Building from 0 to Awesome in 60 Days with Adam Shaw (Marketing For Founders)

So many marketers find themselves as the first marketer... or even the first everything at a startup.  Adam Shaw, expert marketing consultant, has recently started Marketing for Founders (marketingforfounders.com) and will share the lessons he's learned in playing the early-stage marketing role - and helping others do the same.  
Host Melissa Moody and Adam talk about: 

• being able to reach out when you need help across marketing functions 
• going rapidly and removing barriers to speed
• the one area of marketing that people always need help with 
• the enduring value of an email list
• guerilla marketing tactics to drive sales

Shout-outs for: 

• Marketing for Founders: marketingforfounders.com
• https://www.dmndmarketing.com/

Learn more about Nut Tree: https://nuttr.ee/

Transcript

Melissa Moody: 0:24

Hello 2 pizza marketers and welcome back to the show. It's your host, Melissa Moody. And I am here today with Adam Shaw. He's not only a really cool guy just in general, but he is someone who comes from a background in agency. He's been head of demand gen at companies like Wespire and Intentwise. And most recently he is bringing something to market. For small marketing teams, for founders, for the people at the start of the marketing runway, that is in my opinion, really going to change the game. so we'll talk about that a little bit further in on the show, but welcome Adam. Thanks for joining me today.

Adam Shaw: 1:00

Thanks so much. Yeah. Now

Melissa Moody: 1:02

tell me a little bit. I always kind of ask people, push them at the beginning. What are your, what are your creds for being a two pizza marketer? You've worked with some two pizza marketing teams. Tell us a little bit about how you've been in these trenches of small

Adam Shaw: 1:14

team marketing. Yeah. So I actually started on like the total other end of that, which is like massive team marketing in the agency world. And you know, when you have. Processes built out there and you go into small teams and you see kind of the lack of processes. It's kind of a low hanging fruit is to say, okay, how can we make things work faster? Well, let's put together a really good process and just ram things through it until it works. And that, that's kind of the way that I've approached things with a small teams, whether it's just myself as a marketer, a team of like two or three people, it's create a quick process, launch it fast, and then see what happens. If it's good, then scale it. If it's bad, then don't worry about, you know. Turning it off as fast as you can.

Melissa Moody: 1:54

Yeah, I think your speed, speed to market, but also speed for testing has always been something refreshing. And the conversations that you and I have had, it's been around, Hey, Melissa, you've got a lot of ideas, like just pick one and run hard and then test it out and move. Where most recently, where would you say that that's come into play for you yourself? Where have you looked at yourself and said, what, what process can I straighten out? What can I

Adam Shaw: 2:14

do fast? Yeah. So marketing for founders right now we get into more about what that's about, but big part of it is creating content for our founders who are our members and to do that and keep it fresh and exciting and also accessible for everybody is I have to create a lot of content. So for instance, I have a goal to create 50 blog posts and five new courses by the end of November. And to do that requires a lot of people, a lot of help, and a lot of, most of them are VAs right from. Places like India and Pakistan who have like really, really good talent and you create a process and you give them the tools to do it and to help and, you know, I can go and get 50 pieces of content created in the next, you know, whatever it is, 40 days or so. That's impossible if you don't have a process, right. But it's also impossible to do if you take a really long time, because you can't take a week for every piece, every, every piece of content, it's, it'd take you a year to get 50 out. So it's kind of that mix of process and speed. Yeah, for

Melissa Moody: 3:06

sure. That's a good point to that process doesn't always have to be just operationalized. It can be using the right people, right? I think that that's, that's a really good point. Let's actually rewind and focus on I'm excited today to dig into what you've built with marketing for founders. So marketing for founders, if I had to, you know, not looking at anything, regurgitate what it's been, is this kind of resource where DIY founders, founders who are either It's a resource where they can go, they can get courses, they can get templates, all sorts of stuff. Correct me. What have I, what have I said wrong? Give me a little bit more of your initial why it was built and what

Adam Shaw: 3:46

it does. Yeah. So it's, it's pretty much what I found to be like the only structured do it with help marketing. Solution. So yeah, the courses and things are tools that we use to, to help founders do it with help. But what it came from was my consulting on the side, which is DM and demarketing, which owns marketing for founders. It's not a brand that I like run around talking about just because marketing for founders is kind of cannibalizing it all. But And, you know, transparently, it's expensive, right? Like our average customer value is like 10 K a month, And nobody can, not nobody, but nobody in those little tiny teams can, can afford that. And how many people do I have to say no to, right? Every month and say, they say, Hey, I want to do all this stuff. Great. And then they say my budget is 2, 000. So it came born out of that. And actually what happened was one of my customers at. And he loved the idea. He brought it to me as kind of like he brought his half idea, which is a little bit more of a more more than a more than a community, like a structured help thing. And I said, well, here's this problem that I'm experiencing and seeing and they actually invested into the business. And we. Kind of created this whole, you know, marketing for founders ecosystem now, which actually, I don't know when this podcast is going to release, but this week we're moving it onto a new platform. So instead of just slack and notion, it's actually on its own kind of like self contained platform full of all of our content and things like that.

Melissa Moody: 5:03

That's fantastic. And I like the, the help you, it's not. DIY purely. It's like help you do what you're already trying to do. So one of the things that Adam and I talked about at one point was, especially marketers in these early stages, you have to be a generalist. You have to know how to do everything. Fundamentally, we aren't going to be able to do everything. There are always things that even the best experts need help with. So if you are super heavy product marketer. You may need to have some questions answered when it comes to demand gen, right? And if you are extremely good at performance marketing, boy, oh boy, you may have some questions when it comes to throwing a brand together and having this place where you could go and get that support without having to just, you know, find a whole new contractor or bring on a whole new agency or add to that massive tech stack is. Really, really excellent. Where is marketing? Actually, really quickly. You said you're moving off of kind of notion and slack and those scrappy tools. Tell me though, before we talk about where it's going, you pulled marketing for founders together very fast function. You told us you'd be able to create content fast, which you're doing. You also pulled together What effectively was the product very fast based on super scrappy platforms. What did you learn in that? Anything that worked really well or didn't work or what'd you learn in that process?

Adam Shaw: 6:23

Yeah, I think what I learned in the process was like, that was the right way to do it, right? Just to make it clear, like just to understand, okay, is is this it allowed it to happen quickly. I think it took me from, You actually, one of the reasons why we launched it was we were launching it kind of slowly in the background, but I, there was a layoff at my last role. And I said, all right, well, I got full time to do this. Let's see if I can stand it up in a week. Right. And I did now what I'm finding is, is difficult now is the onboarding process. Right. So I think it's going to start to affect sticky, start affecting stickiness is just like the onboarding process. It's a little tedious. It's annoying, right? Like you got to get them on Slack and got to get them on notion. They got to show them around notion as opposed to like, we're building on the new platform on, on circle. Which is like a community building platform. And that has such a beautiful like onboarding process. So getting people in the door wasn't really difficult, but I think what I'm starting to see is like people will actually log on and just say like, you know, because they can't see the value immediately. It's just slack and notion. People are like, Oh, I don't know if this is the right place for me. What am I going to get? And actually takes a whole phone call with me after they start their free trial to really understand it. And, you know, that's, that's tough, right? Like we're starting to get the point where we're onboarding three or four people a week. I can't do four hours of onboarding calls a week. What happens if we get to eight, nine, 10? And suddenly we're talking about multiple days worth of, of onboarding calls. It's totally, you know, non, not scalable, especially we're talking about free trials. So that was a catalyst of, of that, but yeah, so the, the, the fast and scrappy thing was for sure the right way to go and just get it up and make sure it's clear. Generated, I think we got up to like 5k MRR within the last month or so just off of that. And so now how do we get to 10, 15, 20 volts retention? And it's creating a really delightful like demo experience too. So that people want to like there, if somebody is not ready to drop 200 bucks, or doesn't want to do a a free signup, you know, we can show them really easily how, how nice it is.

Melissa Moody: 8:17

That's hugely powerful. So this, I mean, so much of getting it up and running it fast was simply to prove the market out. And once you saw that, then you were able to say, okay. What do we really need to do? Well, congratulations, by the way, that's very exciting to get something up and running that actually is getting that response and getting people excited to use it. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. How did you decide to move on to circle? I mean, there are so many. Kind of, you know, education, community blended platforms out there. What was the deciding factor for

Adam Shaw: 8:48

you? I Just was drinking a glass of wine and found it and looked like the easiest one, I compared like three or four other ones really quickly. And the circle is the one that I could very easily seem like I could very easily onboard onto without like. Getting a demo and having like a big customer success team behind them. And it's also inexpensive, right? Like we're still in the, I've only, this has only been around for a month. Right. So for me to like, like drop 2, 000 a month, I'm like the most robust platform or something. Right. Doesn't make a lot of sense. Other options are like discord, which is cool, but discord is, is as a really good tool, but as a brand, it's very much focused in other areas. Like, so my, my audience may not find as much value in discord. They may see it as a. The platforms for something else like gaming or something like that. Right. Which isn't necessarily true. Like I'm part of like several discord communities. Right. And they're awesome. And they're all marketing related and like founder and startup related. But yeah, so that's where, that's why I went with circle. I can't really pick out one like main reason, but it was cheap and fast. And then I've been putting it together for a week and it's almost done. It's pretty fast.

Melissa Moody: 9:47

Yeah, that's, that's, I mean, A, to your point, the mentioning the pricing barrier, right, every single time if I click on that pricing tab and it says I need to see demos, like for people like you and me who are running so fast, that is just a huge blocker immediately. Right, right. And then I, I actually think you're right about Discord. I enjoy Discord for a lot of the more like personal communities and things and, and even for some marketing, but to me that falls also into one of the pitfalls I think you mentioned of Notion and Slack. Is almost there too wide open.

Adam Shaw: 10:18

There's robust.

Melissa Moody: 10:20

Yeah, you could go and do anything and things are everywhere and there's not a very focused moving people through the process. So what you said about needing to create an onboarding that. It doesn't require you to shepherd them through it. I mean, discord is one where a lot of people would say, where are we? What is going on here? How do I, how do I find my way? So that makes sense to find a, an onboarding focused one. Well, we are,

Adam Shaw: 10:43

we are very much, we're very much not a community. Like I want to like make that super clear because I'm not competing against these amazing communities and like discord slack and all those are inherently community oriented where a circle, like they're. Their viewers or experience that we can supply to our, our customers is we're able to design it to be a lot more resource heavy and support heavy, which is what we are like. Yeah. Okay. You can, there is a section where you're going to be able to talk with our founders, but it's not the point because there's, there's a rep genius. There's, I mean, I can just do a look at my Slack right now and tell you that our communities, right. I don't want to. Yeah. And how can I, I can't possibly compete with all of them. So we're not a community. We're not stealing thunder from communities. We're giving like real actionable help from experts, right? Versus leaning on other people who are doing the same thing as you. This is some, you know, it's, it has a different value prop in my mind to communities.

Melissa Moody: 11:35

I hear that dramatically. Something that I've been working on recently also has the pitfall of being potentially perceived as a community. And I have said repeatedly, we are not building a community. Now, there's a funny little nuance there, which I've been leaning into recently. We are, by nature of what we're building, building. Community we are building connections between people, but we are not building a community. I think that that's a really interesting distinction where you can be building community and people leaning on each other and feeling like they're part of something without actually building a community where they have to participate and give input. What, considering then that you're, you're putting together kind of the resources in a more accessible way, you're moving into this scale where you don't have to be doing the onboardings. What else is coming up next for marketing for founders? What is the next move that you guys

Adam Shaw: 12:24

are going to be making? Yeah. So we're starting to find a really good niche talking with accelerators and incubators basically as the only plug and play marketing ecosystem. So something that if you haven't been involved in an accelerator incubator, they give startups some funding and some resources to help them grow. And depending upon what kind of accelerator it is, it might, if you're a biotech, like you might get lab space if you're, you know. Tech, you might get you know, software dev help. You might get you know, some sort of fractional CFO help, whatever it might be. A lot of them have some of these some of them like the big ones, like Y Combinator have all of them, right? Like they, that's a fully thought out, like they've been around forever. They have billions of dollars in investment over the years and do it, but you have the vast majority of accelerated have like a board that's investing like three, four, five, 6 million into this. And they don't have. Okay. All of these advisors to help out, and I just can't possibly support that. So we're the only plug and play marketing ecosystem for incubators and accelerators to help their startups go to market faster and cheaper.

Melissa Moody: 13:24

It's so brilliant. I think I've sat in on many, many startup weekends or mentorship opportunities where individual marketers are asked to provide literally all of this to the startups as they need it. So to have a already. Provided set of resources to have a focused set of you know, I know you run office hours out of it. I think that's a brilliant way to do it every day, every day. Exactly. So you can get every single day. We just recently, there was a startup week up here and we did just that week. Marketing office hours. And the questions that come up are so fun. They're all, you know, left field, right field, they're everywhere. Tell us about those office hours. What have you encountered? What are, what are small marketing problems that I'm sure our audience has heard? What are the ones that come up most often maybe?

Adam Shaw: 14:11

Yeah. So the, the absolute number one is actually something you already mentioned, which was just pick something and do it and go. You'd be amazed. Actually, you probably wouldn't be because your experience is how many founders Have all these things are like 98 percent of the way there and they're just like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, go, I was talking to one of our members the other day and in office hours and they're getting ready to launch a paid media campaign on LinkedIn, they have 5, 000 are going to test for about four or five weeks and they wanted to do this for like six months and I said, all right, well, show me what you got and they had, Dozens of creatives, dozens of designs put together where they would take their competitors ones that they see on their own feed and then redesign it for themselves and just kind of put it in a folder and be like, Oh, when we do this, we're going to like, here's some ideas. And they also had their audience fully. They're literally everything, but I just don't know what to do. I'm like, well, you kind of do know what to do because you did it here. The last thing you need to do is just stand up the landing page that you want to use for and you're good to go, right? And it's, they said something really great actually, which was all right, you scared me into action. And they launched it like, I think ended up being like three or four days later. So I don't, this was last week. So I'm not really sure exactly. Like how, how it's going so far, we'll find out but yeah, just like going, getting it and going is, is the biggest thing. And I think the term analysis paralysis is overused because it is okay to overanalyze and stuff. But once you find that, that data point, you just kind of got to go and do it from a tactical standpoint. I get the most questions about outbound because that's such a low hanging fruit to do when you're a startup, you know, founder, and you don't want to go spend a bunch of money on paid ads. You don't have the time to build amazing landing pages and do SEO and content. You stand up one good piece of content, do some outbound around it. So a lot of folks are asking, okay, where do I start? It's sales nav on LinkedIn, Apollo for email. And then just test your message and go you know, and then we, I have a ton of resources on that, that I hand out to our folks when they, when they need that extra help. But yeah, so just going and doing it and then outbound is a big one. And webinars are big too. Cause again, really, really easy, cheap way to just go and get some, some new.

Melissa Moody: 16:11

Yeah. Three brilliant things that you just brought up there. And I think the, the fundamental piece of just go, I mean, Hey, listeners, there has got to be that thing that you were sitting on right now. You heard it here. Adam Shaw says, get up and go get the thing out the door.

Adam Shaw: 16:24

Yeah. Address your fear on it. Like what? Okay. Like what is going to happen if it doesn't work? Like, what's Nothing is going to happen. Right? Like, the only thing that can happen is if it does work, you get a bunch of people in the door and you have to like figure out how to handle them all. But if it doesn't work, it fizzles out unless you're, first of all, don't do this. But if you're going to, if your budget on like some brand new thing is a hundred thousand dollars, then be scared to do it, but also don't do that. So

Melissa Moody: 16:47

Right. I'm guessing you would probably say like some of the first things that you can try should all be zero budget anyway, just get them out the door. There's so much you can do with low hanging fruit at

Adam Shaw: 16:55

zero. I lost my money for founders with a 2, 500 wine party at St. Louis startup week. And we invited at 60 founders show up and that was at 2, 500 bucks and it turned into three signups for marketing for founders and then two services clients on the consulting side of things. And it's 2, 500. It was, it was huge. Right. You know, that proved out the fact that conferences will be a big, big part of our play in the coming months. And, you know, it's only costing her a dollar to figure that out. I didn't even get a ticket for it. I just threw the party. It was not a sanctioned party or sanctioned for lack of a better phrase party with them. It was just all right, cool. You know, send out a ton of LinkedIn messages and emails to everybody in the greater St. Louis area who has founder in their title and get them to come here.

Melissa Moody: 17:37

Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a, we definitely have some work in the series in the season coming up around guerrilla marketing at events and not to shoot down like standard participation in events as well. But I think there's so much to be said for throwing that, throwing that dinner when they're all in town. Grab those people who grab your targets while they're there. It seems to me too, like if we go back to your move with marketing for founders Around the incubators and the accelerators. I think what's really fun. And I always love the stage of growth is you're working on channel fit. You're working on where can we show up and see huge success with, you know, ideally less input, less. Less spinning of the wheels. And it's really exciting to think about channel fit in, in that way. I think as marketers, we often default to literally the standard channels, right? Like the, the proven demand gen channels, but to find channel fit in just a different top of funnel source, like. Pairing up, partnering with those VCs and accelerators. It's really, really brilliant. Have you kind of seen that in action? I know for gated, that was a big thing. We tested a lot as well. It was channel fit. Do you work with founders taking that on right now, or have we not seen that as much yet?

Adam Shaw: 18:48

Definitely do again, like channels, depending on how you're managing that, that can be really cost effective. We tend to call them partnerships or affiliates on our end, which is say, go find somebody that does something adjacent to you and see if you can provide value to each other. Marketing for founders. We have three partnerships coming up in November that we're doing webinars and blog posts and discounts back and forth. And that costs zero dollars, right? That will, it'll be nothing they will, I will get access to their audience, which is perfect. They'll get access to mine for upsell opportunities. So you're finding those kind of. Those, those synergies, those same things now with, with the channel we're actually not calling our, our accelerators channels because the accelerators and the incubators are paying for the licenses for their users. Right? So that's actually, they're actually a buyer. So for instance, we're going to, we're going to these accelerators and we say, okay, you've got a cohort, you do three cohorts a year of, you know, 10 startups. So you need 30 You need 30 licenses active per year, right? They buy that. So it's more of an enterprise sales model than it is a channel. Yeah. It's more

Melissa Moody: 19:51

of a, I mean, really they're just a persona like, right. You're going after that, that is the persona. That's fascinating. Yeah. To your point earlier about the partnerships and affiliates, I often think of those I was talking to someone about this the other day. Partnerships being that point of mutual uplift, right. Where you're each getting uplift affiliates. I always kind of segment out with. They are, they are driving traffic to you for, for value. You're giving them like the kickback value, but it's not necessarily a value to their business. It's more just some sort of kickback.

Adam Shaw: 20:18

Yeah. And I think too, like when you get started, you know, you don't have a huge email list. Like I'm only a month into this and my email list has 300 people. So it's not that valuable yet. But I, the people who I'm going with partnerships for their email lists are thousands. They've been around for a long time, but I can't offer them is just an incredible webinar experience, content experience on my end and say, I will take on all of that work and that's where I'm bringing the value. You're bringing the value by promoting it to your potential two, three, four, 5, 000 person email list that, you know, 30 percent might be founders that are perfectly aligned for what, you know, I'm selling. And you guys might walk away with a better process to webinars and content creation in the future too. Go for it.

Melissa Moody: 20:58

I think that's a really good point. I think a lot of times when we are small, when we are the small fish in the pond, we look and say, what mutual value do I have? Right? Because it does feel on the surface, like you are getting all the value out of having the larger partner come in, sharing their bigger lists, sharing their bigger audience. But I think that that's well said, which is really understand that even as a small fish, you may have a very concrete value to provide and just reframing around that versus around shared mutual, you know, list size, list volume. Yeah. Yeah. That hit, that hits home for me right now with something that I'm working on very much so. And so I like, I like that suggestion a lot. Tell me a little bit. Well, actually I'm going to pause. This is the point in this story where I want to hear something that we ask every one of our guests, which is. A lot of small team marketers do what we do, knowing that we're going to be in the middle of a mess. So I want to hear about your marvelous mess, Adam. Something that went just, you know, hot mess and you either learned from it or maybe you walked away from it with scars. I don't know, but I'd love to hear what's a marvelous mess that comes to mind for you.

Adam Shaw: 22:07

Yeah. I mean, I think everything that we do to some degree. The way that I do it starts as a marvelous mess, right? Because it's fast, it's scrappy, it's, it's, you know, it launches, you have to watch it fast. It's going to be messy and then you fix it after and streamline it. But I guess if you're looking for one that failed miserably, it's, you know, there's been several of those. I think the, the main ones are the first time that I did events, right? It was very much just attend and see what happens. You just, everybody's so confused, especially if you have a team, like if you're a single marketer, but there's three or four salespeople, you, I learned very quickly that salespeople will absolutely not know what to do at the event outside of talking to people. Cause they're very, very good at that. What the marketer team, if you're a single person marker on a team, that's a sales driven team. When you guys are doing events, you need to facilitate. What is essentially a tool for you, which is your sales team's ability to have a really great conversations. And yeah, if you're not giving them those guidelines of like, okay, you need to be here during this time or there during that time. And we're doing this event now, and we're having this party tonight. And then there's a, there's, you need to be at the desk between these hour, the booth between these hours and the other hours. And then, you know, creating all that, because then your sales team is going to be confused, not knowing exactly what to do. You know, they're very, they're smart people, and I'm not saying that they're dumb, but they are very, very good at talking to people. It'd be like basically starting, consider if you did a LinkedIn ad campaign, you would never just turn on an ad campaign, the biggest. You know, group with some creative, you never thought of, or that you, you spun up in two seconds. You'd have some thought on it. So why wouldn't you do the same for a, for an event? But yeah, that was a long time ago and I was learning how to do events, but it is a big mess that I see people do single marketers and founders too. They go, I got tickets to big event. We're going to go make a bunch of sales. Cool. How are you going to do that? And they go, well, I'm going to talk to a lot of people. Okay. Well, you just spent 5, 000 on these tickets. So how much revenue do you get out of that to make it worth it? 10, 000. Okay. Well. Thank you. How many people do you have to talk to? How many demos do you have to give to get yourself 10, 000 revenue? 10? All right. How many people do you have to talk to to get 10 demos? And they go, a hundred people. Okay. So how are you going to talk to a hundred people at the event? And they go, that's actually kind of a lot of people. Not impossible, but I need to be. And then they get back and they go, why did we fail? How many people did we talk to? I don't know. Okay. So we'd have no idea where in that situation did your investment go wrong. Just like you would with any other channel, just cause it's an in person and it's a human connection doesn't mean you shouldn't be making a plan to actually execute. So there's the marvelous mess and then the, the outcome of it and how to fix it. Yeah. Okay.

Melissa Moody: 24:34

Well, that's a darn good learning for everyone listening. I mean, I love that you essentially, you know, apply to funnel, like make sure that like every, everything we're running, you apply a funnel to in person work and to your point, you're right. It does fall on the marketer or the founder to curate what that sales team is doing, because yeah, you got a great knife. You got some good salespeople. Let's make sure you're putting them to

Adam Shaw: 24:55

action. Right. And if you're at an event, you do like a party or something. Right. One of the things, like the reason the party idea comes up is how can I get. 50 conversations from my salespeople, a party, get 50 people in a room having dinner and drinks and your salespeople are going to have. The ability to have that conversation. Same thing if it's just your single founder and you're launching your product is how am I going to talk to 50 people invited to a party? They're there already. You're going to talk to them. They're not going to be distracted about other things. They also love you for giving them booze and food. So they're going to be highly likely to want to spend time with you while you're there. So yeah, it's just a tool of the, the party is just a top of funnel tool to get more conversations in and in the middle of the bottom of funnel is what your sales team is really good at. Or if you're a founder, you're probably pretty good at it too. Yeah.

Melissa Moody: 25:39

On a more traditional level too, if you're, if you're going to be investing, you know, all the folks, I was recently at a demo at a conference and it was just, you know, the hall of demos, excuse me, I'll cut that out. But you can put that, you know, the billboard of your tagline or whatever, up behind your sales team. But if, if you don't have something that's actually pulling people in, they're just, I mean, if you can watch it, people are just walking by because there's no reason to engage if you know, you're just going to get pitched. So giving them a reason to have those conversations and a reason to be starting those discussions with people is, is critical and, and you can see where the effort ends with, we have a demo, it says what we do, and I put some salespeople there, versus we've come up with a way to engage people, we've come up with a way to draw them in, we've come up with a way to get more of those hundred meetings.

Adam Shaw: 26:29

The best, the absolute best I guess event in, in like, you know, whatever the demo rooms are, you call them the I forget who it was, who, who this company was like a Martech data thing. This was at trafficking conversions back when it used to be in San Diego. And They did digital portraits and the digital portraits took the artists like four or five minutes to draw them. So while you're sitting there getting your portrait drawn, the salesperson has four or five minutes to have a conversation with you. It was really, really great idea. But that's also similar. So to do that at a cheaper level at St. Louis Startup Week where we launched. We just had me and my head of growth he put a t shirt, we put t shirts on that said, I'm hosting the biggest one founders only wine party in St. Louis and a QR code on the back for people to take a picture of it. So they would come to me and be like, where, when is this, where is this, this wine party? And I'd be like, it's whatever it was like, it's Thursday at 6pm down the street, whatever. And here, like take a QR code. Yeah, it got them in and I got their email like that, right? Because that QR code went to an invite but it attracted people. It was exciting. It wasn't just like, come see a demo. It was like, I'm doing this really cool thing. And then I didn't have to worry about that person again, because I knew that, A, I got their email and B, I'm having a conversation with them. Probably on Thursday night. I don't need to be running around scrambling. That's one person. That's like a foregone conclusion to fit to get that metric of X conversations. So, yeah, it's just another final play. Yeah, I

Melissa Moody: 27:51

think it's weird, but I mean, it feels, so far from the standard, but I think it's important. You want people to just come and talk to you. And sometimes that is doing things that are slightly off base or it's, I mean, I think yours is a beautiful example because it wasn't off base. It was very directed and targeted Pulled them through a funnel, but sometimes too, it's also just being the spot where people want to come and talk and hang out. Recently at GTM 2023, there was a Commsor was doing, they were basically recording content right there at the show. So they were recording, like you ate hot wings with Mac and it was just. The place where people wanted to be because you literally were watching a show being recorded in front of you after he'd done all these hot wings, multiple people said, can I get in and do an episode to it? Wasn't he'd already pre scripted all the people he was hosting and he went, sure, come on in because it was just interesting. You wanted to be there. It was fun. It was like a sentiment of, The place in the demo alleyway that you actually wanted to hang out versus kind of awkwardly being pitched to. And so I think creating that environment where people want to hang out is actually a huge step to opening up those sales conversations.

Adam Shaw: 28:57

Yeah, absolutely.

Melissa Moody: 29:00

Interesting. Didn't think we were going to get into events and demo strategy, but I like

Adam Shaw: 29:03

that we went there. I loved events. I love planning events and doing them because that's such a low hanging fruit way for founders to, to test and then get out there and convert demos. It's That is the easiest way to physically see the math behind making, you know, going to market work. So I think that's a good thing for founders to do. That's a super

Melissa Moody: 29:23

powerful statement. Also, whenever I say, tell us about your marvelous mess, like 90 percent of the answers on this show have all been about events. So take that with a grain of salt.

Adam Shaw: 29:33

I didn't, I didn't say that by accident.

Melissa Moody: 29:36

Okay. Here's one more fun thing I always have to get, which is. And you've seen a lot of these, I know you have tested a lot of tools, I know you run fast with them. I always like to hear from our guests, what is a tool or resource, and if you want, you can give me two a tool or resource that you personally use and absolutely rely on, you just think is. Yeah. Cool

Adam Shaw: 29:56

beans. Yeah. Well, I mean, notion is like how I live my life. Notion went down for like two hours last week and I just was like, didn't know what to do with myself. So that I'm also like really, really process driven and notion is a fantastic place to create processes. So when you're a single marketer, you can use it for a lot more. Don't recommend using it for much more than processes. If you're a if you're on a team, it's just not built for that, but that is my number one. And then My number two, I don't know, because tools don't really mean that much to me. I guess it's like about building out these processes and then proving them and then seeing like, okay, what's the next step and increasing the conversion or the volume. And then I pick a tool that does that. So I'm not really beholden to tools too much. Our tech stack is real small.. I usually

Melissa Moody: 30:36

say tools or resources because actually I had one person tell me about the energy drink that they drank, which was hilarious. So really, it's like whatever gets you through your day. And I love, yeah, Notion is software, but it is process oriented. So I like that you called that one out.

Adam Shaw: 30:51

Yeah, I think then from a resource standpoint, if you're going that direction, then these guys back here, my bikes are pretty, pretty big part of my day. Right. What brand, what brands are you rocking back there? That's a Canyon over here. And then right behind me is my triathlon bike is my BMC and I got a couple more canyons downstairs for gravel.

Melissa Moody: 31:07

Someone needs to get out on the trails pretty soon and listeners, you can't see it right now, but Adam is rocking a really sweet kind of pink tie dyed. I am Kenough sweatshirt. So I'm somewhere between Adam's job is bike and Adam's job is marketing. And that's probably where he would put himself to. I guess.

Adam Shaw: 31:25

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I, you know, these days marketing for founders and taking a ton of my time, but yeah, when I'm, when I'm moving along pretty good, you know, my training and triathlons and biking are a part time job for sure.

Melissa Moody: 31:38

Well, tell our audience a little bit about where else they can find out about you, certainly about marketing for founders and anything else you want to shout out.

Adam Shaw: 31:45

Yeah. So check us out at marketingforfounders. com. Of course you can get me on LinkedIn, just Adam Shaw, mine is the one with the little line emoji. Fun fact about me is I am an amateur sommelier, so do that for fun too. But I got the certs and everything, paid all the money. So you can find it for his fancy dinner parties now. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then yeah, find it marketing for founders. com. I'm sure by the time that this is getting launched, we will have our freemium version, so you'll be able to go on there. It's more than just a 30 day free trial. You get all of the really cool chats and the one in the expert AMA in the chat functionality. So you can test it out, see if it's something that you like and see if you'd like to upgrade to a more hands on do it with help.

Melissa Moody: 32:22

Well it was wonderful to have you today. I always love saying goodbye to guests that I know I'm gonna get on the phone with probably in another week or so. So it won't be too long till Adam and I talk and I hope everyone listening today enjoyed the conversation. Feel free to reach out to him or just go try out marketing for founders. Everybody. It is going to be it's already awesome. And it sounds like it's getting even cooler very soon. Absolutely. Cool. Thanks everyone. Bye for today..