Ryan Levesque: 05:32
It’s an honor, honestly, to be here. You know, I think we can all agree and say, like, we’re really lucky to have you as a leader, like, as our leader here in this group, and just the heart that you bring to everything that you do and your care. And, you know, when I was a nobody in the back of the room showing up to Titans of direct response, just there to learn as a student, and just the way that you welcome me with open arms, I think, is just the way that you operate as a human being. And it really speaks to, I think, a-you as a person and b-the community that you bring together, which is what makes this group, I think, so special. So it’s an honor to be here. What I share here today is probably going to be a bit unexpected. I’ll say it like that. All right. So I jokingly titled this talk How to become the Least Popular Person in the Room, because there may be some things that I share that perhaps are a little controversial, perhaps a little unexpected. What I really want to title this talk is what you see on the screen, which is 5 Unexpected Lessons Learned by Being Curious, Asking Questions, and Seeking Truth. So with that frame, I want to invite you to put yourself in a place right now where you can reflect deeply on your work, on your business, where you are right now in your life. And I invite you, if you don’t already, to have something that you can take some great notes with, to take some notes with, because there’ll be some things and some ideas that I’ll be sharing with you that you may want to capture them in the moment exactly as they are written, or exactly as they are said. And it may be powerful to have that by your side. So with that said, let’s get started. In 2021, I received an offer for $70 million to buy my company, and after 12 months of diligence, after $2 million spent in the process, the deal fell apart. And this was not how this story was supposed to end. This is not how I’d written the story. It’s not how I imagined it in my mind. It’s not how I journaled about it. And I thought I’d done everything right. I built a company that generated over $100 million in revenue, landed on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies seven years in a row, been featured in virtually every media publication that you can imagine, tens of thousands of incredibly happy and satisfied customers. And the deal didn’t happen. And after that experience, I spent a lot of time deep in reflection and a lot of time really asking myself and reflecting on why it didn’t play out the way I expected it. I spent a lot of time reading one of the books that had a big impact on me. If you haven’t already read it, it is The Second Mountain by David Brooks, as you see right here. And I spent a lot of time reflecting on a number of questions, and one of the questions that I reflected on, I asked myself was if the deal had gone through, what would I do with the money? And the answer is pretty simple. The answer was to move out into the mountains and start a farm with my family. And then I asked myself another question, which was, what the hell is stopping me from doing this right now? And the answer was nothing at all. So in the wake of that experience, my wife and I decided to take our family on a grand adventure. We’re living in Austin, Texas. At the time, we decided to put our house on the market. Sell it. It sold in less than 24 hours. We had a 14 day close. We sold one of our cars, put everything that we owned into storage, loaded up the truck, the kids and the dog, and we road tripped our way across America to Vermont with no plan, nowhere to stay, just a dream and a vision that we were going to start a farm as a family. What you see in front of you right here is my family. It’s my family. It’s my wife, Eileen. My two boys, Henry and Bradley. And that’s our farm dog. Yes, she’s wearing a dress. Don’t judge. And this is our farm. And we are on a journey right now to grow 100% of the food that we eat and consume as a family. And we have another family that lives with us on this farm. And we have planted over 500 fruit and nut trees on the property. We have over 50 different types of berries that we grow. We have apples and pears, persimmons, plums, and peaches. We have pecans, acorns, walnuts. We raise cattle on our farm. We have pigs. We raise meat birds and laying hens. You see, right here with one of my little guys, We have 48 beehives. We raise trout in our ponds. This is our annual production garden that you see right here. And this is an example of a daily harvest that we have in our in our life between our beef, chicken, pork and fish and eggs, we produce 100% of the protein that we eat on farm, between the thousand maple trees that we tap and the 48 beehives, we produce 100% of our sweetener. And right now I have overwintering in our root cellar everything from onions to garlic to carrots, parsnips, three different types of potatoes. We’ve got four different types of squash, not to mention freezers full of everything that we grow. And every morning I get to wake up to a view that looks like this. And every morning it’s like God has painted a different painting that represents an entirely new day. And the reason why I share this with you, just to start our conversation here today, is because none of this would have happened had I not even asked myself the question. And in our conversation here today, we’re going to be exploring a series of questions that I want to invite you to think about and reflect on in your business with the work that you do. And it brings us to the first lesson that I want to share with you here today, which is this idea that when you change your questions, you change your life. Now, Brian mentioned my first two books, Ask and Choose. Ask on the left hand side, which was all about asking questions to understand your market at a deep emotional level. I’ve been a student of questions my entire life. I’ve always found the art and science of asking questions to both be simultaneously profound and incredibly insightful. Now, as popular and as powerful Ask was, there was one question and one specific voice that was not focused on in that book. Ask was all about asking your market. It was all about asking everybody else. But what it failed to explore was asking the most important voice of them all, which is yourself. And as we go through some of these lessons that I want to share with you here today, to reflect on in your business and in your life, I want to invite you to think about and reflect on these questions that we go through and what the questions that we walk through here today, as you write them down in your notes, I want to invite you to pick one of these questions to reflect deeply on after our time here together. I’ve always been a student of questions. You can see right here. This is a post that one of my good friends, Justin Welsh, recently shared on LinkedIn, where he was talking about the power of questions. And I shared three questions that I’d love to start the conversation with here today that are great ones in my experience to begin with. They are as follows. If you find yourself feeling stuck, when you find yourself feeling stuck, the question to ask yourself is what’s one step I can take that’s so small it’s impossible for me to fail? Or this question here, when you find yourself blocked, maybe you’re writing a piece for a client, or you’re working on an important project for work, what invisible rules am I following right now that might be limiting my perceived options? Or, question number three, when you feel conflicted, what rope do I need to let go of so I can step into this potential new future? Three questions to start our conversation here today. So to begin our dive into this material, the question to be asking yourself at a meta level is what questions do I need to be asking myself to help see what I’m not seeing? We all have blind spots. We all have things that we’re not even thinking about right now. There are things that you are not even considering right now in the work that you’re doing, the project that you have right now, your big plans that you have for 2025, and de-risking your business and de-risking your life largely revolves around seeing the blind spots, finding what they are. Of course, you’ve heard the expression when you’re inside the bottle, you can’t read the label. And it’s true for all of us. So I want to invite you to reflect on some of the questions that we walked through here today. So the question I want to invite you to reflect on as I share all this is the following. How can you stand out by doing the opposite of everybody else in your market? How can you stand out by doing the opposite of everybody else? That takes me to lesson number three. Shine the flashlight where nobody’s looking. On the heels of the essay that I wrote, The Great Sea Change Why the Digital Marketing Playbook of the Last Decade is Obsolete. There was a much anticipated follow up that people were waiting for, which is what is the solution? Where do we go from here? Which led me to publish a second piece, Going Analog The Contrarian Path to Thriving in this New Digital Era. And in this piece, one of the things that I explored is the idea of marketing channels and specifically, where is the greatest opportunity for us right now in terms of reaching our ideal customer? In other words, what’s the least crowded channel available to us today? And I wrote. As an advertiser, as a marketer, when it comes to marketing channels, what you’re looking for are asymmetric supply demand imbalances, places where you can be, where there are a disproportionate number of potential customers relative to the businesses competing for their attention, and to find this asymmetric supply demand imbalance and thus the opportunity that it presents. Sometimes we need to shine the flashlight where nobody’s looking. Now, of course, the ideal situation, as we all know on this call, is to be the only food stand in a stadium filled with starving fans. You have a line of people around the block and you can charge whatever you want, right? But sometimes the opportunities in front of us are non-obvious. And in order to find the non-obvious opportunities that everybody else is missing, we first need to get really good at recognizing predictable patterns and cycles, and marketing channels follow predictable cycles. Let me explain. So a channel gets good and useful for consumers. Think something like email or Google.
Then marketers like us get wind of the opportunity and we work to exploit it. Marketers ruin everything, right? So think spam and Google Ads. Channels work for a period of time before advertisers effectively outnumber consumers that we’re targeting. Consumers leave those channels because the experience starts to suffer and they move on to something else. Trees don’t grow to the sky, and channels don’t last forever. Channels get saturated. Now we’re seeing this play out right now with a relatively new platform known as Perplexity. Now, if you’re not familiar, Perplexity AI is an AI powered search engine that’s making a run at Google. It’s faster, it’s arguably better, and it’s free. And the best part is, right now, at least, there are no ads, though that may be changing. It’s a better user experience, and people are racing to the platform right now and they’re not looking back. So it’s only a matter of time before users switch their home screen from Google to Perplexity or its better known cousin, ChatGPT. Now, speaking of ChatGPT, ChatGPT does not have ads today, right? However, and by the way, Brian, can you see my screen still? You can write slide thumbs up. Yeah.
Brian Kurtz: 18:56
What can I help with?
Ryan Levesque: 18:57
Yes. Perfect. Speaking of ChatGPT. ChatGPT doesn’t have ads today, but if you think it won’t have an ad supported version at some point in the not too distant future, then you’re missing what’s likely to be a massive opportunity on the horizon. In fact, the interface is designed with space for future ad placements right there. Netflix started as a subscription before introducing an ad supported plan. Channels follow a predictable path. Now, these are not opportunities that we can take advantage of here today, but can help you understand why platforms like Facebook and Instagram are scrambling to keep their users on platform, and why they’re no longer yielding the way they once did. These platforms aren’t dead, they’re just crowded. They don’t have the same asymmetric supply demand imbalance that they had even just a few short years ago. So where is the opportunity here today? What is the least crowded channel available to us right now? Well, for this, we need to open our minds to a potential paradigm shift. We need to not only think outside the box, we need to think beyond the screen. After all, the most competitive piece of real estate that we are all competing for, all of us right now, right now for our consumer, is the 14in² that we can hold right here in our hand, the one that fits inside our pocket. Now, for me, the light bulb moment went off when I started having a conversation with my publisher last month about my next upcoming book. I’m working on my third book right now as we speak, and my publisher, Reed Tracy, is the CEO of Hay House books, which was acquired by Penguin Random House back in 2022. And in my conversation with Reed, which is the largest publishing company in the world, access to a tremendous amount of data. And in my conversation with Reid, he shared with me a piece of information that stood out to me. He said e-book sales for virtually all genres right now are down across the industry. However, at the same time, audiobook sales are way up. Now why is that? I thought it was one of these data points that just stuck with me. Something that I couldn’t quite shake but knew represented a clue that it had a conversation with a friend of mine, Kerry Green, a longtime customer with a thriving online community who’s been using small scale, in-person meetups to drive membership to our online community, then had a conversation with a mutual friend of Brian and mine, Will Hamilton, founder of Fuzzy Yellow Balls, a long time client in tennis education space who is crushing it right now, selling physical playbooks with QR codes that drive people to instructional videos on YouTube. Tennis players take with them on the court, and others are replicating this in markets like dog training and music instruction and more. And I had dozens of conversations like this. And what became blindingly obvious is that this post-pandemic return to work movement that we’ve been hearing so much about in the media has actually coincided with a much larger post-pandemic return to the physical world. See? Screen time may be something that we limit for ourselves and our kids, in which we know should come with a Surgeon General’s warning. But time in the physical world, that’s something that we all want more of right now. Less time in front of a screen, more time with our hands in the dirt. So it makes sense that audiobooks are on the rise right now, something we can listen to while we’re existing in the physical world, while we’re raking fall leaves in the garden, or shoveling snow outside while we’re baking biscuits in the kitchen or going on that hike. Audiobooks are a way for us to reach our audience outside of the screen time that big budget advertisers are ruthlessly fighting for, in which we desperately want to limit. And on top of that, audiobooks and audio more broadly is arguably the most intimate medium that we have available to reach our audience. Video is consumed in all different ways, in all sorts of different devices, for a few distracted minutes here and there. But when we consume audio and audiobooks specifically, if we’re not listening to it in our car, we’re most often listening to it with earbuds deeply embedded in our ears, often for hours at a time. It’s the closest we can get to putting our voice directly inside our prospect’s brain. Zig When They Zag.
Outro: 23:10
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.