Ira 0:04

Hello and welcome . I am Ira Gordon and , along with Stacee Santi , the host of The Accidental Entrepreneurs podcast . We each previously founded successful companies Along the way . We became business owners and eventually sold those businesses despite us having no real background in business or ever even planning to become entrepreneurs . In other words , we did this all despite originally having no idea what we were doing or getting ourselves into . In each episode of this podcast , we will share stories and tips from our journey and we'll answer a randomly chosen question about our experience . Let's jump right into the show .

Stacee 0:42

So did you have time to think about the question from last week

Today's question: What were some of the marketing ideas that failed?

Stacee 0:46

, which was "what were some of the marketing ideas that failed ?

Ira's answer

Ira 0:51

Yeah , I've got a pretty bad one . It's almost like embarrassing to even share .

Stacee 0:58

It can't be more embarrassing than the one I'm going to share . So you go first though .

Ira 1:03

We had this product that just wasn't taken off . It was hygienist prep . So it was our prep course for dental hygienists that we built and we had done all this research . We're like it's this big market , these people make almost as much money as vets do . And we knew some hygienists and they're like oh , this would be great , right , and I'm like I'll come , like I'll come . We can't sell this thing Like well , we don't know hygienists , like what is it ?

Ira 1:29

And there was this group that had dental hygiene in-person border views , which is kind of like we're sort of familiar with this in optometry . Like the dominant board prep company was somebody that did in-person border views . And then we started to sort of take over a market share from them when we built the optoprep . But in hygienist prep we were getting double digit subscribers . It just wasn't really moving . John went to one of these in-person border view seminars , despite us saying we don't really know if this is a good idea . This kind of seems a little weird and shady for us to be at their thing . But he went and he stayed at the same hotel as the thing . He just started talking to all the people there and handing out our cards and stuff .

Stacee 2:25

Like promoting it at their event .

Ira 2:29

Yeah , not literally in their lecture , but at the same place that they were doing their thing and it just felt like super . I don't know , we're not really supposed . There's nothing illegal about what we're doing , but it just feels kind of yucky right yeah .

Stacee 2:47

As my Memom would say , it seems a little tacky .

Ira 2:51

Yeah , that's probably the best word for it , but anyway it didn't really help Ultimately . Like the guy that ran that company , he's sort of influential in that space . So we pissed off one of the opinion leaders when it came to sort of dental hygiene board prep by doing this tacky thing at his event and yeah , I think it ended up hurting us rather than helping us and it was just something like we just always felt not good about it because we were sort of resistant to it . It felt like we kind of got pushed into doing it and then we kind of got called out on it , right , and it's like , yeah , like ultimately , like this is our business and like we did , we green-lighted the idea , although I think we didn't , we didn't really expect everything that happened to be everything that happened , but it was the worst case scenario that we imagined happening .

Stacee 3:51

The lesson learned from that is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of integrity , like integrity with your company . I've been in the same spot too where you are feeling like these . I don't know you have a funny feeling about it , but you're not sure . You should always acknowledge that funny feeling , because always that feeling is leading you , it's trying to tell you something .

Ira 4:19

I think marketing makes scientists and doctors and those types of people uncomfortable . Good marketing makes them a little bit uncomfortable , but bad marketing makes them very uncomfortable . That's a hard line to know when you've crossed it , the big ethics test of how would you feel if what you did here showed up in the front page of the newspaper ? Would that be something you're like yeah , I feel okay about that , or good about that , or I feel like that would be really embarrassing ? This is definitely one of those . Yeah , this would be really embarrassing .

Stacee 4:59

Yeah , I can relate because in my company it was pretty competitive , as there were several companies doing the same thing and several of the other companies were posting on their website these little checklists of who does what . These are things that big companies do . That you think maybe sales force versus HubSpot versus here's all the boxes we check , here's where your competitors deficient . Some of the companies went deep into where everyone else sucks in order to make their candle shine brighter . My marketing team was like we got to get in there and do that .

Stacee 5:44

I just always felt so weird about it because I actually knew that these were people that were real entrepreneurs like me and they are hustling and they are doing their best . Also , not that I don't mind taking a dig at someone , but I didn't 100% know if my dig was accurate and I didn't know what they were working on on their roadmap to . Maybe my dig was going to be short-lived because they had an improvement coming out , or a lot of the digs were on bugs . Oh , did you know that the competitor can't do this ? I'm not saying we didn't dabble in that because we did , because everyone else is doing it , so why shouldn't you ? But I never felt proud of that . That isn't something I could walk around a conference and be like oh , I did this , I regret doing some of that .

Ira 6:39

Yeah , now I totally understand and this was always really hard because we had one major competitor for Vet Prep and for most of our other products . There's other people doing similar things . Yeah , this comes up . You feel sometimes attacked by what other people do and you've got to figure out whether you should respond . People would ask us all the time why should I pick your thing over somebody else's thing ? It takes a lot of practice and discipline to develop a response that doesn't feel like you're avoiding the question but also isn't taking shots at somebody else's product that , frankly , you don't really know what's on their product roadmap .

Ira 7:18

So if you say well , the reason is because we have this thing that they don't look like maybe they're going to have that next week Maybe they already have it and you don't even know it yet .

Ira 7:28

So it just puts you in this position of being an expert on something that you are not actually an expert on .

Ira 7:35

And I think , yes , it's simple-ish to take this refrain of like , well , I'm going to speak about what I know about , which is all the good things about my product , but you kind of need a little bit of a delicate and refined approach to do that without seeming like you're avoiding the question . But really the ethical thing to do is to admit that , like you know , like I hear that they have a fine product , but like what I really know is what's great about mine ? Right , and you should talk to them about you know what's great about their product . Let me tell you what's great about mine . And I think ultimately , like we figured out how to do that , but not without some slip-ups along the way , for sure . And those things they don't really help your business and they certainly don't help your reputation , and it's a pretty small world and people find out and then you end up having to defend yourself for making you know claims about something that you didn't know that much about .

Stacee 8:41

I think people really like more of authentic voice . They don't want to be bullshitted by your massive claims of you know we can fix anything and we're gonna save the world .

Ira 8:54

I think people are tired of it . Stacee , have you ever

A clip from the movie "Crazy People"

Ira 8:57

seen the movie Crazy People ?

Stacee 8:58

No .

Ira 9:00

Oh my gosh , I haven't seen it in ages . I probably need to re-watch it . But the premise , which I'm probably gonna screw up , is basically there's this ad executive who's tired of , like you know , promoting these unrealistic visions and he starts writing ads that are like really what the product does and they're not very positive and I think they put them in a mental institution or something . But basically the ads start working because people actually you know that's they want on his advertising .

Stacee 9:32

Clip from movie: Buy Volvos . They're boxy but they're good .

Stacee's answer

Stacee 11:09

Well, for me, I have several failed marketing ideas . I mean, I have a bunch, but I have three to share . So the first is probably the funniest I think . I really wanted one of those explainer video for Vet2Pet that I could put out on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever . Y bbut I haDry erase board making a picture . I tried to figure out how to do that . I couldn't do it . Others were using avatars to try to record . I tried doing that , I couldn't do it .

Stacee 11:20

So I ended up going on Upwork and I put the job out there and I'd had pretty good success at Upwork . So this person , I don't know , somewhere else on the planet , picked up the gig , for I want to say it was about $300 , maybe $500 I spent and I communicated with them through the chat on Upwork what I wanted , and I waited and waited and it was delayed and I finally got my explainer video and , oh my god , it was so bad . I'm going to share it in the show notes so you guys can see it . It was ultimately like culturally inappropriate . It had all these little avatars of all these ethnic people in there and then at the very end it had an avatar of me sliding down a rainbow . It was something that when I finally went to I don't know if you know Craig Spinks at Veteos ? They make these high end production explainer videos I went to him and he charges quite a bit more than that guy and I showed him what I had paid for and he just died laughing and he's like can we use that in our marketing of what not to do and what being ?

Stacee 12:46

What Martin , my business partner Martin , would say his grandmother used to tell him is we're too poor to be cheap . You know , we've got to have good quality stuff right out of the gate or we're just wasting money . And you guys , you're not laughing now , but please click on the link in the show notes and you will have a good chuckle . It's really , really bad . So another fail I had this one's pretty funny too is I was out of . I was going to a trade show and I thought you know , you need to . You need something to get the people to stop by your booth , like some sort of shotski . Is that what they say ? It Chotski , or ?

Ira 13:25

Yep .

Stacee 13:26

And I got this big giant gumball machine off of Amazon and I filled it with jelly beans that were purple and green , which is our brand color , and then I thought people could come and just get a dose of their jelly beans . But I got one that was automated and so people wouldn't have to crank the wheel to get the jelly beans to come out , but there was a delay on the automation , so when you put your hand under the dispenser , nothing happened Very similar to when you go to try to get a paper towel .

Ira 14:04

A dispenser ?

Stacee 14:05

Yeah , yeah , and you waving and nothing happened . So you take your hand out and you keep waving . So what would happen is people would put their hand under the jelly bean dispenser . Nothing would happen . So they take their hand out to re-wave and at that exact moment all the jelly beans would come out all over the floor .

Ira 14:21

That happens to me every time I use an automated soap dispenser . I'm like what ? Is going on . I'm like I give up and then , as soon as you do like , the soap just drops right on the counter .

Stacee 14:28

So this resulted in jelly beans all over the floor all day long . The more people that came to the booth , the more jelly beans . It was just such a fail . That was a product fail . Another one this one's probably more serious fail is in the beginning of Vet2Pet .

Stacee 14:50

We knew that veterinarians would need to market their app to their clients and we really wanted to make it turnkey . So they didn't have to lift a finger , and my theory was make it frictionless , make it easy , they'll do it . And so we would spend quite a bit of time and money creating a marketing box for them . It came with note cards you could put out at your front desk . It came with some posters or a mouse pad you could put at the when people write their check . You know all all these things like quite a few little things that we custom branded and we printed for them .

Stacee 15:32

And then Karyn's son , who was probably about 10 at the time . We hired him to come and he'd put them all in the box and we'd write a handwritten note to them . I mean , this was with love , right , and we'd ship it off to the customer , and we were spending a lot of not only labor but money printing A lot of child labor and a lot of money printing all these things and shipping costs . And so after a year or so , I started wondering are these really working ?

Stacee 16:08

And we started to run some numbers to try to see , you know , people that got the marketing kit versus people that didn't get the marketing kit how were they performing ? And we ended up finding there was no correlation to people that got the marketing box did better than the people that didn't . And in fact , the reason we ended up running this little pilot was because we would call our customers and we would ask them do you need more refills ? Or people just weren't ordering refills and they were free , right , so why weren't you ordering ? Well , what we found is , a lot of times this box would arrive to somebody in the practice and they didn't really know what it was and it ended up on a shelf somewhere and nobody the people that needed to know about it the manager , the owner of the practice never even got it . And it was such a waste of money and effort that we just ended up stopping that and we started charging people for their marketing supplies , because when you buy something , you have more of a buy-in right .

Stacee 17:22

Yeah , like I'm expecting something . So that turned out to be a much better approach and , if I'm being honest , somebody actually told me this advice before early in the game and I just didn't believe them . They're like , oh , you always have to charge for marketing supplies and I'm like I don't think so . But she was right .

Ira 17:47

The first time , probably two or three years in to VetP rep , we started to get some calls from universities and this is really cool like they wanted to sign up their whole class to take VetP rep . Because pass rates for boards are one of the criteria that are used for schools to be accredited and obviously it's important to them for all their students to get licensed , and this is really neat . Instead of having to try to sell our product to a hundred individual students like we can just sell it to the whole school . How great is that ? But what happened in some of those first examples was not surprising , given what you just shared . Right , the school paid for subscription for all the students and what happened ? Most of the students didn't use the product nearly as much as they did when students were paying for it themselves .

Ira 18:40

And they didn't do as well on their board exams as most of our users did , and it was a big realization for us that we really need to be kind of careful . Although it was maybe best in the short term for the business for us to get these bigger sales , we needed to make sure that we got the right buy-in from all the stakeholders , including the students themselves , that this was something valuable that they needed to use in order to get a benefit that they needed from it . So another one of those learning experiences yeah , free is a four-letter word , right .

Ira 19:21

Yeah , people feel like they get what they pay for , right , it's sort of the gym membership thing .

Stacee 19:27

Oh yeah , let's not go there . Okay , so now it's time in the show where we will share a favorite tip , trick , quote , inspirational something . What do you have for us today , Ira ?

Ira's tip of the week: A book called "The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team" by Pat Lencioni

Ira 19:41

So a book that I really liked probably more relevant for my time leading veterinary practices than my time at VetPrep , but applies to both is a book called the Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni , and it is a pretty funny and engaging book that kind of walks through the ways that teams can be dysfunctional and the approach that leaders can take to try to improve the function of teams , and I would really like that I shared it with numerous practice managers that worked with me at the practices over the years .

Stacee 20:20

I haven't read that book , so I'll have to check that out .

Stacee's tip of the week: Loom

Stacee 20:23

For me, I want to talk about Loom , and I discovered this I don't know maybe five or six years ago , and what it is is . It is a video recording program . You can use it on your desktop or on your phone , and you can either share your screen or just record yourself , or both , and it allows you to make quick videos that you can forward out to other people . So the cool thing is is it's all hosted on their site , so you just get a URL , so it's like streaming , and the recipient of the video can add comments on the video at certain timestamps , they can give you emojis , and you can actually have a conversation in the video about the video , which I used in several ways .

Stacee 21:20

One of my favorite ways , though , was one of my team members that was more on the operational side . She would send me an end of week recap on loom , and this avoided a meeting , right ? She would just send me a recap , and then I could ask her questions in the video about , and she'd say hey , what do you think about this ? Tell me in the video , and I would just be able to have a conversation with her without having to meet , which ended up doing a lot of things Like kept our Fridays pretty clean , which we always like getting trying to get home early on Friday , but it also gave a record of what we were working on , so that was good . The other way I'd use this was to record just videos to my team so I could do just a quick little end of week recaps or first of the week let's go get them videos , and it was just an easy way to communicate with people without having to pull everyone into a Zoom room . So I really love Loom .

Ira 22:22

It's great . I only used it a little bit . I think I used it once for a online CE that I had put together and that was how they wanted to collect all the videos . It was kind of neat , but that's interesting insight into how to use it on the sort of operational side .

Stacee 22:38

Well , we started using it too on customer support , because you would get people that say I don't know how to reset my password and we're like OK , well , you click on the button that says reset your password , which we would make a little video and you could have them stockpiled . So you could just share a little screen recording . It's personal , it's easier . A lot of people are visual learners . They don't like to read long instructions , so definitely check that one out .

Ira 23:08

Use it lately .

Stacee 23:10

How do you use it lately ? Mostly because I don't really have a job anymore , so I don't know .

Ira 23:15

Yeah , I heard a few months ago that loom was bought by Atlassian , which , if you know who Atlassian is , they have a lot of interesting products . They have confluence .

Stacee 23:24

They bought Trello and they bought Trello . That is my favorite .

Ira 23:27

And I believe they own . Jira as well , and they are continuing to sort of put together a pretty interesting suite of tools .

Stacee 23:36

Oh , I didn't know that . Very good to know , all right , well , I guess it's time to spin the wheel .

Ira 23:43

All right , "you have to sue anyone .

Stacee 23:53

Oh , I got a story on that . I did actually .

Ira 23:57

Oh boy , I will leave everybody unsuspense about me .

Stacee 24:02

All right , See you guys next time .