Dominic McGregor: How we built Social Chain into a £200m company

0:00Knock on the door comes guy from BuzzFeed. He got his phone out and he pressed start on his timer and he went go on then.

0:05Ben Hanlin: 20 minutes later it's trending. Welcome back to What's the Trick. I am your host Ben Hanlin and this is the podcast where I sit down with the world's most creative people and try and understand their creative process. And today's guest is co-founder of Social Chain, Dominic McGregor. So you'll have heard of Social Chain probably because Steven Bartlett was his other co-founder. and I'm going to bring you up to speed so we can dive into this episode. Dominic was at university and he went onto Twitter and he started a page called Student Problems where he would just tweet about student problems and that built an audience or as they then called it, community.

0:41Ben Hanlin: So he built this community. Down the road, Stephen Bartlett was doing something similar with a community called Wallpark and a social platform for students. They got together, they had a coffee and off the back of that, Dominic dropped out of university to go and work with Stephen and then they did a few projects and then eventually in 2014 social chain was born and for those that don't know social chain it was essentially a marketing and consultancy agency that totally disrupted the rest of the marketing space so just to give you some context what they did is they built communities across social media so they built pages about food or pages about sport and they built all these communities just like you did with student problems then they went to the brands and they helped the brands create content that would go on those pages that could go viral because of all of these communities and the access to the amount of people they had they could make so much content go viral for brands it was worth a lot of money and no one else was doing that no one was coming up with creative ideas and then putting them on their own platforms and off the back of that they then started to consult for some of the biggest brands in the world and then eventually run their social media as well so they became a bit of a bigger marketing agency.

1:52Ben Hanlin: But to give you some sense of scale, their clients included Disney, Apple, Amazon. They were going into these offices as two lads going, you lot don't know what you're doing. They grew, they had global offices and they grew to 750 staff. And then eventually Stephen and Dominic merged and then exited the business. And they exited when it was worth over what between 150 and 200 million dollars so they did all right so i wanted to know how'd you do that that was i wanted them on this podcast because i wanted to know well how do two two guys from their bedrooms start such a massive company how did they build communities how do you actually do that and how do you know that you can make content go viral it seems like a magic source to be able to do that so i want to speak to them all about that we cover all of that and lots of more and i understood his overall creative process was really quite interesting we recorded this in birmingham near my hometown obviously which was nice he came down from i think he's up in manchester cheshire way so we recorded this it was a bit of a punchy episode because we were quite restricted in our time which is good so we get through a lot of stuff in this episode so enjoy it Here we go.

3:04Ben Hanlin: This is What's the Trick with Dominic McGriff.

3:092014, you'd done student problems, you dropped out of university, you'd met Stephen. How did you two then at that point come up with social change? Because we've got these communities, we've got this audience, and we were starting to send people to websites and traffic and seeing that there was something in this, we kind of believed in our own opinion that social media is going to be the future yeah and so we kind of said okay let's go and sell these communities to more people and ultimately what drove it more than anything was the fact we needed some money so we were like okay how are we going to get paid and how are we going to live so we reached out to 300 brands who wanted to reach students and said hey do you want to work with our student problems community so the idea came from the fact that people were validating it saying oh this is valuable because we could see that we were having impact for businesses so we were then like oh well if we got more audience and we got a bigger audience in different areas from just students like gaming and fashion and food we could go and speak to brands that want to that have got food businesses so that was where the idea came from and social chain the concept was a chain of social media pages so at this point you're sat there have you just got one page with one we have we just have students right so we started in the student space we built different types of pages in the student space but it's all focused on student right so you sat there and gone oh we can replicate this for food for gaming for sport we'll build these communities we'll go to the brands and they'll buy ad space or whatever is on there right yeah wasn't was that being done already though at that point what was the difference between you i suppose and everyone else doing it i don't think it was being at audiences and communities in the way we made them look at it so we were going to and i remember specifically walking into a big fashion business and telling them about instagram and we're trying to pitch these communities about how we can work with students on instagram and they're they don't have their own instagram page right so like we're at a point where we're pitching these communities that exist on social and brands aren't even on social yet okay so you and steven might go okay part of social channel we're going to create a food page or whatever it'd be right yep so let's dig into this how back then did you come up with an idea and create this massive following of hundreds of thousands whatever is millions of people in one community how did that happen so take the food page an example yeah okay so what you what you got from just posting on social and you still get it today is you get like a reference point of what works what doesn't work yeah so we really through trial and error posted tons and you got me back then it was just this is just images it's not even video videos are not even on instagram yet okay it's just you just posting nice photos so we were posting um we realized that like maltesers always banged nutella was something people always love so we would find and source the images of gorgeous pancakes with nutella all over it and people would like it something you said before is you guys quite very confidently said you could make almost anything go viral right yep how does something back then go viral what was the secret sauce so yeah we said we could make anything trending in the uk in half an hour that was like our party trick and tell me the buzzfeed story then we're jumping ahead of time yeah so this this is this is probably like one of the craziest moments of like probably the closest i've ever come to experience in something live like tv or anything so we're in the office and i'm no joke knock on the door comes guy from buzzfeed guy called luke bailey um he he we don't know why he's here okay and then he takes us into this little meeting room and he's like you guys said you can make anything trend within half an hour he got his phone out and he pressed start on his timer yeah and he went go on then right that was literally it so we're there sat there being like this is a hit job like he's trying to discredit us because we've said we can do this yeah prove it yeah prove it basically so we're like sat there okay and my brain's going okay i'm like the creative one here so i've got to like think of something we can get trending it's i think it's like a wednesday at 10 i'm like what are we gonna get trending there's nothing going on in the world how can we just come up with a hashtag that we know is going to work so i think the logic was it was like at a time when there was like a presidential election and the u.s there was a u.s kind of trend in the uk trend so i was like let's go for you know you're british when okay so let's go nostalgia let's go like proper like patronism let's like show all the things that you know when you're british so hold on so just so the time has started yeah how long has it taken you to go that's the hashtag i mean a minute a minute my brain my brain's working i'm like what should we do i'm like okay thinking about all the things that are going on in the world at the moment all the reference points i'm like what could what is going to bang okay so you've got 29 minutes left what happens so then we load up laptop opens i'm out the room tweet decks loaded we get the team around we're like okay this is what we're going to do we're going to pull out content from areas you know let's go nostalgia you know you know you're british when this was your primary school it was a picture of the um the chairs you had at primary school which everyone knows.

8:07Yes. Or like the benches. The benches, yeah. Yeah. When your PE lessons look like this and it was plimsolls. Yeah. Like pull out all that content. So that was like the pages there in Nostalgia. We had a page called British Logic and a page called UK Banter. And it was like when, you know, your biggest debate on is how you have tea. Yeah. All these kind of like very British things. We're trying to create a little bit of patronism. And we also knew because it was early in the morning that the US went up, yeah? Yeah. So if we go heavily British, in the uk it was going to be very easy to concentrate and and get people to share it yeah so once people start we start posting it and then people start joining in and once people start joining in we retreat their posts as well so it becomes this whole like spiral where it feels like everyone's talking about this and then yeah 20 minutes later it's trending so how long did it take so from the moment he pressed his stopwatch to it going how long it took about i think it took 24 minutes he references that in his article 24 minutes it took wow and what did he say after that he went yeah i'll get back in my box a little bit yeah and then then he kind of he went away and then he wrote his article and it was um ridiculously positive and that was our springboard moment that was like the moment where you know when someone buzzfeed at the time which was one of the coolest new trend media pages says these are the kids which are controlling what other kids talk about that becomes a very powerful line to then go and reference in to brands so then i suppose just before we do we're going to talk about the brand and i want to talk about how you would creatively come up with something when a brand does that but before that so you've got these i'm going to totally just paraphrase you've got these two lads who've dropped out of university that have seen something are doing something that the whole of the rest of the marketing industry that is worth billions have not seen what is it or how is it that you think that you found this and no one else did we were like addicted to doing this and then like you said the unlock came when we realized there was an intrinsic value in the audience because we could make the audience do things and that was the great unlock where it's like oh where we can influence people yeah and i think tell me if i'm wrong but with social chain you then still more good let's fast forward to start working with brands you would then sit with the brand come up with a campaign come up with the creative make the and then it would go on your pages rather than maybe the other brands that are just being monetized for for putting content on a page exactly and i think coming back to that fashion brand i mentioned when they had no instagram account well the pitch became well run your instagram account for you so we we we were you know we were two or three steps ahead of the industry so we had to bring the industry along with us so when a brand was saying what we do on social we were like well you do this well let's dig into that so you started working with these big clients you had amazon apple you had disney can we just talk about if you want just so we can start to understand how you would do this yeah a a campaign that you did maybe we sat with a massive brand and they've gone we've got x this and then talk me through the process of how you would come up with the ideas put it out and then how that campaign was received so i think my favorite early day campaign was with um 20th century fox for a movie with carol de la vene if you remember Paper Towns.

11:23Paint the Towns. Paper Towns. Paper Towns. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like a movie where the maps basically have fake towns on it to stop other people frauding the maps. And she went on like an adventure to find it. So we were like, okay, how do we make this movie the most talked about movie coming into it? Well, before that, they pull you into an office. Yeah. And do they say, okay, lads, here's some, do they give you a money? Or they say, how does the brief stuff? So that brief started, and I'll tell you figures, we've got£50 ,000 to spend on social. We want to give it all to you to make this the most talked about thing.

12:04All to me so that people know about it and go and see it in the cinema. That's the deal. Got it. Okay. And we did something which I think was like today is probably like the standard that a movie would do. We got five YouTubers who were, you know, at the time, there wasn't many YouTubers. We've got five YouTubers. we hired them a camper van and they drove around different towns in the uk they basically did the paper town star they vlogged it uh we shared on our communities we also shared the trailer saying this was like an amazing movie to go see yeah we've got millions of views on the trailer we've got millions of views on the content and um yeah that was it well that was in 2014 and you compare that to 50 000 quid wouldn't even get them any ad space to play the trailer on tv at the moment No.

12:46Right, at that point. So what they would get, you know, an ad on TV once versus, like you say, millions of views. And that was their most, one of the most successful launches, 20th Century Fox, in terms of social presence as well. And they got a younger demographic there. And we just, you know, that now is like a normal campaign. That's what someone would do. But we were completely pushing the boundaries with like what they should be using social media for. So that was one of my favorites. another one which like in the early days was um amazon we launched the bundesliga on amazon right when it first got into it we got um a freestyle footballer uh to go into germany do tons of tricks you know all that kind of stuff got all our sports pages talk about it and being like i can't believe bundesliga is coming to amazon yeah and it was just like again something no one had ever seen in terms of like social and then everyone knew that amazon had bundesliga yeah it became a massive success and it was a um like a blueprint for like sporting campaigns off the back of that like every single bookie came to us because we're like we want you to recreate what you've done for amazon and if i would have been in the office in social change during then creatively what was the process did you all sit down and brainstorm did you have a bit of a a culture of how to get the best ideas out because ultimately i'd imagine a lot of it the production isn't that glamorous it was the it's the hook it's the idea right that's where the the current if you get the kernel right everything else will work yeah so my kind of hot take on this right now is i still think people don't understand social media i even think now social media managers don't understand social media unless you've grown an account be it your own personal brand or like a community you don't intrinsically understand it right so what we would do our creative process would basically be the guys that were in the accounts telling us what's going to work so that would include me that included steve i include cahill who was who went on to be our us um creative director those individuals and hannah who'd run communities and built communities always knew what would work why how did they know what would work you just from running communities you just get millions of data points every single day you know what copy is going to work you know which creative is going to work you know what people are going to engage with and it's getting you know it's much more kind of um standardized now because there's more brands and more people have done it but at that point there was you know even even our um account managers there was there was so little people who actually understood social media that we had such a like concentrated creative process but what we were allowed to do with the brands was think bigger so we were now thinking like as you say with those with those campaigns what could we do yeah and what should we do and so that that was where i think we really won is because we had this grounding in social but we went straight into the consultative sales we went straight into kind of strategy thinking and then we would be like well if you had unlimited budget which at the time 50 000 pounds felt like unlimited budget yeah you should do this so we were always kind of like our ethos was um always trying to basically make the client say this is too big and too bold right so our process would be we'd get in a room we'd go we work we'd work for the brief we'd go straight to the extremes of like what should they do what would be like going viral tick like trending um and then we put that in front of them and then normally what would happen is um the bold brands would say yes yeah and the ones that were a little more sensitive would water it down a little bit so it's quite interesting that creative process of like if we could do anything what would we do start there and dream big so it's interesting as a magician that's how we start with magic tricks is we go forget the method forget how we're going to do it if i could really do magic right now what would i do and you go i would i'm holding a bottle of water i'd make the bottle of water just completely levitate out my hands i don't know how i'm going to do it but you start getting excited about the idea yeah and then that leads to somebody else go what if the water then changed to wine or what and all of a sudden you come up with this vision without caring about the production and then we get excited by that and then we almost work backwards.

16:53And I think that's exactly it. So we, because we're in the content space and the content game, it's like what content is going to work for our audience? So we understand the audience, we understand content and then the brand needs to fit itself into that. Not the brand telling us what they want to create. The number of times a brand will come up and say we want to do this and it would be vanilla, boring, terrible. We'd be like, no, you need to do this. Yeah, we've got this tag that brand do so all the time. We've got this, I know, pick a brand like KitKat and we're going to do a whole have a break this summer campaign and everyone's going to sign up and you'd go I've just made that up but you go well no one cares about that yes basically basically in the early days of social everyone everyone wanted a hashtag yeah everyone needs to have a hashtag onto it and it's like oh my goodness so and you still see now like the creative process for a lot of brands gets watered down when it actually comes to execution so we would exactly like you said we would go straight to what should they do what should be the idea that they sit there and go wow this is like impressive and i think at the time maybe the best example of who was doing that was um was like innocence movie yeah and like a nike nike were a really early in social they did that amazing london campaign um so some brands were starting to push it really far but the when you've got um businesses themselves that weren't thinking about social they were still thinking about tv yeah john lewis was probably at this height of his tv ads at that point they're still thinking tv first and social isn't afterthought we were trying to make people think social first and like if you build something inherently for social it looks completely different to tv yeah so i think that was it and it's because we we wanted to give our community and our audience great content that we said this is what you should do to make our audience really love what you do well let's talk about communities so you've well you touched on it and how you built them But you said every brand should build a community.

18:41Do you still think that today, 2026? I think every brand now should see themselves as a media publisher. Every brand? Every brand. Every brand. Right. As a content business. And explain that then why? So every brand's got a brand, it's got a tone of voice, and it has an audience. And they're out there creating content frequently, be that a TV ad or a social post. they um and my favorite example for this now is is mns okay mns um so that the i think i think she's called katherine she's the head of product ms right her tiktok is phenomenal she's out there right now doing her product releases so yesterday she was talking about the new ice creams they've got is she the one that picks like the picky bits from mns everyone loves yeah and you see her and she's like this is our new picky but yeah that that's their product launch now it's her who's a normal product director doing a tiktok video in store in the office they don't need to do a big billboard anymore to tell people about picky bits she does it even the fact that we know we we've used the phrase picky bits and you assume you associate that with exactly so she is just a member of staff she's almost like now a character she's almost like um she's an actor she's like she's like plays a role she's mns's so what happens when she leaves well she doesn't leave That's the point now.

20:02She becomes an asset to the business. She can, she in theory, should be negotiating her next contract with her audience in there as well. Yeah. So like she's making herself inherently more valuable to M &S.

20:13Ben Hanlin: Hello, it's Ben. We're going to take a short commercial break. For regular listeners, you'll know it's not a proper commercial break because I haven't got any sponsors. So what we are going to do instead is, first of all, this is Dom. Very good, isn't he? He's had a really, really interesting career. and if you want to follow Dom and see what he's up to, he's on LinkedIn a lot, Dominic McGregor. So you can go over to LinkedIn and follow him there. I'm also on LinkedIn. Give us a little follow there. On Instagram, he's at DPJMcGregor. So you can hear about some of his thoughts there on what else he's up to.

20:45Ben Hanlin: And it's since leaving social chain. We're going to hear this later on. He founded a company called Fearless, Fearless Adventures, where they invest with founders and they help grow founders and they do a number of things. So you'll hear about that later, but you can go and have a look at that. So that was Dom. I suppose as we've got no ads, I might as well just plug myself. That sounded strange. Right. What have I been up to? What do I do outside of this? Well, obviously, I'm a performer and magician. But the thing I'm doing a lot of at the moment is keynote speaking. In particular, I talk about how you can use human connection to create a competitive advantage.

21:18Ben Hanlin: because essentially all I do in my career is I communicate and create connection with strangers. And we can all do that. It's a skill, you can all learn. And if you'll do it, especially in this AI world, we'll all have an advantage over our competitors. So I've been doing a lot of them. Last week, I was up in Edinburgh for only 15 people, 20 people, but it was a leadership team that there was a lot of important people in the room. So it was a value for them to hear the keynote and start applying it to their team and the wider business. So there's things like that. If you want to have a look at all of that, You can have a look at it on benhanning.com as well as all the awards performing and after dinner entertainment, etc.

21:52Ben Hanlin: that I'm up to. So that's the business side of it. And for the rest of you, if you're new here as well, if it's the first time you've listened to the pod, hello. You're welcome to stay. Basically, if you're enjoying this episode, one thing I want to point out is, do we remember some of you here? Episode one, Simon Squibb. He's our second, well, Dominic is our second founder we've had on the pod. so if you're liking this ep go and listen to Simon Squibb because he was really interesting as well slightly different approach and if you are liking the show thank you for listening it it's a newish pod so it really does help if you hit that subscribe if you want to give it a little five star review or yeah let's call it five stars might as well and the thing I ask if you haven't done this yet and if you're a regular listener shame on you all I ask is that you think who would like this who would enjoy this pod or this episode and get out your whatsapp or whatever and just share this episode with somebody that you know and if we can get one listener each week and we can each share it then it's going to grow it's gonna be amazing and you can also pop it on your socials and if you don't do any of that but you want to say hi to me i'm at benhanlin on instagram dm me and i do literally reply to every single message so i hope you're enjoying it uh this is a great episode we're going to dive back in i'm also going to really tease you coming up in the next few weeks we have got one of my biggest heroes of all time we've got an incredible guest coming up so make sure you subscribe and don't miss that anyway back into this one this is dominant mcgregor on what's the trick but what about there might be people listening to this that have small companies and they hear this all the time that you know your staff should be your brand advocate etc yeah what about these people that may be thinking yeah but if i help my staff gain a big following on linkedin or social and they leave then we've i've lost all my customers yeah but you're not going to leave so you need to do it so the founder needs to founder needs to do it yeah And, you know, I think if you create a brand like a great example, a little restaurant called Urban Tandoor in Bristol, the founder of that is crazy.

23:48He's always on TikTok going viral. And that restaurant now is booked fully. Right. Like he can't like he's incredible. Like what Salt Bay did years ago. Like Salt Bay, Mega, Binley Chippy, these kind of places which all go viral from social. So I think every brand now needs to think of themselves as a media publisher. so all the way up to like big corporate bands that are out there for example chat gbt have just bought a podcast because they need to get their updates to audiences so if you think like that and the same reason why more brands are doing podcasting it's much easier for you to create the content post out there than it is to go and create a um pay for tv pay for influencers but for the last 10 years since we started social chain, brands have been buying audiences.

24:38So they've either been buying audience from influencers or they've been buying audience from Facebook, Google, whatever. They've spent millions and millions of pounds on buying audiences. And in the next 10 years, it looks like they're going to buy more audiences. If they built communities or built up advocates internally or their own assets 10 years ago, they would have their own audience now. so hypothetically somebody like curry's who are doing a great job on social but if they 10 years ago went we're gonna create a community about people who love gadgets or tech yep and they built that and you like the gadget show or whatever it is or a podcast and it just so happened powered by curry's underneath whenever they want they've got a platform to launch a product exactly yeah right and we'll see a lot more brands retrofitting it now by buying audiences by buying a podcast slightly different questions you've been doing this for years now and obviously he's really passionate about it what have you learned about human behavior because you you've got so many points of data you've had over the last 10 years yeah i mean the i look at this from two sides i look at this from like a commercial brand side and then like a social side so like the biggest thing i've learned from a brand side commercial side is like change is so slow like we sit there and think big companies have got it all figured out but they don't they're so slow in the way they move innovation is so hard for them to happen and you know they're sat there and they're just there for disrupting so i've learned that from like a commercial brand side from a human side social side regardless of people knowing they're being influenced they're still happy to be influenced go on and like compare like compare culture is is rife so i see it with my wife i see it with people i know they'll see social media is ultimately a highlight reel yeah yep you know that's been described many times you know you'll see someone post there on holiday but they won't post for two weeks time yeah and the algorithm feeds you content which sits at the top which is most interesting for you to engage with so that's based on your friends and people you know engaging with it and it fuels um the platforms ultimately wanting your attention they want you to stay on them yep so for example with tiktok the average user scrolls the length of the Eiffel Tower every day on TikTok right the length of the Eiffel Tower what scroll that's like five centimeters or six centimeters the length of the Eiffel Tower gosh that is it that is it when you think about it quite every day every day so so these platforms are gamified to make you hooked and what the biggest thing that's taught me is that because I've always thankfully seen social media as a tool and like a business like asset i've always been a little bit removed from it so i've not i've not been probably like a slave to the algorithm but even now we're with 2026 people know should know i think surely should know that the algorithm's there to trap them yep that everything you see there is the highlight reel yep and that it's not real but we're still we're not there yet I don't think the world's there yet to understanding the dangers of social media and I don't think people view it in the right way they're still chasing they're still chasing perception of oh my god so and so is doing that why aren't we doing this and they're still getting influenced by peers and influencers but like when you see an influencer post a brand you know they're getting paid so like why are we not seeing through that yet that's the biggest thing that gets me from the human side is that because people just like to switch off and just consume and almost be sold to or i think we just we just we just we just love comparison and i think the the nature of influences and content is it makes us a little bit envious down that we want that or we should be doing that yeah which is how i guess marketing has been happening since the 50s right if you want to be seen as this you need this product yeah and i think about this from me like a young person perspective like when i was at school my comparisons were only people in my school year yep because i wouldn't see anyone else so fashion the reason we dress terribly when we're younger is because our influences were only people we ever saw yeah so if you had no one at school who was like cool and fashionable no one would be cool and fashionable right that happened at my school we're all wearing jack wills and abercrombie yeah so your influences are that and then straight away social media now means that a kid in Bolton can now compare themselves to a supermodel in LA and see what they're wearing and see what they're doing right and go hang on a minute my life in Bolton is very different to their life in LA yeah that makes me sad or I should wear or I should be doing this or I should be doing that yeah and I think that's the biggest thing for me is that it's made the world smaller.

29:37But we've not worked up to the fact of what actually that means. Yeah, like you work all year or whatever to go on holiday and you're in a nice place. And then as soon as you get there, you see somebody, a celebrity on an island and you feel less good about the holiday you're on. Yeah, exactly. Something you mentioned about you kind of consume social passively and something I've noticed about you as a trend in your life is the ability to be a bit of an outsider in a good way, right? So you've talked about this before, how when you were a teenager and you went to private school and you were one of the only ones out of your friendship group, I think everyone else went to the state school, you went to the private school.

30:15And it seemed like you, in a way, quite enjoyed being the outsider there slightly. And then when you were at private school, you were different to all the guys in private, kids in private school because you were from the local town. And then when you were at university, you dropped out of university and you seem to be quite happy being the outsider there. So that idea of almost enjoying and putting yourself in a scenario where you stand out and being comfortable standing out, when I was just understanding your story, I was like, ah, there's a trend here. Have you thought about that much and how that's played a part?

30:49Not until 30 seconds ago. Oh, really? But that idea of... The reason it is, and I'll explain why, because I've been reading Rick Rubin's book, Rubin the Music Producer, and there's a line in his book where he says, don't ever try and fit in the goal as an artist is to stand out yep to try and be different because that's where all the fun creative opportunities come from but it seems like you naturally lean into that and i've compared you to rick rubin yeah i'll take the compliment i'm like yeah so i wonder if the question i wonder if the i wonder if that's like innate or that's created so you what you talked about there was a little bit of like how it could be created but i'm trying to figure out now in my life is if it's innate i think i mean i think in general we're we're so much of a product of our lived experience there's obviously something from your from your upbringing that gave you that being comfortable and the ability to stand out but i suppose do you see the benefits of having that mindset yeah and i think i think maybe my the reason i am like that is because i'm one of four boys so you have to stand out with four boys right so i think that's i always look back i think that's probably where it came from and then i think it just became yeah a a different not necessarily a cry for attention that wasn't what it was it was just like being comfortable standing on your own two feet so yeah i think it's i think you have to be i think you have to i remember it's very you know talking to my friends at university i had two amazing friends like love them to death girl called live and a girl called tabby and um i was telling them i'm dropping out of university to run a twitter page which sounds sounds bonkers and i'm at university of edinburgh like people like well like this is like top university like you're literally dropping out university to run a twitter account and in my head what i said made complete sense yeah yes i'm dropping out university to run a twitter account if i went and told all the people that i'm dropping out of edinburgh university they they call me nutter so i think there's there's an element of like conviction in myself that i'm doing the right thing but also So there was like that piece which was missing was what people say about me or what people think about me or what society wants you to do as a norm is just not there.

32:57I do not have like, you know, telling them I'm dropping out of university, what their view on it is or what the peers' social presser view is on it doesn't matter to me. So you generally don't care that much what people think? No. No. Across anything. Which now is leading to me feeling like I'm like an old granddad saying what I want and what I feel. But I don't have that peace about me where I genuinely care what other people think or say. And you must see the opposite. You had a company that's 750 staff. You've probably seen all sorts of types of people, et cetera. There are people that care a lot about what people think, right?

33:33And it prohibits them. I've had people come to me, friends, people at work. I'm not going to experience this situation, but holding on something that I said like five years ago. Right. as like a thing which has defined their life right and i forgot i said it i forgot it even happened yeah so they hold something which i said is like a passing comment as something which is deeply deeply like influence their life right and i don't remember it yeah i mean there might be people listening here kane do you know what i do suffer from pushing myself out there because i'm worried about what people think is i mean is there anything you can say those people to how they can stop caring what people think so i think my my story is also an example of this okay so um going back to student problems i posted 400 times and i got 400 followers right a normal person probably stops because they go this isn't working right and actually you can go on it now you can look at a lot of social media accounts a lot of social media accounts are dormant because people started something and never got past that tipping point yeah for me like one like was great sometimes i got zero like sounds like that's annoying but it never made me stop and i compare it a little bit to like yeah come into the creative process the the beatles honed their skills in hamburg yeah they played night after night after night in hamburg to a tiny audience and no one was there and no one cared yeah and that was me tweeting i was like okay tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet no one cares and then something changed and what changed in that moment and this is actually probably um a kind of deep value i i've got is the algorithm changed twitter now allowed photos so the minute something changed on the platform i was like okay let's try put a photo and see if that works and suddenly uptick yeah followers started to come in because we rode the new wave so my mentality social was it's always going to change it's always going to be new you'll benefit from using new features, new products.

35:39So the business mantra became keeping brands at the forefront of an ever-changing landscape. And that was what we did. Because like you said, so many of them, it's like trying to turn an Arctic. They're so slow. But interesting, I've heard you talk about student problems before. I never really heard that there was 400 posts where nothing happened. And you hear this a lot like with Joe Rogan, right? Everyone looks at Joe Rogan and go, oh my gosh, what an easy gig that is. You've got the biggest podcast in the world. yeah he podcasted for three years and nobody listened yeah and it's that same thing of just getting through that that mud for years getting exactly like like consistency is key and i actually think i did like 400 posts in that maybe the space of like three months right and that's a lot like that's like i worked out i was like seven a day that's a lot of time and i was like and i actually people like start to notice i was just like running twitter accounts more because i was in i i was engaging with people i started commenting back i started like making a community rather than just posting and suddenly it flipped and that's what and i've experienced experienced that firsthand is that you just need to be consistent so coming back to the point around brands if they started 10 years ago with the view of like we're gonna become a media play and they've put 10 years of compounding value into it they would be significantly further ahead than the competition right now yeah rather than just buying audience well this has been amazing i'm conscious of time and i really want to talk about fearless yes so you left social chain in fact you know what i'm going to ask you a question and you can pass on this or not why did you leave social chain so the business was basically for me it was like a family so we built an amazing team i went to an office every day which i loved did work i did i loved and then um we go through the process of listing the business so i like can go on my bank account and see how much money i've got my bank account is this difficult a lot of change yes a lot of money every single day and you're like oh that's that's mine now yeah and then covid happens and then suddenly like steve and i spent a lot of time just locked in a room and like what we're going to do and we were looking at a bank account and we're like the effort it takes to get this number bigger versus taking it now and going and making it bigger elsewhere yeah was very simple and when you lost the community and you lost the people around you you lost that energy of the office you ask yourself what you're doing it for so from my perspective i remember very very a moment when i knew not only was it right for me to go but it was right the business didn't need me anymore and it was a very humbling process like entrepreneurs talk about making themselves redundant in their role by building a team around them and i had that moment where i sat in a pitch with our team our creative team and i didn't wasn't involved in the pitch beforehand but the the team said we want they want you there yeah and i all i said in the pitch was hi i'm dom right and that was it done yes all i said everything was covered everything was covered the team ran an amazing pitch we won the work it was incredible the work was amazing i was like fantastic this is great and i went i'm not needed anymore and that was a really kind of key moment i was like okay i've got this problem where the the value of my my work now is not going to change much greater the team is in a structure where it doesn't need me covid i'm not around the team anymore so i'm like at home isolated so time to go yes and almost like you'd done the thing you'd climb the mountain there's a new mountain to climb somewhere else but also whatever was going to happen post covid the business was going to look different someone needs to rebuild it and i was like do i have the effort to rebuild it yeah and is the effort worth the return and the answer for me in that situation was no yeah so it was time to to say well that's someone else's job i've I've taken it this far.

39:16I'm tired. I've done my seven years. Let someone else build it back in the way they see it. So the way you've just phrased that, it's almost like you've done a Thanos and you've gone and sat on an island. But no, you've just gone and started another business. Yeah. Invested in others. Yeah. So let's talk about Fearless. Do you know what? Why don't you try and sum up in as concise as you can, a sentence or two pitch of what Fearless is. So Fearless is a business which invests in companies and helps them grow by doing their marketing. recruitment and strategy so one of my biggest problems was we worked with brands and we'd only ever service them and you take a percentage of their very very small percentage of their growth and they grow and become massive and you're there like well we got paid yeah but we helped you create a lot of value but we didn't really realize it so my vision was always let's have a lot more of a line strategy where we all grow together and that comes from investing and having equity and you work with a lot of founders you help these founders to grow and grow their company so there's a there's a thing of particularly i mean because there's so many different ways we could talk about founders or or growing businesses i particularly want to talk about what i think a lot of people would be listening to this is freelancers that become founders yep so there's a lot of people that have amazing skills they might be photographers they might be artists they might be whatever it might be they've got these amazing businesses and i and i say this from a pain point of myself right i sell time for money yep and i've been doing it 20 odd years now and i love what i do i'm really passionate about what i do but i i do think how could how can i scale how so what are the i mean it's a real open-ended question but how do these people who are skill-based founders when you you see how can they start to think about scale so that's kind of what we were you know we we we were the brains you know i hate saying that but you've been in the germartine space but the people at the top of the the value yeah yeah a lot of time so that was a frequent question of like how do we get away from time-based um selling and one of the things i read well we we worked with a mentor very very early was that there's two this is my ethos and this is what i say to a lot of people there's two ways to price what you do there's um the input of what that gives that so a day two days and that's what you sell you sell your days or and this is where we always try and get to and this where i always try and tell people to get to is selling the impact so the impact of what you can do in one day is not the value of one day yes the impact could be momentum yeah so massive so um i remember um my favorite brief i ever got was from Coca-Cola and they said, how do we get more young people drinking Coke Zero?

42:06That was just the brief. They weren't asking for five videos on Instagram, 10 videos on Twitter. They were asking for us to solve a real problem that they've got of how do more young people drink Coke Zero? And so we didn't answer that brief by saying 10 Instagram posts. We took it away and said, to have an impact on young people, this is what you need to do. And then when you think about the value, what Coke Zero could be to Coca-Cola in the UK, the price there becomes significantly bigger. So I work with freelancers and small business owners to say, I know it feels conventional to base on a time basis, but you need to really emphasize the impact you can have.

42:50And the issue that people don't really like about impact is actually what you're selling there is quality. if you can't have impact yeah you end up being someone input so it's it's outcome start with outcome transformation impact that's the only messaging and then from that people will then yeah it changes the whole process you have to deliver that you have you know but you have to deliver in that space if you can't deliver impact you sell input right and for me this is what i try and say is that that if you're but also it's a two-way street yeah you need to go to the brands and say you don't need someone to attend an Instagram post.

43:26You need someone who's going to change your perception around young people. So for me, I really speak to freelancers and say, you could have a great lifestyle business doing time and stuff like that, but you'll always be selling time for money. If you want to be regarded as the best in class of what you do, you need to have a meaningful impact for businesses. I think that's great. Unfortunately, I could keep talking to you for ages, but we are going to have to wrap up. I've got a very few minutes to talk about my fast five. so thank you for this mate um fast five we'll do it quickish so i'm gonna go are you ready you ready for i'm ready for the fast five right all right first question the highlander question in the film highlander uh it's about immortals chopping people's heads off but anyway when they do that they get to steal the skills or expertise of the person that they they kill you don't get to kill anyone but you get to steal the skills and expertise of anyone dead or alive on this planet dead or alive perfect that's the question i was going to ask you fine who do you Napoleon.

44:23Napoleon, you crazy psycho. Napoleon, hands down. Why? I just don't think there's anyone who has ever been as incredible politician, fantastic leader, and visionary as Napoleon. I did not think you'd ever. He's my idol. I haven't seen the film. You don't need to see the books. As an individual, he was born in relative poverty. He was a Corsican mid-level nobleman and he went to become the emperor of France which at the time was the biggest nation. He is by far and there's loads of innovations he did in terms of how military moves and military marks but also his governance of law. The reason we've got house numbers is because of him.

45:09The entire Western law is based on the Napoleonic Code. So hands down Napoleon. Wow. Well we've never had that answer. There you go. Time capsule. So you can only keep one thing to go into a time capsule. The rest of your work will be evaporated. It could be a single post. It could be a whole campaign. You could put a whole business in there. Anything you want that you go, that's the thing I'm keeping. I think I will keep my tipping point moment. So have you seen the movie The Hobbit? Yeah. When Martin Freeman, Bill O 'Baggins goes, I'm going on an adventure. Yeah. So that was that first image I created that I put on Twitter.

45:47Yeah. And it was the first time I ever got a thousand retweets. And still to that day, that meme is the same because I basically made it on paint or word art where I put the image and put I'm going to adventure over it. I would take that because for me, I was like, that's my, that's my Jack Dorsey NFT first tweet where it's like, yes, this is something. That was the spark. That was the spark. Yeah. So I would take that tweet and take that with me. There we go. And let's talk about Culture Vulture. so what have you book film anything you've listened to watched that you just want to share and give a shout out to uh so we were talking about this on the way down i watched ladies first the other day with sasha baron co yes yeah i just thought it was so funny yeah i thought it was um a really good take on swapping roles um and it kind of highlighted the fact that like when it comes to equality in workplace when it comes to the role women play in life and society um we've got a long way to go and men are men don't change often and um we don't want men to become we don't want women to become men in the boardroom and that but we want to we need to value everyone equally based on the contribution of value they bring to an environment and also it was based in a marketing firm it's basically winning winning campaign everything do you know what every movie seems to be based in marketing every single time we watch a movie me and my wife like it was a pr firm like yeah there was a devil's wear prada do you know what it's a good way of getting brand deals in there isn't it the whole film was based around guinness um let's do what magic wand i'm going to give you my magic wand you get to make one thing vanish from the world of social media if you like or business yeah um this is like the world about this this was the easiest question go on jessical in jet two come and hold my hand standing in the kind of ruin yeah that one but some would say as a brand we all hear that song and we think of jet i just i it's been like 10 years now it's just done move past it out of all of the things i know what you mean i always think i spoke to somebody the other day i said what you know they said i work for jet too i just went how much do you hate jess glenn yeah it that would do your head in wouldn't it it's but it's coming ways i remember when we first like i felt like 10 years ago was been there and they went viral on social last year i'm like just move past it because now you're at the point of like being a meme yeah like you're a joke because of it because of the sound is a joke the sound is a when you land you're like oh for god's sake yeah so i think they need to move past that now interesting right there you go you've heard it if you listen to this social marketing team change your audio um they could do a whole campaign on that couldn't they could do yeah they could there's been a massive campaign of like people singing singing um songs and i think there was a girl who did dr pepper and it ended up being their super bowl commercial really and it was sourced from tiktok so what jet two should do is just like open it out to their social find a new jingle and do that they should 100 % do that coming back to the thinking that's how I think what's the extreme thing they should do well go and find a new jingle go and find someone on TikTok make it very viral yeah yeah whole campaign out and then if it doesn't work they could go we're bringing it back yeah they could or make like Brains Not Talent style competition yeah where Jess Clint's the judge done right how much

48:56Ben Hanlin: can we charge them for that done right he's always on always working right final question of the entire pod so So what is the trick to creating a huge social media marketing agency? Have a successful career in, let's say, marketing and social media. I think the biggest trick is timing. And that's not a trick though. So I think now today, if someone starts a social media agency, no one's going to care. Right. When we started a social media agency, it was in the press. Everyone was writing about it. What is this new thing? Yeah. So life has frontiers, if you go back to the historical term. Yeah.

49:46And these frontiers need to be explored. And my advice to anyone who wants to build something significant is spend your time in the frontiers. Don't spend your time in something that's been well trodden before. Because going back to the point of pricing and how you build something valuable, you've got to make sure you have impact if you're starting something out today there's people who've got much more experience in social media than you do are you going to have the impact that they're going to have maybe not because you won't have the resources you won't have the kind of brand and capabilities in a new frontier it's it's a fair game you can have impact so innovate that is the only option i think for people these days is to spend the time the frontiers not in the pastures that have already been farmed.

50:30There we go. Look at that. Loved it. Great end answer. Thank you very much, Don.

50:34Ben Hanlin: Thank you so much. So there we go. That was Dominic McGregor on What's the Trick? Really, really interesting chat there. As I said, if you've enjoyed that and you want to hear from another co-founder, Simon Squibb, episode one, was really interesting as well. Completely different mindset to that. And I was just listening back to that and reflecting on some of those points. A few things that I took from that was he was obsessed with two things really to create viral content it was data data insights analytics data data data plus being consistent so if you do something consistently and you're constantly analyzing the data you can understand why smith works and why smith doesn't work he's clearly hugely analytical and he's being creative through data i thought that was really quite interesting and then the other thing really and we did talk about is his ability to lean into being an outsider um that as i mentioned rick rubin um says you should never want to fit in you should want to try and be different you should want to try and disrupt or not lean in lean the opposite i think that's quite interesting um because i think sometimes we want to live in the safe space and be part of the crowd but sometimes the real success comes from not being part of the crowd and standing out.

51:52Ben Hanlin: So if you're somebody that stands out, good for you. Anyway, I don't know what this mini TED Talk's about. You got the gist. Remember to subscribe because coming up, we have a phenomenal guest in the next couple of weeks. You won't want to miss that. If you've enjoyed this, drop me a DM at Ben Hanlon. Have a great rest of the week. Episode drops every Friday. See you then. Bye-bye.