EFP 172: Scaling Your Content Marketing With MarketMuse

It shouldn’t surprise you too much to know that content marketing has been a major part of our growth strategy over the last few years.

It was slow going at first, but one of the benefits is that you can reap rewards years after you wrote that blog post, published that podcast episode, etc.

Still – not everyone is comfortable pumping out content on a regular basis. How do you come up with the topics? How do you know what to say? What’s the best way to speak to potential customers AND the search engines?

Our guest today – Jeff Coyle from Market Muse – believes they have an answer to some of those problems.

We’ll dig into his entrepreneurial story, talk about the challenges (and successes) in their business, and then look at how their works helps other entrepreneurs grow their content marketing across the board.

If you’ve been looking to start a content marketing campaign, but find you keep putting it off – this might be the episode for you!

Check Out This Week’s Episode:

Direct Download – Right Click, Save As

Topics Discussed This Week:

1. Background on Jeff Coyle and Market Muse
2. Getting Market Muse started
3. Growing pains, struggles, and successes
4. Value proposition for business buyers and sellers

Mentions:

• Jeff Coyle @ Market Muse
• Neil Patel
• Clay Collins @ Lead Pages
• EF Listing # 43981 in FBA and FBN in the Confectionary Niche
• Market Muse Case Study on Neil Patel’s Site
• Aki Balogh @ Market Muse
• Open View Partners
• Richard Mallah @ Market Muse
• Future of Life Institute
• Tech Target
• Hubspot
• Zendesk
• Authority Hacker
• Content Wrangler
• www.marketmuse.com/purchase 20% off first 3 months. CODE: empireflippers
• Justin Cooke @ Millionaire Interviews

Spread the Love:

“Content marketing is expensive and takes time at first, but the benefits roll in for very long time.” – Justin – Tweet This!

“Your content should naturally and elegantly answers questions to where you don’t need an FAQ.” – Jeff – Tweet This!

So…what are your thoughts on content marketing? Are you using it to grow your business? Think Market Muse can help your business? Let us know in the comments!

 
Justin:
Welcome to the Empire Podcast, episode 172. Content marketing has been super important in our growth strategy since 2010. I heard that Neil Patel use a company called MarketMuse to double his traffic last year. That got me interested.

Justin:
I invited Jeff Coyle, founder of the company called MarketMuse, to come on our show and explain how his company provides marketing briefs that can really help grow your traffic. Now we get into his company’s backstory, the methods behind their madness, and some of the days in which MarketMuse can help our buyers and sellers grow their online businesses, so stick with us. You’ll find the show notes for this episode at empireflippers.com/marketmuse. All right, let’s do this.

Speaker 2:
Sick of listening to entrepreneurial advice from guys with day jobs? Want to hear about the real successes and failures that come with building an online empire? You are not alone. From San Diego to Tokyo, New York to Bangkok, join thousands of entrepreneurs and investors who are prioritizing wealth and personal freedom over the oppression of an office cubicle. Check out the Empire Podcast.

Speaker 2:
And now your hosts, Justin and Joe.

Justin:
All right, Joe, look back 10 years, man, 10 years ago before we started AdSense, before we started Empire Flippers, any of this kind of online journey stuff, if I told you that we’d have a business built on the back of content marketing, on the back of podcast, on the back of blog posts, guest posts and reaching out to people in our industry and sharing content, would you believe me?

Joe:
No way. Even eight years ago, I think it would have been or seven years ago when we first started out writing this content and doing this stuff, heck, when we first started the podcast, you listen to those first few episodes, we’ve come a long way since then. We got a lot better at doing the content. We got a lot better at picking topics at delivering. That’s why content marketing is so strong, because it takes time to really get good at it, and it takes time to really build up enough of it that it makes a difference.

Justin:
It helps if you like it. I didn’t mind doing it, not just didn’t mind it, but I actually liked aspects of it. If I remember there were times where, before we really kind of had a division of labor, I was like, “Joe, can you do this post on migration?” or “Joe, can you post …?” And you’re like, “Uh.” You’d do it, but you’d put all this time and effort into it, you just did not like it. You’d do it, and then you see the response, and you’re like, “Okay, no, I guess it’s good and helpful,” but you hated it.

Justin:
I think some people in our audience probably feel that way too. Right? They’re like, “I know I should do it, but other ways of doing leads or other ways of driving business are just easier. I can just pay money and drive leads.” But the problem with that is it can be awfully expensive. With content marketing, it’s expensive in time. You put up a lot of time at first, but the benefits roll in for a very long time especially if you’re good at it and you stick with it.

Justin:
That’s really kind of what got our business started, and it was time intensive. We put in hours and hours early on, but we started seeing those dividends, that payout, one year, two year, three years later, especially as we started to build audience.

Joe:
Yeah, and I think the great thing about content marketing is it’s at least semi-evergreen, right? Overtime, those posts don’t go away, whereas paid advertising, paid traffic, as soon as you stop paying, it goes away. So that’s something to consider when you’re coming up with a content marketing strategy.

Justin:
So one of the things I’ve been trying to figure out for the last year or two is how do you scale content marketing? I really like Lead Pages, Clay Collins’s approach to that, in terms of scaling his content. I think he did a great job with it. We’re attempting to follow in those footsteps, to some degree. I think I’ll talk a little bit more about that in some future episodes and some future posts. I think that would be interesting.

Justin:
In the meantime, for startups, for companies that struggle with content, I think MarketMuse offers and interesting … I don’t know if I want to call it product. Product/service where they do these kind of content briefs and get you the outline, the skeleton of a piece of content, and it makes it a lot easier to put that content out. It’s kind of what people are searching for, what people are looking for. I think if you’re looking to grow, it’s a way to kind of leverage their skills at putting that together and make the content production a lot easier for you.

Justin:
Now we’re not MarketMuse customers. I looked at it, and I’m just not sure it works for us, because I think we can come up with content relatively easy, but if you’re more like Joe in that you don’t like putting out content, you’re pulling your teeth or you delay blog posts and podcasts, I think this might be interesting. Also for startups that are looking to leverage content, I think that’s kind of a good customer for them.

Joe:
Yeah, I think just any business out there that doesn’t have a content marketing team and doesn’t have the money to deliver one, MarketMuse gives you a good first step to get there.

Justin:
Anyway, I’m a little skeptical. I beat Jeff up a little bit in the interview trying to get at the heart of what he does, and whether it’s worth it and who it’s worth it for. So we’ll get into it in the show. But before we do that, man, let’s pay the bills with our featured listing of the week. What do you got for us, buddy?

Joe:
We’re talking about Listing 43981. This is an FBA and FBM business created back in February of 2012 in the confectionary niche. It’s a candy business. It’s making a little over $58,000 net profit, so definitely this would be your main and only provider. It’s had very steady net profits over the last 12 months. So a good big business. We have it listed for just short of $2 million.

Justin:
Yeah, man. I like these big FBA businesses we’ve seen recently. We’ve been doing a lot more seven-figure businesses just in general, but particularly in the FBA space. I think the market’s had time to mature, and so you’re getting some of these larger businesses that have kind of gotten to that point and are looking to potentially exit. A lot of interesting opportunities there, and really exciting.

Joe:
Yeah. It does have a small amount of its business coming through its own storefront, and that’s definitely something that could be developed by the new owner, but with over 1,400 SKUs, it’s well diversified in the niche. It has plenty of products. Only has two part-time employees to pack and ship to Amazon. So it’s fairly hands-off from the seller’s point-of-view.

Justin:
All right, man. Enough about the featured listing of the week. Let’s get into the heart of this week’s episode.

Speaker 2:
Now for the heart of this week’s episode.

Justin:
So we’ve got Jeff Coyle from MarketMuse with us today. Thanks so much for coming on the show, man. I appreciate it.

Jeff:
Thanks again. I appreciate it.

Justin:
All right so I know a bit about what you do and I’m familiar with your business, but for listeners who don’t know, could you give us the elevator pitch? What do you guys do? What value do you provide?

Jeff:
Sure. MarketMuse uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate content creation and planning. So by analyzing massive amounts of content, whether it’s web content or natural language content, MarketMuse’s platform builds comprehensive content outlines that show you exactly what to write and the highest priorities for what create and optimize, and also how to execute on those individual page level publishing endeavors to cover that comprehensively and to be equivalent to that which a subject matter expert would cover.

Justin:
So it basically helps you with an outline, in terms of really writing helpful content, but it also looks at your old content that you have out there and says, “Hey, you can tweak it a little this way, add a few key words here, and you’re going to improve your rankings and help beat your competitors.”

Jeff:
Yeah, it’s basically we’re able to model that which, like I mentioned, a subject matter expert would cover if they were thinking about this concept. So within a content, one page or within an entire content package to say where are you strong? Where are you weak? Where do you have gaps? Or where are your competitors effectively doing a better job?

Justin:
Would you consider yourself a SaaS business, a service company? Where do you fit in there?

Jeff:
So it’s definitely a technology-enabled solutions provider. The majority of our customers are either just SaaS subscribers. We have licenses to our software, but we also enable technology-enabled deliverables where we’re building, with the help of our technology platform, but we’re customizing them to suit specific project needs as we need to.

Justin:
So we’re going to talk a little bit about where you are today, and then we’re going to go back and talk about how you got started. So let’s talk about your numbers right now. What are your customer numbers, your revenue, your traffic? What’s the business look like?

Jeff:
So we’re over 100 customers just recently. We’re over 1.1 million in annualized revenue. We have a huge number of large integrations and deals on the near horizon. So this is going to be something that is going to scale dramatically in the end of this year and early 2018. We also have a major platform rollout in Q1 of 2018 that is a huge thing that we’ve been working on for a long time.

Justin:
So over 100 customers, over 1.1 million annual run rate. Then do you cast a wide net to get those customers? What’s your traffic look like? Is it very targeted? What are you-

Jeff:
So our customer pool is really anyone that values content quality and kind of getting a return on investment for their content marketing initiatives. We have specialized workflows and processes for all different types of sites and inventories, whether it’s e-commerce, people that own a lot of authority sites or blogs, publishers, or B2B tech, even financial industries and local.

Jeff:
So we’ve customized the technology behind the artificial intelligence, the topic modeling, and the machine learning to be able to be applied to any type of business, from a standpoint of where we acquired the gross majority of our customers come from inbound as a result of our existing success stories and through our own content marketing efforts.

Justin:
Yeah. One of the things I thought was great was I read your kind of case study on Neil Patel. What I thought was really interesting about that was I could understand someone that has an e-commerce business with lots of content out there, but they would use MarketMuse, because their content is not, I don’t know, personal. It’s not great, unlike an e-commerce business generally. You know what I mean.

Jeff:
Yeah.

Justin:
And you were able to kind of give suggestions for Neil Patel’s blog, which I thought was fascinating, because that is what I would consider as not just kind of like your run-of-the-mill text broker type content. It’s quality stuff. It works both with quality content and just kind of your text broker type style. I thought that was pretty interesting. I’m going to link to that in the show notes first, anyone who wants to take a look at the Neil Patel case study. It’s fantastic.

Jeff:
Yeah, that was a really unique situation, because it wasn’t about … Commonly when you’re in a content inventory or content audit situation, you’re having to pick and choose your highest priorities to update or to create. What MarketMuse’s platform is able to do a comprehensive site audit, it’s able to prioritize the initiatives for creation or optimization. In that case though, it was, “Hey, I want to update every page. I want to optimize every single page and make it better. I want to see the impact of that.”

Jeff:
So we did the prioritization just so that they could knock it out in order of operations, but everything was updated. The results, as you can read in there and then continue to see, were very dramatic. Obviously as with any search engine optimization or content marketing case study, there’s a lot of other things in play. But we were able to isolate the impacts of what we were able to do with his team. They are experts. They are an amazing team to really continue to drive growth and continue on the momentum that he already had.

Justin:
Yeah. In the interest of transparency, I’ll tell our listeners that before, I wasn’t sure I was a fan of this, to be perfectly frank. I wasn’t sure that I liked it, and particularly for really quality content. I thought, “Oh, sure, e-commerce guys are going to work for it,” but really in-depth content, I wasn’t sure that it was great, but that helped to shift my mindset on that a little bit. We’re going to get into that a little bit more as we get into this interview, but one of the things I want to ask you about as an entrepreneur, as a founder, how did you guys get into MarketMuse? What was the impetus for getting you guys started? What got the ball rolling here?

Jeff:
So my co-founder, Aki Balogh, and another, Richard Mallah, they separately from me were trying to solve this problem from an artificial intelligence and machine learning perspective. So Aki had done some content marketing and had done some research with a venture partnership or venture capital firm called OpenView Venture Partners. He had looked at series B investments and big data and machine learning. Then he went and worked at a database company where one of his roles was content marketing where he then immediately was put into the fryer and experiencing the pain points of what do I write and how do I write it?

Jeff:
His interest in big data and machine learning, and his experience from working at OpenView, drove him to seek out artificial intelligence experts that might consider this interesting. He found Richard Mallah, who currently works with the Future of Life Institute, which is, among others, an Elon Musk backed think tank and institute trying to make sure the ethics behind artificial intelligence are upheld in society. They build the earliest algorithms in technology that power elements of MarketMuse even still today.

Justin:
Now that couldn’t have been terribly complicated, right? That must have been a basic out of the gate, kind of works, but not really the vision of what we were planning to do. What did that look like? How long did it take to develop?

Jeff:
They were inside kind of in their rooms and doing it as more of a science experiment for quite a long time. It was nearly a year. The approach that … They had other jobs at the time, obviously, among other things, though, Richard has won accolades for his work on the number one rated natural language processing platform by Forrester. He is a very decorated artificial intelligence expert.

Jeff:
But this was something that they really did as much more of a science experiment over about a year before the first algorithms and software was operational. Separately, and we have two patents on our topic modeling technology. It’s a very unique and novel approach to this solution that we’ve only improved over time. That’s the fun thing about machine learning. It just continues to improve the quality and our capabilities.

Jeff:
Separately, kind of the founding story is I’ve been doing this for about 18 years. I’ve worked in this space since kind of before it was space. I was an early employee at a company called Knowledge Storm. We were selling leads to software companies in the early days of online lead generation. So when we were acquired by our leading competitor, Tech Target, where I grew their in-house team that managed all elements of inbound, paid, organic. I also evaluated deals for acquisitions, which would be interesting, I’m sure, to your audience. Evaluated and gave detailed recommendations for, gosh, near on a dozen significant acquisitions while at Tech Target. Ended up being framed mostly as tuck-ins, but I’ve done that.

Jeff:
I also worked in private equity as a consultant for acquisition as well as for inbound marketing. So those types of things, I was trying to solve this problem. I was trying to figure out how do you take inventory and evaluate where I have strong writers, where I have high quality content? How can I put some objective measures of comprehensiveness to figure out my content gaps at scale? Then on the page level, how can I make really detailed content briefs that a writer is going to read and want to take action on? They’re not going to feel constrained by just saying, “Hey, try to stuff this keyword in there.” It’s really getting to the bottom of what does it mean to be about something and really focusing on high quality content.

Jeff:
Then MarketMuse was really the only thing that I had seen that wasn’t manual that tried to approach that same problem. When I plugged it in to some of the work that I was doing and it immediately worked, I was hooked. Then very soon after, the co-founders asked me if I wanted to come on to bring a solution to market and really push on the merchandising of it, and speaking the language of content marketers and the workflows that they painfully struggle through.

Justin:
So the ideas, Google has algorithms. So they’re looking at a page of content much differently than a human will. Your goal is to provide outlines for real writers to follow for real readers that will take that algorithm into account and be beneficial both for those algorithms but also for the people reading it. Then to take that, you can take that machine and apply it to previous content you’ve written to make it more Google friendly.

Jeff:
Yeah, our goal was always to say … Like I mentioned with Richard, his background isn’t content marketing. He’s building this truly to focus on subject matter expert augmentation of their knowledge to say, “What content gaps should I fill that are always going to be logical?” It’s going to say, “Oh yeah, I could have added a section to that page that would have discussed that.” Then a reader would have had a more comprehensive, engaging interaction. Then at the same time, the search engine’s goal is to provide a great user experience. It’s to provide the user intent profiles and task completions that searchers desire.

Jeff:
So these two things are kind of moving toward the same end goal. It’s providing great content, answers users’ questions, allows them to complete their tasks, and our solution uniquely is able to assess the quality and comprehensiveness of content and isn’t just looking at, for example, the top 10 search results to do so. We’re looking at everything that’s about this concept and really trying to figure out who’s really great at writing this? Who’s not? Where are the gaps? What are the high quality concepts that I should have included that I might not have or that my competitor included? We give you the ability to gauge your own and measure your own content, or even look at each of your competitors line by line and say, “What are they doing?”

Justin:
What year did you guys launch?

Jeff:
The official launch to market was mid 2015. I joined full-time in October of 2015. That’s when we really started accelerating the sales and marketing process.

Justin:
That’s when you were like, “Okay, we need to get this in the hands of people that are actually using it.”

Jeff:
Exactly. Two years.

Justin:
“Done with the drawing board. Let’s get this live.” Now they were working on this for a long time beforehand. You said they had other jobs and they were doing this. At what point did you guys realize this was a business that was viable, that was going to make money? Was it after you launched? Did you guys know beforehand that it was going to be a winner? What was the point at which you said, “Oh, this is … We got something here?”

Jeff:
I think the biggest inflection for the business was when Aki and I met. Me, as an early stage, almost mad scientist trying to do this manually, there’s processes that I had been trying to work on that would take 30 manual hours to do that I just was seeking somebody to solve these problems. There are things that Aki was already doing in this that I was just blown away.

Jeff:
When I walked him through a lot of these workflows, I think that’s really when these applications of this started to crystallize. Then in October when I came on full-time, that’s when I think we all realized once we started onboarding our first and seeing the success of our first really large-scale enterprise publishers and e-commerce sites that it became, “Oh yeah, this is going to work, because it just makes sense, and it speaks the language of the workflows that agencies and content strategists are dealing with everyday.

Justin:
Your price points aren’t cheap. You’ve got a $500 option, a $2,000 a month option, a $5,000 a month option. I was wondering how did you get your first few clients? Were they kind of free beta testers? How did that work?

Jeff:
Surprisingly, no. When I first got and touched on with Aki, my co-founder, the early evangelists, as I call them, there was a few of them that were in that $100 a month type range. But really there wasn’t a real push for a customer success driven approach to selling, frankly, at that point. That also kind of when I came on, I transitioned the approach to the messaging and the selling process to really dig in deep, spend a lot of time evaluating what would success mean for the typical person in this situation? What would that mean not only from a milestones, onboarding, and things like that, but also how would that be valued?

Jeff:
When we’re able to hand off information like, “Hey, these are the five most important things that you should create this month,” and it has a larger impact on their overall success than, in some cases, their entire last year of content publishing, the value then and the association to the price points starts to not really matter all that much.

Justin:
So you were looking at it specifically from a how much value are we providing them, and how can we price it right to where we get a nice piece of that? Fair enough?

Jeff:
Absolutely, yeah. Just really exactly it. Right now, we have for our content optimization software suite, which is really something that’s going to be expanding tangentially to our platform, we’ve had tremendous success at the between $400 and $700 per license price point. If you have a content cadence of more than a couple pages per month, whether it’s creation or updating or optimizing, typically going to make that very successful for you.

Justin:
On average, how much are your clients making per month? If you’ve got a $1,200 a month Amazon Associate site, this isn’t going to make a lot of sense, right? But if I’ve got a $30,000 a month e-commerce business and net profit, sure. This might be something I’d be interested in. On average, what are your customers like?

Jeff:
Yeah, many of them are in the growth phase where they want to be at the 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 more. As far as our solo-preneurs or people that manage a lot of authority websites, they are already in the five digits per month zone with their earnings and when they’re really feeling comfortable with this type of expense on. Some people still reference that as tools, but they may already come to the table with a subscription to a popular keyword tool that they prefer. They’re already spending a couple hundred dollars on that per month. This is an additional expense that they have to justify rather quickly.

Justin:
So you’re looking at five-figure, maybe low six-figure or mid, even high six-figure per month companies and entrepreneurs. That’s kind of like an ideal fit for you. When you find those customers, is it mostly they come to you via content marketing, or is it through partnerships with other businesses? Where are you getting those clients today?

Jeff:
It’s mostly inbound through influencer marketing channels or our own content marketing, or through partnerships. We have a really strong set of partnership channels through communities where we are very active, and with situations where I think the word’s on the street that I will help anyone usually at any time. So I get a lot of personal calls and personal emails too where it’s just saying, “Is there someone on your team that can look at my situation and tell me is this the right solution?” We’re really blunt about it. Our content strategy team and all of our sales teams are really strong content strategists and our customer success team has extremely strong search engine optimization and content strategy background.

Jeff:
We like to get our hands dirty with your situation, because if we get into a game with someone who’s gone through six or seven penalties, they weren’t doing things the right way, they’re looking to cut corners, we’re usually pretty blunt with them in saying, “You know, you weren’t focused on quality. Then we’re not so sure you’re going to be focused on quality now. It may not be the right pay.”

Justin:
Gotcha. So part of defining your best customers, what your customers look like is finding out what your customers don’t look like. Was there any point as you guys were doing business you realized these are not good customers to target? Whether that be SaaS companies or e-commerce companies. Are there any other entrepreneurs or businesses that you’re like, “This just doesn’t work as well for them?”

Jeff:
I think that that’s something that we continue to tune. Honestly, yesterday and every week we have a town hall meeting where we discuss all the things going on with the business or challenges or problems and such. We’re a significantly remote team, so we rely on a lot of standing meetings and web-con for a lot of things. We were talking about this. It’s to say … We hate to disqualify anyone, but sometimes you really have to make tough decisions. For us, sometimes we have to make decisions based on even things like customer support scheduling where if you’re in Australia or New Zealand, and you do have an onboarding issue, can we predict that that’s going to be a major problem? So we’ll go through is it based on location? We’re trying to not make those things hurdles to success.

Jeff:
What I find the biggest challenges we have in customers that we are pushing towards shying away from are those which when we do our initial internal reviews of their sites, they’re doing things that we would not find to be up and up. If we can find historical-

Justin:
Shady SEO.

Jeff:
Very shady stuff. If they’re doing stuff-

Justin:
Spun content.

Jeff:
Spun content, things that they’ve clearly done things to manipulate or where their initial usage of our solution is to apply it in a way that is not focused on quality, we will be very blunt to them not, more so than two years ago when we were just really happy to have a customer. We’d be really blunt to them now and say, “Hey, that’s not what this is about. You can’t just cut and paste these words in. You really got to be thinking about how to make this better for your readers.” That’s been a big change for us. It’s approaching customers, paying customers and saying, “Hey.”

Justin:
Yeah, it’s weird, right? It’s weird.

Jeff:
It’s really hard. It’s really hard to tell somebody who just wrote you a check that their [inaudible 00:25:56] is ugly.

Justin:
Yes. You don’t want to say no to money. We had that problem earlier on with our outsourcing company where Joe and I were like, “Oh, customer? Yes. Can we do that? Yes, we can.” Right? We’re like, “We’ll figure it out.” Right? We were hustling. What we realized is it’s a hard lesson to learn, but once you do, you’re like, “I don’t want to take customers that are a bad fit,” because it costs you down the road. Right?

Jeff:
Oh yeah.

Justin:
It costs you time and effort. I don’t know. Is your work on these front-loaded? Do you spend a lot more on the first couple months than you do six months down the road, 12 months down the road?

Jeff:
By the way, what you just said, put that as a quote in the show notes, because that’s as true as anything in this space. When you put yourself out there from a customer success organization like we do, your neck’s out there in their success. We’re really sensitive … Bad fit customers also are abusive customers. If they are … It’s respect, but it’s also about the quality of as far as how much of our work is front-loaded, that’s part of the evolution of our solution as well.

Jeff:
I’d say in the early days, a lot of it was upfront. We were bending over backwards in usually unprofitable ways or going in the red on a deal for the first three months, hoping that we can turn it into a profitable deal. Now because we’ve staffed our customer success team appropriately, we’ve built onboarding processes, we have triggers for things that signal that they’ve had enough training. That is a couple things. It’s the quality of their research in the software. It’s the quality of their updates. It’s when we see that they’re having success.

Jeff:
I wouldn’t say we reduce our resource application, but we transition that resource application into strategy and into a thought leadership positioning, so it’s different types of resources. It’s not just about, “Hey, hey, hey. Are you seeing the value?” It’s, “Okay, do you know what you’re going to do next month? Let’s talk about that.” It ends up being where we spend a ton of time throughout the entire engagement no matter what. That’s always going to be, in my opinion, the best way to do this, because it’s so complicated. Not everybody is used to that with just buying something online. They think they’re just going to go in and they’re going to … If you want it, we will spend as much time as needed to make sure that you’re using the solution effectively, because no one wants to buy a software package and then not use it. Nothing [inaudible 00:28:25].

Justin:
Yeah, for sure. One of the ways you’ve coached on the five and six-figure a month entrepreneurs is by pricing out the smaller players. You don’t have a $50 a month plan. You don’t have a $100 a month plan. What I like about that is-

Jeff:
Purposeful. Yeah.

Justin:
Yeah, for sure. Right. You’re targeting the right customers. But it also gives you wiggle room to deliver enough value, right? If you’re charging more money, then you can put more into it to really provide them enough value to stick longer term. It also allows you a higher acquisition cost so you can spend a bit more to acquire clients, right? I don’t know if you guys have done a ton of that yet, but in terms of paid acquisition, you’ve got wiggle room to make that happen. So you could start dropping cash on onboarding and more and more clients, and you’ve got the wiggle room to do that.

Jeff:
Yeah, and for us, we have not had to do a significant amount of paid acquisition, but it is something in 2018 that we’ll be accelerating. But one thing it has enabled for us, which I think you’re alluding to is we’re able to do partnership relationship channels that have affiliate agreement without it dramatically impacting the bottom line. We have some connectors that have been really successful in that role.

Justin:
So Jeff, some of my, I guess, beef before we talked and some of my questions about your businesses, I talked to Greg and I know you talked to Greg as well, our content manager. I was like I don’t know, man. This machine type content, I like reading content that’s written from read people for real people that’s not automated, that doesn’t have this automated feel. There’s something icky about using machines to write content that it didn’t agree with me.

Justin:
As I said at the top of the show, the Neil Patel stuff made me rethink that a little bit. How am I wrong? How is this not kind of … what’s wrong with my icky factor feeling here?

Jeff:
No, I think the icky factor is both kind of … Not that it classifies you as a consumer of content, but I think that we feel that when we’ve polled audiences and talked to people about it. That’s where our current solutions, we have three product lines, are really focused on the automation and using artificial intelligence to augment subject matter experts and to accelerate or improve the results of what they publish to do comprehensive audits of existing inventories and decide what’s the best thing to do next.

Jeff:
To go as far as building a great comprehensive content brief that a writer can then use along with their research to be successful. The content generation field is the next frontier of that. The people that are currently doing it now, there are two groups. Not to get into the technical side, but there’s really people that are doing it based on static rubrics where they’re filling in the gaps of a rubric or a structure, and then there’s more this kind of spinning type content.

Jeff:
Someone like Washington Post with Heliograf, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that, where they’ve automated things like the Olympic scores where they could structure something to report who won the gold medal, who won the bronze medal, who won the silver medal. I consider that … The Washington Post can’t feasibly cover all … Gosh, the winter Olympics are coming up. All 195 events, but with this type of solution, they can tell me who won the gold medal, and they wouldn’t have been able to do that. With the elections, they used it. They were able to cover 100% of the election results.

Jeff:
For me, as a reader, that services everyone more effectively. But is it going to ever be the case where you can write content that which a subject matter expert would have written in a way that wouldn’t ever require that expert lens for QA and improvement. I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think there’s always going to be a lens of expertise needed. You’re going to be able to put out low quality content. you’re going to read it and you’re going to go, “Ew, this is icky,” but I think that there’s always going to be the need for the cleanup. What do you know that’s special? If we’re able to do content generation in the next few years that is able to impart some of that, it would be pretty amazing.

Jeff:
Am I leaving the door open to someone like us doing that? Yeah, because it would be a beautiful thing, but I think there’s always going to be a QA that says, “Does this pass the sniff test?” I don’t want to represent my company, frankly, unless it’s really operationally like the Olympics or like the elections or … I don’t want to represent my company or put liability on the content that my company is building, unless it’s great. So surprising that people are putting out low quality content, because it’s the same liability.

Justin:
I’m on the lines, particularly referencing Neil Patel’s case study, which again is fantastic [inaudible 00:33:16] should go read it.

Jeff:
I agree.

Justin:
They went back and changed some of the content, like changed it for the search engines. On thing I was discussing with our content manager about that, that just feels wrong to me. He disagreed. He was like, “Look, if you can update the post and make it better, make it more valuable so more people read it, the search engines will like it more so they can rank it higher, isn’t that good?” I said, “Well, it depends if you’re changing the kind of meaning behind the post. If I had particular findings and then you’re changing that to match the search algorithms, but you’re changing the content significantly, that just seems odd to me.”

Justin:
I guess it comes down to you as the publisher can determine how many of those changes you want to implement, because really your tool is just recommendations, right?

Jeff:
Yeah. No, that’s actually one of the best descriptions of a common problem in this particular strategic focus, being content strategy. It’s you still need to assess what current user intent profiles does your content successfully support? If you take your content item and it’s about one thing and you add 4,000 words that’s about a related concept, it’s going to now be more about that other thing. That’s actually kind of what you’re getting at. That’s not a good strategy. That’s going to necessarily it might be because you want that page to perform better for that other thing, and you just happen to get lucky with the primary topic that you’re focusing on. But in a lot of cases, that can have a negative impact.

Jeff:
There is a strategic lens on understanding what that content … We call them content clusters or content packages. It’s to say do I have support structure for this? What’s my breadth of coverage? How high quality is my entire inventory on this concept? When you go in and you update something, the goal is certainly not to … It’s to make it more robust without changing the intent, the main intent. If you add an intent profile, that is to kind of fill out the shopping cart with all of the different things, but you may see that and go, “Hey, I can’t work that in. I can’t work in that intent profile. I need an entire new page or an entire content package to support that.”

Jeff:
We often see people kind of get a little … They want this to be formulaic. That’s just the natural belief of people. They want it to be I see A, I do B. So they’re like, “Okay,” and we see this in some of the solutions that are very questions based. People will look at a set of questions and they’re like, “Well, okay, I’ll put it up in FAQ.” That’s not the point. The point is that your content should naturally and elegantly give answers to those questions. It’s not that you’re just putting an FAQ on your site.

Jeff:
So once you start thinking strategically in situations like that, it’s like, “What are the buyer decisions that you, hey, e-commerce site owner, go through before you buy a hammock? What are the things that you’re thinking about? Does your site service those things? Does it support all of the stages of the buy cycle, all the user intent profiles that happen before you … Like those micro conversions before you actually convert.”

Justin:
Let me go back to your customers a bit. We use services like HubSpot right now. We’re using HubSpot Enterprise for our marketing [inaudible 00:36:26] our CRM. We use Zendesk for customer support. I don’t know. One of the benefits to those companies is that it’s kind of a pain to onboard. You have to learn quite a bit of their platform. Once you onboard, moving away sounds miserable, unless I’ve got something significantly better, I wouldn’t leave them. So they’ve got that kind of advantage, that kind of locked in feeling from users that will help with churn.

Justin:
What do you guys do for churn? How do you keep customers … Because this is a price point at which people will look at. They’re going to consider two months, three months, six months, eight months down the road, what do you do to continue to provide value? At your inflection point where people start to churn, what do you do to keep them on?

Jeff:
So, by the way, also HubSpot and Zendesk customer.

Justin:
Yeah.

Jeff:
I know exactly. There’s a great article-

Justin:
Can you imagine switching from them right now? No way, it’d be such a pain, right? It’d be horrible.

Jeff:
We did a conversion from Pipedrive to HubSpot. I’ve done so many CRM conversions, yeah, but that one definitely was a struggling migration, but anyway, that’s another story for another day.

Jeff:
We classify churn in active and passive churn. Passive churn or … So two things, one, from a customer success perspective, we read and we live by Lincoln Murphy’s documentation. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him. He’s a customer success expert. We try to adopt as many of those things as we can from a customer success perspective. So when we find churn situations, we like to try to identify why it’s in that situation. What happened? Was there a technical issue that they just couldn’t get over? Was it an onboarding challenge? Or did we not appropriately plan the account to assess what would those ideal milestones be to where we connected the customer’s required experience with what their current appropriate experience is using our platform.

Jeff:
Where did it go wrong and at what point did it go off course? What we find is we have very, very little active churn, which we’re very proud of. We see there’s things that we can provide on an ongoing basis to add value and continue to add value. Whether that’s built into their solution that they’ve purchased or whether that’s delivered via customer success, we have successfully built out a program that continues to provide value over time.

Justin:
So with low active churn, your goal is to keep them using it, right? To keep them from turning into a passive customer, which would more likely lead to passive churn.

Jeff:
So when I’m thinking of passive churn, I’m thinking about it a little bit differently. I should have defined that. Also, that is what our edge case is too where the company, they turned off the lights in the morning for one reason, or the customer sold the website that they cared about and they’re really happy. They’re like, “Hey, I don’t have a website right now,” or situations where people moved roles. We had a very successful … When we looked at someone moving a role or something like that, we know, “Ha, man, our customer success program missed out. We didn’t expand our contact lists.” So we’ll go through those processes, but we would consider those equivalently passive. It’s not really just about stopping using. It’s really about some sort of special case in that situation. That is also quite low, but we like to separate those two things.

Jeff:
How do we approach it? It’s really to say what’s at the bottom of this? Is this a personality? Is this a significant experience problem? Is this a connection between the value we’re providing and the price, or is this just a lack of understanding of their true pain points and what it would take to get them over those milestones.

Justin:
Yeah. Is there something we could have … You’re just looking for areas of improvement. Could we improve here, or is this working as intended and this is just a natural unexpected dropout?

Jeff:
Yeah, perfectly said. Did they have the appropriate experience? If they did and they’re not successful, that’s the stuff that keeps me up at night. But if they had a bad onboarding, they weren’t approachable, let’s just say, for training, they didn’t want to go through training, they wanted to do it themselves, they got inside, and they did some stuff, and then they waited a week and said, “Hey, this didn’t work.” Improper expectations, or they did have … We’re a technology company. We have outages and downtime like everyone else. How do we correct situations where our system performance isn’t meeting their needs, or it’s a unique situation? Your main user is behind some sort of firewall in southeast Bulgaria, and for some reason, they’re not able to access the system from 6:00 AM to 12:00 PM. How do we solve that problem? That’s a real situation, actually.

Jeff:
So you get some real specialty situations, and we bend over backwards, but there is a point where you’re saying, “Hey, has this transitioned from truly being about success, and/or is it a form of abuse?” We know at this type of price point, there are types of people that will look to gain an advantage. We have a keen eye for that.

Justin:
I get disappointed when we screw up. We know that there are something our Empire members did that we didn’t do as good of a job for a customer, or we didn’t onboard them or give them the information they need or support them. That’s the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night. But on the flip side of that, we have a no asshole policy, for lack of a better wording. If we’re dealing with someone who is a jerk, that’s just not going to work. Every time we break that rule, and sometimes we break it because we get greedy or whatever and we say, “Look, we can make this work. We’ll make this work,” every time we do that, it always tends to bite us.

Jeff:
I know.

Justin:
Our no asshole policy has been something we don’t always stick to, but we definitely try to, because we know what the end result is. Let me just switch over a little bit. I want to talk about your team.

Jeff:
Yeah, sure.

Justin:
You’ve got an office on Boston, and you’ve got a team there, but not everyone’s there. We were talking before the show, and you got one of the guys down in Medellin, Columbia where I’m currently at right now. You’ve got guys that are in other places. How do you bring on this remote team? How do you onboard them and how do you get them up to speed and into the company culture?

Jeff:
So that’s actually really something that we value as something special about our business. We are really, really focused on the talent and the talent that we can acquire by having a remote team. While our primary sales and customer success teams are headquartered in Boston, I work remotely. I live in Georgia, and we have a small office here. Internally, we have a remote work culture. We have a lot of face time though, even on the development side with the business. I spend more time face-to-face, eye-to-eye on video conference than I would if they were all in one … If they were separated by two floors of a building, frankly. So that’s something that we really value.

Jeff:
As far as finding talent, it’s been really successful for us. To be able to get data science professionals, content strategy professionals, or great search engine optimization professionals, many of them who are very good are able to write their ticket in this world. That’s just a reality.

Justin:
Where do you find the data scientists in particular? How do you find them? Do you use headhunters? Do you put ads out?

Jeff:
It’s just something I’ll brag on them in a little bit, but both Richard Mallah and Aki Balogh are both charismatic and also their reputation is out there. Richard has received awards from Stephen Hawking. He’s a sought-after speaker in many artificial intelligence fields. He’s basically someone who you want to be connected with if you are in this field. He will help you get better at your job through association and osmosis.

Jeff:
Then on my side, I’ve been doing this for a really, really long time. The ins and outs of the industry, it’s allowed us to recruit really based on reputation, and that’s been a big one for us. That’s where so far that’s allowed us to really be successful with hiring those remote teams. We have some just superstars. We have a quick trial policy for all employees too. So working with us for the first few months is an active trial. You can walk at any time.

Justin:
Yeah, we do the same thing. We have six months, but yeah, it’s a six-month kind of trial period for both sides to make sure that everything works before they’re brought on full-time.

Jeff:
Exactly.

Justin:
Let me ask you. The ultimate goal for marketing, your big hairy goal three, five years from now, are you guys looking for acquisition? Do you want to raise more money and get in other parts of the industry or parts of the space? What’s your end goal here?

Jeff:
We’re in the fundraising process right now. To date, we’ve raised no institutional venture. We’re solely funded by angel investment. That’s pretty great for doing what we’re doing with the amount of IP that we have, the amount of product line that we have. We’ll be rolling out a major platform release next year in early year that is pretty groundbreaking in this field. No one’s really taken the approach that we’re going to be taking with it. We’re also going through a fundraising process at some point in the future.

Jeff:
Our goal is to really build the best products for these particular pain points and solutions. If that then lends itself to any outcome, whether it be doing large-scale integrations as a core product line or something where we become a large enterprise org or acquisition, all of those things, as long as it as a function of us building a solution that actually works in a field of things where it’s kind of like choose your own adventure, whether it is going to work or there are people trying to look for kind of a shortcut. We’re really just trying to figure out it works for the workflows we’re looking to engage-

Justin:
Do you think you found your core offering? Is this going to be your core, or do you see that changing in the next year, two years, three years into something more advanced or different than it is now?

Jeff:
I think that the fundamentals, the engine is going to power the most successful offerings. However, we feel that our current solutions, as well as future SaaS or tool feel where your functional things, those are always going to have kind of an audience of people who have already gotten … They already understand that this is extremely important. They may want to learn. They may want to get through it and figure it out. What we’re looking to do is streamline a content strategist’s core workflow challenges. That’s where our main wins are going to come out of in the mid tier. It’s going to be are there ways that we can streamline the site audit, the content audit, content inventory, prioritization, content brief development, processes which currently are just amazing time sucks, and they have very low success rates in the enterprise today. That’s going to be our real area of opportunity.

Jeff:
We currently deliver all of those things now as technology enabled solutions or service deliverables. We’re having dramatic success with them. So we feel that when they roll out into our next major launch, that’s going to be the major change.

Justin:
I can tell you’ve been fundraising, because you give me just enough information to make me interested, but not enough to where you release the whole thing. That’s so funny. You’ve been doing this a little bit, I can tell. Your mind’s in it.

Jeff:
It’s so hard too. I want to take screenshots and go, “Hey, hey, hey, check this out,” but it’s so hard. But if you think about whether you’ve got 50 pages or 5 million pages, answering the question, “What should I do tomorrow?” Doesn’t exist anymore. Our goal is to solve that problem.

Justin:
Let me ask you about how this applies to our listeners. Our listeners, generally they’re running an online business, they’re considering selling it maybe in the next two, six, 12, 18 months, or they’re looking to acquire some online businesses. They’re looking for businesses on our marketplace to potentially buy. How can let’s say a seller, let’s say I want to sell my business in 12 months or so. How could MarketMuse help them sell for more money?

Jeff:
Right, so that’s actually a wonderful question. That’s something we work with authority website portfolio builders. Then even when I was doing this in house as part of this function, I found that evaluating content inventories and situations with doing content audits to assess the value of content, to assess the actual value of a site can reap dramatic benefits where you can buy low and then fix those problems, see the improvements, and sell high.

Justin:
That’s interesting. What you said right there, I could see it potentially being used as a buyer’s perspective as a due diligence tool. Can I take a business I’m looking to potentially purchase and run it through the MarketMuse engine and it’ll give me examples of improvements to make, so I could take five major pages of content on the site, run it through, and see what kind of recommendation it gives to see if it could really give us some improvements?

Jeff:
Absolutely. The page by page, you can do that, yeah, because content analyzer, our core page level offering is site independent. You can look at your sites. You can look at individual-

Justin:
Oh awesome.

Jeff:
Yeah, at the page level, you can dive in at any level. Then on the site level, that’s where you have to set up, you’re paying per site ongoing so you can get your site in the system and get what are the top 100 things you’d do to level up this site? Then get kind of a predictive lens on how much impact they want to have too.

Justin:
So on the buyer’s side, I can use it potentially for due diligence to look for sites that may have opportunities, content opportunities in particular. I could also use it post purchase to kind of set the outlines for content going forward, but also to make adjustments to previous content written to improve in the search engines. If I’m a seller, I can use this potentially six months, 12 months out to improve my rankings in Google, which generally and usually will improve earnings as well. Then I can take those earnings and then get a multiple on that in my exit, which is helpful.

Justin:
Aside from yourselves, obviously, what are your favorite resources for content marketing? Who do you look to? Who do you think is crushing it in the content marketing game right now?

Jeff:
Well, I think there’s a couple different approaches. People that are doing it with small inventories that they’re constantly updating and keeping them up to date that are doing a really good job, and then you’ve got people who are doing it as kind of a function to market their own solutions. So that’s a way that I would separate it. I consume everything. So both on the books side, I think that the teams in the content strategy field that are connected to Content Wrangler, all the books that they put out and the publications related to that-

Justin:
Content Wrangler?

Jeff:
Content Wrangler, it’s a company that they have books on content inventories, content strategy, really easy to consume things. I think those are really … If you’re in the content strategy game, knowing how people do it manually is really important to be able to understand what workflow improvements should I be making? I just think that there’s a lot out there.

Justin:
Cool.

Jeff:
On a customer success side, it’s really anything related to, like I mentioned, Lincoln Murphy, anything related to that. I love everything that he puts out.

Justin:
Awesome.

Jeff:
So I think that that’s a win. On the search engine optimization and content marketing side, it’s tough. It is so hard to gauge. What I’d like to say is I have a few trusted communities that I take part in. Some of them are focused on technical SEO. Some of them are focused on entrepreneurship and such. That’s where I get most of the success is people in those communities that are contributing.

Jeff:
Whenever I read anything on search engine optimization or I have a clothespin on my nose a lot of times, because I want to … How much of this is opinion? How much of this is opinion? I really do … Everything I read, I separate the opinion, the wheat from the chaff.

Justin:
Yeah, it’s tough.

Jeff:
It’s so hard in this space. I think you build up a stable of writers who you think are really, really smart. So if I see something written by Patrick Stocks or Paul Shapiro or a technical SEO superstar, I know it’s going to be great. If I see something that’s written by a content marketer who I know has blood on their hands, then I’m … But if it’s just another search engine X, Y, Z publication and it’s saying top five ways of optimizing your videos, that’s basically my snip test. It’s usually by people, but hey, people can start out and they get better and better, but yeah, really for me, I like to separate the opinion. If there’s a lot of opinion, I’m probably not going to read in the future.

Justin:
All right, Jeff. Well, thanks for the recommendations. I’m going to put links to those in the show notes. We were talking about this before the show when you said you were willing to give Empire Flippers listeners a bonus. You’re offering 20% off for the first three months. That’s very generous. They can go to MarketMuse.com/purchase and enter the code empireflippers, all one word.

Jeff:
You got it.

Justin:
You’ll get 20% off the first three months. It’s really cool.

Jeff:
Yeah, and that’ll be good for a couple weeks. Yeah, if you’re a listener to the podcast, we’d love to talk to you about your portfolio and all that kind of fun stuff too, whether we can help out with evaluating possible purchases or exists or anything in between. That’s the type of thing we deal with all the time. Yeah, any way to get you on board and seeing the value makes sense for me, so we’re happy to extend that. That’ll be good for, like I said, a couple weeks.

Jeff:
If you have any problems finding that link or anything, you can send also an email to success@marketmuse.com with the details, and they’ll set you up.

Justin:
Awesome, Jeff. Thanks so much for coming on the show, man. I really appreciate it.

Jeff:
Thanks so much for the time. I really appreciate it, and great questions. Yeah, really analyze the situation. You know what you’re talking about, and we love Empire Flippers. We think that a lot of the things that you guys are doing are, especially on valuations and deals and that process, and diligence is top rate.

Justin:
Awesome, man. Thanks so much.

Jeff:
Thanks again.

Speaker 2:
You’ve been listening to the Empire Podcast. Now some news and updates.

Justin:
All right, Joe. News and updates. First off, buddy, let’s pat ourselves on the back. We broke $40 million in all-time sales. So from when we started through today, we’re over $40 million sold total. It is interesting that our goal this year is to do another 40 million, so we want to double our all-time business in 2018. That is an aggressive goal.

Joe:
Yeah, I just was going to say that. That’s a funny number here. We’re talking in January of 2018 and we’re looking to do that much money we did in the last few years all in one year. I think it’s definitely possible. We’re off to a great start here in January. I’m looking to have a great Q1. So it’s always good to get ahead of the game when you have these sort of goals.

Justin:
It doesn’t work out terribly well for our banners that we get for the conferences that we go to, because it’s like we’re constantly having to change them. We should just have it. That’d be funny. We have it to where we can just rip off the number and put on a new one, just keep slapping new numbers on there. That’d be good. How many installs? 42, 53, 64. I don’t know, man.

Justin:
You know what’s interesting though about this, we worked our butts off. Our team worked their butts off. Our customers were wheeling and dealing to get to that number. It was just a ton of work. One thing I felt a little odd about, Joe, is I’ve seen some new competitors, like new potential brokers kind of step on the scene and just make all kinds of claims. “We do 100 plus million. We’ve been in business 10 plus years. We did $130 million in deals.” Literally their domain was registered six months ago. You know what I mean? They weren’t in this space. We know the big players that are in the industry, and they just hadn’t done that many deals.

Justin:
What do you do about that? Because we make those claims, right? We talked about how much we’ve done, but anyone who’s followed us for any period of time has seen our growth and trajectory over time. If we’re lying, which we totally could be, and no one can really necessarily verify that, but if we were lying, it’s like a ridiculously long con. You know what I mean? We’ve been doing this for years and we’ve been talking about our numbers for years. What do you do with a competitor that just makes up their numbers out of nothing?

Joe:
Yeah, that’s an interesting thought. I’m thinking of bringing it up to my mastermind next month when I go there and see what they have to say. I’m sure a large number of people would say just ignore it. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have much of an impact on your success. By challenging it, you’ll just make it worse. That’s definitely one way to deal with it, but I’m sure there’s got to be other ways to kind of do it and deal with it in a more professional manner.

Justin:
I brought it up in a mastermind. One of the things that was recommended, I’m not sure if it was a mastermind or something I read, but one of the things that was recommended was to set some kind of standard where it has to be provable, right? You have to make it third-party verified or you have to make to provable and make that like the industry standard.

Justin:
So you started to create standards for the industry that block out the liars, that block out the fakers, right? So that they can’t be a part of it, so they can’t prove their numbers or whatever. I thought that was pretty interesting. I don’t know how we would do that, but-

Joe:
Yeah, and the problem in this industry is if you’re just one guy with a phone and a computer, you close two deals a year, and you’ve probably made enough money to live a pretty good lifestyle, especially if you’re closing a couple of six-figure deals. With the amount of-

Justin:
You’re trying to sell competition. You’re like, “Hey, guys, close a couple of deals a year, you’ll be rolling in dough. Rolling, just a couple of deals a year. It’s all you need. Just lie about your numbers, a couple of deals, you’re making a ton of money.” Now I-

Joe:
Hey, if you can sleep at night basing your business off of all lies, then more power to you, but I think me personally, I’d rather have a real business that’s based on true facts, but there are definitely these individual brokers out there that are sort of doing that. For them, I feel bad for their customers really, because the level of service that they’re getting is so low that you just see them coming back and saying what a mistake it was.

Justin:
I’m going to turn this away from just online brokerage space, but just more in general, I think the fake it until you make it crowd, and some of them absolutely make it and are successful, but I think more often than not, they’re looking for the easy path. The easy path is lying. What happens is when they run up against any hardships, they tend to go into another industry. They tend to pivot into something else looking for the easy path again. So they don’t have the stick-with-it-ness. They don’t have the stickability that gives them the time in any industry to make them successful.

Justin:
I think having some stick-with-it-ness and also some integrity that makes you want to actually do what you’re saying, there’s value in that that plays out in your business in other ways. Does that make sense?

Joe:
It does. I think the other problem is too is if you’re “faking it until you make it”, cash reserves are probably pretty low and it’s impossible to scale up your business. This is true in just any industry. If you have just only a little bit of success, it’s tough to turn the corner and go to the next level, because you’re supposedly so much bigger than you are, but your cash reserves don’t reflect that.

Justin:
Yeah. Let’s talk about another topic that’s hot right now, Joe, is crypto. Man, crazy crypto right now. First off, I just want to answer a question. We had some questions on Twitter, the email. They’re wondering if we pay out in Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever. Yes, we do. We’ll pay you out in Bitcoin or Ethereum. You can also pay or buy online businesses with cryptocurrency, Bitcoin or Ethereum is fine. Yes, we can accept your money and we can pay out in that money.

Justin:
We’ve done on both sides of it. I think only once have we received Bitcoin and then actually paid out in Bitcoin. Most of the time it’s one way or the other. I think it’s a really interesting option, especially all the people that are going the hodl crowd, they’ve been holding Bitcoins forever to be able to turn that into a fiat earning enterprise to cash flow themselves I think is interesting.

Joe:
Yeah. I’ve been saying this for a while as well, and I think now with a little bit of a … Well, more than a little bit, but the sharp decline in the price of most cryptocurrencies in the last 30 days, maybe people are starting to say, “Hey, I should invest this in a more stable opportunity.” We would love to do that. We’ve done stuff where we’ve gotten paid in Bitcoin and paid out in Monero. Basically any coin that runs on a Kraken exchange we’ll go ahead and either accept or payout in that coin.

Justin:
I know that Monero coin, that’s a sneaky hide your money coin, anonymous stuff, man. I don’t know about you, Joe, but I got some crypto, and literally for me it was like gambling money. I was just going to gamble with it a bit. Then I’ve done a couple ICOs, and one of the ICOs we did together, and really kind of my thought there was I just want to be involved in this so I understand it a little better. We can incorporate that into our business as it goes along. I do believe that blockchain and some of the crypto stuff is going to be around a long time. It’s going to make some big changes to massive industries. Understanding it and having some grasp on it, even if it’s just like fun money or gambling money I think makes sense.

Joe:
Yeah, exactly. I think that’s the important thing to remember is please don’t put anything into these ICOs that you can’t afford to lose. It’s definitely a very risky proposition. Be careful out there and make sure that there is some sort of liquidity event at the end, because that’s one of the biggest things I see a lot of these ICOs is they can’t answer the question of how are the going to get on an exchange? How are they going to give their people some sort of liquidity event at the end of the day? They really don’t have a path for that.

Justin:
Yeah, so I’ve kind of held off on this. We’re actually going to have a crypto expert on the show. I wanted to ask him some questions, get into kind of the scams, get into what’s going on, getting into the real opportunities there without the hype. So he’s great. I’ve known him for quite a while. I know his background in crypto. He’s one of the good guys. I’m doing the air quotes, just because there’s so much sketchy stuff out there, but he’s one of the good guys. I’ll be great to have him on.

Justin:
The last bit of news I want to mention is we are hiring right now a content marketing specialist. This is someone that’s going to be helping our marketing team, be working with Greg, our marketing manager to create content for us. That’ll be things like guest posts. It’ll be things like blog posts on our site. It might include things like seller interviews. It might include other things as well. So it’ll be starting in April and be joining us in Boracay, which is an amazing island in the Philippines in April. We’re going to have almost our whole team out there for some fun in the sun and working together. It’ll be a great time to be introduced to everyone.

Justin:
If you’re at all interested in working with us and coming on board, a really I think fantastic opportunity at a great time on an awesome beach, I definitely encourage you to apply. It’s open and available. You can check it out at Empireflippers.com/blog.

Justin:
All right, buddy, listener shouts, also known as the indulgent ego-boosting social proof segment. We’ve got a great mention on a podcast I did over at Millionaire Interviews that really goes through kind of our backstory. We did that original backstory on our podcast in episode two way back in the day. This kind of does a bit of that, touches on that, but also since then, so if anyone’s looking to kind of if you’re just listening to our podcast or this is the first, second, or third episode you listen to and you want to hear our story, definitely check out our interview over at Millionaire Interviews. I’ll link to that in the show notes if you want to check it out.

Justin:
Also, if you’re interested in the show, you’re appreciating the show, you’re digging the show, make sure to head over to iTunes and give us a review. We’ll likely give you a shout on the podcast. We just appreciate it, man. We like the positive feedback.

Justin:
That’s it for episode 172 of the Empire Podcast. Thanks for sticking with us. We’ll be back soon with another show. You can find the show notes for this episode or more on empireflippers.com/marketmuse. Make sure to follow us on Twitter @empireflippers. See you next time.

Joe:
Bye-bye, everybody.

Speaker 2:
Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Empire Podcast with Justin and Joe. Hit up Empireflippers.com for more. That’s Empireflippers.com. Thanks for listening.