What it takes to scale B2B to $100M+ — Andy Mewborn on positioning, content, and distribution

# Bridge the Gap Podcast - Andy Mebor Episode

Good morning, y'all. Thanks for checking out this episode of Bridge the Gap. This is one that I'm super excited about with someone that I've followed and admired for a long time: Andy Mebor, the CEO and founder of Distribute. Why is this so important? He was one of the number one first reps at Outreach. He's done it all. He's scaled zero to 100 plus and has built and sold quite a few companies since then. Listen to the very end to find his most crucial tip for how to stand out in today's crowded market when building top of funnel and navigating deals through your pipeline.

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast, powered by Revenue Reimagined. We have with us today Andy Mebor, who is the founder of Distribute, an all-in-one workspace for GTM playbooks, which we'll talk about. He founded and sold the small little company you might have heard of that I used called Tapo. He created Brand 30, which is a 4K strong LinkedIn group that has helped me, early days with my wife and some others actually, build and scale their LinkedIn presence. And he got his start in tech with this small little company—I like to call it a first 50 employee—called Outreach. Some of you might have heard of it. Andy, welcome to the show, man.

Thank you, man. Yeah, you made it sound so cool. Thank you. Right? That's the only reason Dale keeps me around is because I do a damn good—yeah, you do a damn good intro. I'm like, it's the radio in me.

Yeah, yeah. Those are all good. And yeah, I'm just like, damn, when I started all that stuff, people are like, "How do you start these things?" And I'm just like, dude, I just follow my curiosity and you put it out there, and then that's kind of it. I have no secrets on that stuff. And it's just like, even Outreach—I was like, funny story on that, which I'll tell you. People were like, "Oh, what made you join Outreach?" And honestly, I was in Chile before, and me and my buddy, we were doing the white... I'm assuming that's what I call Chile. Chile, yeah, Chile—whatever you want to call it. You pronounced it right; I pronounced it wrong. Who knows what the actual thing is. But we were in Chile doing solar. We were like in the white Combinator of Chile. So it's called Startup Chile, which is this program right after college. This was years ago, but I studied engineering, right? So we were doing solar stuff, and we had developed this solar technology. We were trying to sell it, and I was doing engineering and sales. I was like, "This process sucks. Like, you can automate this whole thing." And then we sold that company—not for crazy money or anything—but we sold it off, our contracts and all that fun stuff. And you know, we were 23 at the time, or 22, I think. And we were like, "All right, what do we do now?" And I was like, "Well, I need to build this thing that automates this whole sales email flow." And then when I got back to Seattle, which is actually where I went to college, my one buddy was like, "Dude, there's already these guys building that. You should just go join them." And I was like, "Oh, okay, cool, interesting." So I looked it up, and it turned out to be a great decision. So yeah, that was kind of the always experiencing the problem. I think it's a hack for building anything new. We can get more into that stuff, but I love the curiosity side of what you were saying. A lot of people do. It's almost born out of necessity as well. So like, you're in a place, and you're like, "Okay, there's a better way to do this thing." And like, how do I do it? And it may be just building a better widget as well. But it kind of feels like, as we go through this, when we're working with a lot of our clients, we talk about bridging this gap. And so it feels like the go-to-market gap is getting wider and wider. It's like, how do you do top of funnel? How do you get mid-funnel? What are your close ratios? Et cetera, et cetera. So as you were building, as you started moving out and building Distribute, like you're at what we're calling a stabilization phase. Like, you're trying to figure out the ICP, buying persona, value proposition—what's going to stick in the market? What's the differentiator? What are some of the big gaps that you're seeing in the first part of the funnel, and how are you guys looking to solve that at Distribute?

Man, I got a lot of gaps. I'll tell you, well, we can start with the first one. I got a list of gaps, but you know, that's how it goes with building something.

On Distribute, we're definitely taking the big platform play, right? So there's pros and cons to that. So just to give y'all context before I kind of get into the gap so you kind of can understand, right: the big gaps. If you think about a Distribute landscape, we're in a competitive space. As Adam and I were talking about before, we're also going for the platform play. So you could build a widget in today's world. You could also build niche. You can go narrow and niche and nail that market, or you can go horizontal. You can go narrow. I built Andy LinkedIn Tool dot com in a weekend. It's out now. It's my new LinkedIn tool, and you know, I found Tapo, blah, blah, blah. But I built it in a weekend. It's already making 10K a month, you know? And that's crazy, right? And I'm an engineer by trade. So I don't think everyone, you know, I move fast and I've been doing this for 10 years. You break stuff along the way, and then you just fix it. Yeah, I just put it out there and I do it. I'm like, "All right, we'll figure the things out later."

That's very interesting. I didn't know you were an engineer by trade because I know you're from a sales background initially, and you are outgoing and friendly and like arguably boisterous—like the sales guy, right?

Yeah, yeah, no, I get that all the time. Yeah, I'm a yapper, Adam. I'm a yapper. But you are anti-engineer. But now that explains why not only have you been able to like build the stuff from a "I'm going to build it and tinker it" perspective but also scale it because you have that personality and arguably have the sales chops as well.

Yeah, there's one of my favorite quotes. My mom had a version of this, so I'm going to throw it at you guys. You know, Naipal—like the tech philosopher guy—but he has this great quote which is like, "Learn to build, learn to sell. If you can do both, you'll be unstoppable." Right? And it's so true. My mom, you know, growing up, used to tell me a version of that. My mom's also an entrepreneur and all that, you know. So she would tell me, "Hey, you got to learn to build things, and you got to learn how when you build them, how to get people to buy them." You know, basically the same thing. And that's why I studied engineering in the first place, right? I'm like, "All right, I got to get good at building," and then Outreach and I kind of molded my whole life like that. Maybe because of my mom, or what, but you know, seeing my mom do this stuff, build, she built X-Ray Labs in California. So you know, she would do that, and then she'd have to go get orthodontists to refer her patients and blah, blah, blah, blah. So you know, and she did that coming from Mexico illegally back in the day, and me and her grew up in the projects of LA, you know, me with a single mom. So she started out from nothing, right. And you know, so when it comes to going from zero to one, like we've seen it. You know, I've seen the poorest of the poor, and then now I'm very fortunate to be in another circumstance. But going back to it, like I think that's the secret to, you know, education. We can get into this, but like when I look at my son, I have a two-and-a-half-year-old. I'm like, "All right, learn to build stuff, man." And once you start building, we're going to teach you how to get it out there and get people to want it, right? And so that's how I want my kids to be educated as well.

And you know, so yeah, we went on a tangent here, but just going back to your original question: what's the gap? Okay, so let's go into that. So now that I told you guys that, the gap here is it's really noisy in the go-to-market space right now. Everyone and their mama, you know, is out there trying to build a go-to-market SaaS tool. So you know, it's tough. And going back to what I was just saying, you can build a niche tool and you can have customers day one, or you can build a platform which fills many use cases, can't be copied over a weekend, and you know, it's a bigger play. You're trying to go enterprise and all that stuff. So definitely a difference in the types of things you build.

Right now, on the platform side, the gaps are that there's...

Multiple use cases, so what do you focus on, right? You've got to figure out what wedge is to get people in. For example, Gong when they came to market, what was their wedge? It was just a call recorder, right? Call recorder. Now it's every outreach. Outreach was the sequence, right? We can go Zoom Info was the data. Now they've got, you know, it goes on and on and on. So they do start niche. I would say, but when you have a deal room by default, you're already starting kind of with multiple use cases and you need to figure out kind of that wedge to get people in. So we're trying to figure that out, and I think all the deal rooms are trying to figure it out. So they're going to listen to this and be like, "All right, what's his answer?" But I haven't figured it out, guys. I'm watching you guys too. So we're trying to figure that out like what's the wedge that's going to get us more scalable growth? Right now because we're working our ass off for top of funnel. Like it's, you know, everyone, it's like number one problem we hear from founders and CEOs: back funnel. Yeah, back to the stabilization piece that we were talking about. Like you have this platform that you're trying to figure out how to get top of funnel. You understand conceptually your buying persona. You understand conceptually your ICP and you understand conceptually your value proposition. But your value proposition sounds like it goes a bit wide. So it's like, how do I take that one thing that I can wedge in there and then expand? Like, is it an expansion motion that you guys are looking at?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, land and expand is kind of definitely the deal, I think. For us it's a couple things. I think if we can get good reps in there that are tech-savvy initially, like this is the play, which I'm sure you guys know. When if we get one or two of those reps, we've had a few accounts and they scale to 60, 80, 100 reps naturally, like without even us having to touch it, because we know how to build product. We're nerds. You know, so we have a good product. Like that's it. It just comes down to that. We can get into that. But I think if you were to pick one thing to be good at, it's like have a freaking awesome product and then you can, and then a lot of the other stuff you don't have to be perfect at, right? So we're, you know, even though we have a great product, it's getting harder to actually do that because now you have to get discovered. But like I said, once we get discovered and reps in there, they go, "I can't live without this anymore," right?

Yeah, but there's so much noise out there. AI this, AI that, go to market this. I think every, like I said, everyone and their mom's trying to build for sales tech because you can show an ROI, and everyone is always going to buy that. Make the money, right? Or can you show ROI?

What's that? I see a lot of sales tech out there that's not showing any damn ROI. Claim ROI. Let's go, claim ROI. They're all trying to claim it, right? And that's actually a big topic, right?

Yeah. Is ROI and shifting pricing to ROI-based or usage-based, what are your thoughts on that? How do you feel about shifting pricing from per user, per seat, etc., etc.?

Yeah, I, so I don't think there's like a golden answer here, right? I think it, there's agents. So agents are definitely going to be per task. But guess what? Those agents are going to, you know, you can kind of gather what they're doing every day, how they're doing every day, and after they do their task it's like a checkbox, right? It's very simple. So that, for that, that's going to be usage-based. That totally makes sense. When you have more of a platform-type play, that's a lot harder because again, multiple use cases, right? So then as a CFO, and we had this problem at Outreach actually back in the day, which is like we gave people our dialer, right, which was usage-based. And then the dialer, every CFO, I swear to God, every CFO and every company we worked with was like, "Why is the bill this much at the end of the month?" And like the concept's cool, but the accountants actually hate this usage-based pricing from my experience, right? So like, so I think there's a there's what sounds great and then also like, personally as a, like I would rather pay a little more knowing what I'm going to pay at the end of the month than not know, because I just don't like that anxiety.

Yeah, so you know, if you've ever read Psychology of Money, that's also a great book. Highly recommend. And you know, it kind of goes into how people think about money, not just in their personal lives but business-wise. So for me personally, I don't like that. Going full circle back to the psychology of money here, I think there's always going to be people that don't like it, don't like it. So I don't think there's one best way. Is it a way to differentiate? Sure, right? Like if you know a competitor wants to differentiate in the go-to-market and do usage-based, great. I just think that's going to be tough because if you have multiple use cases, pricing that's going to be a nightmare. Coming up with one price is hard enough. Make it simple for people to buy. Like make, reduce the friction on the way. Because you're talking about psychology of money, which is very interesting, which I think is where AI agents and credits and all that kind of stuff, they, people don't know how much something costs. Okay, to write an email it costs this much per credit, but to build an account plan is this much. So that's a whole other topic.

Yeah, one other quick thing I was thinking about as you were talking: How fast do you believe a SaaS technology vendor needs to prove ROI?

Oh wow, that I mean it depends, right? That's an "it depends." My, he goes, "How fast do they need to prove ROI?" I will say I don't know if there's a golden answer there, but it's getting, it's becoming a world where that needs to be very quick, right? And again, it's definitely becoming a world where like, "Hey, there's so much software out there. Like how's this going to help us?" This is why AI has exploded by the way, because the ROI on like using an AI model to write you a cold email when it's 99% better than other emails, like the ROI is just so clear on a lot of this AI stuff. So that is also shifting the world and all the other products, right? To be like, "Hey, I'm used to being able to chat and have all the answers at my fingertips," right? So now buyers are kind of, I believe, shifting in that motion where "Hey, I need to know like I message you and I need to know like what's this making, like what's this producing, what's the output?" Right? Like and of course, like I wish it was that easy. But this whole chat, instant answer, and having the world's knowledge at your fingertips, people getting in that motion, they're definitely expecting ROI a lot faster, right? So yeah, I'm seeing like, I went from like, okay, six to eight months to like three months to like a month. I'm like, you know, like some of the stuff you can't even get people to use it enough from like an adoption perspective to drive the ROI fast enough. So yeah.

Yeah, it's but I, well, I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts. Like what do you think? That's a great question.

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Dale, Adam on usage-based pricing and ROI-based pricing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you think?

Yeah, so we get asked all the time in similar form but slightly different: "Okay, so we're going to contract with you guys. What type of ROI are we going to see, right? We're going to spend X amount of dollars per month. How quickly are we going to see new pipeline and how quickly are we going to see deals closed?" And my answer would be somewhat the same in our world versus your world in software. I can give you all the tools, all the systems, all the processes. I can tell you exactly what to do, how to do it, when to do it. If your team doesn't do it, I can't be responsible for that. So to your point, you could have the best tool in the world, your deal room could have a 97% conversion rate, but if 21 of my 25 reps say, "I'm just not going to follow the process," does that mean that you shouldn't get paid? No.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have an issue with it now where I do think it comes in and where you could drive behavior is: listen, our pricing is XYZ. We could certainly look at some type of incentives or rebates or whatever you want to call them based on ROI at the end of the year towards your renewal. That's a whole separate big calculation we'd have to do, but I'd be much more keen to do that versus, "Sure, we'll give you ROI-based pricing," and then your team doesn't use it. Not a fan.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's again, it's one of those "it depends," right? And luckily, I don't think everyone is expecting this usage-based pricing. If it's all like agent-type stuff where it's like, "Oh, yeah, we go and check your data to see if someone changed jobs and like something's simple," sure, that's usage-based, right? It's all computer-based. There's no people in the middle. Great. But yeah, I think just certain, if you've got users like humans in there actually using the technology in order to make it work, it's going to be very tough to do the usage-based model.

And if it did work and it was profitable, you'd see more companies like Salesforce and Outreach and all these Apollo. You'd see them doing it. Trust me, they're thinking about it, but if it was more profitable and would work, they would do it now.

Zapier—usage-based, right? Again, it's like an agent. "Hey, you send one thing or you get for everything you said." Exactly. "Oh, we sent this to a spreadsheet, there's a penny. Great." Right? That was the way I always thought LinkedIn should price data, right? Every time you ping the API, it's a penny or whatever. So both sides of it—everyone can get the information. LinkedIn just put the wall up. We won't go through that process.

But yeah, well, I'll tell you kind of like where I think the world's going too, to differentiate if we're talking pricing here, right? So if you go to like the Go-to-Market Elite Circle, which is Adam—what we rebranded from Brand30. I got to remember to redirect Brand30, by the way. I think it's broken. But here's my reminder.

So with that, what did we do? So when I build things, I'm like, "Well, what's the biggest pain in my ass, and how do I make this tool kind of self-serve, right?" Yeah. And I'm like, "I don't want to deal with churn. I don't want to think about churn. I'm fully focused on distribution." But this is a money maker of this tool over here, right? So I said, "All right, to prevent churn, what do we do? What do we offer?"

So we actually offered a community—the Go Brand30, Elite Mark, you know, Elite Circle is what we call it—along with the SaaS. So now when you're paying the $99 a month for my SaaS, guess what? You are also part of the community. So what does that do? People don't want to leave the community, even if they're not using the SaaS.

Yeah, right. And so we actually played into that. So that's kind of—a lot of people hit me up and they're like, "Oh, I see what you're doing here," and it's just a different way to do an offer, right? Right. And so that's kind of the way we're actually doing it now. This is a low-ticket item. This isn't a mid-like high-ticket. I'm still thinking about how we can make that better, but it doesn't matter. It's all about value to the price of whatever you're charging, right? So whether it's a low-ticket item or you're charging $50 a user per month or you're charging $220,000 for a year, whatever—it sounds like the question is: "What is the value they're pulling out of it?" Back to the "when do we get the ROI?" and the value component. The value question. The faster you can do it. And because we have things like Instagram and like all this other stuff that's like instant gratification, it's not even technology. It's like we have instant gratification all over the place. So people are like, "If I can't see value out of it when I log into it and start using it, like they just bounce."

And so I think that becomes a really tricky thing. My biggest thing with SaaS today is adoption and how do you get people into your technology sooner, right? So we started this competition on the Aura Ring. Like, we all have Aura Rings and we've been thinking about it. But when I think about the app, the ordering app, I go in every day to check how I'm doing. Somebody else goes to check sleep score. I check—so because I'm an engineer by trade, my focus goes right to: "How can I get this person in the app on at least a daily, if not like a weekly basis?" So there's like usability throughout that process.

Yeah. And the Oura Ring is a dumb app. Like, it's not like super—I mean, there's smart stuff in there, but it's not like you don't think, "When I wake up in the morning, I should check my Aura app." You should. I'm checking LinkedIn or I'm checking something else. Is Adam on it? Is Adam on the Oura right now?

All of our partners, you got—is that two Adamses or is one—wedding, one? One's wedding?

Oh, okay. I was like, okay, okay. Dude, so guys, I was gonna—my wife lost my Aura Ring and my wedding ring somehow. So literally, like, two weeks ago. So I'm trying to find it. So I was gonna say let's add you, but I just thought I gotta go actually freaking find my wedding ring and my Aura. But yeah, I would prioritize the wedding ring if I were you. Little bit of merit advice to someone who's on number two.

Oh, are you on number two as well?

Oh, shit. Okay. You know Adam Robinson? We were wake surfing last weekend, and my wife was like, "Oh, take your rings off." And I'm like, "Remember, I don't have my rings." And she's like, "Oh, shit, yeah." And he's like, "Oh, don't worry, dude. I've gone through like three of them." And I'm like, "Oh, shit, okay." So I'm not—so we were talking about wives and not rings, by the way. He was talking about wives, but in my drawer is a backup silicone wedding ring, and it looks the same as my black one, but like, I do have a second wedding ring.

Oh, nice. Smart, smart, okay, okay. Yeah, I've seen dudes wearing those. I need to—I just need to find my real one, and then we'll go from there, man.

But anyways, guys, so yeah, going back to what you were saying, Dale, you know, it kind of plays in. Yeah, the tech is great and people can reproduce that, but what you're getting into as well is like the community aspect of it, right? And I think as we have AI, you can build up fast. I mean, within a year, you're gonna be able to just talk to it and it'll rebuild anything you want, right? This is what's going to happen in a year. Absolutely.

Now, you still have to have some engine. And this is coming from someone who builds apps, right? And in a year it's going to be like you talk to it and it'll build you anything you want, right? And then it's going to come down to like style and design, like brand. And then it's going to come down to community, right? Like, what are the modes that are going to be left?

You know, you look at all these like D-to-C drink companies. All the ingredients are the same, same, right? Same exact ingredients in all these drinks, but people buy the other one over. Liquid Death is an amazing example. It's freaking water, dude. I get it unlimited from my sink for free, but I still pay the three bucks because I'm like, "Hell yeah, like it's cold and it looks cool," you know?

So I think a lot about this because my investors always say, like, "What's your mode?" And I'm just honest with them. I'm like, "Honestly, there is no modes left besides brand and community, like, right? And if someone tells you otherwise, they might be high."

There is going to be some technology, like, like, crazy high-tech battery technology or nuclear or something that takes millions of dollars to develop, sure. Sure. No one can do that over a weekend. So we're talking about SaaS here, though. Like, simple widget, simple tools, you know? Like you doc. You sign. Don't. And this is me, you know, like there was a kid online that rebuilt DocSense. I saw it, like, with three tools. He basically rebuilt a free version for himself of—exactly, exactly.

So it's like it's crazy, right? And that's where the world is going. And so there's a shift also happening from—and who knows what's going to happen because my predictions, you know, some aren't always the most accurate—but if you were to think like, "Where's the world going?" For me, if we're looking at software for something, I just go and build it. So we're moving to this world of personal software. I do believe that's where it's going: personalized, right?

So then you start to think, "Well, crap. Like, are people going to need to build these platforms anymore? Are they just going to build exactly—because the platforms—"

# Transcript

Are still one too many. You're trying to appease a few different ICPs, sure. You know, whatever, but still, if you have tens of thousands of users, you're constantly trying to make all those people happy. But if you had something just internal that you could spin up, built it for you. So what does that mean for the state of SaaS?

As a SaaS founder, ex—well, dude, I mean, again, I was with Adam. We talk about this every freaking time. We're like, "Dude, in three years we're out of a job." You know, make the money now. We're like, are we out of a job or no? I don't think entrepreneurs and founders like yourselves, like me, like we'll always figure something out. But if you have that mindset, in reality though, I think SaaS is not dead. It's going to take a long time for corporations to figure this out, but I think the golden era of building and becoming a unicorn, building a platform, is going to be tough. You're either going to build something and it's going to grow to 100 million in 20 months, like Cursor. I don't know if you saw that, but that's what I used to code, and you know, and yeah, you use it and the first time you use it you're like, "Holy shit, this is magic, right?" And you're like, "I would, you know, whatever." But then now I also use a different version of Cursor, Windsurf, and I pay them too. So I'm paying for two because I like a little bit, you know, I use one for one, one for another.

And so then you start to think about how this is going to work in the software and SaaS world. So yeah, there'll be consolidation for sure. It's just like GPT, just like ChatGPT and Anthropic. I mean, everyone's got their own little flavor of things, which may be interesting from a compatibility perspective at some point in this SaaS world. Like maybe we go back to like pure PaaS play instead of like the SaaS play, where you're taking these individual personalized applications that can connect together at some level to provide some data at the bottom of it.

Yeah, and it's going to be almost like, what are you paying for? You know, when you go to the store and you buy water, what are you really paying for? You're paying for convenience. 100%. So what I think is SaaS will never die, let's say, because a lot of people they're not going to want to maintain and build and maintain. Most people think, "Build, oh yeah, you build it and you're good." Maintaining it is always the hard part, right? So it's a convenience factor at that point. So you're going to have to be selling. It's the same thing as go-to-market. Like this whole thing with go-to-market, let me ask you, let me ask you a question. How often should you change your go-to-market strategy? Like your ICP, buying persona, value proposition? Like what's your philosophy in changing it?

Or at least, let me change the question a little bit. Pressure testing it. So maybe not changing it, but how often would you pressure test these things?

So for me, we do it like doing LinkedIn content. Once you figure out one thing you double down on it and keep doubling down on what works. But we're always also experimenting. So you know, we're always pressure testing, essentially, right? So like, it's almost always, it's almost always, yeah, you're always trying to find the edge, right?

What do you like? 98% of the people are running playbooks and ICPs from like three years ago, and it's like, "Yeah, why am I not getting top of funnel?" It's like, "Well, you're probably actually talking to the wrong people, by the way, and your competitors moved through and your value proposition is way old."

Yeah, but standing out now again, like, is harder than ever. Like, we started this conversation, Andy, with you talking about how you want more top of funnel. You and everyone else. And I mean no disrespect by that. We want more top of funnel. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's the game. Yeah.

Standing out because of AI, because of things like Outreach and SalesLoft and SmartLead and Instantly and all the other stuff out there, I literally, if I were to look at my phone right now, I probably have 30 missed calls today and probably 50 missed cold emails.

How do you stand out other than go-to-network?

Yeah, and people ask me, they're like, "You have a great LinkedIn. Like, you can do it." And I'm like, "Dude, it's yes, it works, but it's not the silver bullet, right? Don't get me wrong, it's a freaking hack for sure, right? But and it helps. But yeah, just because you have a good LinkedIn following, good content doesn't mean you're going to blow up your product, right?"

So you know, and maybe that's a positioning thing, maybe that's an offer thing, maybe that's a lot of competitors in the market thing, you know? There's a lot of factors. But the one thing I will say is the people that are going to win—I have this saying that the people that experiment the most are going to win the most.

100%. That's it. It's just who can have systems to constantly, as Dale says, pressure test or experiment. And it's just like I kind of go back to like media buyers. This is a good analogy because it's very similar to go-to-market. Where if you look at their process, because I went through it because I was starting to run ads and do all this stuff, and like Facebook now does all the targeting and all the hard parts for you. All you got to focus on is good creatives.

So what are they doing now? They're constantly testing creatives to see which one makes money. And then once they find one that makes money, they put more spin towards it. Guess what? Back to basics, right?

Yeah, you don't need to know all the crazy targeting and all that. Facebook and their AI does it for you. And so what are they now doing? They're experimenting with all the creative. And the people that are actually doing the best with paid ad campaigns right now—all I know, my wife runs sales at Attentive, which is an ecommerce company. So we talk a lot of ecommerce. And I hear a lot of ecommerce people who run ads, and you know, all that stuff. And the people who win are just the ones that are constantly trying to figure out what the right creative is and experimenting.

So if they're doing 10x more creative tests, they're learning 10 times faster, even more, right?

Yeah, that's just like Gary Vaynerchuk, right? He built a whole media platform just to do creative on it, right?

Yeah, and yeah, and so you just got to test. Like, so for us, we have this, you know, we have this, if you want to call it a cultural checkbox for the company or whatever, but it's like always be experimenting. Always be like, and no one has the right answer until we figure out an experiment and prove that that is the right answer, right? Or that is what works.

Yeah, so build stuff, sell stuff, and experiment like hell.

Yeah, and experiment, repeat. Literally, that's it. Like, so for us, every time I post a LinkedIn post, we have a spreadsheet of like, okay, what did this do? What did this work? And boom. And then after—wouldn't it be amazing if LinkedIn let you export that? I'm just saying, dude, don't get me started. But yes, exactly. And we test that. And then guess what? Then we just make more content based on the stuff that works. We know works, right?

And like a lot of it is just recycled stuff of what we know already works. Like, it's not we're not creating things from scratch every time. That would be a waste. That'd be like, you'd be—that'd be, I mean, that goes for anyone though. Like, if you're not going back through, whether you're using a tool or whether you're doing it by yourself, and looking at, "Hey, this type of post, video, whatever, did the best," and "This topic did the best," and like tweaking your content to that, you're in this rat race and this cycle, and all you're going to do is keep posting stuff. And you might get the occasional one-off.

And listen, not every post is going to go viral. But I promise you, if I look at my posts, whether it's about leadership or founder life or sales or my kid or health or whatever, I guarantee you there's one that if I post about, I'm going to get better results than the other. Like, it's just a fact.

I love that you're tracking that. Track everything, iterate on everything. Experimentation often. Perfection is the enemy of progress. And just build stuff and ship it, man.

Yeah, yeah, it's all about the experimentation, man. Like, most people, they, a lot of people talk about systems, right? And systems. But they talk about systems for things that work, right? And they're like, "Oh, well, do we know this works? Let's put a system." But no one has a system to keep experimenting. That's actually where all the learning comes in, right?

And so like for cold email, right? We actually run our cold email just like ad campaigns, believe it or not. So they're direct response. So we're constantly, we're literally doing the same thing. I have a campaign that I know that works, right? And then I have another two other campaigns always running that—

Are testing you language and then we're comparing those two against the one that we know worked. And guess what? If C is beating out A that I've had running for six months, then we're gonna change it, right?

What tool do you use for cold email?

Instantly. I use Instantly. Yes, so we have a bunch of different ones. Yeah, we do all the hacky, you know, crazy stuff. But I'm always curious who. Like, Instantly versus SmartLead. They're the two big ones.

Yeah, SmartLead's great too.

Both. Yeah, we use SmartLead. We just started with Instantly. But SmartLead's great.

So yeah, they're both awesome. Whatever one you use, again, it doesn't matter. It's like the question people ask: should I use Photoshop or Figma? Whichever one you like better and whichever you're comfortable with. It ain't the tool, man. It's you and how you use it, right? They all pretty much do the same thing.

So yeah, you know, I think when you think about it, it's this experimentation mindset that I think a lot of people aren't used to. Fast experimentation. Just because of how fast the world works. That's what people are discovering. That's really the big change that's happening to companies. We need to figure out, well, how do we get more top-of-funnel pipeline? Most of the time, it's not just the checkbox. What do you gotta do? You gotta try a bunch of things. And the faster you try new things, the faster you learn. So it goes back to that old startup mantra: build fast or whatever, break stuff, you know. But it's actually becoming more real than ever, I think, in today's age.

100%. We could go on and on and on. God knows we could go on and on and on, dude. I have it. If we look at the word count on this episode, you win for sure.

I win. I win everything. I mean, let's check our fitness trackers. Pull up your Oura Ring thing, dude. Let's see, man.

I shared my sleep score today on LinkedIn. I'm not ready to share my fitness score at the moment.

Hey, hey, did you beat Brian Johnson though on your sleep score?

I have no idea what you're talking about.

You don't know who Brian? The guy who wants to—the don't die guy. Have you guys heard of him?

No, more. He like has every, like, oh my gosh, oxygen, blah blah. He's a big tech guy. Or he was a tech guy. Sold he sold a company. PayPal? Or, you know, Braintree? Or, wait, he started Braintree, I think. And the payments company. And now he's on this kick. He has a Netflix documentary called Don't Die. Yeah. And what he's trying to do, Adam, is not actually not die. He knows he's gonna die at some point. But prolong the hell out of his life. So he takes like over 100 vitamins a day. He like measures his nighttime erections like as a measurement of like healthiness. You know, like he does all this crazy stuff to like stay alive.

Like, I just added it to my list. Add it to, if you're on Twitter, follow him on Twitter. Like, I can't do Twitter. That's a whole separate conversation.

But I did add it to my Netflix list.

Okay. All right, let's do some rapid fire before we wrap up.

All right. So you're not allowed to be in tech. You're not allowed to be in engineering. What profession are you gonna be in?

Oh, dude. Honestly, guitar playing. Yeah, you were late, so you missed that whole conversation, my friend.

Yeah, honestly. What would I be? Well, I always told my grandma growing up I was gonna be a Mexican telenovela TV star.

So yeah. Nice. TV star. I like it. Let's keep it going.

Yeah, what's more difficult? Starting up Distribute and getting from zero to one, or zero to five? Or when you're at Outreach, getting into the repeatability stage, getting true repeatability in your process and sales?

Oh, man. Different times. So yeah. That's what I mean. That's like it's kind of hard to do it like apples to apples comparison. But starting anything from zero is just way harder, right? It's just way harder. You got a lot of variables. In the Outreach side, you gotta like hire people. You got, you know, broken product pieces. Like, well, then you go back to that product market fit, and that kind of solves a lot. Like I said, good product market fit solves 99% of your problems.

Yeah. But also product market fit, right? Like, if you're the top product in that product market fit thing. But you've seen some of these companies. Like, they're just like, it's not like they have a magic secret, you know? Like, I talked to someone who worked with Dealflow, right? And of course, Dealflow is huge. And he was helping them with marketing early on. And I go, dude, like, what did you do to help them blow up, right? Because that's like the question, right? Like, what? And he goes, honestly, dude, I'm not gonna lie to you. It was just right time, right place. It was a lot of luck. Like, it was a lot of luck. And if you ask the founder, he'll tell you the same exact thing.

So right time, right place, right idea, right? And so, you know, that's why I think a lot of that other stuff you can solve. And sometimes it's a pain in the ass with hiring and firing and doing all that. But like, it's just part of the process. But like, getting to a point where you can actually have the ability to hire is awesome, right? So yeah, I think zero to one is hard. But like, maniacs like me love it. Like, sure. Once Distribute gets flying, like, it will. I'd stay running Distribute. I don't know, because I love the zero to one phase.

You'll go build something else.

Yeah. What's your favorite guilty pleasure snack?

Oh, dude, I love ice cream. I love ice cream, dude.

Flavor?

Oh my God. You only have one flavor for the rest of your life.

Cookies and cream.

Yeah. Love it.

Early bird or night owl?

Oh, early bird, dude. Yeah, I'm in bed by 9:00 p.m.

Yeah, Brad Johnson, exactly. I know. Before him, I think it was Wim Hof. But yeah, I'm an early bird, man. I love it.

What's the first app you check when you wake up in the morning?

Probably Slack. Some of my teams are in Europe, so they're ahead. And sure, I'm just like, oh, is everything okay?

Last one. Last one as we wrap up. Dream vacation destination.

Oh, man. Dream vacation destination. The only continent I haven't been to is Antarctica. So I want to do Antarctica. And like, you know, what am I gonna see? Penguins and ice. But like, I just want to step foot on there. And that's my dream vacation for now. So yeah, just to hit every continent.

Awesome. Yeah, Andy, thank you so much for joining, for spending some time with us, for hanging out. Where can people check out Distribute?

Distribute.so. Distribute.so. That's it. And then LinkedIn. That's it, guys. My LinkedIn and Distribute.so. Boom. That's it.

Awesome. So Distribute.so, LinkedIn. Go check out Distribute. Andy, thanks for joining the show, man.

Guys, thank you.

Thank you, Adam. Appreciate it.

Guys, thank you.