Brian Casel: [00:00:00] Hey, you're listening to Open Threads. I'm Brian Casel. This is my podcast. Welcome to it. Today, I'm talking to my friend, Corey Haines. He is a marketer extraordinaire, and he's been involved in quite a few companies and products of his own. I first became aware of Corey when he was the head of marketing at Baremetrics a few years back, uh, before it was acquired, but he's since has gone on to grow a fantastic community called Swipe Files.

So in this part of our conversation, I wanted to get into media content, growing a media company, if you will, even if your business isn't exactly a media company, maybe you're a software business or whatever Corey.

Has been thinking a lot about and writing and creating some lessons around the idea of using media, creating media as your marketing strategy. I thought that was really interesting. It's something that's been on my [00:01:00] mind for a couple of years now, a direction that I've been wanting to go in my, uh, marketing work for ZipMessage and whatnot, and I mean, podcast, the open threads podcast, you know, just creating more content that I would find interesting that my people would find interesting, I guess that's the core idea.

Well, I still want to, you know, learn more about how to actually. Put this into action as a real strategy. So that's what I wanted to talk to Corey about for now. Here is my chat with Corey.

Enjoy

Corey

Corey Haines: Haines. How's it going, man? Doing very well. Thank you.

Brian Casel: Yeah. Thanks for joining me. I think you're always doing interesting things in a lot of ways. You sort of remind me of myself from the last couple of years, having like a long list of web properties and products and things going on and different podcasts and all this different stuff.

So I guess that's what marketers do these days, right?

Corey Haines: Yeah. Well, I'll take it as a compliment because [00:02:00] from my end, it feels like I'm just flailing around all the time. So. A lot of people are like, Oh, you do so much and you're constantly putting stuff out. I'm like, I know I have a problem. It's sort of, um, I'm just trying to figure it out.

Brian Casel: Count me in the camp of saying, I don't think that's a problem. I really, like, I want to find a way to keep, to talk about this idea of like, it's. Totally valid to just do a lot of things, especially in like the front half of your career. I think, you know, I think too many people kind of harp on this idea of like, Oh, you got to focus, focus and only do one thing and just hammer at that.

But early on, you got to explore and you got to put a lot of stuff out there that people will start to know you for, you know?

Corey Haines: Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, really how I've gotten to where I am today is entirely because I've just been flailing around for the last several years now. And just consistently flailing gets you somewhere.

I can't say I've really made it quite yet, or I can't really call it success or the destination that [00:03:00] I ultimately want to get to. But for sure, I mean, being a guest man is totally played in my favor, wanting to get stuff out there. I wanted to see things in the world exists. Totally helps. It really is.

Like you're just trying to. It's a land grab for mindshare out there. And the more you can put yourself out there, the more trust you can build people, the more, the more that your network grows, the more opportunities come your way. It's this whole kind of internet serendipity. You just have to ship. You just have to get stuff out there.

Brian Casel: Totally, man. It's actually about the network. I think people think about like audience and traction with different products. But like the reason I'm doing this new podcast is not necessarily to grow an audience, but just to continue to talk to more people. And have these relationships and people know me from afar and that helps with networking conversation, you know, so I love it.

So you started creating this, I guess it's like a new product for you all about media brand as a marketing strategy. Can you talk a bit about [00:04:00] that? Maybe introduce the product. I mean, it's an idea that I've been thinking about forever. I'm still trying to wrap my head around what it could look like some examples.

What we should be thinking about here.

Corey Haines: So, yeah, so it's a new course that I just launched back in January, 2022. Now, I was working on it for a few months. I wrote a tweet. I was trying to like quantify the amount of time that I put into it. And like, just in the sort of like course production process alone, it was well over 200 hours at least.

But then there's like all the research and things that go into the ideas kind of sprouting and marinating for a long time, even before that. But it's, it's a lot of work. Every time I create one, I forget how much work that it is. And then I slightly regret it until it's done. And then I'm really glad that I ended up doing it anyways.

So it's a new course. Everything's bundled under a single membership for Swipe files. So members have access to all the courses, to the community access to me and like these live office hours sessions that I do. [00:05:00] So this is basically an additional perk for members. And the whole idea, like I said, as marketing, like a media company, it's funny that you mentioned, you know, like I've been thinking about this forever.

And I've really wanted to know like how this works, because that's exactly why I created the course. And I was wondering that same thing. There's all these smart people like Dave Gerhart and even people like biology who are talking about. The best marketing looks like building a media company or just like doing things as if you were a media company.

And I was like, yeah, I really liked that idea. But like, what does that look like? What does that mean? How can I translate that to myself? So then I spent a couple of months, like really, really researching it, diving into it, studying the companies that I thought were doing this well, or we're essentially exemplifying this and then trying to tease out what are the patterns?

What are the trends? What are the themes? What is the ways that this plays out very tactically and practically so that I can, I'm not just talking about like these big ethereal ideas. Like you have to market like a media company, but [00:06:00] I'm talking about, okay, do this first and do that. Here's why you do X, Y, and Z.

Here's all the things, all these things play together into this one idea, this one umbrella, but then you can actually go and execute on it. But really think about like, what is a media company? A media company is. Basically a content outlet where people come for the content and then you earn their trust that they will keep coming back to that content over time as well.

Whereas if you're selling a product or a service, then the content is a means to an end, right? Where. The content then is to earn someone's trust, to teach them, to educate them. So that later they will buy our products or they will sign up for your, for your service. And so a lot of it is like content driven.

Brian Casel: Totally. Yeah. I was just going to say, it seems like it's like in a way it's like the next evolution of quote unquote content marketing. Right. And I think that's still like, it's still a question that myself and a lot of. Product companies [00:07:00] like SAS companies, I think struggle with, I haven't fully figured it out, which is.

Okay, if the company exists to sell a product, let's say a software product in terms of the website for that company, like in my opinion now, I think that that website should be all about selling that. Like you come to the homepage, the product pages, you're talking about benefits and problems that that product solves, right?

I guess there could be like written guides that also help position the problem and solution. But like, in my case, like ZipMessage, like people, I don't think would come to ZipMessage. com solely for. Learning or following a brand or being an audience member, they're coming to check out the tool, right? So, like, where would a media brand fit?

I, like, would it be on a different property? Could it be a mix of things? Is it like the people involved in the company? Like. How do all these like pieces sort of fit together?

Corey Haines: So all this is very subjective. There definitely isn't like a right or wrong answer [00:08:00] here. And I think that it's also important to note that it exists on a spectrum.

And so you can take this to the extremes and you can be like, everything is a front for the product. So like we sell the newsletter, we sell the content, we create a media company. And then in the back end, we sort of secretly Sell a product or a service once we have someone looped in, but like really the company, what people know you for is the media company, or you can do a vice versa where it's essentially the opposite where you have a product and you have a service.

And it's very clear, but then maybe the way that you do things. Is acting a little bit more like a media company than it would be a traditional kind of marketing function. So let me explain a couple of like, I guess, like paradigms or sort of themes of how I would contrast a company that markets like a media company versus one that doesn't.

I think one of the really key distinctive factors. Is you just take kind of this whole like web 1. 0 versus web 2. 0, or even 3. 0. When the internet first [00:09:00] came out and like digital marketing became a thing, it was largely arbitrage, right? It's like pay per click advertising. It's PR trying to get on tech crunch.

There weren't that many options out there. There was like three or four kind of strategies that everyone was competing for.

Brian Casel: You can't really go out as we're like, we're more like they were able to respond to that sort of stuff. And then, yeah, because it was like brand new now it's like they see right through the banner ads and the paper.

Corey Haines: Right. So there was sort of like a couple of dominant forces out there. And marketing was a way to kind of piggyback off of those dominant forces like Google or Yahoo or TechCrunch or, uh, even something like a hacker news, right? And then you're basically trying to arbitrage your way into capturing some of that attention and funneling it back to your product.

And then it becomes like this direct response kind of function, where now that you got someone's attention, now you're just trying to convert a very small percent of those people to sign up for your product right away. Whereas today it's super easy to create [00:10:00] content all around the web. There are millions and millions and millions of websites.

There are no like big behemoths that hold all the attention. Now there are people on Twitter with hundreds of thousands of visitors and hundreds of thousands of followers. We have newsletters, we have publications, we have all sorts of micro sites, watering holes like product time, like circle, like slack groups, there's like an unlimited amount of places where you can play this arbitrage.

And thus marketing becomes really, really, really competitive because now there's so much more noise in the marketplace, all these signals vying for people's attention. And if you're just playing that arbitrage game of Paying per click or sort of using the system in order to for your own game to convert a small percentage of those, you're going to be a flash in the pan, right?

Even if you do make it work, it's going to work for a very short amount of time, and they're going to have to rinse and repeat to the next arbitrage opportunity, which again, it's going to be expensive and competitive, because Everyone else is doing that exact same thing. [00:11:00] So you essentially want to flip the model on its head and think about instead of trying to use a platform for arbitrage, how can I become the platform and then arbitrage it myself, right?

And become the means of not just like putting an ad on a piece of content, but producing that piece of content. And not selling the ad, but really just the content is a way to get people in the door to build, to build trust, earn their attention. And then in another way, directly or indirectly, you can sell your product or service.

One of the other really big, I think paradigm shifts is just around the means of distribution. And so again, going back to this whole like web 1. 0, largely like you're getting people directly to your site from that arbitrage, right? It's, you pay for a click. You send people to a landing page, and that's your own web property.

And then, Web 2. 0, we started building social media profiles, and we started building on all these other platforms, but now we see also that there's things like censorship, and [00:12:00] there's algorithm changes, and platforms can just go away overnight, or you can just lose all of your distribution overnight. The rules change, the opportunities change, and so, you don't want to build your castle on a big plot of sand.

Right? You want to have a strong foundation and ideally you want everything to funnel back to an owned means of distribution, which are really only a couple of things. It's only a newsletter. It's a RSS feed. It's a personal website, a community, or a text message list. Like those are the only web protocols and web properties that you really fully own.

And so now, instead of thinking about how do I build a castle on sand of. Building up this big Twitter profile, that Twitter profile is a means to an end to get people back to an own distribution channel, which is your newsletter, community, et cetera.

Brian Casel: I mean, I tend to think of it like. It's just the bar keeps raising and it's like raising like higher than ever now just in terms of like [00:13:00] quality but also like originality like it has to be different and original it used to be like you can write really in depth blog article guides I still do this kind of stuff but like there's still so much of that now and so like then we come into podcasts but then even podcasts have become saturated with like Everyone doing like the same sort of like kind of following along with like what Mixergy did, but trying to do like a crappier version of the interview podcast.

Right. We're even seeing it on Twitter now too, where it's like, Oh, people want to do these long threads. So let's all do the same kind of threads and just recycle the same formula, you know? But I think when I think about a media brand, like I would think about it like a product, you have to give people a reason.

To care about it, you have to solve a real need or a real problem in the market of content or whatever that they're actually hungry for. Right? So, like, I'm curious to hear some of the examples that that you've come across, like, the ones that I tend to think about and sort of watch are with, like, wistia studios.

They've got a whole lineup of like, yep. Literally like Netflix [00:14:00] quality shows that they put together. Profit. Well, has been doing this help. Scout has been doing stuff like that. So like really like high end, like documentary films, basically, and like shows that they're doing. I mean, what else have you seen?

Corey Haines: I mean, you're hitting the nail right in the head. I think that, so if you just break it down to those like five main ones, we have websites, we have newsletters, podcasts. Which can also be like shows or video communities and text message lists. So if you think about like who are doing each one of those the best, I think Wistia is absolutely killing it on the show's front, again, a profit.

Well, drift back in the day, did this really, really well. They're still doing it well, but you can kind of check that box of like, these are things that are inherently useful and valuable in themselves. My introduction to drift back in the day was seeking wisdom, had literally nothing to do with. Chatbots or marketing automation or anything like that.

It was mainly about kind of leadership and career development and. How to have a growth mindset in the workplace. And so you think about it on that perspective, those are some [00:15:00] brands that are doing it really, really well, even newsletters. So the hustle got bought by HubSpot, right? And that was because they had a couple million people subscribed to the newsletter with daily news and commentary and sort of featured content in there.

And now HubSpot gets direct access. They own the means of distribution to a net new audience that they weren't reaching before, at least not in that medium, right? Email is really, really. Powerful because it goes directly to your inbox. Of course, there are things like the spam folder and promotions tab and inbox placement and all that sort of jazz, right?

But really, when you get down to the brass tacks, email is sort of like this indestructible distribution channel. It's always going, click send, it's always going to get to that person's inbox. If they find it or not is a different question, but it's always going to get delivered. And now they have a couple of million people reading the hustle.

In fact, they also just launched the hustle daily podcasts, which is like an accompanying podcast version of the newsletter. How spot is a ginormous company, right? They're publicly traded. They're doing, I think [00:16:00] over a billion dollars in error are from last that I saw, but you look at them and man, they've tapped every marketing strategy possible and sort of this old way of doing things around SEO events, advertising, And now they're looking for what's the next frontier.

Well, they're going to go buy a newsletter. In fact, I talked to Kieran, who's the VP of marketing, who basically kind of was the pioneer and the champion for the household acquisition. And he was saying, look, it was a very simple decision. It was, do we think that we can build this cheaply and quickly enough to replace what the household has already done?

Or would it be more effective to buy it for a big company? Like I've saw it's always a buy. I mean, it doesn't make any sense to go and build this yourself. You can, if you can just,

Brian Casel: Yeah, and that kind of gets back to, it kind of speaks to like the defensibility, the moat that you're building when you, when you build a media property like this, it's really hard to replicate or compete with.

Corey Haines: A hundred percent.

That's why also Coinbase, they basically created their [00:17:00] own news arm. And so all of crypto news, instead of Coinbase again, wanting to like. Get some placements and other crypto news outlets or newsletters or, or getting covered somewhere in a sort of traditional publication. They became the publication.

Now there's Coinbase news. They cover everything, including their own competitors. They're trying to be as. Objective and fair as possible, but they're owning the means of distribution there. Even you think about who is it? I just saw one. I just saw that SEM rush, but backlinko from bind from Brian Dean.

That was a lot about sort of that trust that Brian brings from the XCO expertise, but also all the content that he's produced. Now I see him reticulous that benefit. There was also, I think Pendo just bought a big marketing community. I want to say, I forget what it was called. You buy a community and again, now you get the distribution into an owned platform, which is a very private place for people to hang out, but you get the benefit [00:18:00] of earning their trust and being able to tap into that right away.

Brian Casel: I mean, what's super interesting to me, I'm starting to notice now, like actual media companies, news organizations are starting to release their own products. Right. Like, right. So it was like, we just converge at some point. Yeah, totally. I mean, we just saw like New York times bought wordle New York times.

It's not a gaming company, but they're buying up little things like this. And then, um, the other one, this isn't talked about as much in our circles, but it's super interesting. So I read Axios quite a bit for like news, like world news and stuff. They're a news site. Like they're a news organization. Right.

But they are selling a SAS product. They have a SAS product that they sell to businesses for like, it's like internal email communication, kind of AI kind of tool that they're selling, you know, I love that. Like literally having the feed when I'm reading the news, like they have an ad for their own SAS product that they're trying to sell business.

Corey Haines: Yeah. There was an amazing example. I saw from, uh, Nathan Maka did an interview with a guy. He built up a finance newsletter of two, [00:19:00] I think a million subscribers. And then he was selling ads. It wasn't like a course, but it was like cheat sheets and downloadables. And then eventually he was selling like paid newsletter.

And then he was like, this was an interesting one because it sort of checks the boxes on both the product and the marketing front. But he was like, instead of me having to go tap all these APIs for these sort of like financial metrics and changes and signals that I'm looking for, I'm going to build the API.

That'll be the source of news that I use for my own content. And also if anyone wants the same source directly from the spigot, basically, you can pay for it. So now he built a SAS product, which is an API. He sold that distributed through the newsletter. And now is I think the last numbers I saw was doing like 500, 000.

The error are something like that. That was like two years ago, though. Who knows what it's doing today? It's probably eclipsed the newsletter product. And of itself, but there's tons of examples out there. I mean, back in the day, sales hacker was bought by outreach and it was like a big sales [00:20:00] community and blog and podcasts Zapier bought maker pad.

Stripe has indie hackers. We're seeing it a lot more often, but again, the ones that are really like building this from the ground up, I think MailChimp does a really good example of this. Uh, really good job of this a 16 Z also, they do a great job of this, all their podcasts and they're, they have this whole like future kind of magazine publication idea, but you do want to ideally split it out from the main product, but you want them to be connected in some way, because otherwise if it's completely unrelated, then people will kind of catch on and be like, cause it kind of fits you.

Why are they always pitching or like trying to send me over to this? Products over here, right?

Brian Casel: Yeah.

The interesting one recently was a micro acquire, which is like a marketplace for buying and selling sas. They launched, what is it? bootstraps.com, which is like a news site for Bootstrappers, which is super cool.

Corey Haines: A full writing team and everything. Yeah.

Brian Casel: It's like you're investing all those dollars in like Google ad spend, which is getting insanely more and more expensive.

Same thing with [00:21:00] Facebook ads and all that, and then, or you're investing those dollars in energy in like a team of. Writers and actual like journalists or filmmakers or podcasts and things like that. What we're hearing and seeing obviously are all the big companies, the big names with tons of dollars to throw at this kind of stuff and buy up media brands or launch their own and, and like what bootstrapper is going to be able to do this.

But like the thing that I come back to again and again, and I feel like I've struggled with this for years, but I've more recently just started to accept the reality, which is like. Marketing in general, like just the work of marketing. I used to constantly try to chase for like, what is that thing? What am I not understanding where I could put 1 in and get 2 out?

What's that channel that's going to click. But at the end of the day, literally all of my products, you know, we were talking about like flailing between products, like all the ones that I have ever sold, the number one source of new traffic was somebody hearing me on a podcast or somebody follows my pockets.

And then they talked about [00:22:00] the product that I sell and they recommended it to someone. And like, that's obviously the hardest thing to scale, hardest thing to measure. But when I asked customers, how did you hear about. Audience ops or process kid or is it message like by far and away, 90 percent plus.

It's like, Oh, I either listen to your podcast or I heard you on that other podcast. And it's like, I think that is sort of like a form of like media brand for folks like us, like down here in the trenches, like not these massive companies, but like you could take that to mean just make a podcast or just go on podcasts, which I have a lot of fun doing that.

It sort of helps for me, but I think in general, it's just like investing time and being okay with just. Getting out there doing things like that, get exposure, even if you can't measure them and built and having actual human conversations where people can connect to you on a human level, rather than just being like a UTM code and a link that you put somewhere and you're going to get a thousand of them.

Corey Haines: Right?

So here's the really interesting part. After spending months looking over this [00:23:00] and looking over like the patterns and the themes and the tactics as well, the common thread between the companies doing this at scale, like HubSpot and Coinbase and Stripe and all those sort of big players. And the really small guys like the one person solopreneurs, indie hackers and creators like myself.

Is the people behind them. If you think about it, every big media brand usually has a couple of big media personalities behind them. A lot of news stations will have like your anchors, right? A lot of like publications and magazines will have a couple of key journalists and writers that people trust and like podcast hosts, right?

Are huge people get to know you and your voice and your personality and the things that are interesting to you and the way that you interact with people. And the host becomes a part of the show and can even take on a life of their own. This is one of the things that I realized with one, you think about a lot of founder led marketing, it's about making the founder sort of this media personality, someone worth.

Following a thought leader, someone [00:24:00] who has something to say, something new to add to the conversation, most importantly, someone worth following, but even on an employee level as well. I think this is where a lot of the opportunity is going to be in the next couple of years, because I think with a lot of the built in public kind of stuff and a lot of the founder led marketing is definitely taking, it's going a little bit more mainstream.

Now I was just listening to a podcast on my first million with Ryan. I forget his last name, but he's the founder of bolts and he's had this whole like, Big controversy around Y Combinator and Stripe and like they're the Silicon Valley, you know, mob basically, and mafia. And he's now exploded past a hundred thousand followers on Twitter.

And he's getting all this press and attention to bolt, but that's becoming more mainstream. What's not yet is building up in house media personalities with your employees and even your contractors and, or even people who are agencies or sort of partners as well. I realized this when I was studying drift, really a lot of drifts.

Gross was catapulted from David Gerhart because he started posting these [00:25:00] videos on LinkedIn. He helped propel seeking wisdom. Dave became the catalyst for David Cancel, the CEO becoming more popular and becoming more well known voice as well. And then you saw all sorts of drift characters pop up out of nowhere.

You had all the podcast hosts. You had just regular people in the company making these LinkedIn videos and sharing on social media. And if you think about it, you're building an army of marketers internally within the company, even if their job title doesn't include marketing at all. When they're sharing on social media, when they're advocating for you, when they're going into their podcasts, when they're speaking at events, when they're writing and when they're writing other people's blogs and whatever that they're doing, they are representing your company.

When you have these really active public facing personalities. That helps a ton. That is a huge advantage for expanding your brand and marketing like a media company.

Brian Casel: One of the really tough things, again, something that I've been trying to sort of crack, especially the last year. And even if you have some resources to play with [00:26:00] and hire a contractor or one employee, one marketing person to come work with you and help create.

Some of this media brand, how do you kind of go about doing that? And I think that that's still one of the big unsolved problems or unsolved offerings in the marketing services space. There've been content agencies forever. There, there are tons of freelance writers out there. There are ads specialists.

That stuff has been around for decades. But in today's new environment, what we're talking about with like media brand content. Yes, there are some founders who are naturally comfortable with going on Mike and getting out there and they're just happy to be like the face of the brand and all that kind of stuff.

And then we see these larger companies who can hire marketers and stuff like that. But I think there's still a huge gap in whether it's like individual freelancer or consultants who can come into these SAS companies and help. Not just like edit a podcast from behind the scenes, but be the host of the podcast.

Co host it or interview the [00:27:00] founder and like the founding team and the key employees, but do all the legwork of the production and make it awesome and get it out there. And so, like, there still has to be some sort of, like, resources out there or framework for how I say, like, a young SAS company can actually.

Invest in this strategy by hiring people. How does that fit together?

Corey Haines: Yeah. A lot of it, I think is top down just from the leadership. If, if the CEO, the founder doesn't want to market like a media company and, or they don't know what they're looking for. And then the hire someone and say, turn us into a media brand and get us a lot of followers and.

But then they're not actually bought into it. It's not going to work. It's going to be a hard time. It has to be very like from a cultural level, everyone's bought in. Everyone knows the idea, everyone knows the mission, and they're bought into trying whatever it takes in order to achieve that mission. I think also, like you said, the people that you're building up from the ground up to create these media personalities, they also have to be bought into that.

Not everyone wants to be a very like micro famous public personality and [00:28:00] public figure out there. A lot of people still see a lot of risk in putting yourself out there, creating a lot of content. A lot of people are scared of doing something for a company and then leaving that company and sort of leaving it all behind.

Brian Casel: And the company would have the same fear too. Like if I hire someone for four months and then they move on to somewhere else, it's like, well, that's sort of like four months down the drain.

Corey Haines: Exactly. So it has to be very like cultural long term thinking. Everyone's bought into the same idea and they're on board.

And then you can get a little bit more tactical thinking about, okay. Do we know how to execute this playbook? This is again, a very new playbook, but I think that hopefully with materials like my course and other, just other people watching and seeing how it works, the people will start to catch on. I think, again, a lot of founders are catching onto this with the whole building public movement and just knowing how to put themselves out there and create on social media and create podcasts and shows.

I hope that a lot more marketers out there are really pushing and wanting to strive to create podcasts and do a lot of [00:29:00] writing and do a lot of teaching on public speaking and things like that to represent a company. Cause that would, that would be huge. Those people are still, um, a dime a dozen, right?

They're, they're really hard to find and find the right person,

Brian Casel: Literally not many of them, you know?

Corey Haines: Yeah. So we have to build more of them. We have to grow them. We have to cultivate them.

Brian Casel: It's weird. Like when you think about like hiring a freelance marketer, there are a lot of people who call themselves marketers.

But like almost none of them would be, would either have the skillset or the interest to do this sort of work on a consulting basis, but to sort of like wrap up this segment here on, on, on me, I'm just curious about the course itself. Like, so you just launched it like last month, right? I mean, how is it going so far?

And I mean, I'm just curious about like, you've had swipe files for some time now, which is like basically a membership. Professional marketers. It's a community. I'm in there. It's really great to sort of, I'm basically in there just so that I can get to know more marketers because I don't consider myself our marketing person.

I just want to be able to have access to folks like you and your community [00:30:00] and I. Like I am with every community. I need to get in there more and ask more questions, such a lurker. But how has like the transition from having the general swipe files community? I know you've had other courses and products in there, like now the launch of this media brand, like how has the reaction been?

Corey Haines: How has it been accepted? Well, I'm trying to dog food, right. And do this myself, right. Actually, one of the big fundamental shifts that I made was if you go to swifos. com today, you just type that in. There is nothing about a membership or about a product or about a course. It's simply sign up for my newsletter.

And so that's sort of like my media first strategy and approach to first getting in the door, showing you my content, you're signing up for something that is. Inherently valuable in and of themself. And then I'm going to parlay you into the membership. And if you want more of this stuff and or if you're in this situation, I can help with the membership.

So then people sign up for the membership. And even then, there's been a shift between being very community driven to being [00:31:00] more content driven. It's hard because when you're marketing something as join this community, what does that really mean? Right? It's more about. The people that are in the community, the connections that you make, the things that you learn from those people who are posting in there, and that's a little bit out of your control as a community organizer and as the, the cultivator of the community.

And it's really, really difficult, especially like you said, there are a bazillion communities out there and there's a community for basically everything. And I don't want my community to be noisy just for the sake of looking noisy and busy. I'd rather it be really high signal to noise ratio. And part of that has just been putting a bigger emphasis on the courses and the live office hours that I do monthly.

And so allowing people to say, Hey, if you want more content, sign up for the membership. And also, if you have questions and you support about how to execute on this content, there is a community for you to ask questions, to have good support, be accountable, fill in all the gaps of what the course doesn't cover in all the nuances and [00:32:00] details of how it applies to you.

And so in that way, it takes some of the burden off of the community engagement and puts more emphasis on the content itself, which I feel like is. What's completely in my control, but also I can knock that out of the park all day long. I love creating courses. The courses are really thorough and well thought of the production quality is pretty good.

I would give it like a seven or eight out of 10. It's not going to look like it's all about the YouTuber, but it looks good anyway. That's what, yeah, exactly. So the response has been really good. It's not like a traditional course launch in that I launch it and it's an independent product. And now there's just like this flurry of sales.

Now

Brian Casel: I was going to ask, is it like sort of like an ongoing,

Corey Haines: yeah, it's much slower burn, slower trip. Uh, so existing members are loving it. They're enjoying it. They're going through all the content. There are definitely been a good amount of people who have signed up specifically for the new course, but now it's up to me to basically, a lot of it is a function of.

Me posting on Twitter and people sign up for the newsletter and getting us some sort of call to [00:33:00] action within that newsletter to sign up for the membership, which has dripped out in an evergreen sequence in convert kit. So the timing is a little bit out of my control, but as long as I am putting in the right inputs of here, a little calls to action, here's the right cadence of tweets and things that are mentioning the membership and the course.

Then the sales will drip in over time.

Brian Casel: Very cool. So the site is, what is it? Swipe files. com. I mean,

Corey Haines: yep. Swipe files, plural. com.

Brian Casel: Awesome. Well, uh, I definitely recommend folks check it out, certainly for this new course. I mean, I still need to go through some of these lessons and really check it out, but.

I've just been in the community for, for like the past year. And it's been really solid, really awesome to kind of connect with folks in there. And I've actually been able to work with some folks who I met through that community. So yeah,

Corey Haines: That's awesome to hear. I love that.

Brian Casel: And I know that you've been also doing like a matching service, right?

Like a, like a job placement sort of thing.

Corey Haines: Yeah. So long story short, in 2019, I started a marketing focused job board, which was the first of its kinds back then called Hey [00:34:00] Marketers. It was a lot of work and it was a labor of love. And I ended up selling the majority stake to someone who job boards was like their bread and butter.

They ended up selling it back to me, and I closed that deal in January of 2022. And then I rebranded and reintegrated it into SwipeFiles. So now Haymarketers is. The Swifell's job board, it's jobs at Swifells. com. And as a part of that relaunch, I've also launched like a matchmaking service, because I get asked all the time, Hey, do you know a good marketer for this role?

Marketers are asking me all the time, Hey, I'm looking for a new gig. Do you know any companies hiring? And so this way I can just add them to a list. I can play a matchmaker and it's a lot easier and I can sort of like facilitate that process rather than just ad hoc through my inbox.

Brian Casel: I love it, man. You know, I've done a lot of hiring over the years, especially contractors and freelancers in my businesses and far and away hiring people for a marketing role, especially like a creative marketing role is so difficult.

It's so incredibly difficult. [00:35:00] People think like hiring a developer is hard. Like that's easy. To be honest, it might be hard to find them in the competition out there, but like It's easy to find someone and evaluate their skills. Marketing. It's so, so hard. So awesome that you have this, uh, this community and these resources.