, because it takes people six, seven, eight times sometimes to read something and it really sinks in. And I know, because I personally don’t love social media. I’m a bit of a social media introvert, but obviously it’s important for the industry that I work in.

Jesse Paliotto (35:12)

Hmm.

Rachel Gogos (35:37)

And you can put some posts out there about certain topics or ideas or opinions, and maybe you don’t get a whole lot of traction on it, or it lands flat for whatever reason. But say the same thing over and over and over again, because over time, that content will be associated with you, especially if it’s a philosophy or an idea within your industry. But also, again, because people just, you gotta cut through the noise and

Jesse Paliotto (35:37)

Yeah.

Rachel Gogos (36:07)

You want people to read something several times before it really sticks with them. You need them to.

Jesse Paliotto (36:12)

Yeah, we have such a I don’t know what the right term is for it, but like a disconnect between how we assume other people look at our stuff versus how we actually look at other people’s right. So I’m like anybody even the people I really like that I’ll follow. I don’t see 90 % of what they do, but for some reason I think everybody is going to see when I drop that one thing up on LinkedIn. You’re like why no one else you didn’t see anybody else’s.

Rachel Gogos (36:20)

Yes. Yes, so true.

Yeah.

Yes. I

know. That’s such a great example.

Jesse Paliotto (36:40)

And so it’s like, I resonate with that a lot, like keep, and you know, one other thing, and I know I was going to wrap up and I’m taking an extra few minutes here. You know, for me, one of the things that I’ve really taken away from chatting with you today, Rachel, is just about making sure that your brand is your true self. And I would think that saying things consistently over a long period of time is much easier when it’s really you, right? Rather than some kind of construction.

Rachel Gogos (36:46)

That’s okay.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so true. So true. There’s only one you.

Jesse Paliotto (37:09)

Yeah, I knew it.

Rachel Gogos (37:09)

Yep. I don’t know if you can see this saying, but it is personal, it’s powerful. You are your biggest differentiator.

Jesse Paliotto (37:17)

I love it. Personal is powerful. Say it again.

Rachel Gogos (37:18)

Yeah, came up with that a long

time ago. Personal is powerful. You are your biggest differentiator because there’s only one you.

Jesse Paliotto (37:26)

I love that.

There is no better note to close on. With that, we’re gonna wrap this up today. Rachel, thank you so much for being here. Really love talking. Have a great week and everybody else, thanks for joining us on the Growth Stage podcast. I’m your host, Jesse Paliotto. I get to support the digital product community as part of my role at FastSpring and I love getting to do what we did today, which is just connect with great people online. Thanks, Rachel. Cheers, everybody. Have a great week.

Rachel Gogos (37:50)

Thank you, Jesse.