Andrew: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner, I’m the founder of Mixergy, the site where I interview entrepreneurs about how they build their businesses, and I do this for an audience of entrepreneurs. In fact, today’s guest is both someone who has listened to the interviews and now is here to talk about how he’s built his business. I used to, and still do I guess, call it the circle of Mixergy. The idea is you listen, learn, you build something phenomenal, and then you come back here and you tell your story so that other people can learn from you.
And today’s guest is someone who I had seen in a private chat with my favorite video hosting company, Wistia. He’s the expert when it comes to creating great short videos. And I’m actually really curious about the business behind creating those videos. His name is Eric Hinson, he is the founder of Explainify. Explainify makes animated explainer videos for businesses. Really short, really fun, really easy to consume. And he’s got an upcoming book, it’s called Diamond in a Haystack: How to cut the . . . actually this is not his subtitle, this is how he described it to me in private, but I like it. It’s about how to cut the crap and simplify your messaging by finding your diamond in the haystack. And I think a lot of people can learn to cut the crap and just simplify their messaging from Eric. By the way, if you want to see it, he’ll give you the first couple of chapters of the book at explainify.com/mixergy.
This interview is sponsored by Toptal, the company you use to hire your developers, and Acuity. Actually no, we’re going to talk about Pipedrive today, the CRM that both Eric and I have used and love.
Eric, good to have you here.
Eric: Yeah, you as well, thank you.
Andrew: What’s this thing about a mansion that you guys did at your company?
Eric: Yeah, so once we hit a really exciting goal in the company.
Andrew: Are you going to say what the goal was?
Eric: No, I’d rather not.
Andrew: Really? Okay.
Eric: It was a revenue goal.
Andrew: It was a financial goal, a revenue goal. Okay, you guys hit this big milestone, okay.
Eric: We hit it and we rented a mansion, a like 15-room mansion out in the Ozark Mountains. We’re here in Fayetteville, Arkansas, about an hour away from the real Ozark Mountains where it’s just beautiful trees, rolling hills, that kind of thing. So we rented a mansion, had a great time, inviting friends and family over, we went to a theme park, just ate as much as you would on Thanksgiving, if not more, and went and watched the new Star Wars movie, just had a good time. I think it’s important to celebrate the wins in a company.
Andrew: You know what? Before you and I started this interview you were talking about whether you’d talk about your numbers or not, and it looks like you decided not to. Why not? I know what your numbers are, you’ve told me. I know what the milestone was that got you to the mansion. I know where you are now in revenue. Why did you decide not to say it?
Eric: Yeah, it’s not because it’s embarrassing, because it’s not. We’ve been very successful. We’ve grown quite a bit. I’ll tell you the second year in business we grew 350%. We’ve had some pretty good growth just kind of organically and not really trying too hard, which sounds weird.
Andrew: Are you guys over a million in revenue?
Eric: Yes.
Andrew: You are? Okay.
Eric: So we’re self-funded, just completely trying to kind of generate, not recurring revenue as a software, but just trying to . . .
Andrew: Ongoing revenue from the same customers.
Eric: Let that snowball happen, yeah.
Andrew: Okay.
Eric: And we get a lot of work on referrals and that kind of stuff, as well.
Andrew: And this whole thing started because of Sam’s Club actually, right? What did Sam’s Club ask you to create?
Eric: Yeah, so I was working at a digital innovation agency, and it wasn’t actually Sam’s Club asking us to create it, it was the agency. So we were basically pitching some new digital strategies, some new innovation inside of Sam’s Club. I think it was something in regards to a scan and go type situation where you can be in the back of the store scanning your iPhone on the UPC code and checking out right there. I’m not sure if they actually . . .
Andrew: So you were pitching them? You said, “Hey, Sam’s Club, you guys need to have this technology. Let people check out on their own.” And in order to get them to understand it, you created a video.
Eric: We created an animated video. So I was actually hired to do the job. Just taking a step back real quick, I was hired at this agency to create a documentary. And developers aren’t very interesting or exciting. When you put a camera in front of them, they kind of freeze up. And so I ended up having to create a new job for myself by messing around with Adobe After Effects and created animated videos. They quickly realized that they could utilize those for pitch videos. So instead of doing the PowerPoint pitch, we would do an animated video and kind of sell the dream.
And so we did that with Sam’s Club and we actually won quite a large multimillion-dollar deal with that. Just getting people excited about what could be before it even exists.
Andrew: Oh, that makes so much sense, actually. How many times can you look at a PowerPoint without just feeling like they’re all the same? And now a guy walks in with an animated video. And you’re saying you didn’t get the business from Sam’s Club, but you did get this new model of communicating.
Eric: We did get the business from Sam’s Club.
Andrew: Oh, you did?
Eric: Yes.
Andrew: It worked?
Eric: It worked. And once I left several years later, the CFO reached out to me and wanted videos for his company. And he kind of told me, “You really made a big dent in our finances because of the growth we could achieve based on these pitches.” I’m not going to say that it was the end-all-be-all for our success and our growth as an agency, we’re like a $50, $60 million-dollar agency. There’s no way. But it definitely played a huge part in their success.
Andrew: I see. All right. And so I could see how you saw an opportunity in that. What got you to go off on your own and do this independently?
Eric: So really what it boiled down to was the videos we were making were five, six minutes long. They were being led by art direction, which was in a different state but at the same agency, different state from the office. And I just wasn’t really agreeing with the briefs we were getting. It was basically, “Make this five-minute video or else.” And at the end of the day I could look at the analytics, we were using, I think, Vimeo at the time. And look at the analytics and sort of see. Coupled with Google Analytics and different things like that, as well. But could see that the videos weren’t super engaging after the three-minute mark.
And so I knew that the story needed to be more punchy, we needed to find that core message and boil it down to its simplest form and make it more engaging. Because they’re going in and they had a captive audience, but not everybody has a captive audience in marketing or sales. And so the reason was we needed to create something that helped people tell stories in a much simpler format and much faster.
Andrew: And so because you needed to go shorter you decided you’re going to go off on your own? They wouldn’t let you go shorter inside?
Eric: Well, it was sort of a perfect storm. We were getting acquired by WPP, which is a large holding agency. And through that acquisition it was just kind of weird and just kind of stuff happening inside an agency in transitions, natural transitions. And so it was a time for me to transition. And I was speaking with my wife, who is a creative person, she comes from an entrepreneurial family, and she was saying, “You can do it, you can make this happen.” And it was something I didn’t necessarily want to do, but she kind of spoke that into me and made that a reality for us. And we decided we could do it. We did some research, not a lot because we didn’t know what we needed to do as far as building a business, but we ended up just kind of jumping ship and making it happen.
Andrew: What I’m curious with you is how you got not just the early customers, but how you continue to get customers. And I’m also curious about how you run an agency where you know you could produce quality work on a regular basis, quality creative work. That’s a real challenge.
So let’s talk about the first set of customers. How did you find the first? You know what? Let’s start with the first one. How did you find your first customer?
Eric: The very first one was a woman that I had met at South by Southwest. I was working for the agency, just hanging out. They were basically a friend or a colleague of ours. And we just hung out. She was working for a different brand. And by the time I had left the agency, I won’t say the name, I left the agency, we kind of crossed paths and she was starting what seemed to be an upward trajectory kind of social media/social influencer company. And they had about 20 employees at the time, had been a year or so in, and they were trying to tell their message, they were trying to tell their story. They came in and they said it was about a two-hour pitch every time they talk to somebody. And so that was our first customer, was this social media agency.
Andrew: And she just came and complained to you about that? I can’t imagine starting an agency and just being so lucky that’s someone is going to come and complain about the exact problem that I’m solving.
Eric: Well, it wasn’t like she came as a professional client or anything like that, it was a relationship, it was a friendship. And so we developed a friendship over time and she basically said, “We’re having trouble telling people what we do. Our employees don’t even understand, necessarily, what we do. They understand the tactical pieces that go into it, but they don’t necessarily understand how to tell this to their husband or wife.”
And so what we did was came in, looked at all their material. They had all kinds of just weird stuff, like stories about Star Wars and all these just different pieces kind of stitched together.
Andrew: Yeah.
Eric: And there are about 40 pages of documents. And we just kind of sat down for several hours with a red pen and just kind of pared through it, asked a lot of questions. We left, we came back. And this is just my wife and I at the time. Came back and said, “Here’s sort of what we think is kind of the core message that you’re offering.” And at the time they were a start-up growing really fast, they’re pivoting, they’re changing their messaging all the time, so they haven’t had a time to really hone in on what that is. And so they needed that outsider perspective.
So we were able to, after a few more revisions, get to a 90-second script. And the big win was the employees actually called us and e-mailed us and said, “Hey, you absolutely helped us make sense of this. Now we can explain this to our moms and our aunts and our uncles and our cousins, and even our husbands and our kids.” So that was the agency, yeah.
Andrew: Did you charge full price for it?
Eric: Yes, that was the first one we charged full price. I guess that’s not the first customer. I’m sorry, I lied.
Andrew: Don’t you lie to my audience, man. I thought we were friends.
Eric: That was the second customer. So I knew I always wanted to be $10,000 and above on pricing, I knew I wanted to offer a premium product with a really great quality process and experience and all of that. And so the first customer was actually a friend of a friend who had a business. We met in Starbucks and I basically pitched him $10,000, he laughed right off his seat, and it was a very awkward time because I didn’t know anything about business. I was completely green to any of it. And I just acted confident and said, “Hey, it’s $10,000 and we can do this.”
And a long story short, it took a long time back and forth, we ended up settling on $1,000. And I sat in my living room it’s that typical story, I sat in my living room and animated this video. And at the time I was decent at After Effects, I wasn’t great. And I accidentally set up the project wrong and it kept crashing my computer. And so it was just a nightmare of a project, I didn’t make much money. Of course I had no overhead at the time, so that was fine. But that’s sort of how it started. And then from there he introduced us, not introduced us but kind of referred us and made a mention of us to some other people and we got referrals and more business from that. And the second one was that agency, and we charged them $10,000 or $15,000.
Andrew: They paid you $10,000?
Eric: Something like that, yeah.
Andrew: By then, you know what? There already had been people creating explainer videos, right? I remember I interviewed the founder of Common Craft, is that who they were?
Eric: Yeah, Common Craft was kind of the first one. Then there was Grumo Media that kind of came after that.
Andrew: Right.
Eric: Yeah, there was a few.
Andrew: So why did you want to do another one?
Eric: Well, we were still early in and we were fit to market, I think, something very close to that. And it just seemed like we could do it differently.
Andrew: What was your difference?
Eric: It was really focusing on the research and the insight side of it. The digging in and basing a script on interviewing prospects and customers and looking at ad copy and SEO and just speaking with different stakeholders and really focusing. What makes us unique, Andrew, is focusing on the research so we can get the messaging right. We’re not just a video company, that’s half of it. The first part is the story, it’s the research/insight story. The other half is the video. The video is the medium that’s just an amazing medium, as you know because we’re doing this on video.
Andrew: I see. That’s why your book isn’t about how to create explainer videos, it’s about how to understand what your message is about. And so that became your thing. And, by the way, since then Common Craft, which was kind of the leader for a while, they shifted away from it. They went to a directory model where they were linking to other people. And then they focused on educators for a long time, and I think they still do. So if you wanted to teach something to your students, you can go and buy a video from them and use it. Or if you’re giving a presentation, you can buy an explainer video from them. They want to create videos you can buy off the shelf, for the most part, it seems like and sell.
Eric: Yeah, I think they just got tired of the custom game. I talked to Lee LeFever. He actually wrote a blurb on the back of my book. So he enjoyed it. And so he’s a great guy.
Andrew: It is tough. Do you ever feel like, “What am I doing? I’ve got a job for me and my employees”?
Eric: Yes.
Andrew: And doesn’t it feel exhausting? What’s your pot of gold at the end of this rainbow? I could see for Lee he could step away from the business now and people will still buy his affiliate marketing explainer video to use in their presentation to their company. You don’t have that.
Eric: Yeah, the vision is really kind of long-standing. We’re wanting to be a small business that grows organically at a decent, but we’re not taking funding or anything like that and we’re not looking at an immediate exit. We’re building a business in a way that it’s smart. It’s set up financially, the processes are there so that if it were to be acquired, it would be ready to go, but that’s not right on the forefront of my mind.
Andrew: I see. All right. You were doing the editing yourself, you were coming up with the story yourself, you’re doing the whole freaking thing yourself. Who was the first hire?
Eric: And my wife.
Andrew: Sorry? You and your wife.
Eric: And my wife, yeah.
Andrew: What was her contribution in the beginning? What was her part?
Eric: So she was an illustrator and designer, so that’s kind of her background.
Andrew: I see.
Eric: And so you marry that with the animation skill that I have and we had a perfect business right there. The only thing, we didn’t have business chops, so we had to learn that. And so I did a ton of research and tried to figure out how to run a business.
Andrew: How did you learn it?
Eric: Lots of different ways. Mostly the Internet, looking at the Small Business Administration website. I’m telling you, Andrew, this is probably a little too much, but this is what you do when you interview people, you get things out of people.
Andrew: Tell me.
Eric: Just how green I was. I didn’t know what anything was.
Andrew: Like what? What did you have to look up?
Eric: Like an LLC, the difference between B2B and B2C and all these different things, enterprise. I remember talking to a client at some point, I don’t remember if it was a year in or whatever, but they were like, “Could you do B2B work?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure we do B2B work.” And then after the call I looked up on the Internet, “What is B2B?” And that kind of stuff. And it seems silly, but it’s true.
Andrew: I get it. I guess you ended up becoming an LLC though, right?
Eric: Oh yeah, yeah.
Andrew: Yeah. I think most people don’t understand the difference between those two forms of companies.
Eric: I think they make it so complicated. Just the IRS with the taxes and everything, it’s all way too complicated. It’s not really that complicated though.
Andrew: Yeah, it’s not that complicated. The confusing part is that an LLC could be two different kinds of business, it could be taxed like a sole proprietorship or like a company. Yeah, I get it. I think you’re not the only one, I think you’re the only one who admitted that you didn’t know that stuff. All right.
Eric: I don’t know what that means for us.
Andrew: Sorry?
Eric: I said I don’t know what that means for us, for me telling you that, but I just thought it was interesting.
Andrew: Let’s take a moment, and then we’re going to get into how you started to hire other people to do this, because to me that’s the big challenge. You get really good at this, I get it. But to bring in other people and to keep the quality and to explain to them how to do stuff, it’s a challenge partially because there are two reasons.
One is I want to start creating compilation interviews for Mixergy where I take a bunch of interviews around a single topic, we chop them up, we edit them, we bring in a professional team to make it into a documentary podcast episode. And I’m working with the team and I need to tell them what I’m looking for, but not every single time. I want them to start to understand what I’m looking for, to start to understand how we tell stories. And it’s a challenge for me and I’d like to learn from you.
And also part of what we’re doing at Mixergy now, we’ve got this side thing called Bot Academy where we’re helping companies by creating bots for them. And I don’t know how to keep quality consistent, and you do that really well.
All right, so first let’s talk about Pipedrive. I was going to use a different sponsor here, you said that you happened to have started using Pipedrive in your business, right? Tell me about how you use Pipedrive.
Eric: So I think this was the first or second year where I was using Apple Notes and just keeping track of all deals that came in. And so it was a mess. It was so convoluted I couldn’t keep track of any of it. I tried to keep it in my head. It just didn’t work. I hadn’t heard of Evernote at the time, which I think is a little bit better of a brand for me or for anybody else for that matter. And then found Pipedrive and I loved it because it was sequential. It was, “Here’s step one, here’s step two, here’s step three.” It was a pipeline.
Andrew: A sequence of steps for what?
Eric: For the sales process.
Andrew: I see. And so you had to go in and say, “Here are my steps for closing a sale”?
Eric: Yes.
Andrew: Okay.
Eric: Yeah, I think it was important to define that from the very first step, the cold lead or warm lead, all the way through marketing-qualified lead.
Andrew: Do you remember what your steps were?
Eric: I don’t. I think it was really simple. I think I used kind of the default and varied them a little bit, but it was like five steps. It was basically like, “You’re a cold lead, you’re a warm lead, I’ve talked to you, you’re interested and I sent a proposal and we’re done.” Something like that.
Andrew: Right, yeah. Even when it’s that simple, and it was just you alone using it, right?
Eric: Yeah, it was me alone using it. And it was just so easy. I’m a visual person, so to see it sort of in that order. Even a Trello board, I guess, would work well.
Andrew: Yeah, very similar to a Trello board. In fact, people who can’t afford for some reason the $20 a month that Pipedrive eventually is, I tell them just go use Trello. The problem with Trello is that you don’t get things like the ability to export contacts. You don’t get things like a separate field for contacts. It’s hard to have extra fields. We internally have a field about you with your metrics so that we have an easy way of seeing that.
If you were for some reason to turn me down, you’d be a lost deal for us. And someone would take your card in Pipedrive and drag it to “lost,” but they’d be required to say why we lost you. Like, “Did I happen to say something that insulted you? Did I lose you because I asked you to postpone this interview by an hour? Did I lose you because our data was wrong about you?” Every time we lose a guest, either if it’s our fault or because we just don’t hear a response, I drag them in Pipedrive to the “lost” column and I write down why we lost them. And everyone on the team knows to do that. That way every few months I can go in and see, “Why are we losing people? What did we do?”
All right, if you guys are out there and you want to make more sales, if you’re an independent person doing it by yourself of you have a team of people who all want to collaborate about the sales process, go check out Pipedrive. It will do for you what it did for me and Eric, force you to say, “Here are the steps involved in closing a sale.” Then every time you have a new potential person, a new lead, you create a card for them and you move them into the very first column of your sales process. And every time you take the next step with them, you earn the right to move their card over one slot.
And then when you get a team of people, they all start to take over. So I have someone who’s responsible for the column of finding an e-mail address. If I want to interview Eric, I am not going to go out and find his e-mail address because I’ve got to prepare for interviews. Someone else on the team knows, “I have to find Eric’s e-mail address. Then when I’m done, I move that card over one.” And then the next person knows that it’s their job, and so on.
All right, if you’re out there and you want to check our Pipedrive, it’s created by people who are now Mixergy fans. I don’t think they knew me and I never heard of them until I heard about them in a Mixergy, but now we’re superfans of each other. And they’re giving us two months of Pipedrive for free. If you want to try it, you really should go get started with it. Go check out pipedrive.com/mixergy, pipedrive.com/mixergy. And you know what, actually? I wonder if by the time that this episode airs, maybe their offer will have expired. I guarantee you that they are going to give you this offer even afterwards. Let me know, because I’m reading this a little bit later than their offer expired. I was just so eager to do it, Eric, since you’re a fan of theirs, too. All right, go check out pipedrive.com/mixergy.
So, Eric, the first person that you hired did what?
Eric: So it was interesting, the first person I hired was sort of a contractor. It was a friend of mine and I said, “You’re really good at After Effects. I can’t promise you that this is going to be very successful.” This was in the beginning, first employee. Not sure exactly what the vision was, where we’re going with this, but we’re getting busy with work and needed help. And basically brought this guy on and said, “Hey, I think I can afford like four months with you.” So we committed to the four months, we did some videos, we had some success, but then I think it was summertime or something, it slowed down. And I had to kind of, I hate to say “let him go,” it was letting him go, but it was already pre-committed. So it was fine.
Andrew: But he had to create videos on his own?
Eric: Yeah. So I would basically create the storyboards, the script, all of that stuff, and then have him animate the videos himself.
Andrew: I see, okay. So you still had control of the most important parts to you, which were the story and the substance of the videos. And you knew his style, so you knew that he’d get the visual right.
Eric: Yes, exactly.
Andrew: What kind of guidance did you give him on the visuals? Sorry to interrupt.
Eric: Oh, no worries. So he was in office with me and he would help write the scripts and things like that. And he had known the work that I did and I actually taught him After Effects in the past. So he knew my style. He knew how I worked. It was a pretty good match. And how I did it, now I have standard operating procedures, I have processes, things like that. Back then it wasn’t like that, it was as scrappy as it could get. And it was basically, “Here’s the storyboard. Animate five seconds of it and let’s check it and see are we kind of matching the creative brief, the vision that the client has for this.” And we’d check in with, “Here’s five seconds.” And then, “Now, okay, give me 30 seconds,” I don’t know, four days later.
Andrew: I see. And you just kept expanding the work that he would do on his own before he checked in with you.
Eric: Yeah.
Andrew: What kind of operating procedures do you have for a creative role?
Eric: So we try to create operating procedures for pretty much every role, whether it’s project management or sales. It’s just kind of the way things have been done. And I don’t want to make it seem like we get stuck in that, it’s never “it’s always the way this has been done.” We want to evolve that. But what I want to do is document that. So with a small team, somebody gets hit by a bus or just gets sick, let’s not be so grotesque, somebody gets sick, somebody can come into that document, it was often me coming into that document.
Andrew: Just a Google Doc?
Eric: Yeah, Google Doc, yeah.
Andrew: And it’s you going into that Google Doc? What kind of things do you write in there?
Eric: It’s literally step by step. Like, “This is what our process looks like. This is how sales follows these logical steps. And once that happens, then we kick off with the client. And these steps happen. And once we’ve done these steps, then we work on scripting.” And it’s just a way to get what’s in their head out onto paper so that if . . .
Andrew: For scripting do you have a list of questions that you ask that are also in the standard operating procedure? You do?
Eric: Yeah, we do.
Andrew: So if I were to come in and work for you, having never seen the inside of your company before, I would go into a Google Doc that you give me access to on my first day, I know the list of questions, and you could say, “Andrew, your job today is to go ask these questions and see if you can extract the information that we’ll need to create our explainer video.” Is that right?
Eric: At a very base level, yes. I’m not going to get somebody that’s an aggressive type A salesperson and have them write scripts. That doesn’t make sense. But if I get a scriptwriter or someone that’s done research that has a background in that, we show them, “Here’s the questions we ask and we’re going to open it up so that you can write your own questions and dig in.” But this is sort of how we start to get to that core message.
Andrew: I see.
Eric: I think with creativity you can’t just put it in a box. You can’t just say, “Here’s the steps and that’s the output,” because that’s not how it works. It changes every single time for every single client, and there’s so many verticals, there’s so many variables.
Andrew: Otherwise it would be a form, you would just send a form and say, “Go fill this out.” How do you know that the person who you’re hiring knows how to ask the questions right, how to come up with the ones on the fly that you’ll need to get the data you need?
Eric: I think it all goes into the interview process. I think we’re looking for people that . . . when we put out a job posting, let’s say. How do they respond? Is it a creative response? Is it a more unique response? Are they excited about us? Of course culture gets into that, as well. But as far as what you’re talking about, it’s those kinds of things. And then when we’re interviewing them, we ask them hard questions and we give them real-life examples of what happens.
And we give them some test projects. I think that’s a good way to do it, too. Is we pick some of the hardest enterprise IT cloud-based software or something that they don’t know anything about and have them go and research it on their own on their own time and come back to us and say, “Okay, here’s a script brief. Here’s a project brief, here’s a script brief,” whatever that is. And then, “Here’s the actual script and here’s some questions I would ask when you kick off.” And we just kind of make the interview process hard for people. And that really gets us the best people and we can quickly see are they capable or not of that.
Andrew: For my compilation episode I had the team write out a script, including clips from the interviews, they copy and paste into a Google Doc, and I get to see the whole thing as it will read. And my instinct is to just give them feedback on it, what’s in the doc. What I force myself to do, especially with new projects, is to open up a new Google Doc that I would call the “Guide to Creating a Compilation Video,” or “Compilation Interview” I should say. And then any big point that I make in the notes on their work I carry into the guide so that we have one guide with all the points.
So, for example, I really liked the section of the compilation where the guests talked about how frustrated they were, how embarrassed they were, how they felt like a fraud. And so I said, “Keep trying to get emotional parts, especially vulnerable parts, from the guests into the compilation. Here’s an example.” And so now the guide has that and whoever is working on it will know, “This doesn’t directly relate to business, but Andrew wants that included in the finished product, that’s how you give it heart.”
I get it. Is that what you do, too, you force yourself to go into that Google Doc?
Eric: Yeah, I have to go into that Google Doc and we keep iterating it constantly. We review it on a quarterly basis and we try to look for areas that we can improve and/or we can explain further. Or we’re a video company, so we really like to make videos that explain things, as well. So maybe it could be a screencast, just a quick 15-second, “Here’s how you get this part of HubSpot,” or whatever it is. Just kind of making it easier for new people to be onboarded as quickly as possible.
Andrew: I see. Wow. So once a quarter you go into all your docs. And this is something we don’t do. You go in and you say, “Let’s make sure this is all up to date.”
Eric: Yeah, absolutely. Now I’m not perfect, we’ve made some mistakes and kind of have forgotten to do that, just like we’ve forgotten to, not forgotten, but just kind of push aside a little bit your quarterly meetings on those kinds of things. You’re growing quickly and those things kind of get pushed aside. But we made the mistake of losing a project manager and not having very much documented. And so it was really hard to onboard the next person, it just took longer. And it took away my time and it took away at the time it was a sales guy who used to be a project manager who was a better fit as a sales guy. And he kind of came in and stepped in. And the onboarding process took like two or three times as long. So from that day we decided, “Hey, we’ve got to kind of write just at least some basic guidelines of how things work here.”
Andrew: The story that you told earlier about the guy who you sat down with, you asked for $10,000, you eventually got $1,000, that cracked me up. You had to learn to pitch better. How did you learn to pitch your service better and to earn $10,000, not just with your work but with your pitch?
Eric: A lot of reading. I just picked up a ton of books. I looked at buyer psychology, those kinds of things. Robert Cialdini has a great book on that. I’ve also just interviewed a lot of people, kind of like you’re doing with entrepreneurs. Just finding mentors, that kind of thing has been really helpful for me. And then just going to the Internet. I love Google searches. And just, “How do you pitch? How does a start-up pitch?” And then finding start-up resources. And I think Techstars or somebody has a great resource for that kind of stuff. Like, “Here’s a 10-slide deck pitch that works perfectly.” And I translate that into video format and say, “This is how I can pitch video.” And it’s just a big learning process, really.
Andrew: What’s one tip that you learned about pitching video that maybe someone in our audience could learn from?
Eric: About pitching video?
Andrew: Yeah, what do you do in your pitches that the rest of us need to learn from, what’s especially good?
Eric: I think the focus always really goes back to kind of the research and understanding side. What makes us unique, again, is that and not that we’re a video company. And so I think the takeaway or the insight would be it’s not necessarily about your product, your deliverable, your output. It’s the input that’s most valuable and important, especially in the sales process, that’s the thing that people are wanting. Everybody wants a video.
Andrew: What do you mean?
Eric: Well, people want a video. They come to us and say, “Hey, I need a video.” But that’s an expression of a felt need, and that felt need is, “We have a problem we need to solve,” or, “We can’t explain this clearly enough.” And so that helps, when we can understand the problem that they have rather than the output they’re looking for. That’s what expert agencies and expert companies do, is help them understand the problem, help them understand that we have a solution for them.
And so I think that’s the best advice I have for pitching, is understand the problem and dig deeper and dig deeper and just keep peeling back.
Andrew: I see. So if I came to you and I said, “I need a video,” you’d say, “Why do you need a video?” And you’d try to understand what happened.
Eric: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay.
Eric: Yeah.
Andrew: Speaking of selling . . .
Eric: “What’s the business problem we’re solving?”
Andrew: Sorry?
Eric: I would ask, “What’s the purpose? What business problem are we solving?,” those kinds of things. “What struggles does your audience have? What are you feeling? What struggles do you have?” Those kinds of things.
Andrew: Why do you need to know that in order to sell them?
Eric: Because I can help provide a solution. I can help provide a better solution. It helps me to understand exactly the pain they’re feeling, one, to make the sale a little bit easier, selfishly. But, two, it helps inform whether we can help them or not. It may be that we need to send them to an agency to work on branding or to solve their sales process. Maybe they don’t have good funnels. That kind of stuff comes up, and we turn down those clients because there’s no reason for them to spend $10,000, $20,000 on a video when they have a different problem altogether.
Andrew: I see. All right, you and your wife, her name is Krista, right?
Eric: Krista, yes.
Andrew: You and Krista were at Barnes & Noble, you read an article by Rand Fishkin, I guess it was in a magazine back then?
Eric: Yeah, it was Entrepreneur or Inc., one of the two.
Andrew: Okay. And then what did you read and what did you do about it?
Eric: So I read a story about him. It was from him and he was basically being interviewed and saying, “I’m not a good sales guy, I don’t know how to pitch. I had to learn that. It was an acquired skill.” And it just resonated with me, it made sense so much. Because I’m an introvert and I’m trying to be an extrovert and functioning in this extroverted world of sales and talking to these salespeople that were quite intimidating, honestly. And I couldn’t negotiate and all those things. And so in the beginning of the company I really related with that article. I had never heard of the guy, surprisingly enough, I’m in marketing.
Andrew: The founder of Moz, which started out teaching people how to do SEO for marketing, and now has software and other things, they market your business.
Eric: He’s brilliant. And so I reached out, I just sent a cold e-mail, and it was very heartfelt. And it wasn’t long, it was just, “Hey, I really resonated with this article. I resonated with this point, this point, and this point. And I just want to thank you for it and appreciate your time.” And he responded within probably six or seven hours and he was totally on board to help with whatever I want. He said, “I love your stuff. You can improve this,” which was nice that he gave me some feedback on branding. But then I just basically said, “Hey, can you talk about us at all?”
Andrew: You said, “Can you talk about us at all?”
Eric: Yeah.
Andrew: All right.
Eric: I’m not afraid.
Andrew: Way to go, okay.
Eric: Yeah, so then he tweeted about us. And I had a good couple hundred leads in the next 24 hours.
Andrew: Couple hundred leads just because he tweeted about you?
Eric: Yes. Yeah. So once he tweeted about us, I said, “Hey, can you post an answer on this Quora post?” And he did that, too.
Andrew: So you could have answered the Quora post, it was related to you, and you said, “Can you post an answer?”
Eric: I could have, but what would that have done? Nobody knows me. They know him. And so it was, “Who are the top explainer video companies?” And he put us on there and he posted a video of ours. And so it just blew up our company, we just blew up in the tech space. And it’s been a skyrocket ever since then.
So I reached out to him probably a year later and said, “Hey, I want to do something for you, no strings attached. Let’s make a video.” And so we did a Moz video for him.
Andrew: I’m looking it up right here. I think I see the question here. Oh, Chrome, sometimes you disappoint me. There it is. Who are the top explainer video production houses? Why?” And you asked him to do that?
Eric: Yeah. So I asked him and his answer was number one for a while, now it’s just saturated with lower-budget companies, just kind of the trash of the industry. And so now it’s kind of pushed down, but we had a lot of upvotes and it was at the top and it was driving a lot of traffic to us.
Andrew: He is so good that way. I think also your approach of saying, “Thank you, I got something out of the article, here’s something specific,” is just undervalued. I think more people could do that. If you hear an interview and you got something out of it, just shoot the person an email, don’t even expect a response. Frankly sometimes it’s better not to expect a response, just have it in their inbox so a year from now when you need something it’s not just coming at them blindly. You could just go back to the previous email you sent a year before, hit “reply,” and say, “I just saw that there’s this question on Quora. I was wondering if you could answer it.” Right? It doesn’t have to be an immediate thing. But I think people just don’t value that, don’t recognize the power of that.
Eric: I don’t think they recognize the power. It’s one of my greatest strengths, everyone talks about, “Hey, it’s weird that you’re not afraid to just reach out to people and get things rolling.” And sometimes I ask and sometimes I don’t, and with that one it was truly I spent, I think, four hours on a one-paragraph email because I was so nervous that it was going to come across bad and I really didn’t have an endgame in mind, I had no idea that he would even respond to me, but I had no idea who he was. So I had no idea of the odds that were against me.
Andrew: Yeah. I see the answer right now, I finally found it. It’s just a two-sentence answer. “Another one for the list, explainify.com. They’ve done some good work listed here,” he gave a link to your portfolio,” and a good sample video here,” and he embedded your video from YouTube. Boom, that’s it. And that helped you get a lot of customers. Did you say, “Hey, you know what? Rand is big, but what about this search engine land? I’ll go to them, too. Who runs that? And what about these other people?” Did you do that?
Eric: No, I’m not smart enough for that. I just never did. I missed the boat there, man.
Andrew: Not too late. All right, but what you did do though was get a mentor, and the mentor helped grow your business. Let’s take a moment to talk about Toptal. And while we do that . . . Actually, we’ll talk about Toptal, then we’ll come back.
Here’s the thing with Toptal. Do you know Toptal?
Eric: I’ve heard of it on your podcast, but I have not looked it up.
Andrew: I’ve got to say them slower. “Toptal, do you know Toptal? Toptal.” Toptal. “Top” as in “top of the mountain, “tal” as in “talent.” They are a company that prides themselves on having the best developers out there. They will screen you like . . . I think screen you better than Google. Right? Because Google could only hire so many developers. But what Toptal needs is basically all the best developers possible in their network. And so they go through these insane tests to make sure that they only have the top developers in their network. And then when a company needs to hire a developer, they could come to Toptal, Toptal introduces them to the right developer based on the company’s needs, based on their quirks, based on what project are you working on, what language are you working on, etc.
If you’re out there and you need to hire a developer, do what I did. I just took out my… Actually, before I even took out my credit card I got on the phone with them, I told them what I needed, and then I took out my credit card and I hired a developer from Toptal. It was the best thing we could do for our site. I never thought that I was Toptal-worthy, frankly, because they talk so much about the screening process. I said, “This is just a simple WordPress, I’m not worthy of hiring a great developer.” Then I’m so glad that I did because we went to Toptal, we got a fan-freaking-tastic developer, in a matter of days he solved our problem, the search problem that took us forever, and then that just unclogged stuff. If you go back and see what our site looked like before this developer and what it looked like after, it’s worlds apart. Before was just a standard WordPress theme, afterwards it was a site, a machine that will help you find, that will then do so much more, like organize all of our content properly.
All right, if you want to work with the best of the best, and I’m telling you they will bring it out of you. Run with the best people, cycle with the best people, get the best developers out there, they will bring the best out of you. I want you to go try this company that I’ve been talking about forever that apparently everyone is signing up for on Mixergy because these guys keep buying up all my ads. If you want to go try them, here’s a URL where you’re going to get 80 hours of Toptal developer credit when you pay for your first 80 hours, in addition to getting a no-risk trial period of up to two weeks. Here’s that URL, T-O-P-T-A-L.com/mixergy, toptal.com/mixergy.
The mentor, how did you get a mentor?
Eric: I just asked, again. So a friend introduced me to this guy, his name is Tim and he’s incredible. And he just was willing to get on a phone call with me and we hit it off and I just kind of sort of made it happen that we would continue talking over the next few weeks.
Andrew: You just kind of asked? You said, “I need somebody to help me”?
Eric: Yeah. I just said, “Hey, I don’t know what I’m doing and it sounds like you’re really smart with writing blogs and stuff like that.”
Andrew: Who is this guy? Is this Tim Keck?
Eric: No, no. That’s interesting, good research.
Andrew: I’m trying.
Eric: He’s one of my newer mentors. His name is Tim Bickers.
Andrew: Tim Bickers? And you just saw, “This guy knows how to do content marketing, right? I want to learn from him. I’m going to call him up and ask him if he’ll mentor me.” What’s in it for him to mentor you?
Eric: I think he was just really interested in the space that we were playing in. He’s a marketer, as well, he had a marketing company. And honestly I think it was just, I don’t know, just goodwill, just wanting to help people.
Andrew: And it was just you calling him up on a regular basis, asking for some feedback, asking for some guidance?
Eric: Yeah. He offered me way too much help. I would be like, “I’m writing this guest post for wistia.com. It’s a huge deal. I’m really nervous. Here’s what I’ve got.” I’d send him a Google Doc, he’d come in and he’d edit it, he’d help me with it. We’d hop on a phone call and kind of jam on it and make sure it was great. Occasionally it would be an email or something, I’m like, “Hey, I’m trying to win this big deal. It’s $20,000 and I have no idea how to pitch it. Here’s what I’m thinking.” He would just offer me advice for free for quite a while. I don’t think he even asked me to pay for anything until like year two, which was just ridiculous. So I don’t know what’s in him.
Andrew: Why would he do that? Let’s think a little bit. Why do you think he would be willing to give you that kind of feedback? Frankly, editing a Google Doc is a pain in the ass for everyone. Right?
Eric: Right.
Andrew: Why do you think he did that? Be open.
Eric: He’s a man of faith. He’s just a gracious person. He believes in giving, and I think he saw a young him in me possibly. I may be putting words in his mouth there, but I hope that’s what it was. I think he just saw opportunity. Not for him to have improvement or success or anything, but opportunity to help somebody. And he was gracious enough to do that. And now we’re really good friends and planning to travel to Africa with him sometime and do some stuff.
Andrew: Really?
Eric: Yeah, he does venture capitalism out there, out in Zimbabwe. And just a really cool guy doing lots of cool stuff and I want to be a part of it. Because it’s real, he invested in me and now I’m going to invest in all of his things that he’s doing.
Andrew: Did he actually put money into your business?
Eric: No, no money. No, just time, which I think is more important.
Andrew: Yeah. You know what? My friend Shane Mac is good at that. He’ll just send you his Medium post and say, “What do you think of this?” And you’re in edit mode or in feedback mode, I guess they have on Medium.
Eric: Yeah.
Andrew: And I guess even if I don’t give him feedback, at least he’s showing me what he’s about to write. I would never think to get feedback from a friend about that, I’d just hire a writer. But it’s smart, isn’t it?
Eric: Yeah. I think when you’re scrappy, when you’re an early-stage entrepreneur, you do things like that, you reach out to influencers and just try to get them to do something. You reach out to people and get blurbs for your book. You reach out for mentors. I’m just not afraid to ask anybody anything. I kind of learned this in college, this is kind of bad, but I would ask for free food after I already ordered. So I’d be at like McDonald’s and I’d order a meal. I’d get to the window and I’d say, “Hey, do you have any fries that I could get?” And they would be so flustered they’d just give them to you.
Andrew: They wouldn’t charge you for that?
Eric: No, they never charged me, ever. And so I became sort of a con man, I took advantage of it and I got a lot of free food in college. And I saw opportunities in places. And those weren’t quite as ethical. I’m a lot more ethical now, but I think you have not because you ask not.
Andrew: I get that. You know what? I remember sending a “thank you” note to Staples. I called their customer service people, I got a good response. I sent a “thank you” note to Staples. I don’t even know how I got the right address. Then they sent me a $25-dollar gift certificate.
Eric: That’s awesome.
Andrew: “Go buy something at our store with that.” And I think I got a lot of positive feedback on being appreciative that way.
You also were an entrepreneur from an early age. Talk about this thing with the vending machine that you did.
Eric: It’s so embarrassing. So I grew up in Southern California. My dad worked in a citrus packing plant in Santa Paula, California. And I was playing around as a kid and just kind of exploring. The plant was actually kind of a warehouse for movie cars. They do a lot of movie and TV shoots out there. So they had all of these cars covered up in this huge warehouse. And I was walking around and I found this storage room, and there was a little white vending machine in there. It was, I don’t know, probably four feet by three feet.
Andrew: Yeah.
Eric: And I pulled it off the wall. I cleaned it up. I got really excited about it. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I knew that it was going to be cool. Because, I don’t know, it was a vending machine, it was just kind of neat. If you get a gumball machine, I would be excited, as well. So I took it home, cleaned it up, and I decided I was going to sell candy out on the street. I don’t know how old I was at this time. But I cleaned it up, put it out there. I did a Reese’s Cup. I’d set it inside, close the door, put a little bucket of quarters out and had people come by and had them buy the candy. And some people would just try to grab the candy right out of the bowl, and I’d say, “No, no, no, you have to go through the vending machine.” And so they’d go through the vending machine and they’d give me this weird look. And I just never got it, I never got why they had this weird and why they wanted to get it from the bowl rather than the machine.
Well, it turns out that it was a women’s feminine hygiene product machine.
Andrew: A tampon machine.
Eric: Yeah, a tampon machine. It was in the bathroom, not a storage room. It was just kind of an abandoned bathroom, so they took all the toilets and everything out, so I thought it was storage. But, yeah, my parents told me later that this was a tampon machine, which I had no idea what that was at the time. But, yeah, so I sold candy out of a tampon machine.
Andrew: It is kind of fun though. That’s kind of a silly thing to have done, but it’s better to be naive as a kid than not. And this is an example of what can happen when you’re a little entrepreneurial. It is kind of fun. Did you feel that you were entrepreneurial the rest of your life because of these kinds of experiences?
Eric: I felt more like a con man doing that kind of stuff with the food and different things. I watched that show Con on TV in college and I’d get a McDonald’s cup and I’d get a Burger King cup and I’d get all these cups and I’d just come into the restaurant and get refills because I had the cup.
Andrew: But how did you get the cup?
Eric: I’d buy one. I’d buy one. I should have just reached in the trash can and got one, but I’d buy one, and then I’d come back with the same cup for the rest of the year. And I don’t know, I always saw opportunities like that. And I’m a much more ethical person, like I said, I keep telling you that.
Andrew: Is that a good TV show, Con? It’s the one on Comedy Central?
Eric: Yeah, it was. It was a good show. It was only like a season or two.
Andrew: It’s a professional performing confidence tricks, scams, and hoaxes to various degrees of complexity on camera.
Eric: Yeah. Yeah, so it was just a social experiment. I was really into that.
Andrew: Are you going to be embarrassed that your team listens to this because now they’re going to know that you did this stuff?
Eric: I am.
Andrew: You are?
Eric: They see me as an opportunist now. They don’t see me as this . . .
Andrew: What do you mean by that?
Eric: I could be walking around, like at lunchtime we’ll be walking around the square here in downtown, and I’ll see something, I don’t know, I can’t think of an example, but I’ll see something and I’ll just think about something differently than they do and think, “How can I turn that into a business?” And they always are like, “That’s really weird, but really cool and you’re going to be very successful one day because you think like that.” And I never really thought much about it. I just always thought about things and questioned things. I never wanted to be a part of the status quo. I always wanted to change things and advance things and make things better and find opportunities to do better with things.
Andrew: You told our producer that just working with employees took you a lot of effort, you had to learn how to do it. The employee relations stuff for a long time was just a blur and a headache. What was the issue at the time when you were new?
Eric: I think just the lack of experience overall. I didn’t know much. Like I said, I was green when I was starting the company.
Andrew: And so what did you do? Did you treat them like an asshole because you thought you were [inaudible 00:50:29]?
Eric: No. No, I didn’t treat them like an asshole. I just never really set any processes, never set any standards or expectations. And then we would have just tiffs and pushback and just not knowing how to communicate. It really came down to communication issues. We couldn’t communicate clearly. We’d argue and we’d fight.
Andrew: So what do you do now?
Eric: I would never give up on things. I’ve learned a lot about leadership, just being gracious, having a servant’s heart, trying to make things better for them, giving them a career plan, that sort of stuff. Giving them opportunities, whether it’s profit share or days off or experience doing this task that I do or going to conferences or whatever. And just trying to be a better leader, be more of a friend but you got to tow that line of not being like “I’m your best buddy but I’m still your boss.”
And so before I was really hard-nosed, didn’t set any expectations. Now I set very clear expectations.
Andrew: How do you set expectations? What’s your process for that?
Eric: So a Google Doc. I create a Google Doc, I put about 10 bullet points on it and I say, “Here are my expectations for this.” And so with a role, “I expect you to manage 20 projects at a time. I expect you to be gracious when we get feedback.”
Andrew: I see. 10 bullet points?
Eric: Yeah, something like that.
Andrew: And everyone would have that when they start?
Eric: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew: And then what’s your process for reviewing it?
Eric: We review it on a quarterly basis at our quarterly meetings and also at our kind of year review meeting. But also we do 360 reviews with the team and just kind of talk through that. It’s not something that’s super formal. But if I run into an issue with an employee, let’s say, we’ll open that document up or I’ll print it out and I’ll say, “I think you’ve been doing great with these eight things, but these two things I think we can improve. Here’s why I don’t think you’re reflecting this value of ours in the company, and what can we do to improve that?”
Andrew: I do something like that too. What I find is that there’s always one, maybe even three bullet points, that are really urgent. And so we pay a lot of attention to that, and then the rest we forget. Do you do anything to stay on top of those to make sure that you’re fully guiding them towards the expectations you had for them?
Eric: No, I don’t know that I can. I can’t think of an example.
Andrew: Okay.
Eric: I know what you’re talking about as far as having 10 and 3 being important. We try to set goals like that. We try to set, “Here’s 10 goals we have for the quarter,” and we could follow up with all of them. So we ended up setting three goals and we are able to follow those.
Andrew: As a company three goals?
Eric: As a company, yes. And then I have some bonus goals kind of hidden in small print below. And in the end just sort of having worked through those goals, having worked through these expectations, you look at the end of the year. And maybe you haven’t even looked at the thing at all. But because you set them, because you sat down and wrote them down, you’ve achieved most of them because they’ve been in your head, they’ve been in your subconscious or whatever and you’ve been successful.
Andrew: All right. Well, the website is, for anyone who wants to go check it out, and you have great videos on there and they’re kind of fun and they’re short, it’s explainify.com. I like the name of the company, explainify.com. And if you guys want to get the book called “Diamond in the Haystack,” he’s giving a couple of chapters for free so you can read it. Actually, what do we get out of the first couple of chapters? Is it like the introduction and then the first chapter? Is it enough for me to actually get something of value, something useful, or are we just sampling?
Eric: Well, it’s a sample, but it also is valuable. It talks about kind of what I think is one of the most important characteristics, is forgetting yourself. The first chapter is “Know Thyself,” the second chapter is “Forget Thyself.” It’s important to know your mission, what you stand for, all those things, but then you also need to . . . the attention spans are short, so you’ve got to simplify things. People have the curse of knowledge, you’re so intimately aware of what you do. And we give you some practical tips on how to forget those things, how to simplify your story practically and implement that right away. And then it’s also, again, it’s a tease to, hey, we’re getting the book out early summer and we want you to buy it. We’ll give you a discount for it if you sign up on that page, too.
Andrew: All right, sounds good. Explainify.com/mixergy. Actually, you know what? I find a lot of people do first chapters, I think Amazon does a good job with first chapters, there’s not enough of an urgency for it. I think you should consider doing something like a checklist or the 10 things you need to do if you want to find the diamond in the haystack. You know what I mean?
Eric: Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah.
Andrew: All right. I don’t want to tell you your business, frankly. I’m kind of going between being an interviewer who just keeps asking . . .
Eric: That one is free, thank you.
Andrew: Sorry?
Eric: I said that one is free, thank you.
Andrew: From an interviewer who just keeps asking for and trying to learn from the guest to saying, “You know what? Sometimes I do have a strong opinion. I should say it a little bit more in the interviews.” And there it is, there’s my strong opinion right there. Checklist, not the first couple of chapters. But I’m curious to see your writing style and I’m curious to see how you help people explain ideas, because frankly that’s a large part of what I do. I don’t just mean here in interviews, I mean I hire people. When I was a kid I thought you hire someone, they just go do it. What I realize is you hire someone, you have to explain to them why. Because if they don’t care, they’re not going to fully really do it, or they’re going to do it really crappily. Right? And worse than that there have been times in my life where I didn’t explain what we actually do as a company. Yes, I tell them what I need them to do and what their expectations were, but I wasn’t good at explaining what we as a company do.
Eric: Yeah.
Andrew: Right? So the book is on explainify.com/mixergy. And, of course, the two sponsors are pipedrive.com/mixergy if you want to really do your sales right, and if you want to hire a great developer or a designer go check out toptal.com/mixergy. Eric, thanks so much for doing this interview.
Eric: Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Andrew.
Andrew: You bet. Thank you all for being part of it. Bye, everyone.
