High-Value Brand Assets Most B2B Companies Haven't Tapped Yet (with Louis Grenier, Founder of Stand The F*ck Out)

0:00Hey, it's Dave. So Zoom Webinars and Events has made our recent Exit 5 Live sessions way more pro lately. But don't just take my word for it. Check this out. This is what Kelly B said. She said, I compare all other webinars now against Exit 5. I love that. And look, in a world of AI slop, we just want to make something that's actually worth going to. It's not easy to get an hour out of your day. I'm just the on-air talent, though. So I'm going to kick it over to Marissa and Maria. This is our Exit 5 Live production team, our content team here at Exit 5, since they're the ones actually making this all happen.

0:29Marissa? I've been doing B2B content a long time. I know. It's hard to hold attention for more than 30 seconds, let alone a whole webinar. But Zoom webinars helps. Recently, we've had nearly 2 ,000 registrants, over 500 live, and hundreds of hours of watch time on our sessions. Maria, what would you say is driving that? It all starts with prep. We do up to seven hours per session. Choosing a topic, prep calls, building the run of show, and so much more. With Zoom webinars and events, everything's in one place. registration, emails, polls, analytics. So it's simple to run that cycle every two weeks.

1:02At Showtime, I hand it back to Marissa in Zoom's production studio. With Zoom's production studio, I can set the scenes in advance. So on the big day, I just send them live with speakers and content already in place. Clean transitions, crystal clear audio and video. I feel like I'm running the big game back there. So this is why our webinars have been crushing it lately. Look, they just said we're spending seven hours per session on this. And don't just take our word for it. Come and see firsthand. And we run these every other Friday. It's called Exit 5 Live, now powered by Zoom webinars and events.

1:32So come and check us out, see this whole thing live. And if you want to learn more about using Zoom at your company, check out zoom.com slash exit five. That's zoom.com slash exit five. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Convertive, a B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI-powered go-to-market strategy. Q4 is the time of year when having a great agency partner matters more than ever. If you're shopping for a new agency, Convertive is worth looking into. They work with marketing and operations leaders to help grow revenue across the business and AEO. One of the things I know you're thinking about right now is one of their specialties.

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2:52One, two, three, four, exit. One, two, three, four, exit. My guest on this episode is Louis Grenier. Louis is the founder of STFO, a B2B positioning and GTM consultancy, aka Stand the Fuck Out, which is book hero, which is great. He's also one of the keynote speakers at Drive 2026, our big annual event for Exit 5 coming in this September. And he just ran a study scoring 100 B2B companies on how distinctive their brands actually are. And the results were kind of surprising. Most of them blend together completely. So we get into why that happens and what actually makes a brand memorable. And it's not the stuff that we usually talk about on this podcast, actually.

3:37We're talking about design, logos, sound, mascots, the physical identity of a brand. Louis makes the case that in a world where every product looks the same and AI has made differentiation nearly impossible, this might be the last real lever left to pull. Let's get into it. This was an awesome conversation all about brand and B2B with Louis. All right, we're back on the podcast. I'm excited to have you, Mr. Louis, because behind the scenes, we just spent about 15 minutes. You are one of the big stage, big name keynote speakers at Drive, September 8th through 10th, 2026 in Vermont. We're shipping you over via train, via boat.

4:13We're getting you over to the United States, which is a big deal. And you're gonna be talking and you just told me what you're going to speak about and told me that I'm not allowed to tell anybody about it, which makes it even better. So I'm excited to have you. We just published your research recently in our newsletter. And the goal for having you on the pod today was to talk about this because you wrote this interesting angle. So you're all about standing out and you put out this state of B2B brand distinctiveness, which I like, let's just start there. What the hell does that mean? And why did you go and do this?

4:46Bonjour, bonjour. It was a pleasure to talk to you. You remember when I met you, you had hair. So that was a long time ago. Yeah, fuck you. That's it. I don't help companies stand out. I help companies stand the fuck out. We're done. And the podcast is over. It's over. 100 % intensity, man. So why did I use those buzzwords, distinctiveness and whatnot? I wanted to be precise about the words I was using because I think there is a lot of misconception about certain concepts. and I don't want to misuse certain words don't mean the same thing. So distinctiveness essentially is a brand that looks like itself and is different from any other brands.

5:24So it's like, oh, I see this mascot that is this color, this tagline, or I see them at an event, I know who they are. And they stick out in my head. They've created memory structures in my brain that are not polluted with others, essentially. Some people would use the word differentiation, different to talk about it. and I make the distinction, those are not the same thing. Differentiation is the ability to say and claim that you solve problems, challenges, struggles that others, alternatives, competitors are solving, are not solving well, if at all. And it's like this giving them a compelling reason to pick you over the competition.

6:04And to stand the fuck out nowadays, I think, and I believe you need both. In some commoditized markets, extremely commoditized markets, But differentiation is almost impossible. You have the same features, same products, like it's the exact same. The only thing you can leverage is distinctiveness. I have an interesting example of that. So I've been doing Exit 5 for four-ish years now, and a handful of different companies come through as sponsors for our events and for our content. And there's one category of company that is, there's been maybe seven or eight of them. And it's this like interactive product demo.

6:40you know like i'm not throwing there's no shade at all please don't take this the wrong way i'm just saying like there is same way i was at drift there was you know multiple companies doing chat of some kind there's seven or eight of these companies and i have kind of thought like man what would i do if i was in marketing there to try to differentiate because if you look at them all of their messaging it's like everyone's trying to just do like one more feature better like oh well okay maybe these all the other companies have these first nine things but actually the 10th thing, we do differently.

7:09And that's what makes us better. And what drew me to your stuff is like, I think you can win simply by being distinct and having an interesting brand and be like, yeah, I like how these people feel, or I like how it looks. It's, they just have a certain way when you walk into the room, you know, there's a certain brand, there's a certain brand there. I think, I just think like with all of the challenges from competition and AI today, it's interesting to think that like, actually, you know what, your brand, the physical representation of who you are as a company might be the greatest differentiator you could have.

7:41Yeah, that's exactly it. So if you think about that product category as an example, yeah, if I were the CMO of any of them, I would say to the product marketing team, let's stop obsessing over finding differences in our products versus others. Yes, it's important to innovate, but let's make peace with the fact that we're all gonna catch up to each other. And so it would be a waste of time to try to find these tiny mini features that would be different or solving that problem that would be different. Unless you find a problem that is very painful, important, and completely ignored by the competition.

8:14Maybe something that happens recently, like new technology, new context that introduces a problem. Unless you have that, but even then they'll catch up. So let's pour more money into being distinct, meaning sticking in people's brain, more likely to do that. And therefore having higher chances to ending up in their shortlist. and therefore having higher chances to be chosen as their vendor. And that's kind of the only lever you can pull. Okay, so you did this study. There's nine verticals, dev tools and infrastructure, security and GRC, HR and people, marketing and GTM, knowledge and CX, vertical, SaaS, fintech, sales and rev ops, data and analytics.

8:50There were eight assets scored from zero to three. You looked at color, logo, visual device, typography, tagline, human identity, product UI, and sound. What is human identity? So anything anthropomorphic. So looks like a, could be a human, could be a, something that represents a human, could be an animal, could be anything that has, yeah, human-like features. Okay, then bias control. You had AI pick a hundred companies, blind to your own tastes, and then agents scored and you reviewed every score. The report was built end-to-end with AI, end-to-end. And then the bans are zero to six invisible, 7 to 12 generic, 13 to 18 recognizable, 19 to 24 ownable.

9:33So you really want to be above 13. You want to be recognizable and ownable or is ownable the goal? That's where you want to be. So I don't mean to make this study kind of a benchmarking thing where you can score against and if you're above 13, you're great. If you're under 13, you're shit. For me, it was more a way to confirm a bias that I had, which was, yeah, B2B tech, you know, and B2B in general, companies are really not distinctive overall. And I wanted to have a sample that wasn't mine, that wasn't me choosing brands that I knew because then obviously they would be against it and get the answer.

10:11And so, yeah, the answer is that there is only one out there out of 100 that could be classified as extremely distinctive based on the criteria I set up. But I'm sure you could use other scoring system that could find more or less. So the point is not the exact scoring is more like 80 % are really not distinctive at all. And we know that like it's around 80%. So four out of five. So the number one was, is it whiz.io? Yeah, I didn't even know them before that research. So it's whiz and they sell cybersecurity thing. And again, didn't know about them before. And what was really good about them was, it's not that they have like, let's say one mascot that there is like an octopus and it's all fun or that they have a tagline that is so smart.

11:00It's like they clearly, clearly, clearly internally know that the power of a distinctive brand is in making it distinctive everywhere and being absolutely anal about details, anal about the different type of assets you could be using and doing it everywhere. So right now you look at the homepage, you can see the little gnomes, I think, like moving around or whatever. Yeah. They use them everywhere, but it's not just that. They have a podcast called Crying Out Loud and they are the only one with an actual custom jingle. I don't even remember how it sounds, but it was... This is great. This little gnome right here, whatever, the whiz.

11:40Schedule a call with a whiz expert, right? Instead of just saying, get a demo, schedule a call with a whiz expert. They have like, if you go to their blog, their featured image are like really, really consistent and using the same set of color. Like they use this kind of pastel blue, pastel pink. Their diagrams is also quite unique. They look like they have this magic wand type of visual across everywhere. So if you look at their scoring, their logo and marks is a three out of three because they're using extremely simple star thing that looks like they're on the magic thing. No one else in their category do that.

12:18their visual device, which is like a visual device. The asset is like a shape or a structure or something that is like unique to them. And they're using, as I said, this kind of diagrammy way to explain how they work with clouds around it. It's extremely, again, distinctive. And then another thing that is called trion is the color. So like this kind of, as I said, blue pastel, pink pastel thing. So across everywhere, right? So for the study, I looked at the website, but also LinkedIn ads, also any video slash sound. I said that they had Facebook ads, if they had any social media presence in general, as well as their leaders, if they were present or not.

13:02And if so, how they were talking and appearing. This is great. The other reason that I like it, it's like, I think a lot of times people have this belief that you can't be both. Like you can't have these types of graphics and the gnome and the crying out cloud and the crying and like also be serious and sell to the enterprise. But the way that they do that is by just showing real people, real logos. And it's like, it gives you the ability to have both, right? Yes. And another thing that people make, like the assumption that they make when I talk about it in particular is that they think when I talk about being distinctive or standing out or whatever, they think, let's be loud and have a French accent and say, fuck, you know, every few sentences.

13:41That's not at all what I'm trying to say. It's like amplify who you are at 100 % intensity, whatever it is. There's literally billions of possibilities here. So it's more about the behavior and how you communicate that to the outside world rather than being a copycat. Yeah, here's another one that did well in your assessment there, which is Mutiny. Yes, Mutiny. I don't like them. I love them. I don't know why. It's just something I just like the way they behave as a brand. I do know why. They have a raccoon as a mascot and I love the story behind it, how they come up with it. So their CMO, I think, was working with an agency around developing the logo and stuff.

14:18And essentially she said, because we're so scrappy and so extremely scrappy, now everyone would say that, let's pick an animal that would go super far to feed itself or whatever. Oh my God, raccoons are insane. I have them in our backyard because of the compost that we have. They are, talk about scrappy, dude. Yes, and the other day I got out there, and my dog is nose to nose with one of these raccoons. You don't want to mess with one of these guys or girls. The argument was no one else would ever dare to use a raccoon as a mascot logo. And that's so true. Actually, you know what? I'm already working on my next research and it's connected to this.

14:56So I want to know what you think. So there is around, from census, there is around 30 ,000 B2B SaaS slash AI kind of companies nowadays, right? Just as a, you could argue it maybe 40 ,000 or 50 or 20, doesn't matter. But that's the order of magnitude. Yes. How many do you think have a mascot of some sort? Probably less than 1%. I would be shocked if it was more than that. You know, so if there's 30 ,000, I would be shocked if there's more than 300 that have mascots. Three times less. There's 100. We could only find 103 SaaS companies having a mascot of any kind. and which which is funny because if you go the other way and you think about not b2b i like to watch golf i sit on the couch on a sunday for 20 minutes because everyone interrupts me and i don't actually get to watch it if you watch consumer brands they all have you know geico aflac progressive state farm like all these other brands i can think of geico as a lizard state farm is the umbrella you know but for some reason with why do you think that is actually you answer that question i don't think the percentage is higher in the world outside of b2b tech okay so i'm wrong so nobody has mascots it's not that it's just i think it's a testament to the power of such thing it's like we recall and think about them because they are so easy to remember and embed in your brain.

16:36And so, yeah, you naturally go to those animals and stuff like that because they're so easy to remember. But I don't think that many do it. No. And I also feel like maybe there's, it's also a very paralyzing thing, like to hire the right agency, to create the right mascot. You know, like I'm sure that Mutiny, I'm sure people in the company, some, maybe two or three people thought the raccoon was great and a bunch of other people hated it and they did it anyway and it worked, you know? That's a great sign. What, when someone hates it? Yeah. I don't know if you've come across that in your career, but it's like, to me, if everyone agrees with it and say, yeah, it's great, like it's a red flag with clients.

17:14That's what I say as well. Like it shouldn't really be that, like it's too safe then. You have to have people who say, I hate it. Yeah. I guess it's just having the courage and being someone inside of the company that is, I think the challenge from my experience, you asked, you want to get my opinion on, And what marketers and people from our world would say, I think they would say, yes, great idea. I believe you. But everyone's just going to veto me inside of the company. And it's very hard to, unless you're the founder, you're one of the top executives at the company, it is very hard to stand on that desk and say, damn it, we're going to do the raccoon.

17:50And I don't care if you hate it. Yeah. Do the raccoon. Doing it. So I think that would be my guess. And I'm curious, people that are listening, send us a note after this or whatever. That's my guess on why, because, you know, it's the same thing. Nobody gets fired for buying IBM. Nobody gets fired for making, you're going to get fired if you take to do the raccoon. You spend six months with an agency doing the raccoon and it doesn't work, right? Yeah, but you will get fired six months later once you haven't lifted any core KPIs. Sure. Yeah, they're going to fire you either way. So you might as well do a raccoon.

18:21Exactly. But I, look, I emphasize with that and I know how difficult it is. So I have a few tactics here. One of them is to ask for forgiveness, not permission. So instead of going through the traditional route and ask for everyone's feedback and approval, if you have enough power inside a company to do things, do a campaign with it, like launch a new set of creatives inside a LinkedIn campaign and test it and see how it compares to other stuff and then show the results. Another thing is to just use proper scientific evidence because what we're talking about so far is not just my belief, just my understanding of it.

19:00It's not that. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, of people who've researched those things for decades. And it's not my fucking point of view. Those things, those assets, especially the collection of assets that you can develop. So visual, sounds, smell, even in a different world, all of those things contribute to memories. The CRM of the future is going to compete on smell. We have the best smelling CRM. Like, obviously, that's a little world, the B2B or whatever. But like in the real world, hotels and cafes and restaurants and all of that spend so much money on smell. They know that it influences behavior as much as music and other stuff.

19:38Oh, my gosh. Totally agree. My wife and I talk about this all the time. We went to this one place in Mexico for our honeymoon, you know, 10 years ago. And I can still smell the just place smell like a high end. Like, oh, my gosh. It's amazing now. And then compare that to this little place that we went to in Maine last summer, which smelled the opposite of good. And now my head is... Anyway, you mentioned the science and the research behind this. Is this... Do you love this brand, like how brands grow? Is that what it is? The Ehrenberg Bass research? That stuff is way outside of my pay grade. And this is why people love to dunk on me because these things are not for me.

20:11But maybe can you just explain what is this based on that you like? So it's based on the Ehrenberg... Yeah. What is the book? I read that book, How Brands Grow. Yeah. So the one that talk about it a bit more is building distinctive brand assets. That's literally the name of it. And it's from the same people. It's from, it's authored by Jenny Romaniuk, who's a researcher there. She leans on a lot of studies on how memories are built and how it's essentially something that needs to be maintained over time. It's not like you create a memory and then that's it. How to retrieve memories. So she's done a bunch of research herself, but she's leading a lot on research that has been done.

20:53So, for example, they talk about the power of the color. And the most fundamental thing that they've proved there is what type of assets are the most noticed and what type of assets are the most retrievable. right and so over like they show that mascots and human characters are for example extremely extremely high when it comes to both categories and sound is also extremely high so you know if i sing to you it's mad how five five notes and you know who that is you know yes so i think those things are proven, like she mentions things that are from the 70s, 60s, 80s. It's nothing new. She's just used those research as a way to show how memories are built and how people think about stuff and how they retrieve it.

21:49And then she added a bit more stuff like around tagline versus other type of assets. It's a great book. And yeah, it's a bit heavy, but it confirms a lot of things that you would know intuitively. Yeah. Well, this is just my shitty little AI overview. I haven't read the book, but I'm going to pretend like I did because I Googled it. But one of the things that it looks like that she calls out here is she calls it gluttony, just like the marketers a bit like we don't pick one and then stick to it and commit to it. And so if we're changing it all the time, you're basically robbing yourself from actually like getting something to stick.

22:22And so it's almost what we were saying about the raccoon, where it's not even just picking the perfect thing. I believe this in marketing, actually, like I think that there are multiple right answers. I think the challenge is we don't often pick one and then commit to it. And I think you could succeed. Like, I think Mutiny could have been successful if it was a squirrel, if it was a lion, if it was a whale, it almost doesn't matter. It's just like picking one and committing to it. And then if we're changing it all the time, then you don't ever make progress there. I'm nodding like an idiot because that's it.

22:51That's exactly it. And I love your point of view. I think you shared that recently about there's no, anything can work in marketing, you know? Everything works. I say this all the time. But that's so true. So if everything works, then how do I make decisions in the day-to-day as a professional marketer? Well, you lean on foundational stuff first. So like your foundations are the things that you know will always be true, right? First principle thinking. You lean on those and then you take one direction and you go at it with 100 % intensity. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely.

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24:33Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Compound Growth Marketing. They're a full funnel demand gen agency that I've personally hired twice. Yep. Before I was just a thought leader. I was a real marketer and CGM was one of the best agencies that I worked with. They help high growth software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They've helped an enterprise cybersecurity company grow pipeline 168 % year over year with full funnel media and an HR tech company grow 48 % through paid search. And they can do the same for you.

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25:39And this one I have more questions about because this doesn't stand out to me. This just looks like a lot of dev tools, kind of their websites look like this. Am I missing something? So if you really look individually at each type of assets, they have things that others don't have. So their logo, this kind of wireframe sphere mark is quite distinctive. They don't know what else. Oh, this guy. No wonder. This guy kind of looks like you. No wonder you like this brand. It's kind of like friendships. They have this, if we talk about something we haven't really talked yet about, is like the tagline, the words, the type of things they say is quite different from the rest too.

26:20So let's just give you an example in terms of socials. So they use vocabulary like species a lot. So like they say, like a new species of product tool. Okay. Something that others don't do. and they were, I believe, the first to go with this near black aesthetic everywhere. And the other tools that you're referring to are the ones that are trying to catch up to them. Okay, hold on. I kind of like, this is kind of good. At Linear, this is from their LinkedIn. At Linear, we're on a mission to bring magic back to software, to empower product teams to do their best work. We are building an issue tracking and project management.

26:58I like that. bring magic back to software. Whatever that means, you got to have to live into that, obviously, and they've built a great company. But I like words like that. I like the word magic. Bring magic back to software. They have this editorial page as well. Starts with issue tracking is dead. It's like a manifesto thing. And again, I agree. It's not like that's a good news for folks listening. It's not a groundbreaking brand that looks completely distinct from anything else. No one has ever done any of those things. I think what they do so well is that they've picked a lane. They've picked a sharp logo, sharp distinctive shape.

27:36They also are very good with the screenshot. Their product UI is extremely, they have a style of it. They just went for it with all-in intensity. Their CEO is quite vocal on LinkedIn, which helps with their score. So you could always argue about the score or why this one versus another. Again, the sample was only 100. it, what I did was for each category, the companies inside that category were compared with each other only. Yeah. So no, this is good. This is one of the product pages. I see what you mean. And then I like this as an example, though, because I think it's easy for someone to be like, well, we're not going to do a, we're not going to do a raccoon, but we could do this.

28:13No, we're sending to developers. They're serious people. They're wearing suits. So no, no, no, no, no, no raccoons. This is attainable. No raccoons. Exactly. So I think the three that we've talked about so far is a great summary of what we're trying to say here, right? It's like there is millions of possibilities. And it's not about whether the raccoon, a mascot, is a better asset than having a jingle like McDonald's. It's not that. It's that whatever you pick, please go at it with sheer intensity. Because if you don't, in today's world where the noise is the constant, where everyone is trying to out noise each other.

28:54This is the only way to be safe, to sharpen that wedge, to fucking go for it and not look back. Okay, let's talk about sound because you did, so you did the little McDonald's jingle before, right? Or was that Burger King? I don't even know. McDonald's. I don't eat that shit. No, I'm just kidding. No, I don't actually. I feed it to my kids though. Here you go, eat this. Yeah. Okay, so sound. Now I do believe in this And I am a Gary Vee fan. Love that guy. I do. I'll fight you over it. He's talked about audio branding for a while. And I thought that's super smart. I remember talking about this back in the drift days because he just had this little podcast and it made this sound before.

29:37But you actually fully, you did this like a psycho. Five hours. This sounds awful. Five hours. You watch five hours of explainer videos and ads, headphones on, sitting in your little cabin over there. First of all, how dare you? It's my office. Second of all, again, that's the point about intensity. Like what's the point of doing a true brand study and not having sound? Because sound is one of the different way to tickle the brain of your customers, right? That helps to retrieve memories. So not a single brand in the study of these 100 had jingle that you'd recognize? Not necessarily a jingle.

30:15Okay. So sound could be like a distinct music, could be a jingle, could be an accent. like my accent, right? If you think about it in terms of pure distinctive assets, my French accent is actually a huge, huge distinctive asset in my field, just like Arnold Schwarzenegger has a distinctive asset there. So it's not just a jingle. It doesn't have to be just a jingle, but it has to be something that is auditory. Even, you know, I started using Slack at this company maybe 10 years ago when Slack was new, and it's still, I wake up in the middle of the night and I hear the, you know, the Slack notification sound.

30:52Exactly. That's such a good one. Okay. So it doesn't have to be an ad that has a jingle. It could be your product. Could it be product? Like your product has a unique sound or something when you log in? Absolutely. PlayStation. You're probably more of an Xbox guy. I still remember FIFA 98. EA games. Oh, EA Sports. EA Sports. It's the game. That's a legendary one. EA Sports is an EA Sports. It's in the game. Oh my gosh. Yeah. You see how sticky it is to our memory. It's mad at the power of those things. So I got a few people asking questions about something. Well, I never really, I have everything on mute.

31:32I don't even have a ring on for my phone. So how is that even going to work? And exactly as you said, there's other opportunities there. So you need to be a bit inventive. So podcasting, obviously, they're not going to turn their sound off for your podcast. going to conferences, if you run events, you know, what is the sound you're going to play? What is the thing that you're going to repeat? Ads is another one. But as you said, inside the product on YouTube. And I think, you know what? I believe there's a trend that is going to come back. And I might be completely wrong. I think the trend on playing sound on websites is going to come back.

32:06Okay, prediction. Put that in. Put that in here. Now, you have to say yes to listen to the sound or whatever, you know, because browser and stuff. But especially in Europe, in Europe, you're going to get crushed. The GDPR rules of did the sound infiltrate your ears will be a whole issue. But yeah, well, I'm not going to drive anymore. I'm not going to the US. That's it. No, that wasn't a dig at you. That wasn't a dig at you. I'm just taking things personally for no reason. So that's it. That's it, though. You know, I love it. Listen, OK, here's a call to action. So if you're listening to this, I want you to send us an email.

32:41Hi at exit5.com. Tell me, tell us a brand. So we mentioned a couple of them, like EA Sports has a great one. PlayStation. I remember ESPN, SportsCenter, Jingle. I'm sure there's other examples. So tell us. And I think this is a really interesting angle. I really like all this stuff. I'm really digging this because I think product differentiation is harder than ever. And what I'm reading from this is basically you're saying, look, dude, there's 30 ,000 companies, less than 100 are doing these things, which are so clearly differentiators and allow you an opportunity to stand out. So isn't the whole game in marketing, like looking at the field, looking at the board and figuring out like, where can we play?

33:21How can we win? Who's going to be the company to do that? And it seems crazy, but you're going to stand up in front of the CEO and the CFO. You're going to say, here's our logo. It's a bullfrog. I love this type of stuff. This is what got me into marketing. This is the fun shit, man. Not lead scoring and arguing about MQLs and all that bullshit. This is what I love. I love this stuff. Same. That's my thing. The very first book that I've ever read in English about marketing was Purple Cow by, I don't know if you know the guy, he's bald as fuck like you. Bald as fuck. Seth Godin. Hey, not only, we found out we drive, we're working with Seth.

33:57Seth is a gangster, by the way. He has no team. He's doing everything. He's doing everything. He's raw-dogging it. He's raw-dogging it. We drive the same car, Ferrari. We both have the same hair and we're both like legends in marketing. You know, there's, it doesn't get better than that. Just cut this clip exclusively. And then everyone who already hates me will have another reason to hate me because they have no sense of humor. You made a couple of comments about this. Tell me more. Who hates you? Oh, I don't know. People who, people who wanted to, oh, this, his marketing community sucks. I'm like, go build yours.

34:28Let's see your version of it. I'm still waiting, but I'll wait. You know, it's anyone, someone, dude, someone is going to see your research and they're going to hate this. They're going to think you're a fraud. It's just human. It is human nature. if you create something, if you put work out there in public, it does not matter. There could be a book. I do this all the time. It makes me feel good. There's a book that is universally loved. I read this book the other night, great book, called The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. Amazing book. I love the book. My wife loves the book. My wife's mom loves the book.

34:57Amazing book. It was recommended. I go to the reviews and I just click one star and I just go to read just these assholes on the internet with nothing better to do than throw rocks at somebody who created something. I think it's just human nature, you know, and social media has given us a venue where I don't have to walk up to you and say anything to your face. I actually hadn't. I had one time, dude, I went to this event one time and this guy who was like notoriously a troll of mine for no reason. I'm a marketing guy at a software company. Give me like who cares? I say these things to my wife and she's like, dude, who are you?

35:29Marketing people are so weird. Who actually cares? I'm like, right, exactly. I see this guy in the bathroom. He comes. Oh, Dave, how you doing? Good to see you. nice to meet you shook my hand in the bathroom. And I'm like, dude, you're the same guy that just talks shit about me so much on the internet, but this is how people are. We don't, we don't have the courage to say these things. And so whether you're an artist, this is also tie this back. It's why people don't want to take chances and do the brand thing because someone out there is going to, is going to hate it. Someone out there is going to shit on it.

35:54Someone out there hates mutiny because they have a raccoon. Anyway, that's my rant for the day. So. Should we talk about how I've done this study? Yes, please. Because I'm sure a lot of folks listening have played with AI tools like CloudCode and stuff like that. So I think it's important to take a moment to think about how fucking insane is the moment we live in where I'm able on my own to run research like this that would have cost me $10 ,000,$20 ,000 easily to run with more people and all of that. How can I do something like this with just my brain and CloudCode is crazy. It would have taken you$20 ,000 and three months, somebody else, some agency.

36:36Oh, at least, at the very least. So one thing that I do, just to tell you my setup, I use Visual Studio Code with CloudCode. So Visual Studio Code is, you can use another one, but it's essentially an interface that you can plug Cloud to. And it's like, to me, it feels so natural because you can see your local files and it just feels like really whatever the name of this supercomputer that Iron Man has, feels like that. Anyway, whenever I have an idea, instead of trying to think, oh, I have the answers. You feel like Iron Man doing your little B2B brand research study. You feel like Iron Man. Exactly.

37:11But that's how lame I am. By the way, you're as lame as me, if not more. So whenever I have like an idea like this, I don't assume that I know how I'm going to do it. So what I do instead is I ask and I plan it together, right? I asked it, okay, this is my idea. How do you think we should be doing it? And what we did, so phase zero was essentially Python script to look at, okay, what is doable? Like searching for things in perplexity, searching for things. Okay, what is doable? So I built a little pilot with one. And then I had five agents in parallel. So I had one agent that's taking screenshots.

37:51So screenshot one, I'm using an API called screenshot one, that is super high quality screenshots of every page. I'm using Playwright to scrape. So essentially to go to each website and scrape the words. I have a question. Did you use AI to figure out the tech stack to go and use to build this? Did you say, here's my idea, how would I go do this? Yes. So even this is the clean version, but essentially I went through maybe 10 or 12 different ways to try to do things. At first it's taking screenshots using the Chrome MCP tool, but it blocks most pages and it looks like shit. So can you find another way to do this?

38:28And oh, actually, yes, there is an API. You can access screenshot one. It's actually quality better. Right. So that's what I'm trying to say. It's like I didn't have that at the start, but I knew that if I play with it long enough, I will find the answers and it will get to the point where, OK, this is good. So Playwright is a headless browser. So meaning it doesn't open on your computer, but it still scrapes things for you, turn that into Markdown. Then I discovered AP5, which is a service that enables you to do stuff, to access pretty much anything on the internet. Like if you want to see LinkedIn posts from Dave of the last three months, or if you want to see the Wayback Machine, so Wayback version of a website, it doesn't use your own computer.

39:11It just uses an API to access those things so that you don't get banned from anywhere and whatever. So same for LinkedIn ads, same for LinkedIn ads library and stuff like that. And then we essentially extracted every single brand, all of the data for it. So as I said, like website pages, LinkedIn ads, screenshots of their visual. And then essentially built eight parallel specialists that would look at this asset, but from different views. So from the eight type of assets we have. So one specialized in copy and one in color, shape, et cetera, et cetera. And then reconvening all of this. I burned, I think I spent 500 euros of Cloud tokens total to do all of this.

39:54That's it. It's crazy. That's amazing. Because everybody talks about how expensive everything is. And I'm like, do you realize what you can do for 500 euros? Yeah. I could have done it much cheaper. Or people are like, it's$200 a month for Cloud. I'm like, that's insane. Yeah. If you think about it. Willingness to pay. I mean, I'm happy to pay 10 times that amount still. I know this is, okay, this is a separate thought, but something I think about a lot now. I wonder how these AI tools have completely fucked our willingness to like pay for things because the things I can do with$200 a month, Claude,$2 ,400 for the year, you want me to pay$50 ,000,$100 ,000 for your enterprise SaaS product?

40:38That's the hardest part I think right now of marketing. Yeah, well, there'll be a big recording. And I think, yeah, the pricing will increase. But I agree. It's crazy. And so it's like I burned through that. And then I didn't just let AI do everything and score everything. So I made him build a review page where I can give feedback to every single score, look at every single page, listen to every sound or whatever. And essentially have me like review everything, add. There was a lot of shit that were wrong with it. Last thing I would say in the technical side, I also use a tool called OpenRouter, which is an API that gives you access to every model out there, every AI model.

41:19So Gemini, GPT, even the free open source ones. And you can use that with cloud codes. And essentially, I asked it every step up the way to have those look at the stuff we were building to find issues and stuff to improve. So this is just phenomenal, the power of this. And yeah, it's only for little fucking like us to do marketing stuff, but it makes me happy. Well, I, there's thousands of, there's, I hate to tell you, but there's thousands of geeks like us who listen to this podcast is very, very relatable. Good. So thank you for sharing how you did it. Do you also feel like that was a fun, I like projects like that because it gives you a fun reason to like go in the deep end and learn a bunch of this shit.

42:02So it's almost like, it's not just that you did this study about brand distinctiveness, But don't you feel like Louis, as the person, you just learned how to do some cool shit and that's going to help you and give you more ideas for what to do in the future? Yeah, but that's exactly it. That's why I talk about it like this. It's like, it's the first time in my life where the bridge between my ideas or the crazy stuff I could be doing, what I can actually do is so short, so small that it doesn't exist anymore. It's like, I would have dreamed in high school of having something like this. and even five years ago, I couldn't do half of the stuff I'm doing now.

42:37So it's like the bridge is gone and it's just amazing for a brain, like my brain, because that's what I like. I want to go deep and find answers and have fun. Like this is the other thing. It's fun to me. It's not fun to everyone, but it's fun to me. That was super fun. I spent hours and hours and I never felt like I was working. Yeah. Well, and also I think it's really important to go do stuff like that because I think there's the hype about how to use AI is just like out of control that it's impossible to know what's real, what you should keep up with or not, when it's so obvious, like the way for myself personally, the way that I learn is by actually doing.

43:11And I stress myself out when I see what everyone's writing and what everyone's talking about. I'm like, no, no, I need to actually have a specific project and I'm going to deploy all these tools to learn. And it's exactly what you did is like the best type of learning that you could do. Yeah. That's my advice too. It's like, if you feel overwhelmed, just pick one lane and don't try to have the answers before you build anything. No, just come at it from a very curious mind and say, well, I wonder if I can do this. Can you do deep research on this and spawn 10 different agents to look at different sources?

43:41And then you come back with a consensus of how to do it. And that's it. So I don't have the answers. I still don't know half of the shit. If you asked me to code any of that, I wouldn't be able to even write one line. And I didn't know any of those tools that I mentioned two months ago. But that's the beauty of it. You learn and you challenge yourself. It's the thing, it's like follow the fun. Like what gives you the energy? What is the thing that you would do in your sleep? Because it doesn't feel like a lot of work. It doesn't feel like a lot of effort. Like seek those things and stop feeling like, oh, people are going to make fun of you or you shouldn't do it.

44:15You should be doing something more productive. No, just like follow that gut instinct because those are the things that separate you from the rest. All right, Louis. Great to have you on the pod. I'm kind of feel like the rest of my day is going to be figuring out what the exit five mascot should be, honestly. No, it needs to be a sound. For you, it's a sound. Do you think it's a sound? No, I'm just being contrient for the sake of it. I'd like a sound. Yeah, there you go. I don't think you need much more, to be honest. Yeah, I think we're good. We don't need it. I think if I was in a really crowded industry, I would try to stand out.

44:48I think we have all the ingredients. I don't want to make more work for us than we need. Dude, this was awesome. And I'm excited to see you. I personally, this is not for the pod, but I am excited to get to hang out with you in person. And I hope that will show you the ROI of this trip to America. We'll show you what Vermont has to offer. It's a beautiful place to be in September. I'm going to take so many selfies with you and piss you off. And it's going to be great. So I can't wait to see how tall you are. Dude, I had some. Fuck you. First of all, some woman, this is not a bit. This is not a joke.

45:20Some woman at Drive last year came up to me and she said, you're a little bit shorter than I thought you would be. Yeah, I'm thinking too. I think you'll show it. I've not Look I'm 5 '8 and a quarter Maybe three quarters Maybe I used to I just was having this conversation With my mom The other day I said I used to say I'm 5 '9 But I think that was because I had a little bit of hair I'm 5 '8 Hey I have 200 ,000 Thankfully you have a dent On top of your head Like it's like I have a dent I have a flat spot Look I may be short But I have 200 ,000 followers On LinkedIn That's a big fucking deal dude So take that to the bank How many did you buy?

45:55Alright Thank you for listening Louis Louis, good to have you on the pod. We'll see you at drive, exit5.com slash drive. Get on our newsletter, exit5.com slash newsletter. Go follow Louis on LinkedIn. He is a breath of fresh air in a world of sameness. He's the guy that I like to follow and see for like, yeah, you know what? Let me get out of the MQL rabbit hole and I'm going to worry about creating a brand and being distinct and standing out. I think it's very important stuff for right now. And I like the way you think. I'll talk to you later. Thanks for listening to this episode. I love you too.

46:25Bisous. Goodbye.

46:30Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at Exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com. Our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at Exit 5. There's nearly 5 ,000 members now in our community.

47:02People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers, building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group. Or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100 % free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk-free. and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you wanna become a member for the year. Go check it out, learn more, exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community.

47:40Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Customer.io. They're one of our longest running sponsors. Customer.io helps marketing teams get more impact from every message they send so you can reach the right people with the right message at the right moment. And what we love about Customer.io is that they have a great team of marketers who really care about the craft. They just get marketing and understand our audience. Molly, Rosie, and the team bring something creative. Every time that we work together at our Exit 5 event in Austin, they handed out cowboy boots in our newsletter.

48:09They shared an AI prompt cookbook. And at Drive last month, they were giving out Airbnb gift cards and AirPods. They believe marketing is a craft that takes creativity, thought, and taste. And no, AI can't do this part for you. the best teams treat AI as infrastructure and built the right way it actually makes marketing feel more human not less. Customer.io helps product teams build personalized campaigns across email, SMS, push, in-app, and webhooks using their own first-party data and today more than 9 ,000 brands trust Customer.io to send their messages including Notion, Les Mills, and Angie.

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