[Music] Brett thank you so much for joining us here it's another episode of Jolly SEO tldr I have known you mostly through email we've met a few calls over the years this is Brett falo founder of featured we are I like to than early adopters longtime Advocates I've shared about featured in a backlinko article recently on the stage in Brighton and Shenzhen and Bangkok I'm just so curious today to share your side of the story because I'm over here talking about what I know of feature but I'm on the outside so thank you for taking the time yeah thanks for having me and happy to share a little bit more about the journey and yeah be hopefully helpful to the audience here so you want me to jump into the backstory I'd actually love to know it because just for the audience's sake I am a failed agency to SAS kind of transition it was like a classic thing five 10 years ago oh you run an agency well why don't you do a software and Morgan and I invested three years and a couple hundred thousand bucks and the software is still alive but we couldn't do what what you have pulled off here and I remember meeting and being an early adopter and you at one point even opened up I don't know if you ever took investment and you stunned me with your foresight because you're like no as an early user that would be a potential conflict of interest if we IPO in the future so I can't have you guys invest and I was like all right well that's why we're failing like you're thinking on totally different levels than we were so yeah I'd love to know like what was going through your mind when you made that transition because it was levels beyond what I was thinking about yeah yeah definitely just to to back it all the way up I ran a marketing agency for 10 years I had no intention to make it an agency was just kind of a freelance thing for me for about four years and then I got the website to rank on page one of Google for the term digital marketing company and at that point I started getting calls from all over the world of people who were discovering quote unquote my my digital marketing company it was me and my dog and so I started to to max out on clients and then started hiring employees to service those clients Flash Forward we tried to beat all things to all people and be a digital marketing company which to me was email marketing social PPC SEO website building eventually after about two years specialized in search engine optimization did content development digital PR and Technical SEO for small businesses so we serviced over 500 smbs and essentially the hardest thing for us to do was the digital PR component how do you get a small business owner placed in an article and help them build their visibility online and so ultimately we created what was at the time called tural as a just in-house product for us to take our clients asked them questions that spoke to their expertise because we had clients that range from equipment financing to eyelash extension supplies to you name it and basically what I learned is that small business owners have an abundance of knowledge to share but nowhere to share it and so tural was originally created as an outlet for those small business owners to share to get their insights placed Flash Forward basically turqu started to get more traction and the agency decided to sell the agency at the end of uh 2021 and just jump into to what's now featured fulltime in 2022 so here we are about three years in and it's been a crazy Journey yeah wild wait so you had the clients they needed an outlet does that mean tural as an in-house tool already you had some Publishers that were hungry for those contributors' expertise yeah early on and you talked about how do you create a Marketplace like there's always a hard side of the marketplace the hard side of the of our Marketplace is Publishers how do you find websites to you know essentially wave their hand and say hey we want some content and can you create some great high quality content for us so initially that Marketplace was seated just with like my own network my own personal connections reaching out to having been in the space for over a decade it's reaching out to other website owners content managers you know and just hitting them up to say hey would you try it so it doesn't happen very quickly it's a lot of sheer effort and relationships and things like that but that's how it initially got started yeah I'm just like I said sympathetic that was for all of our areas that we failed that was the most challenging and the area where I dragged my feet the most was accepting that if I don't get the Publishers on board and we're always beholden to other sources we're never going to be independent and that's where you guys have have really excelled and I think really quickly started competing with the helper reporter that's now dead with the connectively that's now dead platforms like quoted right you just you got in there and you got the Publishers which to do that though you you have educated me on which I learned but didn't really fully adopt but that is also what killed it you have to have enough contributors like enough varied contributors because the Publishers aren't going to come back if they're not getting contributions that matter yeah one of the most interesting case studies that really inspired us was uh Cameo so if you know Cameo no you can essentially pay for a celebrity to uh film a short video and anything from a happy birthday video to yes you you name it we we had a friend actually Morgan my buddy for a friend's birthday paid that the guy who did the pedophilia series for one of the DAT line I think did a quick Cameo on a friend's voicemail exactly so their go to market strategy was focus on dless celebrities that are huge like that guy who is a huge deal to like 10 people and they're like huge fans of that person so focus on all the dless celebrities and ultimately you get to the C's and the B's and then the the aess celebrities like Snoop Dogg so for us similar strategy our first industry vertical was human resources and we attracted you know sites like the soci for Human Resource Management t. com er. net you know all these different sites that if you're in HR you've heard of and so basically it's a huge deal for an HR professional to be featured on tnc.
com and it doesn't matter to the 99. 9 other percent of people not really but it's a huge deal to see the marketplace you kind of have to have initial focus and traction and for us it was HR and since then we've gr gravitated over to other markets marketing technology Finance now we're getting into home and garden and each one becomes a little bit easier to to enter into yeah the analogy There is almost everywhere in life right like you there are people who just shoot for the what is it shoot for the stars and if you miss it would land on the moon but a lot of us you work your way up building blocks like you to start small whether it's clients or in link building it's you got to work with smaller sites build up your own sites Authority and then the bigger sites will recognize you I can only imagine is similar with the Publishers yeah definitely and the thing is with Publishers is you got to prove it you got to prove that it works right a lot of what our early success has happened is just the success of the content it's a lot of people talk about oh include you know expert insights with the eat stuff in your content and then it'll start to take off we've been pretty fortunate to to like have firsthand experiences of that to see from a publisher perspective if you do a Content refresh and you insert one or two expert quotes what kind of ab tests that have versus something that doesn't include that and you just manually update it so a lot of how we've won over Publishers has just been in proof and performance and it's been pretty cool to see some of our articles be top performers on different different sites what because you're trying to balance both sides and I'm trying to think about the best way to ask this question but I I wanted to either ask what's the most challenging of managing the Publishers versus the contributors though you kind of just mentioned it with the Publishers but what's the unique challenge you face is it just constantly a balancing act where one time your attention's on one side one time sometimes it's on the other or is there a central almost like mission where you're bridging that that was something I couldn't figure out when I tried to accomplish this software yeah I think that the the thing that unites both sides is our mission statement to unlock new knowledge so Publishers want to share new interesting information with the readers and experts want to share their expertise and oftentimes they just don't have an outlet to share that so as long as we're doing that really well for both sides allowing Publishers to surface new knowledge and for experts to share that knowledge by matching them with personaliz interesting questions that they want to answer that's our our core challenge how do you match up a new question with the right expert how do you ultimately deliver the best insights over to those Publishers so you can accomplish that mission you do something that not all of the platforms do I could be wrong about saying none of them do so I'm not going to say that but you do something where you require the contributor to have a LinkedIn profile and a head shot unless I'm mistaken on the second one and I know this because again Jolly is still an active user and we plan to be for years to come right so every client we get to represent they need to be and this is something that I'll admit a few years back we still had a few clients playing the game of the fake persona right the owner wanted to be in the background and not out there on the internet but we've all seen at least most of us have seen the shift and frankly I'm grateful as a consumer I I want to a fourth estate where there's transparency and legitimacy There's real people contributing real knowledge I'm just curious from your perspective for the Publishers what's the priority is it that it's the person is legitimate or is it that the quality of the content is superior because AI a llm rapper writing tools has been kind of hot and cold for the last couple years or is it both those or is it something else entirely like what because I we run a Facebook group with a couple Publishers as well and quality of content seems to be a big one I'm not sure what's the biggest concern I think it's both I think it's both like you got to have both to be really successful and if I were to just choose one I think it goes back to the the person who yeah who are you quoting because ultimately you could have one of the best insights but if it's coming from a source that maybe doesn't have the track record The Experience some of that those credentials then I think that a publisher would rather feature someone with those creds and you mentioned AI usage and doing some of that like I think that quite honestly going back to the vision of unlocking new knowledge um the biggest challenge that experts have is mainly a Time issue how do you find the time to share your knowledge in meaningful ways so going back to like is AI usage it's really early on that and I think that the most important thing is the the digital signature of someone signing off and pressing submit so if you have the credentials and you're being the verification in between that for Publishers that's probably what's most important yeah it's really interesting representing clients in Outreach because we and I speak on this topic at conferences and I always run into people who are adamantly opposed to any form of ghost riding which I always tell them I completely respect that's that's nothing for me to convince you that there's something morally okay or it's that it's ethical uh however not all of our clients are trying to be famous I'm not trying to say that but everyone famous we know has a ghost writer of some form right whether it's for a book or a speech or they're literally reading teleprompters all these things so like it I do respect it but it's a time what you said and I also say it's a bit of expertise just in the writing side because not all subject matter experts are also excellent writers and and it's intimidating for a lot of them and I mean you you see tons of very successful people who say straight up like oh I don't read because I'm dyslexic or I that's doesn't mean they're an idiot they're just they're not great with letters and words that's that's the way it is so yeah yeah we see a lot of that I could vouch for that you know true industry experts who when it comes to crafting a usable quote or usable answer that's a skill that they generally lack so you know having some writing assistance to put your knowledge into a digestable consum consumable format is definitely like an area that a lot of people need help with yeah speak and recording right I'm not a pro at this I was nervous coming into this it's tough for a lot of people come to us to put their thoughts down and then hit that button like you said it's a impostor syndrome all these things really cool thanks thanks for sharing the current challenges I mean I think the last little bit I'd love to hear from you but that's just my side then I want to hear if there's anything I missed is any preview into where the platform goes from here like I said one of the things that struck me when I met you was the fact that you're looking further ahead than I was managing to when I was trying to do this so anything you can share uh that's on the road map yeah I think that a lot of the the years ahead are really around having more places to get featured so yeah you know for us it's we've done a lot of innovation in in 2024 where we've offered new content types that allow people to share their knowledge in different ways so we went from just a question and answer platform where you're sharing knowledge in four8 sentences to now you can author a full length article and get that placed in more than a thousand different Publications so that's one example of how we're allowing people to share knowledge in in different ways I think that as you continue to evolve as a platform you've got different media formats that you could go from so right now it's we're just text what happens if you can throw a microphone button on featured and allowed people to do audio or video or maybe AI becomes a an acceptable way to share knowledge and there's different ways that you could take an existing knowledge base and and really like multiply your efforts in terms of the knowledge that you could share so I think that it's a very very interesting landscape from a publishing perspective search is dramatically changed search traffic has dramatically changed Publishers are dramatically changing so it's really hard to predict like where we're going as a business and I think that the thing that I'm trying to do as a Founder is figuring out where what the world looks like and where can we drive the most value so I think a lot of my answer depends on a lot of different things that that could potentially happen for us it's just staying true to the mission because we believe that people always well have knowledge to share they have a need to share their expertise that's been around in humanity for you know millions of years to share knowledge and so as long as we do that well I think that we'll we'll find our fit yeah yeah you do an amazing job of navigating that I just for the listener I this isn't like a pump BR and featured episode there's things that I disagree with that you've done with the platform that I voiced you and that's another thing I think you excel at is customer service like you take the time explain why you're doing what you're doing and that's obviously as a user I just need to use the platform that you're making right but you also listen to our feedback and build features just directly from the feedback which is really cool I'm honestly just real quick that's my favorite part of my job is talking with people who use the platform we've got over 40,000 people who who use it right now and I love being up on LinkedIn in my inbox on a zoom call I've seen a lot of successful Founders like one of my biggest Inspirations I went to MailChimp a number of years ago and got to spend time with their co-founders and just listen to how they spend their time and a lot of their time is spent at a desk over the shoulder of watching someone use MailChimp at a dinner talking and having some wine with the customer and talking about how do they use MailChimp how do they hear about it and the closer that you can get to a customer I think the better product that you develop so to your point like that's my favorite thing to do and also the most important thing that I do at try to have about 20 25 different customer conversations a week and just learn about what we could do to better support people in their business yeah I think uh that's a lot I could learn there as a business owner right every time I find that my business is in Decline um in a little Mastermind they're very good about being like how many customers have you talked to this month I'm like I haven't talked to a customer very recently that's probably the problem right so it yeah you can't check out it's fun to think that you can force a will your way through the world but we are connected did and you got it you mention all the external things like Google the different search platforms frankly the gpts of the world CLA but your customers right you got to adapt to their needs so makes sense uh what did I forget to ask that you came in here thinking like we we should at least cover this because that's why I'm here I want to learn from you yeah I mean not a whole lot like I could talk about featured I could talk about what's happening in the the industry landscape with expert in platforms like ours um we'll talk about that what's what's like where's features place in this like what's happening in the landscap I mean right at the point of recording we just saw not just haro's death but now it's successor connectively they're just shutting down right so that's a big big wave yeah and I think that one's less about like I think that it's been pretty noisy online about that uh a lot of people have different takes my personal take is just the economics caught up with the platform I think that when it was originally created the business model was newsletter ads and newsletter ads brought it to a million in Revenue they sold it for 1. 6 million in cash and 2010 to vocus vocus was a $92 million company at the time they over the course from 2010 to 2014 when they merged with cion they doubled the revenue they used herrow probably as a lead generation so that they could upsell different PR agencies to their services cion and vocus merged and so all of a sudden Revenue went from from like 100% at when it was just an independently ran to 1% of Revenue to now when it's a merger with cision and and vocus and it's a billion dollar company now it's like a tenth of a percent of a revenue and with the need for internal resources to be devoted to running the service and so I think that like purely from like a black and white perspective I think that it got shut down not because it wasn't successful but because it's placed within cision is the sense that they could take those internal resources put them to another product that's Genera a ton of revenue for them and be able to multiply their company so I think that for it's just a business decision and I think that it's more than that for a lot of people because there's a personal connection to it it's like 15 years of usage and there's some really good memories everyone remembers like the first placement that they got on the platform they remember the good old days the bad days so it's just a a platform that a lot of knowledge was shared a lot of effort was done a lot of Trials a lot of like growth that you may have seen as a marketer so I think that it's sad but I also think that it's just like purely economical yeah yeah maybe and I could echo or I would say I represent a lot of what you just described right like we built this little company off of that Outreach when I had to freelance doing that so yeah it's it can be emotionally charged but maybe you were going to go a different angle when I said we'll talk about that because you're in the mid sentence but I was like Brett's willing to share that's what I'd like to know but yeah no I just think that it's an interesting footnote of where we're at right now and the end of 2024 and that decision we'll see I think that there's there's a couple interesting directions that it could still go I don't think that it's you go to the site now and it's still up so you never know what could happen yeah any anything else you want to share before we head out no just go to I mean I'm accessible available all the time at radit feature.
com so drop me a note feel free to connect on LinkedIn check out featured.
