 here. Welcome to growing your creative business. Ask me anything. And thank you for joining whenever you are and wherever you are. So let's start with some quick introductions of who I am and our guest today. So I'll go first. I'm Chris, a product designer. I quit my head of design job in 2020 and started a UX education company. It's called UX Playbook. So I helped designers of all levels, whether it's building a portfolio, learning fundamental UX frameworks for any project to managing your first design team. Ideally, we take you from zero to a unicorn designer or somewhere in between, right? And today I am joined here by Lex. She's a product designer, growth hacker, and a founder. Let's get her on stage and hear more about her journey and speak to her. Hey, Lex, how you doing? Good. Thanks for giving me another shot, Chris. Absolutely fine. We love to have you here. Thanks. Appreciate that. Yeah. Why don't you give us a quick intro, Lex, and let's take it from there. Yeah. So my background is in growth for tech companies. I used to work in Silicon Valley. I worked with startups. I worked with enterprise companies and growth stage companies to help them acquire, retain, and increase purchases from their user base. I did that for 10 plus years. And then I went out on my own in 2019 doing growth design consulting. So working at the intersection of growth and design with that same audience, but more as a client-contractor relationship. And then a couple years ago, I pivoted to focusing on small business growth. So now I work with creative entrepreneurs, usually one to five person teams, and I help them build their client base. Awesome. So this is like perfect for me as selfish as this conversation. Maybe I can't wait to get it started, but I just kind of want to introduce the overall topic first. So data from the U.S. Consensus Bureau says that in 2022, 5 million new business work started. The onset of the pandemic in 2020 sort of drove this surge in new business creation, and the number of new businesses are trending up. I would argue it's actually fairly easy to start a business, like buying a domain on GoDaddy, but in my opinion, two of most difficult things about this journey is one, making it sustainable, actually having it replace your full-time job. And then two is growing that business, making it bigger and better over time. So this kind of comes to our agenda today, let's just say, which is how to grow your creative business or growing your creative business. And hopefully by the end of this live session, folks will have some takeaways of how to grow their own creative business, how to stand out in a crowded market, and channel to get leads other than social media. But of course, social media is a great one. And just quickly to make this interactive for the folks out there would love if they could drop any questions as we speak down below of this LinkedIn live so we can answer them at the end, tell end of this. And also, as we're just starting, drop where you're from, where you're tuning in, just to know that you guys are alive and we're not just speaking to the camera. Okay, so let's dive into our first topic. And this one is huge. How do you go about thinking about growing a creative business from your expertise, Lex, because I really love to hear from you here. Yeah. So let's start by talking about the difference between marketing and growth, because I think this is a big misconception that folks have, because there's now something called growth marketing, which has been popular for the last, I don't know, 10 to 15 years. And I call myself a growth marketer. But not all marketing is growth and not all growth is marketing. The difference between marketing and growth is that growth comes from within your company. So to use tech as an example, I like to use the example of TikTok. When you're a TikTok user, there's a big share button that glows on your screen and they want you to share that video with another user. That is their growth mechanism. And so it's really likely that you heard about TikTok from another user of TikTok, not from TikTok themselves. And that is because they built in viral growth mechanisms into the app. They made it really easy to share. They made it really easy to download. They put that watermark on the videos. So you know that video is from TikTok. And there's plenty of examples like this, Facebook being like, Hey, invite your friends, LinkedIn being like connect with your colleagues, hook up your address book. Those are growth mechanisms from within the apps. The same principle applies to any business. So your audience that you already have is the most valuable one. And we neglect that often. We start a business, we start a new project, and we go look for strangers. We're like out there. We're like, who can I need? And what we really need to be doing is tapping out the growth mechanisms from within our business. And that looks like referrals from existing clients and customers, reviews and testimonials, press that you can do with people who are notable. Like if you're doing design work, let's say, with notable clients, you might want to pitch press things like ad week or an industry based press. I've had clients do that. I used to pitch conference talks with clients where we would go and basically share an interactive version of our success story. If you're selling digital products, you might want to prompt people to share their experience on LinkedIn, for example, or comment on the YouTube video. So those are growth mechanisms that you want to think about. And that's where I would always recommend folks start because that's how you get off the exhausting marketing treadmill. Okay. I've tried some of these gross. Tell us about them. What have you tried? I've tried to share your experience, share your work. So for example, let's just say they have purchased my portfolio playbook, right? The idea is they want to build a kick-ass portfolio. Okay. And I help them do that. But then I never hear from them again. And I'm like, what's going on? Did you do the work or did you just buy this as mental masturbation? And so how does that work? What incentive do we have to give other folks in order to have them naturally share? I guess, are there some psychological triggers that I'm not thinking about? And how should we think about this? For someone to share something, it's going to be super meaningful to them, whether it's maybe bragging or, I don't know, social credit. Yeah. No, totally. How do you think about that? It does have to be meaningful to them. It also has to be easy. And Florianne asked also in the comments about the incentives part. I think the incentives part, it kind of depends on what the product is that they're buying and what the level of amplification is that you're asking for from them, right? Co-pitching a conference talk is much more involved than like leaving a review. So you want to be mindful of that based on the engagement that you have with your audience. I think the way to approach this is through the lens of experimentation. So as a growth marketer, I drive my business and I teach my clients how to experiment with their growth model. What I see people often doing is hooking up things like referral asks or review asks and then sort of setting and forgetting them and being like, weird, it didn't work. Back to Instagram. And so you want to give as much care to that point in your business as you give to your top of funnel marketing channels. I like to say split the effort between visibility and amplification. So it's not not work. Like you have to also do experiments around that part of your business and sort of figure out, did they do what you sold them? Like did they actually do it? If they didn't, what got in the way there? That's really like a retention play. And when I used to do product side growth, that was a big focus, right? It's like, oh, you're not actually using the product. So of course, you're not going to tell your friend if you only open TikTok one time, we've got to solve that first before you're going to tell your friend. So I think you have to dig into that in sort of a UX research way and figure out did they do the thing that they bought? What got in their way? Why didn't they share it organically? What got in the way of doing that? And are there things that I could do to make this easier? To give you a concrete example of that, there's a tool that I use called Somsama. Have you used Somsama, Chris? It's like a productivity tool. Taylor Palmer, I think also uses it in our design group. And it's like a to-do list that like helps you manage work life balance. I'm a huge fan actually use my referral code. I don't have it to give you hypothetically use my referral code. But okay, the founder has been sending an email sequence driven at referrals. And it is a it's a double incentive. So I get money and you get money if I share my link with you. And it's a really beautifully written sequence. It's really smartly written. It was very clear to me that they intentionally wrote that it wasn't just like someone tossed this into the sequence. It was like, we need to get referrals up. Our users love us. We need to give them the tools to give us better clients or customers. And so they wrote a blurb about Somsama that you can share. They gave the link. They explained the program. And they did it over several emails. And I wrote him back and I was like, Hey, how's this working? Because I think it's really beautifully written. It inspires me to look for referrals. And he was like, it's doubled referrals for us within 24 hours, this sequence. Yeah. So incentives can work. I think incentives tend to work best if people are excited about like what you're doing. And it the Dropbox incentive as an example of that, it was like share with a friend, you get more storage, right? If that's the kind of incentive that you can pull off, great. People love cash. If you're down to give them cash, people definitely love cash. And then if you're doing higher ticket stuff, you're doing four or five figure, six figure contracts, the incentives really work. If you're, you've got like a powerhouse referral partner, someone is going to connect you to multiple clients. Those folks tend to really appreciate incentives. I talked to an agency yesterday, they're doing six figure contracts. I was like, yeah, if you book a million dollar contract or seven figure contracts, actually excuse me, if you book a million dollar contract off of a connection I give you, I'd love some cash out of that. Like that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And like, how do you think about affiliates? Is that part of the growth mechanism? Yes. Yeah. Similar to referral. Yeah. So the, to me, the difference between affiliates and referrals is it's really like about what you're selling. I think of affiliates as like products, memberships, where I can give a code, like my affiliates can sign up for a program and there's like an automated code that gets generated for them. To me, that's an affiliate program. It tends to be more its scale. It implies that there's a scale to your affiliate program, your referral program. Referrals, I think of more as like high touch. If you're running like a product design consultancy, you can handle referrals without any software. People can just share the name of who they came from and you can just reach out to that person and thank them or offer an incentive should you want to. Okay. Okay. So let me put you in a difficult situation Lex. Okay. So I am a designer, let's just say I've got a few years of experience and I'm like, okay, got a few freelance clients, but it's not enough to pay the bills. I can't quit my day job. I still going to grind both things. So how do I think about like maybe I don't even have an audience. Maybe it's just folks that I used to work with. What then do I do in terms of growth of the business? How like I'm really on the beginning of this journey. What do I do? Yes. Yeah. I would still start from the audience that you have. And I think one thing that folks do in this moment exactly, I work with a lot of folks in that moment. Usually they're full time in their business, but referrals are sort of tapping out. Organic referrals are sort of tapping out and they're like, where do I drive the lever? Because I don't have an audience. I don't have like a substantial audience on any one channel. So one of the mistakes I see people make there is they think referrals have to come from their clients and they don't necessarily have to come from your clients. Referrals can certainly come from past colleagues from other jobs. They can also come from adjacent service providers. So if you know a developer, a logo brand designer, a copywriter, an SEO strategist, those folks can send referrals your way. And that is I think one of the quickest, easiest plays is to build a partner network of adjacent providers because you're building your business. They're building their business. Maybe those five clients you worked with don't need you anymore, but maybe they need a copywriter. You start sending copywriting clients their way. They're definitely going to think of you when they have design clients. And that building that network out is actually pretty like low effort because you just got to check in with those folks every once in a while. You don't even necessarily have to send them clients. You can think about this is this would be a case where I would think about incentives because they would be powerhouse referral connections for you. But that's, you know, I would still think of that as like the backside of your, I have a visual for this if you want me to share it. It's like the backside of your growth loop, right? So we think about a lot of times people think about funnels. It's like meeting people converting them. They buy something and then they go away forever. And instead we want to think we're meeting people who should stick around like who should stick around with me. And that's not just going to be clients. It's going to be connector types that you knew from past jobs. We're always networking. It's going to be friends who love LinkedIn because LinkedIn is a powerhouse set of people that you should be connecting with, right? And so you can think of those people as also your referral engine in your business. Okay. Right. You're so skeptical, Chris. No, no, no. I mean, I can give you a specific play around this. So when I left my full-time job to go out on my own, I sent an email to, I was really involved in the UX community in LA and in San Francisco. And so I sent an email to like probably 50 people that I knew who ran meetups, who were out there connecting, who were hiring managers themselves, who I knew were connected to my buyers, right? I wanted to keep working with tech companies. I just wanted to do it independently. And so I sent an email and I was like, Hey, I'm leaving my job. I'm going to do this. Here's a blur of you can forward if you know anyone who needs growth design support. These are the kind of companies I serve best. They're growth stage, they've got venture funding, they have an analytics infrastructure, they've got at least one data scientist on the team, like, you know, lay it out for them who you want to work with and what you're doing. But that email got me booked for probably a year, year and a half. Amazing. Send me that email copy. Send it. I will. I will. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the big thing is like, we don't ask. And I find that creatives, especially don't ask, because if you've been working in house, you haven't had to like advocate for yourself or you could get by without advocating for yourself. When you're a business owner, you have to be asking. You have to ask for what you need. You have to be clear about what you're doing and who you want to work with because people assume that you're busy and fine if you don't say anything. So true. So true. So I did this maybe the wrong way. So I'll give you an example. I was just basically really annoying. So I launched this design subscription agency because like everybody was doing it and I was like, how hard could it be? So classic, classic internet like, you know, dictating your life. So I jumped on the bandwagon and I was like, okay, let's do it. And I reached out to everybody I knew like literally anybody I could think of that potentially needed some design stuff. And I did that. And, you know, I got a lot of calls and we jumped on whatever. And I got my first client in 10 days, which was great. However, I executed the project and I absolutely hated it and was like, I'm not doing this again. But I don't know if I burn any bridges. I don't think I did. But like, there's a point where you can be annoying, right? There's a point where you're like, yo, so I've got this thing, right, that you might be interested in. So what's a tactful way to do this? Or is it just just kind of, I don't know, have your manners and be polite? And I thought I'd have a few times just like healthy habit. But is there something more like tactful that I could potentially not burn bridges next time I launch something? Yes, yes. So one is that I will say that like designers and creatives, especially I find like, it's very rare that y'all step over this line. So I wouldn't be too worried about annoying people. Because if you annoy someone, it's likely that they were on the periphery of your network, and that they also weren't going to buy or refer people your way. And it's just like, it's okay, like for people to, it's okay for you to be like, yeah, we're not moving, our boats are not moving in the same direction. That's fine. I wouldn't worry. I think the risk is more, I'm not asking enough, because I'm worried about annoying people just just for this crowd, especially like, we've all seen terrible sales pitches, we're all getting DMs, like cold DMs in our inboxes, like if you have a business that's registered, you're getting like mail and email, it's annoying. But I think the risk from a creative crowd is actually pretty low that you're going to annoy your audience. So that's one thing. The other thing would be to think about who genuinely would find this offer interesting. This is a mistake that I see people make in communities a lot. They'll join like networking groups, they'll join, you know, industry groups online, and then they'll just be like, here's my offer everyone, like buy my offer everyone. And it's like, yeah, you didn't bother to get to know us. You didn't target this offer at like, who's actually in this group? Like, you know, this is a group about design, why are you pitching your copywriting course? So you need to be honest with yourself about who you know, who would actually appreciate that offer or who would know people and position it that way for them. And if you're like, wow, that list is too small, that's when you're going to have to build those relationships with people who would be genuinely interested in your offer. And that's the same thing that you're going to do if you're starting a startup, right? When you're building an app, you're not just going to launch to the app store, you're going to go out and you're going to try to meet people. I used to work with, you know, companies in the Bay Area, we'd go out to Embarcadero, if any of you are in the Bay, we'd go out to Union Square, we'd talk to people, we'd be like, Hey, when was the last time you bought jeans? Oh, tell us about how challenging that was. Well, guess what, we're making a thing to fix. Jeans, are you interested? And if people are saying no to you over and over again in those conversations, and you really got to work on your pitch, you've got to find that match of like, these are the people that want to hear the thing that I'm doing. So don't just email every, like I definitely think you have to be like, these are the people that need to hear about this, right? I didn't like add my mechanic onto that email or my dentist, like it went to designers, product folks, like, be smart about it. But I wouldn't worry too much about annoying people because I think most often we don't do that enough. And in the meantime, Amazon sent them 25 emails. Right, right. Yeah. Like, we're getting outpaced by these larger corporations that are showing up in all the same channels we are. So we have to be assertive, I'll say in that space. Okay, that, that makes sense. I have a quick tangent story on your second point, which is target the right people, like present your offer to the right crowd, right? I organized this meet up, let's just say a month ago, and it was mainly for designers and creatives. And then these two dudes show up and was like, buy my soap. And I was like, what? I was like, what is this? And they're just like, no, no, here's the soap. Here's the coconut oil. And I'm like, what is going on? And I think everyone got confused because they pitched to everybody. So do not sell coconut oil and do not sell soap to designers at a design event. Selling soap to designers sounds like the perfect book title for your book, Chris. Like, it is that, and that is like, so I help organize a local meet up here in Atlanta. And I see Mark on our, on our live stream, who's also part of that. We get this all the time. People show up and they're just trying to sell to us. And I'm like, we're not your buyer. That's not the right ask. You're asked to us should be, do you know anybody who needs the thing that I'm selling rather than rather than like, buy the thing that I'm selling? And that is, that's just laziness. But you can still be a, you can give an ask to everybody, right? You can, you always can have an ask. We like to think of it this in my marketing program, we call this a call to action menu. So pick the right call to action for the audience you're in front of. It might be get on my newsletter. It might be follow me on LinkedIn. It might be, can you connect me to a buyer? Can you connect me to a press contact? You know, know your audience is the TLDR there. Okay, cool. So moving on from selling soap. How does one stand out from a crowded market? Like my example, right? I had a design subscription service that everybody had, right? Some did really well, some you never hear from, some prices super low. So you're really commoditizing what we're doing. So how does one stand out in a crowded market? I'm really interested in the subscription, the like service subscription model and how sustainable that is. Like I do know that some folks are having success with that, but I've also seen a lot of like to your point about like, I did the project, I got a project in 10 days and then I hated running it. Like, I do think that's an interesting consideration. I'm paying a lot of attention to that. Like, how is that playing out with people? To that point, though, for any of us in creative professions, there's a million of us, there's a million designers, there's a million marketers, there's a million copywriters, there's a million SEO people, graphic designers, illustrators, etc. So the way to stand out is with your own perspective. It's your own take on the work, right? And that's why contents become like, unfortunately, so important, because people need to know how you think and the way that they're going to learn that is through your writing, your videos, your interviews, your quotes in press, your books, etc. So that's really the role of content. If you're doing, like, let's say you're doing a design subscription service, the role of content is not as much about visibility, but more about conversion. Okay, Chris is doing this design subscription business. How do I know if I should work with him or this other option? Well, let me watch some of the live streams. Let me see what he's got on his site. Let me see if I like how he thinks and how he works. And then I'm going to reach out because of that. That's why I think, like, live streaming, podcasting, YouTubeing, and LinkedIn, I guess like LinkedIn content creators has become such an expediter for opportunity because those people, you found them likely in another channel, they're not necessarily coming in through that channel, but you're expediting your relationship with them by creating content there. So to me, it's about sharing your perspective on your work. If you don't want to do content really at all, you can do that on your website. So you have like a really unique take on your website, and you've got to choose your words really carefully there because you can't use generic statements that other people are using, right? Like design subscription for SaaS companies. Okay, like tell me something, like why should I work with you? Right? You want to make sure you're communicating that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's not easy. It's like, that's a thing like Jay Klaus talks about things that are like simple, but not easy. That's a simple, but not easy thing, right? Like it's a simple premise, we can all understand it, but it's actually really hard to nail. Like what is it that's unique about me? One of the ways to do that is to talk to your clients. What did you really appreciate about our project together, right? Or talk to your peers. What do you think is unique about my work? What do you like about the way that I'm sharing my take on design? What did you like about this blog post? What did you like about this podcast episode? Yeah, and I like that, like leaning in towards the folks that you previously worked with. Do you have any other sort of insight or thoughts about how does one find their own niche? Remember like, let's just say I'm running a design business. It's just like everybody's running a design business. Like what is like, why am I different? Do I like design websites for people who make soap and they send it at meetups? Like what like, you know, how do I get my niche there? You flip the soap pitch around, you're like, let me pitch you. I got your soap. Nishing is super hard. I think niching is super hard. So I would approach it maybe like an experiment and I would think about the different intersections that you have expertise in. Like so if you worked in the, I don't know, fintech industry for a long time, you have fintech expertise as an example or financial expertise. Or if you're location, if you're like really passionate about your location, I know a web designer who works primarily with businesses in Germany, which is kind of unusual for a web designer, but that's her chosen focus just to have that niche, right? And so if you're a business in Germany, you could work with any web designer technically, but you might be more attracted to a web designer that's based in Germany that works with German businesses. So you can sort of list out the things that you would have a natural inclination towards niching and you can decide what I find this interesting enough to niche on this. Like do I only want to talk about web design in Germany? Eleanor does and she has a whole podcast on it. And so you have to decide that part and then you can go to the market with it and see if it makes a shift towards your clientele. When you niche, you'll notice that that lead generation should become easier. You should be bringing in more right fit clients in an easier way. That communication barrier gets cut down when you niche in your marketing rather than having to niche in your sales process. However, I do think there is a niche that can come from like the way that you work, the way that you operate. And my lawyer likes to say your niche is you. And you're like, stop saying that. I'm not paying you to say this. He's a lawyer for creatives. He's actually going to be on my podcast because I was like, it's such an interesting model that they have. And I still work with them even though I should be working with a local lawyer because I really like the way that they think. I like the way that they talk with me about my business. And so what he means by that really is your niche is how you think and approach your work. And that's how you attract the right people in. Now, in order for that to be your niche, you have to be really into content creation. That's not an easy marketing game. But if you can come up with a tagline that's like the app designer for the beauty industry, that's an easier niche. But niching is super hard. Like, I don't think I'm necessarily good at that. I guess one example of what you're just speaking about, which is the, your last example is like the way you work folks that have done really well, especially in our industry, which is base camp or 37 signals, they wrote a bunch of books on how you should build a tech company and how people should work. And naturally they've stand out and they're great writers. And, you know, they just do a productivity app. It's nothing different. Like there's nothing inherently that different about it, just baked in with their philosophies of how things should be done async remote, et cetera, et cetera. And that like, you know, they have a great business, self-funded. And I think that really caught on, right? And they were kind of early to the market in terms of thought leadership around async remote work. And that that's really helped them. So that's a good example. That's a great example. That's a really great example is like you are the niche. Like, and they're kind of unusual in that. But I think we're seeing more and more tech companies like pull back the curtain and be like, this is like the ethos behind the company. Like it's not just about the software, it's about the people making the software. And I think that's a really good example. I love that example, Chris. Another example, like that makes me think of Groove, which is a co-working app for creatives that I use. Have you used Groove before? I don't think I'm in the right place to use it. It's worldwide. It's global. Yeah. And where you got the internet, you can have Groove. I'm always grouping with people on the other side of the world, because I'm a night owl. But it's a virtual co-working app. And there's lots of virtual co-working that has popped up in the last few years, as more people have gone remote. But what makes Groove special is the way that the team engages with the community. And so they're super involved, driving community events, like you're grooving with the Groove team, the people making the app. They're doing all kinds of like, you know, they're doing a launch party next week, because they're relaunching the app. They're doing monthly planning meetings, things like that. So it's like, you become partial to the people behind the app. And it really distinguishes them. It makes them stand out. The bonus of that is that they make a better app, because they have a much closer relationship with us than people that are doing co-working apps that aren't talking to their customers every day. Right. And I guess that's another way, right, to stand out from the crowded market, is to be like, to invite the folks behind the scenes and to be like, oh, no, we're building this company together, guys. It's not just me. It's you too. And I feel like that's the, yeah, exactly. To your point of like, tech is becoming more and more human, or companies are recognizing that they need to be there and have a higher touch. Otherwise, you're just another, you know, faceless brand out there. Is that what you've seen as well? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think like, to your point about, you know, design subscriptions, like how do you stand out from each other? I think SaaS companies are having the same like crisis of identity. Like, you know, at this point, the internet is so saturated, there's a million apps, there's a million websites, there's a million everything. So it's no one is impervious, is that the word? Like no one is impenetrable when it comes to this like niching problem and the differentiation problem, like everything is collapsing. So you have to experiment with how you want to stand out. And there's lots of ways to do that, right? If you're, if you're an introvert out there, you have social anxiety and you're like, the idea of talking to people all the time makes me really sad. There's lots of ways to do it, right? You could, you can find differentiation in different ways, but I do think you have to be iterating through that and thinking about, well, how am I going to show up for my customer? What is a way that I can sustain where we can build a relationship here? And I can really be a standout option for them. Okay, that makes sense. All right, let's move on because I think this one is probably the most juiciest. And we saved it for last, which is how do you get leads without social media? Is it even possible in the world we live in today? And Lex, I think you seem to think it's possible. So love to dive into that. I'm like, no, it isn't, but please. That's so funny. So Chris, have you gotten all of your leads through social media? Not all of my leads, but most of it really depends on what business. If it's a UX playbook, sure, it's everything is online. And if it was the backlog business, the agency, though, actually it was just referrals and friends and stuff. But I've had a lot more leads come into me through social media on that business, but not converting. Yeah. Yeah, right. That's the thing I hear a lot actually about social media. So there's an infinite amount of ways to get leads. And the way that we think about this in growth trackers is as a loop, you have your visibility, which is where you're showing up, you have your conversion path, where are people hanging out with you before they have a reason to buy from you? That's often a longer cycle than we want to believe. Like, there's an assumption that if you're visible that people are going to buy right away, and that's only going to happen if they've been waiting for your product, right? So if they're like, I'm looking for a hairdresser found you, I'm booking a haircut. That's one thing. But generally, the cycle there is long. So they need to hang out with you somewhere, then they're going to buy something from you, then they're going to amplify, refer, be part of your affiliate programming, et cetera. So when it comes to visibility, you want to think about what's the most targeted place I can show up. Examples of that that are not social media include industry press. So I had a client who was a political consultant, and she does a lot of press. She's a California based political consultant. She does a lot of California political press. It's a very targeted arena for her to show up. Much more targeted in the social media. If she goes over to TikTok, the likelihood that she's hitting a California is actually pretty low. The likelihood that she's hitting a California and who want to hire her to for political consulting is very low. But it's much higher with political press that's that's locally targeted, right? And the same is true, like, especially if you're B2B industry publications, you can guess posts, you can guess blog, you can guess on people's podcasts, you can guess live stream, you can guess speak at events. I have some clients that do conference speaking and event speaking as main lead drivers. What's cool about that is that it can also be a revenue stream, right? You can get paid to speak and you can get clients off of that. I used to do that actually back when I was doing growth design, I would speak at conferences all around the U.S. and Canada, and both I would get paid from the conference and then also often would get leads from that. That's a really cool one. If you like speaking, you can do your own blog, which would rely on Google and SEO. That's a strategy that I think is sort of going away, but I do know some folks for whom that is working pretty substantially. I think that's really a play I would only go for if you are super, super differentiated because it's very hard to play the Google game these days. But if you are super differentiated, I worked with an audio engineer. Audio engineers, as a whole, we found we're not that good at SEO, so it's pretty good to beat them at SEO. That's a game that he started playing. Let me think about some of the other ones. Partnerships is a main one that I see people overlooking. That would be peers or adjacent service providers or adjacent providers in any way. Teaming up with people, you get right in front of their audience. If you have an audience and I have an audience and we bring our audiences together, that is a way faster way to grow than me trying to cultivate each person on my own. That can look like a referral relationship. It could look like a content collaboration like this. It could look like putting an event together. I've seen people do service combinations. There's a branding strategist in growth trackers, and she's teaming up with a designer. They're both pitching to their audiences. That's a great way for them to get in front of each other and also for them to be competitive up against agencies. Communities is another big one. Copywriters really love communities. Getting in slacks, getting in forums, and being an expert in the community. That's been a big driver for a lot of the copywriters that I follow. You can also pitch yourself for jobs that are either already listed as freelance or contract, or you can try to flip a full-time job into a contract. I think that's increasingly more possible and it's a strategy that I've used a bunch. If you're like, oh, this job is perfect, but I just want to do it as a contract, you just try to find the hiring manager on LinkedIn, see if they're open to a contract. There are freelancer platforms and there are increasingly fractional platforms. If you're more of an executive type, there's more fractional work platforms. Those are maybe worth a look. I think it depends a little bit on how crowded those are. If they're underbidding your rate, you want to stay away from that. Directories is another one. I have some clients that are in really specialized directories for their profession. As an example of that, we have a couple of videographers in our local meetup and directories are really popular in the video space. That's a good place to get found. You can always cold pitch. I would always encourage people to cold pitch from the inside of your network out, so by asking for introductions from people you know, rather than just going cold to the market, you can pitch yourself for press, you can pitch yourself for podcasts. I feel like we covered a lot, but really this list is continually endless. I like to think about what are the targeted arenas where my people really are, where the room is just them, not everyone in the world. Then I have to find them in there. If I go to a meetup of designers, that room is just designers. If I go to TikTok, the room is everyone. Thinking about that, getting really targeted with those things. I always recommend folks go really high-touch early on and then move towards the more broadcast stuff, LinkedIn, newsletter, podcasts, etc. Okay, I'm sold. There's definitely a way. I did a podcast that was called 22 Ways to Get Leads Without Social Media and I break down a bunch of these and explain what they are. Okay, I'll link that. I'll find that and I'll link that in the comments. It's my most popular episode by far. Yeah, I mean, the title is great. It's definitely hooky. So let's spend the next 20 minutes getting to some of these questions. A lot of folks have dropped it in, so I'm just going to- Yes, okay. I thought we were going to meditate. I'm actually standing on a yoga mat. Perfect, let's get into it. I think Jeremy, shout out to Jeremy from- Shout out to Jeremy. Check out the book, guys. He's been working really hard on it, but he had a question. I think this is about tips to get speaking gigs. I think I'm ready. I can't find it now. I'd love to learn more about tips for growing your paid speaking gigs. Yes, that's the one. Yeah, so there are communities for professional speakers. As an example of that, there's a community called Badassery, which is a thought leadership community with gears toward people who want to be speaking more. If you're planning to go into professional speaking, I would look for communities of professional speakers and I would consider doing a program on professional speaking, especially a program that helps you book gigs, because those are out there. There's a program called Mic Drop Academy and I'm pretty sure Jess Ekstrom helps you book gigs. I can't be sure about that, but that's what I've heard about it. I would lean on communities that are of professional speakers because a lot has shifted in the professional speaking landscape. If you're pitching conferences and things like that, a lot of them do open calls, so you can just put a pitch in for a talk and then you would want to validate that those conferences pay their speakers, which you could do either looking at the website, looking at the pitch. It should include that or talking to a past speaker about them. Then I like to ask other people that are in my space, like, hey, where have you been speaking? When I used to do conference talks, I would just talk to my other UX design friends and say, what conferences are you pitching to? Who have you talked to? What experiences have you had? You can put together a list that way. I think the paid speaking communities, it doesn't necessarily have to be a paid community, but the communities of people that are professional speakers are really high value. In the United States, there's something called the National Speakers Bureau, I think it's called. They do local chapters. There's one in Canada. There's various organizations worldwide where you can show up in rooms of people who are talking about this quite a bit. The benefit of that is that you'll raise your speaking gigs quite a bit because those people are charging a lot of money for their speaking. In fact, many of them are professional, like that's their main revenue stream. In addition to conferences, one of the really cool revenue streams I think gets overlooked is speaking internally to companies, like doing an internal workshop for companies. That can be also really great, especially if you're a designer or design leader as you are, Jeremy. Speaking in-house to companies, they have budget for that stuff. You can make good money doing that. It could be pretty fun to do that too. Yeah. In 2021, I moved from Thailand to Vietnam. I spent a year on and off speaking internally to these companies. It was more like workshops, but also like training. That was really fun. It was like people that appreciated it. They paid for your time and you spent a couple of days with them here and there. That's really, really fun. Could it be harder to get than these other call for speaker things? I guess you would treat it like the same in terms of how to get referrals. Do you know companies? Exactly. You would run the same engine again. These are the topics I'm speaking on. It's for this. Kat Velos is a UX designer turned author. She has a very specific, if you go to katvelos.com, I think you'll see her speaking history and some of the topics that she talks about. She does both public speaking, conference speaking, and internal stuff. She targets like ERGs, employee resource groups, for example. Knowing that, you can keep your ear out for that if you're on the receiving end of her referral ask. You would ask for referrals from people that work inside some of these companies. I think to your question about whether or not it's more difficult, I think it really depends on your network and who you've been networking with. Knowing Jeremy and his background a little bit, I would venture to guess that he's well connected inside a lot of these companies and probably could get in there pretty easily. If you haven't been working in-house on the corporate side, you might want to lean towards more public events to start. Okay. That makes sense. I want to ask this question, which is a little bit outside of kind of the topic today, but I think it's still interesting for the folks. How do you balance creating content and doing actual growth or actual design work, like things we do? How do you do it? Lex, you're doing so much YouTube and LinkedIn, just everything. You're touching all of these babies. How do you balance it? Yeah. How do you balance content and eat lunch? I can't do it. Content creation, I will not lie, I think is so much effort. I think my podcast is called Low Energy Leads because a lot of the marketing strategies people pitch to me, I think, wow, that sounds like so much work. I think for any of us, we have to decide, am I excited about doing this activity or not? Because no matter what you pick, it's going to be an effort. You better like it enough to get it going a little bit. Content creation is no exception. Within content creation, you have to decide which vehicle is fun and interesting for you. I was just telling Chris before we started this, I'm getting really sick of making YouTube videos. I've been doing that for eight months. It's a real grind. Yesterday, I was at my wit's end with it. I was just like, why are you doing this, Lex? This is not the mode that you enjoy the most. You've got to change something about the mode. I think it's worth paying attention to your internal radar of whether or not this thing feels like a grind. Is it a fun experiment? Which is great. We want to be in that zone if it feels like a grind. I think we're blinking red. We really want to think about changing modes. In terms of balancing content creation or what I would say is business growth maybe and design work, client work, execution work. I would say that it really, really helps to build in some outside structure and accountability. For me, that looks like coming to my office. It really helps to have this office structure where I physically go to work and go home. For other folks, you might do a daily stand up with other creators or other designers who are independent and give yourself some of that infrastructure back that maybe you had inside a company if you ever worked full-time. You can also join communities like that that do sprints. There's a company called Brainstorm Road. Their whole thing is how to help you ship. It's really cool. It's basically infrastructure for creatives where you're swimming in this giant creative pool and it's like, I need a little bit of what's the cadence here that I'm operating in. I think it can help you sort of right size. Here's the content that makes sense. Here's the investments incurring my business that make sense. Here's the client work and where that sits. You have to shift in time management mode a bit and be honest with yourself. I would also really challenge you, all of you out there, especially if you're not going for a volume business. Christina was talking about this before we started recording. If your business is selling four or five, six-figure, I guess I should caveat that, four or five, six-figure US, high-ticket. I just need a couple of these clients a month. You really don't have to play much of a content game. You can actually have a very low volume one-channel content game and make that work. It's when you pivot into the like, I need a lot of clients. I need a lot of customers. I'm selling low-ticket stuff. I'm selling an $18 membership. I'm selling a $5 e-book. That's when you need to really play a content creation game. Your business becomes mostly about marketing and very little about execution. You have to decide, do I want to be mostly in the execution, do a little bit of marketing? Do I want to mostly do marketing and a little bit of execution? That's kind of crazy because I didn't think about content creation when I started like that. I was kind of inundated like, oh, so I have to be a marketer. Great. Let's go. Nobody tells you this, right? They're just like, oh, just make content. It's easy. It's fine. It's so hard. I'll use myself as an example. I'm a terrible content creator. If you look me up anywhere, I have like 300 followers everywhere. I have like no following. I'm terrible at it. I still have a business. I've been in business for five years because I haven't made my primary engine, the content, or social media. Social media is not primarily where I get leads. I really drive leads from communities, from partner relationships, and from like more targeted communities. You don't have to play this game. You don't have to play the same game everyone else has. Yeah. For you, Lex, to like, you know, with your podcast and content you create, does that kind of move the folks that you've already met existingly kind of lower to the funnel? Like, oh, trust has built over time. I listened to your podcast. Is that the purpose of your content game? Exactly. Exactly. And so for any of you in services, if you're doing client work, that's exactly what the point is of any of your content, really, it's like, there's two things that really I see happen there. One is that it makes for easy referrals. So like, if I'm doing a webinar, I notice that people that already know me, clients, partners, supporters of my business, they'll share my webinar because it's a really easy thing for them to share, which amplifies my webinar. And so it'll look like the visibility channel is LinkedIn, but really the visibility channel is my partner, spreading the word in the vehicle the channel is LinkedIn. And the podcast for me is a conversion space. So pretty much everyone who listens to the podcast, I already know, or they were on my email list before I started the podcast, or they come in through a different visibility channel, and then the podcast sort of expedites them to a sale, makes them excited about working with me and growth trackers, you get some excited about buying my, you know, digital downloads and things like that. But it's really heavy. It's a substantial amount of work. And as I was telling you this morning, well, this morning, my time this evening for you, I really question whether or not it's worth it and how much I really want to drive that because it is so much work. What I really enjoy doing with my time is spending time with my paying members in my membership, like it's fun. It feels relatively easy. It's doing pretty well. The podcast does feel like a grind and I'm really questioning whether or not I need it in my life. Is it the preparation or the post production? Or is it just everything? Post production is like the biggest for sure, because it's a video podcast. But I also think it's like, content is a bit of a gamble. Like, you know, every LinkedIn post you put out, every podcast episode you put out, it's a gamble. And you have to get so many factors right about that. What I like to say to my folks is like, reduce the factors of uncertainty. When you're dealing with a like a YouTube episode, a podcast episode, you've got what you call the episode, who the guest is, if there's a guest, what the thumbnail is, what the intro is, what the caption is, the flow of the episode, how long it is, how much you promote it, right? What channels you promote it on. So you're looking at like seven to eight factors there that you could get wrong and you get one of those factors wrong, you've killed the entire thing. And that's not really true of like an email ask of a conversation you're having and if I chime in in the thread, hey, I'm actually an expert on this. Do you want to talk? Boom. We've now moved into a sales conversation. That was a lot less effort than me putting out a podcast episode. Absolutely right. Yeah, that makes sense. We don't have long left, but there's a couple more questions here that I want to come to you Lexus. If you niche yourself too much, are you in danger of not having any clients or leads? Should someone be worried about this? Great question. I don't really think so. I mean, I always like to play the risks forward, right? So it's like, what's the risk of going in any of these directions, right? With any of your marketing? It's like, what's the risk? So with a niche, it would be like, what's the risk? Let's say I decide I'm going to be a UX designer for Greyhound dogs. And it's like, are Greyhound dogs going to hire me to be a UX designer? We'll find out. And so you go out there and it's like, actually, it's too small. It's hard for me to imagine that if you believe there's a market there, and if you do a little Googling online to see that there is a market there, that that market actually exists, you would want to make sure that it does, that you would be too niche because there's so much beauty in being like the person that just does the taglines, right? Like the person that just does the logo, like there's a lot of beauty in that. But let's say you go too far with that. Like, I can't see a path where you couldn't back that out and be like, actually, I'm now doing all dogs, all pets, I'm a UX designer for all pets. Like, I feel like, you know, people are fairly flexible. And as a person who's pivoted their career, like five times, I started in TV production, I'm now a growth marketer. Like, people will come with you if you tell them enough times like, hey, I'm no longer doing freelance TV, I'm now a growth marketer. Like, people will come with you, they'll come with you and they'll, they'll relearn who you are, they'll figure out like Mark, who's in here, Mark Tioxen, who's a frequent collaborator of mine, Mark spent a photographer for 10 years and he started making kombucha now he's a kombucha maker. And if you meet him these days, he'll lead with that. But a lot of people know him as a photographer, but he's reintroducing himself all the time. So I don't think that risk is very high, but you can always play it forward. The other thing I would recommend is to not like go wide fast. So you can always test those things privately, send an offer to some people, send it out to your mailing list, put a hidden page on your website, do a few content pieces about it or interviews about it. Don't like rebrand everything. That's unnecessary. See if you can sell it and then be like, yeah, okay, I'm getting some signal, I'm gonna start extending this elsewhere. Lex, we're designers. We have to rebrand everything. Oh my God. If I had a nickel for people that were like working on their website instead of working on their business, I'd be so rich. Like, don't do it. Don't do it. Secret. I worked on my website today. Just picture me in the corner like, how is this helping you? Like, people are spending less than less time on our websites, right? They're on these other platforms. Like, you do have to have an internet presence. It really doesn't have to be your website anymore. And so if you have an offer, you could just PDF that, put it in an email. Hey, I'm doing this now, but bam, it's happening. It doesn't need to be a whole flow. Yeah. And on the point of, is that niche too small? I've seen a lot recently of like Twitter or LinkedIn banner designers. So you're not a graphic designer. You're just a banner. That's great. I'm like, genius. Dude, I would hire a thumbnail designer for you too, but that was what they specialized in. Like, that's so amazing. You just sent me some of the specializes in YouTube setups. That seems very niche. Amazing, right? Yeah. It's absolutely amazing. He's like the only guy that does this. Well, when he started. So maybe there's just a lot of folks kind of following in his footsteps as well. Yeah. Yeah. There is like, as they say, there's riches and niches. Absolutely. Absolutely. Let's see what else we have. Maybe a last question. Oh, Chris, you're getting some bent. Like your skin looks amazing. What are you doing? You're getting some compliments in there. Guys, I'm blushing. Please. It's that soap. No, no questions like that, guys. Come on. Come on. This is the top one this live is for. We're going off topic. Okay. I think there was one question that was quite interesting, but also very long. Okay. I'll go for it as our last one from Lucy Kwok. Do you have any tips for turning your niche into something that works for you instead of against you? I have a background in visual design and science communication. And when applying for jobs in the past, found myself rejected by both for not having experience in pure design companies not having a science-related PhD and working on turning this to my advantage in the UX design field, but would love to hear any more tips. So that's the science and visual design, not getting any luck because folks that she's applied to provide one side or the other. Any tips for that? I mean, that's a tough one, Lucy. I would make one distinction, which is that the job application process is quite different from the client acquisition process. And I think a lot of companies are just a solid mess on the hiring side. So I think you'll find some differences. I don't know if you've already started trying to build a client base, but you'll find differences in acquiring clients than applying for jobs. Jobs, they're looking for like resume match of skill match, right? You're going through recruiters at this point, you're going through AI processes and things like that. When you're pitching to clients or when you're presenting yourself for clients, you're positioning that as a strength. So I think it really is like, it comes down to like message testing. Okay. If I frame it this way, are there people that that's their mindset? It comes down to what's the language that your client's using. And can I use that same language to position this to my advantage? And so I would use messaging testing with that. And one of the quickest ways to do that would be to send emails to people and say, this is what I'm looking to do. Here's the intersection of my expertise. Like, do you know anyone? And if you give back, no, no, no, no, no, then you might want to give that another shot with a slightly different positioning, maybe where you emphasize one to the other and put the other as a secondary thing. The other thing you can do if you're really striking out with your tests, with your messaging tests, with your content, whatever, is to just start talking to people who you think are your ideal clients and ask them, what are they budgeting for? How are they framing that, right? What words are they using? Where are they looking? What are they looking for? And try to get to the bottom of that. You want to make sure that the people you want to work with are looking for you and that you're positioning yourself as the thing that they're looking for. So one of the quickest ways to do that is to just start asking them. You can do research interviews, informational interviews, and that can usually be pretty quickly insightful. I did a podcast episode on that with Abhishek Kumar, who's a market researcher, who talks about this. I have one other thing that I've been teaching the job sprint folks, which is a thing I call the unfried vantage map. I actually stole it from the IcaGuy framework for concentric circles. If you fill in all of those, the intersection in the middle is your IcaGuy or your reason for being, but this is much more simple, right? It's your talent and skill. So things you actively work on. So let's just say it's visual design, science communication, and then things you actually really enjoy, right? Things you do without monetary rewards. And it's just really passion-based. Let's just say that's like researching anime, I don't know. And then the top circle would be what a designer needs, right? I'm basically consolidating what the world needs and what the world would pay you for. And I'm just saying that's just a designer's job. So the intersection there, once you brainstorm everything that fills in each bucket or circle, then you can say where's the intersection between that? And literally you can do this with posters and three posters can map really well together or like or not. And then you can try that with Lex's recommendation of messaging and really just try that. And literally it should give you a one line of your unique or unfair advantage, right? And you can try that over and over again and see what works. But that's something has worked for me anyway. I love that. Yeah, that's super. That feels like also really helpful for generating what that niche could be. I think that's really a strong exercise. I love that. I haven't looked at that in a long time. I'll share a screenshot in the comments. All right, Lex, thank you so much for your time. You've been amazing. Do you have anything to plug before we go? Yeah, I mean, if you enjoyed this conversation, I think you definitely enjoy my podcast. It's called Low Energy Leads. It's currently on YouTube and on the podcasting apps. We'll see where that shifts. But you can find it at lowenergyleads.com. Awesome. All right. And thank you everybody for joining. I hope you've been well and tune in next time for the next AMA. All right, cool. Thanks, Lex. Thank you, Chris.