FIVE BIG TAKEAWAYS
1. We live with self-fulfilling prophecies--your innermost desires lead to your thoughts, and your actions are predicated on your thoughts.
2. Think about how far you've come with the gain with your mind. Don't focus on the gap (see RESOURCES).
3. Jon doesn't recommend growth at any cost. Processes and organization from the start is helpful.
4. Separate automation workflows by category.
5. Make sure workflows don't have a single point of failure when building them.
GUEST BIO
Jon is a visionary/integrator entrepreneur who has built a business around helping marketing leaders tackle tough operational challenges head-on and ultimately overcoming them. He is the Owner of ULAND – a boutique marketing agency, the Co-founder of Stitch.vip – a membership management platform for everyday businesses, and a Producer of music and independent film projects.
RESOURCES
YouTube: Moon Village Pocket Sessions: https://www.youtube.com/c/MoonVillageMusic
Book: The Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan with Dr. Benjamin Hardy: https://www.amazon.com/Gap-Gain-Achievers-Happiness-Confidence/dp/1401964362
Podcast: Chris Goodman's Relentless Growth Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/relentless-growth/id1524826698
Connect with our guest, Jon Uland, on LinkedIn:
Check out his company: https://www.stitch.vip/
Transcript
[00:00:20] Islin Munisteri: Okay, great. Okay. Let's get started. Yeah. Hi, this is Islin Munisteri. I'm host of the rev ops careers podcast.
[00:00:29] And we're sponsored by Theia strategies. I'd like to invite John Uland on the show today.
[00:00:37] John Uland: Hi, thanks for having me. I'm excited to. Yeah, I'm
[00:00:40] excited
[00:00:41] Islin Munisteri: for you to be on here too. John is a visionary integrator entrepreneur who has built a business around helping marketing leaders tackle tough operational challenges, head on and ultimately overcoming them.
[00:00:54] He is the owner of Uland a boutique marketing agency and the co-founder of stitch.vip. A membership management platform for everyday businesses and a producer of music and independent film projects. I'm excited to have him with us
[00:01:11] John Uland: today. Thanks. I'm excited to be here too. Yeah, it's if you can't tell I have ADHD but it's a super power.
[00:01:17] It's quite wonderful. Get to do a lot of things.
[00:01:20] Islin Munisteri: Yeah. It's exciting. And I guess let's. Dive right into it. So yeah. How did you start your career and rev ops journey?
[00:01:28] John Uland: Oh, man, this, so I was a developer for a company called Qualtrics back in the day. And I got really burned out writing code all the time.
[00:01:39] And so much that I would find like, just any project I could to like. Boost productivity or basically do something more creative, more customer facing than what I was working on. Eventually it got to the point where I could, I was like, I can't do this anymore. and but I wanted to keep like the, this beautiful, there's a beautiful aspect.
[00:02:01] Development where it's you're building something from nothing. I wanted to keep bits of that, but I wanted the excitement of marketing. And so I, I landed in in a job in demand generation, email marketing, and and that took me from Utah to New York to a whole bunch of different companies to then starting my own.
[00:02:18] It's it's been a wild ride, but it's been quite worth.
[00:02:21] Islin Munisteri: I know you at one point, looking at your LinkedIn profile, you worked at, I think teachable.
[00:02:26] John Uland: I did. Yeah. I worked for teachable, the course creation platform. Yes.
[00:02:30] Islin Munisteri: How was that? It was one of your
[00:02:31] John Uland: yes, longer, longer roles. So I know.
[00:02:34] Yeah. I was I was, working at startups when, during this sort of startup boom. And so I jumped around a lot, which is quite fun for me, but I love teachable. I. I actually was just texting on core. He's the founder of teachable. And for, I think he's out now cuz they sold. But I he was tweeting the other day about all the things he learned, being a young CEO.
[00:02:55] He's only a year older than me. So I think when we started, when I started working there, I was employee number 29 and he was. How old was I was like 26, maybe 20. And he was just so like you imagine 27 year old founder. And I got to watch him grow to be, in, in that role as a founder, CEO, and now an exit CEO and every, there is so much I learned from him particularly, but also the whole team was full of, and maybe everyone says this about companies they love, but like, the team was just so good.
[00:03:29] I created so many lasting relationships. My best friend was my boss actually at teachable. And and we do business together all the time sort of thing. It's just I've created lasting relationships, learned a lot. And then I also, on top of that, I ended up toward the end of my tenure there.
[00:03:43] I ended up helping course creators, start their own, get started with marketing and answer their questions about starting their own business with teachable. And so I would run these webinars and get to talk to these successful course creators. And then these beginning course creators to help them.
[00:04:01] You. Grow as business people. And it was it was really rewarding. So I think teachable, got a lot of things, got a few things wrong and but ultimately the idea, has really changed the economy in so many ways. So huge man. Yeah.
[00:04:16] Islin Munisteri: They, there were totally a, I would say a unicorn in that space.
[00:04:20] John Uland: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. They're, so good. And. I could talk all day you could talk
[00:04:25] Islin Munisteri: all day about it. That's great. Yeah, they're great. And I know you, you had a role at Warner music group for a little while, like doing, you switched from High tech to entertainment. Like
[00:04:35] John Uland: Yeah. It's funny. I always wanted to work in the music industry. I'm a music producer myself. I've got my own music project. I write for I write for indie films and and commercials music. And and so I've always wanted to work in the music space because. Of because of that interest.
[00:04:54] And I had this thing where I like manifest stuff and which some people might get angry list hearing that, but I went, I was at teachable and I at the time and I was like, I really would like to, I really would like to make a move into the music space and then not, month later I get a DM in my LinkedIn from Warner music group saying, Hey, there's this opportunity.
[00:05:14] And it. Look, the pay was crap. the benefits. Meh, but the people were awesome and it was a, again, super cool industry. The team was great. Made some lasting friendships there too, actually even had some. So I used to I used to, when I lived in New York I used to Organize these at home.
[00:05:33] Think of it like a tiny desk concert, but it was in an apartment like an apartment that had been made into a studio. And I would even bring some of them to go and it's on it's online. Moon village, pocket sessions. And we'd record some really cool stuff. And those are my, some of them were my coworkers.
[00:05:48] So I got to into this super indie music scene in New York and because of working through Warner and really opened my eyes to a whole, whole new level of that industry that I had never understood, or never knew that it existed. And there are so many talented people working in there.
[00:06:05] And and working on music. So I got just, I feel like I really got to see the avant guard of Indian music in modern times. It was super cool.
[00:06:15] Islin Munisteri: Cool. And I guess we could dive deeper into I know everyone's like I work in marketing ops, so I work in rev ops and I don't. Believe in the woo.
[00:06:26] The manifestation . But I feel like that's a topic we're diving deeper into. Absolutely. Because I, I feel you don't like if you can manifest but without taking any action, you're like just manifesting, you have to take action and manifest, but yeah
[00:06:41] John Uland: I, oh, sorry.
[00:06:43] Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. No I am a big Proponent of this sort of self-fulfilling prophecies. I think that we ultimately are the result of our innermost desires that lead to our thoughts. If I desire one thing and that's all I think about all the time, my actions are gonna be predicated based on what I'm thinking about.
[00:06:59] My actions are going to lead to the results I get. Leads to my quote, unquote, destiny, if you will, , it's not pre-prescribed for me or anything. It's just we achieve what we truly want and think about that, that has a double edged sword, right? If we think about failure all the time, then we're gonna fail like that happens.
[00:07:17] But there's a good book. I haven't read all of it, but it's called the gap in the gain. Talks about what you're focusing on. You focusing on how far you have to go or how far you've come. And if you're focusing on the gain, how far you've come, it's a lot more. To your progress than then focusing on what you don't have a half, half empty half full sort of scenario.
[00:07:37] But yeah, so I like, there is some aspect of woo about it, like the secret, but at the end of the day, I really don't think it is that mystic, I think it, it really like I'm, I am I'm not I'm like this may be getting way too personal, but I'm like, I'm not super spiritual. I at the, but at the end of the day, I do think that there, we have this, amazing control over our mind and that can lead to us accomplishing some really incredible things in life.
[00:08:06] And that. And incredible is totally subjective, right? Like incredible. I would love, I, one of my, one of my life goals is to open a brewery and slash there's a couple of things, but like these sorts of local, like a local business of sorts, like a brewery or an EPA where you bees and a cheesery
[00:08:27] like a cheesecake, I would love to do weird stuff like that. Like that would be incredible if I could, if I get the chance to do it some people want to be billionaires. That might be nice. Sure. I don't really want that. Either way, regardless of whether you wanna be a billionaire or you want to own a Cheesery or an apiary I think your mind, it comes down to your mindset and And how you think about your thoughts?
[00:08:47] So I invest a lot of time and money into like life coaching, business coaching mental and emotional health. Oh yeah. I
[00:08:53] Islin Munisteri: definitely believe in the, yeah. The, I haven't had a huge success with business coaching per se but yeah, that mental, emotional health therapy, spiritual mentors, like trying to to.
[00:09:03] To get your mind to like the next level that, yeah, I believe that
[00:09:07] John Uland: definitely. I have a, just a shout out for a business coach. It's more of a life coach, but he works with business owners and his name is Chris Goodman. He actually runs the relentless growth podcast. It's he, plugin for I'll shield for this guy all day.
[00:09:20] But he's been a huge reason why I've, I feel like I've made huge strides in the, even in the last year. But yeah, not every, not everyone's the right fit for everything. And but I I've had a lot of success there. It's been great. That's
[00:09:31] Islin Munisteri: awesome. I'll include that in the show notes and I guess so I know that you're running an agency right now.
[00:09:36] So what's the biggest challenge that you have in your current role?
[00:09:40] John Uland: The biggest challenge I have in my current role is truthfully one that will be solved, I think, with scale. But right now it's wearing all these different hats. I've started to scale more in terms of hiring, marketing, more marketing professionals and things like that to help with different clients, cuz it started out with just me, but pulling the different hats of oh, I gotta be the visionary for my business, but I also gotta be this integrator who's, going in and solving really complex, tough tech problems for my clients.
[00:10:09] How do we get data from point a to point B? I really love it. It's hard. It's challenging, but I love it. Something that you should know about me though, is that I, so I love puzzles like jigsaw puzzles, and this is a metaphor or an analogy for everything else in my life. I, the way I, but I do jigsaw puzzles a certain way.
[00:10:29] I have rules, right? The rule I have about jigsaw puzzles and I'm talking like a thousand piece jigsaw puzzles, the rule I have though, is that you, if you get the box, you open it up. You can look at the front of the box once. Oh, and then you have, and then from there you have to figure it out.
[00:10:48] So you can't look at the front of the box again. I know a lot of people like to go off the front. I don't do any of that. I don't cheat. That's cheating to me. The point, the reason I bring that up though, is because it forces me to use processes to, I start with the out the border of the and then I work in one area and then I divide all the pieces up by color and stuff like that.
[00:11:04] It forces me to use these processes to. This visual challenge in front of me. I get a huge kick out of that. And I do similar things with my clients. It's always tough challenges, but I love it.
[00:11:16] Islin Munisteri: And I know you're like, you're a partner of a certain tech technology when we had scoped this back in April.
[00:11:22] Yeah. But what was. What's the
[00:11:25] John Uland: platform. Yeah. Back about a year and a half ago, my former roommate and I, we, co-founded a company called stitch. And it is a membership management platform for everyday businesses like breweries or yoga's instructors nonprofits. What that means is.
[00:11:44] If a business say a brewery wants to offer a membership like a mug club, you pay a monthly fee and you get four pints a month sort of thing or your own special mug in the tap room, sort of thing. Those platforms have to be managed somehow. And it's a huge pain in the butt to do that with Google spreadsheets or Excel.
[00:12:06] And so we. We have the automation technology behind that. We give these everyday business owners, an opportunity to join the subscription economy and which is so cool. This is like talk about a really cool product. My, my co-founder is the official brains behind it.
[00:12:21] He and I look up to him for that. He's he saw this opportunity to really help us a market. That needs it. And and we've been able to build something really cool with it. And so I'm I love it.
[00:12:32] Islin Munisteri: That's awesome, man. That's super I would say fulfilling in a
[00:12:36] John Uland: sense. Yeah, truly is. Yeah.
[00:12:38] If I think like that, I want that to grow and continue to grow. We're not taking funding or anything like that. We're just taking our time with it which is right now a great place to be. And I want that to just, I want that to just take off in terms of user growth and company like, or, and adoption and things like that.
[00:12:56] It would, I know that it would benefit so many different verticals and it's just a matter of breaking into them and showing them the value cuz most of these people are and business owners aren't technologically. Savvy. Yeah. Yeah. I got and they're also like small business owners, so they have so many different hats to wear, as a brewer, a brewery, I gotta worry about my staff head count.
[00:13:16] I got all these overhead if tanks and what I'm gonna brew next week and tap room and all this stuff that they gotta think about. And sometimes, loyalty and memberships are on the. The back of their mind, but really they should be in the forefront because that's what, like that directly affects the bottom line.
[00:13:34] We, I'm sorry. I'm just gonna boast about this. Because our people on our platform are seeing like an average of this is just an average of 10 X ROI with us, and they're doing like four and five figure. Five figures in annual revenue added directly to their bottom line that they don't have to do.
[00:13:52] Like they don't even have to lift a finger for, and for, a small business, five figures. That's one or two new hires, depending on where you exactly. Yeah. And, or in some cases it's funding a new, like location, a new venue and really helps 'em expand. And so it's just these recurring memberships.
[00:14:09] Kicking butt for these local businesses and it drives user loyalty too. There's research behind it. I'm again, I'm gonna, I can get off my, my my soapbox soapbox here. Yeah. But it is I see it as a really cool industry and opportunity to help
[00:14:25] Islin Munisteri: Wow. That's awesome. Yeah. I guess, did, did you have a certain learning, like your biggest learning experience in all in your career as like up to this
[00:14:34] John Uland: point?
[00:14:36] Yeah, my biggest learning experience in my career up until this point, let's let me, I made some notes ahead of time, about some things. My biggest learning experience from past work and off the resume would be to work for companies. or to work, have your clients that you want to work with.
[00:14:59] Islin Munisteri: Wow. Go deeper into that. So like work with the people you wanna work with, that seems super obvious on the on the surface. But what, go
[00:15:08] John Uland: deeper. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So when you're taking on a client, because you need the money or you're taking, and I know that seems like very privileged a thing to say it. Just trust me here. when you take on a client for the money or when you take a job for the money and you don't really care about the product that you're go, that you're going to market for, or that you're gonna be working with.
[00:15:29] We, we, you don't really care about that. You don't do as good a job one, but also you can get burned really easily with the clients they could be, people who like to do scope creep or they could, have a Pia make you wish you would've added a few extra thousand dollars to, to account for the emotional distress they put you through.
[00:15:46] But the reason I learned that was because I worked for a really terrible company. It was called Magnises and it was run by a guy named Billy McFarland. He may have heard that name. He was the founder of the Fyre festival, FY R E. That was a huge fraud. Scam thing in, in The Bahamas back.
[00:16:06] This is this 2022. So was. Five years ago. And he just got outta prison and I'm, and he went to prison for it. And he got outta prison early and I'm just like, this guy needs to I think he needs to be locked up for, but that's my opinion. Cuz I worked there for five months and I, it was two weeks in.
[00:16:23] They asked me to commit email fraud and I said, no. And then I got shot at meetings. And then and then I spent the next five months looking for a job. and and and I did, I found one and I got out and it was great, but But yeah, when you take a job because of the title or the pay and not because you think the product is interesting or beneficial in any way, you really set yourself up for a lot of heartache and pain.
[00:16:50] And emotional issues. I would say down the line I spent, I spent years in therapy for what happened at Magnises and I was only there five months. So I don't know if, I don't know if I ever told you this when we first met, but I got threatened by Billy. When I left a a really bad glass door.
[00:17:07] Basically saying, look, this is a bad place. And he called me, I was, I'll never forget. I was down in the FIDI in New York and I got this call from Billy McFarland and he called me out for leaving this review and it was anonymous, but I think he just assumed and he threatened me basically saying it would be.
[00:17:24] He's look, I've got lots of business connections in New York. And I was like, what a year and a half to, in, in to New York, I hadn't been there very long. He's I've got all these business connections. It'd be a shame for that to get out that you were hard to work with. And and that like just.
[00:17:38] Shattering man. Yeah. Yeah. When and I I was younger. I was new to the city. It was just like, oh God, my life is over. And and obviously with retrospect and with this guy having now a convicted felon, I'm and I'm just, I'm like, yeah, that was BS. But at the time it was so hard.
[00:17:56] So ever since then, I've only chosen to work for companies that I Truly like, and believe in and even to the point where I'll take a pay cut for it. When I worked for, when I worked for Warner music group took a pay cut. No problem. It was, so it was just that fulfilling. And I wanted that.
[00:18:14] I wanted to have that experience and so awesome. Wow. Do what you love.
[00:18:21] Islin Munisteri: Yeah. Do what you, yeah. Do what you love. Don't sell your soul for that title. Cause it really gets
[00:18:30] John Uland: entitles. Titles mean nothing like being a business owner now, , my title can be whatever the hell you want it to be. But at the end of the day, I'm still like I am.
[00:18:38] Yeah. CEO also the janitor also like I title doesn't matter at the end of the day, you gotta affect the bottom line. So that is that's true. Yeah. Do what you love.
[00:18:49] Islin Munisteri: What is your philosophy on rev ops and like how rev ops teams should interact? Because I know you were like head of CRM and did marketing ops at Warner music and teachable.
[00:19:00] And so do what's your philosophy on?
[00:19:03] John Uland: Oh, absolutely. Okay. So I believe in sustainable and that's like sustainable CRM and marketing operation or. Say rev, ops whatever the term is that we're using sustainable organization. A lot of startups, a lot of companies like this idea of growth at all, costs growth at any cost.
[00:19:22] And I've worked for several even good companies. I've worked for have this mindset that comes back to bite you every time. And so that's why setting up processes and organization from the start is super, super helpful. When you're starting a new project or working on something, excuse me.
[00:19:40] Okay. The, so that's my, that is my philosophy. One of the unique things I think about my philosophy is I am a proponent of what I call partitioned workflows. And basically what that means is I separate out my automation flows by category. So like I'll have operational workflows that will like assign rewards or if that's a, that's like a more of a DTC thing or they'll.
[00:20:02] Update user fields and stuff like that. That's all they do. But there's, onboarding flows. So the conversion flows, retention flows operational flows. And I think there's one other kind I use, but I have a whole like slide on it or presentation on it. But the idea is when you have a car, I take this from my time as a developer, when you have If you're building a car, right?
[00:20:26] You the car is built is built such that you can turn the car on. And then you can turn on the radio. The you can roll down the windows, turn the AC, whatever it is in whatever order you want that to happen. Cause each of those functions within the car are partitioned. They're separate from one another the windows don't rolling down.
[00:20:44] It doesn't depend on. Radio being on first sort of thing. And so when you, so I do this, a similar thing. I partition functions out with my automation flows to make sure that they're not one isn't dependent on the other so much that if that it creates a single point of failure, and I try to avoid single fear at all costs.
[00:21:05] So that's my philosophy. Sustainable sustainable. If you've heard of the term technical debt. Oh yeah. Yeah, my friend I think someone else coined it, but I will attribute it to my friend Jackson Reso as well. He is my boss at teachable, but he coined the term to me marketing debt, which is the same thing as technical debt, just on the marketing team.
[00:21:25] We take so many shortcuts in marketing and sales. To get this rapid growth or to like I say, growth at all costs or at any cost. The, there are lots of costs that start adding up like debt. And if you don't take care of them, if you don't account for them ahead of time, they can become overwhelming and it can lead to decrease team.
[00:21:46] It can lead to single points of failure. Your, your system crashing you start or you send out a million emails to the wrong people. It can lead to a lot of problems. If you take a sustainable approach to it from the beginning, you can avoid a lot of that headache. Gotcha. That was one side of that question you just said, how should teams interact?
[00:22:06] And I think that operations, these marketing and rev op teams sit in a really cool position in companies or with clients because you interact with everyone, your. You interact with every single department, right? Like an email that you send is gonna be seen by the customer, which is gonna affect how they respond to customer service.
[00:22:27] And depending on the content of that email, if you're trying to get them into the product, it also affects the engineering team or the product team. The look and feel of it, of that email is gonna be branding. And and so you really have to manage relationships with everyone. In the company, when it comes to outward facing communications, everyone's interested.
[00:22:44] And I think that's really a, it's a unique and powerful position to be in. But with great power comes great responsibility. You have to really manage your those relationships and expectations. Timelines, workloads for yourself to make sure that customer service isn't requesting something that is contradictory to product, get everyone into the same room and talk.
[00:23:06] I did this actually at teachable by by hosting like weekly trainings about what are we doing in email marketing and it was super, super beneficial to the entire team, honestly helped me build relationships with throughout the company. And not only prove value, but also. I would say expand value, augment value, because I started talking with more and more people and getting more and more people in the know of what I was working on.
[00:23:33] So communicate
[00:23:34] Islin Munisteri: with everyone. Yeah. Oh man, that's a huge one. That's definitely important. And.
[00:23:46] I guess what do you think of the term? When I say rev ops
[00:23:49] John Uland: roadmap, Ooh.
[00:23:55] A rev ops roadmap. That to me can mean a lot of different things that can mean. So I'm curious to know actually the context in which you're using it. Yeah.
[00:24:06] Islin Munisteri: So when I've asked folks these, this question of ops roadmap, some people talk about it's your plan, a plan, a, B, and C, like all these different plans in.
[00:24:16] This one thing happens, it. Or contingencies? Or is it contingencies or it might be the flywheel, right? Cause HubSpot has their flywheel of turning prospects and the customers into evangelists who marketing sales and customer success. Like I've been asked the question of, what, like what does the rev ops roadmap.
[00:24:37] Mean to you and another and I think someone, or was it Josh at shift paradigm? At one of the podcasts we did together was having an outstanding customer experience.
[00:24:47] John Uland: So interesting. Yeah. The So when you first said that I was thinking, okay, what's your plan for making everything work, connect together.
[00:24:55] And how is that gonna build, are we, what are are we adding what are we doing to make this data come through? When are we adding that in sort of thing in, into the schedule? So like pulling data integrations in, or adding this automation or and stuff like that.
[00:25:06] That's what I first thought of. Yeah. When I think of rev ops roadmap, it's okay, what is your plan for improvement as a revops team? Not so much but then, but I can see how people might think oh, What's the life cycle of the customer. How do we communicate with them? I guess that that also makes some sense.
[00:25:24] But to me, I think of it more like as if I were a product team cuz rev, op I think is a it's an internal tool, but it's a product in and of itself. And yeah, you're constantly adding new features and integrations and then making sure that they work and then trying to get adoption yeah. Check the box to make the, change the deal stage, dude.
[00:25:45] Some, all those things pulling teeth sometimes, but But yeah, either way, it's really smart to have a roadmap. However you define it. yeah. Like that, that goes back to that organization and lowering the marketing debt discussion we had. It's just, no have a plan in place. And if it all goes to help, that's fine.
[00:26:05] At least you had to plan and you can pivot. It's kinda like having a. You can plan so much. And then as soon as the baby's born, okay, that got blown to bits, but at least you were confident going in enough so that when it does get blown to bits, you can pivot pretty quickly and be like, okay, now we're just gonna do this.
[00:26:23] Islin Munisteri: Exactly. And I guess we can go deeper into the marketing debt discussion.
[00:26:28] John Uland: Oh please.
[00:26:29] Islin Munisteri: Yeah. Cuz I, I feel like the, like as far as marketing. As analogous a technical debt. Do you just have way too many people on your team in marketing debt or is it like too many tech tools or like what is marketing
[00:26:43] John Uland: debt?
[00:26:44] Marketing debt? Oh man, this is great. It really is brought, my, my buddy and I are creating this is super meta and nerdy but writing this thing, it's called the marketing debt manifesto, which sounds it's like a dissertation and I, it is very look it's really heady. It's like technical data.
[00:27:05] It just refers to the accumulation of workarounds and non-scalable processes on the marketing team. Maybe that's I had a client once that they would do these webinar events and they'd create a new workflow for every webinar. No. Yeah. It's look, we that, and that led to the huge, bloat in terms of how many workflows they had, they were doing this in HubSpot too.
[00:27:25] And and so it's we can streamline this process. Okay. We're, that's what we're gonna do. And and so we could reduce it to one webinar. But it was just like, oh my gosh. But they did it because they had to get it up and running and look, you're going to incur marketing debt. It's it is not avoidable in my professional opinion.
[00:27:41] But just like when you take out a mortgage for a house you're going into debt. But you're going in there knowing, or with the educated expectation that, okay, cool. I'm gonna pay this off in the future. And I. The risk that I'm taking. That's how you should approach marketing debt.
[00:27:59] We have these options, right? This this we need to grow now. So this is the best way to do it. This is the, not the best way to do it. It's gonna lead to some issues down the road, but I know that it's being, it's like deliberate prudence, if you will, whereas you would be reckless, it would be like Or like this isn't reckless, would we not even think about it?
[00:28:18] And a lot of people are reckless about about approaching marketing debt. They're just like, shit, I gotta affect the bottom line and they set something up because it's the easiest thing in the moment, but they don't think about how that will what is this going to do down the line? Yeah, that, I think that webinar, example's a really a good one where it's just.
[00:28:36] 50 webinar workflows. And then you're like someone new comes in and you're like, what the hell is this? Or it's someone who's been there for three or five years. And they set up, 20 of those webinars, five years ago. And so now they're looking back and it's what was I thinking here?
[00:28:50] And and so trying to try to reduce that as much as possible. Gotcha.
[00:28:58] Islin Munisteri: Cool is there anything you, we haven't covered today that you'd wanna talk about?
[00:29:08] Not really,
[00:29:09] John Uland: no. I'm just looking, I'm looking at different I think you, we had a discussion on like different topics and stuff now, but this is I would just say I don't know. What do you want your listeners to know? What's something that you think your listeners are thinking about every day?
[00:29:21] Like that I might be able to have an answered for?
[00:29:24] Islin Munisteri: I guess one of the questions I didn't ask was like, what would you tell your younger. As far as like career advice. And I think you, you answered that with, like work at a company. Where you love the product, but is there any other
[00:29:40] John Uland: recognizing that my younger self in their twenties will not listen to any of this, but it's.
[00:29:45] It is chill, dude, just chill. We spend our, I think we, I think this is just a, like a life thing, but we spend, our twenties. Being like, wishing that we were always at the next level and then you get to 30 and you're like, I missed out on my twenties, everyone I've talked to it.
[00:30:02] Everyone talks about their twenties that way. And everyone in their twenties talks about the next step. It's just a thing. But at the end of the day, if I could give advice that I probably wouldn't listen to, it would be dude chill. It's all gonna be okay. Look, if you're out there listening to this podcast and you're like, Don't know if I can do this business or if, I don't know if I can if I can surmount this challenge, tomorrow's gonna come.
[00:30:30] The sun's gonna rise. The sun's gonna set. It's like life is going to go on and you are going to be fine. It will be okay. I cannot tell you how I have cried. I have blood, sweat, tears. Maybe not literal blood , but close enough, with the projects that I've worked on. And I've come to the point where I try to learn, I learn to fail fast.
[00:30:53] Failure is a good thing. I welcome it. I welcome failure. I welcome colossal failure. I will F up a hundred times to learn how to do it right. The one time you sort of thing. Like I, it is. It's gonna be okay. you got it? Yeah. That's oh, that's a good thing. Sorry, that, that leads me to another thing. This is part of these, this marketing debt discussion too.
[00:31:17] It's a philosophy of hypothesis strategy. So many times we we think we pull. Clients professionals will pull these buzzwords of oh, we gotta be AB testing. We got, can you subject line test that? Or, thing, but it's yeah, we can subject line, test anything. You can AB test anything.
[00:31:36] But, and with, without. Without a hypothesis. There's no learning.
[00:31:41] Islin Munisteri: Yes. Yes, you always have to have the hypothesis behind the AB test. Like that. That seems fairly obvious, but
[00:31:47] John Uland: yeah, and there's a really, there's a lot of good things that come from it. Other not only just the learning it shifts the blame, right?
[00:31:54] When hypothesis, if you have a hypothesis and that ends up being a false hypothesis, you are not wrong. You're not a dumb person. You're not a bad professional. It's just. You'll learn something else. Like it's, the hypothesis was false. This other thing was true, right? Yeah. What my, what I hypothesized would raise conversion rates or raised subject line, open rates, whatever, 15% actually didn't and this other thing did or it didn't, thing.
[00:32:21] And we learn and we iterate and we improve. It goes back to this. Everything's gonna be. When you take a hypothesis based approach, it really helps people, your clients, your coworkers and yourself decouple your personal worth from your job. Yes. Gotta do that. Oh yeah. That is, think about if you're a physics person, speed and velocity, they're two different things.
[00:32:45] The difference. Velocity is direction. Exactly. Yeah. So speed without velocity. Yeah, exactly.
[00:32:50] Islin Munisteri: Yeah, I feel yeah. Using the scientific method, it's just surprising, right? Like you've gotta use the scientific method. This business,
[00:32:59] John Uland: our job is scientific. We are, it's just, it's not physics, but it is numbers and it comes down to trends, numbers, findings, experiments.
[00:33:10] Yep. Go learn something. So yeah,
[00:33:14] Islin Munisteri: exactly. Go learn something. And I think we'll leave that with our listeners is to go learn something with your hypothesis. yes,
[00:33:23] John Uland: indeed. Awesome.
[00:33:25] Islin Munisteri: It was great having you on John. I look forward to
[00:33:29] John Uland: talking with you. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. And if you, I don't know if you are on social media or anything, but I'm at, Hey John, Youland on.
[00:33:36] H E Y J O N U L a N D. And you can find me@johnuland.com or ulindagency.com. It'll all go to the same place. Cool.
[00:33:46] Islin Munisteri: I'll I'll link to your agency. Cool.
[00:33:48] John Uland: Or you can connect with me on LinkedIn. That's fine, too. Yep. Thank you very much for having me. It was, so it was so good to, to chat with you again. it was good to chat again
[00:33:59] Islin Munisteri: as well.
[00:34:00] John Uland: Thanks John, best of luck to you
