The Worst Thing You Can Do
One of the worst things a small business owner can do is start building. You build the product, you build the website, you build the infrastructure. Then you try to get people to show up, only to find that nobody cares.
This is not a failure of execution. It is a failure of strategy.
Too many entrepreneurs fall in love with their idea and invest thousands of dollars and months of effort before ever asking the most important question: does anyone actually want this? As marketing executive and senior growth advisor Hamlet Azarian explains to Chris Do, the path to winning in today’s market is paved with data, not assumptions.
Azarian, who has spent 20 years guiding venture-backed startups from pre-seed to Series B, has developed a playbook for finding market fit and scaling a business. It’s a system built on cheap experiments, deep customer empathy, and a relentless focus on testing.
It’s a system that any small business owner can adopt to stop guessing and start winning.
The Startup Mindset Is Not About Money
People hear the word “startup” and think of massive venture capital checks. But Azarian is quick to clarify what the term really means. “A startup is a small team that gets together and their goal is to build a new company, a new service that solves a pretty scalable problem,” he says. “And it will most likely disrupt the status quo.”
The key stages of funding, from pre-seed to Series A, are not just about cash. They are validation milestones. A pre-seed round, often from friends, family, or angel investors, might be a few hundred thousand dollars. As Do notes, this sounds like a lot, but in the startup world, it disappears quickly.
“You're factoring in it's like five people working for $700,000,” Do points out. This scarcity forces discipline. This is where most founders make their first critical mistake. They use that initial capital to build.
Azarian argues this is backward. “One of the worst things you can do…is you start building things,” he repeats. The smarter path is to validate the idea with minimal investment. “It's almost better to build a prototype and market a landing page with the value proposition.”
Using a simple landing page and a Figma prototype, you can run a small ad campaign to see if there is any top-of-funnel interest. Are people clicking the ads? Are they signing up for a demo? Are they joining the waitlist?
These are powerful signals. Positive signals allow you to raise a seed round to actually hire a team and build the product. Once the product is in the market and generating roughly $1 million in annual revenue, you can raise a Series A round of several million dollars to scale. This is the structured path, but it all starts with a cheap test.
The $100 Experiment
To illustrate this process, Azarian shares the story of Camino Financial. Founded by two Harvard Business School graduates, Sean and Kenny Salas, the company's mission was to disrupt the fintech industry by providing loans to first-generation, Latino-owned businesses in the U.S.
When Azarian joined, it was just the two founders in a coworking space with an idea. The challenge was immense: how do you reach an audience that is often unbanked, mistrustful of financial institutions, and primarily Spanish-speaking?
The answer was not to build a complex loan platform. It was to run hyper-focused experiments on Facebook and Instagram.
The team developed around 25 to 30 different ads, a strategy known as multivariate testing. This wasn’t a scattershot approach. Each ad was designed to test a specific variable: the creative, the message, or the audience targeting. They spent just $5 to $10 per ad per day to gather data. “A couple hundred bucks at most to run these ads,” Do observes. Less than a nice dinner out.
The team tested a range of themes, each designed to probe a different potential motivation:
- Product-Specific: Ads focused on the loan itself, like interest rates and terms.
- Value-Specific: Ads about building generational wealth for their family.
- Family-Oriented: Ads centered on providing a better future for their children.
They combined these themes with different targeting options to see which combination resonated. The results were immediate and clarifying. A clear winner emerged, and it was not what a traditional marketing team would have produced.
“What really mattered for Latino businesses was the orientation of family,” Azarian reveals. But even more powerful was the creative. “The raw image, meaning at the restaurant or even with one of our sales associates…at the restaurant with them talking about their business…outperformed any creative that we produced.”
Beautiful, polished ads failed. The raw, authentic photo of a real person in their real business environment won. This single insight became the cornerstone of their entire go-to-market strategy. It proved that a small, inexpensive test can unlock a multi-million dollar playbook. This data-driven approach is a core lesson for any founder, a lesson Chris Do reinforces in his own teachings on how to build content that people actually react to.
From Demographics to Psychographics: Finding the Emotional 'Why'
Most marketers focus on demographics: age, income, location. This is table stakes. The real leverage lies in understanding psychographic info, which Azarian defines simply as the “why.”
To uncover this, he employs a classic technique from the manufacturing world: the Five Whys. Developed by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota Industries, the method involves repeatedly asking “why” to move past superficial answers and get to the root cause of an issue. In marketing, it peels back the layers of a customer’s decision to reveal their core emotional driver.
“Usually what you get to is the emotional reason of why they made that decision,” Azarian says. “And that's the best for a marketer.”
For Camino Financial, the Five Whys revealed a profound truth. Their target customer had often left a difficult life in Latin America, immigrating to the U.S. with the hope of providing a better life for their children. They worked tirelessly, yet were often treated like third-class citizens, a point Azarian emphasizes. They had been given bad advice and denied opportunities. No one believed in them.
The core emotional need was not a loan. It was belief.
“The core emotional why that we resonated and we figured out is having belief in them,” Azarian explains. “We're here for you. We're here to give you the solid advice that you need. We're going to support you no matter what.”
This insight radically changed their messaging. Campaigns were never just about money. “The loan was almost secondary,” he states. The message was: we understand your struggle, we believe in your potential, and we are here to give you the chance you deserve. This customer-centric approach is the foundation of all effective brand strategy, moving the conversation away from features and toward transformation.
This deep understanding was codified in what Azarian calls a customer persona document. They named their persona Miguel. Every marketing decision, every product feature, every communication was filtered through a single question: what does Miguel need? What does Miguel care about? This focus allowed them to scale from a tiny office to having locations in Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Colombia within two years.
A Masterclass in Customer Discovery
To demonstrate the Five Whys in practice, Azarian turns the tables and interviews Chris Do about the headphones he is wearing. The exchange serves as a live masterclass in asking questions that uncover deep-seated motivations.
Do’s initial answer is feature-based. “They’re modular…all the parts are replaceable…they are the most comfortable over-ear headphones I own.”
Azarian gently pushes past the product attributes. “Why are headphones for you very important?”
This is the first “why.” Do responds that he needs to hear every detail in a conversation. “A lot of what I do I believe is about having great conversations…if you let out a sigh, I need to hear it.” This reveals a value: deep listening and connection.
Azarian continues, probing the need for isolation. “Are you looking for even the subtle…the subtlety of sound?” Do confirms it is about the nuance, not just blocking noise. He can tell if someone is eating on a call, which speaks to his intense focus on the person he’s speaking with.
From this short exchange, Azarian extracts a wealth of marketing themes:
- Customization and Modularity: The ability to build headphones that fit your specific needs.
- All-Day Comfort: So lightweight you forget you are wearing them.
- Trusted Referrals: The recommendation came from a former creative director Do respects.
- Deep Connection: The feeling of being in the same room, hearing every subtle sound.
- Sustainability: Replaceable parts mean a longer lifespan and less waste.
None of Azarian’s questions were a literal “why?” Instead, he used follow-up questions to reconfirm and dig deeper, validating the ideas Do presented. This demonstrates a key principle of effective interviewing: you guide the conversation to reveal the why without making it feel like an interrogation. This is the art of listening, a skill Do himself explores in his guide on asking better questions.
From Insight to Conversion
With these validated themes, the next step is to engineer a system that turns interest into action. The insights from customer discovery fuel the next round of ad experiments. You take each theme, like “so comfortable you’ll forget you’re wearing them” or “so clear you’ll swear they were in the same room,” and create ad concepts around them.
Once you have an ad that generates a high click-through rate, the job is only half done. You need a landing page that converts. This is where many businesses fail. Azarian recommends using tools like Hotjar or Smartlook to install heatmaps and session recordings on your landing page. This allows you to see exactly where users are clicking, how far they scroll, and what they ignore.
Based on this data, you can optimize the page using a proven structure. The high-converting landing page framework typically includes:
- A Bold Claim: A powerful headline that grabs attention and states the core value proposition.
- Evidence: Customer reviews, case studies, or social proof that validates your claim.
- Trust Symbols: Logos of publications where you've been featured or well-known clients or users.
- The Brand Story: An explanation of why the product exists and the problem it solves.
- FAQs: Answering common questions and overcoming potential objections before they arise.
- A Strong Guarantee: A risk-free trial or money-back guarantee to remove the fear of purchase. For a new product, this might be as bold as “if you don’t love it, keep it.”
If the product doesn't exist yet, a crowdfunding page on a platform like Kickstarter or Indiegogo can serve the same purpose. A compelling founder story, highlighting the pain points the product solves, can drive pre-orders and provide the capital needed for the first manufacturing run. This approach de-risks the entire venture, ensuring you have paying customers before you have a warehouse full of product. It's about securing commitment, a concept central to closing deals, which Do discusses in his workshop on sales training.
This focus on value also allows you to stay out of the pricing game. “The more we stay away from being the cheapest on the block and the more we focus on the value…the better it is,” Azarian insists. When you solve a real, painful problem, the price becomes secondary to the result.
The A-Player Mindset
The tactics are powerful, but they only work when executed by the right people. Azarian is drawn to early-stage startups because they are typically populated by what he calls A-Players. He breaks down the workforce into three categories:
- A-Players: These are the rock stars. They have a growth mindset, always learning and seeking to improve. They are proactive problem-solvers who take ownership and elevate the entire team.
- B-Players: These are the steady contributors. They do their job from 9-to-5, meet expectations, but rarely go above and beyond. They value stability over growth.
- C-Players: These are the disengaged. They are often toxic, complaining about the work and doing the bare minimum to get by.
Startups, by their chaotic and uncertain nature, attract A-Players. These are founders and early employees who are driven by a mission. “They are hyper-focused on that and they're willing to put in all of the work for absolutely no reward,” Azarian says. “It's actually highly likely that the reward might not be there.”
It is the spirit captured in Apple's iconic “Think Different” campaign, a tribute to the misfits and rebels who are crazy enough to think they can change the world. This mindset is crucial because the data-driven path is one of constant learning and occasional failure. An A-Player sees a failed ad experiment not as a loss, but as valuable data that gets them one step closer to the right answer.
Stop Chasing Perfection
The final piece of advice is perhaps the most critical. Azarian references the famous quote, often attributed to Voltaire or Winston Churchill: perfection is the enemy of progress.
“Sometimes we get in our own way,” he admits. “We're so scared that the ad is just not right, or the landing page is not correct…or the video seems a little cheesy.”
This fear leads to inaction. In the pursuit of a flawless launch, nothing gets launched at all.
The methodology Azarian outlines is the antidote to this paralysis. It is not about being perfect. It is about being in motion. It is about releasing the “cheesy” video to see what you can learn from the response. It is about launching the “imperfect” landing page to gather real-world data.
“If it's bad, what's the worst thing that happens?” he asks. “It was bad…it's not the end of the world. What did you learn from it? How would you make it better?”
This is the essence of data-driven marketing. It is a scientific process of forming a hypothesis, running an experiment, analyzing the data, and iterating. There is no room for ego or fear. There is only learning and progress.
Stop strategizing in a vacuum. Start testing in the real world.
TRANSCRIPT
one of the worst things you can do you start building things and helping people show up but once you get this magic working properly you you're seeing like clickthrough rates of 2% 3% 4% sometimes even as high as 8% can you take me through an example of like when you're interviewing somebody could
be any how about I do you oh you want to do oh you put me on a spot okay shoot this is not rehears I may f up here so just hang in there what you get to is the raw emotional reason and you go through the sequence of the five Y and
once you have that combo it's pretty deadly once I interested this concept it radically changed the way I approached design because what is up everybody today Hamlet is joining me and he is a marketing executive with 20 years of experience and he's helped Venture back startups that range from preed to early stage
series A and B I don't know what that means so we'll have to talk about that a little bit as a senior growth adviser in his role he's helped develop playbooks hired and train the marketing and growth teams Hamlet welcome to the show thanks for having me on Chris excited to be here
for people who don't who you are can you give us a little intro about how you got into this field that you're doing yeah sure um so I work with startups particularly early stage which usually means it's the founders who have an idea they might not even have a product yet uh they
they have definitely no Revenue that they they have zero customers so far I want to go through and try to figure out if there's a business here and what that business is and I come in typically at that stage as more of as an advisor where I'm guiding them to run different experiments
and going outside of their immediate circles because usually obviously our family and our loved ones will always say it's a great idea because they might be being polite but the reality is you need to reach out of that inner circle and talk to people who don't even know you and to see if
you're really solving a paino really solving a problem and that's what I do in the early stage I know that people use this term startup there's a technical definition of what a startup is right can you explain that before you continue what a startup is is a group of Founders or a group
of a team a small team that gets together and what their what their goal is to is to build a new company a new service that solves a pretty scalable problem and it will most likely disrupt the status quo I'll give you a specific example one of the startups that we helped scale
up was called Camino financial and it was started by two guys at a Harvard Business School Sean and Kenny Salis and when I met them they were at the super early stage meaning it was literally them at a Regis co-working space hanging out trying to figure out how they would disrupt the B2B
Financial tech industry but predominantly providing loans for first generation Latino based businesses and so when I came in we were ideating how do we go about running different experiments how do we test this concept and what we quickly learned is running really hyper Focus experiments on Facebook allowed us to learn really fast
what the real paino was and how to build up a goto Market strategy does preedee or early stage means they don't have a lot of funding they have no funding no funding okay in this scenario they had just received their first few checks and and most of the time those checks might be
friends and family or it might be Angels they had received about 700,000 or so and the grand scheme of starting of business that might sound Al likee a lot but it really isn't when you you're factoring in it's like five people working for $700,000 right and let a lot all the marketing expenses
and all the other expenses that go along with it okay that makes sense I mean for everybody who is a smalltime small business owner $700,000 that's a lot of money but in the world of startups that's not a lot to get your thing going cuz that answered my first question is how does
someone even afford you if they have no money but they do have some money to to build an idea right yeah there's some Capital there's there's typically uh preedee VCS which are Venture capitalists and and what they they typically cut a check size of anywhere between 50,000 to half a million dollar and
there's Accel accelerators one of the most famous one is Y combinator which cuts a check about half a million dollars and there's others a bunch of these different organizations that allow uh people who have good ideas who can build it to apply and get accepted into it and in addition get capital and
sell a portion of their company for that Capital to be able to test and ideate their idea what we do is obviously I think you had brought up earlier like what's the difference of the startup so there seed um seed were mostly guiding advising providing feedback we not necessarily involved at at the
rate that that we get involved later on in the stage normally where we step in is when they've raised a little more so the product has been built at this point right so in the early days when they don't have a product they haven't one of the worst things you can do and
is you start building things and helping people show up right it's almost better to build a prototype and market a landing page with the value proposition uh and I know you have a lot of designers that listen in it like every single one of them is enabl to do this right so you
you could easily build a a simple landing page talk about the pain points what the product can be what what you think it would be solving and then build a figma prototype showing the use case of it and then be able to run a small campaign not even a lot to just to
even see if the top of the funnel shows interest right are people even reacting to the ads the images are they landing on the landing page are they scheduling and want to get a demo of this prototype are they are they signing up to be one of the early you know users of
the product that will later on be built all of these different things give incredible signals and once you've done that just small aspects of those things you can then go start raising what's called a seed round and what the seed round will allow you to do is to actually go hire the team
to build the product that you've been ideating and really get it to Market once you get it to Market your job is now to try to get to 880,000 mrr so monthly recurring Revenue if you're a SAS business but in general about a million dollars a year or so if you're about to
build the revenue to annually about a million dollar then you're able to go raise what's called a series a round which would then at that Point could be anywhere between $3 to 12 million in extra Capital that you get so we normally come somewhere between the seed and series a once the product
has been fully built out super interesting that was a really good succinct high level overview it's got me excited and I have many many questions for you so first of all you're you're kind of preaching to the choir here and you don't want to overbuild any idea whether it's a startup or your
business you need to make sure that there's good product Market fit and I love the way that you're talking about this you produ type it use figma you you build a sales page and you try to figure out the problem that you're solving the value proposition I think everybody understands that part okay
now you do some special things I think from what I was able to find out in my research is you actually help them to convert traffic on social into conversions or at least signups so right now let's just assume we're not selling anything we're still like prototyping ideas what do we need to
do on social to get people to get onto that page and what does that page need to do so that they say you know what put my name on down on on the list I think I'd like to to get this product or service from you let's start with if you were trying
to Target on Facebook or Instagram cuz that still is the big monster in the room obviously YouTube does well and and Tik Tok does well as too depending on the audience but let's just talk about Facebook and Instagram I'll go back to Camino because this is a really good example of it so
when we started Camino Financial it we were trying to Target uh Latino businesses who lived in the US who first generation that have had moved here into the country that didn't speak a word of English right so we're now trying to do targeting in Spanish in the US and break bring them over
and what we ended up doing is we created a bunch of ads so in total I think it was about 25 to 30 different ads cuz we had no idea what would resonate with the audience right so this is called multivariate testing and what we were really doing was we were both testing
the ads but within each ads we Tred to make it completely uniquely different focused on one thing and mainly on the value proposition or a theme so for example one theme would be product specific hey we're going to give you a loan right like the loan is at this rate it's it's all
of these the other thing might be at a value specific are you trying to build generational wealth for your family the other one would be more family specific right like so all these different themes we had going on that were completely different but were centered around the product as well and then at
the same time we were testing different targeting options trying to figure out which targeting option would get us in front of the Right audience so when you s when you take these combinations let and I'm going to make the math easy right like let's say if you had five targeting options five different
themes it's like five times 5 so you have 25 ads kind of concurrently running all at the same time you could actually get a lot of data for dirt cheet I know people are probably thinking wow this wasn't cost a ton of money it really didn't it cost is roughly $5 to $10
per ad to determine if it's headed in the right direction and then you quickly start turning things off and then you quickly start understanding what works and what this taught us in a really short manner was that as specifically in this audience what really mattered for liino businesses was the orientation of family
and the and having imagery that was of them the raw the image meaning at the restaurant or even with one of our Sal Associates you know with a with them with our sales associate at the restaurant with them talking about their business with a picture shot I'll perform any creative that we produce
so any beautiful ads that we had any imagery that we had just didn't do that the same notion as as just a really raw photo taken at the restaurant itself so for people who do haven't run Facebook ads yet and you say it's not expensive to get ideas this is really like cheap
research that you can do you're running say at this point 25 ads so each piece of cre creative goes out to five different types of audiences as you're segmenting your audience and you're spending like literally how much money are you spending a day 125 bucks a day less than going to dinner with
three people oh you're spending a couple hundred bucks at most to to to run these ads I've done ads before you'll start to see a clear winner immediately it's just almost obvious it's so weird and it's not always what you expect you think well this is going to be the winner and it's
not always the one that you perform and then all of a sudden you start to kill certain ideas and you realize a couple of them work really well do you do a second round of ads so once you start understanding a concept of working a theme is working you start going deeper and
deeper into that and this is what I love about like creative right and so the world of taking the creative concept and really is resonating with the customer or the user Persona understanding their emotions understanding what's unique and once you figure that out so it's not just the demographic info it's more the
psychographic info and they're really going deep in each one of those themes allows you to figure out a unique creative that is completely scalable in the market and once you have that combo it's pretty deadly cuz then you can scale up so now you're getting if people who haven't run ads um so
like on Facebook you know most ads get about a 1% click-through rate which is average right like so that means for every let's say uh 100 people that see the ad one person will will click on that ad and then if you're lucky out of that if you're doing a decent job you
get maybe a 10% conversion right so so that's 10% of the people do what you want on the landing page and give you your contact information but once you get this magic working properly you you're seeing like click-through rates of 2% 3% 4% sometimes even as high as 8% so the cost of
you acquiring that customer substantially is going down and you're seeing a similar impact on the second part which is the landing page so instead of getting a 10% conversion you might get a 15% or a 20% conversion so the combination of the two things makes it really really cheap for you to be
able to acquire customers everybody hang in there get a cup of coffee we're getting a little nerd here but I I think H you're bringing it in just enough information where they're going to freak out but not enough where they're going to faint because it's just too much information but there's a bunch
of things I have to be a translator and help unpack for our audience okay almost everybody listening understands demographics it's like age occupation income where you live in geography are you married all that kind of stuff fewer people understand the importance of psychographics so first of all what is a psychographic and why
should people pay more attention to that it's the why so that's the way I like to describe it right so there's a famous the five wise if you ask any customer why did you do this and then they'll give you an answer and then you ask another why why did you do this
and and you go through the sequence of the five wise usually what you get to is the emotional reason of why they made that decision and that's the best for a marketer right like the the real inner why is what can really set you apart because now you're talk you're talking to them
at an emotional level that is so basic and so rudimentary that it clearly comes out across all of the noise so for example uh in in the Comino case it was really about uh the value of what we learned is these business owners right they they had left a tough tough tough World
they were struggling in Mexico or they were struggling in you know Latin America and they immigrated to the US sometimes illegally right so so and they did it with with the hope of being able to provide a better life for their children and no one has even given them a chance let alone
is treating them as third class citizens right so why are not even second class like to the bottom of the barrel they work their butts up they're up at 500 a.m. and they're you know they're the first to be out there they're making sure that they're employing they're making sure they're covering payroll
for all their employees they're getting everything done but unfortunately they've been given so many so much bad advice that no one has really believed in them so the core emotional why that we resonated and we figured out is have having belief in them right we we're here for you we're we're here to
give you the solid advice that you need we're going to support you no matter what we don't care what else is going on the other core belief that we got into is that we understand why you made this transition and it's really really hard and you want to build for your family we
also understand that you are incredibly responsible and you deserve a chance right so th those inner wise is what we learn and most most of the creatives and most of the campaigns were a combination of those things it was never even about the loan like Hey we're going to give you a business
like we never even talked about that the loan was almost secondary it was more like here's the capital but in order for you to really really grow we have to start small on the capital but we need to fix all these other things which are your business and this is why we need
to fix it and that that combo worked incredibly well this is a very user or customer Centric approach to understanding a business problem you're you're speaking to my heart here once I understood this concept it radically changed the way I approach design because everything else before was about like what my world was
like what I wanted to do and if you put that aside and say like there's a person in front of you that's trying to solve a real problem they have wants and needs hopes and fears when you start to unpack that using your kind of fivey process you start to really understand what
moves them what motivates them and what their dream outcomes are so that you can speak to that and that's really important did you do this when you said you you were able to discover this did you do this by interviewing people or did you sat sit around and strategize using your vast knowledge
and experience of how this stuff works a bunch of different things and so we did sort of both qualitative and quantitative so um quantitative is we we created a type form you know for those of you don't know it's a tool that allows you to take a bunch of surveys we created a
beautiful survey we sent it out to who we had as emails right and who we thought were going to be our customers and honestly not a lot of them f it out right so it was like a we you emailed I think it was like a thousand people we got maybe 40 responses
back so we're like all right I don't I don't know what I learned but from 40 people but we saw some commonalities somewhere in there right then we got on phone calls and we started doing phone interviews and this was more the qualitative and really asking the why why why why why to
try to figure out the inner wise and then with that we created what was our version one of our customer Persona document and we called him Miguel by the way so so Miguel was born then we started running different test experiments that I mentioned earlier validating both and disproving the Opposites right so
we would we knew what we had a good idea what would work we also what went on The Fringe edges of it to be 100% clear that this is exactly who Miguel is and this is what he believes in and then once we started getting all these learnings we had them locked and
loaded we're like okay we understand who Miguel is now that allowed us honestly to be able to scale the business from what we were that small little company to having offices in both downtown LA Mexico City and Colombia within two years that little unlock nothing changed after that it was really like we
knew what Miguel was we knew what Miguel cared about and everything we did in marketing and everything every decision we made on both the product you know what is the loan we're going to offer them what is the experience we're going to do how are we're going to communicate with Miguel was then
with that early work in that customer Discovery process we got to take a quick break for something really exciting this video is brought to you by us the future if you're tired of relying on Word of Mouth generating inconsistent leads unpredictable work and riding the revenue new roller coaster future accelerator can help
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take me through an example of like when you're interviewing somebody what the first question is and then how the five Y and the responses they get like it doesn't have to be about communal Financial it could be any how about I do you oh you want to do oh you put me on
a spot okay shoot all right okay go ahead let's do okay everybody this is not rehears I may f up here so just hang in there okay do me so Chris you know honestly there's no right or wrong answer to any of these questions that I'm going to be giving you so this
first part is obviously um I'm level level setting the expectations all I really want from you Chris is the honest truth uh you know the more honest you are with me the better overall it's going to be for us to be able to build a better product for you or to be able
to provide a better service uh and so that whole initial onset is really just getting them to be comfortable and to be able to get them to be as open as honest as they can be about it tell me about those headphones that you're wearing right now what do you like about them
they're modular I think I think they're a Danish company all the parts are replaceable and they're pretty responsible in terms of something happens to your headphones within 2 years they'll replace that part and they are the most comfortable overear headphones I own they don't create any kind of weird pressure I don't have
ear ache which I don't know if you do but my ear hurts if I use different headphones and it also doesn't leave a dent on the top of my head because heavy headphones will do that to me as well can you can imagine I'm on calls like this all the time amazing so
so you shared a lot of great things about the product itself but why are headphones for you very important what does it make the call experience for you by wearing a headphone do for you it's very important for me to be able to hear the person uh because a lot of what I
do I believe is about having great conversations and so I want to listen to every single word if you if you let out a sigh I need to hear it and that very sensitive hearing so this really allows me to isolate the sound and focus in on the conversation the person in front
of me amazing and environment that you're in right now does it get loud is it or does it become really hard to hear is that one of the reasons for the headphones or are you looking for even the subtle the subtlety of sound are you much more interested in that I used to
be in an environment that might have had Street traffic or Sirens or children walking by this is pretty quiet where where I am today but it's really about that subtlety like I I tell people oh are you eating right now there how do you know that because I can hear you chewing on
something and it's not to call them out but it's like a a really pay attention to those little things that's amazing and how did you go about finding these headphones particularly like obviously we can't just buy it on Amazon and know is so what was your actual process of going through and identifying
you mentioned it was a Danish brand earlier like can you walk me through that process yes one of my my former creative directors Matthew and Cena he says Chris you should check out this headphone company I think you'll like them and he kind of brought them into the office and showed it to
me I I like aesthetically like the way it looked and I tried them on which is important because they're modular you can specify the different drivers the different ear cups the headbands cables the the wiring that you have every part of this is customizable amazing so it fits to your face to your
form to your liking and and all of those are important to you yes I could go on you've given me so much to Market on already okay like so like what did I learn from this right so I I learned sound is really important for you I learned also having being a referral
from a trusted person that you connect with is also very important for you I learned customization is critical for you I love connection and being able to when you're constantly on calls being right next to someone is also equally as important for you to the point that you could hear everything that's going
on even if they're eating or chewing or whatever it might be so it would feel like they're sitting in the room next to you or in the same room as you so all of these would be themes that we would be generating and testing around to see if it it would have value
to a bigger audience none of the questions sounded like a why question it wasn't because the we were spe specifically speaking to the product itself right and what I was trying to ascertain was the why and you were giving me the why's within those answers and based off of those I I would
second ask a secondary question and the secondary question would allow me to confirm and reconfirm of what you said and most of the time the modularity and the customization was coming around it so I kind of knew that that was the critical element of it for you do most of your interviews sound
like this the person's very forthright they understand what they want what they don't want or you sometimes I really dig it out no no no no so some sometimes they they won't if you for example told me that I don't know I think they're just cool why are they cool well you know
they look nice okay what about them look ni so like we we got deeper and deeper but you knew you knew your product so I'm like you gave me on I think on the first answer you gave me like six seven eight different things I'm not going to make the person I'm interviewing
feel bad about each specific one of those things right so then I'm going to just be reconfirming and revalidating what are the some of this what are some of the elements that you brought up yeah it makes a lot of sense so I I don't want everyone who goes out to try this
because you've been very clear about what you're doing level setting asking the questions that they go out and they hit a brick wall and they're like oh my God I'm like did not prepare me for this I'm like well it doesn't always work like this this is experience speaking it's coming through I'm
a very discriminate buyer so very particular about what it is that I buy and use and so I'm I'm I always say this and it's inappropriate for me to say but I'm like the a marketer's wet dream I buy everything I'll try everything I'll fill out your survey I enjoy that entire process
so I'm very easy to sell to okay let's take it to the next step we have some data and let's stay with the headphone company how do you then convert this into maybe some of the different when you say multivariant testing what what are the different specific things that you might want to
Target and run a campaign on and what might that sound like so here right like uh the headphone company what we learned about you was customization modularity so kind of showing that in in actual real life what do each piece of the puzzle look what are the different different parts of it and
that right now you're just T testing that idea and so you go one by one by one on each one of those ideas in the early onset see what the winners are right so is modularity really really important or is it being in a room this whole idea of like you could hear
me chewing or you can hear my daughter crying in the background and all of those different things right that would be a whole other concept right so so now like you have the headphones on and you're saying is she okay like the whole idea that you know that the fact that you could
even hear that is incredible right so to me that shows that wow that this really can pick up sound to that level of it you start testing these different themes of the different answers you gave and then once you start seeing which ones are winning you start combining the two or you where
it makes sense obviously the customization and the sound element of it wouldn't be a daughter imagery it would be something else right so or it would be like the weight element of it you said it I don't even feel like it's on anymore it's really snug on my ears like it Blends in
with my hat like it it actually looks really cool it looks like I'm wearing you you know a really tight headphone and it's really lightweight all all elements of those will allow you to kind of quickly learn what's working and then once you figure that out then you might start testing different audiences
right so so the audiences you might be testing are uh remote workers is this really important for them or designers is this really really important for them or people who are costly on like uh Zoom calls or like you can kind of figure out what tools that they're using what work style that
they have and so on and so forth and then you start zoning in onto the those different elements it might be Apple users Apple users might be completely different and Android users and a combination of those okay I like where this is going so I'm taking notes here right so this is great
that we're talking about a real thing that people can see and understand versus something abstract so I think there's lots of lessons to pull out of this so I made a list of things that you might want to Target in terms of different concepts modularity Comfort sustainability design referrals and and reviews connection
like the ability to be in the same room with that person and maybe this whole idea of Built For You by you okay and then the visual came up even though um maybe the idea of listening or hearing your daughter crying isn't something I might want to see but if if I had
a young child and I'm like on a on a trip somewhere and I can't talk to my children it's kind of like the second best thing to being in the same room as your child or something like that or connections so clear you might swear they were in the same room or you
can hear somebody's grinding their teeth or something and that like for a person like me those are headphones I need you're not going to make a deadly combo I'm telling you or so comfortable you'll forget that you're wearing headphones you know cuz that matters to me too I got to be able to
wear these all day and I got to tell you I was suffering a little bit because one of the parts broke and I had to wear a different headphones so I was desperately waiting for my replacement part to come and after each call I have to take the headphones off and I could
just feel the weight the dents that was left by the previous headphones good headphones by the way but not really as comfortable as these are one thing I want to highlight and I I know you talk about this a lot too I've seen in some of your streams is one thing we didn't
get into at all was price yes so that's a really important part of this I don't even know how much those headphones are but the more we stay away from being the cheapest on the Block and the more we focus on the value and the connection and what it offers the better it
is for the product itself but also for the marketer right cuz now the connection is further away from oh say is this $100 or is this $200 or is this $50 so you're no longer in the barter commodity category you're now more in the value creation and you're solving a real paino and
the paino that you're solving with this headphone is obviously incredible sound Comfort being connection all elements of that versus oh this is just a really cheap headphone cuz everyone could really create the really cheap headphone but that's not that's not what this product really is right that's and some of elements of this
also that gets really interesting with luxury products is the story of the headphone the creators of it how did they come up with it the engineering elements of it these are things we didn't even talk about here that you didn't bring up but these are things that I would want to test right
so I would I would really want to say how the headphone was engineered and who engineered it does that have a huge impact well like similar to like that's what Dyson does right like if you think about the vacuums and all elements of what they create you know sidebar here I own several
Dyson vacuums they're not great vacuums great marketing I'll say that okay when when uh we bought a melee uh vacuum cleaner my my housekeeper thank me for it she was like so appreciative like thank God you got rid of that garbage she couldn't say it but once we got the new one she
was like this is it this is Nirvana and I use that and I think that is such a superior product not as good marketing but okay so you're talking about kind of being multi-disciplinary here so some of what you're doing is strategic some of it is just straight old school Performance Marketing there's
creative that's involved in in all aspects design photography visuals uh copywriting and then there's a little bit of this that's Tech which is you need to run the campaigns you need to understand targeting and there's a tool set there and you're putting all this together and so that now we know what ad
is going to work and then the idea now is where're they the market is signal to us interest in something they go to a sales page take me to the sales page part because this is where I think many people f it up and they're like oh shoot got this traffic and now
no one signed up for anything what do we need to do can you take us through a similar process let's stay on the headphone product and how where do we go from here first is tooling and I I don't know if your audience knows or doesn't know but there's so much tools out
in the marketplace and one of them uh there's hot jar there is smart look and what these tools allow you to do is to create create both heat maps and videos so now you're able to actually see what happens with the users when they land on the page so you're able to quantify
and and be able to really really track right which part of the landing page are they spending the most time on what are they reading uh where is their eyes really going or their Mouse particularly right and what are the parts that they're ignoring which then allows you to do the same thing
that you did on the ads on the landing page so now you're starting to work through your offer on the landing page to make sure that it's super super relevant and clear and and is personalized to the particular audience as well okay so you do that through the tooling that you have once
you've done that and you've sent enough traffic and and usually you can't make a determination here until you get about 500 visitors or so about a 100 you kind of have an idea right around 500 it's super super clear but then you can start running different tests here to start improving the conversion
rate so to getting the actual goal that you want there's different Frameworks to use here on the on landing pages right so uh the usual one that seems to work incredibly well is you have like a bold claim you show some evidence so the evidence might be uh customer reviews and you know
different examples of it um and then on on top of that you have trust symbols what are trust symbols are like were you featured on different news Publications if you're lucky enough that you have different celebrities that have been wearing your product you can showcase that uh you might have the story of
the brand there initially you might have FAQs what are some common questions that that customers might have before they purchase you might have some version of a guarantee right like hey you can try the headphones risk-free for 30 days if you don't love it just send them back like things of that sort
and sometimes you might be even going deeper in your guarantee if you're a brand new product right so you might say if you don't love it keep it like like things of things as bold as that to get the first few units out the door CU remember at the at the early days
if you were this brand new headphone manufacturer and you were a startup what you really want is you want to get the goods in the hands of as many people as you possibly can to work out all of the different BS because the product itself might be going through an iteration cycle as
whole too so if I'm I if I haven't manufactured the headphones yet these will probably be U some renderings if you haven't manufactured the headphones it would most likely be renderings or it would it would be what we're building right so it becomes more like the place to do this would be on
like a crowdfunding type of page would be much more applicable so you have you might have a video it might be youth speaking about it you might be talking about why you're building these headphones uh you might be comparing other headphones are out in the market and why yours is going to be
better and different and going back to the same reasons that we learned from interviewing some of the customers early on making sure those those components are stated there and then now you're driving your crowdfunding experiment and then on top of that what you're also doing is you can get pre-orders now you're actually
basically getting people to put in a deposit or put in a commitment a small one and say yeah yeah I'm ready you know when the product is ready I'm definitely in here is is $25 for now and I'm going to buy the product at 50% off or whatever it is when it's ready
so so some elements of that you could start doing with the early batch and then you could start doing much bigger and bigger deposits as you get as you get more people committed to it wonderful I know exactly what you're talking about now so we run the ad we figure out what works
and we drive them to a crowdfunding site if it's if it's just a prototype or something we're thinking about and I can see the headline the headline is something like we spent over $28,000 in headphones and here's the one thing we discovered there somebody dumps out all these headphones and it's all garbage
like this one sucks this sucks and they just go through this and it's kind of like the founder story right like why we feel a need for this and they take off the headphones and there's like impressions in the ear and it's sore they talk about all these things and this is plastic
and these break down and what do you do if this happens and so you're really I think you're putting your finger on the pain that you're trying to solve and you're telling that story and then hopefully every couple of points somebody's going to raise their hands like that that's me that's me I
felt that too right exactly you got it okay and then you do the pre-order I love that there's a CTA here so it's not just all like fun in games and some of this if possible you would run some software so that you can watch the Heat Map which is like it's hot
like this is where everybody's looking and it's cold and nobody's looking at this so something's wrong with that or or maybe we need to move the heat map up here where it's closer to the CTA or something like that that's concept right ex you got it exactly and then some software allows you
to to quickly iterate on AB testing and sometimes it's colors you switch one or two things and you keep doing this so this is very I I think in in in the language and in the world that you work in it's very data driven decisions to understand how to Market and what the
the the strategy might be so we're not guessing we're we're testing all the time right testing all the time exactly we're running a bunch of experiments we're collecting data right we're collecting data in different ways some of it with tools that we utilize and how we're building hypotheses so these are like if
this happens then this will happen things of that sort now I want to go back to some of the things I wanted to ask you about earlier which is I think you're a big believer in segmenting Market it was clear it's like we work with a very specific type of entrepreneur why do
you like working with these people that are preed or early seed or something like that what is it about them that in this very stage that you like the most it's the mindset It's a combination of different things and and what I mean by the mindset I talk a lot about a growth
mindset where you don't always know the answer and you're constantly in a state of learning what might have worked yesterday doesn't mean necessarily mean it will work tomorrow and what at least I've noticed in my earlier part of the care my career was with startups there was more of that right so and
that's what excited me more and I think part of what drew me there was personally I was working for like a large corporation and a big company and the mindset definitely was not there right like this is the status quo this is what we're going to be doing this has worked for a
100 years this is exact and you would start seeing the sales drop off right year over year you're like well okay but this the ship is sinking guys the ship is sinking we need to CH and when I got introduced startups it was the complete opposite we don't know what the heck we're
doing but we want to learn and we want to try all these different things that we want to try to figure it out but we want to do it in a scientific way and I just fell in love with that I think the other thing that draws me in is what I call
an a a culture which is what we try to breathe within our organization as well too it's is we want a players right and what I mean by that is there's a players there's B players and there's C players right and I don't know if if your audience knows about this or you
you've heard about this terminology before right so like a players are are are rock stars they do more with less they're constantly want trying to become better they're they are the teammates that you want to have on your team right they know where they roll they know what they're good at they're they're
going to help everybody whenever they can they're going to lending hand you know when they see there's fire they're not going to run away they're going like oh wow there's a fire here let's all focus on fixing this fire it doesn't matter I was working on something else this is much more important
and that seems to exist tremendously in early stage startup it kind of goes away as they get bigger and larger which is natural right but an early stage startups it tends to draw a lot of people D players are kind of what ends up happening as a startup girls right they're like man
there's stability here I like my job I'm just going to go to work from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and I'm going to go home and and if I don't learn anything okay I didn't learn anything you know what I I did what I was to do I got my job done and
then C players are like man work sucks like why are we even working let's go party like like the complete the of all this right what draws me into startups is Founders typically have a growth mindset typically are a players and they want to surround themselves with other a players and they're typically
trying to solve a very focused problem that they have a vision on and they are hyper focused on that and they're willing in they're willing to put in all of the work for absolutely no reward and sometimes they realize that the reward might not be be there it's actually highly likely that the
reward might not be there but that doesn't matter as long as that they have the conviction that if this product comes to this world and if it does work it's going to make a huge difference and and those are the type of people that I get drawn to this almost sounds like an
ad for apples think different here's to the troublemakers the square pegs and the round holes incredible ad right that's probably one of the best ads of all time I didn't know this at the time but that's a jack kowak poem that they just licens I think so kowak wrote that and then whoever
I try day who figure that out like let's use this and it really speaks to the heart of these these Mavericks these Misfits that dream of a better world and I think that's what you're talking about so a players tend to be Divergent they imagine a better world sometimes they're altruistic and they're
deeply driven by purpose and passion and that's what they want to achieve and then the the be and the C players tend to be more convergent thinker they think there's one way to do something or they're very process oriented so doesn't fit within a Playbook they're like nah I don't know what to
do not my job or they're just phoning it in just like I wonder how long it's going to take before they realize I'm not doing anything and I'm just going to Coast for as long as I can and then probably have a lawsuit with HR because of wrongful dismissal you definitely need to
stay away from those kinds of players maybe those are F players they're not C players in all fairness to C players you know there's so many more things that we can talk about but I want to make sure that we get to a couple of things that you want to talk about I
know all over your resume it's like SEO I go to your site you have these massively long articles I know what you're doing you're you're eating the dog food as they say you're creating massive datar articles that are very search friendly to optimize for SEO we don't have enough time to unpack that
but you've talked a little bit about building customer Centric profiles datadriven marketing and strategy connecting creative strategy and just just really this kind of human- centered idea we didn't get into SEO is there another thing that you like to talk about a lot that we can just hint at maybe for a followup
episode we talked about growth mindset a little bit right so that's a that's usually something I like to get into another thing that I like to talk about and I think your audience might might appreciate this is there was a famous I think it was church shill or voler quote Perfection is the
enemy of progress maybe I'm but butchering it or some some element of that and what I've noticed at least this happens within our own team and it happened with me a lot as well too is sometimes we're you know we get on in our own way and what I mean by that is
we're so scared that the ad is just not right or the landing page is not correct the email doesn't look great or the copy does this sound fantastic or or the blog is too long is anyone really going to read it or like we could go on to the laundry list of the
video seems a little cheesy should I really be sending this out there and all of that kind of stuff right right what ends up happening is because we're trying to make everything so perfect we're not we're getting in the way of progress and progress really comes from just doing it right so like
even releasing the ad or releasing the video and if it's bad what's the worst thing that happens okay it was bad a few a few people saw it a couple hundred thousand or whatever it is it's not the end of the world right what did you learn from it how would you make
it better and how would you how would you further evolve your own skill set so that you can take it to the next level or how would you find the resources that you need and surround yourself with other a players that will allow you to be able to bring your vision to life
I was just having a couple different thoughts here so somebody's listening to this they get really excited like wow this guy really knows what he's talking about and I'm excited and there are terms I didn't understand but I I want to work with you how does somebody work with you how do you
structure your fees give us an idea about how this might work so in case they feel like yeah I got to dig a Little Deeper we try to let me you kind of explain what the process is right so haven't talked about what I do so so let me go I probably have
to fill people yeah okay back it up back it up right once I finished the Consulting component of working with the different Venture back startups right so the different DCS themselves so the guys with the capital would come to me and they would ask can you coach other of our companies or portfolio
companies I would say honestly I'm good I had three clients at the time all three were doing phenomenally well one is Camino we talked about earlier in the podcast another one was called cbdfx which was doing incredibly well as well I was more helping them with advisory and guidance and the third was
disco as well where I was more Hands-On helping them build out their goto Market strategy so I had three clients I was paid well across all three of them I was living a good life but there was something really missing for me and and what was really missing was I I felt like
I had stagnated right so I had gone from being an a player to really a b player even though all businesses were doing well and and there was something not happening there for me and then with the encouragement of my wife and also the VCS they told me that you need to do
more you need to provide more and why don't you start teaching and I I know teaching is really big as well for you and so I I said okay that makes sense so I started doing Mentor I started teaching at different universities I started different and I started falling in love with that
then I traveled for to I'm Armenian so Armenian is an Eastern European country it's been in Conflict for hundreds and thousands of years and me being Armenian not being born in Armenia but living most of my life in the US my wife was Armenian from Armenia she finally encourag me to go back
home uh when I went back home I fell in love with the country right I they teach programming at an early age and free at modern modern facilities like Tumo and and creativity is off the charts and but what was missing at least what I saw is this new modern approach of marketing
that I like to do which is this datadriven marketing that we've been talking about and I wanted to change that so I decided at that point I wanted to start a school but in order to start a school I wanted to I had to start an agency right I I can't just magically
start a school out of nowhere so the birth of our agency was born which is aarian growth agency fast forward this story right so if you want to work with us you can go to aerian growth agency.com you can look at the different jobs we have uh but if you want to learn
with us we also have an academy which is ath Academy right so you can easily apply and be any of the classes all the students get 100% scholarships this is not an edtech platform we review very closely all the applicants we go through the application process we want to make sure we're we're
bringing people that are genuinely interested in this and and they want to join startups and they want to be part of a startup team and and we cover all the expenses so there's absolutely no cost to that and we do that if you have a startup we do the same so you can
apply and join and we cover the fees for the startups that weth the startups pay nothing the startups pay nothing students pay nothing and how do we do all of this it's really yeah like how does this work agency right so where what happens with the agency is we're working with different startups
very very selective and high growth companies so these are typically businesses that are and the high growth companies they're already doing about $2 to $3 million a year but they're stuck they founder Le right the founder has a great vision has a great product has a great business might have a great service
and has scaled it to a certain point but they can't figure out a go to market strategy so if you're one of those people listening in today feel free to reach out or they're further along they're doing about 12 15 18 million a year and they're ALS so stuck and they're trying to
grow their business it's typically an e-commerce business at this point and they have they have some marketing working but they might not have a marketing department they might have one or two people who are marketers but don't know the modern way of doing things and they're looking to augment that team so they
would hire our agency and and what our agency does which is different than most typical agencies now now the finally what we do right is we build teams and what we will do is we will build a team of a uiux designer uh a programmer right typically a front-end developer sometimes even a
backend developer an analyst a marketer or a growth marketer a Content marketer and a writer so it's like becomes like this really hit squad or pod unlike other agencies that do something like that similarly where you might be working on 10 accounts or 15 accounts we literally Focus you on one or two
accounts and because because of that our rates might be a little bit higher so most typical agency engagements run at around $6 or $8,000 a month or so on a retainer basis we're a little above that so we're we start at 10 and we go higher than that so I know I have
to answer I wanted to answer your question but I wanted to give you full context to all of it no that was very helpful and I'm glad you answered that way I think and I'm not saying this just just factiously um this is one of those ones where I I probably could benefit
from another hour we're talking to you there's many topics here I want to geek out with you all kinds of stuff I wanted to just quickly ask you this last question before we have to run unfortunately I have another thing I got to do is what's the tech stack what is the tech
stack that you guys like oh my God there's so many that so you Ratt them off they'll fly across the screen there's so many let me tell you there's so many that one of the things that I'm doing for very soon for San Francisco Tech week so we're big in AI by the
way so we're analyzing over 1,500 AI tools and we're narrowing it down because there's so many popping up at the rate that they're coming out right now it's like insane right you could do everything from video to image to writing to you name it sound to music like there's so much available to
you in this modern world so it's not really a fair answer for for me to answer today but I mean I could tell you from image creation we use Shutterfly mid Journey um uh free pick is kind of the three obviously we use Photoshop and all all elements of that as well too
all the Adobe Suites are are something we use at and I started with image because I know you you speak to a lot of designers for videos we use Runway we we like Runway a lot it's particularly it's still early we think it could go somewhere else and we use some of the
Avatar generation ones like he Jen where you can create an avatar version of yourself that is scary real like it almost like literally you I'm trying to think what else your audience would be interested in well you mentioned figma you mentioned hot jar figma hot jar smart look for for the components of
it something that might be interesting for your audience too which we find very helpful is if you have clients that get a lot of phone calls there's a tool called call rail that will allow you to do recording of the calls and then to transcription and sentiment analysis and summation so you don't
have to listen to all the calls but you can quickly start understanding and listening for those wise and why are they calling what are the main things that they're looking for in the product and it really bubbles it up for you uh obviously in the the chat gpts is is a staple we
build GPT Transformers and with that streamline we're getting into agentic AI which is really cool cuz you can really build different workhorses right you can build the marketing content writer or you can you can pick the idea generator and so on and so forth I can go on man this this is my
like no that was great you said I wasn't going to name any and then you went and named them I can literally keep on going I'm sure you can I believe it it was awesome talking to you thanks for sharing with us today and I I want to do this for our audience
if you're watching this on YouTube please leave a comment and ask us a question about what you would have liked to learn more about and if there's enough response there if if Hamlet's willing we we'll Circle back and we'll do episode two but that's really depending on you so make sure you comment
in the section below Hamlet it was a pleasure talking to you I I wish you the very best I'm excited about the just the things I've learned today and I I know our creative Community can apply them so y'all just don't listen to an episode really you got to take some action here
and don't let Perfection get in the way of progress everybody thank you Chris thanks for having me on hi I'm Hamlet you're listening to the Future
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