Transcript:

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:
All right, Amir, thank you for joining me on the exit five podcast. It's an early morning. I saw you just posted yesterday. Good morning from HockeyStacks new hq in San Francisco. That's where you are right now.


Emir Atli [00:00:27]:
Yeah. And that was 11:00 a.m. so that's morning for me.


Dave Gerhardt [00:00:31]:
Usually that was 11:00 a.m. right now it's 07:52 a.m. so this is super, super morning for you. Got to find a way to get your energy up.


Emir Atli [00:00:39]:
I don't know, I just had a special set. I'm excited for this podcast too.


Dave Gerhardt [00:00:46]:
You'll be good. So a couple of things we're going to talk about. I want to talk about HockeyStack, a newer ish company in the B two B SaaS space that seems to be everywhere in the last year or so. And I want to talk about that early stage marketing is a topic that's always popular with this audience and then also spend some time talking about measurement and attribution. But let's rewind back to the beginning of HockeyStack. If you could just take me into the beginning. I don't necessarily want to cover the founding story of the company, but more so when you had something and when you decided it was time to go and do marketing. One of the questions that I see come up a lot in the ex five community or from startup marketers is like, or even a lot of founders listen to this podcast too.


Dave Gerhardt [00:01:35]:
When do you start marketing? And so what was that process like at HockeyStack?


Emir Atli [00:01:40]:
When did you start so quick and throw? Myself, I'm the founder and CRO of HockeyStack. We're doing, as you said, marketing analytics and attribution. We recently released ABM and sales intelligence a couple of weeks ago as well. So we are becoming a platform, not like one product. So as you said last year, we have grown to be one of the largest platforms in the attribution space. Right now, a couple billion dollars, billions of dollars in net new revenue is flowing through the platform from our customers, and almost a billion dollars in performance marketing spend is flowing through HockeyStacks platform. And we are using all of this data in our research reports, which is coming out every single week on Tuesday called Hockey Stack Labs. So how we decided to do marketing.


Emir Atli [00:02:24]:
So I've, I always loved marketing and I've been testing a lot of stuff before HockeyStack and during HockeyStack as well. So I thought, like the attribution space, there's been different platforms. Like Bizzabel is a tool that I admire. It's like the legacy attribution platform that most enterprises use. And last time I checked, drift is using visible. Still, if someone at drift is listening to this podcast, reach out to me. So I thought, like, if I just do, I don't know, cold up on cold call people, cold email people, do SEO, it's not going to break out because people already know about attribution and everybody hates attribution right now. It's not like I'm launching an AI product that everyone's going to be interested in no matter what I do.


Emir Atli [00:03:10]:
I want it to be really strategic, interesting, so that people can actually see and then be interested in the product. That's not like an exciting AI product. So what we did is me and my co founder and CEO, we started posting on LinkedIn every single day, twice a day for six months. I said, after six months, if it doesn't work out, you're going to stop. But for six months, we're going to do every single day, two posts. And at the same time.


Dave Gerhardt [00:03:37]:
I have a question on that. Where was the product at that point? Did you have a product that people could sign up and sell or. Not yet?


Emir Atli [00:03:43]:
No, we were still building. Okay, so both of my co founders are building the product and I'm talking to users potential prospects. Me and my co founder, CEO, we're posting every day on LinkedIn for six months. And after six months, six months was like the deadline to launch the product. So after six months, we actually had like a small audience and we had like, I know 35, 40 people that we met from LinkedIn, jumped on a Zoom call, had a phone call, met in person, something like that. So a small in person community and small LinkedIn community at least. Like if I do a product launch, I can reach out to 40 people and they would support the product launch.


Dave Gerhardt [00:04:19]:
Let's go back to the, just like you're still building the product, you're talking to people. Did you have a content strategy, like some really like, thoughtful thing planned out? We're going to post about this. We're going to do this this day, we're going to post this. Or we kind of just posted anything that came to your mind? How did you decide to, what storylines or messaging angles did you decide to go after at that stage? I'm asking because I think that's where a lot of people are not sure what to talk about. Did you just go hard on what you were learning from customers talking about attribution and measurement? What was the topic?


Emir Atli [00:04:52]:
Yes, this is really interesting question. Because I've not done this for like the last two years or so. So it's interesting to remember how I was doing it. So basically what I was doing was. So I had two posts. One of them was something about the product that we were building or about attribution or something like that. And the second one is I had a list of people that I thought they were posting interesting things. I was reading those posts and writing my own opinions about the same topic without mentioning them or anything.


Emir Atli [00:05:24]:
For example, if you post about man versus dimension, I was writing a post to your post, but as a separate post, if that makes sense. So you said, yeah, I love that.


Dave Gerhardt [00:05:34]:
You were using, basically, you were using it as like a prompt to like, okay, what's my opinion on this topic? I love that. That's really smart. And.


Emir Atli [00:05:40]:
Exactly.


Dave Gerhardt [00:05:41]:
That's also where I think a lot of people get stuck, is like, well, what am I going to say? So you just kind of looked around and found interesting and relevant voices in the space that you knew you were going to build in.


Emir Atli [00:05:50]:
Yeah, exactly. So they would have thought about an idea. If they thought about it, it's probably a good idea. It's probably going to get a lot of comments.


Dave Gerhardt [00:05:57]:
It's not true.


Emir Atli [00:05:58]:
But yes, I will write something as if this was a conversation. And a lot of those posts, actually, some of them got viral. So it was a good sign that there's something in there. And then it's not sustainable, though. So you can down to that for two years, that was like just the initial stage. And then after that, as we got close to the product launch, what we did, and I think every single setup needs to do this. I basically pressured my co founders and our early engineers to at least launch one new feature a week. And at the same time I hired the designer in house.


Emir Atli [00:06:31]:
So basically they were letting me know what we're going to launch the next two weeks. Our designer was doing short videos about the feature and I was pushing them out from my company page, my profile, my co founders. And even at some point some of our engineers started posting it as well. And then at that point, we launched the product. And the product was still the best product since day one because we put so much effort into it. So it was a really good product. We got our first couple customers, we were launching a new feature every single week. And the feedback from our early customers was.


Emir Atli [00:07:04]:
So I was selling it back then, I'm still selling, but like, I was doing all the demos back then, so they were telling me that, I know you're new. I know some of the features that I want is not going to be on the platform, but at this pace, I know that you're going to outwork and outperform all the other competitors. So if you don't have something that I need today, you will have it two months from now. And I'm okay with that. They were telling me this, so I didn't expect this to happen. It was just like, how can I be interesting? LinkedIn so if you see new features, you would be interested in the post, I think. And then there was like the initial cycle, then after.


Dave Gerhardt [00:07:42]:
This is really good. This is really good. This is like such an important playbook. And I relate to this so much. The thing you mentioned about one new feature a week, I love that because this is something that we did at drift in the very early days. We came into the space, people were like, well, why? Nobody needs another marketing tool. There's so many. Isn't this just chat? There's already intercom, whatever.


Dave Gerhardt [00:08:04]:
And so David and Elias, the founders over there, were like, the way that we're going to win and get attention to this market is speed. What advantage do we have is speed? Like, we had like eleven people on the team. We're going to ship something every single month and do a product launch every single month. And so it was like at that stage of the company, you can be so iterative. And so they would literally be, we'd close one customer, talk to them. Okay, oh, interesting. I want we should build a slack integration next. And then we'd all meet and say, hey, Dave, you're in marketing.


Dave Gerhardt [00:08:31]:
Then we want to launch a slack integration next. You build this drumbeat of new thing, new thing, new thing, new thing. Because I do think, to your point, there's a lot of skeptics in the space and so they're like, well, why would I use this? You don't nearly have all the features. I think you almost need to lean into not having all the features. Get people to buy into your vision, show them that you're making progress every week. And it's quite literally the best marketing you could have is new thing, new thing, new thing. It's like you can create your own momentum. And I love hearing about when the product, like product and engineering actually become the marketing.


Dave Gerhardt [00:09:04]:
Like, that's the dream for me as a marketer. Like when I went to drift, it was like, this is amazing. They got something new every two weeks, every month I can announce like, I'm going to be busy forever. There's plenty of stuff, and it's cool to hear you built that in. And then the other thing that I wanted to mention was people also ask about, like, where do I start? How do I get my first customers? And I think what you did is basically, I don't know why you wouldn't do this. Usually you're not like, you started writing on LinkedIn six months before you were really selling the product. I don't know why people don't do this. I really don't.


Dave Gerhardt [00:09:35]:
People say, like, how do you get your first customers? Do I just send cold emails on day one? Well, you could, or you could do what Amir did, which is spend six months building air cover, building some awareness that when you have something to launch, you have an audience to launch to. You can't just wake up on day one and decide today's the day you're going to sell your product and start cold emailing people. And so I love the combination of those things. And so where did you get your first customers from? LinkedIn. How did you get them? Because you've been posting for six months there. What was the content based on? It was based on the conversation that you're having with the people that you're trying to sell to. It's like the perfect combination of how to do early stage marketing.


Emir Atli [00:10:12]:
Exactly. And then you need feedback. So you want to talk to people. If you're active on LinkedIn, even though if you're not, like, an influencer, people see your content over and over again. At some point, if you reach out, you have a very, very higher chance of getting a reply versus a cold email.


Dave Gerhardt [00:10:30]:
Yeah. And also, everything posting on LinkedIn, like, you posting also is feedback. And so I'm sure there were times where, like, you wrote something and that post really struck a nerve, and you're like, whoa, this really relates to something we're building. Like, we should prioritize that because it's clear people want this.


Emir Atli [00:10:46]:
Yeah, exactly. That happened. And that was like, the initial wave. The next wave was, I thought, how can I get this content in front of more people? Then I started our influencer program. Then after our influencer program was, like, at a stage where could leave it on its own. But we hired Obed as our head of content, Obed Durani. Obed took my initial idea of the flow, which was still our kind of like the media engine, one landing page, Netflix style shows and podcasts and things like that. I had that from the beginning.


Emir Atli [00:11:20]:
My thought was no one was talking about media engines or Netflix style podcasts or anything like that. My thought with my co founder was, we are posting all this stuff on LinkedIn every single day, twice a day. If I wanted to see one of my posts that was interesting, I would go to my page and I scroll down all the way to find the post again or find the video rather than that. What if we put all the best content on a landing page, plus our blog post and other content? We built it ourselves. And then when I hired the bet, I said, this is the draft. It's going well, but I need to scale this and I need to have more people and more ideas. Can you do this? And they said, yeah, I can scale the flow as like the B two B marketing, Netflix. And if we did it, we launched a lot of shows, a lot of podcasts with different people, both our customers, influencers, partners, everyone.


Emir Atli [00:12:12]:
So that was the third wave. And after that, the last wave that we're in right now is HockeyStack labs. Then right now, if we can dive deeper into HockeyStack labs and what we are doing right now, but my idea right now is having one big pillar and then creating different sub pillars around it. So that's what we're doing with HockeyStack labs, and we will continue doing it. And then I, in between also, we raised two rounds. We groove a lot. So now we also have the budget to run ads, partnerships, sponsoring events. We do all the stuff, too.


Dave Gerhardt [00:12:45]:
So, yeah, you've built up the inbound and media side, and now, like most companies in this space, you'll feel the pull to sell to bigger customers and move up market more. And that means you're going to have to do more of that event advertising field marketing stuff versus the inbound funnel. Let's talk about that media engine for a second. Let's talk about the flow. Is that in replace of like a blog? Do you have a blog where you write maybe like product updates? Like, where do you see it fit in the funnel for HockeyStack? How does it, how do you decide what goes there? How does it help you get customers? How do you measure it? Those are the things people want to know. Like, I think you go to it, hockeystack.com afloat. People look at it. It looks great.


Dave Gerhardt [00:13:27]:
The content is great. That parts a no brainer. I think the part that people don't often understand or I want to talk through with you is like, but how does this turn into business? How do you drive traffic from it? How do you measure it? I'm interested in that.


Emir Atli [00:13:39]:
Yeah. So we have a couple of categories there. So we have product updates. We have like entertainment shows, we have education shows, we have shows about paid ads, how to run LinkedIn ads, how to do SEO, things like that. We have all that stuff like HockeyStack is analyzing user journeys. And what I see from our user journey, customer journeys, is imagine you go on LinkedIn or search on Google, attend one of our events, go to our dinners, and you are working at enterprise as a cmo, like vp marketing. You see us all over the place. You know the basics.


Emir Atli [00:14:11]:
Docusec is doing attribution analytics for b, two b companies. It's backed by Vice agent Ocala solar stuff. These are the customers. I need the solution. I have a few others that I'm evaluating. I want to learn more about HockeyStack. So now this is like this phase where you think about, can I trust these people? Who are they working with? Who also trusts HockeyStack? So when you go into our website, there are a couple places we can go to our customers page, see case studies. Everyone has case studies.


Emir Atli [00:14:38]:
It's not special, but yeah, we check phone box, we go to our interactive demo. Okay. The product works. This is how I use the product. Everyone has some sort of that, too. You got our platform pages, product pages, use cases. Everyone has those as well. But the flow, when you go into flow, you see the faces that you see on LinkedIn.


Emir Atli [00:14:58]:
These are the people that you follow. You see me as a CRO doing a show.


Dave Gerhardt [00:15:02]:
Jason, I know. Jason, I know. Who else do I see that I know? I see pep. I see Todd, I see two people that, I don't know their names, but I see them all the time. Yeah, this is cool.


Emir Atli [00:15:15]:
Yeah. So now you trust us a little bit more, and then that helps us in the conversations. So they say, hey, I checked out the flow last night. It was really good. I saw this as people that I follow, and I love them. I'm like, yeah, we have like partners. They're creating content with us. And it's just an easier conversation because any platform, like any seller, on sales calls, no one, just sales calls and salespeople.


Emir Atli [00:15:41]:
Anything that would help the salespeople in that conversation, where it's partners, where it's content, there's anything, a, they can send in the follow ups, b, they can mention on sales calls that will help. And what I see is obed. And I, we always call this the rabbit hole. People go to our website in the sales conversation. So it's like stage two. We are in the second call stage. They go to our website, they spend hours on the flow, just like watching stuff and that ours really helped the sales calls and sales conversations. That's like when they got into pipeline.


Emir Atli [00:16:17]:
That also drives out of brand awareness. That's for the top of the funnel. So top of the funnel and middle of the funnel is really helpful.


Dave Gerhardt [00:16:24]:
A lot of people would have gated all of this.


Emir Atli [00:16:28]:
Yeah.


Dave Gerhardt [00:16:31]:
I can just click through right now and watch anything.


Emir Atli [00:16:34]:
Yeah, I mean, one part is, I mean, HockeyStack helps us a lot with tracking, so we don't educate. But also, I mean, I don't know, I wouldn't put my email address to watch videos, so it doesn't make sense to me.


Dave Gerhardt [00:16:50]:
So it scratches two itches. Number one, you can use, you're using your own product to measure engagement, but you're not just giving away all this content for free. You are able to. This is more of a newer way of doing marketing. You're measuring the engagement here in some way and then you're going to know, if I watch two videos and then three weeks later I go to the HockeyStack site and I request a demo or I do something there, you're going to be able to match those things, right?


Emir Atli [00:17:15]:
Exactly. So how we measure it, we use it in funnels. So we have a funnel step engagement to a certain degree. If we use it in funnels, we use it in attribution reports. We also use it in our lift reports. So we are comparing. If you spend, I don't know, five minutes and more on the flow, are you more likely to submit a contact sales form? We are measuring all that stuff. But also, as you said, if you're in our pipeline, we already know via email.


Emir Atli [00:17:40]:
So if you go to the flow, we can easily see that you're Dave because you submitted a form. If you're not in our pipeline, we can then see once you come back and we will also retire to you in the process.


Dave Gerhardt [00:17:52]:
I love that. I'm obviously, I've been out of the game as a, I'm doing a different business now, building a media company. I'm out of game as a CMO and head of marketing. But this is like the approach that I've always thought about and wanted to take with content, where I think oftentimes with b, two b marketing teams, we're forced to measure content as this direct response channel when it should be more about. And I know some people don't like this, but it has influence on how somebody buys and so someone ends up, you know, Amir ends up booking a sales call, but over the course of weeks, I know that he is on our email list and I know that he listens to the podcast and I know that he's watched three videos. I know that he's done these three things on our site. Like that's how I would want to measure content. Like our people using our content and engaging with it.


Dave Gerhardt [00:18:42]:
Not necessarily like especially in b two b people aren't going to read a blog post and then buy your product. And so that whole way of measuring content just feels completely busted. I just think it's been traditionally hard to measure and hard to prove that verse. Like, yeah, this is how people like, hey, marketing owns the website, marketing owns all the content. Like let me get some credit for all of these assets that people are consuming and engaging with before they talk to us. And I'm sure you feel it on your sales calls. People feel like they already know you and trust you and then like, okay, look, I like your stuff. Now tell me about the product.


Emir Atli [00:19:15]:
Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly what happens. And also to your point, our approach to attribution from the beginning has been it's not like you're trying to get credit from sales to marketing. You're helping sales to get more conversations. And along the way you need to learn what is helping sales, what is helping you drive more conversions on the website, on different platforms. Not like we are directly influencing x million dollars. No one is going to believe that. But if you can show the journey, if you can tell a better story with different reports, if you can use with reports, attribution models, customer journeys to tell a better story in the process, you will also learn what's working, what's not working, so that you can drive more pipeline.


Dave Gerhardt [00:19:58]:
Yeah, that's the dream is like when sales, when marketing is seen as an enabler for sale. Like we're going to enable sales. Like this is like we're going to grease the skid is like WD 40. It's like, you know, to make the whole process easier. But there where this breaks down is when like those two teams have competing goals. Obviously you're the CRO, you own revenue at the company. So you see sales and marketing together as one piece and they each have different roles. I think that's just an interesting perspective and I think more people are going to start to think about content that way.


Dave Gerhardt [00:20:28]:
How do you see this media engine scaling now? Like it seems like to date you've been able to ask for content from people. I don't know if you've paid people for content, so tell me if that's true or not. But like how do you see this scaling? How do you want to continue to invest in it? What do you think the future of it looks like? And how do you keep getting content for this thing?


Emir Atli [00:20:46]:
I think the future of the flow in our, like, the media business side is going to be those pillars that I mentioned, for example, Akisak, that's putting out a report every single week. It's a long report. How can we make sub pillars around it? So how can we make one podcast out of it? How can we make one live show from it? How can we do maybe like a quarterly HockeyStack lapse event where we in person in the Bay Area, or like New York, whatever, we announce, we release the report in person. So like creating those pillars and then hosting everything on the flow so that we have one single page where you can see everything about HockeyStack. I think that's going to be the way to scale it. And then the other thing is, so far we haven't used this, but I think the flow is a great, great way to support our pov with relevant people from the industry. So we see the feature like this. Do you see the same feature? Yes.


Emir Atli [00:21:40]:
Let's create content together to build the feature of b, two b marketing attribution together, and then have the flow support that vision with relevant people from the industry. That's how I see it.


Dave Gerhardt [00:21:53]:
So find people who have strong points of view about the future of marketing measurement, attribution, driving revenue, and become a hub for them to create where they can share their voice from a content standpoint.


Emir Atli [00:22:06]:
Yeah. One of my dreams was when we first started to flow. I don't know if you can do it in the next quarter or even this year, but my dream has always been having a place where, for example, if you want to create content, if you want to create a show, but you don't have designers, but you have a great idea, let us send you a camera, a microphone, we record the content, we edit it, launch your show on the flow. That has been my goal. I don't know if you're going to be able to do it this year, but at some point we're going to do that for the short term, for HockeyStack, it's going to be supporting our pov, building those relationships with the key people, and then three, having those sub pillars around our main pillars.


Dave Gerhardt [00:22:45]:
And then the third pillar was HockeyStack labs, which I think is interesting to me because I think the world, like you're doing two interesting things. You have this like media content hub, which I think that one is, that one will be harder to support. It takes money and time. I'm not saying you can't do it. I'm not doubting that you'll do it. I've just, I've been there. I've tried to do it too, where the thing that I think is the most scalable and can produce the most demand right now is the hockey, is the HockeyStack labs concept. Because I think you have the right product, you have lots of data, and that's just a great ingredient for marketing.


Dave Gerhardt [00:23:22]:
And so instead of like cranking out five blog posts a week, why not do what you're doing, which is let's do a bunch of research. I also think that helps people filter signal from noise if you don't publish often, but when you publish, it's like meaty, it's data driven, there's lots of insights in there. It's well designed, it's a report. Gong did this with their gong labs. I think you're taking a similar approach with hockey sack labs. I love this idea of like a pillar piece of content every month, especially with a smaller team. Like do that, go deep on one killer topic, do research, do original content versus just like cranking out content. Is that kind of how you got to this point with HockeyStack labs?


Emir Atli [00:24:02]:
Yeah. So the initial idea was, so every like quarter or so, I think about what's going to be the, be the thing for marketing this quarter. And one quarter ago, like one and a half quarters ago, I've been thinking about this kind of like what's the next step for HockeyStack? What's the next step for HockeyStack? Revenue was the next big thing for HockeyStacks marketing. And at the same time we started getting our first giant customers, just like multi billion dollar brands signing on with HockeyStack becoming customers. And one thing that I've been thinking about a lot is how can we build trust at scale with these brands and overall in the market? How can we be the source for data and also answers? And then I've been talking with our head of growth, John Barry Cooper is MVP at Cognizm and he was always mentioning that whenever he gets a question from the CMO, kind of like, is our CPC on Google is like a good benchmark for an industry? For example, if you have $10, what's the industry benchmark? And there's nothing about that. Or like, this quarter was bad. Is it bad for everyone or is it just us? Are we failing? Or is like a downturn for everyone this quarter, is January bad for MQL or is it not so he was getting these questions from the CMO and others from the company and he wasn't able to answer it. And then I thought, we have these answers from our database, we can help all the marketers have some sort of a benchmark for their questions.


Emir Atli [00:25:31]:
And also this is going to help us in the long term become the source. When you have a question, you go talk to stack labs and then find the answer to your question. And over time it's going to build trust at scale with large prints operators, cmos. Then what happened was this happened really quickly. So we launched about twelve reports. And what we see is cmos send these reports to their team to help them with their day to day. They send it to their CMO group to help everyone with the benchmarks and everyone in the industry that wants to learn. They read the report, understand it, and they want to use it in their day to day lives, which was our goal.


Emir Atli [00:26:12]:
And then every time we push out a report, at least 10,000 people read it in the first week, which has been insane. So main goal was building trust at scale and become the source for any type of questions. In b two B revenue space.


Dave Gerhardt [00:26:25]:
You said 10,000 people read it each week.


Emir Atli [00:26:28]:
Yeah, in the first week they read it. And after that we do like retargeting. We launch them as separate LinkedIn ads. Sometimes we sponsor my posts or like my co founders post or head of growth post or anyone the marketing and anyone that's posting. So it's increasing. But once we post it. Yeah.


Dave Gerhardt [00:26:46]:
So you're driving people back to the, that's how many people have viewed the report and you basically launch the report and then drive a button. Just keep driving people back to that report for distribution.


Emir Atli [00:26:54]:
Yeah. Also, something interesting happened. I think I watched one video a couple of weeks ago from gong. I think the same thing happened to them as well. People get really aggressive with the report saying, no, it is not true.


Dave Gerhardt [00:27:07]:
I was going to ask you about that, actually. I think it's because you have strong opinions and attribution is such a hot topic. Every report that you guys put out does stir up some type of controversy in some way, which I actually think is helpful for views of your stuff.


Emir Atli [00:27:23]:
Exactly. We didn't do it on purpose, so every time right now made me post about it. At least five, six people post about it in the same day. They say this is not true, and then we get more views. I think it's helpful.


Dave Gerhardt [00:27:34]:
The best thing that can happen is if Chris Walker hates something that you wrote and comments about it and disagrees with you, it's just going to blow it up. So it's great. Do it every time.


Emir Atli [00:27:42]:
Yeah, we are in a good spot. I'm sure he hates all of them, but yeah, other than Chris Volker, a lot of people, sometimes they hate it, sometimes they find useful, but at least there's some sort of conversation around it, which is pretty healthy in my opinion.


Dave Gerhardt [00:27:56]:
I feel like I see a lot of questions from exit five. Like people, marketers want benchmarks. They, they want data, they want benchmarks because it's easy to feel like you're flying blind. And so if you can deliver content that's helpful. That helps me figure out, like, where I should spend, what I should do, how I should measure it, which channels are working or not like that. That stuff is always, I think the area that you're going after is perfect for content marketing to be like the channel for the business. I think as a marketer or somebody that wants to drive revenue, you just kind of always are looking at what ingredients do I have at this company? Like, can content be really strong here? Maybe this is events or field or whatever. And I think the conversation about attribution, the fact that it's been a longstanding issue with marketers, the fact that you have strong opinions on about it, it's like you have that perfect storm of ingredients to create content around it.


Dave Gerhardt [00:28:49]:
And I like the idea of like once a month we're going to do original research and write a report about it. I think it's just a great example of startup marketing that people can try to emulate.


Emir Atli [00:28:57]:
Exactly. But even, like, people want benchmarks. And then now the conversation, I don't know if you've ever seen the recent post about it. Now the conversation is HockeyStack is doing more harm than good because now marketers are seeing the benchmarks and trying to get to the same benchmark without it in context. So there's always the conversation. No matter what we do, there's always the conversation. And I'm really, really okay with it. I love it, I embrace it.


Emir Atli [00:29:24]:
But we're not polarizing people on purpose. If we do that, I think we will have more, even more conversations around it. But we're not doing it on purpose. Just trying to help people, help us with more brand awareness and also help marketers have some sort of benchmark to lean on.


Dave Gerhardt [00:29:39]:
Yeah, but you're publishing something that you believe in. You're nothing. Misleading people. You're saying this is our data. Yeah, here's what it is. People say to me sometimes they'll say you. And I'm like, I'm sharing like, what I've learned in marketing. Like, I'll share like a copywriting tip.


Dave Gerhardt [00:29:55]:
And people would be like, you shouldn't say you have a large following on you or you have a responsibility and I don't know, I don't. You have to be responsible for what you read and what you decide to implement or not. And so read this report from HockeyStack and you decide with your own brain, like, does this make sense? Is there something that I can learn from this report? Like, I think that's on you. Your job is to create interesting content and people have to use their own judgment to decide. Are they going to put it into play? Also, anybody who's actually done marketing knows that, like all of this is, there's so much nuance in all of this. Everything is about experimentation and understanding what works for you. And the rest is like, okay, I'm going to see what they did. I'm going to take a sprinkle of that.


Dave Gerhardt [00:30:35]:
I see what they did. I'm going to take a sprinkle of that. I've tried it this way. It doesn't work for us and you got to learn it on your own anyway.


Emir Atli [00:30:40]:
Also, there's a lot of context in the report. So we'd say the sample sizes and 150 companies in p two B SaaS with DIS acvs and this regions, and this is their sales cycle length. This is how we did the research. These are our metrics. You have context, but if you say like, okay, $10 in CBC, we need to get $10 in CBC in two quarters without any context, maybe you have 15 months of sales cycle and the research is on three month sales cycles, but you want to get to $10 CPC because the report says that that's not my responsibility. My responsibility is having the sample size and how we do the research on the report so that everyone knows it. But otherwise it's not my responsibility, as you said, too. And the next thing I think it's going to enable us to do is from day one our goal was getting into marketing attribution because there's a gap in the space and then moving from marketing using the data that we have into other things like ABM, sales intelligence and customer success.


Emir Atli [00:31:39]:
Having one core platform and sub platforms around it, microstack labs, really, really empowers those too. Because if you want to go into ABM, which we did a couple weeks ago, or sales intelligence, we have the necessary data to a make good product decisions and b support RPoe with the labs reports. So for example, we look at our data, we decide on a product idea and then we built the product. And then we go back to our research and say, customers, this is what we saw in the lab supports, this is what we saw on our data. And then we built this product because you need this say much better pov to have backed by data rather than just going out talking to people, which you need to do, but you need to also support it with data and then build the product.


Dave Gerhardt [00:32:29]:
New topic for you. But do you think the name Hockey stack has been instrumental in your growth and brand awareness?


Emir Atli [00:32:36]:
Why do you think so?


Dave Gerhardt [00:32:37]:
Like, it's memorable, it's simple. It sounds like hockey stick, but it's not in HockeyStack. And for a while you all had, I don't know if you still have or not, but like you had that hockey stick emoji, which I'm looking at your website now and it's like, it seems like the brand is growing up a little bit, which I think is great. And we're doing a similar thing with exit five right now. But I feel like if your company was like CGT Labs, like new researcher, I think there's something to the naming of the company. And I'm just wondering if that was like intentional from the beginning. Did you pick a name? Like, I don't know if you've ever spent any time with Pep from Winter, but he talks about how like he knew he was going to create this company. He intentionally went and created a memorable name.


Dave Gerhardt [00:33:19]:
I did something similar with exit five. He was like, I want to find a domain that's available. I want to find a name that's easy to say and common and familiar. And it seems like you have that with hockey sack. I want to want to know the backstory.


Emir Atli [00:33:31]:
I never thought about this way. I actually thought the exact opposite. Sometimes people don't understand, especially like CFO's don't understand the name. And I don't know if it's doing any good there, but yeah, marketers, when.


Dave Gerhardt [00:33:43]:
Do they want the CFO?


Emir Atli [00:33:45]:
What do they.


Dave Gerhardt [00:33:45]:
They only want to know if it's a big five, big three, whatever is it price, you know, PwC. What does a CFO know anyway?


Emir Atli [00:33:54]:
Yeah. And also like older companies, more like bigger enterprises. Sometimes they also ask what's the meaning? Doesn't make any sense, things like that. But they still buy. So I don't think it's doing any harm there.


Dave Gerhardt [00:34:07]:
They still buy. I would just tell them it's like pick a language and say it's a translation for, like, generating revenue in know, like, icelandic or something.


Emir Atli [00:34:15]:
French, it means.


Dave Gerhardt [00:34:19]:
That's right.


Emir Atli [00:34:19]:
Yeah. Pep is actually my, one of my advice is we're really close. We never talk about this, but, yeah, he's awesome. The name is coming from hockey stick chart, like this graph. Hockeystick.com is a hockey company, as you might have guessed. So we went with HockeyStack, and I think, yeah, I love the name. It's great. People love it.


Emir Atli [00:34:40]:
I think, as you also said, if it was PwC labs, it wouldn't have the same effect of, like, the flow by PwC. Yeah, yeah. It was bad.


Dave Gerhardt [00:34:50]:
Just a small detail. But I think these things matter. And if you're starting a company or if you have the ability to influence those things, I think, you know, I don't think you need to spend all this money and like, to do brand development. That's also not what you did. But I think it's like a little bit of creativity and stacking the deck in your favor for getting attention. A name like HockeyStack, I do think that makes a difference.


Emir Atli [00:35:12]:
What does make strife mean?


Dave Gerhardt [00:35:15]:
So, it was originally DGMG, which is Dave Gerhardt marketing Group, which is terrible. And my wife gives me a hard time because she's like, every time you name something, you pick the most damn, like, literal name. Dave Gerhardt marketing Group. And so I've become good friends with my accountant. And every time I would see him, he knows my business and my financials better than anybody. Every time I'd see him, he'd be like, how's GDMD doing? Like, he'd mess up the letters every time. And I was like, this guy doesn't know the freaking name of my business, okay? That's one thing. And then I wanted to, I eventually realized there could be a company here, and I wanted to, like, remove myself as the center of it because I think that it could be a more, I think a build more equity and could be more of a exciting asset for somebody to one day buy if it wasnt like the Dave Gerhardt show.


Dave Gerhardt [00:36:04]:
So I just literally made up a name. I wanted to make up a name. And this guy, Harry Dry, who you know him from, he creates marketing, marketingexamples.com. he messaged me, and I was, like, asking him about it. And hes like, you. Well, heres a quick little naming tip. You can name things literal or lateral. And so literal was like, Dave Gerhardt marketing Group.


Dave Gerhardt [00:36:24]:
Or, like, if you were the, the marketing attribution platform or lateral. And the lateral example is like, you could just make up a story. Like, try to come up with a story about the thing you're creating. And so I was like, oh, okay. I was trying to think of places, and I was thinking of places. Oh, places. Exit five. So, okay, here's a story.


Dave Gerhardt [00:36:42]:
So exit five is the exit off of a highway that my wife and I would go to in the woods to escape and get off the grid when I was working. And it would always be when I was up at exit five, which is this place in Vermont. That's when I would get, like, unstuck on some idea or I'd get some new creative idea, or I'd get clarity on something. And I was like, oh, there could be something there. And, like, the community and the content we're building. It's a place you go to get ideas and inspiration. Let's call it exit five. And I had a bunch of different name ideas, but I went to Godaddy.


Dave Gerhardt [00:37:11]:
I typed in exit five.com. it was available for, like, you know, $300, and I bought it and just picked it. It's a good story now, but I also think, like, I think I could have named it 50 different things. I think you also just have to, like, pick one and go. And so many people just, like, they sit around and, like, wait for the perfect name. And now, like, just like with HockeyStack, the brand is what it becomes and what you make it. And so now everybody's like, oh, yeah, exit five. But I think you, you need to just, like, pick a direction and go and build a story around it, like, as you're doing, as we're doing with exit five.


Dave Gerhardt [00:37:41]:
And that's often, I always talk to founders. That's kind of how it happens to, when I first joined drift, they had initially named the company drift with two t's. It was driftt, and it was a nightmare from a discoverability standpoint. Like, everybody, they didn't know they would email us, and they didn't know if it was two fs and two t's, like, or they two d r I f t. It was a nightmare. And so eventually they had raised a little bit money, and they were able to get the domain drift.com. and then we switched everything, which is, which is very nice.


Emir Atli [00:38:11]:
I always thought it was like nine to five. Reference exiting nine to five.


Dave Gerhardt [00:38:17]:
No, no, I can't. That's what I've done. I have. Well, I guess I'm now building a business, so I haven't, but, no, I can't do that because if everybody quit their jobs, then I would. There'd be no community for exit therapy. We need people to work in marketing jobs don't. That was when I had the narrative of being a solopreneur. Now I don't.


Dave Gerhardt [00:38:32]:
No exit. Let's keep nine to fives.


Emir Atli [00:38:36]:
Skip the nine fives.


Dave Gerhardt [00:38:38]:
All right, let's wrap up and spend just a couple minutes on attribution. This is actually not a topic that I'm very strong at or skilled at. I'm good at getting people to pay attention to things and then hopefully we figure it out with attribution later. What is the high level point of view that you have with attribution? What's broken about it? Why start a company in this space? Just not necessarily to like pitch HockeyStack, but just to give people a perspective about like, what do you want people to think about and how should they be rethinking attribution right now?


Emir Atli [00:39:05]:
Yeah. So there are two reasons why people want to get a tool for attribution or anything in the space. One, show the value pro ROI to get insights so that you can do better in the future. For one, showing ROI. If you just screenshot something like a visible report, Salesforce campaign report, it's not going to make sense to the CEO or CFO or the board. You need to be able to tell a story. And two, in order to understand the data, optimize things and get real value with insights, you need to be able to customize reports, build your own reports, and just like have specific answers to your questions with the data. Using a reporting tool like HockeyStack RPOV is most of the platforms in this space.


Emir Atli [00:39:49]:
They have one static dashboard for every single customer. So everyone is using the same reports no matter how different the businesses are. And B, they use the dashboards to just show the Roi that no one believes in. So then conversations start. Like marketing is influencing 50 million of dollar value, but no one knows what that means. And then sales is also influencing 15 million in value and then total error is also 15 million, but in total is 30 million. So no one understands that conversation. With HockeyStack, what we do is you have complete flexibility.


Emir Atli [00:40:22]:
We also have dashboard templates based on the industry that you're in. You can also customize reports, build new reports to answer your questions with a very simple UI. With that, we also have buyer journeys. There you can go into specific accounts, see what's working, what's not working, from the very first impression all the way to close one with offline online marketing sales touch points. And then with attribution models, incrementality, market mix modeling, everything that you can have with one platform, you get insights and optimize revenue. And then I recently, what we did was, okay, we have all this data. When you think of ABM or like sales intelligence, all of these touch points, like signal based outbound is a hot topic right now, which is our latest product. All of those signals are actually the signals that we collect for attribution purposes.


Emir Atli [00:41:11]:
Now we are enabling salespeople like SCR's and AE's to have those signals and then customize your output. For ABM, we send this, all of these data as retargeting layers to display platforms LinkedIn, so that they can use an ABM purposes. We have economist building, we have Salesforce bi directional syncs for ABM. So one core platform to understand what's working, what's not working, what's driving pipeline with multiple different ways of measurement, and then having two sub platforms for ABM and sales intelligence, do you help in.


Dave Gerhardt [00:41:41]:
The world of, like, a lot of. We're seeing it. It's why exit five is growing as a business. But a lot of companies now are doing what I would call brand based marketing. Not like brand campaigns, but they're doing LinkedIn organic, community building, podcasts, content. Those channels are amazing for marketing, but they're not very good for attribution because it's a little bit harder to understand. Like, marketers want those things to be direct response channels, and they're not. Is that a space that you play in or help people understand?


Emir Atli [00:42:12]:
Yeah. So LinkedIn organic coffee to it ourselves is one. We get HockeyStack gets self reported attribution forms and then categorizes them. For example, if you say immersive LinkedIn, post HockeyStack, LinkedIn, that all comes up as LinkedIn organic. So we can see it. That's one way. The other way we get sales call trackers from gong. So, for example, if you mentioned on a sales call that I heard you from LinkedIn, we get it in the attribution reports.


Emir Atli [00:42:38]:
Three, we can use marketing mixed modeling for one of our customers active campaign just did this. They put in LinkedIn organic impressions, video engagement, and all relevant stats. For Micronix modeling. We get the results back. So there are a couple different ways. If you want to measure it in different ways, you can do it with HockeyStack. Yes, totally. And for Slack, the same thing, usually staff or attribution or sales conversations.


Emir Atli [00:43:02]:
One thing that I learned though, in that most people say that it's not possible to check because they think that it's not a digital touch point, so it wouldn't show up in the pyre journey, so it's not trackable. But what I've learned and what I've seen from our customers and from HockeyStack's own kind of funnel, if those touch points happen, for example, if I. We get a lot of demo requests from exit five, and all those people mention exit five in the form or in the sales call. If there's a touch point like that, they always mention it somewhere. It's just. Can HockeyStack bring that to the attribution reports? Yes, we can. Even though there's not a digital footprint.


Dave Gerhardt [00:43:38]:
I think that's what's interesting about gong and there's like the dream future state, especially in B two B, where you have to have, like, a sales call would be like if you could ask every single person that you have to talk to how they heard about you. Track all that, input it all. Obviously there's a difference between what someone says and, like, the touch points along the way, but that opens up a whole other can of worms. Like, do we care? Because, like, isn't ultimately the goal to get customers, or is it to justify, you know, what you did on some channel?


Emir Atli [00:44:05]:
Exactly.


Dave Gerhardt [00:44:06]:
Anyway, all right, Amir, thank you for hanging out with us. This is great. Did you want to finish on something? I didn't want to cut you off.


Emir Atli [00:44:11]:
Yeah, I just wanted to say, the most dangerous thing is just saying attribution doesn't work because we have five people who heard about us from a slack channel. So we're just going to remove everything rely on stack attribution form or attribution doesn't work. We're just going to go with mmm for paid ads. It's just, that's not the way. It's just, how can we help you with data so that you can tell a better story or get insights and just drive more revenue? That's what we're aiming for and what every b two B marketing organization is aiming for.


Dave Gerhardt [00:44:41]:
So it's never going to be this perfect funnel. But how can we just best understand roughly what's working, what's not, where to spend more time, people, etcetera.


Emir Atli [00:44:51]:
And also, it's the same for sales teams as well. If sales close rates are low, they just don't go to a platform which says your sales close rates are low because of this reason. But B two B marketers are expecting that from an attribution platform. Whereas in the sales world, you go to a CRM, you watch calls, you talk to your SDRs AE's to understand the problem. Same with b two B marketing attribution. You have data, you have the context, you have the people. Come up with a solution.


Dave Gerhardt [00:45:17]:
Cool. All right, Amir, good to hang out with you. Thank you for coming. On the pod. You can check out HockeyStack, hockeystack.com. dot the flow that we talked about. Is hockeystack.com the flow? Or go to LinkedIn, find Amir. You'll find him.


Dave Gerhardt [00:45:31]:
Amir Atlee on LinkedIn. Connect with him. Send him a message. Be like, I heard your point of view on the exit five podcast. I totally agree. I disagree. Or the next time he publishes a HockeyStacks lab report, yell at him in the comments, because that always works.


Emir Atli [00:45:46]:
Please do. Thanks. Save.


Dave Gerhardt [00:45:48]:
All right, I'm here.