Anthony: You’re the first person, I have done maybe a hundred podcasts. You’re the first person who’s ever was like, “lemme put some of your guys’ music,” i’m like, that’s amazing. That’s a, that’s a really nice touch.

Joel Benge: Hey, I’m all about showing how interesting people are, right? So if you’ve got interesting stuff, we, we, I wanna do it all. And I, you know, I think it’s gonna be great. Awesome. Let’s do it.

 Hey, my name is Joel. I’m a recovering nerd. I spent the last 25 years bouncing between creative jobs and technical teams. I’ve worked at places like Nickelodeon and NASA and a few others that started with different letters. I was one of the first couple hundred people podcasting back in the early aughts until I accidentally became an IT analyst.

Thankfully, someone in the government said. Hey, you’re a nerd. That talks good. And that spun me off into the world of startups, branding and marketing for some of the same sort of researchers and startup founders that I used to hang out with. Today. I help technical people learn how to get noticed, get remembered, and get results.

On Nerds That Talk Good, I wanna do the same for you. I talk with some of the greatest [00:01:00] technical communicators, facilitators and thinkers that I know who are behind the big brands and the tech talk that just works.

This is a little bit of a different opening for me. The music you’re hearing is our guest today. I’m super excited to get into that. So let’s just dive in.

Today’s guest nerd, Anthony Pierri is the co-founder of Fletch PMM, a product marketing consultancy that helps B2B Tech startups discover their ideal product positioning or minimally viable positioning and bring it to life on newly crafted homepages. Since Fletch started, Anthony and his partner Rob Kaminsky, have worked with over 400 venture- backed startups. That number’s increasing by the day. 

I’m a, I’m a huge fan, I’m a stalker on LinkedIn of your method. I think everything looks, sounds incredible. We’re gonna get into that and some other stuff today.

Anthony, thanks for joining.

Anthony: Thanks so much for having me. Really excited to be here.

Joel Benge: So I always like to start off, um, with the nerd origin story, right? So you’re, you’re coming at this from the, um. Uh, from the, the [00:02:00] marketing and the copy side, you work with a lot of tech companies, definitely very nerdy, some of the stuff that you do. But I wanna hear about your, your, your full, full circuitous path.

I know you’ve got some interesting, uh, uh, turns in cul-de-sacs along the way.

Anthony: Yeah, I’ll try to give you the short version every time I say that it ends up being really long, so we’ll see. But uh. Basically I wanted to be an English teacher. Actually, a lot of people in my family wanted to be English teachers. Some of them were, um, the copywriter on our team now, was an English teacher, and it’s actually my sister, so she was on, she did English teaching for a while.

I wanted to be an English teacher. My brother, who also posted on LinkedIn, uh, he was an English, uh, he wanted to be an English teacher for a while. So for whatever reason, we’ve all wanted to go down that path. We love teaching people. We love words and things like that, but then we all, Ended up in different places.

And so my older brother and I actually both worked for churches for really long. He still works at a church but has a side hustle with LinkedIn and, and so I went and, uh, was involved very much in the church that [00:03:00] I, uh, grew up in and then became on staff and then I was gonna start working there full time. I didn’t end up working out. I got a different church job in the city of Chicago. My wife and I, we moved down there. I did that for a long time. Then we were gonna move back because of the pandemic. And I, at this point, I had been working in churches for maybe like 11 or 12 years. And I’m like, I need to take a break.

I need to get something different. Like, I just been in this world for so long, I need to change. So, uh, a guy, a former boss, connected me with this agency that did product design, product development and product management. And they were based in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It was all remote. And he said it’s like an entry level sales job.

And the funny thing is, after 11 years of promotions with all the pay increases in a church. Taking an SCR job in tech was a pay increase. So, you know, and this is a job that they give to 18 year olds, right outta high school here. I am much older than that and have a Master’s [00:04:00] degree, and I’m like, “I’m getting a pay bump.”

And I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t even really know what the job was. The company that was hiring me had never done outbound sales. So they were like, “we don’t even know if this is gonna work. We hear that you’re very adaptable and like ambiguous scenarios.” And that is kind of a big thing about me, like I getting my hands dirty and stuff that’s like not fully figured out and it’s like, “we’ll figure it out together.”

That’s kinda what’s fun for me. So like, we want you to do this outbound sales thing and so try it. So I come on board.” And the first thing you have to do when you do outbound sales is, “okay, well who, who are we gonna reach out to?” And the company up to that point had gotten all their clients from the founders’ network and the founder was incredibly well connected, had done a really good job building this deep bench of people who, who liked them and needed their services and things like that.

But the whole point was to say, “can we expand beyond the founders’ network to get more business?” and so I sat down and we said, “well, who do we wanna reach out to?” And he was like, “I mean, anyone, you know, anyone could need us.” So I was like, [00:05:00] “well, we gotta, I have to put something in the emails, you know,”

Joel Benge: Narrow,that down just a little bit more.

Anthony: Yeah, someone, I have to make a list of someone.

So we would try a group. A different group of people, like every month, maybe like FinTech companies. I’d spend and I’d buy a bunch of books and stuff and reading all about FinTech, trying to understand what they, we try that for a little while, no real traction. And we’d be like, “maybe, I don’t know, you wanna do like logistics?”

We jump over there, we try a bunch of things. Um, but the problem was that the, the audience and that the services themselves were constantly in flux. The services were super malleable and it was like any reason you could need a developer or product manager or a product designer, which is like almost an infinite list.

Like my, my co-founder, I ended up meeting him at the same company. He once made a list. It was like 300 different services that they had offered.

Joel Benge: Oh boy.

Anthony: you know, and, and I mean you, but you could put them all under the bucket of like helping companies grow. That’s the only service. It’s just one.

And it’s like, or is it 300? You know? Uh, ’cause that’s gonna be very different. And if you try to market, we’ll help you grow. [00:06:00] Not gonna work. So I bang my head against the wall for like nine months. No real traction. Can’t get a single anything to work. And I’m like, I must be truly the world’s worst salesperson on the planet.

I can’t get a single. Then they hired a marketing agency. They couldn’t get a single lead either. Then they hired a third thing. Uh, it was like this, this whole program I went through couldn’t get a single lead either. And, and what we, what it unlocked for me, which became a big basis of our current company, is that if you keep everything open for the op reason of optionality.

You can’t really do marketing like it just doesn’t really work. You need to have a type of customer and a specific offer to be able to have a marketing transaction take place. And my, uh, co-founder, I. Who I said he was at the same agency we met. He, he was very smart. He had been in startups for a really long time.

I come from more like on the content side, like doing stuff for churches and, and for like, always in a lot of different [00:07:00] bands and stuff. Did a lot of like social media marketing of my own. Um, so I came in with like more of a content background and things like that. He came in with like all the actual startup and business experience and, you know, had been in entrepreneurial roles and things like that.

And so the two of us we met and we were like, wow. Like, and we were really rounding each other out. So we start the business basically incubated inside the agency and we’re, we started posting on LinkedIn, and then we were finding traction, posting about this positioning concept. And we love this lady named April Dunford.

She wrote this book in positioning. We’re like, I bet she can’t service all possible people who need positioning help. There’s probably some more in the market that we could help. So we started posting about positioning, and then we were like, “well, how do we evaluate people’s positioning?” And we said.

Let’s look at their websites. Maybe we can figure out how they want to be positioned based on what’s on the website.” Um, because like there’s those like early days positioning Mad Libs where you like say, we are X company for y type of customer with Z differentiator. And you know, you have this like long sentence.

So we started reading people’s websites and see if we could fill out the sentence. You know, it’d be like, [00:08:00] who, what type of company is this company for? No answer. What do we think that their main value is? No answer. What do they replace? No answer. And we realized like all these websites don’t say anything.

They, they would make no claims at all other than like, “grow your business”, “increase your revenue.” And so we start posting these breakdowns like we call ’em like homepage audits and stuff, trying to be like, “listen, your positioning strategy’s messed up.” And then people started reaching out and being like, “can you help me fix my homepage?”

It’s clearly bad. Can you fix it? Um, so we stumbled into this weird positioning homepage, hybrid, and we constantly were fighting that of like. “Should we just say, we just help people write homepage, should we say we help people with positioning?” Um, and it really was this thing that, like it was a serendipitous total accident that they actually do kind of belong together.

Um, and we created this way of thinking about it where it was like, if you’re going to rewrite your homepage, don’t do it without figuring out your positioning. And the flip side of saying. The best place to document and share your positioning strategy [00:09:00] is in a homepage. And so over time, posting, you know, once a day for a really long time, people start coming around to the idea, start getting interested, start reaching out to us, and we start getting clients and then we build this business inside of the other agency. And basically the whole thing is helping people figure out their positioning, rewrite their website, uh, specifically the homepage. And then over time it, it’s getting a lot of traction and people are coming on and they’re confused ’cause they would land on the page of the website of the. Parent agency and they’d be really confused.

They’d be like, I think you like homepages or something. And it would be like, you know, design development and nothing about marketing and positioning or anything. And then on the flip side, right, like people hear about us. If they had heard of the previous company, they’d be like, wait, I, what is this? I thought you guys were like a design agency.

So there’s just like breakdown of communication and eventually we realized they probably makes sense to just split these things up. So thankfully the founders gave us their blessing to launch off. We avoided any legal battles, which was nice. Um. And we’re, you know, we still talk to them and we’ll partner up on [00:10:00] projects here and there.

And so we, we spun off and started Fletch, uh, which is what brings us up probably to today. And so again, I said it was not gonna be too long. Here we are 10 minutes later. It’s a winding road. A lot of cul-de-sacs, like you said.

Joel Benge: Yeah, I, I, I really, I, that’s a, a experience very close to, to mine, which was, you know, finding myself at a, at a marketing agency and being asked to do all the things and, you know, sometimes the, the agency’s priorities are not exactly what is the, the, the most critical, most upfront, right, for the client.

You know, it was like, all right, we’ve gotta have this website in six weeks and add me as the content guy is like you, we’ve got a little bit of work, some upfront work, which is why I call what I do, message therapy. It’s like, Hey, let’s, let’s get everybody in a room, figure your shit out first before we spend a lot of money in code and

Anthony: Yeah.

Joel Benge: And, and I find you know that, that. Many companies don’t quite get that. They’re not quite ready. Um, maybe And I’ll, I’ll [00:11:00] tell ’em I’ll be, well, we’ll be redesigning this website in 16 months anyway, because if you don’t have the words figured out first, and I, I agree with you. I think, I think the website, especially the homepage is like the crispest most, most, um, uh, important presentation of the Big Idea and of your positioning.

And it’s almost gotta be. The last thing that you do. And so many people don’t get that, that, you know, it’s the, it’s the distillation of everything. And if you’re just rushing to, well, let’s just redo the website, make it cool, make it pop, um, you’re, you’ll be redoing it. So I, I, I feel that, that that’s a, a very, very common experience.

Um. So I, I’m, I’m very interested in the process that you take people through and not to, not to give away, you know, full, full secret sauce or everything like that, but you know, it, it seems like doing this so many times. You have developed almost, uh, um, uh, you’ve [00:12:00] productized this approach to the point where you can really go in and, and, and diagnose.

What are some of the biggest. Misconceptions that people have when they, when they get into the process. You’ve got a whole fact on your website that dispels a bunch of those things, but I’d love you to dig into, you know, people show up and they’re like, what are you gonna do for me?

Anthony: Yeah. Yeah. So we are very. Like, uh, we’ve used the metaphor, it’s almost like open source software. We give away all the secret sauce, like everything we do with clients, we post online. We actually did our entire end-to-end process of multiple workshops with a real client on LinkedIn live at one point. So we’re like, if you wanna know what we do, you can literally watch it and comment in real time.

Um, because like an open source business, you give away everything for free. And then there are certain people who will say. I don’t really wanna do this on my own. I actually, I really just wanna pay someone else to help me do it. And [00:13:00] clearly you know what you’re talking about because I’ve seen you do it.

In public. So we made the bet. We were like, if we dis like we think, the bigger issue is people saying, I don’t know what they’re gonna do and I’m not ready to make that leap. We think that’s a scarier reality than people saying, I took what Fletch does and did it myself and I didn’t hire them. Like that will be a certain group of people and we think that this group over here is a bigger.

Audience and, and a bigger market opportunity. And, you know, if we can empower a bunch of marketing people to use our tools to better their own positioning and stuff in the process, great. Like more brand equity, more positive stuff. Like I’ll get tagged in people’s posts. Um, I just got a tagged in one today where this lady was like, we just repositioned our company.

We use this amazing framework. So and so led us through the framework and the lady commented on the post and was like, I’m just using fletch’s, you know, uh, framework and it. Like, I used it with this client and it made everything. So I’m like, great, the word is [00:14:00] spreading. That’s awesome. You know? And the more, the more credibility and equity you can get, the better.

So effectively though, what we’re doing, like the process we’re leading people through is we, we think through all the different ways that they could position, and each of those in our minds represents a different bet that they could make. And we think of them as like, you know, sort of like a, not to mix too many metaphors, but you could drive East.

You could drive North, you could drive west, you Could drive South. Each of these four different directions will have very different destinations and a lot of different things will happen along the way. And so for us, like we take a company and we’ll say, let’s think about what would be the different ways you could position.

Let’s say you could go after these big enterprise companies primarily that’s, imagine that’s going east. Maybe you wanna go after these really small business companies that’s going west. Either one of those approaches. If you were to prioritize one group over the other, you’re gonna end up with big changes to your go-to-market strategy, your product, uh, all sorts of stuff like that. [00:15:00] Or do you wanna split the difference and be like, no, no, we wanna go after them both equally, and each one of these decisions will have trade-offs. There’ll be a reason why you would take that strategy. Like we call it like the thesis of the strategy, and there’ll be risks of saying, if we try to split the difference and go after both, we basically have to run two, go to market plans.

We have to have double the amount of people, maybe double the amount of money to really get enterprise and SMB versus. We prioritize one, we could probably get more bang for our buck, but the risk would be maybe we prioritize the wrong one, right? Or something like that. So what we do with clients is we lay out all the different positioning strategies, and we have a model for this, right, of how you actually visualize them.

We just get ’em in in rows, and then we put little, here’s the thesis, this strategy, here’s the risks, and then we say, all right, imagine that we’re a financial advisor, and we just ask you like, how big is your risk tolerance? You know, do you want to take this one? It’s super risky, but maybe could make you a billion dollar company.

Maybe. Or do you wanna do the, do you wanna put it in stocks? You wanna put it in bonds? Do you wanna be a very safe investment and you’re not gonna maybe make a ton of [00:16:00] money, but you’re gonna be a successful, profitable, stable business? And then the client ideally chooses an option. And we have, the first workshop we run is on a Monday, second one’s on a Wednesday, we leave a day in between and we say, that’s you guys to get in a room and battle it out and figure out what you’re gonna do.

And then from there, ideally they pick, and then we spend two more workshops basically. Figuring out what would be the messages we would need to make that make sense. Like if we’re going after this enterprise group, what are they? Can they be comparing us to? What do we have to say? What is our differentiation against this competitive alternative, right?

Like, what category do we wanna put ourselves in? All these types of framing questions for the positioning for that specific group. Then we say, great. So that’s week one, and then it’s a two week sprint that we do with every client. The second week then is all around, all right, we took everything from that and we wrote a page, and here’s what the sections would look like.

Here’s the actual words. It’s the strategy documented on a homepage, and then we do three rounds of iterations for that to get you to a final page by the [00:17:00] following Friday. So in a perfect world, you’ve really solved. Both the positioning strategy and the homepage copy within two weeks. And that’s why we call it a sprint.

And we’ve even been telling people like, this is gonna take a lot of fast decision making. Uh, if you’re not really up for that right now, this might be not a good process for you. It’s for people who have said, I’ve gone through this for hours and hours and hours, and I need to get unstuck, and now you know, this is my chance.

I’m gonna use them as a forcing function. We’re gonna go through their process and we’re gonna pick a direction finally, and we’re gonna get it, put it on the homepage.

Joel Benge: Yeah, I think the decision making is, is always one of the biggest challenges. A lot of the companies that I work with, it’s like, I’m, we’ve done the work and I’ve presented you maybe the, the, uh, preliminary messaging or, you know, a no. Layout, I need you to make decisions. And, and sometimes it’s that, it’s that silence that comes back.

They haven’t, they haven’t responded back. Do you find there’s a sweet spot in, um, company size, company [00:18:00] maturity, company type, um, that you work well the best with? Um, or are there some that you’re just like. I would love to take your money and help you out with this, but there is no way you’re, you’re not ready.

And I can already see those red flags, like what are the green flags and the red flags for someone who’s ready to do something like this.

Anthony: So it’s funny because we’ve talked about this a bunch. thing that we have found is the most important green flag. Is there a high enough level champion that believes the same things that we believe. Yes or no. And so it’s like size of company. We used to think it’s, it was a better gauge of like what’s gonna be a good fit or not.

But we have found very early stage startups that do not agree with what we think, and it’s a it because it’s a two week sprint, we can waste a single minute battling out like fundamental marketing principles to be like. [00:19:00] Convincing people of these things that we think are very true, and it’s the reason that content has been such an important part of our strategy is because ideally, we are having those arguments for months and months and months before they ever reach out.

And either we convince them or we don’t convince them and they self-select out of the pool. But if we do convince them and then they get on the call. We can basically say, awesome, we kind of have a shared worldview and now we can really make this thing work. And that is sometimes true with small companies, with big companies, um, and not true with small companies and big companies in probably equal measure that we’ll find some big enterprises.

The champion, like the CMO, whoever brings us in. It’s like I’m a total Fletch believer. And those projects can go awesome, but other times it’s a big company brings us in and they’re like, you know, yeah. So like we just did a project where the champion person who loved what we did, she wasn’t even on the project.

So she convinced the team. And then I start session one and I’m like, so how much are you familiar with what we [00:20:00] do? And the whole room is like, yeah, we don’t really know anything about

Joel Benge: Yeah.

Anthony: And I’m like, how? How? Not set up for success is this project and the fact that like, we’re about to try to make 18 month decisions and, and you’re gonna turn your trust to this guy that you literally don’t know me from Adam, like, someone on your team convinced you to get this.

And you’re like, okay. I guess it’s like in those ones, uh, it’s, it’s a crapshoot whether or not it works out or whether it’s a huge waste of time. And we’ve even made a joke, like, you know, the most extreme would be like. Oh, you’re a referral. You don’t know us, we’re not gonna work with you. Just, you know, come back in a year when you’ve read our stuff.

Uh, we’ve also joked around like, let’s write like a hundred page book and be like,

Joel Benge: I was, uh, I was just about to say, you gotta, you gotta write a

Anthony: gotta get the

Joel Benge: my book comes out this week and I’m so excited because like you said, it lays everything out in there. And it’s like, if, if, if you get it, then great and you could do it yourself. And if not, that’s [00:21:00] why, that’s why we’re here. And I’ve found, but I’ll tell you, this was not, not an easy, uh, process to go through.

Anthony: Yeah. And we’ve, that’s like literally probably our next thing is we’re gonna try to do is to write some sort of book and whether we like sell it or promote like, you know, whatever. But the idea would be, would be during the sales process, we’d be like, I’m just gonna send you a copy.

Joel Benge: Yeah.

Anthony: If you don’t know us, read it over the weekend and then just see what you think.

If you’re like, wow, these guys are so smart, great, let’s work together. If you’re like, this is so stupid, I’m like, don’t buy the project. Right? Like, save your money. You’re not gonna like it.

Joel Benge: Oh, it should be the, uh, the user’s guide to working with Fletch. There you go. So I, I’ve got some people I’ve got, if when you get ready to jump, jump into there, I’ve got some, uh, I’ve got some lessons learned for that. Um, uh, what I,

what I’d love to do, speaking of. Um, giving away the, the process and the sauce is something that I’ve, I’m starting to do with people, which is take you through my process, [00:22:00] which is using my MessageDeck, and I call this, this is, this is the, the, um, message therapy.

So what I’m gonna do, we’re not gonna do a full workshop. I’m gonna pull, I’ve pulled six cards, so there are six cards in the system. They start. Um, up at the top with the Big Idea where I can never line this thing up, up with the Big Idea, story value, sort of like mantras, proof points, technicals all the way down.

I’m gonna, I’m gonna basically throw a card at you. I want the first thing that comes to your head,

Anthony: Very cool. And this is for my business or what would this

Joel Benge: this is, this is for what you do and what you do in the industry, what you’re seeing in the industry, right? So we’re doing a little bit of little, uh, fletch therapy here. So. This is the Big Idea, the gaps.

What gaps are you seeing in the marketplace right now vis-a-vis messaging marketing?

Anthony: Yeah, I would say there’s usually a gap between the CEO really wants one type of messaging that [00:23:00] matches. The conversations they’re in, they get brought in on the biggest sales deals and then they’re like, you know, we lost this thing ’cause we couldn’t prove ROI. We gotta get the ROI message on the homepage.

And then the gap is, I. The people actually shopping on homepages taking calls with AEs are not CEOs. They’re like managers and director of, and what do they not care about? They do not care about the company’s top line revenue or bottom line profit. They’re not staying up at night being like, oh no, the p and l is looking so bad.

Me a senior manager, and you know, I feel responsible. And so you end up with this. Problem where a lot of times high up will push a message and force the marketing team below to put this out, that actually will end up alienating all the people who would’ve started the sales process in the first place.

Is that kinda what you’re going for?

Joel Benge: That’s awesome. That’s a great, that’s a great sort of Big Idea, like this is we can help you solve that problem. Like, boom, there’s, there’s your Big Idea. All right. Bruises, these are your stories. Uh, where [00:24:00] have you failed before in your development, and how did you overcome it? Like maybe the, the, the, you already sort of talked about it, but like, what’s a eureka moment or a bruise that you experience that you wanna keep your clients from experiencing?

Anthony: Yeah, and so this would be my bruises in terms of with real clients or the client’s bruises have, because of that problem, which would be more

Joel Benge: So here’s where we play a therapist. What does that mean to you?

Anthony: I would say, uh, let’s say, um, the client bruises maybe. Would that be more helpful? Okay, so let’s say the client bruises is like, you’re gonna end up putting out messaging that doesn’t actually resonate. And people will say, well, I don’t know why I should pick you over the other people, right? Like, I, I looked at your website and it says that you will help increase my top line.

But like, okay, but I need a CRM and. Should I get you or HubSpot? Like, you know, I, I, I was thinking about HubSpot, but I heard about you guys and you’re not really giving me any info or any [00:25:00] ammo to make the case other than saying you’re gonna help my business. But HubSpot also says they’re gonna help my business and they’re 10 times bigger than you.

So usually you end up with these, these consistent problems where it’s like, you know, I don’t, it’s not matching.

Joel Benge: Right. All right, here we go. Uh, value propositions. Little bit more logical. Still emotional intangibles. So, working with you, working with Fletch, what’s an intangible that you deliver? I.

Anthony: Yeah, I say a big, uh, a big intangible is really the clarity to understand the options and see them in a very this or that manner. Because I think also same issue with a lot of executives is I. They think you can just do it all. They’re like, well, why can’t we just do both? And it’s like, well actually, there’s only so much real estate on the page.

You can’t do it. Both people will not, if you just stuff everything on a homepage, they won’t read it. So, uh. I think the clarity is really the biggest part that people are [00:26:00] buying is like, we actually wanna just see these all laid out and understand the paths forward. And then finding alignment, right, where you’re, you’re gonna end up, where everyone on the team really is on the same page like that is, we are, we’re going east.

We don’t know exactly what the destination looks like, but we’re going east and that’s, that’s where we’re gonna find it.

Joel Benge: The this or that for forcing the this or that is is crucial. All right. Mantras, uh, echo. What is a phrase you hear from your customers often?

Anthony: Yeah, I, I mean, we hear this all the time. People saying, people read our website, but they don’t get it. You know, I, when they, when they get on the demo, they love it, but they’ve read the website, they didn’t get it at all. And we’re like, that’s a disconnect. That’s, that’s a big reason why this positioning stuff is so important so that it’s like they’ll even get it just on the homepage without you taking 30 minutes to explain it.

Joel Benge: Yeah, you don’t have to get ’em in the room.

Anthony: Yeah.

Joel Benge: Alright. An environmental Proof Point. So this is kinda like a third party environmental thing. What’s a third party statistic or [00:27:00] trend that supports the case that you’re trying to make? So it’s not something that, that you can say we have shown, but it’s, Gartner says, Forbes has said, if you just look at the market.

You know, it points right at us and we don’t even have to do anything.

Anthony: Yeah, for sure. We, there’s a company that we really respect called Wynter and it’s W-Y-N-T-E-R. And their founder, his name’s Pep, really sharp guy. He does these big qualitative surveys of like, he just did one of like 300 CMOs of companies making $50 million or more. A year and they did all this qualitative survey around how they buy, how active are they in the process.

And it confirmed so many things that we had seen anecdotally, but from a bigger, uh, pool of like a bigger sample size. Um, things like executives aren’t the one shopping at homepages. It was something like 13% of the time. Was an executive, the one who was championing from end to end. [00:28:00] The rest of the time it was someone much lower and they, they were lower even than we thought.

We thought it would be like director or vp. They were like, no, it’s literally director or manager. Like it’s, it’s often a manager who’s the one spearheading a big SaaS purchase, like a really high. You know, like potential I, uh, IC level person. And so we were like, wow, that’s amazing. ’cause that confirms what we’ve been saying, that it’s like you should be writing for that person who’s actually gonna be reading these pages and comparing and, and weighing the pros and cons of different solutions and things like that.

That’s the person you wanna write this page for. So that was really, um, confirming. Um, and then also other things like we we’re very bullish on most companies that buy software actually care what the software can do. And that sounds like a crazy concept, but in this world, nobody cares about features.

Nobody cares about that. All they care about is the outcome. It doesn’t matter what your product does in the surveys that Winter has run, uh, I think the, they said the [00:29:00] most important factor and the whole buying process of whether or not a company bought was the product demo. It’s like interesting. It’s almost like people.

Really do care about knowing what the thing they’re buying is. Right? And it’s like if you extrapolate it beyond software, you’d be like, when you buy a car, do you think it matters what the car is and what it does and how it looks? Or are you just buying the outcome? I just need a way to get from A to B.

I don’t care anything about that. It’s like, no, humans care about the things you’re buying. And it’s even the same with software. Even for enterprise software, which is, you know, such a, it’s a different, different species. They act like these enterprise buyers. They’re not just literally people like you and me who are like, well, yeah, what does this thing do? You know, and, and so answering those questions, so we were very validated, uh, from these external proof points that it was like, yeah, the, the rules of humanity extend also to enterprise buyers, right? People are people everywhere.

Joel Benge: Yeah, I say it, it [00:30:00] that’s, that’s emotion. That’s the experience. And you know, it’s like if you’re, if you’re comparing technologies on capabilities and apples to apples. The one that is a little bit friendlier, the one that speaks to you, the one that uses your language, that’s the one that you’re gonna go to.

All right, last one. This is, uh, at the very bottom, the, uh, technical integrations. What is required to integrate or use your solution? So for Fletch, what stuff do you have to have upfront? What, what, you know, before you show up to that first uh, session, what kind of work do you think ha needs to have been done?

Anthony: Yeah. People ask us this all the time. It’s a really good question. We usually say like a. Do you know enough about your customer base and potential customers to even know bets that you could make? Right? And so we say we’re gonna, we have you fill out this really big intake survey that asks you all sorts of questions about the market and the customers that you have today, and where do they come from and what are they looking for and how do they use you.

And depending on how well [00:31:00] you can answer those questions is sort of like how good of an output we can get to, like, we’ll work with anyone. At any stage if right, they have the same belief system as us, they’re aligned on what the process is. They don’t understand what they’re buying and they want it, and they think it’s be helpful for them.

We’ll. The output will vary based on how well you know your customers. So like when we ask questions like, well, what would they use instead of you? And if they don’t know the answer and they just make it up, and we build a whole positioning strategy of how we’re so much better than this other solution, but nobody in the market’s using that other solution or even considering it, this positioning, strategy’s gonna fail.

And so. It’s always a question of how well do you know your customers? And, and sometimes it really has to be a stab in the dark. Like when you’re very early on in the business, you might not have it, you still need to do positioning, but it’s gonna be built on slightly more of guesses and hypotheses.

That’s fine. We just need to know that going upfront. So for us, it’s like coming in with enough information that you would feel confident to make a bet. Um, you know that that’s kind of the sweet spot. Some companies [00:32:00] have way more, some have way less. But again, if you like, we’ve gotten to the point where some companies where they’re like, I can’t make a decision.

And we’re like, okay, we can do, we could pause a project, you know, we could come back to it later. We could refund you if you want. Clearly we were not, we didn’t have enough that we were like, I can’t make a decision. I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna be willing to do this. That’s obviously where the whole process breaks down ’cause it’s predicated on the fact that we’re gonna be making decisions.

So, um, that’s probably my answer.

Joel Benge: We will get right back to my conversation with Anthony, which is amazing. We’re gonna hear some more of his music. We’re gonna talk about the band a little bit later on towards the end. I just wanted to bust in and say, Hey, it’s been a little while. I was on a hiatus after the conversation with Guy Kawasaki.

If you haven’t listened to that, you need to go back to the previous episode and listen to that. It was amazing. Uh, it took a little while to retool, uh, you know, did a little thing like releasing a book. So things were kind of, been kind of busy. Um. But I’m gonna start rolling out some more episodes if you wanna be on the podcast,

I am looking for nerds. Uh, if you are a nerd that needs to learn how to talk good. I am looking for [00:33:00] clients, uh, and, uh, just looking for friends. So, uh, head on over to nerdthattalksgood.com. Learn all about the book. You can buy a copy. Uh, you can buy signed copies. Uh, you can buy, uh, copies of the deck.

You can buy. Pretty soon I’m gonna have, uh, the, the coins for, for sale. Everything is on sale. Ah, everything is on sale. I’m going crazy. But I’m super excited, really glad to be back. And, uh, uh, let’s get back to our conversation with Anthony.

 If you do get it to the point where you have to make a decision, where are you on, um, A and B testing? Or maybe, I mean, you talk about that minimally viable positioning, like let’s just, we. At a conference going out, coming up, let’s just take one of our bets and just, just try it. ’cause I, I try to get my clients to uh, um, what I call like a first principles messaging.

And it’s like, it could bend either way depending on, you know, what you need it to do. So before you commit it to the big [00:34:00] marketing project, maybe maybe pilot it or test it. Um, do you do any of that?

Anthony: So it’s tricky because what we’re evaluating is the future and some ideas are testable in an afternoon. So for example, if I’m selling. Uh, you know, the pop socket on the back of my phone say I make these pop sockets where I hold it like this. There might be two or different, two or three different ways that we could position this, you know, to, for different people.

Like maybe some people are really interested in having ability, the ability for it to stand. I. That’s really what they’re, the problem they’re solving is whenever I try to watch a video, I can’t stand it up again. It falls down, right? So I’m positioning it for one group of people who wanna balance their phone while they’re watching, doing the dishes or something.

There’s probably another group of people who are like, no, I think it’s just really uncomfortable and I’m holding it. Like, it just, this feels so, it’s so big. And so you’re positioning as, as a better holding tool, um, to make it easier. Maybe that’s a separate group. We could run Instagram ads and find out in an afternoon.

Which [00:35:00] one of those positioning strategies is gonna work better? Are people who wanna do the watching, are they more likely to buy? Are people who are more interested in the holding, are they more likely to buy? Great. So we could go out and test that and get it done. Now, what happens though, if I am testing a strategy that takes a little bit more time for people to a, understand it, see the world in a different way.

There may not be a way to test that in an afternoon. There might not even be a way to test that in a month. There might not even be a way to test that in a year. Like let’s take the far end of the spectrum. Someone who’s like, I’m gonna build, it’s 2005 or something, and you’re like, I wanna build an electric car company.

I can’t go out and AB test. Here’s a gas car and here’s an electric car. Which one do you wanna buy? Everyone would be like, why would I buy an electric? There’s no chart, nothing even exists. And that positioning strategy, you would say, ah, there’s no market for electric cars. Fast forward 15 years, there’s a huge market for electric cars.

Every [00:36:00] company in the world is of cars are making electric cars. That’s an extreme. But even take us, if we had gone out at the very beginning, take away our, all of our LinkedIn content, all of our thought leadership, and we just went out to a conference and we set up a booth and we said, we’ll help you figure out your homepage positioning.

People would come over and they’d say, what do you guys do? Well, we basically run a series of workshops to figure out the way to position your product, and then we get it documented on your homepage and they’re like, oh, cool. So like, what do you charge? We’re like, well, it’s like 7,500 of your small.

They’d be like, wait a minute, but you design the website, right? I said, well, no, wait. You don’t. Do you, do you develop it? No, we don’t do that either. Oh, what do you get? Why I just give you a wire frame? You still have to get, wait, it’s the whole website though, right? No, it’s just a homepage. Like what? You’re charging 7,500 bucks for the copy at a home?

No, no, no. It’s not the copy. We’ll, you with the positioning. Oh, like the April Dunford stuff? Yeah, similar. Who are you? We’re just like two guys. They’d be like this. This is [00:37:00] the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. They would’ve walked away. Me and my co-founder, Rob, we’d go home sad with our tail between our legs.

I guess they’re still market. Wants it. The positioning didn’t work. We tested it. Nobody liked it again, now. Imagine there’s a world where 12 months of thought leadership content growing an audience building a POV, all of a sudden there is a big market. We do roughly a million and a half bucks a year from people who now think that exact same sales pitch, it’s worth not just 7,500.

If they’re larger, it’s worth up to 20 K to do that process with us. There would be no way to test that bet because you can’t run. Parallel universes, right? Like let’s run 18 months in universe A where we become thought leaders around positioning for homepages and 18 months in universe B, where we do website design and, and there’s a cop copy element and there’s just no way to do it.

So that’s why when you’re dealing with the future for certain positioning strategies. You can’t really test it [00:38:00] because you’re talking about multi-month stuff. Like we talked with one another, we’re working with another company, and basically we walked it out with them. We were like, okay. It’s a very new, it’s a new strategy.

How long does it take clients to buy from you? And they’re like, it’s a 12 month process. It’s like, okay, how long is it gonna take to get the word out that this narrative exists? And they’re like, it’s easily gonna take two quarters of marketing to even get this out. It’s like, great. So whatever decision we land on is gonna be two quarters of marketing and then a year of a sales process.

And then when they buy. What do those clients do? Do they, are they good clients? Will they upsell? Will they renew the year after, or will they be much worse than a previous client base that you were positioning for before? So sometimes we won’t even really know if the strategy was right for two years.

And it’s like, I, we struggled with this for so long because we’re like, everyone’s like, how do I know I’m making the right decision? And you wanna give them some sort of bulletproof thing. [00:39:00] But at the core level is we are trying to solve entrepreneurial risk. And if anyone can solve that problem, they will be a, not a billionaire, a trillionaire, because 95% of startups fail.

For either marketing, positioning related or product related, or market timing or shifts. No one can solve knowing the future. And so, like I said at the beginning, there are certain products that could be tested in an afternoon. You could go to a conference, ask people around, and you really know if that’s gonna work or not.

And there are just other bets that you’re just not gonna be able to know, and you just gotta, that’s the founder intuition, founder gut to say, I’m charging in that direction. ’cause that’s where I think the market’s going.

Joel Benge: And that is being a good, uh partner, a good salesperson, being honest with the client. I see way too many people, or you know, they’re selling a package and they’re like, yeah, we’ll do it. Guaranteed. Or, you know, these, these big, outrageous, uh, uh, big, outrageous [00:40:00] claims. And I think, I think being honest with a client.

And, and that’s where being a consultant comes in, not being a burger flipper, not being just, you know, I’m gonna just be an agency and I’m just gonna take orders. Um, and there’s real value, I think, in what you do, which is, which is incredible. Uh,

Anthony: along those same lines, right since the beginning, we have never once promised customer outcome. So for this, I, I try to get this in a post at least a hundred different times. My latest one, I think is my best, is that you have a bucket of things that the company can control, and then you hope that customers will respond to those things with actions.

And so, like for example, we can build an SEO optimized website, or let’s say a, but we can’t. Cre, make someone force them to type in the search that will get there. We can put marketing out to reveal a problem and we can hope that that drives them to put the search in, right? But we actually can’t control [00:41:00] what the customers do at all.

We can make really clear copy and good CTAs, but we cannot make the customer click those CTAs, right? We can get on a sales pitch, we can pitch them the offer, but we cannot force them to buy it. And so us as consultants. We since the beginning have never promised that the customer will do X or Y or Z ’cause it’s not in our control and it’s not even in the company’s control either.

So we always have said since day one, we can promise things that are in your control by the end of our two weeks. If you follow the process, I could guarantee I could write this in the contract. I’ll guarantee that you will have chosen. A strategy and that the strategy will be internally consistent and based on your understanding of the customers will be.

Framed in such a way that would be clear and concise and ideally compelling to someone on the other side. But we’ve never [00:42:00] once said, you will get more clients, you’ll get a higher conversion rate. We will share, like previous customers say that like we have testimonials, or people say, working with Fletch increased my conversion rate by x percent.

Working with Fletch, I nailed my ICP and got all these new like, so. Again, but we cannot control what’s on the right and so we say, don’t buy our service if the stuff on the left, which is what the company controls, isn’t interesting to you. So if you’re like, it’s not worth the price to get us all aligned around a single cohesive story, it’s not worth the price to have made a bet and chosen an ICP and had someone help us do that.

If that’s not worth it to you, don’t buy us. If you’re only buying us for the customer side, then I would say you’re taking a risk because. Those customer outcomes, we cannot control them. You cannot control them. You know, we don’t live in a dictatorship where the government or whoever can tell you, no customer, you must buy this.

You know, like by threat of, you know, violence or something, you have to buy this service. Um, and I, [00:43:00] I think in general, most consultants and freelancers and service providers and even software companies. We would do better to just promise things that the company itself can control and stop com promising customer outcomes because it’s, there’s this gap between the two, and it’s like, right, we got everything right.

Let’s throw it over the fence. And we’re hoping it works. We’re hoping to come back and reciprocate. Like, and, and like a, you know, from the music world, you could have the best band, the best artist, the best producers, the best marketing strategy, and at the end of the day, we’re putting out the album. We really hope people like it and sometimes they still don’t.

Even when we had all the right stuff, the market is fickle, the market’s gonna do what the market wants, we can’t control it. And in the business world it’s identical, but we pretend it’s not. We’re like, oh yeah, work with me and I’ll guarantee you to five x year, whatever. It’s like, no, you’re not. We’re all guessing.

We’re all hoping everyone just crossing their fingers, lobbing over the fence and hoping that they come back and be like. I’m, [00:44:00] I’m, you know, hook, line and sinker, whatever, you know, whatever metaphor you wanna do. I’ve used too many. They’re all mixing.

Joel Benge: I, I’m glad, I’m glad you brought up the band, because I wanted to mention that earlier and we just got, we just got rabbit holing.

What caught my attention was a post that you had recently where you said, “I don’t usually share this content. Um, but it, you know, since it looks like a lot of my, my closer contacts are the ones who are, getting most of my, my posts. I figured I’d give you what I, what, what you want anyway, which is my band content” and I immediately clicked over.

Um, love, love the Good Hangs. I’d love you to tell us a a about the band, where it, where it came out, and then maybe we can find some parallels between, uh, being, uh, we’ll call it headlines, headlining and writing headlines. How about that?

Anthony: I love it. I love

Joel Benge: maybe that’s the title of the, of the episode.

Anthony: That’s great. I, uh, it’s really funny actually, and this is gonna sound like super nerdy, which I guess is great for the podcast, right? Uh, all of the same positioning principles that we used with [00:45:00] the business, we also used with the band. And this was an explicit, this was not like it just happened that we were, we like sat down with the band and we were like, let’s do the Fletch model.

On the band that we’re gonna start and see if it works. Uh, ’cause we had done all this stuff in B2B and this was a very B2C world, right? Like the band going to consumers. And so me and the other band mates had been in a bunch of different bands in the past, and we always were following our artistic integrity and going, you know, we like all sorts of different genres.

We’ll do this genre and that genre for one song and stuff like that. And effectively, we were doing the same thing that that agency was doing. We’re like, we’re offering all these different things and nobody was shopping for all of them at the same time. So we put out this album before we did this exercise, we put out this album, had 10 songs on it.

I would say all 10 were 10 different genres. And it was like, you know, and we, because we are very eclectic. We like all 10 genres, so this is great. Every single person we showed the album to, they were like this, I really like [00:46:00] Song two and three. I didn’t really get into any of the other ones when I was like, I love that eighth song.

I didn’t like anything else though. What we found is like people have specific genres they like, and the fact there was even a moment where Spotify did this algorithm thing where it was like. How unique is your listening profile? And I’m not saying this is a brag, but like me, my brother who’s in the band and our singer, it was like, you have a 98% unique music profile.

So I’m like, oh, great. So if we write this album for us, like we’ve cut out everyone. So when we started this one, we were like, okay, well what are all the principles that we’ve learned from this, this business, you know, on the side, well there are fixed markets and they have, uh, things that they want. It’s very easy to market something if you pick a group of customers and say, I’m just making it for you and I’m gonna make it exactly how you would want, and I’m gonna use marketing strategies to get it in front of you, like Marketing 1 0 1.

So we, we actually made five playlists, five different genres that we liked, and we sat down [00:47:00] and we said, okay, we could do this electronic stuff that we like. Puts us in one bucket. We could do this like indie stuff in this other bucket. And we had five of them. And the third one, we were like, we could be a pop punk band.

And so then we evaluated it and we actually picked the electronic one. We were like, we wanna make this style of like really cool underground electronic music. And then we were like, what does this, what does the concerts look like? And we went to our favorite band of the group and we watched YouTube video and it was literally a guy at a, a DJ booth, he had a turntable and we’re like, what?

Joel Benge: There’s no energy. There’s no,

Anthony: we’re like, we all play instruments and stuff. Um, so we were like, okay, that’s not gonna be the right. So then we pivoted and we were like, okay, which of these markets do we think we could actually be competitive in? So we looked at the indie one, we’re like, well, what are the indie ones have in common?

Their singers are all incredibly, good looking and well dressed. And we were like,

Joel Benge: We are out.

Anthony: be able to. Yeah, we’re not. It’s not us. And then we were like, um, we went through them all and we were like, we could do this like pop music. And we’re like, they’re all incredible American idol level singers.

None of us are good at singing. That’s not gonna work. Went [00:48:00] through, we see the pop punk one. We go, what is the thing about pop punk? The singers are whiny and nasally by design. They’re not good. Uh, that’s us, right? We, we aren’t very good at singing either. We can do the whining and nasally thing too. And so we.

We look, we’re like, who are the big pop punk bands now? And they were like, we thought they weren’t very good. Like they’re all okay. I mean, some of them were fine, but most of them are like, just like pretty run in the mill cookie cutter. So we’re like, it feels like we could probably compete in this space and maybe actually get some fans.

Um, and we picked a hyper specific group of people. It’s kind of a mirror of us. We’re like, it’s people in the early 2000 who loved pop punk in the early two thousands, and that’s probably the only pop punk that they listen to to this day. Because they don’t like the new stuff. The same way that we listen to the new stuff.

We’re like, I don’t really like this. It doesn’t sound like the pop punk from when I was in high school or middle school or whatever. What if we just tried to make the early two thousands music for that same group of people who feels very underserved by the rest of the pop punk of today? And that’s like a big startup theory, right?

Like [00:49:00] Lean Startup is like find a group of people underserved by the market leader and then go after them and be like, we’ve built a solution that doesn’t have any of the problems. So like we were like went to those people and we were like thinking let’s make a music for them. So we wrote a bunch of songs.

We did a marketing strategy where we would post on Instagram, we’d make these reels and TikTok and stuff where we basically were like. Does this, does this sound like you? And we would show all these early two thousands nostalgic like images and albums and like, was this in your, you know, stuff like that.

Like then you probably will like our band. And then we would play our song and it would sound just like these early albums. And then we wrote like a big bio. We put it on the Spotify and then we just start putting it out there and it starts working. And people would say, I read your bio. It literally was like written for me exactly like this music sounds exactly what I liked back then.

I don’t like any of the new stuff. It’s, and so we start putting it out and the ball starts going slowly. B2C growth is slow. Maybe B2B as well, but B, B2C especially is like slow growth. So [00:50:00] like for a while we’re like, okay, first year we’ve got 2000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Then it’s like, next year maybe we’ve got 10,000 or something.

Then it starts speeding up and then we were like. We got, um, some Spotify starts pushing us algorithmically in the same way that the LinkedIn content gets pushed algorithmically. Spotify actually does this as well. Whenever you turn on the radio or the DJ feature or Discover Weekly or release radar, all these things are like algorithmically generated and we start seeing people follow us on Instagram and they say, I was listening to this band, and they say, A band that’s like doing the same strategy as us.

And you came on right after and I listened and I loved it. And so it became this flywheel. And now like we’ll read the pop punk Reddit. Every once in a while people are talking about us, like this band came outta nowhere. It’s exactly what we loved. And, uh. And then it still keeps going, and then it snowballs.

And now we have like, um, around 120,000 people listen to us on a monthly basis. We’ve got a couple songs that have over, one song has over a million streams, another has over 3 million streams. And, uh, the numbers are ticking up. [00:51:00] Spotify sends us like a $2,500 check every month, and that number gets a little bit bigger with the more streams and stuff.

And so it like, feels like it’s working and it’s like. It’s because of the same underlying marketing principles that all the stuff, uh, you know, in the, in the B2B software world does it, it’s all the same. It’s basic human marketing principles. And like when I told that story to a group of people at this, like, we went to this marketing conference, we’re all having, you know, drinks and stuff and I’m telling this about.

And the one guy, he was like, that sounds horrible. Like, why would you think about, ’cause I was showing him like, we track all the numbers and all the analytics and stuff. He’s like, don’t you just wanna make music and.

Just 

Joel Benge: have fun?

Anthony: Yeah, doesn’t have fun. And I’m like, yeah, we did that for 20 years. You know, I’ve been, we’ve been having fun since I was 10.

Like, now we wanna have like an actual fan base, we wanna have a, when we put out songs, we want people to listen to them. And, and, you know, so now like, putting on that marketing hat, like, yeah, maybe you could say you’ve destroyed the artistic integrity, but at the same time it’s like, you know, you, there’s the concept of founder market fit.

Like, you’re not gonna start like a, you know, logistics startup. If you know nothing about logistics, [00:52:00] like you have to actually care about the thing you’re doing. Like we love the pop punk music. And we’re not making music we don’t care about, like we love what we’re putting out. We just put a little guardrails on it to make it a little bit easier to market.

Joel Benge: Yeah, and I’ve, I’ve really enjoyed listening. I, I will include, uh, Spotify links in the, uh, um, in the homework section. I always like to have resources and homework. So, um, you, you, you’ve me mentioned, uh, April Dunford several times. Who are some other. People that, that you, uh, admire people who you, who inspire you, um, either musically or, or, uh, um, business wise.

Anthony: I mean other people doing similar stuff like, uh, some early inspirations was like a lady named Elena Verna, who’s a big PLG lady. Now she’s head of growth at Lovable, the AI coding app, which I’ve

Joel Benge: started using that this week. It’s.

Anthony: yeah. Very cool, very cool. Um, she’s, she was awesome. Like she was a really big, um, inspiration for us at the beginning [00:53:00] because she would do these unbelievably powerful frameworks and would share them.

And like that was how she got a huge audience, was sharing these like really deep, thoughtful frameworks all the time. And we were like, Ugh, if we could only do that. So we started posting, like trying to be basically emulate her, uh. Right. Like we love her book and stuff. She doesn’t really do that, like posting frameworks and stuff like Elena was doing.

So, um, but you know, we, we love her as well. Big inspiration. People like Andy Raskin, you know, like these people who have built these really large businesses around these kind of concepts. Uh, and then there’s like a lot of other people, like just in the field who do similar stuff as us that we really like.

You know, like there’s a guy named John Ikin. He is got some great, uh, positioning content. Other people like Emma Stratton, she’s great.

Joel Benge: I love Emma.

Anthony: Yeah, she’s written a bunch of good stuff. She has the book that just, you know, came out not that too long ago.

Joel Benge: it’s over here. It’s over here someplace.

Anthony: Yeah. Um, there’s a lady named Rachel Lambert.

She ran a, um, a, uh, product marketing consultancy early on. She like reached out to me and was like, you know, we’ve done [00:54:00] this product marketing group brought me in. And so that was like some of our first exposure to like a lot of these product marketing people. Um, her, her company’s called Olive and um.

Now she’s doing a different startup. But yeah, lot, lots of cool people like that. And then like, you know, music wise, it’s like all the OG people that I loved growing up, you know, it’s like in the, in that field, like the Blink 182s, Jimmy Eat World, Dashboard Confessional, you know, Taking Back Sunday. Some of these, like early artists, like are, they’re still pretty much the same influences that are driving us today, you know?

Joel Benge: Yeah, it, it, one of, uh, I used, speaking of brothers and bands, I used to work, um, very early when I was on a, uh, a help desk, uh, with a guy, his twin brother. They were in a band called Splitsville. And like very small. They’ve got a, like they’re big in Japan, like literally big in Japan. Um, and they haven’t put anything out for decades and they just announced a brand new album and I’m like, I, I listened to some of the clips.

I’m like, it sounds just like, just like the music from 20 years ago. I, and I’m so excited. Yeah. I’m very [00:55:00] excited. Um. Any final closing words? Any advice to somebody who wants to get into, uh, technical positioning or even just for that founder out there that is like, um, you know, it’s all up here and I, you know, I, I, I, I know it, but I can’t see it.

Um, what, what do you think would be like the first step besides calling Fletch?

Anthony: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I would say check out our content. Like we post stuff like this all the time in LinkedIn and, and uh, we have this Notion database of all of our posts that we have on our website, and basically it’s like a good. Starting point of everything we think, but you could also just scroll back through and look at some of the older posts and, and things like that.

’cause we have a bunch of helpful frameworks of like, here’s how to map out your positioning and evaluate these different options and things like that. So I’d say that’s probably your easiest starting point if you wanna learn from our perspective. Right. But again, like April Dunford’s book is awesome, obviously.

Awesome. You just came off with her new one sales pitch, like, you know, all, all these people’s materials that we’re all [00:56:00] saying. Very similar things with slightly different packaging, different vernacular, like different definitions. Um, but I think everyone is kind of describing the same underlying fundamental marketing reality just with their own spin on it.

So it’s like some people might find her easier to grasp than ours and vice versa. And that’s totally fine. You know, like, I think as long as people are, more people are adopting like very foundational marketing principles, like the better.

Joel Benge: Yeah, I’m, I’m gonna head out and, and buy the, uh, uh, the Notion database. ’cause you know, I saw that, I was like, what, 50 bucks? You’re giving that up. Yeah. That, that’s like a no brainer. Just at least a. Just the least to compare and contrast and bounce, bounce stuff off of. It’s like, it’s like having you in the room.

Um, thank you so much for joining. Uh, maybe what I’ll do as a, as a treat is, uh, is go out on one of your songs into the, the outro. Uh, which one would you recommend I drop in here?

Anthony: Oh, our, our main one is called, um. The long title, which is, this is How Titles used to be in the early two thousands. So this is a, it’s a, it’s a [00:57:00] joke because that’s how they all did it, but it’s, it’s a very serious song. It’s very depressing. But they always would use silly titles. So it was called, “I Only Do Pushups When I’m Drunk.”

It’s our biggest song by far. And it is, again, if you read the lyrics, they’re very serious and upsetting and emo. Uh, but that was the trend back then. And so it said, let’s keep doing it now. They do these long funny titles for these very serious songs.

Joel Benge: Awesome. Well, we’ll go out on that one. Thank you so much for joining today, Anthony. This has been a blast, man.

All right. Thank you so much to Anthony for joining me, and thank you so much for sticking with me during my little bitty hiatus. I got a little busy releasing the book and working on a brand new show, so I am actually bringing live to the stage MessageTherapy* Live. It’s a game show version of the workshop that I do.

If you’re interested, you can find information over at, uh, nerdthattalksgood.com. Um, if you want all of the resources, all of the links to the stuff we talked about today. That is gonna be down in the show notes, uh, in the homework section. And once again, thanks for joining me. Thanks for sticking with me.

Give me a, a thumbs up, a like stars, whatever, all the [00:58:00] things on all the platforms. And remember, you don’t have to speak perfectly well. You only gotta learn how to talk. Good. See ya!

If you want links to the resources mentioned on the show, head on over to the episode page. And for information on booking a Message Therapy workshop, getting your hands on the MessageDeck, to check out my book, or just buy me a coffee, go to nerdthattalksgood.com/podcast. 

 Until next time, happy messaging.