The Viral Marketing Bets Behind High-Growth Voice AI Company Bland.ai, with Ethan Clouser (Head of Marketing)

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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 exit5. That's zoom.com slash exit5. 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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3:02Hey, my guest on this episode is Ethan Klauser. He's head of marketing at Bland. They're an enterprise voice AI company focused on regulated industries. Ethan is 22 and runs marketing for an enterprise tech company that just raised$100 million. And if you spend a few minutes with him, you'll see why. He has a passion for the craft of marketing, especially building a brand, and why you need to build a brand to win in the enterprise today. We talk about his approach to marketing at Bland, which is guided by their culture of getting as crazy as humanly possible while still walking the line into credible enterprise territory.

3:36We talk about finding that third rail, that electric fence. We talk about their viral campaigns with Soulja Boy, the red phone car and working with Toby from the office on their Series C announcement, and how they measure these big swings and what channels they'll need to invest in as they move into an ABM motion and try to stand out in a sea of 200 competitors in the voice AI space. And we also talk about why it helps to do marketing at a company with a truly great product. Enjoy my conversation with Ethan from Bland. All right, what's up, everybody? Back on the podcast. My guest today, head of marketing at Bland, Ethan Klauser.

4:10I say your name right? Ethan Klauser. Nice. Bland AI is an enterprise voice AI company. You joined about a year ago as the only marketing person. Team is now seven people. I'm going to give you the punchline right off the bat. I think it's pretty cool that you're a 22-year-old guy who's the head of marketing at a company in the AI space that just raised$100 million. So I'm excited to talk to you. You're a member of our Exit 5 community, and you got a bunch of cool stuff in here. I'm series C stunt with that guy from The Office. I don't know if you can mention that. I did The Office, whatever. Billboard campaigns and talking about shifting from viral to ABM.

4:51So, Ethan, thanks for doing it. I'm happy to have you. And in true startup fashion, you were just at The Office and there was a fire drill. So now you're home to do this podcast. Correct. Yeah. Dave, thanks for having me on, man. Yeah. We were just talking briefly off the record in the green room before this, but just some context as to like, how did you get this job? First marketing hire at Bland, head of marketing. You have a marketing backstory though that everyone can relate to behind this. You started your own agency. Can you just give me like the couple minute overview of your agency story?

5:22Yeah, so I realized later in my life, like around 20-ish years old that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I was sold the idea via YouTube videos that the best way to do this was via software. and that you could just use Fiverr or Upwork to hire a software engineer. This is like pre-Claude, pre-AI, right? You can't really vibe code things at this point. And I was like, oh, you know, if you just hire somebody on Fiverr, like pay them five,$10 ,000, they'll build your whole software and then I can market it and become rich. And I tried that for seven, eight months. Well, then there's the other one.

5:57There's also the other one, which is like, or you buy someone, you go to like acquire.com and you buy someone's, you know, someone's thing. And I'm like, wait a second, Some guy just spent like two and a half months and they're selling this company for like six grand. It's not a company. It's not a product. What am I doing? Pre-revenue, yeah. Pre-revenue. I love that, yeah. So I worked on trying to build a software as a non-technical person for about seven months before I was several tens of thousands of dollars less in my bank account and no product to show for it. Then I thought, wow, the only thing that I've done up to this point, I was working like a part-time social media job, was I kind of know how to market things.

6:36And so I really went all into that, started the marketing agency and grew it to six figures in five months. It was a lot of pure grit, a lot of just like doing, buying courses, researching online. Like, how do you... What was the agency? Sorry, if you think I'm not looking at you, I type notes while we're talking. No, you're good. Some lady always flames me in the webinar chat. What was the agency? What were you doing? What was the service? we primarily sold LinkedIn marketing services. So I got really good at that platform. Everything from content to cold outbound. You have to figure out all the hacky things, right?

7:10Like how do you scale LinkedIn cold outbound to like 40 ,000 messages a month? Yeah, right. Because I don't know that many hacky things, but like Matt and I, we were sitting in a conference room in New York and I'm like, wait, did people, and I didn't really know anything about LinkedIn automation. I'm like, wait, after 10 messages, they like shut me off manually doing this. So like, how do people do that? Yeah, there's a lot there. Yeah. And I think one of the core skills that I learned through this process was how to continue to double down and make bets when things are working. So I got my first few clients, got revenue in the door, but I always kept doubling down, which was like, I kept hitting those exact limits that LinkedIn restricts you with.

7:48And I found one guy who knew how to bypass them. And I paid him all the money. I think I paid him like five or 6k a month into the business, which for me at the time was most of the revenue I generated. And all I had said is, hey, teach me how to do this. He taught me how to do it and became the best investment I ever made. Because then that got me to the six-figure range really fast was what allowed me to sell the agency and then move forward from there. What was it that told you that you were good at marketing? I think you said, I'm good at marketing, I'm good at promoting things. And you didn't grow up as some people, like the Gary V story of hustling, trading cards when you're in second grade.

8:24What was it that gave you that marketing bug? Yeah, I actually always tell people I'm kind of an accidental marketer, right? Like I wanted to build a software and I was forced to have started a marketing company because it felt like it was the only thing I can control from client acquisition to sales to fulfillment. It's like, I know how to do this. And even if I don't, I can figure it out with like YouTube videos. There weren't a whole lot of other businesses I felt like with such a low barrier to entry where I could do that. And so I got my foot in the door and then I built a track record for being a marketing guy because it was a marketing company.

8:54And then when I tried to get into startups, that was where I continued the trajectory and ended up here. How did you? Okay, so Bland, give me the overview. So Bland is interesting because you have this specific positioning of voice AI for regulated industries. Talk about how did you find this company? How did you get the job? And then if you can just kind of talk about what Bland does, and that'll give us a good overview. And then I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions about what you've done. For sure. I found Bland through LinkedIn cold outbound. So I just sent 40 ,000 messages and found one company willing to hire you.

9:32Pretty much. No. Our founder had made a post that he was hiring a marketer at that time. You had mentioned I was the first. I was actually the second marketing person, but it's because there was a guy originally that went from seed to series B who had done all their marketing on that front end. And he was incredible, but had just left right before the time that I had joined. And so they had nobody to do their marketing, a series B company growing really, really fast. And so our CEO had put out a job posting and what he had put in the description was really resonated with me because he was talking about how we're hiring somebody with no experience required.

10:09Like we're looking for these, you know, the weird diamonds in the rough that like you wouldn't really expect to be able to market well, but have figured it out. And so that, I don't know, it resonated with me. It resonates with me because I think especially when, and I think this speaks to things that are changing in Silicon Valley, even venture-backed companies. I think typically five years ago, if you just showed me on paper, there's this company, they just raised$100 million. They're going after this category, Series C. They're doing this new thing. I'd be like, oh, they're going to go hire the CMO that used to work at Salesforce or used to work at this company or that company.

10:47But it's almost like, actually, maybe you answered this. Why do you think they were looking for, why do you think they didn't want that? Why did they want someone more like you? I think that that's exactly who the founders are. So our co-founders started the company at 19 years old, and I think 24, and they are oddballs. Like the story goes, they joined Y Combinator, they flunked out of YC, no revenue, rejected by 180 investors, like not much of a track record or experience. And then over the past three years, they've been able to raise over$100 million, grow Bland to where we are today. And so I think that they, early on, started hiring people that looked like them, which were people with low pedigree, very young, super scrappy.

11:28And then they just found that it worked. So I think in that original job posting, he had mentioned that their lead engineer used to work at Taco Bell three months before joining Bland. And they just come from the most odd places. And so that has been a philosophy that we've carried out even to this day. And when you joined, there was already revenue-ish? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we were a larger size company at the point when I joined, had raised a Series B, I think like six or seven months prior. What I will say though, is that Bland at that time had almost entirely built its brand and its revenue off of viral marketing.

12:01And so the guy who was there before was incredible at coming up with good ideas and then making sure that those ideas would get people's attention. So the story of really how we were able to raise our first round, so the Series A, was we had roughly$3 million in the bank account. And we decided to take one big bet that we thought would pay off well, which was to take a third of our runway and put it into a billboard campaign. And this was like two and a half years ago when AI billboards weren't really a big thing. But we threw up a bunch of billboards in New York and San Francisco that would literally just three words, still hiring humans with the question mark.

12:37And then we put a big phone number in the middle. So you've probably seen some of the ones that say stop hiring humans these days. That was a company that kind of stole the original idea that we had had of still hiring humans many years ago. But that billboard campaign took off. And oh, I hate those ads. I've seen that. I've seen that company. It's that creepy looking like robot lady. Yeah. And so our idea was like we put we wanted to ask the question, like, are you still hiring humans and kind of have it be an open ended conversation? And then we put the phone number there so people could call and experience the voice AI.

13:08and did over a billion impressions on that campaign. I think from what I've heard from our sales team is we had full calendars booked out across every sales person and executive for three to four months in advance after that campaign. And so that got us to several million dollars in revenue, helped us raise the series A. And then we've just continued to do things like that. Okay, wait, hold on. So what was the, what was like the pricing? Was it like a low end? Are people buying like a$19? I have no idea about the company. So if I call, tell me, Who do you sell that to? Enterprise? Yeah, we sell it at Enterprise.

13:41It seems like a nightmare to deal with, just from a sales ops standpoint, like everyone calling this number on this billboard. It was fully AI. So that was the idea. We sell AI voice agents. And so the number was to talk to our AI so that they could experience what it sounds like. And at the time, voice AI was such a novel concept. So if you would pick up the phone and you talk to a robot that sounds just like a human, it's that aha moment that they get to have, which is why I think they all went and then booked. Oh, I got it. So calling the number was essentially like experiencing the product.

14:12It was a demo live right in front of them. That's awesome. Yeah. Okay. So that was the head start. Okay. That was before you, you did a good job of not taking credit for that. Shout out to that guy. But that's great. Okay. But you joined the company in my head. Like, okay, you're young. You're this young guy. You're scrappy. You're a marketer. You started this LinkedIn agency. I would have guessed like, yeah, you would be good to be the zero to one guy. But I actually think like joining and already having a big base of recurring revenue and then having to grow, like that's more intimidating to me.

14:44Yeah. It was, it was challenging because we had this really great base. We had revenue, we had decent kind of systems in place in terms of like, how do you go viral? How do we generate eyeballs? But what we didn't have is any of the traditional marketing things. So do we have email nurturing sequences set up? Do we have any account-based marketing motions? Do we have like a really good paid ad flywheel? All of these things were pretty much non-existent when I had joined. And so it was very different than the LinkedIn SMMA agency world that I had come from. And I think the reason I was able to make it work was because I had a really good mentor and our CEO who comes from a marketing and advertising background.

15:22And so when he hired me, I think he was looking for a lot of raw, intangible skills of somebody who can just figure it out. And he was able to guide me through a lot of these things and give me kind of the opportunity and space to learn the resources to learn. He told me a story the other day where like his mom was a heavy advertiser. And so at like seven years old, they'd be driving downtown in LA and she'd be like, Hey, what do you think this billboard is trying to sell you? And then they would do drills about like breaking down. Wait, what do you mean? His mom was a heavy ad? I don't know. Like for who?

15:54I don't know. That was like all she did. Okay, like in her job, like she had experience like buying ads or she was in the industry. I just think it's a funny, his mom was a heavy advertiser. She just loved ads. Yeah. Okay, so you have this like viral motion, you had like, you're kind of a company built on this DNA of like doing these viral word of mouth type of hits. But what you were missing was like the machine. can you tell me some of those things that you did like specifically people i want to come back to the viral stuff i i gotta ask you about like the the soldier boy stuff and the series c stuff but since we mentioned i'll just talk about some of the the systems and like what did you do and what's relevant today because i think there's a lot of legacy stuff but you i think especially being younger and joining a company earlier and joining a company that the founders are younger and the company is like ai pilled i'm sure there are some different decisions that you made than maybe some people that listen to this podcast in the past would make.

16:55So I'm curious, like, what did you do? What did you go work on? Yeah, I think for one, it was like, how do we increase the surface area of channels that we are being able to be seen on? Because with the viral stuff, you typically are only well-known on some of the social media platforms like LinkedIn or X or YouTube shorts, right? Like we had a lot of eyeballs and impressions through that, but we had no, like people who go to events and aren't on social media had no idea who Blant was. People who only Google stuff had no idea who we were. And so it was figuring out like, how do we tackle each one of these channels one by one so that we can build up our presence here?

17:28One of the best things I did early on was hire an SEO agency who has absolutely crushed it for us. I think they've been at like 20 % month over month growth since I hired them eight months ago. And so dialing in that channel so we start ranking well on all the... I thought SEO is dead. I thought that doesn't work. Not at all. No, I don't know. So what do they do? How do they do it? What do they do? I think that because of all the viral things that we had built on the backend, like we had really good domain reputation already through people citing us and talking about some of these campaigns. And so we had a good baseline in place.

18:04And so all they've been doing then is restructuring how we build our H1s, how we build our H2s, what type of like back landing pages do we have? They do three blog posts a day, like insanely high volume so we can increase that service area. and I think all of it just has been compounding very well. So it's like if you have this brand that is well-known and in the social sphere and has word of mouth, they're kind of like connecting, wiring everything up behind the scenes. So like, oh, we should link to this page here. This page should rank for this keyword or that. Exactly, yeah. I mean, the same thing that it kind of goes in pair with the AEO, GEO stuff that we've been doing.

18:42We've had even crazier growth on that end, like 50 % month over month. Does the SEO company do the AI SEO stuff or that's separate? It is more or less the same. A lot of the output that what we've gotten is from the AEO, GEO side has been from the work that they're doing with the blogs and with the landing pages, right? Because that's where the citations a lot of times come from. Simultaneously, though, we work with like a Reddit agency because that's a huge place where these LOMs are citing things. I think one of the coolest and hardest parts of this whole process has been reforming what the LOMs think about us, though.

19:15So in the early days of Bland, we were a heavy developer-focused platform, not really known as the enterprise-secure solution. But as of lately, we have positioned ourselves in the market, as you said, voice AI for regulated industries. So we're working with some of the largest companies in the world who have the most secure environments. And so that's a different positioning. But when you would look up Bland a couple months ago, it would say in the LLMs, Bland is for developers and not really for enterprises. and we've completely shifted that narrative to where I looked the other day, I typed in Bland AI review and it was like a marketer's dream.

19:49It said, this is the perfect company if you're a large enterprise with a huge call center. And then even on the cons, it was like, don't touch this if you're an SMB, which is like the exact narrative. Oh, it's great, right. Yeah, handling the, we're not for you. We're not for the small companies, yeah. Well, I pulled up your website because I think if I, and this is my first time looking at it, but like just based on our prep, right? I'm like going through this, I'm like, you know, viral AI, kind of crazy stunts, billboards. But then when I go to your website, like this website says to me like enterprise, high end.

20:24And so it's this interesting mix of like, you can do those things and then you still come here and like, this is the actual perception. And I thought this was great, by the way, this 548 million, like this, this thing that's constantly taking up calls resolved to date. I love little social proof like that. And then I think this headline is a great example to me of, I think we always want to search for like the really sexy or crazy or like punchy homepage headline. But I love this one, which is like, if you can make a claim, if you can say something that clearly speaks to a particular type of buyer, like, oh, voice AI for regulated industries, this headline, this is one, two, three, four, five.

21:01This is five words that says so much. You know what I mean? like you're saying, like regulated, that speaks to, okay, that must mean they can do this and must mean they can do that. Like I, how did a line come up? Well, I think for one, I get really frustrated as a marketer. Every time I see a billboard or I go to somebody's website and it's like AI infrastructure for, you know, GTM Alliance. And like, I don't know what any of those words mean. That's a good AI infrastructure for GTM Alliance. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It's just like a bunch of buzzwords that don't really mean anything. And so as a marketing department, I just really pushed our team to try to make everything as simplified as possible.

21:40We go by, okay, sure, we're for enterprises, but like we try to make all of our copy fifth grade reading level. Yeah. Built for high stakes, built for high stakes phone calls where security and trust actually matter. Yeah. And so the goal of the website copy is not to sound cool or esoteric. The goal is to clearly define what you do so that the audience understands immediately how you can provide value. And that's kind of in the philosophy for how we do all of our content. Do you think that the website serves a different purpose today than it did a couple years ago? Or how do you all think about the website in your funnel?

22:16That's a good question. I think that it has a very similar role personally. But I do know that a lot of people are maybe taking a different process after going to the website, whereas it used to be website, go to the CTA, book a call so you can talk to a salesperson. I understand that it may be much more closer now to go to the website, feed the website into your LLM of choice, and then get whatever output you are looking for on a specific question. And then finally, after you've done all your research, you might go talk to a salesperson. So I think that the copy and the content that's on the website is just as important, if not more important than ever.

22:53But maybe the UI, the design isn't as important if people aren't actually looking at it and they're just feeding the content to the LLM. But I still think it's insanely important, yeah. More important than ever is interesting because it almost has two audiences now. It's like it needs to resonate with humans and it needs to be crawlable by all of the LLMs to properly understand what you do. Yeah. Yeah, just a shout out a guy on my team too. Shout him out, shout him out. We built this website. Shout out Guy on Ethan's team. A month ago, his name is Cal. And he had this idea. We used to use Webflow, but like Webflow was such a pain just in terms of, I didn't know how to use it.

23:34It was a very complex software for me to try and understand. We had to hire out an agency, but they were offshore. And so there was the time delay. And like, if I wanted a new landing page spun up, I would basically be a three-day turnaround. And this was unacceptable for the speed that we were trying to move. And he had this idea. what if we just use Claude code to build the entire website from scratch? And so that's what he did. So the entire website at Bland.ai is fully custom code by a guy who had never built a piece of software a day in his life. And so he shipped the whole thing from the ground up to where it's really good looking and professional too.

24:07You know, it's not like some piece of good. It looks like a company who raised a hundred million bucks. Yeah. And so it took him a month to do. He coded the whole thing from scratch. What's his role on the team? He runs our brand actually. Wow. So I love this. And was he not a technical guy? No, no. Like never done a piece of code. So like if I'm like the PR guy for big AI, you know, like that's the story, which is like person who is a brand person, creative person. This is the story I think about AI, which is why it's cool, can actually go do this now versus having to have an agency or all these other people do it.

24:42Like you have the idea, you go make it. Correct. Yeah. And what's cool too, is it actually provided a lot of value because now if I want to make a brand new landing page from scratch for a specific ad campaign and for a customer, all I do is I open my clod and I say, hey, make this landing page. And I want it to roughly look like this or roughly say this. And it'll do it in five minutes, the entire page with our brand guidelines, everything fully optimized. And then I can push it to production and we're good. And so like it allows the iteration cycle to have gone from three days to now five minutes, which is huge.

25:14What if it breaks? It hasn't happened yet. So I don't even, I'm not trying to speak that. Let me not, I'm not, I'm not trying to speak that into existence, but like Dan and I have had this conversation about like, can't we just like vibe code our website? And I always just get stuck on the like, ah, the only thing that I don't like is that inevitably something with the website breaks and like, no one knows like how to fix it. Yeah. Um, that's a good concern. Nothing's happened yet. I think it's a made up concern, dude, because I've had a developer, you know, it still would be like, oh, we got the web developer, but, you know, he's in Ukraine right now.

25:48And like tomorrow we'll get back to him, you know, so it's always something. So that, that's cool. That's, that's promising. We'd like, I like, I like to hear that. Okay. Yeah. There's a lot of guardrails around it too. Like we can't ever push things without our engineering team giving them the okay and the approval and everything, everything is very safe and secure. So we did all the - Wait, why, why is the engineering team involved in the website? Just because it's in the GitHub and like kind of all, you know, they're in separate places, but we just make sure we have all the right parameters in place to not mess anything up.

26:18Okay. Because I know nothing about code. So I just, you know, type. Yeah, but you have Claude. You can basically learn it, you know? Like, hey, reverse engineer me this thing. Yeah, it's true. Okay. So how do you run marketing? You got a team of seven? Mm-hmm. Anything you've learned about, you know, I think having ideas is great. Doing these viral campaigns is great. But everybody that I've interviewed over the years that is a successful marketing leader, they kind of come down to like, you got to have an operating system. You got to have some routine of like, whether it's campaigns or meetings or from how do you do your one-on-ones to how you set goals.

26:53Do you have any philosophy on this about a year into this company? Yeah. So I'll start by saying this. Everybody in our team and almost everybody in the entire company is full-time in office five days a week in San Francisco. I know people have different opinions on this. For us, it has worked really well because not only do I get to build an incredible culture with the team. Where's your office? We're all in North Beach down here in SF. Okay. And so we meet every day at 930 in the morning for 15 minutes. The entire team gets together and we walk through a simple three-step process, which is metrics, objectives, and blockers.

27:29And so in that 15 minutes, we make sure everybody's really aligned on where we are in terms of our metrics. What are the objectives that everybody needs to accomplish today? and then what are the blockers that are stopping us from achieving those objectives that we need to solve immediately? Do you guys like kick a hacky sack around while you do this? No, I might do that next time. Some guys on like a bongo board. I had to say, I always, everybody hates me on YouTube. It's like, this guy keeps interrupting. I'm like, it's my podcast. I'm gonna do what I want. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely.

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29:09Hey, 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.

29:41They offer a combination of full funnel paid advertising strategy and execution, AEO, and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured, and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you. And this works because they were started by an actual former VP marketing who really gets this space that you work in in B2B. So visit compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five to see how they can help you meet your 2027 revenue goals. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five. On the metrics thing. So what would be a daily update on metrics that somebody would give?

30:16Yeah. So everybody on the team has two KPIs. The first is a shared collective KPI for the entire department, which we have called estimated pipeline value. It's just basically how much pipeline is marketing driving for our sales team. I'll tell you in a moment how we built out this model because it's one of the coolest things we've done here at Bland. But everybody reports on that. And that is our team goal. There's bonus incentives tied to it. This is my way of trying to make sure that everybody is oriented towards the same collective goal. And they know that every action that they take, they will somehow be benefited for and the team will benefit for.

30:51So how would someone like the brand guy influence that? With the brand one, it's a bit tough because his is not as attributable. But I think the whole thing that he did with the website. Well, that's right. He made the website. That's the store. That's literally your store. The guy built your store. That's how it's attributable, right? Yeah, yeah. And so, and he'll come up with like creative campaigns. He's always working on what is our backdrop for the events? What's the activation that we do there? He's working on the giftings that we send out for ABM. So like, these are all things that maybe aren't directly attributable to him.

31:21But because we have a generic team goal, we have to increase pipeline value. He knows that every action that he does should have that end goal. So if I was on your team and I was like, hey, I want to start a podcast for Bland, would I have to tell you a story about how I think that that podcast is going to lead to pipeline in order for us to do it? I would say yes. You just have to make a slightly compelling point. But what I will say is that we have the team KPI and then we all have individual KPIs. The individual KPIs are set in accordance to their specific role and the scope of their role. And so for our content marketing lead, all he's here to do is make high quality videos that communicate our product well to our buyer.

32:07And so his KPI is he has to do X amount of high quality videos every single quarter that have to get shipped. Again, he has incentives tied to this and whatnot. as long as he hits that KPI, then he can do whatever he wants. So if he wants to start his podcast on the side, he can do that. Assuming, you know, if he's like, Hey, it's going to cost $20 ,000 to do to set up. And it's going to take me an extra two hours of my time. If there's nothing else that I have that I would prefer him doing, and I know he's still going to get his main KPI done, go for it. I think that everybody on our team is super capable and we're small enough where they can come up with their own ideas and take bets.

32:40So seven high quality, whatever the number of high quality videos. And are most of those like, how do you, is high quality just a word that you use or is it actually a qualifier? Yeah, we try to define it the best way possible. And we have examples of like what the video should like in order to qualify. But yeah. I'm asking this because it is where a lot of things get stuck. It's like, and I wanted to just hear you have an example because it's not always, oh, this person needs to make a video that leads to three new demos of Bland. It's just like, It's just a little tagline on the project that's like, oh, if we are, for example, how I would answer that podcast question and be like, yeah, we want to do this podcast because we want to reach leaders in regulated industries.

33:23And we think if we can interview them on the pod, we'll build relationships with them. That'll help open door. It's just kind of like that, right? It's like, check like that. Our intentions are right for doing this channel. It doesn't necessarily mean can we directly prove that these six videos drove X dollars in pipeline? Correct. Because that individual KPI is what I've established is the most important thing for their position to move the needle. But then the estimated pipeline team goal is their freedom and ability to be able to determine what they think is most high leverage to help us to that goal.

33:51Okay, so daily standup, that's key. Yeah. Yeah, no, look, I have no shade on the office thing. Like I was just talking to Dan about this yesterday. I'm like, you know what? I think that I am very tired of being here alone in my house. And we have a team of eight people. We have a great culture. I think we would be at least 50, We would grow at least 50 % more if we were all hanging out in the office every day. Yeah. And everybody really enjoys showing up to work. You know, we have a weekly team lunch where we all go out and just enjoy life and hang out with each other. So I think what we've built there is really special.

34:24Okay. So that's a part of it. What is, so daily standup, what else is in your head of marketing mix? Man, I don't know. It's pretty, it's pretty relapsed. Like everybody - Okay. Let me ask you a better question. Ask a better question, get a better answer. Yeah. You do seem to do a lot of viral, you know, campaigns, right? Do you have a, at Drift, we did these things called marketable moments. And we try to do, we just said that we're going to do one thing a month that like, we're going to get people to talk about us. Do you have, do you have anything like that? Are you running some type of regular, once a quarter, we want to do a big splash.

34:55Once a month, we want to do a blank. We're going to run a six month campaign about X. Yeah. I think that like at the stage that we're at, we still have a lot of different channels that are untapped. So this whole month, this whole upcoming quarter, my only goal is how how do I build a really solid ABM program and then scale it? And everybody in the team has usually specific tasks that when we get into the objective section on the daily standup, it's like, here's what you're doing in order to help us with this ABM thing. So our events marketer is building out specific one-off events or dinners that she's hosting that I can then invite our ABM list to.

35:29Our growth coordinator is helping build out one-on-one personalized outreach videos that we can send to everybody on the ABM list. another events coordinator is working on giftings. Like we have everybody that kind of ties into this core objective of what we're trying to solve as a marketing team. Yeah, okay, I got it. Yeah. So right now you're trying to shift the mix from what you were doing before to be more, to do more ABM. We're trying to keep the overall character of Bland, which is this company that's really exciting, that does fun things, that will hire Soulja Boy to come do a wine tasting with, which is something we have happening this Friday.

36:02So we brought them back out to do a private wine tasting with some prospects and customers. Like, who doesn't want to meet him in this setting? I mean, I, yeah, I don't know. Look, I am a little bit of a music guy. I fancy myself, you know, I got into the game when Soldier Boy was coming out. So for me, that's interesting. For an enterprise, I don't even know who your customer is. Like, maybe, yeah, that's cool. Can you tell me about this anyway? Because this is in my prep notes. You guys bought Soldier Boy's voice rights for an AI voice campaign in Atlanta. He was the first rapper to automate his voice with AI.

36:40And wait, where the heck did that idea come from? Why did you pick him? What did you do with it? Please tell me. Speaking of Soulja Boy. Soulja Boy, we have a mutual friend, I think, who had worked with him at some point. And he kind of sent us the idea that there was an opportunity. Or let's just say Soulja Boy was maybe in a situation where he needed a little bit of money. Let's just say he needed some cash. and Soulboy is also this perfect figure because his time of peak popularity was early OG internet like OG like internet social media marketing that's what people think of yeah yeah which for ICP you know call it anywhere from like 30 to 50 year old you know people that are executives in larger companies like this was the era in which they were you know in high school in college listening to this type of music.

37:32And so people have a lot of positive affinity with him. This type of music, that rabbit goddamn rap music. You kids listen to it. You should have got Mike Jones. This might have been before your error, but Mike Jones had that. He put his phone number out there. That was like, you know, hey, what was it? Anyway, I'll get it later. I'll wrap it later for you, don't worry. We talked about that one too. So, but at the same time, like everybody knows who Soulja Boy is. I think I Googled it. It's like whatever, 50 % of the US actually knows who he is. yet he has kind of fallen off for the last decade or so.

38:04And so it's this weird in-between point where like he's not as expensive as he probably should be, but he's still a celebrity that everybody knows his name. And so when we had the opportunity, we talked to his manager and him and like it seemed pretty aligned. And so what we did is we bought the rights to his voice with exclusivity and we decided - Sorry, what does that mean? What does that even mean? Like buying the rights of someone's voice, what does that entail? It means that we can use his voice within our platform and anybody can automate their phone calls with Soulja Boy now. So this is like a real thing that people do.

38:39Customers of Bland will use Soulja Boy to automate their phone calls. So like if you call into a restaurant that is using this voice, Soulja Boy will pick up the phone and he'll take your order and he'll process the payment. So I could create a support line for Exit 5 and we could use Soulja Boy's voice for that. Correct. Yeah. And so that's what it means for Bland to have bought the voice rights is that now anybody using Bland can use that. And can you use him anytime in your marketing that you want? I believe so. Yeah. We had in the contract something about I could fly out to Atlanta. We did a full day of shooting.

39:12I don't know if you've seen, but one of our big ideas early on was we bought a big red telephone car. So this is a fully street legal vehicle that drives on the road, but it's a massive telephone. So if you just Google like bland AI telephone car, it was one of the best purchases that we ever made because we still use it like two years later. And we I shipped the telephone car out to Atlanta. You can see Soulja Boy right there. Yeah. I shipped it out to Atlanta and we did a full filming day with him. How do you drive in this thing? Where do you see? Dude, you have to look through the numbers. It's a stick shift.

39:47It's like a 1960s needle that we turned into a telephone, insured, street legal, like the whole thing. So sometimes we'll drive it around San Francisco or conferences. At the most recent conference we went to, it was actually our activation. So we figured out a way to get it inside the conference. And we just let people hang out in it, take photos, call our number, like do all the inside the phone card. This is actually crazy because you got so much like, you know, double XL magazine, they don't care what your product is or who you, you know, but they're writing of soldier boys, the first rapper with a telephone card, but that is going to be something that increases your word of mouth, which matters because the LM is on the internet.

40:26This is amazing. Right, right. Exactly. Yeah. We had, we had a lot of fun with this. I think we did like 60 million impressions in the first week, which was a really good CPM for what. So even though you're like going up market and doing ABM stuff and focusing on the enterprise, do you think you can still do this type of like marketing stunts, guerrilla marketing and B2B? Yeah, I think we can't afford to stop. Every ICP customer that I talk to knows that this phone car exists. They know about the Soulja Boy thing. They know about the recent collaboration we did with Paul with a Series C video.

40:59Is there a lesson? Is there a lesson there? Yeah. About what approach to marketing works today? I think the brand is really important. And I define brand as the association that people make with the thing. So if you're familiar with like the origin of the word brand, right, it's the whole, they used to stick brands on cows. And so I'm not school me, school me, young man. Tell me. Okay, cool. So, um, this is not my thing, but like we, uh, a student of the game, the original way where the word brand comes from is farmers used to brand their cows. So they would stick a tag in their ear or somewhere on the cow.

41:35And it would be to determine that they were the owner of this animal. And so what would happen is that people would be wandering around, they would see the cow, and then they would make an association depending on what the brand was. So if you saw the cow, you're like, hey, it says John on it. Depending on your association with John, whether it's positive or negative, you will treat the cow separately or differently, accordingly. And so it'll be like, if you hate Paul, then you might kill a cow and eat him for dinner. If you love Paul, you will probably return it back to Paul. And so the brand is the association that you have with the stimuli or the thing.

42:09And so what we try to do at Bland is we try to create really cool viral experiences that create a positive association with Bland. And so we want to stamp our logo. We want to stamp a brand on it. And so that when people see that thing, they associate it positively with the experience we gave them. And do you have like a full, that's great, by the way. I love, I love just talking to people. This is what I like. People are going to listen to this and this, these interviews make me happy because it's like, these are the things that I love in marketing. This is what makes me love marketing. It's why I got into the job.

42:40It's not to like make sure that the nurture email campaign is sent out or to spend, you know, half of my year negotiating with Gartner on like how to get them to talk about us. It's like, let's do this type of stuff. But on that thing, on like the what you want Bland to be associated with, are there guardrails for these campaigns? Like it doesn't seem like you're, a lot of people that do this brand type of stuff, it's very like, they're trying to take shots at competitors or call out the old way versus the new way. Do you all have a philosophy on doing this? You're kind of just like, hey, we got Soulja Boy in a car and it's working.

43:14You know, you're not really like being controversial, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. We ax a lot of our ideas, like probably 80 % of the ones that we come up with, we have to cut because we don't think that they will capture enough attention. We don't think that the brand sentiment will be positive. I think it's just a lot of throwing out ideas, giving people the space to come up with stuff. And then we always just try to think from the perspective of our ICP. So like, would they stop scrolling if they saw Soulja Boy in front of a big red telephone car? If they would stop scrolling, then we can then figure out how in the video to communicate what we do as a product.

43:47And then would they like that experience? And so that felt like a good idea and a good bet to make for us. And just on like the why now, do you think there's anything related to trends right now with marketing and AI in the world and business in general that makes this approach even more relevant than ever? Do you have to do this to succeed? Or can you write a thousand blog posts and that can also work? I think that can definitely also work. In a crowded space like the voice AI landscape, though, where the industry is moving so fast. I went to a conference the other day. I think there was 200 voice AI competitors.

44:21It was absurd. But when I looked at all of their booths, this is a really good example. It all was the same buzzwords, the same jargon. Voice AI that drives ROI, voice AI that actually saves you time. And it's like, I don't, I don't care. Everybody's saying that. So how do you stand out in an environment? Well, one, you say something like voice AI for regulated industries, so that the regulated industries, people identify with who you are as a company, you really niche down. And then also, you get something that captures their attention. So that was the one where we took our full phone car, drove it into the conference and stuck it there.

44:54And nobody else had a car in the building, let alone a telephone car. And so both of those things working together have served us well. Ah, nice. All right, so we're like 40 minutes in and I got the hook for this, which is like, it's how this B2B brand stands out in a sea of 200 competitors. And you're all well-funded. And this is what makes the job fun. This is like why it's like a game. It's the game of, all right, there's 200 other competitors all saying the same boring kind of stuff. What are we going to do to stand out? I think that's a key ingredient to your approach to marketing. Yeah. If you were in a different industry, may have no competition, then you might take a different approach.

45:35Yep. Yep. It helps do that. I'll just say this point, like our product team is phenomenal and the direction that our founders went early on. Yeah. Helped a lot from a marketing perspective. So every other voice AI provider in the space decided that they wanted to build some type of a wrapper around frontier providers. So they take OpenAI, they take Anthropic, they stitch it together with a text-to-speech provider and some inference, and then they call it a day. What our founders decided to do was build the entire stack from scratch. And so they decided to build custom LLMs to build our own text-to-speech model in-house so that we controlled, we had full reliability, we had full security, since none of the data went to third-party sources or were bouncing from API to API.

46:16It's more suited for voice because you can decrease latency. Like the whole thing was built for this idea that real enterprises need all these features. They need reliability, they need scalability, they need observability. And so that helps a lot too when you have a real product or differentiator like that, that I can just state the facts and tell the truth and people want it. State the facts, exactly. If you have a great product, it's like, I can tell you've studied marketing and gone and read some of the classic books and understood that, but it's always been like, own your facts. And if you have great facts, like the facts are the best marketing ingredient that you can have.

46:49Did these guys have prior experience in this space? Like how did they go? Why are they the ones to go and rewrite the rules and build this a new way? no prior experience. They started by trying to automate insurance denial appeals, which, you know, as you can imagine, was very unsuccessful. And our CEO one day, in typical engineering fashion, wanted to order takeout from a local restaurant, but they only took phone orders. And so he decided he didn't want to actually call them. He wanted to try and stitch together AI to call it. And this was, again, this is like Chachuk G3 had just come out. Like, it's really bad.

47:24But he, in a matter of 24 hours, figured out a way to get Chajuti to make a call to, it was like five second latency at the time. But his idea was, hey, I finally figured it out. And if I can get value from this, some other people might be able to. And then they just started obsessing over the industry and the product for the next few years. Did you know the product was that good when you were interviewing? Yes. I think the ability to demo by just simply typing in a number into your phone and calling it is really helpful both for prospects and for hires. Every part of my onboarding, when I bring on a new person into the org, I spend ample time having them call the number, having them watch real live production calls.

48:03Like there's this one call that's my favorite that I show them, which is like a customer that we have did a call and on it, the customer who was ringing in was like three minutes into the conversation. And then our agent says, also, if you would ever want to talk to a real human, Let us know when we can make that happen. And she goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought you were the real human. I didn't even, sorry, I've been on this call for like five minutes. I didn't even realize you were a robot. And so those types of experiences, being able to show them to candidates, me getting to see stuff like that.

48:34Oh my gosh. Well, what I think is so cool talking to you, it's like guy who's really fired up about his company, doing creative marketing. I think it's so underrated. And I write about this sometimes. I've like, everyone talks about marketing in B2B. Everybody talks about sales and marketing alignment. and you're going to go through this as you do the ABM stuff, I'm sure. The really underrated, the most important is sales, is marketing and product alignment. It's like, oh my gosh, give me a great product. Give me good founders in the space. Let's go. That's all the right ingredients. It's harder.

49:05And I think this is the thing people don't often want to say is, yeah, of those 200 competitors you have, probably a lot of those products are shitty products. Yeah, really bad. Yeah. I have two questions that I keep typing over here that I wanted to get back to you because you mentioned it. You mentioned axing, like you guys ax a lot of ideas. What's the forum for having these ideas? Is it in Slack? Is you have a weekly meeting where you throw a bunch of ideas out? And then how do they come to be? Yeah, so I think there's two different types of ideas. There's the ones that we come up with ourselves and there's the ones that we use agencies to help us with.

49:36So we can't take credit for everything. What I will say is that we are the type of company who enjoys spending money on marketing. We think that there's a really high return on investment, even if it's not fully attributable. And so if there's a really great agency that we've worked with in the past who can dedicate ample amount of time to just coming up with creative ideas. We're all willing to pay money to get that help. And so those sessions are really helpful, brainstorming with them. That's an important lesson of the game though that you've already learned, which is like you don't have to create ideas themselves.

50:05Most everybody, you look at every company that has a Super Bowl ad, none of them came up with those ads themselves. They all had an agency that did it. And I'm a huge believer of contractors. So our team is intentionally lean. And what I try to do is have one or two domain experts who run a department in marketing. So events, brand, demand gen, etc. And then give them full access to whatever resources they need, whether that be capital, whether that be contractors and agencies. Because I just believe that you can hire contractors or agencies who are world class at what they do, and you can get their high leverage output at a fraction of the cost.

50:39And so with a creative agency, we've always gotten great ROI from that. So we continue to do it. when it's just us coming up with ideas, we like to do roundtables sometimes. Our kind of main ideas is let's just throw out everything we possibly can and let's be as controversial as possible. And then let's dial it back. So like go as far as you can and then let's just figure out how do we bring it to where it's just kind of on that line where it's enough controversy or enough novelty to get people's attention, but people still have a positive association with the brand. Yeah, I like that. That's good.

51:13Yeah, you have to get to the electric fence to like figure out where you should be at. Right. And if Soulja Boy made the cut, I'd love to know what didn't. Yeah. Yeah. You also mentioned brand sentiment. Is that, was that just a thing that you said? Or do you, do you also measure that as part of your, your marketing efforts? No, I think it's more anecdotal. I get to talk to a lot of customers. I've got feeling like, oh man, people, people did not like that. That did not go over well. Yeah. And thankfully, you know, we, we have a large kind of sounding board that we use. And if, and if there's multiple people who are like, this is not going to go well, like we've had times where our CEO or one person is like, we have to do this, we have to do this.

51:51But then the rest of the team is like, I don't think people will appreciate it. We usually will veto it. And then sometimes when we need to call in the big guns, we'll ask the investors. And then it usually almost always gets shut down. So that's, that's always a good rubric. Yeah. Like, what do you, what do you all think of this? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right, Ethan, this was great. I could spend hours with you. I'm hoping there'll be more forums for this. And it's fun. Doing this podcast gives me an insight into like which companies are doing interesting things. And I got, I'm going to hit the, I don't do this.

52:22I'm going to hit the follow on the Bland AI company page, because I want to see what's going on over there. But thanks for coming on the pod. I'll obviously see you in our community, see you around Exify, but keep doing an awesome job. I love stories like this, which is company kind of in a traditional space, lots of competitors, outsmarting people and innovating with fun marketing, which is like, that's why a lot of us got into this job. And I hope people get that sentiment from the podcast. If you do, send us an email, hi at Exify.com, or we'll link to Ethan's stuff right here. The best thing you can do is send him lots of messages and LinkedIn connections after our podcast goes out, because that makes me really happy and let us know that this landed.

53:01So, all right, you got to get back to the office. Fire drill's over. Get out of here. Thank you, Dave. All right, man. Bye.

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