 In countries like this, you have an advanced infrastructure. And the benefit of that infrastructure is that you don't have to worry about spinning up satellites in order to have regular cell service. Your mobile service works because infrastructure is here. But imagine you went somewhere else. Imagine you went to Brazil and they didn't have the same infrastructure. What they would have to do is spend an incredible amount of money to shoot up satellites into low earth orbits. These are Leo satellites and what they do is provide the infrastructure for cellular and mobile telecommunications. It costs a lot of money to build one and a lot of money to get one into space. Does that make sense? You with me? Okay. So years ago, a company decided that they were going to take mobile service into a country like Brazil. We're going to say a country like Brazil because if I tell you the details, I might get put in jail. But they did all the work. They sent salespeople into Brazil. They put up billboards that announced that mobile was coming. They rented out, they signed leases to have little shops, retail places, where they could sign contracts and get people to join a plan that was coming. They let people start looking at the devices and putting their names down to register and everything started going. And then they took the satellite and they shot it into space. On the day that they announced they were going live, an executive for that company was traveling in Mexico. His satellite phone beeped and he said, we don't have satellite signal in Mexico. So he picked up the phone and he dialed the home office. And as he talked to the home office, he said, I'm calling you on the satellite phone, when did we get signal in Mexico? And they said, we don't have signal in Mexico. Now at the exact same time, teams deployed throughout Brazil or a country like it had no signal at all, at all. Now this is going to sound crazy to you, but it turns out that when you build a satellite, if you put the right panel on the left side and the left panel on the right side, you change where you have signal and coverage. And I'm not lying to you, this happened. So the company had to send a massive amount of people to Mexico to buy billboards and rent leases and to start signing up customers because they were live in Mexico. And then they had to tell the people in a country like Brazil that it was going to be a delay. I'm not joking, this really happened. And you're thinking, Chris, I know that you tell stories, but what the hell does that have to do with what we're talking about here? I understand. In case you don't know, if you don't know me, I'm a guy who, among many things, has worked with a lot of different WordPress companies. I've worked with a lot of different product companies because over the last 21 years, I've been a product guy. And so for the last several years, I've worked with companies you've heard of, hopefully, and helped them think through product, product marketing, go to market strategies. And what I want to spend the time we have today, I want to spend our time talking about some lessons learned that you could learn without hiring me. You could learn for free today. Does that sound good? Who likes free? Yeah? Yeah. So lesson number one. And the reason I told you this satellite story is because I know this is not you. OK, let's all agree that you are brilliant people. But there are other people not here, probably the guys sitting in the other room, and you know that they spend an inordinate amount of time designing, architecting, and building software. Oh, they have meetings. They have project plans. They have meetings about project plans. And they put together all sorts of energy to develop the right code. How many of you have ever been in a meeting where someone wants to add another feature? The rest of you are liars. We're all in those meetings. Another feature, and then another feature, and then another feature. We have meetings upon meetings about how to build software. And then when it comes to launching the product, it's almost like we're that mobile team who suddenly gets surprised that, oh my god, we have to launch this thing. And then we're rushing at the last minute selling cellular in Mexico because we're shocked that we have to do something called marketing. And so we rush. We spin up a landing page. We spin up a website. We do something. We put some copy there. We put a grid of pricing. And we just hope that it'll work. If you know me, and if you don't know me, this is a welcome to me. Hope is a wonderful thing to have. Hope is a beautiful thing. We can't live in this world without hope. But hope is not a strategy. You don't get to the last minute when you're getting ready to launch a product and decide at that moment, oh, what are we going to do? Let's go, we'll buy some ads. Can we do this Facebook thing? Let's create a landing page. OK, let's go sign up for a course to learn about landing pages so that we can write the right landing page. And then let's launch and let's send it out on Twitter and let's hope that everything works out. And hope doesn't pay the bills. Hope is not a strategy. And so lesson number one is that you need to spend as much time, as much energy, as much effort in the plan around your marketing as you do the plan around your development. Does that make sense? I hope you're sitting next to someone that you can nudge with your elbow right now and be like, yeah, see what he just said, right? I hope you're sitting next to the right person. But if not, we're recording this. And so you can just take a little snippet and send it to them and say, hey, this is a message just for you. Because the reality is you don't want your marketing to be a last minute, oh my god, what do we do thing? Now you may think, OK, but Chris, this really only focuses on product people. What if we're not product people? But the reality is this applies to whether you're a blogger who's doing affiliate stuff, or whether you're an event manager, or whether you're a product person, whether you're services, how you talk about yourselves, how you're going to get the message out, how you're going to woo an audience, all of that takes planning. And if you're not investing your time and energy in that, in the same way that you're investing in the rest of your engineering focus, it's suboptimal. I was about to say you're doing it wrong, but we're not supposed to say you're doing it wrong. So I have a new one, which is just suboptimal. It doesn't feel like I just smacked you in the head. It just feels more like, OK, I guess we could be suboptimal. You don't want to be suboptimal. You want to invest in doing it right. Does that make sense? These are my friends over at Ninja Forms. How many of you have ever tried Ninja Forms? Cool. They're coming out with a new version, version 3. I have no idea version 3 is going to be awesome, but you know what I know? That for the first 20 days of January, they wrote one email after another helping people understand what version 3 was going to be about. They created a content plan for how they were going to educate not only customers, but prospects on what this new version was all about. They had to figure out what their main message was. They had to figure out what the story components were. And story is critical because you have to tell a compelling story. And you don't tell a compelling story by chance. How many of you have a friend who doesn't know how to tell a good joke? If they're sitting next to you, don't raise your hand. But you know there's some people who start trying to tell the joke. And as they're starting to tell the joke, they forget which parts of the punchline. So they release the punchline as part of the joke. And then they're like, oh, but I know. And you're like, why are you talking? Stop. You're good at other things. Don't tell jokes. You will not craft the perfect and compelling story by chance. It just doesn't happen that way. You're going to have to plan. You're going to have to sit down and put together a strategy. Put down the themes. Make sure you understand who you're talking to and what's important to them. And you're going to have to spend time doing that way before you launch. And that's what I love about the guys at Ninja Forms. Because they decided, well, the code is pretty much done. But we need to woo our audience. We need to bring them in. We need to get them as excited and to get them telling our story to others. We need to do that. So they're going to spend the first 20 days of January getting our audience ready. Do you know how we know this works? How many of you have ever been to the movies? That's good. When I talk to only developers, no hands go up. So I can tell you're more than just engineers. That's good news. Some of you have weekend lives and such. Well, you go to the movies. If you go a little early, you know what happens? They play trailers, right? Previews. And how many of you have ever seen a preview and said, oh, we have to go see that movie? Right? Yeah. How many of you realize, after you saw the movie, that the preview was the best part of the movie and you wasted your time? I hate that. I hate that. I'm like, oh my god. I should have just watched the preview and been done. But my point is this, the work of the trailer and all the effort related to the trailer is meant to pull you in. It's meant for you to say, ah, this title, this actor, this story, that's compelling. We need to go see it. So a month later or two months later, what happens? The movie is announced that it's available. You remember the title, you remember the actors, you remember the trailer, and you buy tickets. And you hope it's good. But the trailer has done its part. When you plan your marketing, when you plan your launch, when you plan how you communicate with customers and prospects, you're creating a trailer. It won't be perfect on your first try. You're going to have to invest. Make sense? All right. If you know who I am, you know that I love telling stories. It's about the only thing I do well. I can't tell you how important storytelling is. I can tell you how essential it is. And there are some people who are better at telling stories than others. There are some people who it looks like. It's just more natural. But some of the best storytellers actually spend a lot of time preparing so that it looks smooth and easy. That's the notion of a good storyteller. It makes it look like they're just comfortable and easy. But it takes work. And you want to spend that time telling a story. How many of you have ever gone to a website and you get to the landing page or you get to the home page and it's a list of all their features and you've said to yourself, my God, where have you been my whole life? I've needed this. I'm ready to buy. Yeah, there's always one in the crowd. We don't do that because it doesn't speak to anything interesting or compelling. Yet when we get to a website, when we get to a page where it highlights challenges, where it suggests what the end result might be, when it moves us through a journey, oh, then we go, oh, that is the problem I have. That is the solution I need. Where can I buy? The reality is how many of you have ever seen Star Wars? Okay, so I don't have to do a lot of background here. There's a guy named Luke. Luke is the protagonist. Luke is the main character. And we discover that Luke needs training to become a Jedi. And so Luke meets Yoda, a short green fellow who's a little bit old and a little bit odd. Yoda teaches Luke. With me so far, most people, when they write their websites, act like they're Luke. Most of us, when we tell the story of our products or our services, we pound our chests like we're Luke. I'm the main hero of this story. You're here at my page. You're here to buy my essential and incredible product. This is my awesomeness. We're going to pause the Luke and Yoda story for just a second. How many of you have ever been to a cocktail party or hung out at a bar? That's right, all of you. There's two kinds of people at the cocktail party, two kinds of people at the bar, right? There's the one that talks about himself, nonstop. And the one who, as your chatting says, oh, you know what you're doing? You could really use, it would be great if you met this person. Or I would love to introduce you to this other person. They're helping people. And the helper gets more and more people in his crowd and the boaster gets virtually nobody, right? Eventually, everybody goes to the host and says, why did you invite them? Most of the lessons I apply when I work with companies come out of the context of a cocktail party. I basically tell them, if you wouldn't do it at a cocktail party, don't do it at business. Because the reality is, if you show up to a cocktail party or you show up to the bar, and all you do is talk about yourselves, it doesn't go well for you. And yet, that's what we do on websites. We set up the page, and we boast all about ourselves. We are the best, fastest, most amazing product you've ever seen and you've ever needed in your whole life, and we will do it all for free for $9. How come I can't be scalable? I can't run this business. You're like, you priced it wrong. Because we're Luke, we need to be Yoda. The main actor in the story we're telling is the customer that comes to the site. They're the hero. You're the guide. They're Luke, you're Yoda. And your job, when they get to that page, your job is to tell them the story the same way that Luke didn't know the story. Luke didn't have a backstory or understanding. Obi-Wan had to explain. Yoda had to encourage, guide, coach, and counsel for Luke to get to the end and win if you learn to tell a story as Yoda, as a coach, as a counselor, as someone who comes alongside your customers and equips them so they can be the hero. Then you're telling a story that people listen to. Then you're telling a story where people can see themselves as the hero of that narrative. Does that make sense? So the next time you go into a meeting and you're talking with your marketing department, you just look at them and say, we need to be Yoda, not Luke. And they're going to look at you like you lost your mind. They're like, no, Chris Thama told us. We have to be Yoda. My friends over at Wu Themes, I met with some of their marketing folks a couple of years ago. And they said, we're having a problem. The gal who is in charge of their website, and particularly the blog, so we're having a marketing problem. And we're just not getting enough traction. We're not getting enough people commenting. We're not getting enough movement. We're not getting enough shares of our blog. And I said, can I be honest with you? The truth is I had no plan B if she said no. I don't know how to be dishonest. I'm just like, look, I'm going to tell you the truth. I'm like, your blog reads like release notes. How many of you have ever gone to a product's website and the blog is the announcement of the new features in the new release? And below that, it's the next post about the latest release before that with its features. And below that, it's the articulation. I'll just wait, because you've all been there. Yeah, see? Those are release notes. That's not a blog. You're not telling a story there. And so we sat down. We were having dinner in San Francisco. And as we were talking, I said, look, you should be telling the story of your customers. You should be making them the hero. You should be telling the world how they're succeeding. The fact that they're doing it with your product is an ancillary benefit, but one that will serve you in the long run. Fundamentally, what I call this is outside-in marketing rather than inside-out marketing. Inside-out marketing we're all comfortable with, right? Inside-out marketing, it's like, what do we do well? We have these great features. Great, tell the world about it. That starts from the inside, and we push it out. And we don't care if people care. We just assume they do. We assume that they want the features we spent time coding for them. That's inside-out. And it's not a compelling story. Outside-in means we start with where they're at. We start with an understanding of their pain, their struggle, their challenge, and we come alongside them to help. And we match them to, ultimately, what we're doing. Now, you've probably heard at some seminar or in some book, someone say, don't sell features, sell benefits. And that's good. It's better advice than selling features, for sure. But I'll tell you, you'll do one better if you sell the destination. Chris, what the hell is that? What does it mean you're selling the destination? What the guys at Wu understood is that when they started telling the story of their customers, when they started telling their customers and prospects how to do something and show them how easy it was, people started seeing themselves in the story and they started seeing themselves at the final result. And when they saw themselves at the result and they discovered that it wasn't a lot of work to get there, they got excited. The difference in their blog is amazing, right? Wu Framework 6, what to expect, Extending Canvas, to suddenly a post that says the features every great product page should have. This new post is specifically saying, I want to educate. I want to equip. I want to show you how easy it is to do some of these things. And when people say, oh, I see what the destination is. I see what's possible. I see the result. And it's not that hard. Then they go, OK, we should do this. And the conversation normally that happens as a result of this second post is that people talk to each other and say, hey, did you read that post? Did you see it? Can we do that on our site? And they act because when you tell the story right, you make a destination that previously felt unreachable and suddenly become inside the frame very accessible to them. That's why we have to get good at storytelling. Because at the end of the day, if people don't buy what we're selling, we have nothing to do. If none of us went to any movie, they'd stop making movies. Because the underlying notion isn't just, let's tell a good story. Let's put a lot of visual effects. Underlying notion is we have to make a profit. And most of you, even if you're working in a nonprofit, have to generate enough revenue to exist. And so it's in my top five. You have to get good at telling a story. You have to do the work. You have to learn. Because if you keep doing inside out marketing and inside out messaging, the result is people will move on. And the crazy thing about the WordPress ecosystem is the next guy is going to come out with the next plug-in just like yours or the next service just like yours, the next feature host just like yours. And if you can't differentiate, if you can't tell a compelling story, it's game over. That make sense? I have to confess something to you. I'm trying very difficult, very in a most sincere and committed way to do something very difficult, which is to become the most spoiled person I can be. I want to stay in very nice hotels. I want to wear very nice shoes. I want to own wonderful watches, great pens, and a beautiful car. I couldn't do this when I was younger. Now I can. So when I was younger, I didn't really understand segmentation. Because the way I thought about the world was a hotel room is a hotel room. You pay for four walls, a roof, and you're done. If it has a bed, you're good. And over time, so I've gotten older, I realized, no, I want to be a little spoiled. I want a nice hotel. And it turns out that four walls and a roof can cost something in the US where I'm from. It can cost something as inexpensive as $29 or as much as $700. And I think there's rooms that are even more expensive, but they won't tell me about them. Can you imagine four walls, roof, door, bed, bathroom? $29, $700, what's going on here? I feel like this is, when I was young, I'm like, no, just put me in the $29 room. Now I'm like, no, I'm sorry. Do they not have a nice hotel in that city? Then I cannot speak at their word camp. I'm kidding a little bit. I stay in normal hotels. But the reality is, there's a huge difference at a nice hotel. How many of you have ever heard of the Ritz? Ritz Carlton, yeah? The Ritz analyzed its customers. I don't know if you know the term lifetime value, but the notion of lifetime value is how much money a person is going to spend with a company over the lifetime of their experience with that company. Does that make sense? The lifetime value is how much this person's going to spend. It's an average. It's an aggregate of an average, and it's a single number. A single night at the Ritz Carlton has cost me about $500 for a night. That's a lot of money. Do you know what the lifetime value of a customer is for Ritz Carlton? $250,000. Do you know what happens when you know that your average customer is going to spend over the course of their interactions with you? $250,000. Anything I want. They bring me a basket of fruit. I like pears, and I like apples, so I eat those. I don't eat the banana or the peach. The person who picks up the basket when they clean my room makes a note. Mr. Lemma likes pears and apples. When I go the second time, I get a basket of fruit. Guess what's in the basket? Apples and pears. You know what happens when you go to a $29 room? There's no basket. They don't need to take notes because there's just no basket. Like, good luck, dude. I hope the bed stays in the same place. The Ritz can afford to hire staff that can take those notes. They can afford the basket of fruit because they understand their customer. They understand the customer's value. They understand the lifetime value in that relationship, and they can invest in it. Does that make sense? And the truth is, the same dynamic happens in the automotive space. It happens in hotels. It happens with watches. It happens with pens. Do you know you can buy a bic pen for $0.90 or a Mont Blanc for $1,000? You're like, what? This is crazy. They both write with ink. I'm a fan of cigars. I like cigars. I may have lost half of you now because you think cigars are so unhealthy, but I don't inhale. Does that make it better? No? OK. So I love cigars. I did some work with a company, and they decided that as a gift at Christmas, they wanted to give me a nice cigar. So they went to a very nice place, and they said, what's your most expensive cigar? I don't recommend you do this, because you're basically signaling nothing about cigars, and you're willing to spend a lot of money. But what happened was they happened to have a very nice cigar in that place. And they basically said, we don't get most customers don't buy this cigar, but we got it. Here's the story. The leaves of the tobacco, the leaves of the cigar, are only available in the Amazon jungle, and you have to hike 25 miles in to harvest these leaves. And it's a finite set of leaves, and so there's only a certain number of cigars that can be made from these leaves. They gave me one. They spent all that money to give me a gift, because we'd done a lot of work together. I smoked it, and they said, how was it? Just between you and me? I couldn't tell the difference, but that's just between us. But segmentation happens in the cigar world, too. You can buy cigars for $6, and you can buy cigars for $200. Segmentation has nothing to do with the product. Segmentation has everything to do with customers, different customers that are willing to spend different amounts. What's really nice is you can name these segments. My friends at iThemes and I two years ago spent some time talking about these segments and said, not every customer is the same. We can group them into similar groups of people that have similar habits and similar desires and similar problems. And based on those segments, we can name them, and we can even attach them to the pricing. And so we worked on blogger, freelancer, developer, and then they added, a year later, the gold package. But when you look at these, what you notice is that people can easily self-select. They can see themselves in the grid. They can say, I'm a blogger. That's the one I should buy. Or I'm a freelancer. That's the one I should buy. They navigate directly to the path you want them to take, and they say, this is obviously for me, and they click the button. And what they've done is coordinate the features, the price, and the segment. And the moment you make a decision about which product you buy, you are also telling them something about yourself. I want you to imagine for just a second that you walked into a shoe store, you go into the shoe store, and you see four sets of shoes. They look identical. One set is only two or three euros. And you're like, that's really cheap shoe. The next one looks similar, but it's like 40 euros. The one next to it is 45 euros. And then the next one is like 400 euros. They look similar. You have to decide. There are some of you that are always going to buy the cheapest one, because you're like, it's just shoes. I don't care. There's some of you that are going to buy the most expensive one, because that's who you are. And then the rest of you are going to look at the two in the middle and go, well, no, I can afford the extra five euros. And you might buy the better one. And you notice this whole time we haven't talked about shoes. We've talked about you. When you make a purchase, you're telling me about you, not about the product. You're going to have customers that will always buy the cheapest product. They're also going to give you the most support tickets. I'm just going to let you in on that secret right now. But you're going to have people that always buy cheapest. You're always going to have some people to buy high, which is why they created the Gold Plan, because they see themselves a certain way. You need to understand how your customers see you, see themselves, and play to it. And you need to break them up so that you can talk to, with different messages, talk to where they're at, because different people interact differently. If you've ever heard of co-schedule, they let you schedule tweets and social media comments about your blog posts and such. And these guys have a great little dynamic. When you go to their page, it says, tell us about your team. Are you solo? I work with a small team. I work for a large company. When you pick something, you're telling them something about yourself. But also, if you go to their website and check it out, it changes the messaging of what they're telling you. They're tying the story they're telling to the segment that's there. Make sense? Number four, embrace the buyer's journey. Here's the reality. Most of us write all of the content on our website as if people were immediately ready to make a purchase. In a continuum from negative 10, where they've never heard of you to positive 10, where they're telling all their friends about you, we write the copy on our websites like they're at negative 0.1. They're just about ready to make a decision. But it's not true. People find themselves all over that map. How many of you have ever wanted to find an answer to a question and you haven't even known what the right words were to put into Google? Right? Like, how do I find, what do I, like, and you write a weird phrase that turns out it means something totally different and you get the lit, you're like, no, not that, not, you know. And you start again. The reality is, right, that we start being completely unaware. We can't even articulate the problem and you need to recognize that. You need to recognize that there are some people that don't even know how to stipulate what problem they have and you can help them. You can write by focusing on problems. You can write stories, checklists, Q and A, that helps people go, you're right, I do have that problem. And if you've done that, you're moving them from being unaware to being aware of the problem, at which point you focus on solutions. You can write the best ofs and comparisons and how tos and what happens. They go, okay, I not only know the problem, I'm now aware that solutions exist. I work with a company right now that is building staging sites for people who don't use managed WordPress hosts. And we sit and talk a little bit. And the reality is there's a lot of people out there that have a website that don't know what a staging site is. So they don't even need, they don't know how to type in Google staging site services. They get like, staging site doesn't mean anything to them. And so we have to do the work to say, no, hold on. You have to articulate the problem so they understand the problem. You have to articulate a solution so they start learning the vocabulary of the solution. And once you've done that, then and only then can you start talking about the product. And you notice at that point, you're gonna use different kinds of content to finally get them to the decision. Customers start at negative 10. They're completely unaware of everything. Your job is to write content and a different kind of content in different steps of the journey to move them all the way to a decision. And if all your content looks the same, right? They always be closing. By now, you're missing it. Suboptimal. It doesn't work that way. You need to help them move along a journey. And lastly, lesson number five, you should really listen to your users. I mean this in the most sincere way. I don't know if you've been to Amazon, anyone? Yeah, the rest of you are liars again. You go to Amazon and what happens? You see that 20% of the page is the product copy. 80% of the page is the comments. What do you do? You read the comments. And what do you do when you read all the positive ones? You skip them. And you get to the ones that tell you the negative and you have to decide, is this a big enough negative that I'm willing to get past it? Or is it so big that I'm not gonna get past it and I'm moving and going to another product? And that's the decision we're making constantly. But you know what all that content does? All that user-generated content? It gives us the words that our customers are using already as they're talking about things. They use words that are different than our words because let me be honest with you, we're insiders. You show up to this conference, you're already an insider. You build a product in this community, you're an insider. You've forgotten what it's like to be an outsider. You want to be an outsider, right? Go to another country where they do a whole conference in another language and sit in the chair like I did today. And you're like, oh my God, I totally do not understand French. And I'm trying. I know Marcel, like Marcel is the wapu and you're like, okay, I know Marcel. Like, I know now three words. But we forget what it's like to be outsiders. And so we use insider language and we message with insider language and you've forgotten the user. The users are outsiders. They don't know anything about your product. They don't know anything about your service. They don't know anything about anything. And when they show up, I once had a call with a client and I said this stupid thing. I said, do you want your site responsive? She said, are you kidding me? Of course I want it responsive. Like if they click a link, it should do something. Oh no, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. I said this other stupid thing. Are you gonna want sliders? She said for lunch? Because sliders can mean little hamburgers. Not a carousel-like image on the top of their homepage. We're insiders. We use insider language. We don't use outside language. We have to interact with customers so that we understand what they're talking about. Their comments are our campaign source material. We can hear them complain. We can hear them talk about the words they use, everything else. There's a company here, right? These guys at Design Palette Pro are my friends over at Reactive. And what we did is we started pouring through a lot of data, a lot of comments, a lot of support tickets in the Genesis and Studio Press forums to understand what the pain points were so that we could write, don't wanna write code to customize your Genesis theme, you don't have to. I can't tell you how many hours were spent to create a line. That line works very well for them. It's about a 400% lift on the line beforehand. Because fundamentally, this is the language of their customers. Now, the customers weren't their customers. The customers were customers of another product. They were building a product that fit in that ecosystem. But as they listened to those words, they understood the messaging. Does that make sense? My name is Chris Thamma. I'm the CTO of a company called Crowd Favorite. I blog over at christhamma.com and you can find me on Twitter at at christhamma. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chris. So hi, Chris Thamma, I thank you for your talking. I'm very happy and very proud to know you now because I never see your talking, but now I think for you, follow up on Facebook and everywhere you want to go. I have two questions for you. So my first question is, you talk about the teller story and I see on your t-shirt, clue story, bro. Does that make sense? No. How, what do you think about returning because we can make acquisition. You can get some client, but after that the most part is retention. How to make retention for a client. And another thing you talk about on customer relationships and what do you think on growth hacking? So for you is new, sorry, new fucking world know and new things that is not right, is wrong. What do you think about growth hacking? Because now many developers, many people are focusing on growth hacking. What do you think on growth hacking? Okay, so two questions. If I understood the first question is, what's my thoughts on retention, customer retention? And the second is what's my take on growth hacking? So yes and 14. I'm just kidding. So when it comes to retention, I know I sound like a broken record, storytelling is critical. So when I finish a project with a client and at Crowd Favorite we work with global 2000 companies, ABC, Disney, Lexis, big companies. And what happens, what I have to do as an executive is when we finish the project, I have to remind them of the story. I have to remind them of what we've gone through. We started very excited and then it was really crappy and then we had to climb through those handles and we had to work through stuff and we worked together and because we worked together, look at what we've achieved. And by telling that story, you're right. We should do another project with you. If I don't tell that story and maybe they only remember the last two weeks of launch, they may never come back. Because launch is hard, right? You make critical decisions and you decide what's in scope and out of scope and that's hard. And so we don't want to just remember the last two weeks, we wanna remember the whole story. So you have to be a good storyteller. And you gotta put that in your frame of reference to think about, okay, how do I keep these customers coming back for more? When it comes to growth hacking, I think that there are some things in the growth hacking community, some lessons, some technologies that are absolutely critical. I think they're fundamentally strong and worthy and we should pursue them. I think there's a whole lot of crap in there too, because the truth is, real value takes time. So someone who wants to magically get my Twitter followers from 12,000 to 80,000, I don't want it, right? Cause I just don't believe that that's the genuine approach to how I'm building relationships and rapport. That's how I'm building trust. So some parts of growth hacking, I'm not looking for a quick fix. Other parts, the discipline on collecting information and feedback and knowing how to use the right technologies to drive my message out, those are fundamental in sound and I embrace those. Thanks for asking that great question. Do we have another? Hi Chris, great presentation. What was the decision making for iThemes' goal package? It's a great question. So the notion is when you're selling products is a lifetime or an unlimited or anything like that, right? Lifetime purchase, unlimited deployments, anything like that, that in the end, there is no such thing as lifetime and unlimited because you have cost and so eventually your costs are gonna get past the revenue that came in and so it gets funky, right? Cause you're like, oh, this is unsustainable. The reality though is that if you do the math, so if you're talking about a specific product in a specific space and you do the math, you can figure out what the lifetime looks like. So you can say, oh, on average, our customers last here for three years. So if I put the price of that package at four years of revenue or three years of revenue and I accelerate my income, then this is worthwhile because most likely they'll fall off at a certain point and I won't have to support them past that. So you don't wanna rush into doing that until you've done the math, but if you do the math, it can make sense. Thank you, thanks. Thank you very much for an amazing and very inspiring talk. I'd like to begin with, I completely agree with most of everything you said. We are a web agency and the problem is we have many services that we sell and for each service we have many profiles, many different segments with needs and different pain points and each of these segments are people that are in different stages in their decision making process. So my understanding is proper. It means that we have five plus five plus five. It means we have 200 segments for which we need to create content. 200 topics that you have to write about. Yeah, how do you manage that situation where you don't know the person that is landing on your web creation website that has typed in Google website creation services and is landing on your landing page. What stage is this person in? How do I address her and how do you put storytelling and stuff like that in practice? Okay, so that's about 14 questions. Let's see if we can knock it out, right? And I'm willing to do it even though it's not clear that you agreed with everything I said but you agreed with only most of what I said. But I'm just gonna let that go. So the question is, right, if we're really doing this across a lot of services and the buyer's journey is different for each of those services and different segments that are buying that product, don't we end up with a matrix that is massive and there's tons of content that has to be created? The answer is yes. There's no getting around that. Like if you wanna sell website design and you wanna sell website development and you wanna sell application development and you wanna sell mobile development and you wanna sell SEO services, you're running five businesses. So yes, you have to do the work of five businesses. There's no shortcuts. And every time you create a shortcut, suboptimal, right? You don't wanna do that. That said, you asked a different question which is, well, what happens when someone types something into Google and they land and we don't know where they're at in their journey, right? Now, this gets into the heart of decision science, okay? And I know we didn't come here on a Friday afternoon to talk about decision science, but you have to learn how to ask what I call the single most important question. The single most important question that immediately segments your audience. So I worked with a company that did awnings, right? The covering that comes out over a porch or over the business patio and we asked one question and that was, now it took a lot of time to come up with the question, but the question was, will you need financing? Is yes or no? But the very nature of them picking yes or no segmented the audience. It told us very different things. At one point, my friends that are decision scientists worked with Fair Isaacs which are the people that created their FICO score and we worked with American Express and when we worked with American Express or when they did, I worked with FICO he worked with American Express they had to come up with one question. They discovered that if they asked what do you care more about? A high limit that doesn't revolve or a lower limit that revolves that can be carried on that simply your decision between the two they could predict what kind of FICO score you'd have. They could predict if you were a good credit or low credit and then they would make a decision based on that. You have to do the work. There's no getting around the fact that you're gonna have to ask the question but you could if someone landed if they did website creation services and they landed on a page, you could ask, right? Are you looking for this or are you looking for that or have you already prepared this or do you work with a designer? I've worked with several different companies that have different questions but what you're trying to do with that question is segment them and move them in different places. It means that you may create several different landing pages and more importantly it means that you probably want to try and write that content for different parts of the buyer's journey so that people don't just land on that generic page but they land on very specific pages. Does that make sense? Awesome, thank you. And I think that's it. There is one more over there and you're done. First I'd like to thank you for coming to Paris because I've been reading your blog for a very long time and it's been a very precious resource so thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you. And my question is about the buyer's journey that you've described. I find this is very interesting the different stages and they need to create content for each stage but what would you consider a good mix? Is it like 90% for unaware buyers or much less? What would you consider a good mix? So because you read my blog you'll understand this answer. I have a lot of friends that are software engineers that build products in the WordPress space and a lot of times they say to me something like, you know Chris, you're a really smart guy. People would know that you were smart if you wrote longer, deeper technical articles and not so much of the story crap you put on your blog. They mean it as a compliment. Like people would know how smart you are if you just did it this way. And what they don't understand is I'm writing for the buyer's journey, right? So if you spend time on the blog you'll discover I'm trying to educate people to have no idea what WordPress can do and I'm writing about specific tutorials that help them understand which product that will help them do something and I'm writing the comparisons on different products so that people know which membership plug-in is the right one to do and I'm writing across all of them and you know what? I'll tell you that my experience is it's equal. It's all across the board because if I spend too much time on that last decision point it looks like I'm sell, sell, sell all the time, right? And so I just spread it out and I just keep moving through it and they keep writing and I'm doing a little like what he was talking about, I write a lot on membership sites but I write a lot on e-commerce and then I write a lot on LMSs and so trying to do three different spaces plus multiple segments plus the buyer's journey is a lot of content and you just keep working at it. All right, I think that's it. We have another presentation coming up. Definitely, thanks a lot. A break. Thank you very much. And then we'll pause it. Thank you, Chris.