The Exact Framework for Practical Social Media Marketing, Building a Community, and the Scalable Content Model

0:00Podcast nation, before I get you into today's podcast big announcement. As you probably heard at this point, because I had John from Stan on the show, I'm an investor advisor to an incredible startup called Stan, Stan.Store. I'm sending you right now to GaryVee.com, GaryVee.com slash Stan. Go check this out. We've done a GaryVee Stan Store Challenge, which actually has a weekly call with me. This is built for everyone who's been affected, honestly, by my overall content. the tech stack all these features and the minimal costs per month that stand store has built is really the tool that was needed for this world that i envisioned when i wrote crush it when i wrote crushing it and this overall thing i'm thinking a lot about lately which is the individual empire right this this creator entrepreneur slash entrepreneur creator economy that i think is going to eat up the oxygen very honestly the thing that so many of you want in your life and the reason so many of you are not there yet is you've got the strategy for me.

1:01You've got the ambition within yourself, but you don't have the tools for you to fully maximize it. And I believe you can find that at Stan's store, stan.store. But specifically, I want you to sign up for it through my challenge because I want to get access with you. And plus there's a bunch of cool things. So if you want to go see those cool things, go to garyvee.com slash stan, S-T-A-N, now to the podcast. This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience.

1:55How's it going? Good to see you. Donald, Lymec Capital. Mortgage broker with a B2B bottle in the Bay Area. You met Russell a few months back. Yes, I remember. I remember. Good to see you again. Good to see you. Billy Richardson. I'm in the restaurant business in Las Vegas. Very nice. I've got four little restaurants and ruined my brands out. How long have you been doing it? 12 years. Good for you. All in Vegas the whole time? All in Vegas. Well, and then we had 10 outside and then COVID. Yeah. Of course. Tough. Yeah. pleasure thank you Ian Matthews from Washington D.C. and I'm here with David we same company building on what he said smart devices for in the car security business so it's a connected car alarm understood real pleasure Gary Paul Robillo long time yes long time brother 2009 yeah really good to see you yeah three time founder all the investment space and I want to build something else there and that has a bunch of URLs that I've been upwiring that I'm going to talk to.

3:00I love it. I love it. Monique Frown. I run an organization that teaches life skills. I also work in film and television production, a little real estate investment and brand development for my husband's legendary career and film entertainment entertainment life so it's great to see you again great thank you great anybody else joe nope that's it good we got a nice small group and we can get we can go very deep today so let's take advantage of that so let's go back around and this is the time to get very selfish and be very direct with your question i'm sure some people will pick up nuances on it okay you want me to go first all right um i'll try to keep it try to keep it concise but it's the time we got three questions for you um just a little bit of backstory on myself i was very much like like you as a kid you know, hustler, immigrant parents, kind of a hard struggle there.

3:51I ended up going to dental school. I got some really niche training in my field, which was great, but I graduated about 800 grand in student debt, which is crazy, but it's, it's normal in that. I noticed. I was, you know, getting ready to come out and pay that debt and crush it. My daughter was born with a life-threatening condition. And so I couldn't really do that as a dentist. So I found another way, published a book, sold thousands of copies, and that turned into an online brand, which is now like my ed tech business, uh, which does better than I would have done if I would have done just regular clinical dentistry.

4:23Good for you. Uh, so that builds a team around it. And now we're expanding to a private label medical device as well. So it got a little nice little business model, um, taking some big, big steps in that. So my first question is I'm basically the bottleneck in my content creation, uh, to create like the pillar hero content. I got to be in there doing surgery or something and teaching something around that content. It's hard for me to constantly create that content as the business owner. I'm trying to outsource that to other collaborators, but kind of having a hard time getting them to feed that funnel.

4:58Other collaborators as in other people executing the actual surgery? Yes, getting other influencers or people doing surgery, feeding me that content so we can just repurpose it as a team and turn that into 20 pieces of content. Having a hard time feeding that funnel. Why? Because these guys already make$500 ,000 a year. They don't really need me paying them$1 ,000 for their content. They're just, I know, as charity, basically. So how do I get them to buy into that? Or how do I feed the content funnel? There's a lot of things there. So let's talk about the pillar content and the funnel. Is the model that, you know, obviously I'm very proud of really working for you?

5:35Like macro, hero, chop it down. make that into content that's performing against the business KPI, is that working? It does well when I can feed it. I can feed it myself. How many times are you refurbishing it? Adding new content? No, refurbishing the original content. Yeah, so the repurposing thing is a very important convo because as most of you probably know, so much of my world from a brand building standpoint is predicated on that, And so much of that is predicated on me being filmed doing stuff. And that completely got eliminated 18 months ago. I wasn't flying. I wasn't doing this in person.

6:16So what ended up happening is at first we did a lot of stuff through Zoom and things of that nature. But that obviously is a very one-dimensional visual creative. There's only so many times you could see me in a t-shirt. And the context matters. And in feed it matters. so what ended up happening when I analyzed the last 18 months I was thinking about on the flight out here ironically because I saw a piece of content do extremely well from 3 years ago in the last 24 hours is wow if DRock and I never film another thing I've put enough film on paper on wax, on YouTube that if I remix it in perpetuity I should be able to be effective with the evergreen content one of the things most content creators don't take advantage enough of is the repurposing, truly understand what that means.

7:06I'll give you an example. If you've got, I'm making some assumptions, so keep me in line here. If your content is you performing, when you're doing that, are you also looking at the camera and teaching and going through it? Sometimes, yes. So I'm sure you probably have seen this. One of the things you can do immediately is how many would you say pillar pieces of content have you created? Oh, a lot. 200 great so right off the top there's probably an ungodly amount of content to be made where you're split screening like i do the original piece of content and now you're just social commentating contextually on top of it with other variables right so to me what what's really interesting about the way i think about content which i do think for every business here from Vegas restaurants to yours to medical devices you know the whole world is predicated on in on communication and and does that create consideration to buy something what is interesting about how I look at what I do and what I see working is my content is pretty evergreen literally in my hotel before I came here right now I just produced a split screen from DailyVee episode 22 from March 16, 2016, where the person's question was, how do you do what you do?

8:32And the two answers were empathy and gratitude. And here we are five years later, and it's like everything that I continue to say. And so I added a piece of content to it right now. And I'm pretty damn sure that, oh, I'm sorry. So here's this Q &A from Daily Bee 2022. My split screen, my additional context went a little bit into gratitude and this is all improv in my hotel room I took the cup of coffee that a little coffee left I'm like this is full I'm grateful for this what's in here because I have more than most and then when I sent it to the team actually this is why not show you so in the WhatsApp thread where my team lives where this was the original piece of content they sent me because we're doing this, we have the same problem you do, right?

9:28So here's the question. This will now be a visual split screen. You'll see where I'm going. You've seen those from me. I would say empathy. Right, and so I'm answering.

9:39Right,

9:43and so then I fend them literally.

9:51my friends, if you deploy these mental mindsets, and at the end of this, and then what I sent to the team was, I want the title to say, you have more than most. What's interesting about that, what's interesting for everybody to say, so this is gonna be titled, you have more than most. I just split screened a piece five years later. I just realized I said 2026, so we'll have to make a joke of that in a post edit.

10:18It's a pretty substantially different piece of content that I'm gonna write copy to that's gonna really focus on the gratitude part of the split screen, but I have to do this because I'm at the mercy of the pillar content production not being where it's at because we haven't started moving. If you've done 200 pieces of original pillar content, you probably have 4 ,000 pieces of micro content that can be brand or performance-based as a funnel acquisition. So I think that's what you have to think about. I think the concept of the other thing to think through is in a world of$500K,$1 ,000 framework that you create, they make$500K a year, they're doing this basically for charity.

11:02If you look at James' pillar content as something that extracts 57 pieces of creative for you because you create post-production from it, it might put you in a position where you're willing to pay him$5 ,000 instead of$1 ,000. So I think the answer to the question is a much deeper thought of post-production, which you don't even have to be the pillar, the bottleneck of. I'm doing the split screens. You probably should as well because it's much more impactful. But don't underestimate hiring an animator or other people where the split screen or the post-creative content can be post-produced in animation or post-produced in video or overlay wording.

11:44So it's post-production. so I realized I'm leaving a lot on the table by not repurposing that enough okay and what's fun is whatever I was going earlier I didn't finish the thought I'm glad I remembered is what I'm saying is evergreen that's how I got to that 2016 thing what I'm saying I'll never change to the day I die the slang term the nuance to something that just happened so I'm in the evergreen business and then daily you're using the context of your industry of the moment i mean tomorrow and you know in a week in the world series a player may take a ball to the mouth and lose all his teeth and that's a pop culture moment that might have you being able to over which will lead to so much more relevance right he may make a video of a dish in his of his one of his restaurants four years ago but something might happen in vegas tomorrow that if you post-produce on top of it, the way I'm talking about, so it's really the remix, it's the DJing of the assets in perpetuity at scale, contextual to the distribution.

12:45So for example, to continue to layer on this for everybody, and I'm going deep on this because this is an answer for all of you, it's not only pop culture relevance like Cody Bellinger losing four teeth, and maybe you can figure out what to do with that, it's also distribution. the way you would the way I would talk if I knew that I'm posting this on LinkedIn to get clients is gonna be different than the way I would talk if I'm gonna put on TikTok two platforms that even four years ago weren't even in play we first met it was just Twitter and Facebook that's it and so it's post-production not only for what's happening culturally or topical it's post-production for the distribution too those 200 pieces of content if they've mainly been posted inside of Facebook and Instagram.

13:33Have they been done for pre-roll YouTube? Have we made them for TikTok? You may never need to do anything again. You have enough work for the next five years and what we just talked about for the last 10 minutes. Right. Okay. Is it okay? I have two more questions. Is that all right? So this one is going, it's a little different. So the medical device space and dental implants, they're all huge companies. They're all really, really big dogs. we're the underdog uh i've had even ceo of one of them is tell me you know you better not enter the space you're just going to wipe the floor with you basically yeah that's usually the biggest reason i would enter a space and so happy time to daredeck so we're basically we're entering in for christmas yes that's when we launch um and kind of do this david and goliath type uh story okay right i don't know how much to sass the big dogs because really i don't want you know i don't have as much funding as they do how would you play that by passing them as much as possible because i'll tell you why i've always you know i've struggled with this because we have major clients at vayner who are the number two in categories and they're petrified and i'm like you don't understand you haven't sassed them or razzed them or poked them in three decades that's why you continue to be number the only way you know david beats goliath is by going at it what are they going to do?

14:52Like ultimately what's actually going to happen is you're not important enough for them to actually spend the money and resources on it. But you poking them will give you micro markets, your growth. So just go hard on it. What are they going to do? Talk it through. What are they going to do? Out market you? They're going to out market you anyway. So the person in particular who said he's going to crush us basically, he's already started two implant companies, sold the first one 100 million, sold the second one 300 million. He said, you know, the next one, we're going to price lower than you and I have the credibility you don't so you're basically the fact that he's even talking to you is already the most interesting thing to me like the fact that he even acknowledges you I don't even I would never spend a second on a company smaller than mine that that's the most interesting part of it all it speaks to in my opinion irrational competitiveness or slash emotion which could end up being the best thing for you if you're a thorn in that person's side he may end up referencing you more which is going to only help you i'm fascinated by that if somebody who's you haven't entered in at all yet and they've already had two exits of those size and this is the third one price is only just one variable for example this is where TikTok really matters.

16:09Price is one thing. Relevance always beats price. People pay more for things all the time if they think it's better or cooler or represents them more. Price doesn't scare me. What scares me is if David doesn't understand where the arbitrage is. How much is the implant? So they're gonna price at 100. We're gonna price, we're thinking at 130. Yeah, I mean, I would be very aggressive on TikTok. Very. Okay. Yeah. My last question for you, Gary, just as a CEO, you got to keep, you know, you got to keep your pulse on a lot of shit. Yep. If you have family, personal family crisis is going on, such as my daughter's medical condition, it's when the, when the shit hits the fan, basically, you still got a business to run and bills to pay.

16:55How do you think straight when you can't? You don't. You don't. And I think the biggest thing I can tell you, my friend is, you know as somebody who has not had to live through a level of challenge of that level I feel incredibly inappropriate to speak to it first second of all what I've observed from others the only thing I could tell you that feels incredibly natural to me is my number one goal in life is not to live with regret I don't think there's a single person on earth who chose their business over their family that feels great about it when they get older I think every moment you spend on your family situation at the expense of your business is a good moment to be spent thank you you got it david yeah i'll grab a prop because please sorry i like a good prop please prototype so everyone be be gentle yes um so my background i studied mechanical engineering at georgia tech and then started on the corporate path and quickly realized that wasn't the best fit ian was my manager 20 years ago ge i didn't fire him up that's what he he didn't probably should have um i uh you're pretty ashamed yeah i know if you got shit down from bumbum um well i interviewed with uh they were one of my investment banking interviews uh a friend and i tried out for a reality tv show called american inventor in between my first and second year at business school i was at harvard and we actually made it so this is called american inventor is a precursor to shark tank and uh long story short we took this bicycle rack invention licensed it to whirlpool we had a single patent and they went and sold over a million units through distribution through lowe's home people um so i decided not to go into finance goldman made the right choice and not extending me an offer they detested that would have quit or been fired probably fired day one uh so then started the cloud uh website backup company i had a website crash raised some money ian was an investor in that 10 years ago.

18:59We grew it to about 500 ,000 customers, a million websites backed up, sold it for about 30 million, I don't know, three years ago. Around that time, I had my car broken into for the third time. Wow. So just moved to a different part of Atlanta, where I thought was a really nice neighborhood, had been in two prior neighborhoods, had my car broken into, and a neighbor's car was stolen. He left his key fob in the middle of his car. And so I just said, I'm going to go on Amazon and find like ring for my call. I'm going to go find this, buy it, and called a bit so i searched all i could find were like the club old school car alarms and uh and like dash cam forgot about the club but like legitimately that's what was up yeah and then that and then one of the top recommendations i believe it was baby cams you take a baby cam because it's close enough to your house you could put it in the car and then see what's going on and so i had an original idea did a patentability search and um it came back free and clear so started working on the product while i was uh i mean that must be a holy grail scenario for someone with your kind of skill set right like the fact that like you're living like i think scratching your own itch is always the best start of a business when you have when you're lucky enough to be an engineer and you can actually make it you know for me scratch my own itch in this scenario stops somewhere which is i have no idea how to fucking make the thing for you that i mean that must have been a really fun moment right other parts of that i know how like there's a microwave sensor inside of this thing and the hardware where there's a literally electrons bouncing around inside of this that allows you to text someone outside of a car that is like way over my head so i've had to learn painfully after a software company our hardware is um part of what i was describing with the way we were code guards you partner big with big hosting providers co skater and brew host they'd Add us to the checkout list.

20:49There's your website back. Yep. That's how you got your acquisition. That's how we got it. That's how we grew. I got it. The claw we sold through big box. So now, you know, I'm sitting through these sessions and my mind is just blown because the D2C and having an individual conversation with a single customer is, it just feels very, very challenging. It's foreign to you. You've been in the B2B business. Very, very foreign. And so we've raised$4 million to date. We've got 21 patents, five of those issued. We launched a TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield a month ago. And right now we're growing our wait list and trying to potentially get some pre-orders.

21:24And we're thinking Indiegogo or Kickstarter in the next month. The next steps would be... I have a very wild idea for you, but keep going. Next. What is the product? Oh, so this is a... It's hilarious. So this is... It goes in your cup holder. That's what I thought. And then you can still put a cup inside of it. It will detect if there's any motion outside of your car. and it will flash an LED ring and make a really loud chirping noise. And we call that deterrent mode. If they open the door, these PIR sensors will detect them. No false positives. It sounds 120 decibel blast, which is really, really, really loud.

21:57I'm not going to have a good way to slur out. So please let's send your car. It's an ambulance in your car. Right. So step one, if it gets too, too close, it's going to show the person, like, you might want to pick the next car. Step two, if the car is super fancy, 10 % of the time. Go ahead. People breaking in. So that's big now. Most people just walk around and pull up on door handles because we're leaving their car door unlocked or they've left a fob inside of it. So they walk around, they pull it in. Or actual theft, you know, taking off with your car. So when we looked at this, most devices...

22:30Got it. So you're talking... I'm sorry. I apologize. On the first scenario, you're talking about people just taking shit, not taking the car. Taking shit. Yeah, taking the laptop out of the batteries. Totally got it. A billion dollars worth of things are taken from cars every year. Right. Where the car isn't even being taken. And that's just being reported. That's just being reported. And there's so much bit of shaming around them. Of course. Because someone's car gets broken into and they're like, did you leave it on law? Yeah, and just some people, like honestly, some people are in the place of like just realizing like, I'm not going to waste the time and report this to police.

23:03I'm going to go to Best Buy and buy whatever the fuck got your token. Absolutely. And if you can't report to police, then they say, oh, you know, they don't have anything they can recommend. And so, like, my neighbor's car was stolen. The police came around. Mine had been rifled through. I had left it unlocked because I really like our neighborhood. I don't get home and get paranoid about how bad the neighborhood is. You get home and shoot hoops with some of the kids in the street. Of course. So one of the things is it anchors. You twist it. It'll anchor. You install it yourself. You connect it to power.

23:29And then you have a fob where you use your phone, so it'll arm automatically. And then it senses you and you walk up and disarms automatically. It'll record video if someone does enter the car, transmits it to the club. It's really cool. You can have professional monitoring like SimpliSafe. It can view it on your back. How much is the club? $50, maybe. It's like$60. $60? And how much will this be? You're not sure yet? What do you think? $50? There are two groups. So we survey customers, and there's customers who view like a$50 to$75 price point, and there's$200 plus. because they view it as alarm system alarm system and then we have safety capabilities so we can i assume you get more excited when people say 200 i do but see this is the thing too is that i know when i bring out a prototype there are pros and cons and i'm not showing you the mobile app screen so i know yeah to your point i can forget i can no no that's exactly right it's by the way you're 100 right if you showed me first out of production line and you if you just do anything that apple simplifies it in the white box and shows the app and the screen the justification of a dollar up 199 versus 60 goes through the roof and by the way even the fact that i'm sorry we were going to start at 299 understood i understand and then we want to have a lower end version down the road somewhere in nesta model where you start by and tesla model start with the higher end uh there's you know what's so uniquely fascinating about this from a consumer lens and you'll probably want to spend a little time on this is where does it become price prohibitive also matches the higher propensity for theft and breakthrough so you're gonna have to find that mendoza line because the people that don't have price friction at 299 are also less targeted less feeling the pain and so finding that right area is going to be that's in your in this business hypothesis that's going to be really fascinating yeah yeah i think it's going to be really interesting my street i mean My street in Atlanta, I think some neighbors are targeted more than others because on my street, three Range Rovers have been stolen.

25:35One guy was at the mall. Of course. I mean, every city and state in the country has, there's always towns that begin to have a different income level connected to the town that does. I mean, it's just the most cliche story of them all. So we think that Price, I did a survey, I ran Google Ads and found that there, I interviewed 130 people. and the splitter is really interesting. Can I give you a much better way to do that? Yeah. Because I love the way you just said that because it's very smart. Before you do Indiegogo or the thing I'm about to throw at you, I would actually run a website that looks like it's actually functional.

26:16Design the whole thing. A, B, C, D test the pricing. Yeah. When they're done in the checkout, have a video of you two saying, thank you for doing this. this is actually pre-launch because we're trying to find the price because you completed the whole order you're going to be one of our first 500 people that's going to get a free one from us see you soon because then you'll get real clean data and I actually do think specifically for this product given that it's hardware you got to produce it you got to put it right it's different than some of the stuff you've been involved in I think it's worth going through that process because then you'll flat out see.

26:56This will be not a survey where humans subconsciously know that you're analyzing their data. This will be, I actually think I'm buying this. I bought it for$149. I bought it for$299. You'll get some very clean data. Something worth thinking about. Plus the marketing of the authenticity, like getting a video from you guys at the checkout part when it's done. You're like, thanks, this is actually not ready yet. This is not even the real name of the product yet. This is not even the real price of the product yet. You though are gonna get this because you just went all the way through and bought it.

27:25So we're thankful. You're one of the first 500 people to ever do that in the world. And if you do this now, and in spring of 2022, we're going to hand deliver you one to the address you put in here as a thank you for going all the way through. There's a lot that can happen there. You'll get the data. You'll build a very small community of very loyal people that will feel part of your community. You might even get like some marketing and new coverage for your product because of how unique that idea is. A few months ago. Yes. about how she locate CPAs and financial planners to work with me on my B2B mortgage.

27:59Yes. And you talked about setting up Facebook groups. Facebook groups. Sacramento Business Alliance, not... Yep. Yeah. And so I'm still working on the logistics there. I've been super busy on some other stuff. No worries. But please do that. So like follow up with Joe or whoever. And I'm not going to be five in question. I'm really passionate about it. And at the time when we did that, that bit was hot on my mind and I'm starting to get the feedback loop from people that I said it to individually or I mentioned a couple times publicly in some podcasts it's really working for people and just to catch everybody up the concept is if you try to do local business the Facebook groups are doing so well especially in that 40 to 75 year old demo that if you create something a little more evergreen literally back to your like back to the prior one the atlanta small business facebook group buckhead small business group or like you know like like like denver mom's club and if you're the host you're the host and if you can build up that group you can do localized marketing inside of it cool um i also want to start looking at ways to probably run some targeted ads on linkedin okay going after specific companies that have the right size for what i want yep because what i really need is i need a practice where it's one guy in charge and he may have some junior partners or it may be at the most maybe three partners because when we get much bigger than that it's hard to get the buy-in from everybody's like makes a ton of sense based on what you're doing so for me to do that do I actually target the companies or do I go after just this size an institution it depends on what LinkedIn's gonna you know sometimes when it's too small the targeting capabilities are not there so you have to pay a little more for it to be a little more broad but still get what you're looking for okay do I run static ads or videos or both okay the you know the number one thing with social media ads that everybody misunderstands is it's the creative not the media.

30:11Okay. So try everything. Because it's the only way you're going to get your math right. The amount of people that just decide that Facebook ads don't work because they ran three ads, it's even back to the way we started today. It's like really squeezing the shit out of content. I mean, we're living it right now for Wine Tech's Quora is a thing that's really working. I think all of you should look at Quora too. Answering questions and running ads against the questions, very effective. Quora does extremely well with Google search. It's not plain Google search. There's sometimes price arbitrage where a search term is like 19 bucks on Google ads, but Quora is the first organic answer, and then you can buy the Quora ad for four bucks.

30:51So you see where I'm going with the ARBs? Quora could be really, really good for a lot of people here, but where was I going? Now I remember. When I got off the plane today, I was talking to John Morgenstern, who used to be head of all of VaynerMedia's planning of what's the right strategy. I've now brought him in to just work with me directly. My brand, WineTax vBriends, mainly because I think he'll be even smarter working on this because the clients don't let us do the best stuff. So he's almost working with me, but it's gonna make the org much smarter. And it's already happened in a week because he's the best of all time.

31:26And he's like me, he loves to get his hands dirty. So like doing it again is fun for him. We're crushing Cora, but then there's fatigue. Like he hit me up right now and he was like, I need more answers to different questions because these three ads that are working are fatigued. So it's always gonna be more content. So in the LinkedIn example, it's like even when something's working, you gotta do more. And most people only run one or two or three different variations of creative and call it a day and decide if a platform works when you're supposed to do hundreds of variations. Which is why I want everybody to do, for example, I would love for you to start a show to answer questions for those brokers so that you can then chop up the show and run them as ads.

32:11Okay. So like it's even another move above that, which is like, how are you gonna keep creating so much ads? Well, what if you actually had a Q &A show? Which is really in essence answering, that's the whole point of why Q &A works. Ask Gary Vee was so brilliant because it's no different than Google Ads. Google Ads work because it's intent-based marketing. People are searching something they want to answer. My Q &A show works because it's the temperament. Tea with Gary Vee, it works because that's the current temperament of what people want to know. one person usually represents 10 ,000 people's question.

32:42That's a good point. So what I'm thinking about that, what I think I'm going to do then is go to the independent guys I'm already working with who are doing the best at it and interview them. Love that. And then go. That's a very good start. But again, if you start again the Sacramento real estate brokerage, like very long tailgate groups, you can extract new people. Sacramento Small Business Alliance. That goes very broad. Sacramento brokerage, you know, mortgage brokerage or real estate agents is more narrow, but will be very specific. You can, oh, by the way, the world's about and, not or. You can start both those Facebook groups.