Joel Klettke: I think a lot of technical people are so engineered towards well, as long as the specs on this thing are good, the features are great, as long as the product is great, it’ll sell itself. That’s one of the dumbest lies that’s been perpetuated, you know, to, to founders, not just technical founders, but that, that, oh, we’ll just build a great thing and it’ll take off on its own or that people will even understand it

[Musical Intro]

Joel: My name is Joel and I’m a recovering nerd. 

I’ve spent the last 25 years bouncing between creative jobs and technical teams. I worked at places like Nickelodeon to NASA and a few other places 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 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 want to help you do the same. I talk with some of the greatest technical communicators, facilitators, and thinkers that I know who are behind the big brands and the tech talk that just works. 

Joel Benge: Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Nerds That Talk Good. This is a real treat for me. I am thrilled to be welcoming another Joel to join me today, somebody that I’ve been following for a very long time, Joel Klettke.

Business copywriter, founder, best looking man in the world. We’ll, we’ll get into that. And another bald guy with glasses. So I can, I can attest to that similarity. Joel, thank you for joining us.

Joel Klettke: Yeah, thanks for having me on a special edition of Joel’s

Joel Benge: This is, this is, it’s like, it’s like I’m staring into a mirror. What I wanted to bring you on about is because of your background, and I think you come at, at communications and, and Speaking a little bit differently than than my typical guests, which, which are technical practitioners and are those nerds who are looking to talk good.

I’d love to have you give a brief introduction to your background, how you got to where you are and, and we’ll dig into maybe some of those stories.

Joel Klettke: Yeah, so early on in my career, I started out in an agency doing SEO. That was my first real, you know, I fell backwards into that job. I didn’t even know SEO was a thing until it was my responsibility to do for clients. But I learned a lot about the agency world and the web and how things kind of worked then.

And always loved to write, never saw a career path in it until sort of the last few years of the agency, the whole industry kind of turned its head towards content and copy and how do we communicate and all of a sudden it became Important to have something to say not just be able to build a thousand terrible links from directories and that played to my skill set pretty well. I went out on my own on 2013 originally focused on the content end of things– blog posts and white papers and in very short order within two years, I’d finished pivoted to focus on landing pages and copywriting and ads and everything on more the sales side of things.

And with that came positioning and messaging and some of the things you get your hands dirty with too. And then about eight years ago, maybe more now, while I was doing that and consulting and working on that side of things, I rolled off A side project with a partner called Case Study Buddy. And there we were putting together customer success stories end to end and really tackling all the nuanced, nitty gritty, really tricky pieces of what happens when you have at least three different stakeholders in the mix on one piece of content.

Our client, their client, and us. And so, you know, I’ve seen a lot from helping really technical companies like AI companies years ago before it was in vogue, try to explain to people what they do in a way that was compelling to marketers, but also compelling to buyers and average Joes. I’ve worked with the enterprise of the enterprise, multi billion dollars.

I’ve worked with mom and pops. I’ve done just about every type of writing you can do. And also have the adventures and misadventures of building a company and selling that. And, and yeah, navigating, you know, all of this difficult communication stuff in a lot of different contexts. Lots we can press into, and yes, the former “best looking man in the world” but we’ll see if I can make a resurgence.

Joel Benge: Awesome. Well, I, I definitely want to dig into that in a little bit, maybe in the, in the personal projects stuff toward towards the end, because that’s a real fun story. What I’m really interested is you sort of came at this like, like I mentioned backwards from where a lot of people do. You started helping other people find their voice; telling other people’s stories then became a founder yourself, and then, you know, I, I think we, as, as marketers ourselves, sometimes talking about ourselves is the hardest thing. So I, I, I will dip into the founder journey, but I’m, I’m interested in some of the challenges that you’ve seen when you’re trying to make technical content accessible for general audiences on behalf of somebody else. Tell me about that experience.

Joel Klettke: I think a lot of the time, what’s so difficult, especially as a technical founder or someone so close to the building of the thing or, you know, the technical components of the thing, is it’s so easy to forget that not everyone thinks like you, understands like you, buys like you. It can be really difficult to recognize that.

I think a lot of technical people are so engineered towards well, as long as the specs on this thing are good, the features are great, as long as the product is great, it’ll sell itself. That’s one of the dumbest lies that’s been perpetuated, you know, to, to founders, not just technical founders, but that, that, oh, we’ll just build a great thing and it’ll take off on its own or that people will even understand it.

I think a lot of the time, you know, when I would come in, it was playing translator. It was helping, you know, these, these, Individuals, these founders, these product marketers, these technical, you know, data engineers, even at times really understand through a different lens, what it is they’d built, what is the value that they had created to someone else and through someone else’s eyes and helping them understand what language they could use to really express that to people.

A lot of the time, it’s doing this balancing act between, you know, what it is that the company believes and what they view as their value and what they view as their differentiator and doing a lot of work on the opposite side of things to balance that out with, well, what do customers and prospects think?

How do they talk about it? So kind of translating in both directions to arrive at something really clear. I think the other challenge, is even within the same company, different, you know, it’s, it’s kind of like that tale of the blind people and the elephant. Everyone’s touching a different piece of the elephant, describing it a very different way.

We all have different priorities and we’re all inevitably going to lean into our own bias. And so again, for someone very technical, they’ll care about the technical. For someone in marketing, they often care so much about the sizzle, they forget about the steak. And so it’s, You know, a lot of the challenge comes from just being in the middle and trying to unify this language, this story, and translate it ultimately for an audience that needs to make the decision for this great thing to continue to exist.

So I think that’s one of the biggest challenges is just anytime you have people involved, technical or otherwise, we all have our biases, we all have our ways of speaking. And we have to find a way to bring that out, preserve the value of that, find what’s meaningful, and express it in a way that the right people will get it.

And that really has been the heart of, you know, at least on the copywriting and conversion side of things what, you know, what I’ve done. I think to marry that up with the customer story side of things too. I think, you know, when we’re telling a customer story, again, we want to lean into the things we think are great, we think are meaningful, learning to help, you know, I think helping founders and companies step outside of themselves.

And again, view this through a new lens. That that’s really been the heart of, of how I come at that. And, and a lot of the, the wins and successes that, you know, we’ve been able to create as Case Study Buddy or, or you know, my own consulting side of things.

Joel Benge: I love that, that metaphor of touching the elephant and describing it differently. And I think I see that a lot with my clients and their internal teams is, is not everybody has an opportunity to to speak up and share. And sometimes you’ve got that developer or that product person who’s quieter in the background, and they’ve got a really great perspective that can enhance or lend itself to the overall message, and they don’t feel comfortable sharing.

And so I wanna, I wanna pick into that just a little bit. What techniques do you find help when you’re trying to, and I’m talking about it. internal team alignment on messaging, develop that, and then we’ll flip to the, the customer validation and the case study side, but just figuring your own stuff out first as a company is a challenge as a company grows.

So when you see that founder, that’s like, ” my, vision of it is infallible,” how do you pop someone’s bubble just enough to allow them to let some other outside perspective come in?

Joel Klettke: Yeah. I mean, don’t, don’t bring opinion to a data fight. I think it’s kind of, you know, what it comes down to. I think at the end of the day, part of the job is creating an environment of empathy where you can have these, for me, it’s always been one on one conversations first. Everyone needs to feel heard before they can feel like they can get on board with a new direction.

People are much more likely to support. You know, new messaging or new marketing or whatever it might be when they feel like they’ve had a voice in its creation. And so one of the most important things, you know, I did and founders can do, or really anyone in a company can do is facilitate conversations, structured conversations.

And so it’s really about discovering, well, how do they see the elephant? You know, like, what is it that you’re seeing? In your opinion, what would you change? How does the current messaging serve you and not serve you? If you could snap your fingers and change anything about the way that the rest of the team perceives you and your role, what would that be? I’d ask questions like this and it creates this opportunity just for a dialogue. And really I’m just collecting data points. So creating this space for these one on one conversations where everyone in different roles feels at least like they’ve had a chance to speak and share the perspective becomes really valuable.

The other side of it is popping everybody’s bubble by talking to people outside of the org. So whether that is current customers, whether that is prospects, whether that is prospects who turned out. You know, a big part of my job was always to try to get that external perspective and help weigh that against this internal perception of, well, this is what we are and this is what’s important.

Then once you’ve done that, I think now you’re at a point where you can bring people together and say, “Hey, listen, I’ve heard your priorities. I’ve heard your complaints. I’ve seen your vision for this. Here’s where you’re all aligned. Here’s where the differences are. Here’s what your buyer ultimately thinks.

And now with all of this put together, this is the direction that we can go in.” But without having space for those conversations, without coming with some data to support, whether that is survey feedback, being able to say, “well, categorically, when I look through this, here’s some of the themes we see,” or whether that’s review mining, again, looking at reviews out in the wild and seeing, well, even if you don’t have any customers yet, let’s say you’re very early stage of saying, well, here’s what people are saying.

Buyers are saying about your competitors, you know, here’s the things they like about them. Here’s the things they dislike about them. Do you think we could maybe press into some of these things? You know, for example, if you go look at reviews for a competitor and there’s just universally something that’s decried across the board and you do that thing really well, then it’s an opportunity to get people excited, say, look at this, look, we, we can crush them.

This is something you do well. This aligns with these priorities and these things you’ve already told me. Let’s move in that direction. So, you know, copywriting, messaging, positioning, marketing, at the end of the day, it’s all really a communication and a mental game. It’s really not about being the smartest, you know, or the most eloquent, and more about having the best understanding.

So bringing that understanding internal, I think, is really what equips people to go, “Oh, okay, I hadn’t thought of it that way. Okay, now that I know my opinion is valued or my perspective has been heard, maybe I’m willing to see it another way too.”

Joel Benge: That’s really great. I think, yeah, I think like you said, gently popping their bubble and showing them, you know, this is, this is where we are right now, but this is where everybody else is and we’ve got to look for those, for those opportunities in the market. I’ve, I’ve oftentimes had a client. You know, I’ll ask them, what’s your big idea?

What’s the, what’s the tagline? What’s the takeaway you want someone to have when they, when they encounter your brand and they’ll rattle something off that sounds just so corporate, just so safe, just so comfortable. And, you know, it’s one thing to say, yes, we can work with that. But here’s an alternative than to say, let me show you where everybody else in the marketplace is saying the same thing.

Do you want, you know, you do have to fit in to stand out, but do you want to look like and sound like everybody else? Which I think that’s the challenge that I’ve always found in tech marketing early on was you can be technical or you can be emotional. You can be emotional or you can be logical, and it was a very early tweet, I believe, of yours, which I’m still trying to find, so it’s back in the ether someplace, and I believe it was you were saying, “you capture attention with emotion, you justify engagement with emotion.

Logic, but you win customers with credibility.” And it wasn’t until I had seen that credibility mentioned that I realized that was the missing thing. That’s that aha moment. Which I think you get only from a outside perspective that, you know, case studies, customer testimonials. You know, so, so I’ve built credibility up as this big thing, but did you identify that as the opportunity with, with a project like Case Study Buddy or did that just organically become the thing to you?

Joel Klettke: I think, you know, my work on the conversion and the copywriting side showed me how critical it was to really understand the voice and the language of the customer and also demonstrated to me You know, there was this growing because what I was exposed to so much, I was doing a lot of work for software.

You know, I worked in other spaces, but a lot of it was software. And there is just this arms race where, okay, all of a sudden, like, you know, competitors can quickly copy your features. They can quickly copy your branding. They can quickly copy your style, all of these different things. But they couldn’t take away your proof.

The results that you’d earned were uniquely yours. The outcomes you’d won for clients were uniquely yours and yours to lose. And so I started to have kind of this idea, you know, I think early on, like I saw firsthand, first of all, the difference that it made when you had proof versus when you didn’t, how much harder a copywriter would have to work to try to bridge the gap when we really didn’t have any stories or outside proof to point to yet. And it was a constant, constant refrain. “You need to go get some more proof. You need to get some testimonials. You need to get some case studies.” I had wrapped up a project for WP Engine doing some of their core site and it had gone well. Someone on their board came to me and it was kind of, this was the catalyst really said to me, Hey, I advise this little company called Pingboard.

They’re trying to get a customer story done. Is that something you can do? And to that point, you know, I’d been exposed to a lot of customer proof. I’d Captured some through surveys, things like that. But I hadn’t actually taken on the end to end process of creating a case study. And so in the interest of learning, I said, yeah, sure.

You know, I’ll give it a go. And I did a lot of research. You know, I, I tend to just bias towards like over complication. I want to, I want to have all the information before I do anything. And so I did a lot of competitive research. I looked at what was out there. I was not impressed. Most stories were boring.

They were dry. They were self serving. And then I looked at, okay, well, what does it take to get this done? And I saw, well, there’s a ton of moving pieces here. We have to get the customer involved. We have to interview them. We have to capture it. We have to get approval. We have to manage that entire process.

And so it was kind of through doing that initial project that I thought, okay, well, there’s a massive, everybody needs proof. Every single company I’ve ever worked with. Needs proof and does better when it’s there. It’s hard to do and it’s hard to do well as evidenced by the fact that there’s so much bad proof out there or none at all.

The last piece was there is a repeatable process. I saw, even though it’s complicated, you know, there’s a lot to this. There are steps you’ll go through every single time. There are disciplines you’ll, you’ll use every single time.

And we’ll say, well, surely somebody’s kind of planted the flag and said, this is all we do. We do it really well. And that was the aha moment because nobody had. There was Casey Hibbard. She’s sort of the queen bee of customer stories. And she was definitely there first, but beyond that, there was, it was just one more thing that agencies tried to do, but obviously not well.

So I thought, well, could I build a specialized team that just, focuses on this? And that was sort of the advent of Case Study Buddy. We learned a ton as we went, but it really did start, as you kind of alluded to, in the recognition that, yeah, okay, I can write the best sales page on the planet, but the customer’s always going to be better at making this believable.

They’re always going to be more compelling with their sales pitch, you know, than even the best copywriter on the planet. You know, we’re, we’re kind of like those those fish, you know, where they have like the little symbiote fish that attach to them and like go around. Like we need each other. We, we, we really can’t function without each other.

We need proof. And, and so, yeah, it, that’s where it reallyall began.

Joel Benge: Yeah. In, in the card game that I use with, with my my workshops, I have a card called the Testimonial, which is like, you know, talking about yourself is weird. And at, at some point, it’s, It’s just not believable anymore but anything that you can get somebody else to say about you is automatically worth like 10 times more than things that you could say yourself, even if you used almost the same words.

Why is that? Do you have a, do you have a suspicion? Maybe we’re delving into psychology a little bit.

Joel Klettke: As an example to, it’ll be immediately obvious when I give this example, every company on the planet in the services space makes some claim to the degree of, we really care about our customers. Everybody and anybody can say that. There, there’s no, you know, like. There’s no barrier to entry on claims you can make.

You can say anything, but when someone else is saying it, when someone is sticking their neck out for you, when they’re saying that I have verifiably had an experience and found this to be true, that’s compelling. There’s a difference between saying you love your customers and your customers saying “they really looked after me.”

There’s a difference between saying will save you time and money. And a customer saying, ” I no longer have to go door to door in my office, delivering checks by hand anymore. It all happens automatically.” I mean, it’s the difference between a lived experience and an empty claim. If there’s no substantiating proof for your marketing claims, you can really say anything.

Customers know that. They know there’s no stakes . And so this proof, this substantiation of your claims, the fact that it doesn’t come from a marketer, but comes from somebody who paid money and took the risk and got the outcome.

Companies can say anything, but customers have the experience to, to back it up. People are getting more cynical, they’re getting less inclined to trust brands. And so being able to back up all of your claims with validated third parties, willing to stick their neck out for you, it makes all the difference in the world.

Joel Benge: I’m curious, I’m putting on my, my early tech founder hat now. And maybe I’m sitting here and thinking, that’s all great. But you know, I’m so early on, right? Maybe I’ve got a couple customers, maybe I’ve got a pilot running here or there, but I just don’t have the the track record or the book of work of successful projects and clients.

But I want to still begin to build towards that type of credibility. What advice or what techniques would you have to somebody who’s, who maybe they’re on their first pilot. But they want to make sure that it’s successful and turn it into a case study. What are the steps towards that?

Joel Klettke: I think first recognizing not all proof has to be a full blown case study. You know, I think we put a lot of pressure on proof to be this huge, massive thing. And truthfully, you can’t force it if it’s not there, but there’s always feedback. There’s always an opportunity to hear from customers, what they liked, what they didn’t like, how things went, how it made them feel, why they chose you.

I think the simplest thing that gets missed so often is we want to leap to an end state where we have this great big case study in these massively impressive KPIs and we forget every story with a customer has something in it that will be attractive to another prospect or lead. Every customer has some facet of their story where they took a risk, they made a decision, they found some sort of value.

It doesn’t have to be the full blown, massive proof, giant KPIs to be compelling to someone who’s thinking about this decision. And so rather than try to leap to the end state and think, how can I get a case study? The question to ask yourself instead is, how can I build a culture and a system of feedback from customers from day one?

How can I open the lines of communication from the very first day all the way through? And with Case Study Buddy, we kind of, you know, I developed this idea that I called Proactive Storytelling vs. Reactive Storytelling. What I mean by that is for most companies, even the ones with billions of dollars in revenue and all the resources in the world, customer proof is still reactive.

It’s still sales goes to marketing and says, we need a story about this, can you go find one? And they go, well, who do we have in our database? And they try to work backwards. to go, well, who had a win like this and can we get by? And it’s all in reverse. You’re racing to discover the story backwards and get approval.

And the smart companies, the best and most successful companies are doing it proactively. So for example, one of my favorite onboarding experiences I’ve ever seen, I don’t know if they still have it. I hope they do. FreshBooks used to ask you as a new user, as a new customer, what your goals were, what is it you want to accomplish?

What does a win look like for you? That data point gives them everything they need to have a meaningful conversation with you from that point forward. “How are we tracking against those KPIs you said were important to you? Have you accomplished? This mission you set out to accomplish yet, if not, why, how can we help you?”

And so I think for, for companies that are early stage, take the pressure off. It’s not, you need this case to materialize out of nowhere. What you really need to do is engineer a system of feedback. How can you, from the moment someone even becomes a lead, discover what’s motivating them, what they’re looking to achieve, why they picked you, and then continue that conversation, whether that is directly through a sales or account rep.

Whether that’s just through in app feedback, “hey, could you answer a quick question” and get a piecemeal over time? But if you’re proactively compiling this story over time, now you can turn it into whatever you need it to be, a soundbite or ultimately a big story at the end. The other side of this is realizing that not all stories are created equal.

Again, we always think that we need to have this giant transformative journey, this start to finish, you know, we were here and now we’re there. Well, it’s true that a story, a good customer story needs to have some kind of transformation. Not every story has to be finished for it to be ready to be told. So for example, one of the things I would often encourage some of the software clients with was tell implementation stories.

Just getting this thing up and live is a success. You know, don’t wait for them to have used it for three years and have these big, glowing numbers. Tell the story of a successful implementation. Tell the story of a successful kickoff. Tell the story of successful adoption by somebody’s team. Because behind all of those stories are real concerns customers will have, “will my team like this thing? You know, can we trust them to help us get going? Will they show up for us?” And all of that. So, you know, don’t put pressure on it to be more than it is. Build a system of communication and make it a cultural thing where everyone on your team owns some responsibility for actually knowing what’s going on in accounts, and you’ll be way further ahead than even the juggernauts with a thousand times the budget and resources.

Joel Benge: That just sounds like, like responsible account management, just customer success, but having a place to put it, I think is, is, is probably the challenge. Where do we collect this stuff? Because in my experience, it’s always been a scramble. We finished the project. Let’s look through the emails. “Where did they say… Did they say that? Did they say that over coffee or did they say that on a Zoom? Can we go pull that transcript?” And it becomes this, this scramble for that. I’m assuming this was sort of the, the nut and built into, into Case Study Buddy, but conceptually what other components of that story that you want to keep and capture whether that’s even just like in a Notion, in SharePoint, in a document someplace that you’re always referring back to. Is that, is that something that, that is consistent or does it change situationally?

Joel Klettke: The mechanism will change, you know, what’s, it’s kind of like a CRM. The most important CRM is the one you actually use. Like, you know, it doesn’t matter. You can pay a billion dollars for a Salesforce implementation. If nobody touches the thing, it’s not going to do what you want it to.

Putting aside the mechanism for a moment. I mean, the key things you really want to know and track about a customer. First of all, what brought them in, right? How did they find you? Why did they choose you? These are two things that are very easy to discover. And honestly, with the right reminders in place and the right accountability in place, really easy to document.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to say, Hey, how did you, how did you hear about us? And what made you choose us over competitors? And to document those things. Success criteria is another thing that if you can get it is enormously valuable because as I alluded to earlier, if you can Hold that, it can inform the rest of the conversation.

You can even see how their definition of success changes as they achieve those milestones over time. So, you know, what is it they want to achieve? I think throughout the story, you want to be tracking and keeping in touch with them on, you know, again, how are we performing against that success that you wanted to have, but also, you know, their experience of your product or your service or what that might be.

You know what are we doing, Really well, or what positive feedback do you have to share? You know, the type of things, it’s not revolution, but the type of things we set out in the customer feedback survey, where it’s just like, Hey, how are we, how are we stacking up? What do you really love about working with us?

What do you really love about this tool and, and what could change? It’s, it’s the kind of insight that again, normally, if you are responsible, you’re collecting throughout the life cycle of the engagement anyways. And then, yes, you do want to, you know, play an active role in helping them understand and track their success as well. 

I think too often we assume that they are going to know when they’re winning with our product or our service. That’s not always the case, right? They, they may, they’re not thinking about you and your tool or your service as often as you imagine that they might be. And so that’s where checking in and reminding them of, hey, you know, like, What kind of ROI are you seeing or what kind of wins are you having?

Or what can you, you know, one of my favorite questions, what can you do now or do better? Because of X service or tool, because you can surface qualitative kind of things there as well. So those things hold constant, you know, those are the milestones and markers of the relationship. I think on the mechanism front, one thing that’s really exciting for me is I know there’s a tendency right now to like just sprinkle AI on everything, but, but there is a lot of potential for some of this now to happen in the background where people don’t have to remember, for example, being able to pull, you know, exchanges out of email and put them into a timeline.

And those types of things I’m really excited about because there, there is this new sort of layer of potentially intelligent automation that will make it easier for us to be documenting these stories in real time and capturing these meaningful components and not having to, to race backwards. So I do think that is one interesting and really functional area where I do see a huge amount of value in AI, especially once it’s integrated into some of these platforms. But the mechanism is only valuable if you actually use it. And those other things I just mentioned are the things to be keeping an eye on.

Joel Benge: I think the, the human connection and taking the friction out is really, that’s, that’s never, the need for that’s never going to go away. As much as we automate and as much as we say we can just put something on rails and, and automate it. Something like, like, testimonials, case studies, customer success, it all ultimately is going to come back down to the, to the the customer’s customer.

You know, several, several people are removed upstream. What do you think is next though? So, Case Study Buddy launched, grew it sold to another company. What are you looking at next? Where do you see conversion copywriters and, and individuals, right? We say business is always about the individual, but we’re, we’re removing more of the individual out of business as, as these tools come on board.

Joel Klettke: I think broader trend outside of myself, you know, for all that I liken this whole period to like the satanic panic of like the, the 80s. Like. Everybody’s so worried that…

Joel Benge: I knew you were a headbanger, I just, I just knew you were a headbanger back to the 80s.

Joel Klettke: I mean, I was born in 87, so I missed some of it, but I think you know, there’s a lot of panic and fear and doubt around like, oh, well, will the human part of marketing still be human? And will we still need copywriters? And I can plug things into AI. And don’t get me wrong. I, I love The promise of AI.

I play with it all the time. There are so many opportunities and ways of accelerating your process and things that is good for all of the most respected people I know in the space, though, are the very first to admit that content generation is one of the worst use cases for AI. It’s, it, you know, like it’s, Andy Crestodina said AI is average information.

It’s the average of all information. You’re not going to get something radically new. And I think ultimately, you know, in, in seeing some conversations with Joanna Wiebe, who is my inspiration in the conversion copywriting space, there’s more demand for human led copywriting than ever, you know, the, the people that are still downcast, put their heads down and wondering where their jobs went.

They’re not paying attention and they’re not making changes. Like you have to go to a marketer to find an audience that, that’s really interested and excited about what they’re doing. I think there’s still an enormous amount of opportunity for people in communications in general to understand at the heart of it, you are not what you do.

You are how you think. You think people don’t hire you for what you do. They hire you for how you think. How do you solve a problem? How do you synthesize data? What process do you bring to the problem that, that makes it possible to solve it? How do you work through those very human problems? Like we talked about earlier of helping founders get out of their own way or helping teams see the whole picture or helping articulate something in a way different to the average in a way that stands out.

And so, You know, the more things change, the more things stay the same. I think companies across all levels still desperately need help articulating who they are. I think things are only getting noisier as our means of making more noise get easier and cheaper. And so that’s, you know, the industry on a whole, that’s where I see things largely going is there’s still a very human centric heart to doing this stuff well.

The tools are getting better to make those people more efficient and better at synthesizing some of these pieces of data. There’s less things we’ll have to remember to do. Like, again, if I can have a tool that automatically pulls these types of data points out of my email exchanges and compiles them so that I can tell a story with them, you know, that’s a huge win.

That’s, that’s a very positive thing. But we’re still human selling for the moment, selling to humans. You know, we AI purchasing bots going out and making all our decisions, and I don’t know how close to that we really are. 

For me personally, it’s, it’s been an interesting summer, man. I sold off Case Study Buddy, and I’m not gonna lie.

There’s a lot of stress and challenge. and just things that I loved that team. I loved that client list. I’m not sad to see it go. You know, I accomplished what I could accomplish there and, and learned a ton in the process. And so for me now, it’s been a lot of figuring out, you know, what do I want?

Where do I want to find myself? And so, you know, I, one thing I know with relative certainty is I’m almost guaranteed to be completely out of the hands on production copywriting set of things, you know, I, I can’t see myself writing websites for people for a living anymore. 

I really enjoy the strategy side of it. I really love building processes. I’m a really good catalyst. I’m really good at helping people identify opportunities and things for themselves. So, you know, what I’ve been enjoying of late is helping people kind of make the leap from, you know, these successful freelancers who want to build teams. How do I know when I can do that?

How do I make that jump? How do I avoid the landmines that, you know, I stepped on so many of them. I would have needed to be an octopus to have enough legs to get through. But I’m enjoying that side of things and, and just really I’m more open minded to what the future looks like than, than I think I ever have been.

So we’ll see.

Joel Benge: That’s awesome.

Joel Klettke: I still, yeah, still love copy. Still love messaging and positioning. Just don’t see myself doing the hands on piece of that as much as I used to.

Joel Benge: Now that you have an opportunity maybe to take the foot off the accelerator a little bit and look around, what, what are you most excited about? What, what I mean, you mentioned a couple other communicators and people that you’ve drawn inspiration from, but where else do you get your inspiration? Now we’re turning into the, the introspective personal questions.

But what, what turns you on, man? And you’re like, this is, this is an interesting place I might want to dip my toe into.

Joel Klettke: I’m really fascinated by ultra successful, small, small team businesses of all kinds. I look at what Katelyn Bourgoin, I’m sure I pronounced it wrong, but what she’s done with Why We Buy and that newsletter. And I’m, you know, I’m fascinated at the empire she’s been able to build. 

Louis Grenier and Everybody Hates Marketers, which is like probably the best name. of anything in marketing. I’m fascinated and inspired by what he’s doing there and some of the changes he’s making. You know, someone posited to me months and months ago; Dan Leffelaar . he’s an executive coach at Novus Global. They work a lot with like elite athletes and I’m fortunate to know him just on a personal level.

But I was talking about, you know, next steps and what I was going to do next. And, you know, he put it to me. He’s like, “well, what if it was easy?” Because I had this limiting mindset that anything we’re doing needs to be hard, needs to be a grind, needs to be difficult, or you’re not really earning it. And he said, “well, what would it look like if it was easy?”

And that’s kind of what intrigues me now is like, how can I take all these skills and things I’ve built up over the past decade plus and, and use them in ways that are fun. And so there’s all kinds of, I have all kinds of little pet projects and ideas.

You know, I, I have an idea for in person live events for dads, where half the event is just building connection and community with other dads, because I think a lot of us are lonely.

And the other half of the event would be bringing in like a relevant subject matter expert, whether it’s a child psychologist, a counselor, a therapist, and talk about issues that dads are facing, whether that’s dealing with stress and anxiety, whether that is being able to be patient with kids, whether that’s how little kids brains develop, and like, what are reasonable expectations to put on your kid.

You know, I’d love to start something like that. I’d love to, you know, I have a friend who’s like a Scotch connoisseur, and we’ve talked about what would it look like to do private Scotch tastings in a white collar city that has almost no Scotch options. You know, so when I say I’m more open minded to a lot of different things, like I really truly am, I think I’m looking at this combination of how can I do interesting things with really interesting people and what would it look like if it was easy?

Anything worth doing obviously takes effort, but what if it wasn’t a slog?

Joel Benge: I love that, that twist on it, which is like, I know I’m going to have to work hard, but what if I didn’t? If this were a breeze, and I was living my best life, and I could do what I wanted, what would that look like? And having that, that, what if? Which brings me back to where we started, which was, you know, you’re a multi TEDx Speaker but, but one of my favorite talks of yours is where you reveal to the world, and I don’t have the proper date on this, but at least a decade ago at one time, you were the best looking man in the world and I’m sure that does not come easy was that, was that just a, a, a fluke, an inspirational thing?

Could you just Tell us that story a little bit, very briefly.

Joel Klettke: so I was working at that agency. I was doing SEO and frankly doing it for a lot of boring things like, you know, plumbing and insurance and one day I kind of sat and went, hey, wait a second. I get paid to make stuff show up in like the biggest search engine on the planet. What is the like most interesting thing I could do for this?

I was single at the time and I, I also wanted, you know, I was like, can I find something that’d be like just a lights out example we could show clients just showing what we could do. And so I went to GoDaddy and I, I, I wondered, well, what if I could, you know, first I thought, what if I could be the best looking man in the world or sexiest man alive?

So I went to GoDaddy and bestlookingmanintheworld.com was available. And I thought, well, this is a sign I’m going to go for it. So I bought the domain and put up my picture and, and wrote up a big, you know, I think the site actually probably is still alive. You can probably

Joel Benge: I’m looking at it right now. Yeah. I’ll, I’ll put the link in the notes.

Joel Klettke: Yeah. I bought the domain. I put up a picture, wrote some things up, did the same kind of level of SEO work that I was doing for clients at the time, reached out to my SEO community, got their, you know, help getting some links and things going to that. And so for the better part of like, I want to say three to five years, whenever you would search best looking men in the world, my picture would be the number one result, which was a blessing and a curse.

It was a great example. It turned out to be something that got me a TEDx talk. It was, you know, great for party conversation and to pull it up and, you know, get a laugh. And then on the other side of things, I was like, I found out later my face was used like hundreds of times to catfish people all over the world because unscrupulous people would just search for best looking men or best looking man in the world and steal that picture and create fakes with it.

I had a hat on, I’m sure that helped, you know, helped their, their chances as they did that. But yeah, it was, Really just start as a fun experiment and I think, you know, that’s also just about, you know, what I see for myself in the future. And I think it’s more of that, like most good things that have happened to me have been a result of fun experiments, whether that was, you know, I did when I was younger, I did 30 day challenges where every month I’d pick a new challenge to try to stick to, whether that was walking every single day or eating like a celiac for a month before there was all these like gluten free options and stuff, or reading. I think I tried to read 20 books in a single month or losing 20 pounds in a month and all these different things. And like people got excited about it and started following along. I published a book by accident. So a lot of the things I’ve done have been these little creative experiments that turned into something more. And I think that’s, you know, what I’m excited to kind of get back to is just seeing what happens when it’s fun, when it’s easy.

What do some of these experiments lead to, even if it’s nothing?

Joel Benge: That’s what I always try to remind my my technical founders, which is like, why did you first get into this? What was that emotion? And I think, you know, if, if you’re an experimenter, which you, which you obviously are, that it’s the thrill of just seeing what comes of something, I think and reminding people of that often can unlock some of the greatest messaging.

I want to close just asking if you had one piece of advice just to anybody, your average John, or Jane, a developer or someone who’s like, you know, it’s not my job to talk in front of people, but every time I get up in front of somebody, I just, I don’t know what to say.

So. You know, being the best looking man in the world will open some doors, but you still have to know what to say. So, advice for just improving communication skills in general.

Joel Klettke: I think, if you can do two things. You’re already doing better than most people, which is be specific and keep it short. When we’re nervous or we don’t know what we’re saying, we tend to say a lot. And so if you can rehearse or get yourself to the point that you can be specific and keep it short, that’s your North Star, the rest, it’s not that the rest doesn’t matter, but I do believe the rest kind of falls into place.

Joel Benge: Yeah, less is definitely more.

Well, thank you so much for joining today, Joel. Again, it feels like I’m looking in a mirror. How can people connect with you if they want to learn about more about what you’ve got going on. I’ll put some links in the, in the notes, but we want to keep an eye on you, man.

Joel Klettke: Yeah, I think probably the best place is LinkedIn. I kind of, I’m pretty active there. I share, you know, a lot of what’s working for me, what I’m trying out, what I’ve learned. And I don’t always answer quickly, but I do always answer, so you can send me messages and I’m happy to chat there. Less these days, but I’m still on X.

You’ll, you’ll find, or Twitter, I still like Twitter better than X, but you’ll find more about like hockey and, and me being generally cynical about different things on, on that platform, but it’s still, it’s still one where I’m active. And for now, you know, those are the two best places until I get a new set up about whatever it is I’m doing next.

Joel Benge: Awesome. I’m really excited to see what’s happening next and and to continue chatting. And when you start doing those Scotch tastings, let me know. I will fly in.

[Musical Outtro]

Joel: 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 upcoming book, or just buy me a coffee, go to nerdthattalksgood.com/podcast. 

 Until next time, happy messaging.

 Remember, you don’t have to speak well, you only gotta learn how to talk good.