Transcript:

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:12]:
Exit. All right, so Natalie, do a quick intro. Who are you, what do you do? And then tell us about your company, capsule, and then we'll dive into the good stuff.


Natalie Taylor [00:00:22]:
Yeah. So I have been working as a startup marketer or marketing team of one, sometimes both, for the past ten or so years. I consider myself sort of a marketing generalist with an emphasis in creative and content. It's probably kind of similar to you, Dave, but currently I work for a early stage startup called Capsule. It is my favorite job I've ever had and I'll get into that later. But capsule is an AI powered video editing tool specifically built for enterprise teams. And what they need, and what they need is to be able to edit videos ten times faster and easier, keep everyone on brand, and make collaboration seamless across the organization. So that's kind of a high level of capsule.


Natalie Taylor [00:01:14]:
I found the job because I got laid off from my last job. And side story is the that was the largest company I'd ever worked for.


Dave Gerhardt [00:01:23]:
What was it? What company was it?


Natalie Taylor [00:01:24]:
The last company I worked for was a company called Everfi. It's not a big company, but to me it was like 500 people. And then it got acquired by an even larger company. And I learned in that brief stint that I do not like working for large companies. So when I got laid off, I posted on LinkedIn, was like, hey, I got laid off. I really want to move back into the startup world. Here's kind of what I'm looking for. And someone I went to college with reached out, saw my LinkedIn post, hadn't talked to him in 1012 years, and he was like, hey, I work at this startup.


Natalie Taylor [00:01:57]:
We're looking for some marketing help. I'm happy to introduce you to the CEO. So he introduced me to the CEO of Capsule and we just hit it off immediately. We worked really well together. I grasped the product and the vision and got it immediately and loved it and have just been working together ever since. I started for like six months as a contractor, and then after our public beta launch in September of 2023, I joined the team full time as the head of marketing.


Dave Gerhardt [00:02:27]:
Was the contract role on purpose because the company hadn't launched yet, or were you, would you have wanted to take full time earlier?


Natalie Taylor [00:02:36]:
We were both kind of feeling it out. I was thinking about maybe doing contract work for a few companies just working part time, and they were trying to figure out what exactly they needed on the marketing side. But it very quickly became apparent that it was going to be a really good fit for both of us. I very quickly was like, oh, I'm all in on this. I want to do this full time. And I made that clear, like, a couple months in.


Dave Gerhardt [00:02:59]:
So you probably went above and beyond then a contract marketer, because you're like, oh, this could be the thing. I want to do a great job and impress them and make it a no brainer to make me your head of marketing at some point.


Natalie Taylor [00:03:10]:
Exactly.


Dave Gerhardt [00:03:11]:
You talked about, first of all, there's a lot of people who, my least favorite narrative about LinkedIn is that the real people doing the work don't post there. And it's just for vain assholes like myself who want to write there. And then I talked to so many real people like you, and I wrote about it on LinkedIn, and that led to my next thing. I just can't, I can't overstate that enough. I just think there's no downside to, like, in an industry like marketing, being on a platform like LinkedIn, talking about your career, talking about your work. Do you have to do it? No. This is like the same advice that I give to founders. Do you have to do it? No.


Dave Gerhardt [00:03:45]:
Can it create an advantage for you and maybe some opportunities come your way that you might not have had otherwise? And, yeah, it sounds like that's what happened in your case.


Natalie Taylor [00:03:53]:
Yeah, 100%. I have found several of my, actually, three of my jobs, two of my favorite jobs, capsule, and one of my other jobs, I got through LinkedIn. And then, well, in the past, like, six, seven months since I joined capsule full time and have been posting on LinkedIn about working at capsule and about things we're doing at capsule. I have had more public appearances in my entire career in the past seven or so months, just because, I mean, I think largely because of what I'm sharing on LinkedIn, that's how people know about what I'm doing. And so that's part of probably why I'm here on this podcast, too, is just being active and sharing what's going on there.


Dave Gerhardt [00:04:34]:
Yeah, I love that. I love that perspective. I want to talk about working with the founder and CEO at Capsule in a minute, but maybe just career wise, I think outside of the marketing tactics, a lot of people listen to this podcast because of the career path stuff that we talk about because it's like listening to your peer group, right? It's not always something that you listen to or read about, and we can do that here. You've mentioned the term favorite jobs, so that, to me, tells me that there were some jobs that were not your favorite. Right. You don't have to get into specifics about who and everything, but maybe just explain what you've seen now that led to this being, like, the right job, the favorite job. And is there a younger version of you that you've learned some things along the way about what might make for the right place to go and work and the right role to take and maybe let's talk through some of that stuff.


Natalie Taylor [00:05:23]:
Yeah, I love talking about this stuff. I think one key thing that has always worked out for me is working for people, choosing jobs based on who I'm going to be working with and working for. So some of my favorite jobs, where I've learned the most, is where I've had an incredible manager that I just want to learn from. Maybe I don't, like, love the product or it's not a particular passion of mine, but I recognize just in the interview, talking with the hiring manager and looking at their experience, I'm like, I want to learn from this person. I know you've shared a similar experiences, too, with your careers. Like, I just want to go work for this person.


Dave Gerhardt [00:06:01]:
Yeah. I think what people miss and, like, obviously I know this now. It's just like anything in life, you don't. You don't know it until you've gone through a bunch of different things and you've tried a different things, dated some people that wouldn't have worked out well until you meet. Met my wife. And I'm like, oh, yeah, wow, this is why we're great, right?


Natalie Taylor [00:06:16]:
Totally.


Dave Gerhardt [00:06:17]:
But there's some things in there. But I also think it's also, I think a lesson I wish I had known a little bit earlier is early in your career and maybe even ever, are you rarely going to be able to check every box? Right? Love the boss. Love the set of work I can be doing. Love the industry. And so you kind of have to be like, man, I don't. All right. I don't love this. I'm not passionate about cybersecurity, but the team is awesome.


Dave Gerhardt [00:06:42]:
The company's growing really fast, and I'm going to get to do something that I've never done before. Or I had a scenario where I was leading marketing at a startup right around Covid, and I took the job under the premise of, like, the budget was going to be this many millions of dollars and you were going to have you get to hire this many people. And I was like, oh, this is going to be fun. I'm going to build a team from scratch and then March 2020, all that went to zero. And I was like, wow, I'm just going to be here for a couple of years, not doing a lot of growth. Or let's look at it from a different standpoint. How can I tell the story a year or two from now from we had our budget cut, we had everything frozen, and yet we still grew. And I took that as an opportunity to find some new skills to work on.


Dave Gerhardt [00:07:24]:
I think you have to have that mindset of not all the ingredients are going to be perfect. You're not always going to be in a position to pick the things. But can you see, can you zoom out and just think of your career beyond the one company that you're at right now and say, okay, can I be in skills acquisition mode for like the next one or two years and then see what comes out of that?


Natalie Taylor [00:07:41]:
Yeah. I view every job before this as a learning opportunity. There's always something to be gained, whether it's I learned that I hate this or I learned that I really do not work well with this type of person or whatever it is. And so now I found this opportunity that is this perfect combination of my background, my skills, my interests, and a product that I genuinely love and get. And I'm passionate about that. It's all working together now. But like, I couldn't have gotten to that point without learning that I really do thrive in startups or that I really do understand a lot of the pain points around video editing because I had to teach myself how to use Premiere pro to throw this thing together. I've had to use these other scrappy tools that weren't really getting the job done.


Natalie Taylor [00:08:27]:
And now I understand this huge pain point that capsule solves. And I love using the product and I love teaching people about it and getting other marketers to use it as a very easy way to create polished on brand videos.


Dave Gerhardt [00:08:41]:
That's the best scenario in marketing when you do believe in the product and you are passionate about it and you can use it. I think it would be very tough for me to do marketing for a company or a product that I couldn't actually use. I think I know enough about marketing and I could pull the right strings to like figure that out. And I know this is not going to be possible for everybody, but if you can pick from companies where you can actually touch the product, use the product, I just feel like that makes a huge difference in connecting the dots. The companies that I've worked at, where I've been able to like log in and actually use the software, it's always been software companies for me. I've been such a better marketer and I also feel like you're often then on the front lines of like you're using the product. You build so much credibility inside of the company when you're like, wow, this feature is actually super interesting. Like here's how we're using it.


Dave Gerhardt [00:09:27]:
This is a different way that we can talk about it.


Natalie Taylor [00:09:29]:
Totally. Our product team has dubbed me the number one QA tester because I use the product all the time when like new features ship, I'm in there testing it and I am using it for real applications and so, but it's nice to be able to be very involved with the product too.


Dave Gerhardt [00:09:46]:
All right, so you meet the founder, what's his name at Capsule.


Natalie Taylor [00:09:50]:
Champ Bennett is our CEO and co founder.


Dave Gerhardt [00:09:53]:
Champ Bennett. That seems like an AI generated name for a CEO of a startup. That's awesome, Champ Bennett. And let's talk about this first six month period of you taking that job. What was the mission that you were given? Why did they bring in a marketer working on a contract basis? What was the job you were hired to do?


Natalie Taylor [00:10:12]:
Yeah, the job I was hired to do was to help get ready for their public beta launch, getting ready to announce that this is a product that people can sign up for. Now here's kind of what it does. So I was helping manage the launch video. We worked with an agency to create a really great launch video. I worked with you and a couple other influencers to help get the word out for that launch, partnering with a couple influencers and then just kind of experimenting with a few different content formats and just figuring out what works. So I think it was a test of both. Like, can we work well together? Can I function in a startup environment and get things done and work well with the founder and kind of grasp his vision and translate it in a marketing sense. And so that's kind of what the first few months were like.


Dave Gerhardt [00:11:01]:
Let's dive into there. And you and me are doing a webinar on this next week. Who knows when this will air, but it'll be beyond then. But I love product launches because I feel like oftentimes in marketing, if they just hired you to like do marketing and grow the business, there's so many different things that you could do that just become like, let's try SEO, let's try paid, let's try this thing. The focused effort of a launch, it's like there's a deadline, there's a thing we have to announce, we have to package it, we have to find ways to promote it. I think it just shrinks the scope, and you have to have all the other things that follow. You have to have a narrative. You have to have a launch plan.


Dave Gerhardt [00:11:35]:
You have to have goals. You have to have measurement, you have to do it all, but it shrinks the scope into that, into, like, a shorter timeframe. And it's one of the reasons, like, one of the things that I picked up when I was at drift is just, we launched something every two weeks, basically from in the startup phase. And as we grew up a little bit, we just, we still did something once a month. And I feel like that is such a healthy habit to build a marketing organization that drives growth for the company and to get the company shipping. It's like if you're just kind of always doing, like, always on stuff, it's hard to drive momentum. But we did a product launch the first Tuesday of every month, and it was like, boom, boom, boom. You still do the always on stuff, but it just gives you an opportunity to go back out and announce something new.


Dave Gerhardt [00:12:12]:
And so I'm a huge fan of launch marketing and using launches to drive the marketing strategy for the company. It's like we even were just talking about this earlier in the week with exit five, we look at months. Okay, what are we launching in June? What are we launching in July? What are we launching on? Okay, well, in June we got this new thing that we're doing. August. We have this thing. We don't have anything for July. Okay, then we got to go figure out, like, what thing are we going to create? Is it a product thing? Is it a content thing? Can we go and create something to drive momentum? So I love using product launches. You joined for the public beta launch of this company.


Dave Gerhardt [00:12:46]:
I see a lot of questions about product launches come up in exit five. The first thing out of your mouth was launch video. And I love that because I feel like to do an effective launch, we often get right in the weeds and we're like, well, we're gonna, what is the thing? You need a thing, right? And so how did you decide, like, was it instantly obvious that, like, we need a video? A video is going to be our asset to create for this launch?


Natalie Taylor [00:13:08]:
Yes. We often start with a video for product launches is like, because that, that helps you define what the story is, what the narrative is, and then have very clear messaging from there. So that's kind of like the starting asset for us is like, if you need to summarize this in a minute and a half. What's the story? What do people need to take away from this then? It's way easier to create email and social and every other asset around it.


Dave Gerhardt [00:13:34]:
Yeah, because you're forced to write the script for that. And that becomes the, whether it's a video or not, I like the idea of having one main asset because then everything else gets created off of that. But video, to me, especially for companies in the b two b space now, video is how we all communicate. You know, my day is filled with sharing video clips with my wife and my friends, whether it's about business or kids or golf or whatever. I think that is like the currency of how people share information online. So if you're launching a new product, how do you not have a video? We haven't done a real good video for exit five. And just this morning I was like, man, I think we got to come up with something. I just, I like marketers thinking like, video first for their launches now, right?


Natalie Taylor [00:14:18]:
Yeah. Well, I mean, the demand for video, like b two b is usually a few years behind b two c stuff. Just kind of general trends in general. But the demand for videos within organizations even is so high. So, like, capsule's focus is on enterprise teams, and these teams are needing more and more video, not just like marketing teams, but sales teams and HR teams and learning and development teams. And so if you think about the evolution of docs being accessible to everyone in the organization, and before PowerPoint, not everyone could create a slide presentation. And before Canva and Figma, not everyone could create design. And we're still at this point where not everyone can create video within an organization.


Natalie Taylor [00:15:02]:
So that's what capsule is really trying to solve, is democratizing video, because that's the preferred format for everyone these days. But it just still hasn't caught up to inside enterprise organizations.


Dave Gerhardt [00:15:15]:
Trey, so what was the process for creating this launch video? I want to talk through launch video influencers and how you ended up bringing this thing to market, what the launch was like. But how did the video come to life? How did you do it? Did it cost money? Did you do it in house? Did you write a script for it? I want to know all of the behind the scenes.


Natalie Taylor [00:15:31]:
Yeah. So for that launch video, that was kind of our biggest product launch that we've done to date. Was that public beta one? So we did work with an agency. I spent time sourcing different partners, interviewing different people, and finding a good partner that could fit within our budget. We obviously paid them to help us with the video, we were heavily involved in the storyboarding and the script and kind of the overall narrative and things we wanted included. And even further down the process, we really helped refine even the animations at the end. We have an in house person who's a motion designer and helped with a lot of that. And so since then, we've been doing all of our launch videos in house with just me, our CEO, and our motion designer to kind of punch them up.


Natalie Taylor [00:16:17]:
But for really big ones, we'll usually partner with an outside partner or vendor to help really make it nice and give us some more time to work on other aspects of the launch.


Dave Gerhardt [00:16:27]:
But did you have, like, an outline and a script and an idea for, like, the type of video? Like, we have an idea of how we want to, what we want, and then we'll go find the video creator to do this?


Natalie Taylor [00:16:37]:
Yeah, there were a few projects that were moving in parallel, so there was the website launch and the product launch video and kind of all the assets and messaging around what capsule is, because this is kind of like our coming out of, not exactly stealth, but sort of. And so we have these messages that we want to get across, and how are we going to communicate that in a website format and in a video format? We're kind of the two biggest projects, and so they kind of worked in parallel together. As we're developing the messaging, for one, we want to make sure that that messaging comes across in the other. And so, yeah, we kind of created the messaging hierarchy and script and want to make sure we include these key features that we know people love in our beta testers, et cetera.


Dave Gerhardt [00:17:21]:
And what was the process of, how do you go and find a good video editor?


Natalie Taylor [00:17:25]:
Yeah, I think luckily, he's our product lead. He's actually the person who got me the job. His name is Clark, on our team, who is a very experienced motion designer, has a lot of connections, used to work at agencies, and so he has a good sense and a good place to start and has a good sense of, like, the aesthetic that we want and the kind of partner we want to work with. And then we together would just sort of vet different partners and evaluate to make sure they were good fits.


Dave Gerhardt [00:17:52]:
Do you remember how much you spent to create the video?


Natalie Taylor [00:17:55]:
I dont exactly. I probably wouldn't share either because our budgets are just so scrappy.


Dave Gerhardt [00:18:02]:
But wait, you wouldn't share because it's too low. So if it was like 50 grand, you would tell us, but if it was like $200, you wouldn't?


Natalie Taylor [00:18:09]:
No, just because startup budgets are so all over the place. Also, they worked with us, the agency worked with us in a startup capacity, knowing that they would normally charge larger, but hoping to work with us in the future as we grow kind of thing.


Dave Gerhardt [00:18:23]:
Got it.


Natalie Taylor [00:18:23]:
I wouldn't want to put them in a precarious situation is mostly what I.


Dave Gerhardt [00:18:26]:
Mean, because then everybody would be like, I want the $500 video.


Natalie Taylor [00:18:29]:
Right? It was more than $500. I'll say that.


Dave Gerhardt [00:18:34]:
Sometimes you got to spend my, I got Lasik a couple of years ago instead of wearing contacts, and I think it was like maybe four grand. And I remember looking it up and I found this Reddit thread and someone was like, I found a doctor who would do Lasik for $400 instead of 4000. I was like, lasers on my eye. I don't want the discount version for that. I'll pay the full price. That's great. All right, so you get the video made, and then obviously, like, it's a video company, and so you got to use your product as part of this and showcase the, showcase the product then, okay. You spend the time and effort to write the script, work with somebody, make the video.


Dave Gerhardt [00:19:09]:
This is where I think a lot of efforts then fall flat. All right, we got the thing now, but let's talk about distribution. How do you start with Zero? As a startup, you don't have the built in audience. How do you distribute this video and how do you make sure it's not just a one day pop? So what was the actual launch plan like?


Natalie Taylor [00:19:27]:
Yeah, I mean, distribution is such a huge part of it, and you can't really start from zero. So that's why we worked with influencers, people who had built in audiences already that we could leverage, that we knew would be interested in that. So we worked with a creator named Amanda Getz. I think you know her as well. She had just pivoted to becoming a full time creator but hadn't yet monetized it. We had never worked with a creator before, and so we were both really invested in making this work as sort of a first test on both sides. And it did. It worked amazingly well.


Natalie Taylor [00:20:03]:
She created this incredible video asset for us that shared her journey of video editing and how intimidated she was by it. And wow, look at this amazing tool called Capsule. And it makes it so easy. And now I can create a way more videos as part of my creator business. And that video generated over half of our launch impressions. It was incredible. The story really resonated with people, and it was just an amazing asset. We worked with another creator.


Natalie Taylor [00:20:30]:
And then I think you posted on LinkedIn like a week after our launch, which was great too, to just kind of keep the momentum going. But that was really a really important part of our distribution channel. The other part is also our investors. So we send out an email to our investors the morning of that launch, like, hey, here's the link to our tweet and our LinkedIn post, please. Here's some very quick, easy instructions for you to amplify this to your networks. And that sends some early signals to the algorithm as well. That is really helpful in boosting those impressions on launch day.


Dave Gerhardt [00:21:06]:
So why did you pick Amanda? Why did you reach out to me? I want to unpack how you decide which influencers to work with. One of my frustrations is I see people asking about how to find influencers and I want to just jump through the computer because it's like, if you don't know, you have to know. This is your company, this is your industry. You have to know which people have the attention or reach of the audience that you're trying to reach. I get it. And maybe this is different for larger consumer brands and if you're selling like Cheez its, you want to find some random bravo celebrity to like do a promo with your new Cheez its or whatever your new Cheez its flavor. But I think in b two b maybe in any industry you got to know the audience and who they listen to and then kind of go down the tiers of who might be interesting. I know some people have like theres databases and you can go find influencers off of some database and im sure with large consumer brands there's whole agencies that do this but I think in the world that we're talking about, you got to know.


Dave Gerhardt [00:22:10]:
And so how did you pick Amanda as an example?


Natalie Taylor [00:22:13]:
Yeah, I'm actually going to talk about our other more recent launches that we've partnered with influencers because I think we've gotten a little bit better at this since.


Dave Gerhardt [00:22:21]:
Sure.


Natalie Taylor [00:22:21]:
And so I guess the second launch we did with influencers or creators, whatever you want to call them, I just built a list of people that I followed and it's very, I mean, I'm fortunate that I am a target user of capsule and therefore I know who I consume and I know who I follow on LinkedIn and where I am. And so I just started with a list of people whose content I really enjoy or respect or admire and just reached out to them and DM'd them cold and was like, hey, I love your content. Do you ever partner with other brands? We're launching something fun at capsule at the end of the month. I'd love your help getting the word out about and the response rate to those DM's was like, I think only like one person didn't respond to me. Out of 20 people I reached out to. A lot of these people have a lot of followers and I've admired them for years. So I was first kind of surprised by that. And then it was honestly kind of like a sales process where I created like an intro deck and gave them an overview of capsule and kind of pitched them on capsule and pitched them on the campaign and then built up a contract and got them onboarded, all of that kind of stuff.


Natalie Taylor [00:23:28]:
But the list building part was a, who do I follow? And b, whose content do I think will align well with the kind of content we're trying to create for this campaign? And that's how I kind of started with that list. So, yeah, again, I'm fortunate that I personally had a strong sense of who it would work for because I'm in the target audience. But I think there's other ways you can do that too. Just talking to your customers and asking them who they follow and who they respect and admire and trust when it comes to making decisions around products.


Dave Gerhardt [00:24:00]:
What's great about doing this in b two B is the size of the audience. You don't need to find somebody, like, you didn't need to find somebody with millions of followers on a campaign, right? It's like because of the product that you're selling and because of the industry that you're in, finding someone with like 10,000 LinkedIn followers that are engaged in the niche that you want to sell to. You can drive a ton of engagement on that post, which I think makes it a very interesting channel for marketing.


Natalie Taylor [00:24:25]:
Well, there's even people who had 2000 followers. We had several people that were like under 5000 followers. That drove a ton of impressions and engagement for us because they have very engaged audiences and post really great content.


Dave Gerhardt [00:24:37]:
I love that. I love that as a strategy. I've thought about this actually with growing exit five, but like, I think you could go, you could try to find a super big name, you could try to find the middle range, ten to 100,000 followers, whatever. But I think there's a whole play out there where you find like micro influencers and you get a list of ten to 20 people and you pay each one of those people like $500 for a post. And now you get 20 people writing 20 posts for the cost of what it would have taken you to get one person to do one post. I think that's a really interesting play. That's something that I would definitely be doing if I was, like, a scrappy startup marketer, for sure.


Natalie Taylor [00:25:16]:
Yep.


Dave Gerhardt [00:25:17]:
She said yep. Because I guess. Right? And then what was the. Let's talk about the play. What was the offer there? How do you know that these posts drove any business? Because this is where I think a lot, and we do a lot of. A big part of our business at exit five now is sponsorships. And one of the things that we do is, I don't do any, like, when I was just working solo, I would do, like, one off sponsored posts. Like, that's what I did with capsule as an example.


Dave Gerhardt [00:25:42]:
Like, here's my audience. Yes. Here's how much it costs to have me write a post about your thing. But now that we're really growing this business, we don't just do, like, the one off posts anymore, because I want it to be part of exit five. And so we do them as part of, like, a bundle. And so a sponsor might do, like, we might do two webinars, ten newsletters, and, like, two LinkedIn posts over the course of x months. Right? And I think that works better. But I do see a lot of, sometimes we'll get copy from sponsors or even just the other things where there's, like, too many calls to action.


Dave Gerhardt [00:26:12]:
We want you to, like, read this link to this blog post, and then, like, go to this thing, and then, like, here's this UTM tracked link, which I get the intention of that, but you have to understand how these platforms work. And, like, LinkedIn does not like links, neither does Twitter anymore. They don't like links. They don't want to take people off the platform. And so this is, to me, the fun marketing challenge is, like, how are we going to work with these influencers where it's not going to be direct response? Because if we put a link in here, and if everyone in Amanda's posts has to click this link, and then the only way Natalie can measure that is if she gives Amanda the right, like, UTM code, it's gotta be something like, sign up for capsule for free. And, like, there's actually no link at all. But the video and the creative and the offer is so good that you wanna drive people to go to that page. Am I.


Dave Gerhardt [00:26:54]:
You get. I'm trying to articulate.


Natalie Taylor [00:26:55]:
Nailed it.


Dave Gerhardt [00:26:56]:
When we try to over engineer, we try to over engineer, like, everybody wants to do this work like this is the shift in b two B. People wanna work with influencers, micro influencers, communities, whatever, but they also want to treat it like, it's like a direct response email campaign where you can have perfectly tracked links and it just doesn't work like that. I love what Amanda Natividad says about zero click content. I think you really gotta think of the creative and how you're gonna get people to engage without actually, like, clicking that UTM link.


Natalie Taylor [00:27:27]:
Yep, you nailed it. The offer, the whole story, the reason to take any sort of action is all in the video that the creator makes and the copy in their post. And the call to action is usually just within the video. Or maybe there's a mention in the copy as well. That's like our objective is just for people to create an account and sign up for free and test out capsule. So that's the call to action. Try it for free at capsule video. And that is just mentioned somewhere.


Natalie Taylor [00:27:51]:
But we don't use utms. We don't have these complex systems. And we just track, we have self reported attribution and our sign up form, which is helpful. But we also know we see spikes when we do these big launches, we see spikes and signups and we know that that's attributable to these campaigns and that's, that's good enough for us right now.


Dave Gerhardt [00:28:13]:
Yeah, I love that. I love just looking at the, looking at the signals, like, oh, that was the day Amanda's post dropped and we did that. And so, yeah, roughly then go look at directionally, the likes and comments on her post. You go map that back. It's not going to like, it's not like you open up your dashboard and you see like 75 people, said, amanda, you can roughly associate, and I think this is what we're looking for most of the time in marketing. It's not this perfectly measurable thing. It's directionally, oh, yeah, we did this. We spent this with influencers, like, that worked.


Dave Gerhardt [00:28:40]:
We drove sign ups that day. Let's go do this again.


Natalie Taylor [00:28:43]:
Yeah, I'll say at startups, it's really important in startup marketing to hone into those signals and not get too caught up in the perfect modeling, the perfect system, or even sustainability and scalability of some of these initiatives. One of the things that I think we are doing right now at capsule is, well, first, there's three things that we're doing when it comes to startup marketing right now. I'd say the first is talking to customers a ton, shipping really fast, and then doing things that don't scale. So things that don't scale for us right now are we're doing these really intimate in person dinners with our icps, and it takes a ton of work. It's a lot of time. But it is our number one opportunity creator right now, and it is working. I'm not too worried yet. We're getting to the point where I am starting to get where I need to start thinking about how to scale it out and make it more sustainable.


Natalie Taylor [00:29:39]:
But right now it's working so well that it's worth spending the time on as opposed to like, well, we shouldn't do it because this will take a lot of time and effort and we don't know how we can possibly scale it at this point. So I think it's really important to do that.


Dave Gerhardt [00:29:55]:
Yeah, I love that. The startup marketing playbook. Talk to customers, ship, fasten, do things that don't scale. I'm taking notes. That's great. That's really great. Yeah.


Natalie Taylor [00:30:03]:
I'm happy to talk about any of those as well.


Dave Gerhardt [00:30:05]:
Well, I want to talk about the dinners, actually. I want to dive into the dinners. I just want to put a bow on the influencer thing that we were talking about, though.


Natalie Taylor [00:30:11]:
Yeah.


Dave Gerhardt [00:30:11]:
This is what I want to push people to think about. We oftentimes spend a lot of time on the campaign creation and we don't think about the actual delivery of the asset of the creative. And it's like, we got this x budget. We're going to do this influencer campaign. We're going to have everybody post this blog post. And then we're like, why didn't this work? We're like, I love Gary Vee, and I don't care who knows it. And Gary always says that creative is the variable for success. And I've always thought about that line, creative is the variable for success.


Dave Gerhardt [00:30:42]:
Creative is like, so when you make that great creative, when you make the great video, you have an offer that actually works and you think about the flow. Like, we're going to give this video to Amanda. She's going to post it. Does this flow make sense? Are people actually going to watch it? Are they going to click? Are they going to get back to our site? That's the difference in what makes a great campaign actually work. I've done, we did something earlier this year. We work with a company and we're learning a lot this year. We're spending a lot more time now with sponsors and we know this audience best. And so we're almost acting like a mini agency with them, instead of just being like, yeah, we'll take your money and do a sponsor.


Dave Gerhardt [00:31:17]:
We're like, well, we'll take your money and do a sponsor, but we're going to help you do the execution of this because we know how to structure this, how to write it, what the offer needs to be. I just, you got to sweat that part. And that's the fun part of marketing that I think you can have the greatest campaign idea in the world. But if you don't think about the actual execution of, like, what is this going to look like in the feed? What is the copy going to be? Instead, we like, gloss over those details and go more to like, well, how are we going to measure them? I'd much rather not worry about how we're going to measure it. I'd rather nail the creative, nail the offer. And how are you going to measure is because you're going to go to your analytics and you're going to see a bunch of people signed up for capital that day. Anyway. That's the end of my rant there.


Natalie Taylor [00:31:54]:
Yeah, no, I love that. I think that's one of the things I've learned a lot from Champ, our CEO. He has really great marketing instincts. I've learned a ton about marketing from him. One of those is just a basic understanding of human psychology and really putting yourselves in the position of your target audience and thinking about, if I saw this on my feed, would I do something about it? Is it compelling enough? Is it interesting enough? If not, why are we doing this and just thinking about it, where it lives in the wild and what it's going to make people do.


Dave Gerhardt [00:32:24]:
Just taking notes. I got an idea. Okay, so I want to talk about dinners. I also want to talk about CEO with great marketing instincts, too, but so you mentioned dinners. Dinners have been the greatest pipeline driver for you. Let's talk about what does a dinner look like? How many people go, how do you invite them? What is the content of the dinner? I get the concept of dinners. I have done them before. I believe in it.


Dave Gerhardt [00:32:48]:
But I want to actually walk through the logistics of this because I think people are wondering, well, how do you do this? And is the dinner, I'm guessing champ is not standing up and doing like, thank you for coming to our dinner. Now I'm going to pitch capsule, but people still end up buying. So how have you made dinners work? I know you're trying to scale them, but let's talk about a good dinner that's driven pipeline for you. What does that look like so we've.


Natalie Taylor [00:33:09]:
Done three of these so far. We're about to do our fourth one in San Francisco later this month. But the way we structure them is. Well, let me back up. The reason we're doing them is because we have identified a pain point that is so strong and so acute with our ICP that we just need more ways to get in front of our ICP. And Cole's emailing. Asking for an intro meeting is not as effective as inviting them to a dinner with their peers at a really nice restaurant where you can talk about these challenges that, by the way, we know you and all of your peers have. So it's just a more compelling hook, and it's a way for us to build meaningful relationships with people we know we can help solve a problem for.


Natalie Taylor [00:33:54]:
So that's why we're doing it.


Dave Gerhardt [00:33:56]:
Okay.


Natalie Taylor [00:33:57]:
The mechanics and logistics of how we're doing it is we pick a major city where we know a lot of our icps are. So San Francisco, Boston, New York, that's where we've been so far.


Dave Gerhardt [00:34:09]:
Safe bets.


Natalie Taylor [00:34:10]:
Yep. And it's B. Two B. SaaS. Enterprise companies, heads of creative, heads of video within those companies. So we start with our networks, our own LinkedIn networks, our investors networks, to try and get warm intros and send those invites to those people, because that's always more effective. But then we also do a lot of cold outreach to inviting people to the dinner.


Dave Gerhardt [00:34:30]:
And, sorry, in the cold outreach, does that come from you? Does it come from champ? How do you build the list for that? What does the outreach look like?


Natalie Taylor [00:34:37]:
Yeah, it's mostly coming from me, occasionally from champ. But building the list is like a combination of working with just using different data providers and combing through my own LinkedIn.


Dave Gerhardt [00:34:49]:
Can you talk about what's a data provider that you might use?


Natalie Taylor [00:34:52]:
Apollo or we work with, like a lead gen agency or a outbound agency that helps us kind of with list building stuff. And I'll just give some criteria, but also, like, for example, when we went to Boston, I used to live and work in Boston in the tech scene, so I was very familiar with the companies out there. And so I knew off the top of my head who could potentially be good fits, and I would just do a little digging on LinkedIn and manually search for some of these people. I wouldn't do that for everyone, but it is good to mix in a little bit of your own personal experience if you have experience within those industries. So, building the list, sending out invites. I pick the venue first. I pick a cool venue. I spend time going on like eater or infatuation and looking up like the hot new restaurants in that city within the past year or so and then book the venue.


Natalie Taylor [00:35:41]:
We keep it to like 16 people, and that includes me, our head of sales and our CEO at the dinner. So we have 13 people. We start with inviting a few customers who are in those cities. So like when we were in Boston, we had our contact at HubSpot come to the dinner and our contact at Commvault, who was based in New Hampshire, came down and then the rest are like new prospects and we invite them. We come to dinner. The premise is like, you're going to get together with your peers at this awesome restaurant, talk a little bit about AI and video and talk about shared challenges kind of thing. And I will say the first dinner we did, we actually didn't sell hard enough, if you can believe that. And so in subsequent dinners, we have sold a little harder.


Natalie Taylor [00:36:29]:
And it's not like if we pull up a PowerPoint presentation and like go through capsule's value props, it's like our CEO stands up and is like, thank you everyone for being here. And just kind of frames the general challenges that we are seeing across the market and then just like explains what capsule does and how capsule solves that. And that's pretty much it. The other way that we are not selling ourselves but allowing our customers to sell is I then stand up and I say, okay, we're going to do quick intros. You're going to say your name, where you work, what you do there, and then one big bet, you're making around video this year and bonus points if it's related to AI. So I start off, I give a little capsule spiel because I use capsule. And then our customers stand up and say how they're really excited about capsule solving XYZ problem. And then prospects stand up and share, like, well, I'm really facing these challenges with scaling video at our organization and keeping everyone on brand.


Natalie Taylor [00:37:24]:
And then that's just further validation and fodder for our sales to follow up and have conversations. So that's sort of the main structure. And then the last thing I'll share that has been a key kind of marketing play in this whole dinner motion is I'm taking pictures during the dinner on a nice camera. I get pictures of everyone at the dinner that night. I upload them into a Dropbox folder, draft an email with everyone's LinkedIn profile links to connect everyone, send a link of the photos and say, thanks again for coming. Here's some photos from the dinner. Feel free to post on social media and tag capsule. And we get, like, three to six people from that dinner, posting about the dinner, which then creates this whole second round of fomo within their networks.


Natalie Taylor [00:38:08]:
And people being like, let me know when the next one is. And it builds momentum for the next dinner.


Dave Gerhardt [00:38:13]:
Yeah, this is great. People are going to love this episode. This is what I want, the tactical stuff, the real stuff. So I love this play. And there's a couple things to unpack. I love the idea of having customers there, just a couple to talk about how they're using it. Number two is, I think the reason people go to this is because we put a lot of stock into what we do for work. And even if we don't want to, you know, I go to my kids t ball game and some person shakes my hand, the very first question out of their mouth is, what do you do for work? It just is how we identify as humans.


Dave Gerhardt [00:38:48]:
And so if you can gather people, like, if it was all different roles from all different companies, I don't think you'd be able to fill rooms for the dinners. But if you said, hey, we have, like, video team members from, like, all of these companies coming for this dinner, you're like, okay, cool. This is like a room full of my peers because anybody that's been to something like that before, let's say if I'm a copywriter, I'm in a room full of ten other copywriters. Like, I know I'm going to get smarter. Like, yeah, yeah, whatever. I'm never going to buy capsule, but they're going to buy me a steak and I'm going to, like, you know, get to network with Natalie. But then kind of halfway through the dinner, you've, like, talked to three or four more people. You kind of like the capsule team.


Dave Gerhardt [00:39:21]:
You leave that feeling good. A week or so later, you get a follow up from the sales team. Not with a hard sell, but just like a, hey, let me tell you about this thing that we do. I do think this play works for that reason. And people are more likely. I can be very introvert. I'm like a mix of introvert and extrovert. I can see, like, I used to be like, man, nobody's going to want to come to these dinners.


Dave Gerhardt [00:39:40]:
Like, I wouldn't want to do this. I want to leave my family on a Tuesday night. All of a sudden, you get a highly curated invite. You see who else is there. It's ten to twelve people in your industry. It's a nice dinner at a nice restaurant. It's 2 hours. You're like, okay, I'll go.


Dave Gerhardt [00:39:53]:
And it's fun. It's fun to be around other people and to, like, share stories about work. And I think. I think this can work really well. And I like the idea of getting everybody to speak by having them share something. Another mistake I made in one of the first dinners that we did was there's usually like two or three people at the dinner. Most oftentimes men who just hog the entire conversation. And so one trick that I learned from somebody was we had like a multiple course meal and we just would rotate everybody in between.


Dave Gerhardt [00:40:23]:
And we're like, hey, sorry, this is going to be a little bit weird. We're going to clean out all your stuff, but, like, appetizers are going to come. Then you're going to rotate. You're George, you're going here. Natalie, you're going here. I just. Even if people think that's uncomfortable, it just mixes things up a little bit more and it makes, like, two people that hog the conversation not be able to do that and just mixes the group a little bit better. But I really, I really like this play.


Natalie Taylor [00:40:43]:
Yeah. Two other things we do that I didn't mention is I'm very intentional about the seating arrangement. So if there's someone we really want to be next to our head of sales, to, like, learn more about what's going on there, or our CEO, but then I'll sort of group people. Because at these dinners we have, like, heads of creative, then we have some, like, vps of brand or more like heads of marketing. And then maybe there's like a couple, like, heads of video. Those titles are less common just because it's not as common in B two B SaaS companies, we'll group those people together. And then before dessert, I make that kind of awkward announcement. I'm like, hey, we're going to switch spots just so that you have actually, I do.


Natalie Taylor [00:41:20]:
I let people know ahead of time that that's going to be coming so that if they're trapped next to someone that they really don't like talking to, they're not like, dreading a whole night and trying to dip out early. So I say before dessert, we're going to get up and these four people are going to switch with these four people kind of thing so that you have a chance to mingle.


Dave Gerhardt [00:41:35]:
I like that.


Natalie Taylor [00:41:36]:
Oh, one other thing I was going to mention is in the invite, you mentioned people want to come to these dinners because their peers are there and they want to learn and network from their peers. And also, people are still, I think, really craving in person connection post Covid. I think there's just still that hunger for it, especially since most of us are remote now.


Dave Gerhardt [00:41:54]:
Oh, my God. I went to a dinner. I got invited to a dinner before an event in New York, and it was like, the greatest night of my life.


Natalie Taylor [00:42:00]:
Exactly. Okay, so at our last dinner in New York, one of the guys, who.


Dave Gerhardt [00:42:04]:
Am I right now? What am I doing? Am I okay?


Natalie Taylor [00:42:07]:
One of the guys that came to our last dinner at New York, he was on his last week of parental leave. He had just had his second kid, and he was like, I'm so excited. Like, he was having the best night of his life. I was like, I know exactly how you feel. It's so nice to be out, right?


Dave Gerhardt [00:42:22]:
They're like, did he even breathe when he ate that steak? Where did his food go? In any walk of life, you can win somebody over with a great meal. And so I also like that you're not outsourcing this right now. Like, you. You seem to have an interest in food. Do you have a side business with pizza ovens or something like that? Yeah. And so I like that you take pride in, like, finding cool restaurants. Again, back to what we talked about with content. This is the offer here, right? You're not saying, like, hey, come the 15 of us, we're gonna go to cheesecake factory, right? No disrespect to cheesecake factor if you do want to sponsor exit five at some point, but I like that you're kind of, like, hand picking these, like, cool spots and curating this experience for people.


Dave Gerhardt [00:43:01]:
And you can also get a pretty good restaurants, like, when you pay upfront, like, on a fixed price menu on, like, a Tuesday night or something. And so you can kind of get. Get a little bit of leverage in what you pay for these things, too.


Natalie Taylor [00:43:13]:
Yeah, sorry. The other thing I forgot to mention was when we invite people in, like, the email copy, we keep it very short. We try to instill some fomo. So we say, this is, like our fourth vip dinner we're hosting around AI and b, two b video. Previous attendees have included heads of creative and video from companies like HubSpot, Figma, Brex, and notion. Would you be interested in attending? Or, like, can I save a spot for company name kind of thing? Yeah, we have a few slots left. Can I save them for you?


Dave Gerhardt [00:43:42]:
I like that. I like that because you got to know, you want to know who else is going, right?


Natalie Taylor [00:43:47]:
Exactly.


Dave Gerhardt [00:43:48]:
I'm going to admit something one time, I haven't done this anymore. One time. I may or may not have sent out it. In my scrappier days, I may or may not have sent out a dinner invite saying something like so and so from so and so is coming. I had emailed them. They had not confirmed yet, but it's like a little bit of like, okay. I said, I know people would come if I say, natalie's coming. So I'm saying that Natalie's coming.


Dave Gerhardt [00:44:11]:
Then I get those two people in, then I can go back to Natalie and say, hey, and this person, hey.


Natalie Taylor [00:44:16]:
These people are coming.


Dave Gerhardt [00:44:17]:
Natalie. Yeah. So I've been there.


Natalie Taylor [00:44:20]:
I've been there before.


Dave Gerhardt [00:44:22]:
And we got to be able to admit stuff like that, okay, this has been great. Sometimes I mess around with, like, what I'm going to write for the title while I'm doing this. I was going to, we got to work dinners into the title this episode. We haven't had this much of a deep dive. I want to wrap up and ask about just from a company strategy perspective. So you're selling to the enterprise, but you're the, your funnel is free. Like, do you want an enterprise customer to start with free? Is free the entry point, or do you have, like, multiple funnels where, like, somebody might be on free forever, but there's also enterprise. What does that motion look like?


Natalie Taylor [00:44:51]:
Yeah, we are a sales led motion. That's our main focus right now. But we are starting to build a foundation for a true product led growth motion because we don't want what happened to envision to happen to us. So what happened with envision and Figma? I don't know if you're familiar with this is envision started with the enterprise top down sales led motion, and they dominated the market for a long time. And then Figma was just building this incredible product that everyone was using and everyone was loving. And then these enterprise companies would have these contracts come up with Envision, and they're like, I'm sorry, everyone in our organization is now using Figma. We can't, we can't work with Envision because everyone's already on Figma. So now that we have product market fit and we're sort of at that point where we're crossing the chasm, as Jeffrey Moore says, we're like, we know we have a thing that works and it's going to work.


Natalie Taylor [00:45:46]:
We're building that foundation for a true product led growth motion where people do come in on the free tier. But right now it is a mix of both. I mean, we do have a lot of free users and a lot of paid business users, but the goal is for them to come from enterprise companies and really fuel the enterprise motion as well.


Dave Gerhardt [00:46:05]:
Yeah, I think it makes for a way. I realize it's not possible with every company, but I think if there's a, if you can have an enterprise motion but have a free version of the product, it makes it more fun and much easier from a marketing standpoint to get people in. It's hard when you're like, it's hard to have two funnels. It's hard to have a product that people can't interact with and touch and play around with before they buy it. So I just wanted to mention that and then we only have a couple minutes, but maybe just talk about your relationship with the CEO. So you mentioned that the CEO has great marketing instincts. How do you see your role? How do you bring him into things? How do you not fight with those? You don't want to always be an order taker. But some of that is realizing I had Kip from HubSpot CMO on the podcast, and he always talks about how the first job of the CMO is realizing that the CEO is the CMO.


Dave Gerhardt [00:46:55]:
Seems like you might be in one of those cases, just kind of want to hear about your relationship, how you work together on marketing.


Natalie Taylor [00:47:00]:
I was going to bring up that exact quote because when I heard him say that, I was like 100%, 100%. And I think that's the way it has to. I mean, at least at capsule working with Champ, it works so well that way. When the founder truly is leading the vision and the brand and setting the tone for everything, I think it's either.


Dave Gerhardt [00:47:19]:
That or it's like the CEO has no involvement in all and I'm not going to work at that company anyway. So it's like, I'd rather only have it this way.


Natalie Taylor [00:47:27]:
Exactly. Yeah. So I think we make a really great team because he has a very clear vision and like I said, really great marketing instincts and really understands the value of brand and marketing and messaging, that it's easy for me to execute and brainstorm and provide feedback and gut check and provide other ideas as well. But having the founder and CEO really drive the brand and the vision is, I can't imagine working in another capacity. It's so rewarding and beneficial to have it work that way.


Dave Gerhardt [00:48:02]:
Well, the most important ingredient in marketing is the story, because the story and the strategy go hand in hand and if you don't have a founder led story, there's no vision there. And when I started working for myself, I did some consulting, and I was helping some companies with positioning, and I was working with one company. We were, like, trying to beat them so hard. And, like, you need a differentiator. You need a differentiator. And the reason they had no differentiator is because there was no vision from the founders versus, like, I worked at a company drift, where, like, the founders almost had, like, too much vision. It was amazing. It was like they could tell me where they thought the company was going to be in 20 years, and I could use that in our marketing and write about, you got to have vision to be able to then go create great marketing messaging.


Natalie Taylor [00:48:43]:
Exactly. I view my role as, I think this is where my background in content has really helped, is like, when you work in content, you work with a lot of subject matter experts and have to kind of, like, translate their really smart thoughts and ideas into a message that makes sense for a target audience. And so I view that as a big part of my role is, like, I understand his vision and his message and what's going on and what he's trying to accomplish. My goal is to kind of translate that into a format, into a channel, into a campaign, all of that kind of stuff.


Dave Gerhardt [00:49:15]:
Love it. All right, Natalie, great job. Great hanging with you. Great talking to you. I show you my this upside down, but my lessons and learning today. Good stuff. Good to see you. I'll see you next week.


Dave Gerhardt [00:49:23]:
We're going to do a product launch webinar together. But I got a bunch out of this interview. Natalie Taylor, go find her on LinkedIn. Connect with her, send her a message. Be like, hey, I heard you on Dave's podcast. It was great. I learned about X, Y, and Z, and check out capsule. All right? And thank you for being a great member of the exit five community.


Dave Gerhardt [00:49:39]:
It's nice to have a member on every now and then. Then, too.


Natalie Taylor [00:49:41]:
Yeah. Thanks. And one last thing I forgot to mention is we have a special discount code for anyone who listens to the podcast.


Dave Gerhardt [00:49:49]:
Get out of here. Come on. Take notes. Take notes, everybody. Thank you. This is how you do it. Go ahead. Sorry, I'll shut up.


Dave Gerhardt [00:49:55]:
Go ahead.


Natalie Taylor [00:49:56]:
It's okay. Our paid capsule plan, you can get 25% off for life with code e 525. So use that on a paid capsule plant, which gives you unlimited export ports, all the features, everything amazing about capsule, 25% off for life.


Dave Gerhardt [00:50:11]:
Good job. That's called being prepared, ladies and gentlemen. I took a screen. Anytime I'm doing a. We have a, just a slack channel in our company. Slack for the podcast. And anytime I'm, I like to, I believe in, like, showing our work, and everybody kind of shares, like, what they're doing. I don't really do anything other than, like, respond to Slack messages, post on LinkedIn, and host the podcast at the company anymore.


Dave Gerhardt [00:50:29]:
So I take a screenshot of, like, who I have on the podcast. It's a show team. And Matt said he's blown away by your camera, so great camera work, whatever camera you got over there. And now I'm going to have to tell him that you over delivered. So good job. Good job.


Natalie Taylor [00:50:42]:
Thanks so much.


Dave Gerhardt [00:50:43]:
All right. See you later.