Steve sits down with Matthew Hunt, Founder of Automation Wolf, a communications and demand generation company which helps busy B2B founders/CEOs create all their LinkedIn content in one hour each month.
Matthew has built three B2B profitable companies in the last 13 years and has been hired by hundreds of businesses to help them implement his marketing and sales strategies. Some of these companies include RE/MAX, Valvoline, FedEx, Chef's Plate, League, and TouchBistro.
Listen in as Matthew breaks down his ultimate B2B demand generation system, which he calls the “three-pillar system”. This involves creating short-form, long-form, and controlled-form content to develop the know, like, and trust factor among those who come across your brand.
Matthew also discusses “content networking”: creating content through interviews, summits, and other avenues that allow you to promote other thought leaders and industry experts while bolstering your own credibility as a brand.
Key Takeaways:
Connect with Matthew Hunt on LinkedIn.
With 25+ years of marketing experience, Steve Goldhaber is a former head of global digital marketing for two Fortune 500 companies and the current CEO of 26 Characters, a content marketing agency in Chicago.
Connect with Steve on LinkedIn.
Steve Goldhaber: Okay. Welcome back to the show, everyone! I am here today with Matthew Hunt. He's the founder of Automation Wolf. Matthew, welcome to the show.
Matthew Hunt: Thanks, man. Thanks for having me, Steve.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. So, as everyone knows, we always start off with some marketing stories, Matthew's got a couple to share with us today. First, we're gonna go over something that Matthew calls the three-pillar system. So tell us what it is, and how does it connect to the content?
Matthew Hunt: Yeah, sure. So I call this actually the ultimate B2B demand generation system. It's mostly for B2B businesses and it's about building demand, very like the top of the funnel and some things that people need to understand at the end of the day is, “why focus on demand?” The reason why we wanna focus on building demand is that it builds trust. At the end of the day, we all know that people only buy from you if they know you, like you, and trust you. Well, they can't trust you if they don't like you, they can't like you if they don't know you, and so knowing you are top of mind. So what we find in general, a great way of staying top of mind: creating something called short-form content. This is where you can add value to people on a regular basis and it can be done in lots of different places today. Generally speaking, it’s done in social media, and if you're in B2B, your probably number one social media channel should be like LinkedIn. Now, for people to really trust you, you need some sort of long-form content. So that's like pillar number two, this is something that's like a podcast, or it could be a webinar or a workshop, something where they spend an hour or longer with you. Then the last pillar is controlled form, this is where you can stay top of mind without feeling like you're actually marketing the people because nobody likes marketers and salespeople, nobody wants to be marketed to or sold to–
Steve Goldhaber: We're all evil people. Yeah.
Matthew Hunt: They were all evil people and we need a way to be invisible with that. So there are ways of doing that today, online in social media, you can do it with pixels and watch time and really interesting ways like that. You can also do it through things like community or doing other things like a channel partner program. There are all kinds of ways of going about doing that. But the point is that you're putting people into a system where it doesn't feel like marketing is sales, but again, you continue to stay on top of the line. Because the reality is that 97% of people are not ready to buy from you right now, but they can buy from you at some point. Now, if you own the relationship in advance where they know and trust you when they are ready to buy and they're ready to address the marketplace, you are more likely to be their number one choice to go to, you also can suck at sales and close more sales when you have this demand and this trust in place. So I like to tell a little story around this, so the way I always look at it is this, let's say you were a web design agency that sells web design and landing pages, designs, or funnels to coaches and consultants. Well, if you took a thousand coaches and consultants and you put 'em in a room and you said, “Hey, who here in the next 90 days is looking to get a new website designed or redesigned or some sort of funnel or lending page done?” Well, 1 to 3% of the people are gonna raise their hand. But if you change the question to who in this room between now and the end of their career is going to need web design surfaces. Well, the whole room raises their hands. So the reality is they can all buy from you. you just don't know when. So, your job is to create some sort of controlled-form environment where you can put them into it, where you can continue to keep depositing goodwill, add value where you can build demand in advance, so that before they start searching for competitors, they're gonna go to you first because they know, like, and trust you. The way you do that is with content, and the way you do that is with the three pillars, short-form content, long-form content, and controlled-form content.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So tell me, how did you get to this system? Did you start with one component, and then you realized it was missing? So maybe tell us about that journey of how you got to like, “No, this is the right balance.”
Matthew Hunt: Yeah. It's called, 15 years of doing it all wrong. Not only working for three different businesses that I've run and own. So, I sold two, I sold one in 2014, one in (20) 18, and this is the third one, they're all agencies. Then on top of that, because of their agencies, people are kind enough to trust me, to test this stuff out with their businesses. I've been able to like test it with many other businesses, and throughout this point, as well as to this system, now we've taken 60 other businesses through this process and it's repeatable. No matter what the B2B business is, right? It's almost as high ticket enough. And not just like a few bucks, a $50 SAS product, or something. But if you sell something substantial that thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars, or some of these clients have millions of dollars. This is a really, really important process, and it works really well. So that's how I discovered it, it’s just from doing it wrong. But the way I structured it, initially this wasn't actually structured this way. It was all over the place like, we would do digital ads and then we'd do speaking on podcasts, or we would be doing the virtual summit circuit where we had like a YouTube channel and then, you know, we'd have a sales team, but it was out of order. So the way I put it in the right order was based on your time because that's usually people's biggest obstacle to get over. “Do we need to add people and manage people?” Because nobody needs more people to manage, more people equals more problems and is equal to more processes. It's it takes a long time, as well as like budget, then we cross-reference that to impact. So what we're looking for, “What is the lowest amount of effort that we can put in with the highest amount of impact?” is usually where we start. So what I've learned is there are sort of three to four stages to this. So I usually call this, “Hey, you need the first develop your one-to-many selling systems.” This is where you start to show up for the first time. Generally speaking for most B2B businesses, that's gonna be on LinkedIn. So you need to get your personal brand, a LinkedIn organic game down. You need to create a LinkedIn conversion event and you need to get your LinkedIn ads down, that would be your show-up stage in your one, many selling, because you don't need other people to do it. A busy CEO or founder can easily do this. So when they work with us, I only need them for an hour and a half each month to be able to do this system. They don't have time to do that. They don't have to hire more people or management people. Once you get through that stage, you're gonna move into what we call sort of this share-up stage, which is where you're gonna start doing content networking. This is where you're gonna do interviews, Expert’s ask-me-anything, you're gonna start building in your own community and do a micro course. It requires a little bit more energy, right? Of course. It's gonna give you bigger benefits. It's not just based on you anymore, but then, the reality is now it's taking more of your time and budget to do those things. The impact is higher, but you don't wanna skip the first steps because I found that if you skip the first steps of doing the basics, the simple things, you're not gonna be able to do the complicated things, right? At the end of the day, I think there's a saying that says, you know, simple scales, fancy fails. We always gotta get back to the basics. The foundations first.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. You know I wanna talk about LinkedIn. I've been on LinkedIn for a long time.
Matthew Hunt: Sure.
Steve Goldhaber: –And I've worked with them when I was one of their clients. I'm a LinkedIn advisor now for the last couple of years. My challenge on LinkedIn is always, they're trying to evolve their “what's a post?”, “what's a long-form article?” And what's really challenging is every six months to a year they'll change. They'll tweak the algorithm to their advantage. If they want to launch documents, now they're gonna like put all the views on documents. Years ago, when they launched the blogging platform, they threw that there. The challenge for me as a marketer is always, there are things that I wanna do that are the right things for like what the user is, but LinkedIn will just not give you as many views. So you're kind of caught in this trap of like, “Oh, I'd really love to do it, but it's not as good from an exposure standpoint.” So I'd love to get your thoughts on, how you balance the “We're doing the right thing with LinkedIn, we're gonna decide not to share this type of content with more people.”
Matthew Hunt: Yeah, sure. Well, all social media platforms change or they change the way content or the formats that consume. Their agenda is to keep users on LinkedIn. Period. For longer. The longer they stay on it, the more they consume it, and the more abilities they have to make from advertising. Those are their core metrics. So you have to understand that you want to do that. So it doesn't matter what the format changes to, you just adjust to it. The point is, if you're in a social media news feed, like most social media networks, just remember whatever content you put there, needs to be snackable. We're there to either procrastinate or to be in discovery mode. So you must deliver it in the way that people want it. You also don't wanna send people off of LinkedIn. LinkedIn doesn't want that, users don't want that, and you're creating additional friction you don't need to. So, one is getting your organic stack of content down, but if you're not connected to the right people with your message, then the organic content's not gonna do great. So you also need to be connecting with the right people. You need to build the right network digitally, right? And even if you don't, there's a way of fast-tracking it. So a lot of times sometimes we'll have clients who start doing content and it's like, “Ah, it's just doing okay.” Well, they're not connected to the right people. But then if I take that content and I run ads against it, to the exact right people, because what's the great thing about LinkedIn and ads is that you can give me your dream 1000 list of companies you wanna work with, I can take the company name, upload it, get a matched audience, cross reference it with the titles or the senior leadership that you care to speak to and guarantee that your content to be seen. I say, “content”, not ads. The mistake people make with this is they run direct response ads. It doesn't work. They don't know you. You're a stranger. Of course, they're not clicking on it. Of course, there's banner blindness. But when you create it where it looks like content and feels like content and adds actual, real value, it works, because I can get a matched audience. Then from that matched audience, let's say I run a video that's one minute long that has dog whistle copy in it, so let's say I targeted COOs and I ran like a CEO Alliance and I said, “Three things CEOs wish they could tell their CEOs.” while that dog whistle copy is gonna stand out. It's a one-minute video that adds some value to that relationship on how CEOs and CEOs integrate and work together while it's gonna get their attention. It works really, really well. Then what I can see is if they watch 25% or more of that video, I can create another audience, and then I can do a waterfall effect, cuz then I can create a video that's two minutes, and then I can create a video that's five minutes, and I can actually do a paid ad video up to 30 minutes in the newsfeed, not that you should, but the point is you can without them even realizing it. I'm taking them through what's called an invisible marketing funnel based on their behavior, regardless of whether they actually liked it or commented on it because I can tell based on watch time, that's very, very powerful. Then they can get to know, like, and trust you. If you do it well, a small audience, what ends up happening is you look like the big fish in a small pond. They don't know that they think you look like Coca-Cola by the end of it. Now, when you serve up your direct response ads, or then when you do your cold email or when you do other marketing activities, it's much better received at the end of the day. Of course, those micro little pieces of content, you need to ladder it up to something else this long-form. Where someone is committing their time to consume you in long-form content because that's where you bridge the gap between necessarily being liked to trust. So know the frequency of showing up, the long-form will get you to the trust factor at the end of the day, until someone spends an hour with you, it's just not gonna happen, right? So you want to get them there where they've reserved their time and decide to show up to do that, or at least watch the replay or something else later on that will do that where they go, “Okay. This person has some really interesting things to say. I think I want to explore this a little more deeply with them later on.” And so you have to have all parts for it to work. You can't just do one, but it's not gonna be as effective obviously. You got to get started somewhere, but it would be just understanding what LinkedIn wants first. What is their agenda? As well as what is the agenda of your ideal clients or customers and serve that at the end of the day. Don't worry about algorithm changes or this or that changes. It's always gonna change.
Steve Goldhaber: I love the email match strategy. I've done that for myself when I'm working with the client. I feel like that is so underutilized because a lot of the folks who are using LinkedIn more on the ad side, they've fallen in love with the ad metrics. They're trying to feed impressions and engagement, but I love the idea of just taking a list and then chiseling it down. Then, ultimately what I called the, “warm the door approach” so that if you wanna engage your sales team, now you've got a list to say, “Hey, for the last two months, we've been running these programs. So when you do your outreach, whether that's a phone or email, you should get that, ‘Oh yeah, I know who you guys are.’
Matthew Hunt: Yeah. Right.
Steve Goldhaber: That's a big moment. Once you can cross that “Oh, I know who you guys are.” You've at least got another 5 to 10 minutes on the phone or whatever to secure it. So, some people aren't big fans of email matching. I love it. I totally recommend email matching.
Matthew Hunt: Yeah. It works very, very well.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. So let's jump into another story that we're gonna focus on here. And this has to do with content and using it to network. We've talked a little bit about that, but tell us your thoughts on how those two can live together.
Matthew Hunt: Yeah. So content networking is a great way to open doors. Anytime you ask to interview someone, it's kind of ego bay, but it works every single time. You can do this through like micro interviews. You can do it through podcasting. You could do it through a virtual summit. You could do it as just as an ask me anything. You can invite them into your community. It's an evergreen strategy. It's never gonna go away. The concept is that it actually works a lot better to create leverage for you because it moves you from no longer being the talent, the expert, to be the talent scout. And what ends up happening is it works really well. This is not a new strategy, Oprah did this, Tim Ferris has done this, Joe Rogan has done– what are they? Experts of absolutely nothing. But what are they really good at doing curating really smart people to come in and ask them questions to teach their community what to look for and look out for. But what ends up happening is this, you end up having you as the host, or your brand as the host, and you have really smart guests. Well, then that guest goes away, another smart guest comes, another smart guest comes in, and another smart guest comes in, and you are the fixture that's there. What ends up happening is you have the log transfer taking place. So all their expertise gets transferred to you. So if you take an example of someone like Tim Ferris, except for his very first book, I believe, don't quote me on this, all the rest is curated information from his guests. He didn't even create the information in the book. He literally just crowdsourced really smart stuff with actually the same question most of the time, he literally asks the same three, or four questions every single time, like 50 different people, and becomes a New York best seller. He's the one that everybody remembers at the end of the day. So the mistake people make all the time is, they are too busy trying to be the expert or be the talent when really they should think about being the talent scout. There are two different types of people you wanna interview. So there's one that has a bigger brand than you. So you can up your brand by interviewing them because they already have more audience. So you can tap into their authority plus their audience, it’s called OPA. Most people know what OPM is, other people's money, but in today's marketplace 2022, we're speaking of an I imagine for the future going forward, what's more important is building an audience in authority, because if you own that, then you're a media company, that's where the money is made today. Because if you have trust with a group of people, you literally have a license to print money. So that's one way of fast-tracking your results to get no one, right? To have higher status without actually having to be the expert. The second part of interviewing is a lot of times you don't have to do it on a grand scale. You don't need to be Tim Ferris. You don't need to be Gary Vee. You do not need to be some of these big brands, you can have a very small micro niche and you can just interview your ideal clients. A lot of times they will come in and interviewing them is really just a fancy discovery call without the sales pressure, because your first call should be like that. You're asking about their business, about them, making them feel great, learning about what's important to them and them getting to share how smart they are with what they've done so far is, is a great first call. The only difference is you not only get the fast-track, the relationship, and fast-track trust by doing it, the best part is you get your content made for you.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, no, it's a good strategy. I used this maybe unintentionally, I wrote a book a couple of years back. I had a list of maybe a hundred people that I wanted to interview and I probably got maybe 40 or 50 of them to engage. You're totally right. What you're able to do in a 30-minute or a 60-minute conversation with someone as long as it's legit and genuine. I think there are some people who are manipulating this technique, but if you approach that first engagement genuinely, you will start to build a relationship. So for me, it was great that you just gathering content and insights. You're like, “Oh, that's a great quote. I'm gonna throw it in the book.” Then what's also nice is once– in this case –the book idea, you're launching the book, you already have a little army of people who are like, “Oh yeah, that was cool. He quoted me in the book. Sure. I'll give him a shout-out when he does his launch.” So I think what you're saying is really good as it relates to anything, whether it's a podcast or book.
Matthew Hunt: Yeah, well, this is coming back to ethics, right? You never bait and switch things like the agenda is to create content and promote others. You don't see Oprah trying to promote herself, she's promoting others. She's even created other brands out of it. If they're really smart the goal is always other people. It's always your audience. It's always your customer's agenda. It's always their agenda. The byproduct is that if you do that and you have the right intention, always seems to just come back in spades to you that it works really, really well. But you're right, there are some people who lead into it as like a sales thing and they have no intention of doing anything else. That's a really bad intention. So the goal should be to create content and promote others. The byproduct is you fast-track the relationship and builds trust, you end up getting more sales, and referrals at the end of the day. This works in an offline environment too. Like one of the core strategies I used at my second agency was to move into Fortune 500 companies because they didn't know me. I ran a mastermind CMO dinner and there was no agenda. So the only agenda was that they could be around each other because I knew that birds of a feather flock together and I knew they felt alone in the role. So I would call the email them and say, “Hey, I hold it once a month. CMO dinner. Dinners on me, come on out.” I would host it and get them talking zero pitches of my services. I got to learn a lot about them. At the end of the dinner, they're always like, “Hey Matt, you're a cool dude. Yeah. What do you do?” I have a good answer and it would lead to referrals or at least they pay attention to my content and sometimes it led to deals. So it was a great door opener. So it's like anything there are people who are really good at networking. The ones who are really good at networking, understand how to build a real true relationship. They actually genuinely care about people and they have some ethics to them, right? But of course, there are people who go to networking events and they just do their “kiss-baby-shake-hands” and try to close deals. Well, usually it doesn't work out very well for them or their reputation gets ruined at the end of the day. When they leave the room, no nice things are said about them, which is not great because you've only been given one name. You want to use it wisely when you're out in the world. So, no bait and switch obviously lead to the right intentions.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Cool. Thanks for sharing that with us. We're gonna jump now into the interview side of the kind of who you are, what your background is. I know that you've started out, there are so many marketers I've interviewed for this podcast that are not marketers, right? Yes, I got a degree in communications. I knew that I wanted to do that, started in theater, right? So tell us your path of where you started and when you hit that moment of like “No, marketing, working at agencies, that's what gets me going.”
Matthew Hunt: Yeah. I think I was always an entrepreneur, but just didn't really know it, because I wasn't raised around any other entrepreneurs, but I was always solving problems throughout my life. So even though I was in theater, I was even a lot of times, not only just performing around the world and doing different things, I often ended up being the producer and the director. Raising the money for it, getting the funds for it, selling tickets, and doing everything. I just sort of did things. Even as I had jobs through that decade in between theater gigs, the same thing, I would always end up going to like management or solving problems or bunting heads with the owner going, “Why are we doing this the silly way? Why wouldn't we do it better?” I could just find ways to optimize it, and make it more efficient. I even do it at home. Even my poor wife, I'll bicker with her and say, “You gotta load the dishwasher the right way because I unload it the next day and if it's not loaded the right way, then I have to dry certain dishes, right?” That's how weird I am about these things. I just solve problems and make things more efficient. But what ended up happening was I was in theater and I got tired of doing some of the other gigs and I discovered a commission-based sale selling ATM machines and POS machines. I was like, “Oh, I could just make my own hours go out and knock on doors, close sales, and it was like a good commission plus I had a residual income.” Which I'd never really heard about before, except for my acting stuff where I get like paid commissions for doing a commercial or doing a movie, which was awesome. I still actually get commissions today from movies I've done.
Steve Goldhaber: Nice.
Matthew Hunt: That's kind of cool.
Steve Goldhaber: Nice.
Matthew Hunt: It's been 20 years later. Not a lot, but it really proves the point about residual income, right? So my eyes started opening to that idea and the challenge was, even though I was good at sales and learned everything about sales, I still knew it was not the most efficient use of my time. So I started optimizing things. So instead of going door to door, I started doing cold calling from my house and setting up all my appointments in one day to smack 'em up and close 'em. Then eventually I tried different things and eventually I read a book called, “Perry Marshall's Definitive Guide to Google AdWords” in 2007. I was like, people are online, I got a friend who knew how to build a website, that was the landing page, I learned how to do ads, and then I started becoming an order taker. Once I kind of learned how to do that, I became the number one salesperson in that organization, without anybody knowing how I was doing as a straight commissions person. I hired a friend to actually take the orders for me and I consumed everything I could about marketing, every single thing for three years, and eventually started my first agency in 2010. It started with small businesses. I got the practice with small businesses, growing them for four or five years, and then exiting that business. Then I moved into another agency because I realized, “Oh man, you can get paid $50,000 a month or you can get paid five grand a month for the same work.” In fact, working with Fortune 500 companies, the impact is bigger, it's easier and slower to do than it is working with the local lawyer or the local plumber. So I was like, that's a better business at the end of the day. Then I exited that one in (20)18 and then here I am, I got bored as an entrepreneur. I couldn't wait to get back at it and I work mostly with my peers. So people who build those types of businesses, most agencies, now, I coach them and help them through that and help them with their marketing. Because most marketing agencies actually do not know how to market their own business or they suffer what's called the, “coupler's kids go with no shoe syndrome”, which means they're so busy taking care of their team, their clients, and they don't have time to do their own marketing. Even though they're a marketing agency, to make it accountable and get it done, they need to outsource some pieces of it to other people.
Steve Goldhaber: Well, I'll ask you a question. So, when looking at your path of calling them like, ‘sprints’, for lack of a better word, when you do these things every three to four years, I see a lot of entrepreneurs in that zone of them going all in for three years, they take it as far as they can take it, and then they're kind of just, “All right, I'm tapping out.” Right? Just because I've pushed the limits as far as I think I can and now I'm on for the next challenge. Do you find that it–
Matthew Hunt: I think everybody has different seasons, different timing for me, every story's a bit unique on how it came about, but I do believe that it probably takes at least four or five years to build something great. So I think when it comes to building a business, there are probably four or five stages to every business, and it takes about one year to do each stage if you know what you're doing. So the first year is usually going to market like you find something that people want and is easy to sell. The second year is the startup stage. Now, you start to get a few more clients than just a few or a dozen who validated that this is a good product or service. Now you need to work on delivery, to do that. So then out of that first-year startups, you gotta get yourself added delivery. So then you're only focusing on marketing, sales, and talent acquisition. So now you're at the stay-up stage. Then you gotta work yourself out of marketing, sales, and talent acquisition that gets you at this scale-up stage. Then once you start scaling for a little while, which means that you can prove that you are no longer needed in the business, that means you start moving into real big business problems. You would obviously need to be profitable at the same time as well, too, extremely profitable. Then you can focus on other things and you have a lot of different luxuries. Each one takes about a year to do. Now some people get stuck and certain ones, like I run into entrepreneurs all the time who are still stuck in the startup stage. They've been doing it for 12 years and without them, it doesn't run. They might make good money, it might be a good lifestyle business, but the reality is they're still in delivery and maybe they don't do all the delivery, but even if you're in 20% of the delivery, you're not out of the start-up stage, right? So it's just not gonna happen. So you just have to realize where you are and I've been at various different stages. The furthest I've gone is scale-up in one of my businesses. This one right now, this business that I'm in, I'm in the startup stage right now. So I'm still in 20% of delivery and by the end of the year, the goal is to get out of that. So that next year I can just focus on marketing, sales, and talent acquisition. The good news is we don't have any problems with getting customers right now. So it's not a pain point for us at all, that's where it really should be. The biggest pain point is making delivery flow without me as well as it would flow if I was in the business. We're just obsessed about that. Delivering the best product and service possible, making sure that clients are a hundred percent successful, that it's perfect and everybody feels really confident about it, and there's not just one person who can do it. There are many people in the company who can do it. So if there's any employee turnover, you're not sucked right back into the business, right? So you can work on the business versus in the business, all these things we hear all the time, over the years.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I like that. One thing I can relate to in that is when I've–, this is my fifth year for 26 Characters, we're a content marketing company. I remember in my first six months I was like, “I was doing decent, but I'm just not converting enough new clients.” Immediately I went to, “I gotta get better at sales.” Right? So I spent months taking in all that content. I got incrementally a little bit better. I'm glad I went on that deep dive into becoming better at sales, but ultimately what it also taught me is that the offering wasn't there. I shouldn't have had to rely on being an amazing salesperson to get customers.
Matthew Hunt: Correct.
Steve Goldhaber: That was a good lesson for me. I almost skipped that market fit-matching stage. Yeah. I've learned as an entrepreneur that, if you share an idea or an offering with five people, if three or four of them are not really excited about it, don't do it because it doesn't matter how great your marketing is or how great you are at sales. You're just not gonna get any traction.
Matthew Hunt: A hundred percent. So this last business that I started, I did not even build anything or register a company or anything. I have a holding company, so I could just still make some sales and stuff. But I just went to my warm network, there was no website, and I just pitched 20 people the service. I had them vote with their wallets, I gave them money, I just called it a beta like, “Look, I'm gonna do this. The price is gonna be double this if you're okay with some kinks, and doing this with me you know my reputation, this and that, let's go!” Then once they did it, I could see that they were extremely ecstatic and happy, I was like, “Okay, we're onto something.” Time to build a landing page, and that's all it was, put some testimonials on there and rinse, repeat, and get better at delivering the product. That was it. I really loved that. Where in the past, I probably wouldn't have done that, I would've built the website and the landing pages, did all this other stuff, and all this sort of busy work. The reality, now that I've learned doing things the wrong way for 15 years, I realize, “Look, if you're gonna start something, if you can't get someone to give you money before you build anything, then it's probably not gonna be a good fit.” Then the second validation is like, “Are they happy with what you delivered them at the end?” Like an ecstatically happy, where they're gonna send you referrals.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah.
Matthew Hunt: If the answer is no, you're still not on to the right thing, you need to go back to the drawing word. Figure that out. You don't need to worry about your t-shirts and your coffee cups and your website.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep.
Matthew Hunt: Your marketing plan or any of the other bullshit.
Steve Goldhaber: Maybe one or two more questions before we wrap up. I wanna get your thoughts on the content looking forward, right? What I liked about your framework before was, it's short versus long. It's not video versus social, but what do you think long-term might change as it relates to how we either consume content or maybe even on the creation side too?
Matthew Hunt: The reality is this, humans are addicted to short-form snackable content but secretly crave long-form content. It's already even approved in the marketplace. Like people will listen to three-hour podcasts. They love it. They're crazy, but where do you get discovered? It's always the snackable bits and then even the long-form stuff gets reinforced for the snackable. So there's this whole idea of staying snackable for either top of mind or discoverability. Then as you do enough of those two things, they always come back to the long form. The long form is really where trust is built and the relationship is built and where you develop Jeff Kelly's version of your thousand true fans, right? Which is what anybody needs. If you have a thousand true fans, you literally have a license to print money. You don't need to have like 10 million or a hundred million people, just a thousand and any that's doable for anybody to do. If they just do enough time, the other mistake that people have is they just don't understand the basic concepts of things. This is why I'm such a huge fan of like really smart people like Warren Buffet and other stuff like this Charlie Munger. Even though they talk about economics a lot, there are principles that apply to anything at the end of the day. Ray Dalio examples, but it's not “timing the market”, it's “time in the market”. It's more of consistency, even when it comes to content like I see it all the time. Consistent B plus content exceeds inconsistent A plus content, all the time.
Steve Goldhaber: You mentioned Charlie Munger. There's nothing better than watching Charlie talk about Bitcoin and Ethereum. It cracks me up. He is such an old-school guy who's made a ton of money, but it's funny to have him look at like new world metrics in the account.
Matthew Hunt: Well, these guys just have different guiding principles. It doesn't mean that those guiding principles are the only way they make money, right? But if you look at Warren Buffet, I believe from looking at this, he did not invest in Apple right away until Apple got iTunes. Then he could see a cash-flowing business because these guys only believe in investing in a cash-flowing business, period. They don't believe in buying growth stocks, right? So if there's no cash flow and dividends and a way to show that potential. They just will not invest in it, period. So even with the cryptos, until it's gone through regulations, fully regulated, and there's a way to earn yield, which is another form of dividends in a very safe environment that's protected and follows the rules. They will not invest in that. Some of them might invest in Bitcoin because it's seen more as a commodity that's similar to gold. The same reason why people hold gold, but it's just a different ball of wax, but you have to respect their guiding principles because the proof is in the pudding. Over the years they've outperformed everybody else. If you look at their portfolios, it works just like compound interest. Their first 10 or 15 years were not that exciting. It's after they had put in enough time, 15, 20 years, and then you see that hockey stick row, but the problem is most people just don't have the patience to do that. Most people are not Jeff Bezos. Who's gonna reinvest in their business over and over again and not take a penny for 20 years? Most people just don't have that vision and this is because their time horizon is literally in hours, days weeks, months, never mind years. Even hear people write vivid visions, the most they say and write it out for, is three years. Because how do you know what your vision's gonna be? Because people just can't see beyond it. But those that can see beyond that and understand what it's like in decades, are the ones who win all the time. It's just because their time horizons and their ability for delayed gratifications and patience are just so much higher than everybody else's. So really the root cause is your impatience, which is why you're failing.
Steve Goldhaber: What's a big pet peeve for yours? When you see it in the industry, what's something that you just wish you could change, because it annoys you?
Matthew Hunt: It's the entrepreneur thing, building all this shit, and doing this busy work before going and getting some sales. So nothing happens until you make a sale. Everything else is noise. I think that's a really crazy thing. I see it all the time. I was actually sitting on an advisory board for an individual and I kind of got sucked into this for free. Just to be helpful, because I'm a helpful person. But we had three calls over three months and the individual told us everything about all these amazing things that they were doing. But still, no one sells. It's like, “What's the point of having this call?” How can I advise you? I can't even like help you if you don't even have a client, right? Like this is silly. This is ridiculous. Like go get clients or go get a job, you know? That's something that really bothers me. The other thing that really bugs me is people who don't focus or have too many side hustles and other things, or too many things are focused on. I believe that you need to have one focus. It really dries– I think there are very few people that can have multiple, multiple businesses. You're not the Elon Musk of the world.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah.
Matthew Hunt: You never will be. Right. So like can like just get one right, one thing right. Or even people who have like a job and a side hustle. It bothers me as well too because I don't think it works, either go do the side hustle or go do the job. But if you're not committed to either one, neither is gonna be great. You're gonna be like, “Just okay in your job” and you're just gonna be “Okay in your side hustle”. There are very few people that bridge the gap. Generally speaking, you just need to burn the boats and go for it. You won't really know what you're gonna do until you do, in my opinion. So playing it safe is not the answer, like go all in or get all out.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. I like that. We are in a culture right now where it's kind of like, “If you don't have a side hustle, there's almost some shame attached to you”. It's like, “Oh, what, you're only doing one thing? What's wrong with you?”
Matthew Hunt: Yeah, it's totally glorified. The same thing in short-term stays at companies. I understand it's hard for some people to get career growth. They jump jobs because they think that, that is the way that they get bumps in salary and title inflation. But the real root cause is that they joined the wrong company, to begin with because they were basing their decisions based on that versus basing their decisions on the company, the manager, and the boss that they would be working with because that's more important, right? You want to collect experiences and learnings, not paychecks. If you actually truly focus on that, the byproduct is you end up with title inflation and the byproduct is you end up getting rewarded financially very, very, very well. But when you do it the other way, and eventually you get exposed because even if you can do that long enough, eventually you're gonna get to title inflation and you're gonna be all of a sudden caught in a room where people are like, “Yeah, you don't know what you're doing”, and then it's gonna hit your confidence and you're gonna get bumped down. So it's more important to just do the research on the company and the managers, the people you're working there, and think about experiences and learnings more than paychecks.
Steve Goldhaber: Totally agree with that. All right, Matthew, I enjoyed you on the podcast today. What's the best way if people want to connect with you, how can they do that?
Matthew Hunt: Yeah, there are only two ways you can find me on LinkedIn. That's the only social media network that I'm active on. Then you can go to automationwolf.com. It's spelled exactly the way it sounds. It's a one-page website on purpose. You can only do two things there. You can watch the video or read the testimonials, or I guess a third thing you could reach out to me by clicking the ‘contact’ button. But outside of that, that's all you can do and that's as big as a sub website's probably gonna be for quite some time.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Well, I enjoyed the conversation once again. Thanks for joining us and good luck with Automation Wolf.
Matthew Hunt: Thanks, Steve.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Take care.