You already know it's the creator spaces show. So what exactly do you create?
Yeah, so I create businesses, I think, and I create audiences. Like current time is predominantly on one business and the rest of my time is spent on ideas and potential new side hustles, new businesses. But my main. Currently, it was a side hustle and it was one of those ideas. I started the idea back in 2016 and it gradually grew and it got to the point where I had to make a decision and that was going to blow it up and just forget about it.
Or do I give it a lot more attention, but it was making money and it was doing all right. And I made the decision to quit my job and we went from there. Awesome.
And so what is that?
So the elevator pitch for it is it's a survey company and the differentiator from our survey company against the rest is your surveys will only ever be a maximum 30 seconds. And I figured that if we limit the number of questions, people are more likely to do. But if I send you an email, say, look, can you give me 30 seconds of your time? You still might say no, but you'll also be a lot less likely to say no than you would be. If I said, can you give me 20 minutes of your time?
And the truth is Michael. You can get a lot of insight out of four or five, multiple choice questions. You can get persona details, you can get opinions, you can get feedback, you can get all this stuff, you know, In my opinion gets very over-complicated very easily. And you get a lot of stakeholders involved. You got a lot of people who got to justify things and all of a sudden it's every decision is micromanaged to death.
How do you go about building up the audience for that?
That's a very good question. I guess the three main pillars I suppose, is referrals. So that's word of mouth stuff, and I'm very much trying to tap into the whole viral loop thing where there is an incentivizing or whether it's just trying to get people to share it with a friend. And then that person shares it with a friend. And then that person shares it with a friend. I know for a fact that the people who come through referrals are significantly higher than any other.
I know that they're significantly less likely to unsubscribe. And I know that they are significantly higher to complete the speedy polls and surveys when I pushed them out. So my theory was that if I make them interesting and don't make them too cumbersome, I make them about topics that are relevant, that are timely. Then people just might do them and I'll let you know truth, be told there's no hockey stick growth curve here.
This has been going on for nearly six years now, when did you go full time? Exactly. November. I went full time on it, but didn't really tell anyone. And then February was when I really came out to the world. Yeah,
it seems like you've really been on this slow, but steady growth path. Is that what you're trying to maintain now? Or are you trying to shift it over to a little bit speedier?
I guess the answer to that is it's coming back to how I acquire people to do the polls. When you work on a referral word of mouth process, it gradually picks up its own steam. That growth comes in. It just automatically gets past.
So walk me through sort of your monetization model. You sell surveys to companies and then those surveys get featured in the opinion.
Yes. It's two main ways of monetizing station. One is we put out surveys for marketing companies or in-house marketing. So the sort of stuff, 40% of men thinkness or 38% of women think this. And then the other one is we run our own surveys. Most days, once we get our results, we then offer to sell that result to someone. And it might be that, say, you're an agency and say, you've got a car insurance client, and we've asked a question or we run a search. Call focused.
So before we publish it on our own site, we might say to you, would you want to buy this survey? This is the story. This is the numbers. And then they can have it their own. But those are the two main ways we do it.
What's your north star metric for success? How do you know you're on the right.
My metric is number of survey completions. And the reason I came up with that is because I want a million survey completions, why I chose that number was because I figured if I get more clients, then I'm going to be doing more surveys.
Yeah. I'm guessing that a lot of your pricing bases on the total number of completions, you average.
The key things to remember is because I worked in marketing for so long. I was on the other end of the phone call. I was on the other side of the desk when the survey companies were saying this, that, and the other, the process of putting a survey out to these people is not really different, or I'm clicking to send it to my entire database, or I'm sending it to a half of my database, then it's a click, isn't it. So it didn't make sense to me to charge on that.
Piece of piss me off when people, some people said that I have a flat fee that I charge
a flat fee is interesting to me. How often do you raise
the flat fee? I haven't raised it since I started.
Have you Dover doubled in size of what? My panel? Yeah. From what I get better data for the same price for.
Uh, so I will know that I will get X amount of answers within an hour, within two hours in three hours in four hours. My clients will always tell me what they want first. So some clients on a thousand people and they don't want it to be nationally representative. They just want a thousand. I've got one I'm doing for a company currently. And all they want is a thousand dollars. And then last week I did one for an insurance company and they wanted a nationally representative number.
So I know that I needed to get a minimum 2000 for me, 2000 doesn't sound enough. So I always do it more, but what I will do is basically I will turn it on and then I would turn it off once they've hit the number that we're looking at. And then you pop one of your own surveys. No, I'll just. So they're always on my site, but if I say I send out midday, I know that by four o'clock, I'll probably have about 4,000 respondents.
That is good for me because I know that I can get my data guy to put into spreadsheet, not in the pivot tables up. And I can almost have it back to the client by close of business, or at least by same
day or next morning, very
easily. That's important because a lot of the stuff I do is. And you're familiar with the term news jacking. Oh yeah. So a lot of the stuff I do is timely and it's relevant to the headlines in the news and the rest of it. And that a lot of you guys are trying to get on the news, jacking vibrator, you know, they want to enlist to say I was this, that, and the other, if you can turn something around in a couple of hours that is hugely valuable to a.
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Especially once you start talking about news jacking and some of those other tactics that come into play,
well, this is it, right? Like I said earlier, there's so much content floating around these days. How can you make yourself stand out? Like when, what this big wild. Wildfires, every outlet is going to be writing about wildfires, every news channel talking about wildfires. So if you can give them a different angle that no one else has got, then that could be the factor that why people click on their coverage.
What's your current goal? What's that next block of the way towards the million mark. What's the next, the thing that must be done,
the next thing that must be done, eh, I'm working on ways to build my own personal audience and, well, I mean, it's not rocket science philosophy, but I figure if I can build my own. That it's a really tough question. I'm going a bit part-time over the summer, I've recently moved house. I got two young girls who are sort of, of school and nursery and whatever. One of the key drivers for me was the fact that I could work from home more. I could spend a bit more time with my kids.
I could be the master of my destiny. If you like you asking me that question now is a bit of a strange one because I'm pretty part-time before. With a view to going on holiday at the end of the month. And then September is when I'm really going to start winding it back up again. I'm in a similar
about it makes me feel any better. So when you're thinking about that personal brand building
strategy, my theory is that if I start building my own audience alongside building my business audience, then the two can co-exist and help each other and grow. And the rest of it, this is stuff I want to do. Yeah. I'm a huge consumer of. Podcasts and YouTube, and I'm a huge consumer of newsletters. And in my mind, I'm a little bit caught up about whether or not there's just too many of all those things already be because there's too many.
Is there any chance of cut-through I guess obviously I suspect your answer will be about differentiation and the rest of it, but let's suppose your kind of title.
The only reason for you to build a personal brand is to increase inbound B2B lead flow. If that's the case, then you pick one of those channels and you focus on that. I recommend a podcast just because you can do a newsletter alongside a podcast. Yeah, they work well in tandem. YouTube is really an SEO thing. So you record the podcast as a video, boom, two and one, but if the goal is B to B, then the podcast interviews, people who are in your target market and that builds your network.
So the podcast should be profitable without anyone listening to it. Yes. And so then if you run a cycle like that, then are you really building a personal brand? That's up in the air? Not really. You're building a backlog of content related with your person, but you're not actually building the audience necessarily. And that's okay because you're still making the money. And then when you say down the line, oh, I do actually want to build a personal audience.
I'm not as involved in this business anymore. It's time for me to start looking at other things at that point, then you start investing in building the audience around your brand around whatever that next
goal is a thing they can co-exist. I
think you'd be spreading yourself and you'd be fighting a war on two fronts. Yeah. I only really work on one account of. That is growth focused at a time. I might work with multiple clients, but only one of them is focused on any sort of hypergrowth because realistically it takes all of my brain power, all of my bandwidth to make that client move the needle consistently at that sort of level
tightly.
But at the end of the day, there's a lot more money in doing the things that you don't want to do because they get you where you want to go. If you could send a tweet back to your star, what would it be? And when would it be you get to choose great
question. And I think it's a great question because it can throw up a variety of different responses. And I think my answer to that. The place I'm at now, both professionally and personally, I'm incredibly happy with. And I wonder if I had the chance to speak to my former self at any point, what could I change? And I think that if I'd have known. Well, I know now then things might have been different, but ultimately identified, it ended up in the same place.
I don't know if this sounds like a wishy-washy answer. I don't think I would send myself that sweet. I am very happy now. And I just don't know if I could have adjusted that journey and still been here.