Efficiently Turning Your Content into Revenue

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Justin Nassiri  0:00  

Much more about building. I think that whether this is an asset or a liability, what I love about entrepreneurship is creating. I view entrepreneurs as artists, in the same way that I view people who make movies and people who write books, they’re really artists. So I love the artistry of entrepreneurship. I don’t think that what drew me to this was the dream of becoming ridiculously wealthy, and it’s still not really, I certainly want to provide for my family. And more importantly, I want to set an example for my two and a half year old son of someone who’s achieving someone who’s really growing and putting themselves out there. Like that’s very important to me. But the thought of buying a private jet, the thought of having more and more money to spend on lavish meals that don’t really motivate me, but the thought of creating is a huge motivator for me.

 

Richard Matthews  1:04  

Heroes are an inspiring group of people, every one of them from the larger than life comic book heroes you see on the big silver screen, the everyday heroes that let us live the privileged lives we do. Every hero has a story to tell, the doctor saving lives at your local hospital, the war veteran down the street, who risked his life for our freedom to the police officers, and the firefighters who risked their safety to ensure ours every hero is special and every story worth telling. But there was one class of heroes that I think is often ignored the entrepreneur, the creator, the producer, the ones who look at the problems in this world and think to themselves, you know what, I can fix that, I can help people, I can make a difference. And they go out and do exactly that by creating a new product or introducing a new service. Some go on to change the world, others make a world of difference to their customers. Welcome to the Hero Show. Join us as we pull back the masks on the world’s finest hero preneurs and learn the secrets to their powers, their success and their influence. So you can use those secrets to attract more sales, make more money, and experience more freedom in your business. I’m your host, Richard Matthews, and we are on in 3…2…1…

 

Richard Matthews  1:59  

Welcome back to the Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews. And today I have the pleasure of having Justin Nassiri on the line. Justin, are you there?

 

Justin Nassiri  2:06  

Yeah, I’m here, Richard, thanks so much for having me.

 

Richard Matthews  2:08  

Awesome. Glad to have you here. So I know you said you’re calling in from Denver, Colorado. Have you guys gotten to winter yet, up there?

 

Justin Nassiri  2:17  

It’s so funny, we’ve been here five years and every Halloween is just frigid. And Saturday the day before Halloween was 70 degrees. It was beautiful. I thought this is going to be the first year that there’s no winter on Halloween. And sure enough, come on Sunday morning, it was 40 degrees high, 20 degrees low. So when winter is in full force now.

 

Richard Matthews  2:40  

That’s funny. We’re in South Florida or Central Florida right now it’s Halloween in the Kissimmee area. And it was beautiful. So it was still 79 degrees outside while we went for our thing. And then the next morning it was cold, but cold in Florida is 60 degrees.

 

Justin Nassiri  3:01  

That’s not bad. I would take that right about now.

 

Richard Matthews  3:03  

Yeah. So what I want to do before we get too far into this is go through your bio, and then we can dive into your story. So Justin Nassiri is the founder of Captivate.ai. He is also a serial entrepreneur funded by Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt, whose products have been used by fortune 500 companies and 50 million users. Justin’s a marketing technology expert and founder of Captivate.ai, which turns a podcast episode into three months of social media content. You’re in your MBA from Stanford and is a US Navy veteran. Thank you for your service, sir, with five years of experience onboard nuclear submarines. So before we get too far into all of this, why don’t you start off by telling me what your business is, what you’re known for. And basically, the problem you solve for your customers?

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Justin Nassiri  3:47  

Yeah, so I guess, I’m currently known for being the founder and CEO of Captivate.ai. And like you said, we turn a podcast webinar or event into a lot of content for our clients. And I think what I’m known for long is two things. First of all, companies invest a lot of money in what we’re doing right now, podcasts, webinars, they are exceptional tools to connect with your audience. And what frustrated me is I saw that most companies only get about 10% of the value of that long-form content. So what we started to do is two things, first of all, take a video from a podcast or webinar, we turn it into what we call snackable content for social media. So they get about 20 to 30 videos that they can use on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc, to broaden their social footprint. But the second thing we do that’s just as important is the data to go along with that. Because rather than having one metric, which is a podcast download or a webinar view, we turn that into about 30 data points with discrete messaging to see, okay, what is the specific bite-sized topic that resonates with your audience which specific keywords and talking points are making an impact. And so that gives a lot of data and insight to our clients. So they can change their sales, their advertising, their marketing, based on what they’re learning from our platform.

 

Richard Matthews  5:20  

That’s amazing. We’re in a similar business. I know we mentioned before the call, I run an agency called Push Button Podcasts. And what we do is we essentially help our clients build a content marketing machine, that’s what I call it. Where the smaller companies that need to be getting into the content game, the thing they struggle with is, how do I do this thing where I’m constantly everywhere, that you see the big companies doing. And what we tell them to do is sit down and record a podcast episode once a week, or batch report at the beginning of the month, and then you hand it off to our team. And we’ll basically do all of that kind of work for you and create all the other content because that’s the problem that companies have nowadays is, it’s very complicated to be everywhere. And if you’re going to reach your audience, you need to be everywhere.

 

Justin Nassiri  6:10  

And what I found as a podcaster, myself, I’ve done 410 interviews and enjoyed almost every single one of them. If you asked me to sit down and write a blog post, I’m never going to do it. But if you asked me to get on a zoom recording, or some sort of video recording with someone else and be curious and learn from them for an hour. I love it as time flies by. And if you do it properly, as you’re talking about, that can yield months worth of social content in a way that’s painless. So I love that you’re championing the sense of like a podcast a week, he is able to fuel a social media empire just like the big boys do it.

 

Richard Matthews  6:54  

Yeah, the thing that makes me so excited about it is that it’s a type of leveraged work. Especially your small and medium-sized businesses, they really need that because they don’t have a huge team to come up behind them and help them do those kinds of things. So they have to use leverage. And you don’t have to build specific content for every platform. But every piece of content should be optimized for that platform, which is a complicated thing to do. But if you start off with like, hey, I have one long-form piece of content that ‘s already in your area of expertise. It’s the stuff you love to talk about anyways. It’s the work that you do for your clients, or for your customers. And you can leverage that and turn it into essentially, your attention gathering machine. And nowadays, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, you’re in the attention business, whether you like it or not.

 

Justin Nassiri  7:55  

I mean, that’s where our name comes from Captivate. And that’s our goal is to help our clients captivate their customers. And what I’ve seen in my previous company—Story Box, I developed a lot of empathy for marketers who have to publish on half a dozen channels every single day. And at the same time, consumer expectation for the quality of that content has never been higher. So not only do you have to be posting original content on a daily basis across six different channels, you have to do it in a way that’s authentic and high quality. And so that’s really been our goal is to help people do that at scale.

 

Richard Matthews  8:36  Yeah, that’s cool, similar goals for what we’re working on. So what I want to get into is your origin story. And I know we’ve talked a little bit already, you’ve worked with Fortune 500 companies and your stuff is used by 50 million people, but every good comic book hero has what I call an origin story, it’s the thing that made them into the hero they are today, we want to hear that story. Were you born a hero? Were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to get into building software? Or did you start in a job and eventually move your way over to becoming an entrepreneur? Basically, where do you come from?

 

Justin Nassiri  9:09  

Yeah, I guess the most unlikely of places is a submarine in the middle of the ocean. So metal cylinder surrounded by 180 other men, and spent five years serving on nuclear submarines and really grateful for that experience in the leadership training it gave me and at the end of my five years, I knew I wanted to move on to something else. I had no idea what that would be. But I thought, okay, I like managing people. Businesses need to manage people. So let me go to business school. So I went to Stanford Business School. And that was really the first time I gained exposure to this thought that big companies come from small companies, small companies come from people who want to solve a problem who want to fix things and make the world a better place. And so I graduated. And I started with a simple idea that over the course of about a year, I built up and was able to grab funding from Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt grew that company shrunk it, grew it, shrunk it, really went through that startup roller coaster of having moments on mountain tops, and then moments in the desert, just wandering and feeling lost and like an idiot, and did that for eight years. And then out of that came the idea for Captivate, which is what I’m doing now.

 

Richard Matthews  10:31  

Awesome. So in the whole startup world, what was the company that you built-in?

 

Justin Nassiri  10:41  

So the company was called Story box. It started as video Genie, which was about video testimonials. And then we pivoted to story box to be more about customer stories on photos and videos. And Instagram became pretty pivotal to what we were doing. We ended up taking photos. So if someone posts a photo on Instagram, wearing a Patagonia jacket, the software we built would find that photo, and we would get the digital rights to use it. And we’d put it on Patagonia’s website so that when you’re looking at that jacket, rather than seeing a model, rather than seeing a photo taken inside a highly curated environment, we’re showing you real people wearing that jacket out in the wild. And then we’d have the analytics to show how that impacted sales. But as you can imagine, seeing real people use a product has a pretty big impact on people buying more and converting at a higher rate.

 

Richard Matthews  11:42  

That’s interesting. So did you exit that company?

 

Justin Nassiri  11:46  

I did. I sold that last year. And it wasn’t the life-changing journey that I thought it would be. But it was great for me, it was great for our investors and we learned a lot, but we are very hungry to have a bigger impact with this next company.

 

Richard Matthews  12:03  

Interesting question on that, do you enjoy building or selling the company more which is much?

 

Justin Nassiri  12:11  

More about building, I think that whether this is an asset or a liability, what I love about entrepreneurship is creating, I view entrepreneurs as artists, in the same way that I view people who make movies and people who write books, they’re really artists. So I love the artistry of entrepreneurship. I don’t think that what drew me to this was the dream of becoming ridiculously wealthy, and it’s still not really, I certainly want to provide for my family. And more importantly, I want to set an example for my two and a half year old son of someone who’s achieving someone who’s really growing and putting themselves out there. That’s very important to me. But the thought of buying a private jet, the thought of having more and more money to spend on lavish meals, that doesn’t really motivate me but the thought of creating is a huge motivator for me.

 

Richard Matthews  13:13  

So alternate question on the same topic is, did you learn anything from building a company that you eventually sold, that informs how you’re building your next company?

 

Justin Nassiri  13:26  

Oh, man, I mean, everything and I can see, when I first raised money for story box, I was really upset when I heard from investors who wanted to invest in serial entrepreneurs. And I was frustrated because I didn’t have any startup experience. On the other side of that now I do see the value. Specifically, I built my first company with a team of 20 to 30 individuals, and I’m trying to build Captivate with as low of a headcount as possible. I’ve just found that as a manager, I suck. I’m not great at optimizing people. I’m not great at pushing people to do more. I’m great with finding people who are self-motivated, who don’t need a lot of oversight because I don’t have a lot of oversight to give or desire to do that. So that’s one key difference. I feel like the first company I really wanted a big team. This company I want the smallest team as possible. I want to leverage technology as much as possible. I think a second thing is my first company I sought to raise money I sought to grow this quickly. With Captivate, I’m trying to keep funding to a minimal or to non-existent. I’m trying to just have organic growth drivers. I think it’s a smarter way for me personally to build a company. And then I think the third one is that I’m trying to build Captivate in a process driven way and with story box I just had this thought of because I didn’t have my own business experience, I thought, let me just hire people with a great resume people with a lot of experience, and they’ll figure it out. And I think there’s a lot of pitfalls in that. And instead, I’m trying to build from the ground up, I’m trying to prove out a system, and then hire people to execute that processing system, rather than to figure it out. So those are three big shifts with my second company.

 

Richard Matthews  15:24  

That’s interesting. I particularly like that last one, because in the process of building our Push Button Podcast agency, that’s the way I’m approaching it is very process driven. And I’m building processes and building workflows and building the software that backs them up first. And then I’m filling the team roles into those things, which I don’t know this, but it seems like the more scalable way to do it, when I was approaching it, how am I going to do this, I was like, I want to be able to go from being able to service two clients, or 20 clients or 100 clients, and have the workflows be able to scale and the only thing you have to do is add the staff to fill them in.

 

Justin Nassiri  16:07  

Yeah, I think what you’re doing is the smart way to do it, it’s very, very difficult for me to slow down and do this. But I like the analogy that I am a sales representative. And I am going to be in that role until I write the process and hire someone to execute that process. And then I got promoted to sales manager. And I get to build the process for the sales manager until I hire someone to take over and execute that process. And then I got promoted to VP of sales. And it’s just continuously creating the process. And don’t get me wrong, I want to learn from people who have experienced, I want to borrow that experience. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. But it’s very alluring for an entrepreneur to think I’ll just hire someone to figure it out. And there’s so much snake oil out there. There are so many people who claim to be able to do something and don’t deliver. I’ve been burned by that too many times. And I don’t want to try to just throw a Hail Mary expecting someone else to run it a town for a touchdown. I know that I have to do that heavy lifting myself.

 

Richard Matthews  17:17  

Yeah, I’ve been in a consulting business for a long time, one of the things that I’ve done for a number of clients that have done millions and millions in sales is do process development, building processes when it came time to build my own agency and really start serving clients that way. I’ve been taking a lot of the stuff that I’ve been teaching other people about how to build systems and processes and just applying it to my own business. So it’s kind of fun that way. But I’ve got a course that I’m in the middle of creating it’s called Push Button process. The biggest difference between what I’m doing and what I see most of the people do when they teach other people about building systems and processes is building a foundation of language. And I think language is one of the most important things for anything you get into how to learn is understanding the language. So you have like the mental hooks to hang things on. The whole foundation of the course is teaching people. What is the system? What is the workflow? What is the process? What is the status? And how do those fit together? Because most people use words like system and workflow and process interchangeably. They’re not actually interchangeable words, they have definitions, and they fit into a hierarchy. And so if you understand the language of systems, I think it’s a lot easier to actually build them and build workflows that work for your business and can work for other people’s businesses as well.

 

Justin Nassiri  18:37  

I love that words have power. And I think we don’t give them the respect that they’re due. And I love the precision, the more precise we are in these terms, the higher up we can build. It’s like the more solid the bricks are to build the scaffolding to build this cathedral.

 

Richard Matthews  18:55  

Yeah, absolutely. I’ll send you a copy of the course if you want.

 

Justin Nassiri  18:59  

Yeah, I’d love that. 

 

Richard Matthews  19:00  

It’s not done yet, you’ll get to see the middle version of it as it’s going. But maybe it’ll help inform some of what you guys are working on over there. Maybe not but hopefully it will.

 

Justin Nassiri  19:11  

I appreciate that.

 

Richard Matthews  19:12  

Awesome. So I want to talk a little bit about your superpowers that maybe you have developed over the course of time building these companies. Every iconic hero has a superpower, whether that’s a fancy flying suit made by genius intellect, or the ability to call down thunder from the sky, or super strength. In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with, or you developed over the course of time that really helped you to slay the villains in your client’s lives, so to speak. And the way I like to frame it is if you look at all the skills that you’ve developed, all the different areas of expertise that you have, there’s probably a common thread that ties those all together. And that common thread is where you’re going to find your superpower. So with that sort of framing, what do you think your superpower is?

 

Justin Nassiri  19:58  

I think it’s scrapping inefficiency. When I raised money for my first company story box, I remember an investor told me, Justin, you’ve done with $10,000. What I’ve given people hundreds of 1000s of dollars to do. And same with story box, I started story box investing just 5000 of my own money, my own capital, and insisted on not spending another dime on it and thrown it over to half a million dollars in revenue in about six months. So I think I’m really good at taking nothing and turning it into something. And that can be a liability as well, like if I become too cheap if I become too scrappy, it can hold back growth. But I think, for the most part, that’s one of my biggest assets is being able to do a lot with very little.

 

Richard Matthews  20:45  

So the thing that stuck out to me, when you said that you were able to take $5,000 turned into half a million dollars in revenue. And it strikes me that you have to really focus if you’re going to do that. So for those of us who were in the middle of trying to build our companies, what is your recommendation for how you focus properly to focus on revenue, or how you take what you have the resources you have and focus on creating revenue with that.

 

Justin Nassiri  21:16  

You know, it is something I’m not naturally good at like I love and I admire entrepreneurs who pick a swim lane and just are laser focused on that one thing, I can get distracted by all the shiny objects of what we could do and new features and new products. So two things that have helped me stay on track. One is working with an executive coach, I meet weekly with a coach and I work on different things for building the business, that helps me stay focused, because I have someone listening to me and maybe pointing out inconsistencies of what I’m doing or maybe sees me falling into my own little traps of trying to do too much and can kind of help me pull back, slow down and focus. And then a second is surprisingly journaling, I find myself journaling on a daily basis. And I just kind of use a stream of consciousness of whatever I’m thinking about, and use it to get clarity. So usually I’ll start pretty scattered and pretty broad. And by the end of just a 10 minute journaling exercise kind of walked away with like, these are the three things that matter most today. And so those are my kind of hacks to get focused when I’m someone who tends to be a little bit more ADD.

 

Richard Matthews  22:38  

One of the things that I’ve been talking about recently, and the more I talk about it, the more it makes sense in my own head is figuring out how to accomplish more in less time. 

 

Justin Nassiri  22:52  

Yeah.

 

Richard Matthews  22:52  

Because I travel full time with my family. And I’m more interested in my kids than I am in my business. I mean that for my clients, but I am more interested in them than it’s pretty much anything else. So I want to spend as much time as I can with them as possible. And in light of that, I’m generally like how do I build my business and get all the things I need to get done with it in the littlest amount of time possible. And the thing that I’ve come up with over the last few years that I’ve been sort of testing rigorously is this idea of productivity is about stacking completions. And so what I have started doing is looking at, I’ve got this amount of time available today. And that amount of time is what I’ve decided is available because this is what I’m going to put into my business today. The rest of it is my family’s. So if I’ve got an hour or two hours or three hours or eight hours, or whatever it is, this is the time that I have available, what is something I can take from start to finish in that amount of time. The start finish is more important to me than where it fits on the whole order of importance because you hear things about, it’s important or it’s urgent or, unimportant and non urgent it and that it’s kind of a cliche thing almost at this point, but it’s less important that it’s one of those important items that it is something that I can get completed. That I can take from start to finish. And what I’ve noticed over the course of time is if I stack completions because I complete that thing, it’s done, like a Lego block I’ve got in my business and I can complete something else and stack it together complete something else and if I complete something every day. Then very shortly you have a whole stack of completed things.

 

Justin Nassiri  24:32  

Yep. I was taking notes. I wrote that down as you were saying that. What I like most about that is that for myself and I think for society I think that we are taught to fragment our attention. And the lens that I’m viewing what you just said is yesterday I did what I know all of us know we should do, and I never do it is I set my phone in a different room and I spent two hours with my son and at the end of those two hours, I felt great, I felt focused and calm, I felt less stressed, I felt less frustrated all of these emotions that I took into our time together, by just the act of doing one thing for a set amount of time, I felt better. And so what I like about what you’re saying of driving towards completion is like, we can probably all relate to that sense when we’re, I feel this on a daily basis, I’m responding to a Slack message, I’m responding to an email, I’m responding to a text, I’m responding to a LinkedIn comment. And after 30 minutes of that, I just feel scattered. So I really like this thought of driving towards completion. I think that’s a much better way to operate and results in a higher quality of work output than trying to just move like an inch along five different projects and a 30-minute block.

 

Richard Matthews  25:55  

Yeah. So when it comes to doing things like responding to messages, because that’s one of those complicated things, how do you think of that in terms of completions, and what I’ve started doing is I call it my triage time. 

 

Justin Nassiri  26:06  

Yeah, I love that. 

 

Richard Matthews  26:08  

It’s like, okay, what I need to do is I’ve got all these places where I got messages that come in, it’s Facebook Messenger, it’s email or Slack channel. I’ll go through it, and I’ll basically look at each one of them. And it’s like, the completion for that is I’ve looked at everything and decided what the next steps are. So the completion is knowing what the next steps are, and all the messages and all the things that have come through, and then I’ve completed that portion, I’ve triaged it all. So instead of looking at the message to be like, Okay, this message here, and I need to respond this way. And I need to do these things in order to have that done. It’s like, no, I know what that is. And I’ve sent it into my next box of like, okay, that message needs to respond in this way. Next message, this message needs to be responded to in this way. And then I’ve gone through and I’ve triaged all the things. And now my next completion is like, okay, message number one needs to have those things done with it. And I can complete that thing. And I’m looking at each thing in terms of what’s the completion.

 

Justin Nassiri  27:04  

I love that. I think that’s a great approach.

 

Richard Matthews  27:08  

Yep. So far, it’s working. I’ve been doing it for a couple of months now. And what’s interesting is it actually came from a renovation project I’m working on, so we’re renovating the RV. And one of the things I realized is, since we live in it and travel with it, renovating it means we have to fix something to renovate. And we have to take it from start to finish because we have to use it like now. So when you think in terms of completions, like for instance, we’re redoing the floor. So I did the floor in the bathroom. And so I had a Saturday afternoon, I was like I’m going to rip it all out and put it all back in. And I’m going to finish it. And the floor is going to go all the way through to the front room. Which means that in order to finish the bathroom, I’m going to put in half tiles at the transition point in the hallway. Which means when I go to do the rest of the room, I’m going to have to rip out those half tiles. That’s a waste. It’s inefficiency. And as entrepreneurs, we sort of tend to hate inefficiency. And so we’ll leave projects unfinished, and transfer to something else, and it’s not completed. So you’ll have a bathroom floor metaphorically, with the tiles all the way up to just the edge where it’s sort of jagged because you didn’t finish the tiles. But you’re like, I can’t get to the rest of the room right now. Because like that’s a bigger project. So we’ll leave something unfinished. So what I actually did was I finished the floor, like transition strip the whole thing, it’s finished, which means I’m going to pull out the transition strip and those three tiles waste when I get to the next room. And so completions. When you start thinking in terms of completions, you start thinking in terms of like, if they’re building some waste into your process, it helps you have completions. So to put that into the business world, like one of the things we do is build email follow-ups, and say you’re building like, we do an evergreen webinar follow up. And then we’ll build another stack of follow-ups that go in between it and you’ll have like a couple of emails that transition between from one set of stories to the next set of stories to open the loop. And if you were thinking in terms of completions, you might build that entire project, the first set of follow-ups, and the last email, you would close all the loops in that, just so it was done. And it’s done and it’s finished. And then you build the next set. And you’ll build all your open loops and everything. And you’ll finish that. And part of that inefficiency is I’ll have to go back to the first one and open some of those loops so they can transition back into the other one. But that’s okay. Because who knows how long it’s gonna take me to go from this set of things to done. But if I’ve got that complete, I can use it. I can plug it into my business and have it going and doing its thing. And so I started thinking of everything in my business is, how can I complete it? Even if it means I have to wait a little to make sure it’s done.

 

Justin Nassiri  29:49  

I think that’s a great approach.

 

Richard Matthews  29:52  

Yeah so far, I said it’s working but let me know how it goes if you start using it. So, I want to transition a little bit from your superpower. So if your superpower is that ability to really be scrappy and get what you need to get done with the smallest amount of resources possible, the flip side of every superpower generally it’s the same coin is your kryptonite. So just like Superman has kryptonite, or wonder woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad, you probably have a flaw that you’ve struggled with something that’s held you back in your business. For me, it’s a couple of things. I struggled with perfectionism for a long time, where I was like, I can always tweak it to make it a little bit better. And kept me from completing things really is what happened. And I also struggled with lack of self care, which means I didn’t have good boundaries, I let my clients walk all over me, I let my time walk all over me. And learning how to fix those things really helped take me to the next level. So I think more important than what your flaw is, is how have you worked to overcome it so you can continue to grow your business?

 

Justin Nassiri  30:58  

Yeah, I think that one of them, there’s certainly many, but I think one of them is managing, and that the hard part for me with this flaw was with a background in the Navy. I wrote my business school applications to Stanford saying, I’m a manager, I’ve led people, I lead these teams of 200. And I sold that vision to investors with Story Box, I’m going to build this great team, I’m great at managing. And it was probably four years into my time at story box where I realized I’m actually a horrible manager. Like when I see great managers, they are exceptional at drawing out that incremental 10% out of everyone they work with just really being able to motivate and manage people in a way that gets more out of them and gets more out of a team. And I hate that I love doing my own project. I love tinkering. I love building, I love visioning what something should be. But when it comes to the day to day oversight of individuals, that really saps my energy. And so I’ve had to build around people who are better at that than me, I’ve had to find people that can work with very little oversight, very little structure and kind of make their own way or follow my processes. I’ve had to build processes and ways to measure that in a way that’s easy for me. So it’s something I’m continuing to try to buttress up against to try to fortify. But the act of optimizing individual performance is something that I’m not great at.

 

Richard Matthews  32:41  

So if it’s something that you’re not good at, you know you need to have it done. You’re working on hiring people, one of the things I’ve learned from lots of ultra successful people is they focus on the one thing they’re good at, they focus on their superpower. And they let other people shore up their weaknesses and learn to delegate that. And so I’m curious how have you worked to sort of overcome that, and really focus on the thing that you are great at?

 

Justin Nassiri  33:13  

You know, one thing I love about technology is it helps me with that. So if I can build a feature in our platform that does something, it’s one less or five less people I need to have done that. So I think that one thing is just playing to my strengths by saying things like, I want to build software, I want to build something that solves a problem rather than relying on humans. That’s certainly one way. A second way is, there’s a quote from the author, Herman Wouk, who wrote the book, The Caine Mutiny. And he said The Navy is a system designed by geniuses to be run by morons. And what I took away from that is the importance of building a system with interchangeable parts. So whenever there’s something that needs to be done, I create a process. It’s usually a Google sheet with a video that kind of shows what it’s done. But that means that if I hire the wrong person to execute that process, it’s not a big deal, I can instantly get rid of that person and replace them with someone to follow that process, there’s less institutional knowledge that becomes a risk of losing. So I’ve tried to build things in a component way where I’m not overly reliant on any one person. And I can have discrete people doing discrete jobs that are measured in discrete ways that I can automatically fix and replace if they’re not performing the way that I need.

 

Richard Matthews  34:40  

Yeah, that’s very well thought out. I know one of the things that I talked about in my course on building systems is learning how to silo tasks into strength areas. So for instance, in our Push Button Podcast service, if we’re going to create the derivative content that is taken from the large thing, each piece of derivative content has asset sets. So you have your graphic assets, and you have your written assets, and you have your multimedia assets. And those things all require different skill sets. And what’s interesting is they also have sort of dependencies. So your graphic assets and your multimedia assets require the written assets to be done. Then you have your publishing things, and one of the things that I’ve started working on is, how do we silo all of those, and then silo them in an order that makes the most sense. So you can bring in a writer whose skill is writing, and have all of the written assets done at one time. So titles, subtitles, tags, short descriptions, social media posts, show notes, blog articles, everything written from one long-form piece of content all at one time by one person, then you can take all of those assets and move them over to the next silo. And because they’re siloed like that, even if you have one person that’s working in multiple silos, the work is efficient that way. But it’s also easy to train and easy to fill positions, like, hey, this is the thing that needs to get done here. I think it’s the same kind of thought, cuz I’m the same way, I’m terrible at managing people. But I’m really good at understanding what I need to have built. 

 

Justin Nassiri  36:38  

Yep. I love that. I love that. 

 

Richard Matthews  36:40  

Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about your common enemy in your business Captivate specifically, so every superhero has what I call an arch-nemesis. And it’s the thing that they constantly have to fight against in their world. In the world of business, it takes a lot of forms. But generally speaking, if we put it in the context of your clients, it’s a mindset or it’s a flaw that they have, when they come to start working with you, that you have to fight to overcome, over and over and over again, because it always shows up. And if you had your magic wand, you could bop them on the head as soon as they sign on the dotted line. And you could actually get them the results they came for. What is that common enemy that you seem to have to fight against in your business?

 

Justin Nassiri  37:21  

I see it in business owners that we work with, but it’s certainly prevalent in society is that desire for a quick fix, a quick win. And what I am trying to preach to our customers and our prospective clients is the same thing that works in fitness, and works and investing, works with social media and with marketing. So we get stronger physically, by exercising every day, day in and day out. It’s not sexy, it’s not glamorous, but it creates results. We become wealthy by setting aside money every single month, without exception, that’s how empires are built, by being prudent and setting aside money and saving and investing that wisely. It’s the same for social media, people are trying to sell virality, which cannot be sold. But we can offer more lottery tickets, we can offer a system to publish high-quality content every single day, day in day out, some of those posts will do great, some of them won’t. But that’s what we’re selling is the ability, the ammunition to post consistently high content, high-quality content over time, that builds up a massive audience over time that builds up trust and engagement. But oftentimes, we find people looking to have a single post, do everything. And that’s expecting too much. So what we’re trying to do is kind of teach people a better mindset, which is consistent action can move mountains. And that’s what we aim our clients to do.

 

Richard Matthews  39:00  

Yeah, I love that. Because one of the things I tell all of our clients is that you don’t get into the content game for a short period of time, you get into the content game for the long term, which is why we have the whole leverage idea as if you need to do this every day all the time. What are you going to do without having to take over your business? And you need something like Captivate.ai or Push Button Podcasts or a team of people behind you that are going to do all those things. So you can actually play the game. But you have to have more time at bat. You’re not going to get up and knock it out of the park. Like Babe Ruth the first time that you go out and create a piece of content. You need to have a lot of times at bat over and over again. If you look at like, Babe Ruth batting record, he was struck out more than he hit home runs but because he was at bat all the time. You have more opportunity to hit homeruns, to hit that viral content and so that’s exactly what people need to be doing is they need to show up all the time. And it’s, again, it’s the attention business, you’re in the attention business and to play the attention game, you have to be somewhere where you can get someone’s attention. If you’re not there, you’re not getting it. So to further that discussion, how are you working on doing that education with clients? Are you working on pre education? Is that the type of marketing you’re putting into the marketplace? Or are you doing that after someone comes and becomes a client, you’re doing that as part of your onboarding process? Where does that sort of education and fighting that battle happen for your company?

 

Justin Nassiri  40:36  

We primarily provide software as a service. And one of the reasons I did that is I didn’t want to be in the education business. So certainly we are targeting companies that are already believing in this, people that are already investing in a podcast, webinar, event series. And so there’s not a lot of education required, other than just saying, ook, you’re getting 10% of the value, we’ll help you get the other 90%. We’ve built the product in a way that it kind of helps people make good decisions, I think we have a lot of features that help people publish more consistently. But one of the things I wanted to do and build in Captivate is to look, I don’t want to have to change behavior, I don’t want to have to constantly spend time managing customers or have an account management. So we’ve tried to build software in a way that it can just kind of be someone’s Jetpack and help them get where they’re going faster, without having to have a huge instruction manual to go along with it.

 

Richard Matthews  41:36  

Yeah, that’s interesting, because it’s almost exactly the opposite approach that we’ve taken with our agency because we’re talking about taking people’s hands and essentially doing it for them. Which is a different type of client in a different type of business structure. But yeah, it’s interesting.

 

Justin Nassiri  41:51  

That’s why we work with a lot of agencies because it is, it’s like, hey, we’ll be behind the scenes, we’re extremely efficient creating the content and you can handhold the client, you can do all the prettying up to look good, we don’t really care, we can be in the shadows working behind an agency, just being one tool in their arsenal that helps them get better content.

 

Richard Matthews  42:12  

Yeah. And it’s interesting, too, the content game is not getting any easier. There’s not like, there are less platforms today than there is tomorrow, and you hear announcements, like Facebook’s gonna build a Metaverse. And you’re like, who knows what that’s gonna be. But everyone knows we’re going in that direction. We’re going towards more and more digital life, which means more and more digital content in different categories in different ways. And you hear about things like the AR and the VR Worlds that are being built. Being at the forefront of that content game. That’s where your customers are going to be. Yep, right. Yep. So if you want to be there, you have to start playing the game now. So the other thought I have that I’m curious how you guys handle this is one of the things that we teach a lot of our clients is that in your area of expertise, clients struggle a lot, one of our common enemies is clients struggle with like, I don’t know how to do content regularly on whatever our area of expertise is. And they’re like, they have this feeling that I need to create new things all the time. And one of the things that I’ve been trying to teach people is that really, all you need to do is figure out new ways to approach the same topic. And on top of that new ways to approach the same topic, keeping in mind that your audience has a very short memory. So you can re-approach the same topic the same way over and over again, over the course of time. And I’m just curious, do you guys build tools that help people understand that or, what are the thoughts behind sort of reusing topics or teaching people how to come into the same topic over and over again?

 

Justin Nassiri  44:03  

So one of the things so one of the components of what we’re doing is creating this snackable content, usually videos, everything that we do is transcribed. And we provided an adaptive dashboard, that searchable, sortable filterable, one of the things that we’re building towards because we have these transcripts, that means like, you know, a year from now, if I want to post a video on email marketing, I type in email marketing, and it shows me all of the videos that talk about email marketing. One of the things that we’re building towards is monitoring a brand’s social feed to see what their customers are talking about, and then recommending content that they have relevant to that. So we don’t have this yet. But one of the things that we’re developing is the ability to say, hey, your industry is talking a lot about email marketing. Here are two videos in your arsenal related to that, click here to post or this event just happened, here’s relevant content, the only way that you can do that is if you have a huge amount of content if you have this content arsenal, because then you have a lot more diversity, you can actually start to identify lots of different trending things where you can speak with authority. So that’s definitely where we’re going is that ability to spot trends faster than a human could and be able to find the corresponding content to contribute in a meaningful way to that conversation.

 

Richard Matthews  45:33  

Absolutely. And it’s about getting back into the content you’ve already created.

 

Justin Nassiri  45:38  

Yeah, absolutely. Yep. 

 

Richard Matthews  45:39  

And using more of it, that’s cool. So the flip side of your common enemy. So if your common enemy is what we were just talking about there with your content and everything being a hard thing to create, and essentially getting people to do it and create it. The flip side is your driving force, it’s what you fight for. So just like Spider Man fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham, or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information. Whether or not we want them to do that is a different discussion. But that’s what they’re fighting for. What is it that you fight for at Captivate.ai.

 

Justin Nassiri  46:22  

So the biggest thing, and I know, I’ve only got about six minutes, because I have a client call right after this, so I’ll be brief. The biggest thing for me is I’m a small business, I’ve worked with a lot of small businesses, I know that you need to be efficient. And I really want to help businesses be efficient to have the maximum marketing impact with a minimal amount of time committed. So that’s what’s really driving me. How can we maximize the visibility in the most efficient way possible for these small brands that don’t have a huge marketing budget, they don’t have a huge marketing team.

 

Richard Matthews  46:55  

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Richard Matthews  48:26  

Yeah, absolutely. So I know you’re short on time, I’m going to ask you one more question. That I think is one of my favorites. But it’s your guiding principles. So one of the things that makes heroes heroic, is that they live by a code. For instance, Batman never kills his enemies, he only ever puts them in Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up, let’s talk about the top one, maybe two principles that you live your life by, maybe something you wish you’d known when you started out your own hero’s journey.

 

Justin Nassiri  48:54  

I think one of the biggest ones right now and maybe it’s overused, I’m not sure if you or your audience has heard it before. But I really like this sense of like, if the golden rule is do unto others as they would have you doing to them, or has as you would have them do unto you. The Platinum Rule is Do unto others as they would have you do unto them. And I can get caught in this mindset sometimes of this is what I want. Therefore, this is what I’ll do for my clients. And I think that’s a great starting point. But more and more, I want to be driven by the sense of like, okay, I have my own perspective, my own needs my own viewpoint. So do my clients. So what is it that they want to be done? What is it that they need to be done that I can help them with? And my coach often tells me, he says empathy can be a competitive advantage. And so I’m trying more and more when I meet with clients and prospective clients, rather than looking for ways to force them into the mold that I’ve built. I’m trying to be genuinely curious and empathetic of like, what do they need? Can I really solve that? Is this the right tool for that? Is there something we could be building, that’s better? So I’m trying to view things more from their perspective, how do they want to be treated? How do they want to communicate? How do they want to market? How can I support that? Rather than saying, I’ve got this mold? Let me find a way to contort you into it.

 

Richard Matthews  50:19  

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And I know that’s one of the principles I’ve always lived by too. I always thought the golden rule was lacking. 

 

Justin Nassiri  50:26  

Yeah. 

 

Richard Matthews  50:26  

 I don’t think I ever called it the platinum rule, but that same idea is like Do unto others as they would have done unto them. Because it’s more important because some people are not interested in the things that you’re interested in. And they don’t want that. And that’s forced into them, they would be sad, or mad, or some other negative emotion. And so if we start looking at, like, how do I put myself into their shoes? And what’s interesting is that’s actually the secret to good marketing is, how do I figure out where they are? What are they thinking about the conversation that’s going on in their head? And how do I put my business into that conversation? How do I help them with where they’re at? So anyways, I think that’s really good. So I think that’s basically a wrap on our interview. But I do finish every interview with a simple challenge I call the hero’s challenge. And I do this to help find access to stories I might not otherwise find on my own because not all of us are out doing the podcast rounds like you and I are doing. So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think got a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine and why do you think they should come to share their story with us on the hero show? First person that comes to mind for you?

 

Justin Nassiri  51:30  

Yeah, the first person is a guy named Andy Mowat. He runs a company called Gated. And what I love about this is he recognized that we all get emails from people that we don’t want to be hearing from, he’s developed a tool where they gate your inbox, they keep it safe. But the way they do that is they say, look, if you really want to email this person and you don’t know them, donate 50 cents to this charity of this person’s choosing. And we’ll let the email go through. And so that way, every time you get an unwanted email, you know that that person donated to a charity that you believe in. So I think it’s a really cool way that’s adding value to the world and in a very innovative way.

 

Richard Matthews  52:12  

That’s cool. Yeah. So we’ll reach out later and see if we can do an introduction. Maybe get him on the show. Sometimes they say yes, sometimes they don’t. But it’s always fun to see if we can get new stories. So in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people who are clapping and cheering for the acts of heroism. So our analogous to that on this show, is I want to find out where can people find you? Where can they light at the best signal so to speak and say hey, Justin, how can you help me captivate my audience? And I think more importantly, who are the right types of people to reach out and ask for that help.

 

Justin Nassiri  52:41  

I really appreciate that. So my email is justin@captivate.ai. or, excuse me, if you go to captivate.ai, we have a lot of call to actions to request a demo for me or someone from my team to see if we can add value. I would say in general, always happy to chat with anyone. In general, we tend to work with companies that are already investing in a podcast or webinar, or live event series. So that’s the easiest place to start with our self-service platform. We do work with larger companies to help them create webinars, podcasts, things like that. But it’s a lot easier if you already have that because we’re gonna instantly add value by creating more content and the data to go along with it.

 

Richard Matthews  53:22  

Awesome. Thank you so much for coming to the show today. Justin, if you are listening to this and you are already creating content, definitely take the time to reach out to Captivate.ai I know we’re going to be looking into it personally over push button podcasts to see if it’s a tool we should be adding to our arsenal. But yeah, I appreciate you coming on and sharing your story today. Justin, do you have any final words of wisdom for our audience before I hit this stop record button?

 

Justin Nassiri  53:46  

No, I love what you’re doing and I really am grateful for the opportunity to share my story. 

 

Richard Matthews  53:50  

Awesome. Thank you for coming today.