 you need to understand the problem. You got to own the problem. You got to be able to explain the problem. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast. Helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Smarter Building Materials Marketing. My name is Beth Popnikolov. And here I'm Smarter Building Materials Marketing. We believe that your online presence should be your best salesperson. And I'm excited to bring someone into the studio today who actually got us, Venvio, to reach out to them based on their ads. So they're living our actual, they are out there living our motto, which I'm excited about. Imagery is one of the main pain points that we know people in the building materials world run into. So whether you're in the installer category and having to catalog, advertise for yourself, keep track of your projects or on the manufacturer side and in desperate need of being able to showcase your product in a built environment, this is something that we talk to manufacturers and companies about all the time. So we are bringing someone on the show today who is basically on the front lines of that and working really hard to solve it. I don't know if that's too lofty for you to feel comfortable with Luke, but we're excited. We'll try to lower the bar, but we're excited to welcome Luke Hansen to the show. He is the founder and CEO of Company Cam. Luke, thanks so much for your time. Welcome to the show. Glad to be here, Beth. This, I think, is going to be a lot of fun. So yeah, we work with a lot of contractors and builders. And then I know with your stuff and marketing, like I used to run marketing at my family's roofing company. It's kind of how I got into the technology, the building technology space, let's say. And I love good marketing. Makes me really happy. And it also makes me happy to see people do bad marketing because that's like more for us, right? It's like, oh, I was telling one of our people the other day that like, I was like trying to use some app and it was really badly designed. Like it looked really pretty, but then it was impossible to use. And I was like, oh, this is painful, but it's kind of this reminder that it's like actually hard to make things good. Like it takes a lot of knowledge, a lot of work. And it's not just that like someone can wake up and be like, oh yeah, like we're not going to do something stupid because most of, I don't know, my life, it feels like it's just trying to avoid doing stupid things. We've done a lot of them in marketing, but apparently we've done some good things because we got you on Instagram. And it was our goal. This is a really long play. Yeah. So I will link the video and the show notes, but you guys have excellent video ads that do Luke and I were talking about it before the show of like, it does exactly what it should like, it gets your attention. There's enough production that you can tell someone put thought into it, but not so much production that you're like, oh, that is a very sterile dry corporate video that I was just forced to watch. I mean, it's, it hits that sweet spot and you would nail the pain point, which is so obvious and clear. So which I feel like we're giving everybody a giant teaser. So can you tell us like, what is company cam? Tell us who you are, what you do, maybe where the idea came from. So my, my dad, he wanted to be a coach. It was like sports science or something, a kind of a trainer coach. And the job market was bad. So he started a roofing company in Lincoln, Nebraska, like 1984. So I essentially work for him off and on, mostly on until I was 30, just kind of doing everything you can do at a local roofing company. And it grew a lot. No, thanks to me. Mostly my younger brother did a lot more there than I did. But we had this problem where we were trying to take pictures. It's like 2014, 2015, you know, you need to take pictures to know like what did it look like before if there's some dispute, you want to plan what you're going to do, how you're going to do it. You want to be able to use those later to show the customer what it's going to look like. I was trying to build this thing called the shingle finder on our website, because no one really knows what color of shingles they want. And you can take a little sample board out to them or something and they can set it up against their house. But I wanted it like we've done thousands of roofs. Some of these houses look kind of like yours. And if we could just allow you to kind of like easily see and imagine, like, oh, I want to look at like split level houses with white siding and see all the things that people have done there. So there's, we were trying to solve all these problems. And the key thing was like we needed to get the photos from all of our projects and get them together and organized. And this was back when people would hand you like that tiny micro SD card that you put in the bigger SD card. And then you would put that in your computer and then all the files are named like image underscore 5729. And so we tried to like do Dropbox and I couldn't get people to get them in the right folder or to remember to upload the photos. And it was just this pain. And I was like, okay, someone has solved this problem, I'm sure, because I have this problem right now. I'm going to go find it. And I looked all over for like months. I just, there was no solution that I could find to this problem. And I thought, we are doing it, but we need to make this app like it needs to exist. And so that's where company camp started was basically we're trying to take pictures, the before, during, after. And we want them automatically organized by the location because that's how contractors in general organize everything, where is the place. And we want to know who took it and when they took it. So it's just automatically all there. We can search it, we can find it. And that was where we started. And we realized pretty quickly that like getting the, once you're doing it in an app, you can deliver like a feed. It's, we call it the project feed. It's almost like an Instagram feed for your company where you're saying, Oh, Oh, nice. Adam dropped off those materials. Oh, oh no. There's rotten decking boards on this job over here. And we, we need to run those out to Jose so that he can finish. And it's like, you're just seeing all this stuff happen. And that was kind of, we almost stumbled into that, but that's by far the most important like feature is just this taking things that were disorganized and organizing them. And then taking things that like you would have to go looking for like, Oh, I want to go look at in the folder of this job and see what's there and sort of like streaming it to you. And once someone gets used to that, they don't, they don't want to go back. Like no one wants to go back to knowing less than they know now. Company cam does a lot more stuff than that now. But we've got, I think 800 million photos, we've got over 20,000 contracting and building materials distributors using company cam every day to basically capture the stuff, get it organized, kind of sync up across their company. And then like, again, tons of features on top of that, but that's like the meat and potatoes. Well, I was interesting though is like, it's so much more than imagery. And I think when we talk about imagery, it can, I can quickly get put into the like fluffy marketer box and people are like, we target like, you know, like we're a drywall manufacturer or we do like sub flooring, like imagery isn't important to us. You know, that's just like fluffy finishings and surfaces and architectural stuff. And like, that's not really for us. And you're, what you're talking about with imagery is so much more important that you, it's gone into basically QA and project site management and safety and customer service, but also just understanding the importance of like, seeing is believing. So you're right, you're, you might have insulation and that's not a beautiful product. But if you aren't able to show me what it looks like before, during and after, but your competitor is, I'm going with your competitor because that it's just simply make it a reality. No, you're, we, we like to talk about visual communication. You can take in so much from seeing something that if someone's trying to explain it to you, they're trying to tell you about it. You know, that's like these phrases, let me paint that picture for you or whatever it goes back to this, like you said, seeing is believing. And when you're out in the world, like building things, cleaning things, fixing things, you know, you're like, you're manipulating the physical world. It's not, it's like you're making a document or something, you know, like the way to communicate the most with that is with a picture, a video, something that just shows it to you. And you can have a hundred questions in your mind that it would take us 30 minutes to go through, but if we can just look at it, then we can align really quickly and have like this much more like a shared understanding. And so, you know, I was talking about capturing and getting it organized. And then the real-time element of seeing it all happening, it really goes down to this like effective communication. The fact that when, when we can all see it, then we can get on the same page way faster and we don't like, we, it just solves so many problems that you didn't know you had. And this is like a little bit into like the sales pitch territory, but you know, everyone knows they need to do marketing or that they need accounting software or things like this. No one's Googling visual communication and daily accountability for contractors. You know, they're looking for that, but it really is that people see it, they start using it, and then it really makes sense. One of our biggest customers is a big materials distributor. And they don't want to have disputes with their contractors of whether they left XYZ or where it was put. And they want to know right away. Like, so when they get a call at the office, they can be like, oh yeah, those are sitting behind the left side of the garage or whatever. And it does span across, I mean, not just roofing. So we have a lot of companies that are roofers, but you know, it's really any, anyone who goes to a job site needs this, but we try to permeate that visual communication through everything like those ads that you were talking about. We call them floaty ads. And it, but it's, it's kind of showing our app and explaining the problem and my face is kind of like bouncing around and I'm talking about it. But it, it, it like shows you the person, it shows you the, the product. It, it mean, while you're explaining the problem, but by seeing it all together, you can understand it a lot easier than if I wrote you, and I used to do this, I even sent not just cold emails, cold letters to people, like direct mail back in the day. And that, it honestly kind of worked for a time, but it would take me pages and pages to try to like paint the picture. Anyway, here I am talking about visual communication. On a podcast. I want to stop there because I feel like, first of all, I feel like in the beginning of the episode, as you're talking about imagery and organization, I'm seeing all of our listeners heads just like not along and be like, Oh yeah, this is really hard. Like this is totally a thing that's a pain for us. But you've done something pretty unique, which is you are targeting contractors with a technology to do something different than they typically do. A lot of those, a lot of people would say that's a pretty uphill battle, because contractors get, they get a bad rap and we've honestly found that they're a bit more adaptive, especially, you know, post pandemic-ish. I'm not really sure where we are in the pandemic. I don't think I can say post, but it's not not post at the same time. You get it. Anyway, especially post pandemic with the way that we've all been pushed online, like at our lump it, we're seeing significant increase in the adoption rate from contractors, but you're not a post pandemic company. So tell me what your experience has been with getting a contractor to adopt a new technology and what that conversation and journey has been like. Absolutely. So in our case, we took a process that was bad. Like you're already going out and taking pictures on your phone. Well, then what's the problem? Well, they're on your phone. They're mixing with your personal photos. You got 50 people at your company. They all got phones. So the hard part of like using the phone to take the picture or what I would call the hard part of adoption, I think was largely done. And we're saying, hey, you're already pulling out your phone to take this picture, but then everything after that is kind of a mess for you. And if you just do it with this app, then it's not a mess. And, you know, you can do XYZ, you know, photo reports and all this other stuff. You should do that. I think we're in a little better place there for that reason. And also, we're not replacing another like piece of software. Like if you're trying to get someone to directly replace what is something of a solution for them with your new solution, you got to be way better. If you want people to actually say, I'm going to stop using this and I'm going to use this, it's got to be 10 times better if it's twice as good. Heck, it's not even worth it. Am I going to get Jim to be able to use it? No, he prints the pictures off or whatever it like. So that, I think that's an advantage for us. And then the sort of connected disadvantage, like I was joking about earlier, is when it's not something that people are just automatically looking for, you know, it doesn't even fit into a category in their head of where they're ready to buy a product. You can tell me all about your product, but like seeing it, seeing it, installed, seeing happy people, seeing the difference in kind of like comparisons. There's just so many ways that you can kind of like do this visual communication well. And people will look at pictures all day. Like that's from when I was selling, I used to do sales for my dad's roofing company. And I could show up at your house and you don't know whether how you want the chimney flashing done or whether you like your gutter apron this way or that way. But if I show you two pictures, you can be like, oh, I like that. And you don't have to know anything about anything to be able to tell the difference between old and dirty and disgusting and nice and new and clean. And everyone can just see it. We have all these opinions about things that we can see that we couldn't even explain why we think them. And so sorry, I'm on this big rambling tangent, but that just seeing things is so, so crucial. Well, I think you're saying a couple of different things, which is one is the importance of immediately highlighting the pain that a contractor experiences or really any audience or customer segment experiences and how significant the solution is. If I'm a contractor, especially if I'm the owner of my contracting business, this is a thing that is it's a pain on a regular basis. I'm wasting my time following up with my guys, getting questions from homeowners, you know, just feeling this burden of like, what if you accidentally send some of your personal images to the homeowner or to the admin or into our Dropbox, if I'm even getting you to use it like really highlighting the pain. But then the other thing that you started talking about is homeowners, which we talked about all the time is homeowners, God bless them are so gung-ho about their projects these days, even if it's if they're hiring someone to do the install for them or complete the project for them. We know that they want to have basically as much education as though they were going to do the install themselves. And they're like kitchen, great, what do I need to know cabinets, floors, things done, right? And then you get into all this other stuff. And then you go to the exterior, homeowners have never heard the word flashing in their entire life. They don't know that a gutter has an apron. These are things that they've never even thought about. And now they're having to make decisions that frankly are highly aesthetic. So they do care or highly impact the performance. So they don't care, but maybe they will after it rains, right? Like they're having to make micro decisions and being able to have that conversation up front and give a really simple visual way to get them like step by step through your actual products, kind of like the doctor, like the eye doctor, like is one better or two better, two is better, great. Based on two is three better or four better, four is better is great. Like here's your end product. And just knowing that you have that builds confidence and again, doing it visually gives me more confidence that you've done this before you've answered this question before this house looks like my house that roof looks like my roof. It has pitches and evil eagles, gables, whatever the roofing word is, like gables and eaves. Yes, you're on it. You've said more roofing terms than you have any right to know. So a weird amount of vocab about very specific things. You need to understand the problem. You got to own the problem. You got to be able to explain the problem. If they feel like you understand the problem better than the next person, that puts you way up here in that trust category. And when you were ticking off your fingers there, not that anyone else could see that, but I did. You're really articulating like building trust with the customer. So showing them the work like that visual element builds trust, being able to really articulate the problem or the frustrations that they might even be anticipating, that builds trust. And then you talked about kind of the education. And there's almost no end when you can be the one to teach them. They are going to trust you or they're going to be building trust in you. And the entire game is about trust. Like they want to trust that the product is going to work. They want to trust that they're being charged fairly. They want to trust that you're going to show up on time. It's a series of I'm trying to figure out in a sense who I can trust. And you've got all these angles on which to build that trust. And if you can touch, I don't know, I should probably count them up again. But if you can, between the problem, between the sort of proof, the visual elements, between the education, if you can be building trust in all of those areas, people, they just will want to buy from you. They'll tell all their friends. They feel smart. Everyone loves to talk about things that make them sound smart 100 times out of 100. If someone buys your product and they feel smart because they did, they're going to tell like six people. Well, I think the other thing you mentioned previously is owning how much better it has to be. Half a half a percent better, probably not enough. It's not worth my time to change my process, buy all new materials, train all my team. But if it's 10 times better, it's 100 times better. It's 300 times faster, stronger, whatever. I mean, now, now we're talking. And I think that's, that's also like, it feels like respectful of the contractor. Like, these are seasoned professionals, man, who are, it's just like day in, day out, blood, sweat and tears doing, having to be a million people at once. And if don't bring to the table, hey, this is five percent faster than your current solution. You literally took my five percent by having that conversation with me. It's now equal. Yeah, you are trying to make something, and then you're trying to offer it to people and, and explain the value of it, why it's better, you know, that teach the problem, et cetera. And the ones that like really seem to kind of knock it out of the park are, it's not like they're looking at the market and going, we can do it five percent better. Like those companies are probably gone. It's the ones who are saying, hold on, I'm stepping back. And there's a kind of a bigger question to be asked here. Like, why do, does no one do this this way or whatever? And I mean, when we started our company, it was around, okay, we have this, we need to take these photos. We need them organized by location. We're all carrying around like super computers in our pockets with GPS and cameras bolted to them. Like why, why not solve the problem almost like at a like a level higher up? And that's, there's so many big, big opportunities up there. I actually love that. I think that's brilliant. It's the worst at one in like the micro millimeters, but it's the, it's the 30,000 foot view that's like, so much of this is broken for so many people. Let's tell them how broken it is and give them a solution at the same time. That's, that's some game-changing stuff. Hey, can I flip this around and ask you a question? Oh yeah, sure. Okay, here we are. This is my podcast. I'm Luke at Company Cam. We've got Beth. Delighted to be here. You work with a lot of manufacturers. There's a question of targeting like the sort of contractor or the homeowner in the marketing of a product that like a contractor has to install. And I'm sure that this is not a new question that there's probably lots of angles here. Are you seeing that the marketing, the same type of marketing is like, is it converging where the same type of things work for both the homeowner and the contractor or are you seeing, I'm sorry, well, I'll say the contractor, that you're really doing two wildly different things. Like how do you look at that when you're doing this for your customers? Oh, okay. That's a great question. So first, if you are my client, this is how I would start. On average, most building material companies target somewhere between four to six different audiences because you've got contractors, installers, homeowners, dealers, or distributors, builders. Some people, it's even like building owners, facility managers, developers, right? Like, and all of them play an intricate part in your customer journey. And all of them have the opportunity to disrupt the buyer journey for any of the other ones. And it's sometimes difficult to understand. And it can be completely different for this one. This is like, building owner called it, it's happening, get over it. This is like, architect put it in the spec, contractor flipped the spec because he's never used that product before. Builder was like, I'm not finding a new contractor, so we're not using what architect has, right? There's so many time opportunities for disruption. So I have this, we have this conversation all the time, because what most people do is they feel like, well, then we have to have a fractured message for everybody, because we have to tell everybody exactly what we're going to do exactly for them. The truth is, there's almost always a singular underlying thing that everybody wants. So let's say if it's an aesthetic thing, a contractor is often, if you're doing an aesthetic install, you're closer to like a carpenter artist installer. You want your work to look really good, because I want you to tell your neighbors who installed your work so that when they want something that looks really good, they call me and they ask me. We also know that homeowners ask contractors. Contractors, they're often the tiebreaker. Now, that's not playing field is getting a little bit more even, but then starting to become uneven again, because millennials are these, someone has solved this, let me ask the pro, like that's the millennial in you that went to the internet and was like, I have a problem. I'm not a professional in this. I know, let me go find a professional, like our generation loves professionals. Every other generation felt like they had to know the most in the room. Millennial generation loves to be the person that's like, I don't know anything, but I'd love to pay someone who knows it, right? So millennial homeowners are happy to ask a contractor who's installed tile 75,000 times and say like, hey, am I going to hate this mermaid tile in a year? Is subway tile going out? Joanna Gaines told me that shipwrap was great, but now nobody likes her anymore, right? Like they really depend on contractors, but contractors know it's got to look good. It's got to perform really well. They're not going to remember the name about shipwrap because it's a commodity. They're going to remember my name because I installed it because they called me because my name is on the bill. So like we all have that underlying outcome. And it's the same. And if it's a non-aesthetic, then that contractor has to sell. What is it? You know, is it our value? Is it energy savings? Is it, you know, it's going to make it less likely to leak or keep things safer? Like whatever, like they wanted to give you a safe product. The homeowner wants a safe thing. So you, you want, you have that, that common denominator that you just need really hard into. It's more about finding that core important thing. The idea that there's some, there's some kind of core element that actually aligns that, that, that, that set of people or not, maybe not aligns, but the, the, either decision maker or the, the kind of like most important element. If you can get that across, that can be the thing that kind of that pushes it through versus if it's like this big splintered message. And I'm saying like, Oh, building owner, this is going to last for 50 years. Oh, customer, it's beautiful. Oh, contractor, it's super easy to install. This connects to something I feel like I say around here a lot, which is that it's actually often better to be good, to be different than it is to be better, which is that you just have to have an identity that people can understand and remember. And people cannot remember your six different traits. No, you beat the same drum. And that's where like, so I think fracture messaging is kind of the cheap seats in marketing, because everybody does have a little bit of a different need. But if you take the time to push in one layer further, or like, you know, even ask the five why is the what do they really all want? I've done I've been doing this for 10 years, I have yet to come to a significant stopping point of like, hold up, no one cares about this. No one, but everybody, you know, like, half of us care about a and half of us care about B, what do we do? I'm telling you, like, I've never come to that point of like, it's so what vastly different from customer A to customer B segment that we have to have two messages. If we if we get there, I'm like, then we haven't asked the right questions that we need to go back because we're all we all build the same buildings and homes that we live in that we function in that we're going to do over and over again. It had like, there is all almost always that common denominator that we all want to have this same outcome. Okay, sorry, this question to my podcast, then I'll hand it back over to you. Sometimes when you have to choose an identity, you have to land on that thing that can be maybe more specific to maybe a customer segment or the idea that it may not be for everyone, right? Like your inclination is to say, this is for everyone. Everyone wants this. Well, okay, maybe everyone doesn't value shininess versus price versus ease of installation or whatever the idea that like, actually, it's not for everyone, almost certainly. When you have clients that kind of come to you, is that a battle that you find yourself either fighting or almost like coaching around of like, this is this this idea of like, it's for everyone versus no, we're gonna kind of hone in on this core thing. And we're gonna really, really market this to these people who it's like really, really made for. Yeah, so phase one of when you really start to dig into marketing is you typically what helps us with that is budget. You want to be your everything to everybody all of the time. Great, that's going to be 70 bajillion dollars in order to hit all of those channels over not every, but you don't have 70 bajillion dollars. No problem. Let's talk about what are the best case scenarios? Like where do you where do you absolutely crush it? And you are 100 times better than your competitor in what type of an environment? And what's the result that you can deliver? That's really, really significant and impactful and show stopping. Let's start there. You know, so that's one. The other thing is that we typically that helps with that conversation is the experience that we all have with looking at reviews. If you read a review, let's just think about like vitamin supplements. If you read, if you're looking for a vitamin supplement, you know, like we just want like a daily vitamin supplement because, you know, we're like getting into like a little bit later 30s. I don't know about you, Luca, like little later 30s. So I'm like, I should probably like, right, take some vitamin supplements or whatever. Like, let me just like be healthy to that. Like when I drink three bottles of wine during the week or whatever, like I don't feel so bad for myself. Okay. So if I read a vitamin supplement review, and it's like, it makes your hair grow and it makes you lose weight. You have more energy and you sleep better and it cures cancer and it makes you tan and fat, like thinny, thinny, makes you tan and thin and faster and smarter and better and like makes you richer, right? Like you read that and you're like, I don't think so. But if you read something and you're like, Hey, if you are 37 and a female and work really hard and use your brain all the time, like this is going to help your brain work better. I'm like, okay, now we're talking. And then I go look at the reviews and the reviews are like, this is great. This is great. This is great. This sucked. This is great. This is great. This is great. This sucked review actually gives credence to the positive reviews. There's data to show that if like one or two negative reviews actually make your positive reviews more believable. Because people are skeptics. So if I write, you've looked at products where it's all positive reviews and you're like, no chance, just no chance that you liked everything, that everything is good. That's either like sponsors or fake or whatever. But if you have like one or two people are in there are like, I don't know, it's like a two or three star for me. You're like, okay, I now believe all of the five stars more. Well, if you think of 20 people that you know, one of them is a misanthrope, like always upset about everything, you know, like, yeah, it's just like, you know that that's real. And if you don't see that manifested on the page, then you're like, okay, they just, it just happened to be that the angry people on the internet have never tried daily vitamins or whatever. It's like, now they definitely have. So something's fishy here. Yeah. No, you're so you're totally right. Okay, Beth, it's your show again. Thanks for letting me flip the tables. Okay, so I'm going to ask you one more question before we let you go, Luke. If you could give someone one piece of advice who wants to win over homeowners or distributors and get them to and wants to win their business, what's one thing you would tell them? I would say build trust. Think about building trust by understanding what they value. So we apply our values to other people all the time. Oh, I care about things that are beautiful. So my immediate assumption is like, I'm going to tell you about how beautiful this thing is or whatever. And that it's kind of like sales tactic, but that element of sort of listening, understanding what they value, which I think is what you were talking about earlier, and then knowing that this decision will be based around trust that that is the fundamental element here. It's not about how much money it costs, it's about on the angles of which they value, do they trust you? And if they trust you around the value, then they're going to be a customer sign up, install your product, and you've got to you've got to build that trust. That's good. I love it. Luke, thank you so much for your time. If any of our listeners want to reach out, get in touch, learn more about Company Cam, what would be the best way for them to do that? Absolutely. So we are at Company Cam everywhere. I think on Instagram we're at Company Cam app. I think I just lost the password to the original one. We're not second comers, but my email is just luke at companycam.com. Hey, we partner with tons of manufacturers and all sorts of stuff. So feel free to hit me up for anything. I read my emails. I even sometimes respond. No, seriously though, we're available. We'd love to hear from you. And Beth, thank you so much. This was really wonderful. Yeah, thank you for your time. We appreciate it. And for our listeners, if you want more great content like this, head to benvio.com slash subscribe until next time. Thanks, everyone.