13: Why tactical playbooks fail & the money moments framework w/ Marc Thomas

Jim Zarkadas (00:00) Hey, I'm Jim, and this is the Love at First Try podcast, a podcast for SaaS CEOs and developers that truly want to learn more about design and care about it, but there are no designers that find it too complex. In every episode, we discuss how to design products that become sticky and unforgettable. We dive into the topics of taste, UX, growth, and conversions, and we share practical tips and frameworks you can add into your development process. Enough with the intro, so let's dive into today's episode. Marc Thomas (00:27) I'm waiting for a package. If one turns up and I run away. Jim Zarkadas (00:28) Yeah, we just interrupt and then I can cut it on the editing. Yeah. Yeah. it's all good. Yeah, no worries. So yeah, thanks a lot for joining and welcome to the podcast. The first question I always ask is a bit of an intro. kind of before we start recording, you already did a bit of a short intro. But ⁓ yeah, for people that never heard about you, I wanted to ask about like the story, like things that you worked in the past and how what are you working on at the moment and who are you helping essentially? Like a bit of a description of like your services and your ICP as well. Marc Thomas (01:01) Yeah. All right. Well, look, let me just give you the super quick history. 2010, I started out as a journalist. I was doing magazine journalism, basically interviewing people, creating in-house magazines for people. was building a business around that, like a customer publishing model. 2016, I started a tech startup, basically a live polling tool for doing live surveys at events and stuff like that. with a couple of friends. And then I spent the next five years growing that and working out, how do you grow a software company? Because I had sort of stumbled into growing a company and had never thought about anything to do with SaaS before. In fact, I didn't even know that I was starting a SaaS company at the time. I was just building a product. We grew that really nicely for five years. And in 2021, I just got tired of running it. COVID hit our first, our second kid had just been born and I was exhausted. And I was like, I'm stressed all the time. I want to go, I want to go and like get paid by someone for doing what I'm really good at. turns out what I'm really good at is SaaS marketing. And so I went to work at Powered by Search. Jim Zarkadas (02:09) you Marc Thomas (02:19) Powered by Search is one of the world's most well-known SaaS marketing agencies. I was the head of growth there for a couple of years, grew that company quite significantly during that time and also got to work with clients between 10 and $100 million of ARR, which having come from small startup world was like pretty daunting, but also turns out not that different in some ways to growing a tiny company. Jim Zarkadas (02:29) Hmm. Hmm. Marc Thomas (02:50) Um, and then, uh, 20, 20 re two, think I can't remember. It's a blur now, 2023. must've been, uh, I went back in house because I missed working on product so directly. Um, so I went in house as a growth marketer at Podia. Podia is a kind of like an online course platform, uh, with a website builder, uh, and also an email marketing product. And we launched. Jim Zarkadas (03:09) Mm-hmm. Marc Thomas (03:19) the email marketing product during that time. We were a team of, I think, seven marketers at that point. And then by the time I left, we were a team of two marketers due to various different reasons. But effectively, the company was still growing really nicely. And we were super lean as a marketing team. Jim Zarkadas (03:38) Mm. Marc Thomas (03:39) And if I'm honest, I looked at what I was doing there and I was like, Hey, I should be doing this for other companies again. Uh, and so last year, uh, 2020, uh, what was it? 2025. Yeah. Uh, I, uh, decided, okay, I'm going to go be a consultant and not just like telling people what to do. I want to do the work as well. Like I want to be hands on. I want to treat this like, like I'm putting on a punk, uh, a punk show. I want to do the tickets. want to play the. Jim Zarkadas (03:45) Isisisisis Marc Thomas (04:09) stuff, I want to engineer all the equipment and basically get my hands dirty. And so for the last sort of 12 months now, almost, I've been basically working with clients between, usually between about like one and $10 million ARR on their marketing. Specifically what I do is most of the time these days is I work on lifecycle marketing, which for most people means just doing email sequences and things like that. I think about it little bit more broadly than that as well, but predominantly. That's the easiest way to frame the value that I provide, help people filling gaps in their life cycle. How's that? Jim Zarkadas (04:51) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Some quick comments. When you were at Powered by Search, I think during that time, also like ZenMate, the team we're working with, they hired Powered by Search. We work with, I think it's Andrew, and another guy, I remember his name. It was more of a SEO. Yeah, it was more like on the SEO and the blog side that helped to kind of do some improvements. So was like a very scoped kind of a collaboration. But yeah, yeah, I've been looking to Powered by Search and the... Marc Thomas (05:02) Yeah. ⁓ cool. Yeah, yeah, that might be just after I left, I think. Yeah. Jim Zarkadas (05:21) I actually was going through some blog posts as well and some stuff there that was really, really useful. Yep. Yep. Marc Thomas (05:25) Highly likely that I wrote them. Have you had Dev on as a guest? The founder, Dev? You should. He would love to come and do this, I think. Yeah, he's great on a podcast as well. Jim Zarkadas (05:32) no no no okay yeah Okay, yeah. Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah, I think about it, but that's a good one. I'm gonna take a note actually. Okay. And on this one, what was the other thing that I want to comment? Yeah, on the lifecycle, before we started recording, you mentioned something that I really liked on how to think, because you said most people think of lifecycle marketing as emails. And yeah, that's me. Like I'm one of these people. And I really like how you explain it of you. Marc Thomas (05:43) Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. Jim Zarkadas (06:04) help people like go to the next kind of a stage into the overall kind of a buying process and you kind of figure out what needs to be done to do that. Like emails is like a traditional asset you need most of the time because you need to somehow reach out to these people. But yeah, I like how you explain it and it helps me like have a different mindset when I think about lifecycle marketing. It's pretty useful. Marc Thomas (06:14) That's it. Yeah. Well, if you think about life's like literally the name life cycle is okay. It's the whole life of a relationship that you can have with a customer. That relationship starts from, don't know about you at all, all the way through to I'm, I'm basically sending you new people who don't know about you yet. and so there's a lot of stuff that happens in there. Now email, email covers a lot of that. For sure, it's one of the most powerful tools in lifecycle marketing. But there's also other kinds of messaging that is required at different points. And it's not just, OK, we'll send text messages. Personally, I don't send text messages to people, but I'm not against it. ⁓ But it's also going like, OK, well, at the point where they're at, this person is at the, let's say, Jim Zarkadas (07:07) bit yeah yeah exactly Marc Thomas (07:18) They know about the product, they don't, they're not ready yet. Like, what are we doing to help those people get to a place where when they are ready, they take action and they choose us. That's part of the life cycle. Now, how do you reach those people? Could be anything, could be content, could be sales, could be community building. And so, Jim Zarkadas (07:31) Hmm. Hmm. Marc Thomas (07:45) So while one of the kind of the core services that I offer is a life cycle sprint, which is exclusively email, when I work with clients long-term, a lot of what I do is thinking, okay, what do we need to get this person to the next stage of that buying life cycle, regardless of what that is and whether that's like me then going off and doing it or whether that's me helping people find the person to go and do that based on the kind of the core strategy. Jim Zarkadas (07:59) Mm-hmm. Marc Thomas (08:14) Like that's really a kind of, I'm agnostic about that, you know? And so I think like thinking about your life cycle as exploding the concept from just sending email to, this is really about moving people along the buying life cycle. That's a really meaningful change in your mindset. And it really opens up a lot of possibilities to you, but obviously. you should have the email stuff going. It's almost like it's a no brainer, I think, if I'm honest. Yeah. Jim Zarkadas (08:45) Yeah, and it's one of the topics that I'm going to go deeper into in a bit as well. On this part, so I feel like it's the right time to ask this question. One of the things that remember you wrote in the past is that you've worked in agencies like Part-By-Serts and other companies where they had very specific playbooks that you would execute. And at some point in your life, you're like, you know what, I'm done with traditional playbooks. I'm not going to play the playbook game. And you started actually talking about the idea that playbooks may not be working anymore. and you wanna approach in different ways. So it's one of the opinions that you shared in the past that stayed with me. I'm like, I get it because I'm also, it's so B2B sauce, I'm doing marketing for myself as well. And the whole idea with playbooks is one of the things that you were saying in one of your posts is that you look like everybody else. And this is something that I don't like with the playbooks is that a playbook, for example, of like you need a website and you need that website to have good positioning. I don't even call, I wouldn't see it as a playbook. It's like fundamentals or that you need to have emails. But yeah, what you write in there or how does the website look like? It doesn't have to be exactly like everybody else. So I wanted to actually ask you to go deeper into that opinion and share some more thoughts. Marc Thomas (09:51) That's it. Well, look, think, I think you shared something that is interesting that. So what you essentially said there, and I agree with this is that there's, there's a separation between a strategic playbook and a tactical playbook. Now a strategic playbook is saying emails can help. we need to get in front of people constantly. they are always in their inboxes. Therefore emails can help us to do that. That's a strategic playbook. And you can, you can be more granular at that. And you can say, well, you know, we need to do this bit of the life cycle or whatever. Those playbooks, strategic ones, always valuable because they're effectively fundamentals of how people buy. you could say the same for content. you know, our product does this, but people don't know that they should think about it in this way. They're comparing against alternatives. Therefore we will write a piece of content. and put this throughout our messaging that explains very specifically how we relate to the thing that they need to do and are evaluating competitors for. That's a competitor comparison playbook. And ultimately that will always be valuable because it's about how people buy. There are tactical playbooks though as well. And really what people talk about when they talk about playbooks is tactical stuff. So they're talking about like I'm doing this kind of LinkedIn ad or I'm doing this kind of Reddit post or I'm you know, and and those things change because they become saturated so fast. That's the primary reason now like by the time that you've heard that something is driving results. I will bet that a large number of people have already tried to replicate those results and the efficiency of that tactical playbook is declining over time. And so, so that's what I'm really, I find really frustrating is that people end up going, Hey, these guys did this. We should do this because they said that it drove this result. That's a tactical playbook. By the time you've heard it, it's already too late. most of the time. Now, if you were to take some strategic lessons from that and you say, well, why did it work for them? Jim Zarkadas (11:56) . Marc Thomas (12:10) Is there, is there something lacking in our existing life cycle in our existing kind of messaging effectively, that this, these people have stumbled upon by doing this tactical playbook. And then you take that lesson and you apply it at a strategic level. Suddenly your marketing improves because you've, you've appreciated something about your, your ideal buyer. And I think, I think that's what I'm really, I'm really sort of. trying to get across there is that like, yeah, you look like everybody else. And so actually, buyers adapt their expectations based on that. And they think, well, okay, well, if they look like everyone else, maybe they are like everyone else. So, so how do you differentiate? You take it back to a strategic level and you say, here's the insight. What can we do to reach these people in a, in a fresh innovative way? Jim Zarkadas (12:54) Yeah, it's a good point. I love the thinking so, so much because I mean, I also relate to everything that you said on this and it's really how high approach designers work as well is that look at the fundamentals, try to understand like the first principles there. Like why does this thing work? And then what is your, like how you gonna execute on it? Like the podcast, for example, is a strategic playbook for people that are into services because you create video content, people can see you, people can feel the energy, they can... see what other people that you talk with and if your network is good or bad for example like there are many things that a podcast can showcase but how you're gonna do the podcast is where like the tactical playbooks that it doesn't have to follow a very specific format you can get creative there and find an authentic way to to do it and i really like how you separate i didn't i never thought about like this terminology of strategic playbooks and tactical and that you want the strategic ones but not the tactical the tactical is like looking for the cheat code almost like yeah we don't want to think Let's see, let's just do what they did so that we can get the same results as soon as possible. And quick story from me on this. I had this ambition in the past that I decided to draw at some point because I realized it's not the right way to approach it of I'm gonna make a UX design kit. So I'm gonna make a design kit for SaaS companies to improve their onboarding. And I was pretty fascinated by the idea. It's not a course, it's not a library of components, it's a mix. which sounds really cool in theory. And I was like, it's a playbook. can sell it to new SaaS companies that they cannot hire a designer and they could improve the activation. But once I started actually building it and working with companies in activation, I'm like, everything is so custom for every company. I cannot tell you how your get started page should look like, how your empty states should look like. I can tell you principles that an empty state needs to talk about the benefit, the outcome. It needs a call to action, needs some social proof, but I cannot tell you what is the right composition for your SaaS. if you should have just a small banner, if it should be like the full page in empty state, because it really depends on the product. And that was an experience that I had of what you're saying where I could see their strategic playbook working because it's the principles that apply, but how you're going to implement these principles to your product or to your marketing, in your case emails and so on. It really depends on the company, who you're selling to, what is the product, what is the industry. There are so many variables there. And that's why like the one size fits all kind of approach doesn't really work. Marc Thomas (15:19) Yeah. Yeah. Jim Zarkadas (15:22) like the idea that they want to sell with tactical playbooks. yeah. Marc Thomas (15:25) That's it. Can I, ⁓ I'll give you two additional examples from my own work here. ⁓ I'll give you one that's literally happened today. ⁓ So last week I sent the draft of a new annual upgrade sequence to my client, Oli at Sanger. Sanger is like a social proof library. Jim Zarkadas (15:30) Yeah, go for it. Okay. Marc Thomas (15:48) where you can also create a bunch of kind of like widgets and basically make your social proof work for you. People love it. And what we're trying to do is to basically say, strategically, we know that people love this tool. Let's get them to commit to using Cendr for the whole next year by saying, okay, upgrade to an annual plan. You know, need to make this part of your business. Now commit to it. Jim Zarkadas (15:54) Yeah, yeah. Mm. Marc Thomas (16:14) The playbook there is to send the annual upgrade email. Now what most people do is they just send one email and they do it sporadically and they go, wow, great. We've banked a lot of cash. And then they never, they don't do it for the next 12 months. And then they go until they've like hit this cashflow crunch or whatever. My take is that you should be sending firstly, a, like a series of emails that go out over a year and encourage people to do that. But Jim Zarkadas (16:27) Mm. Marc Thomas (16:41) The example that I want to like the way that we've done this with CENJA, which I really want to like highlight here because I think it's such a good example is basically the first email in an annual upgrade sequence usually says, Hey, you could save $58 a year by upgrading to annual now. And, I know that's the first one because, because I like, obviously I've both received these and I've written a bunch. Now, over time, what I've realized is that there are so many different ways that you can frame this value. And, the first email in Senja's new annual upgrade sequence, which is literally literally sent yesterday, to a bunch of people who had already upgraded to a month who were on monthly plans. it basically says, okay. you could say $58, by, ⁓ upgrading to a Senja annual plan today. Here's what you could do with that $58. And then it basically lists off 10 really stupid products that you can buy for $58. There's like a scarf that's in the style of a receipt. And it links out to Amazon or wherever, whatever shop there is. Now, I thought, oh, that's whimsical. People will enjoy that. I can tell you that people have enjoyed it so much, even in the first day that people Jim Zarkadas (17:39) That's cool. Marc Thomas (17:59) that literally people are taking screenshots of this email and they're sharing it on Twitter and LinkedIn. Now, what's the benefit of that? Is it just kudos? Yeah, sure. There's like some element of kind of like, great, these people like it. But there are also two benefits to this that maybe are beyond the surface level. The first one is people now think Sender is a company I like. I like their email. So there's a value there that goes beyond just features for the company. This is a brand win. But then the second benefit that is immediate, regardless of the outcome of the conversions of the email and the cashflow that it generates, is that for every person who takes a screenshot of that and shares it on social media, now we have a referral win as well. So it's not just... Jim Zarkadas (18:27) Hmm. Marc Thomas (18:52) It's not just a brand win for the individual using or receiving the email. It's also a referral win whereby people who have never heard of CENGEL before suddenly become aware of CENGEL because somebody has shared that annual upgrade email, right? Which validates, this is a tool a person I trust pays for already. I should maybe look at that. So there's a life cycle win there that's very immediate. Then there's a life cycle win there that is like long-term. Jim Zarkadas (19:07) Yeah. Mm-mm. Marc Thomas (19:20) it's both a strategic and a tactical win. I am honestly very happy about Jim Zarkadas (19:26) Yeah, yeah, congrats Marc Thomas (19:27) I'll give you another one here. This one blew my mind. So this happened when I was at Podia. And one of the things that we wanted to do at Podia was to try to find channels that maybe our competitors were not using already to reach people on a very broad audience. So we came up with this concept of effectively using our own users as to create content about Podia. So a lot of Podia's users are creators who have their own audiences, but maybe aren't at a place where big brands are coming to them to say, promote our content. So basically what we did was we looked at our database of users. We pulled out all of their social links. We went, looked at their audiences. We did this programmatically and basically found undervalued influences in specific niches. And we basically said to those guys, Hey, we'll pay you to just create content that you would normally create and to package it in a way that you feel your audience would like. also great. If you want to mention how you use Podia, that would be amazing. and we had people come to us, and say like, I want to do this, but I don't know what to do. one of those people was a company called the, I can't remember what they're called the plant based whole foods cooking show on YouTube. So they have this audience of people who like to look at recipes for plant based whole foods. and it turns out they actually have quite a big audience are, and are already monetized by. Jim Zarkadas (20:44) . Marc Thomas (21:03) ⁓ by food companies, not software companies. So we say to these people who, who ask us for an idea, like, why don't we, instead of you doing like a reel or something, why don't you do a recipe, which you can like make about Podia and we'll use the brand color purple. So you've got to make it purple. and, and it's gotta have some resonance. So we took this concept of ⁓ people hitting a create running out of creative juice. and we were like, why don't you just create a purple juice, and call it creative juice and you shoot a video talking about this and yeah, sure. Say how you use Podia. Great. So this whole whole food plant based cooking show with an absolutely huge audience that's been totally undervalued by marketing in software companies is now creating a 20 minute video. I mean, it's live. You can go watch it. It's like a 20 minute video about podia while creating this juice life that their audience would want to create. Anyway, it looks interesting because it's purple, which is stands out, you know? And so, so that took like, again, a strategic insight, which was our competitor, our competitors are already trying to get the market for like influences. we have people who love the product, therefore we should pay them to create content for their audiences who might also use the product. And then we put a tactical element on that, which was basically like, do something interesting that's gonna promote the brand in a way that feels organic to your audience. Here's a really specific, unusual, weird idea. And then put it live and we're gonna measure. Jim Zarkadas (22:35) you Marc Thomas (22:49) who signs up through your landing page? How many people have viewed it? How many people comment on that video? All sorts of qualitative and quantitative things to work out. Is this a good investment? And, ⁓ and yeah, that's, that's a second example. Jim Zarkadas (23:04) Yeah, like one thing I didn't mention that in the beginning, like on the intro, one of the reasons that I wanted to discuss also with you is one thing that I appreciate to you as a marketeer is that you don't look and feel like a marketeer, if you get what I mean. And what I mean by that is like marketeers just have like many times they have a very specific vibe, like numbers, tactics, algorithm tricks, all kinds of things. You have like a beautiful... colorful background, you have a more playful vibe, like you're more artistic. That's what I'm trying to say. And you can see it into the ideas as well, is that they're more creative. Like you understand the fundamentals of marketing, the psychology and the engineering behind it, but then you put a creative twist on it. That's what I really love. And both stories that you shared is actually, yeah, both really, they use a strategic playbook. They really use some fundamentals, but then you give a lot of space to creativity and to creative thinking. Marc Thomas (23:32) Hahaha Jim Zarkadas (23:56) So yeah, these are really lovely examples. I love both. Yeah. Marc Thomas (23:59) Jim, that means a huge amount to me. I struggled a lot, if I'm honest, in my career to be authentic, be ⁓ myself. Because when I ran a startup and I had investors, I thought, I got to be this corporate guy. There's a picture of me, I share it a lot, wearing a suit and just looking dead in the eyes. Jim Zarkadas (24:08) Mmm. Right. Marc Thomas (24:20) And, you know, when I was in house, I was like, you know, no one ever told me to, but I basically put myself in specific boxes. And over the years, I've worked really hard to get out of that and just be, myself. And so I'm really, really glad that's coming across and yeah, thanks for saying it. Jim Zarkadas (24:33) Hmm. Yeah, anytime, anytime. And I can imagine that it can be very kind of a, it depends. Like it's more of like my thing. Like it's something I'm trying to embrace now that I'm getting more into marketing. I can see how hard it is to be authentic because you don't fit in. And the moment you don't fit in, all the insecurities are going to come on the surface. And it's something that I've been struggling and like working on is like, just do the thing you believe into and forget about LinkedIn tactics, let's say, and what should LinkedIn content look like, for example, and find your own style. Marc Thomas (25:05) Yeah. Jim Zarkadas (25:07) voice. Marc Thomas (25:07) Yeah. Jim Zarkadas (25:07) And that's something that, yeah, if people would ask me to think about somebody with more authentic content, it's you, like your music video is a good example where they're weird, but in the good ways, like they stand out. It sounds that stays with you. And yeah, in general, even like, I'm not sure if it's in your cover or your website, the quote that you have about the moustache, that it's real and that it brings you revenue. Yeah. Yeah. Marc Thomas (25:27) yeah, let's say on my LinkedIn profile. The mustache is fake, but the results are real. Yeah. Jim Zarkadas (25:35) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you really understand branding, which was, it's a bit of topic. So I don't want to derail the conversation, but I feel I have to ask one of the questions that I always ask guests is how do you define taste? Because I'm always curious to see how everybody thinks about taste. And in your case, I would also add to the question, how do you find taste in branding? I know it's a very broad question. So I'm just curious to hear your top of mind thoughts on this one. Like what are the things that come to you? And then we're going to go to the next topic, which is the money moments that is kind of a more related to what we're discussing. But just to make a small practice on this. Marc Thomas (26:07) Yeah. Yeah. I've actually written about taste a little bit. I should send you the thing. how I think, how I think about taste is, ⁓ I think about, this, I, might not be familiar with them, but he's a guy called Tony Wilson. Tony Wilson was a TV presenter in the UK. ⁓ he was basically a news journalist. and he worked at, a not the main broadcaster, the BBC, but like one that doesn't exist anymore called Granada. And he was in the North of England and Tony Wilson had this insight, aside from doing the news journalism, that basically London was the tastemaker of all music in the UK. So if you were in the South of the UK, you could probably, you know, and you were in a band, you were, you would go to the right clubs, you play at the right places. You're going to be famous. Tony Wilson thought that that was like, disgusting. he was a northerner, and he wanted, he wanted Northern bands to get heard. And, ⁓ so in Manchester where he lived, he decided to open a club, and put on club nights. And basically he, he had been at one of the early gigs of the sex pistols. a Southern band, but he had been there in the North and there were about a hundred people at that show. the sex pistol show, which is now pretty inconceivable, but in that show were people such as joy division, Mick Hucknall from simply read, there were, there was, thingy from the fall Mark, Markie Smith from the fall. Jim Zarkadas (27:36) you Marc Thomas (27:39) all before they were famous. Now, Tony Wilson decided, I'm going to give these people the stage. They clearly have taste. I'm going to give them a stage and just let them do what they want to do. And from that, he started what is called Factory Records. Factory Records produced Joy Division. They produced New Order, who do Blue Monday, the famous track. They produced the Happy Mondays. Again, you definitely have heard the they produce so many, so many famous artists. They also, when factory records wasn't going brilliantly, decided to buy a nightclub in a, in a, like a big industrial warehouse, which was no one wanted to play at because it was so echoey. no one turned up and basically it lost heaps and heaps of money until they put on a band who basically started the rave scene in the UK. And this club became what's called the Hacienda. The Hacienda is one of the most famous electronic music venues ever. And it ran for several years before at the height of its influence, he just decided we're going to close it. And that's, that's going to be it. Now, Tony Wilson was not a musician, right? But what he did know was, okay, I know what, I know what people want. I know that they're not getting it. And I know that there are these people who are producing it. I'm going to put the pieces together and I'm going to say, okay, this is, this is taste. This is what this looks like. And over his career, he reinvented himself multiple times. So he started out in punk music. Then he went into, you know, new wave or post-punk. And then he went into rave, right? And like he continually did this even up until the end of his life, you know, which was only like 10, 15 years ago. And so what do you learn from that in terms of taste? I think you learn that taste is not any one thing. It's more a question of saying what are the components in front of me? Jim Zarkadas (29:48) . Marc Thomas (29:50) And how do I put those components together in a way that produces something that is interesting and strikes a chord with people? In marketing, that means saying, well, OK, what are the channels that I have? What are the brand assets that I have to work with? What are the problems that we encounter in this audience? What are the features that we have? And like, where is all of this messaging going? And basically you're saying, let's take all that stuff, put it together and maybe what feels like an abstract way, developing it over time through like an iterative process. And then by the end of that, you're left with something that someone goes, if you've done it right, wow, I love that. And they take a picture and they share it on social media, you know, hopefully. So that's, that's what taste is. think, I think it's a real skill. And you have to tune yourself quite, quite carefully to like different signals that maybe don't make sense. ⁓ when you think about them too hard and you just have to go with it. It's like in your body, you know? that's how I feel about it. Jim Zarkadas (30:48) Hmm. That was a hell of an answer, Like a whole story about it. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it was, it was really, really good. Okay. I love it. I don't really have any comments because yeah, I mean, you said it all. I have one follow-up question actually. How do you develop your taste? What are some habits, some routines, some rituals that you have as a creative marketeer to develop your taste? Marc Thomas (31:00) Hahaha cool, thanks. Yeah. Yeah. I, I absolutely devour cultural things. and not from any one specific discipline or genre. I listened to a huge amounts of different music, not, not new, not old, not like it could be anything, ⁓ any genre. just following interest. I read a lot. Not again, not just nonfiction. I read fiction. I read in different languages, judge, literally judging books by their covers, you know, right? You know, picking up a book just because it looks interesting rather than because I know what it's about. And just, you know, finding things that I like. I do a lot of research on Wikipedia a lot of the time. Jim Zarkadas (31:56) Hmm. Marc Thomas (32:03) you know, like just clicking the links that I don't recognize and seeing what comes up. And then, you know, like, obviously kind of consuming little bits of pop culture here and there to kind of add some relevancy and time timeliness to that. And I think I think you're a I think you're a product and your taste is really a product of what you consume more than anything. ⁓ And so if you put in diverse Jim Zarkadas (32:04) Mm. Hmm. Mm-mm. Hmm. Marc Thomas (32:32) inputs, you probably end up with a very interesting output that won't be like anyone else's. ⁓ and so I think, I think, you know, it sort of behooves you as a person. If you want, if you want to develop your taste, you should consume a lot of different stuff from a lot of different places. And there is really no, there's really no need for you to be limited by what anyone else's, you know, diet of inputs is, you, you can just go wild. Jim Zarkadas (32:39) percent. I fully, yeah, I fully, fully agree. I have like a similar approach on these and I fully agree on the diverse part. It's like you need to look into different areas. Like if you want to be a good marketeer, don't just consume with marketing. Sure, you want to look at great case studies and great branding and all these things, but you need to find inspiration in different areas. And like one thing that I realized more and more through the podcast by talking to people is that it also comes down. like to finding your own style as well. Like you can tell like your style by just looking at the decoration you have, what you're wearing, like your videos. You have a very specific style that feels like Mark. Then yeah, like Alex James is another, like he's a B2B messaging strategist. ⁓ Yeah, I had a podcast with him also. I love his content and he has a different kind of style. And he was explaining how he also developed his taste and how, they influenced him why his car sales look like that, where he... Marc Thomas (33:38) yeah, nice, cool guy. Jim Zarkadas (33:52) uses a lot of kind of a 90s, like the photography and everything, the whole vibe that he has. So yeah, it's very interesting. And I love the idea of looking into unconventional places for inspiration and creative thinking. May Lynch, another guest, she used to be a senior designer or designer, I can't remember, at Wise, wise.com, the FinTech, and she's into DJing as well. I see it started on the episode how DJing actually helps you become a better designer because when you're a DJ, you really read the audience and set a vibe. You create a vibe, create an atmosphere and you tell a story through the sequence of tracks that you're playing. So yeah, I love this part. that's what I personally find it really fascinating. That's why I love stuff like marketing a product design so much, because if you want to be truly great, you have to find ways to be very creative and to consume a lot of creative stuff and music, as you said, is one of them for sure. Marc Thomas (34:47) yet. I tell you one other thing here, Jim, as well. think one thing that limits people is their own comfort. So you probably have in every day heaps and heaps of ideas, even though you're attuned to this already, I'm sure. You have heaps of ideas that you think, can't say that out loud because someone will judge me. ⁓ so, again, I'll give you another example. ⁓ so again, working with Ollie recently on sender, one of Ollie's things that he said to me was, Hey, some of these emails that you're writing, like I think they're really functional, but I also think they're a bit vanilla. and I was like, man, I don't want to be called vanilla. it's a good flavor, but I don't want, I don't want to be it. Uh, and, um, and he was like, like, can we, can we think about some different ideas? And I was just like, yeah, fine. He was, he said, I want some of these to be unhinged. and as soon as I said, okay, well, you want unhinged, like, let's give you unhinged, uh, to myself. I realized, okay. Um, let's, you know, I can't, I just started putting down. ideas on paper that were just like, okay, these might not get seen. We might not ever do these, but like, let's at least explore whether there's a taste that like an appetite for them. And so, you know, one idea that I put out there, which I really, really hope we're going to write, is, to do one of these emails as an erotic short story, where, know, instead of all of the, you know, the cheeky words, we replace it with just the word social proof. because that's what all these product does and he's into it. So, you know, maybe, maybe you're going to see an erotic story in your inbox soon from, from me. ⁓ but, but the, the, the point I'm trying to make here is that, ⁓ you can have all the tastes you want. You can have all of the ideas that you want, but if you filter yourself before you've had a chance to allow those ideas to develop in the, in the air and be judged, Jim Zarkadas (36:28) Can't wait. Hmm. Marc Thomas (36:45) you won't ever be able to produce the kind of work that you actually want to do. and that's one thing I've definitely learned from, from working with Ali actually, he's kind of pushed me a little bit to go like, stop, stop trying to put yourself in a box. so yeah. Jim Zarkadas (36:57) Yeah, that's a really good, good insight. Yeah, it's like you also need the confidence. You may have the taste, but you also need like the confidence to get it out there and like put in front of people and not try to put yourself in the box. That's, yeah, that's pretty solid. Yeah, fully agree, fully agree. On this one, now that you mentioned Oli, one of your posts, I remember you said about how cool it was that... Marc Thomas (37:05) you Jim Zarkadas (37:20) All the things he had, one of the reasons he hired you was like the money moments when he got in touch with you is like, Hey, I want to implement the money moments. It was a bit of a moment for you. Like special moments like, Oh, they started using these terms that I started playing poking around. Now it's like a framework people use it and they want to buy it even. Which for me, like when I was like, that's cool. That's really cool. And I was really happy about it. And this is a really nice kind of a moment to switch to into the money, the money moments topic and ask you what it is. Marc Thomas (37:25) Yeah. Yeah. Jim Zarkadas (37:49) How do you define it and what's the idea? And then we can get into more kind of actionable stuff of like, what does it really mean in practice, like in all these products maybe or something else. Marc Thomas (38:00) Sure. Well, when people start to think about lifecycle marketing, they tend to immediately default to when it comes to software, hey, I need to write an onboarding sequence or I need to write a win back sequence. And then that really is the extent of the best practices that somebody comes up with for lifecycle marketing, which I don't blame them for. If you don't think about it as much as I do, it's totally reasonable to say, Okay, that's a good first step. However, given that I do think about it so much, what I've realized is, is actually Whenever there is a moment in your life cycle where somebody could give you money or take away money from you any moment, regardless of whether it's a best practice or not, you ought to have a life cycle sequence, an email sequence that responds to that and preempts it. So it either encourages them or discourages them from taking action on giving you or removing money from you. I call those moments money moments because it is so descriptive of what they are. Money moments exist at every point in the life cycle, whether somebody is completely unaware of your product or whether they are referring other people or they've been using it for a long time. so thinking about your life cycle in those terms allows you to build out a much more relevant life cycle over time than just saying, okay, I'm gonna do these email sequences that I should have. And that's really how I try to get clients to think is like, okay, not just what should we do, but what do we need to do here? That's it, yeah. Jim Zarkadas (39:39) Look at your product. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty brilliant because like, yeah, really like how you phrase the whole thing and also how it works because it forced you to look at your product. It's not like, hey, you need an onboarding email campaign. Yeah, sure. Like every SaaS product needs, like people sign up, you need to communicate with them, sell them on the value and so on. But actually it's not just that. you kind of like... What I really like with the money moments is a concept that you find like a high level framework that force you to look into your product and not look for tactical advice. But actually it makes you think what are my money moments? Because every product is unique and has different money moments. Could you show some examples of money moments actually? Marc Thomas (40:13) Yeah. Sure, sure. So let me share that what the one that makes it click for most people is this. When I was at Podia, we had a pricing model that worked on having a base plan. So you could choose from one of two base plans, which would give you most of the features of the product. And then we also had an add-on product, which was an email platform. where it integrated with everything that you did on Podia and you could send targeted emails to your potential customers. We looked at the data of what people did in their first, I think 30 days, I can't remember exactly, their first 30 days of using Podia. And we found that if you were going to upgrade to Podia, you... only chose a base plan, first of all, and that you basically in your first 30 days, that was when you would upgrade. If you didn't do it by day 31, your likelihood dropped to effectively zero of buying the product. And so what we realized was like, okay, our email sequence that we do as that kind of classic onboarding, while it could talk about all of these different ways that you could use the product, actually the only way that people use the product in reality, the money moment is upgrading to a paid base plan. So until they do that, the likelihood of them adding Podia email as an add on is effectively zero. So that was the insight. That's the money moment is when you sign up for a free trial, we don't need to sell you Podia email. We need to sell you Podia's base plans only. ⁓ and basically what we did was we restructured our, we restructured our, life cycle. So the first sequence that you trigger was an onboarding sequence. ran for four or 30 days. I think there was a 14 day free trial. and it ran, so the onboarding sequence ran for 30 days to kind of get some people who maybe didn't convert during their trial period. Jim Zarkadas (42:10) you Marc Thomas (42:24) Once you converted to a base paid base plan, you got removed from that sequence, no matter where you were in it, whether you're on day one or day 29. and then you would immediately get added to a new sequence, which we created, which only talked about Podia email. So it didn't talk about any of the other features of Podia, just Podia email. now the take-up rate on the expansion, the, the add-on was significantly higher after we did the, the, kind of restructured that life cycle based on understanding that money moment. And the second money moment there is obviously once you've got a paid base plan, you're probably wanting to do some more sales. You'll probably want to do some more marketing. so email becomes very top of mind for you. It's a sensible investment. Almost everybody who sells digital products needs to do email. We have a platform. It integrates. better than any other platform with your Podia account because it's in Podia, you should buy it. Here's how other people use it. Do you want to take action? And yeah, people really wanted to take action. It converted like crazy. Jim Zarkadas (43:33) That's pretty cool. Yeah, and like the very interesting thing is also like the don't again which comes back to the previous like strategic versus tactical playbook is understand how people Like what is the real buying journey and how do buyers really behave for your product? That was a pretty good one. ⁓ I have a question. This was also in my head. It may sound like a silly question, but how many emails are enough emails? I know it's like super open-ended, but yeah. Marc Thomas (43:48) Yeah. Yeah. no, no, fair enough. This really depends on a number of different things, but I'll give you some kind of benchmarks. So as a general benchmark, you're probably not sending enough email. ⁓ I'm not saying that because I sell email services. I'm saying that because it's true. ⁓ Again, at Podio, I can tell you an example here. Jim Zarkadas (44:19) Hmm. Yay. Marc Thomas (44:29) So we, and actually I've repeated this multiple times. So we discovered that in all the marketing activity we were doing, we actually were sending only, I think one email a month or one a week. I can't remember what it was. I think it was one a week actually. And basically these emails were really nice, but we ran this experiment. which is what would happen if we started to send three emails a week for the next couple of months. And so we went from four emails a month to 12 emails a month. And that was just standard emails. So we emailed Monday, Wednesday and Thursday of every week for at least four weeks. I can't remember the exact period. What we discovered was Jim Zarkadas (45:03) Mm-hmm. Marc Thomas (45:16) There is a massive increase in conversion on days where we send emails versus days where we don't send emails. And because we sent these as broadcast emails, effectively what I did was I said, okay, let's chart the number of paid upgrades that we get on days where we send versus days where we don't send. And we'll see whether there is a conversion uplift based on that. We found that there was, I think a 12 % bump in paid conversions above the baseline. paid conversion rate on days where we sent emails. And then there was also a trailing effect over the next few days. And it went down to 9 % over the next two, three days ⁓ increase in conversion versus days where we didn't send. So 12 emails a month feels like a punishing number of emails to send to your customers. But it works. ⁓ And unsubscribes. Jim Zarkadas (46:05) Alright. Yeah. Marc Thomas (46:11) At that point, almost don't matter because the goal of building a SaaS and sending email is to convert people to customer to paying accounts. So we weren't experiencing a particularly high number of unsubscribes, but we were experiencing a particularly high number of paid upgrades. And so that's one example. I also did this with a different client. We found there was a 60 % increase in revenue added. Jim Zarkadas (46:19) Yeah. Yeah. Mmm. Marc Thomas (46:38) above baseline on days where we emailed versus didn't, 60 % increase. That's insane. That's a huge amount of additional revenue. And literally these were just helpful emails that showed, you know, one thing per email, like, okay, here's an interesting way to think about this topic. Wednesdays were here's a feature you might have missed and how you could potentially use it and how other people are using it. Jim Zarkadas (46:46) Hmm. Marc Thomas (47:05) Thursdays were, I call them Thursday Thunder Clap, horrible name. But basically here is an example of a customer using the product. You could be doing this. ⁓ So yeah, and that's true of most email sequences, by the way. I'll take another one. Onboarding sequences, people tend to go, okay, we can send maybe three emails to everyone if it's a 14 day trial. Jim Zarkadas (47:14) Hmm. Hmm. Mm-hmm. Marc Thomas (47:31) And we'll also send a couple of kind of branched conditional emails based on whether a person has taken, taken action or not. I disagree. I always try to get my clients to send for 30 days. So if it's a 14 day, basically I double the length of the trial and say, let's send over that period. So you still get a 14 day trial, but we're to send you emails for 30 days. because some people won't take action. They might forget or maybe they just don't want to. And then by day 30, they'll go flip. Actually, there are heaps of use cases of this. I've had to think I should do that. So there's that. And we send 15, 20 emails potentially in that 30 day period. And it converts. People don't unsubscribe in the way that you think they would. I've seen that over and over and over again. Jim Zarkadas (48:09) Hmm Marc Thomas (48:22) That's true of almost every sequence. Send more email is my mantra. Jim Zarkadas (48:28) Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also like the topics that you described are also useful. So it's not like, hey, bye, hey, bye, hey, bye. Like you don't say this, you actually saw something meaningful in there and you try to incorporate some good taste and some creativity so that it's any melk worth reading. Which like, yeah, you could say that it's like implied that yeah, it's obvious that this email needs to be good, but that's something for some reason, many people means like, hey, it also matters what you have with that email. You don't want to spam people. And Marc Thomas (48:50) Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Jim Zarkadas (48:57) On the emails, on the story that you shared from Podia, so you sent, like, you kind of doubled the amount of days. So let's say you have 30 days trial, so you send emails for 60 days, but would you do like three emails per week for 60 days? So that's how many weeks? Like eight weeks. That would be too much, right? Marc Thomas (49:10) No, no. Here's how it normally works. It's kind of like, I don't know if this is, if this is accurate, but it's basically like that kind of Fibonacci sequence, right? Like right at the start, you send more emails. So with Rosie, one of my clients, I started when we did, when I did their onboarding, I, the first draft that I did, I totally underestimated their conversion, their conversion lag. And in fact, what we discovered was day one and day two, incredibly important. They are by far the most important days in their conversion pathway. And since I have also experienced this with multiple other companies. So in day one, for a lot of my clients now, I send two, three emails after they sign up. So literally that's every few hours in the first day. Then in the first week, we might send, you know, an email a day, maybe two some days, depending on what there is, and depending on whether we've done any kind of conditional, if you have to use this feature or else you won't get value. And then from day, you know, seven through to day 14, we might send one email a day, maybe a bit less even. And then after day 15 to day 30, we would probably send very, you know, like four or five emails, maybe even, maybe even like six, seven, I don't know. It depends what information you need to get, what information Jim Zarkadas (50:40) I see, I see, yeah. Marc Thomas (50:42) you need to get out. There are some standard points that you should always be sending emails about, by the way, if you're doing one of those onboarding sequences. Day one, the first email should be Jim Zarkadas (50:49) Mm-hmm. Marc Thomas (50:54) everything that you need to do to get value from the product. So it should say, here's what I recommend you do to get the fastest amount of value. So you, you click here, you create this, then you press share. Here's how you do it. So that would be day one, day three, day two, doesn't matter which you should share. Here are the pricing options. A lot of people don't do this. They wait. to share their pricing, you should send an email very soon, specifically saying, this is what it looks like when you pay. You should, and in that email, you can say, here's the difference between the plans, literally in terms of who they're good for and why. And then you should give a recommendation, which says something like, I don't know, if you're a small business, you should choose this one. If you need X, Y, or Z, you should choose this plan. So that should be day two or day three. halfway through the trial, no matter how long your trial is, you should say you're halfway through your trial. If you haven't done these things yet, you should. Here is the pricing. And then the final day and the day before, you should also say here, your trial's about to end tomorrow. You need to take action if you don't want this to happen. If you don't want your trial to. like cancel or expire. And day seven, you should say, we need you to choose something like if you've got a seven day trial, for example, then a few days later, say two days after the end of the trial, you should say, Hey, what happened? Did we notice you didn't upgrade? Sometimes things get in the way. Let me know if you need that trial extended or choose a paid plan here. And then the final email, whenever it is in your sequence, you should say, Hey, I've obviously been emailing you a lot. Here's why. This is what the product does. Here are the key use cases. Here's the pricing. Here's how you take action. Thank you for trying the product. I'll still email you, but it'll be less frequently now. And that, those are the kind of key like ribs that you build the body around effectively. Because those are the emails that tend to convert. Jim Zarkadas (53:03) Hmm Marc Thomas (53:03) in my experience. Jim Zarkadas (53:06) Yeah, that's a great point. Also the part like that's something that I feel kind of guilty about is like tell them your pricing. Like we assume for some reason because we made the pricing page that people know your pricing, but in reality they don't. And sometimes they even ask for a link to pay. It's like, where do I pay? It's like, yeah, you can just go to your billing settings, but it's not as obvious to everybody. And always depends like on the audience. That's something that I've seen with some. Marc Thomas (53:16) Yeah, they don't look at it. Yeah. And even people who are in the product sometimes don't find the billing page. So you should link directly to it. And if you don't have a billing page, which I've seen a number of times recently, amazingly, just with my mind, yeah, it's like a modal that comes up and says, here's where you pay. And I'm like, well, what do they do if they miss the modal? There's no route to send them to. I'm like, well, OK, well, they don't pay. So there you go. Yeah. Jim Zarkadas (53:32) Yeah. Yeah. Already? What? wow. Okay Really cool. Yeah, that was really, really kind of a practical advice. Thank you. And I'm looking at the time and I know we booked until two, so I don't wanna like hijack your schedule. You have three minutes for the last question. Otherwise we can end it here, however you feel. ⁓ So the question that I always ask is, what's your, like at the end is, what's your favorite SaaS product or mobile app is in general like a tech product that you've been using the last few months. Marc Thomas (54:09) Yeah, hit me. Jim Zarkadas (54:22) that had a worldwide impact on you and made you excited about it. Some that you feel like excited about using. Marc Thomas (54:28) OK, well, let me give you three. Is that all right? ⁓ The first one is Sunsama. Sunsama is kind of like a task manager, S-U-N-S-A-M-A, if you want to look it up. It's kind of like a task manager. But effectively, what it does is it's based around having a calm life. And so what it does is it integrates with all of your other Jim Zarkadas (54:30) Okay, yeah, yeah, of course. Marc Thomas (54:52) products that you use. And you effectively go through at the start of every day and you drag things from different products that you need to get done into the day. Sansama then estimates based on, I don't know what, how much time it will take you to do those things. And then it'll show you if you've overloaded your day. And it'll say, hey, you should defer some tasks for tomorrow. Jim Zarkadas (55:14) I need this. Marc Thomas (55:16) Every, every knowledge Jim Zarkadas (55:16) I need it. Marc Thomas (55:18) worker I think should be using something like this if they're self-employed in particular. ⁓ and so I, what I do is I stopped using Slack's reminders, ⁓ which is what I previously did because it was just so stressful. And instead I basically just went, okay, I'm going to install the extension to sunsama. ⁓ or a right click and say, create task sunsama reads the task, the context around it creates the task title estimates the time. Jim Zarkadas (55:22) That's cool. Same. Marc Thomas (55:46) and then links back to Slack when I add it. So I can always go back in quickly and just review that. It's incredible. It's made my life so calm. Probably lacks some of the features of other tools, but honestly, I value the calm above anything else. ⁓ Jim Zarkadas (56:01) Also, also the headline when I defy level promise that they do is make work life balance. ⁓ What is the or something like that. Yeah, a reality, which is a very nice kind of high-level promise. And it looks really interesting, Actually, thanks for the mention. I'm going to use this for sure because my calendar is a mess and I use it as a task manager personally. And I also do the Slack reminders. And what you described is really kind of how I feel like on the stressful part. So yeah, thanks for the mention. Marc Thomas (56:11) Yeah, it really does. Yeah. Number two, Whisper Flow. ⁓ I'm sure a bunch of people have recommended this already. I think I've probably written several hundred thousand words in Whisper Flow. I keep my mic in front of my face all day. It's not just for podcasts. I basically don't type anymore. So incredible. And then the third thing is Manus. That's M-A-N-U-S. Manus is an AI tool that I think, you know, Jim Zarkadas (56:32) Mm-hmm. Marc Thomas (56:55) Actually, Claude Cowork, I think is what Claude released to compete with Manus. Manus was just bought by Facebook. It's an incredible tool. It's 10 times as good as any of the other AI tools that I pay for and use, in my opinion. And if you're a person who is doing, who wants to do AI workflows or agent, like agentic style work, but you don't want to manage Claude code or, you don't like Claude code work or whatever, you should be trying Manus. It is insanely good. That's what I would recommend. Yeah. Jim Zarkadas (57:33) Yeah, you mentioned on a Slack conversation we had, I signed up, I was like, ah, I feel too busy for that, like, and I postponed it, but you would say like, over cloud, you would use Manus, like. Marc Thomas (57:42) Dude, I tried Claude's code again recently. I mean, I'm not like un-technical, you know? I've been working in tech. I know how to use a terminal and like happily do that. But I just looked at it I was like, what the heck would I do this for? Like, there's no real reason for me to do this. I'm not using local context. I'm using cloud services. This can write the API calls for me, go off and do the workflow and like, Jim Zarkadas (57:49) Hmm. Marc Thomas (58:09) I don't need to think about it. I just need to whisper flow into... into clout... into manners, sorry, and then I'm away with my work. So yeah, that's it. Jim Zarkadas (58:19) Okay, really good mentions. Thanks a lot. Really cool. And yeah, that was really nice conversation. Many interesting topics, beautiful flow. Thank you a lot for today. That was really nice. Marc Thomas (58:31) Oh, it was pleasure. love chatting to you. Jim Zarkadas (58:34) Thanks man. And yeah.