Ben Settle: 04:12
A few times.
Brian Kurtz: 04:13
Yeah, yeah. And that’s like talk about I mean, Troy, it’s not just him showing up on a screen. So I think I got some clout with Ben somehow.
Troy Broussard: 04:21
I have to go to his place in a couple of weeks because I can’t get him to move, like, outside of a, like, two mile radius. So I am, you know, braving the flights and flying out to Oregon next week.
Brian Kurtz: 04:34
Well, I’m going to consider myself special then, because I’ve gotten Ben to move to my world many times. And of course he’s freely come on these calls in the past and I guess I was reminded that we hadn’t had them on for a while. He’s always been one of the top speakers that we have here. And then I started getting your emails, Ben and Troy about BerserkerMail and what you’re doing with that. And Chris Mason sent me an email and said, you know, Brian, we should look at BerserkerMail, at least as one of our two ISPs. And so I said, well, how about this? Instead of them doing a pitch to us, let them come on, just share their brilliance on what’s happening in the email marketing world right now. Things they’re seeing, things to be careful of, things to actually exploit. And I say exploit in only the best ways. Then when you exploit, you exploit differently than I do. We’re well aware of that. But I just wanted you guys to have you on, give us a state of the union of email marketing, as you see it at the end of 2024 going into 2025. And then, you know, I’m giving him free reign to talk about BerserkerMail. I mean, Ben and Troy are email geniuses so instead of adapting to what was in the marketplace which they thought was not good enough, they invented their own. And so if the person who’s the best practitioner in email marketing design decides to build their own email service provider, you got to listen. And I want you guys to listen. And then I have to listen because I don’t know all the details either. And I think after this call, I’ll probably be a BerserkerMail client at some point early in 2025. But that’s beside the point. I just wanted to have you guys on to end the year on a good note. I’m really always, always just so grateful for your friendship Ben, and yours too, Troy, and for being here. And you know, these guys are some of the best marketers in the world on this call, and they are eager to hear what you have to share and what you have to say. I will say that, you know, this is a highly attended call for us, so I know you’re a draw. I think you drew more than Ryan Levesque last week. So that’s saying something. So Ben and Troy, the Xcelerator are yours.
Ben Settle: 07:08
I didn’t know we were giving, like, a presentation.
Brian Kurtz: 07:11
Presentation, but walk out of your ass, and it’ll be a presentation.
Ben Settle: 07:18
Well, what do you want to know? What do you want to know? I mean, first of all, let me be very clear about something and all of this, because I don’t think Troy gets the, for some reason, I get a lot of the credit for BerserkerMail. And I can just say, like, if BerserkerMail is our child, 99% looks like Troy and it maybe has my smile like it’s all he designed it. He had this guy almost literally. I don’t know how much detail Troy wants me on. He literally almost died for this platform. Like, that’s not even drama. The guy literally, almost. I wrote about it in October, actually. And so my point is, you got someone who can actually articulate this stuff because I sure as hell can’t. I just push send and I just send emails and it gets my emails delivered better than any other platform I ever used. And I have some input here and there, and it was based around we have to make it caveman friendly enough for a guy like Ben, but attractive enough for the guys who like to geek out like Troy, who’s like, you know, a nuclear engineer guy. So all I’m saying is, this is a rare time to have someone like Troy to actually articulate all the things that make it work, because I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you any of it. I just know I push send, and money shows up.
Troy Broussard: 08:34
And can we get that caveman approved stamp to put on? I want that caveman approved. Well, you know, I am a berserker. I am a berserker fan and if you have any doubt, I just had my brand new Chevrolet Traverse wrapped with the Berserker all through the side, up and down the side, and the logo and all of that over the car just because I can. And it makes me happy every time I walk out and I see that berserker.
Brian Kurtz: 09:02
What is Berserker?
Troy Broussard: 09:04
BerserkerMail is really about creating Berserker fans. And if you look at the website, you’ll see that it has a vivid orange theme and color. And you know, Ben and I often refer to BerserkerMail as the red headed bastard stepchild of Ben and I. If we had a love child, it would be BerserkerMail and that is really –
Brian Kurtz: 09:30
I just got some thoughts in my head that you don’t want to see.
Troy Broussard: 09:32
I know, I know, but I’m going there, man. I don’t hold back. I’m former military. I don’t hold back. You get more candor than you ever want with me sometimes. But, you know, that is how BerserkerMail started. It started over Ben and I having a glass of wine and in the Napa Valley, sitting over at a wine bar and just enjoying and talking and him pontificating about what he would love in an ideal platform. Many of you know me or may know me, Ben, and, you know, for example, Brian and I got to know each other through my history as being one of the top 2 or 3 in the world with Infusionsoft. I was and have worked for many of the people. The gentleman that you just said that was on last with Ryan. You know, I was CTO of his organization for a period of time and have been one of the top guys in marketing automation on the planet for years now. I don’t really do that anymore. I don’t do any marketing in that regard. I haven’t done consulting for many years now, and so I don’t really do that. But what I got tired of with Infusionsoft is, and I don’t want to make this about them because it’s all the competitors. I did it with ActiveCampaign, I did it with many, many different providers. But what would happen, Brian, is people would come to me and they would say, Troy, we need you to fix and clean up all this automation. It’s a mess. We need you to standardize it. We need you to clean it up. And they would pay me a very nice fee to do that. And my team and I would go through and clean it all up. And then six months later, they would say, you know what? We’re not happy with deliverability. We’re going to switch off this platform. Can we get you to migrate us off? And then, you know, they would try that and then six months later they would say, you know what, we really can’t stand this new platform. It has better deliverability, but the automations aren’t there. Can you bring us back and put us back on Infusionsoft again? You don’t know how many people I migrated three different times, right? And every time for a fee. And what you realize is that the industry is a revolving door around this dichotomy between Simplification and complexity and automation. All right. And Ben and I honestly are like a perfect reflection of that dichotomy. Ben, no joke is caveman simplistic with what he does, right? And I am and have been known as one of the world’s renowned automation specialists. That’s been my thing. I’ve done campaigns and automations that would make your head explode like a little Martian on Mars attacks. Okay, I’ve done stuff that is so complex that I’ve only had three clients in the world that had the list size and the ability to actually take advantage of. So I’ve gone really deep down that rabbit hole. And Ben was on the opposite extreme. And we sat there, you know, talking over some wine, and it just came to painful fruition. And this is the statement that I really want to make. And Ben, you correct me if I’m wrong, but I remember us specifically saying that we were willing to commit. And at this point, we’ve put a lot of money in there. Okay. A lot of money over seven figures into this company. I don’t know if it’s multiple seven, but it’s way more than seven. And when Ben and I sat down and talked about this, we said, you know what? We’re going to build it the way we want it as marketers that run multiple companies, and we are going to do it our way. And if nobody ever buys the damn thing, if it’s just for our internal use, we’ll be happy. But it was kind of like that, right? Ben I mean, the conversation.
Ben Settle: 13:09
That was exactly it. Like, we’re going to use it. What’s the thing we would use for our own thing for our own businesses? And not just, you know, we both have businesses that most people probably don’t see every day. I mean, we have a trading business and we have, you know, mobile app business.What would we use for all of our own stuff? Right. What are we going to do to get the most emails delivered right? For our own stuff? So it’s not even just about serving clients. And it’s like we are the ultimate client, right? So I like how we eat our own dog food. Like that was our whole thought. What would we do? We’re not going to sit here and just sell it. We have to actually be users of it. And Troy and I were briefly part of another company together selling a shopping cart, and we both kind of jumped out of that at the same time because the partner in that we both like and everything, there’s nothing, no bad blood. But you know, I remember kind of pinning him. I’m like, are you going to use this cart? Well, I can’t actually use it, Ben. You’re going to have to use it. So, you know, it occurred to me that a lot of people don’t use their own platforms, right? I mean, I don’t know who owns all the other email platforms. I’m pretty sure they’re not sending emails out every day to their own list that they’ve created, so in their own offers, at their own expense. Right. I just don’t see, I’ve never seen that before. I’m not saying it’s never happened. I just don’t see it. We’re the opposite. We’re actually using it. So, you know, we’re going to do everything in our power to make sure that it’s going to do everything we want it to do, including getting high, very high deliverability, having the kind of support we wish we could get. I mean, Troy has been in the software business for a long time, and the stuff he tells me, I’m like, this can’t be. This is not true. He goes, for example, you’d be surprised how many tech platforms not just email, but tech platforms, how they have their helpdesk set up so that you ask a question and they just reply so that they have it on log, that they reply, they make it look like they actually care and they’re doing something. But the reality is nobody even probably read it. And it’s just like they just wanted to keep the ticket going. So it looks like they’re actually giving you service and people.
Troy Broussard: 15:09
Triage, baby triage.
Brian Kurtz: 15:11
Yeah. I mean, we had a discussion about customer service when we opened up the call today.
Ben Settle: 15:15
It’s abysmal out there. Yeah. It’s real. And it’s gotten worse with Covid. Like after that everybody just turned into a flake times 100, right?
Troy Broussard: 15:23
Don’t even don’t even get us started on the whole introduction into that crap now. So yeah.
Brian Kurtz: 15:28
Let me backup a little bit. You mentioned Troy, that you said that, you know, everybody’s hopping from one email service provider to another. And it reminds me, you know, of whoever’s got the best price, it becomes different. It becomes commoditized in a way that just, you know, is repulsive. And so I guess my questions for you and, and and you know, without geeking out too much because I’m not a techie and I know some people on this call are. But yeah, to go at least a, down a level, what are the key things that like no other email service provider can do? The ones that frustrated you the most and the most that forced you to create your own? And you know, you can be specific because everybody here has encountered the issues, whether it’s I mean, I have Infusionsoft and ActiveCampaign, two companies that you worked for, and they’re good at some things. They’re not good at others. I could move to somewhere else. And also, how do you deal with if someone comes to BerserkerMail from one of those, how do you deal with the barrier to switch? So the pain of disconnect, even though the connection to the existing email service provider isn’t that strong really, because they don’t do a lot to keep you connected except, oh, they can handle my orders. They can handle my, you know, my shopping cart. They can handle the basics, but what were the biggest things that the biggest the it’s a long it’s a there’s probably a long.
Troy Broussard: 17:02
I get it I got you. So yeah here’s the first thing you have to realize. To summarize what Ben said, I really do believe that we’re one of the only platforms that was created by marketers for marketers’ use daily by the owners. And I really want that to settle in, because that’s what Ben is saying. You know, you go to these big platforms, they’ve taken a lot of public funding. They’ve taken hundreds of millions of dollars, some of them. And some of them have just been recently sold off because of just a disaster of their funding policies. And they then are held to all of these public policies that they’ve made and the money, they’re beholden to them, and they have to do what Brian just referenced, which is featuritis. Okay. I call it Featuritis. How many of you see this? You go look at and you look at comparing 2 or 3 different services and all of them, you will not find this web, this URL on our website. Don’t ask for it. You won’t find it. You will not find a compare you to x. Compare x to y. Compare z to x like they all do this. They all do this grid of we have this feature. They have that feature. And it is really sadistic because it turns into a featuritis creep that all of these platforms try to impress you with all of the features that they can do. When the reality of things is you shouldn’t be using 90% of those features. And as somebody that has arguably one of the top three in the world in consulting with people, I’ve consulted with nine figure companies, multiple eight and seven figure companies throughout the years. I can tell you that 99% of the people that have Infusionsoft or very complex systems like that and ActiveCampaign, they want the sex appeal of all of those features, but they don’t actually need them, and they certainly don’t utilize them. And so what you get is this just sadistic kind of it’s almost like incestual relationship in the industry of featuritis. Of just adding more and more features just because they can to put it on a checklist that says that we have this feature when that company doesn’t. Ben and I don’t do that. We don’t add more features. What you’re going to find with BerserkerMail is it’s got what you need, but we’re kind of like the tough love parent that says, yeah, I know you want that, but you don’t need it. And that’s the way BerserkerMail is. Now some people, Brian, that pisses off because they’ve got their love for this one stupid little feature. And it doesn’t matter how many times I can show them that it’s irrelevant and statistically makes no difference in their income, they’re going to get, you know, they’re going to go with that competitor, and that’s fine. We’re seeing our competitors doubling their prices, going 40% higher in their prices on all of this stuff. Because what you don’t understand as a software developer is when you compete on featuritis, you’re just bloating the code base. You’re making the product slower, you’re making it more difficult to support. You’re giving more bugs and more things that you’re going to have to continually refine and enhance and increase your development team and staff and costs. And they pass that along.
Brian Kurtz: 20:18
Let’s talk about words as opposed to pictures now. You know how, how you can make emails, sing as you always do. And also, there was some stuff in the chat that I was thinking about as well in terms of, you know, how let me just see if I can find that. Oh, yeah. It’s like it’s become a differentiator to write compelling emails with no images and no fluff and no, you know, real all content emails. And so talk about the art and science of that, Ben. And also in context with Troy, was sharing about images.
Ben Settle: 20:58
This whole idea that you need images for anything to me has always been kind of like this was silly to me, even ten, fifteen years ago. Like I’ve never really understood it. I know people will say, well, I got my clicks up. Well, who cares? What were your sales? Right? And I’ve never seen any of these guys actually talk about that. I’m not saying they don’t. I’m just saying that to me, it’s good, better, best. I actually don’t care if people use images. We’re just not going to allow them on our platform. For all the reasons Troy talked about. Now, just not too long ago, one of my customers sent me this interesting testimonial. He’s in Toastmasters. I guess for whatever reason, he wants to learn to be a speaker. So he went to Toastmasters and he goes, you know, Ben, I took your advice and I decided not to use a visual aid of any kind. No slides like everyone else is using slides. He’s not. And he said his engagement compared to his other talks and everyone else’s talks, was just through the roof. Because the thing that people don’t understand about any type of images, especially in email, but I would say this applies to a lot of things, is they’re designed to create vision, but really they just create an email scrolling. All they do is get you.
Brian Kurtz: 22:05
Yeah, exactly.
Ben Settle: 22:06
All the Zoomers know this, by the way. It’s only the older guys like us that don’t realize because we’re not, you know, we’re not.
Brian Kurtz: 22:11
You’re a baby, Ben. Don’t talk.
Ben Settle: 22:13
We’re not in that generation. But I can tell you, I’ve had many of them say, yeah, but that just makes me want to scroll. That’s the whole social media thing. Now, if you want emails, you’re just going to make people scroll and not read because you can’t write. Maybe you should use images. And I know that sounds facetious, but that’s actually advice I give.
Brian Kurtz: 22:30
It’s very true. It’s very.
Ben Settle: 22:31
True. Get writing, man. Maybe you should put images in there. I’m not saying not to, but they create and not only do they create scrolling, but there’s a good chance they’ll create objections too. Now, what creates vision is the reader’s imagination. Like we’re trying to. People are trying to force images into their head that they want them to see when it’s much better. And I think, Brian, you’ve worked with enough of the –
Brian Kurtz: 22:54
Brilliance Breakthrough. Brilliance Breakthrough by Eugene Schwartz. It’s about creating image words, picture words. He called them right.
Ben Settle: 23:00
Because they’re. Yeah, because the reader’s imagination is far more useful to us than what we’re trying to project into their head. And so, you know, I’m not saying there’s not a place for like on a website where you can control how it looks. Right? All the great retailers and merchandisers, from Disney to Steve Jobs, have all wanted to control the whole process from start to beginning. They want to control what you see and how you experience things for a very specific reason. I get emails every day. You guys probably all get emails every day that, you know, maybe you have your images turned off like something like 30 or 40% of people do anyway. And it looks just crazy. It’s like, what is this? Right? Besides that, you have people trying to format their emails and tables too. And I can tell you every device is going to look at that differently. You can try it on 20 different devices, but there’s going to be 20 other devices. You’re going to have to use your finger on the phone to scroll over, right. Because not everybody’s reading them on their desktops anymore. And so our whole thought was instead of messing around with all this, resize this and do this and keep it under this number of, you know, kilobytes, and make sure you do this and trick Gmail. By the way, tricking Gmail is literally something one of the bigger ISPs advice gave to one of my customers. I’m not gonna name names here, but I read this and I’m like, what are they telling them? Why not just give them a good experience in the email? Talk about something interesting to them that’s just about them about their problem. And give them somewhere to go where they can learn more and give them a good experience. Like that’s our whole philosophy.
Outro: 24:40
Thanks for listening to the Timeless Marketing Podcast with Brian Kurtz. Visit BrianKurtz.net and click Podcast at the top of the page for a full transcript and show notes. If you are interested in working with Brian personally inside of Titans Xcelerator, go to briankurtz.net/help to see how Titans can help you grow and scale your business. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z [dot] net [forward slash] help.