Starting Your Own Marketing Consultancy with Angela Lee

[00:00:00] A Discussion on Content Marketing and Distribution with Justin Simon

[00:00:00] Jess Bahr: There aren't a lot of companies that produce just a ton of content and they miss what is arguably the most important side of it, which is distribution.
[00:00:08] Jess Bahr: What are you doing with all this content you're sitting on?
[00:00:10] Jess Bahr: Are you a dragon hoarding shit?
[00:00:12] Jess Bahr: Maybe not.
[00:00:18] Jess Bahr: Welcome to another great episode of Marketers talking Marketing.
[00:00:22] Jess Bahr: Today we're joined by Justin.
[00:00:24] Jess Bahr: Why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?
[00:00:27] Justin Simon: Yeah, so I am a, I guess, half creator.
[00:00:32] Justin Simon: I have a podcast, I have a newsletter, I have some other things in the works.
[00:00:37] Justin Simon: Consultant.
[00:00:37] Justin Simon: I work with several B, two B SaaS companies advising on content marketing, distribution, repurposing, all those type of things.
[00:00:46] Justin Simon: And so, yeah, I've got a nice mix going on here.
[00:00:50] Justin Simon: Happy to chat, Jess.
[00:00:51] The Importance of Content Distribution in Content Marketing

[00:00:51] Jess Bahr: Yeah, and I think one of the reasons that I initially gravitated towards your content, aside from knowing each other, from working together, is there are a lot of companies that produce just a ton of content and they miss what was arguably the most important side of it, which is distribution.
[00:01:07] Jess Bahr: What are you doing with all this content you're sitting on?
[00:01:10] Jess Bahr: Are you a dragon hoarding shit?
[00:01:12] Jess Bahr: Maybe not.
[00:01:13] Jess Bahr: How did you because I think you've also kind of niched on the distribution side.
[00:01:16] Jess Bahr: Your podcast namesake.
[00:01:19] Jess Bahr: Tell us more about distribution and why you focus on it so heavily.
[00:01:24] Justin Simon: Yeah, so my show and really the frameworks I implement, everything I'm building around is this idea of distribution first and essentially flipping content marketing on its head.
[00:01:35] Justin Simon: So anybody who's been in content marketing for a long time I've been into it for twelve years at this point.
[00:01:42] Justin Simon: And when I started, it was all about publishing content.
[00:01:46] Justin Simon: It was all about hitting publish on your blog and then moving on to the next thing.
[00:01:50] Justin Simon: And hitting publish on your blog and moving on to the next thing as social media has sort of come up and grown.
[00:01:58] Justin Simon: When I started, Twitter was really probably in its infancy.
[00:02:02] Justin Simon: Facebook was maybe a little bit more mature, but not really as like a content marketing sort of engine.
[00:02:07] Justin Simon: And now everybody's sort of really shifting toward a different way and a different approach of doing content.
[00:02:13] Justin Simon: But the philosophies haven't really evolved with that.
[00:02:16] Justin Simon: There's still a lot of content programs, a lot of content programs that focus on publishing content and hitting publish and they do not care about I mean, I don't want to say they don't care, but they're not focused on what happens after you hit publish.
[00:02:34] Justin Simon: And so really that's been a focus for me in terms of working with clients.
[00:02:39] Justin Simon: And honestly, even working at previous companies was, hey, we're spending all this time creating all this content and then we just move on to the next thing.
[00:02:47] Justin Simon: And it's like, oh gosh, can't we just do some more with it?
[00:02:53] Jess Bahr: I feel like AI is kind not to go into AI initially, but I was working on a tool for a client, a workflow for helping produce a larger volume of content with the goal of good content.
[00:03:05] Jess Bahr: That's SEO and came across a handful of tools that are really leveraging AI just to produce the volume.
[00:03:11] Jess Bahr: But what do you do with all that content?
[00:03:13] Jess Bahr: It feels like we're going AI is driving us maybe in that direction of more and more volume without the distribution side being solved.
[00:03:20] Jess Bahr: And if you haven't solved it, what are you doing with it?
[00:03:23] Jess Bahr: You're not really getting the most out of it.
[00:03:25] Justin Simon: Yeah, and I'm actually in the process of this with a couple of different companies right now.
[00:03:31] Justin Simon: But I would guess if you took a step back and started auditing your content and actually looking at what was happening with the things you were publishing, you would start to see a massive gap in between what you think might be working or what you hope will happen versus what's actually happening.
[00:03:56] Justin Simon: And so at any given company, depending on the structure, I mean, the AI thing, I've seen lots of people talking about how we can use this to just pump out more content and get more stuff out.
[00:04:07] Justin Simon: And it's like, well, that's not really the goal.
[00:04:09] Justin Simon: The goal for content marketing isn't just to produce content.
[00:04:16] Justin Simon: It's not a volume game anymore, honestly, for me.
[00:04:22] Justin Simon: And I came up in SEO, but I'm just seeing less emphasis on the need to start there and more emphasis on creating a story, building an audience of building a community of people who are interested in the same.
[00:04:35] Justin Simon: Things you are versus, like, let's rank for the top ten terms around our product offering and just kind of end up in a commodity list amongst every other company out there.
[00:04:49] Justin Simon: It's funny because this is a generalization, but I think if you took a step back, started auditing that content, you would probably start to see that 20% or less of the content that's currently sitting on your website is driving 80% of the traffic to your website.
[00:05:05] Justin Simon: And so it's just a matter of looking at that and trying to get a number and to understand, like, oh man, we've got a lot of stuff that's just literally not doing anything.
[00:05:16] Jess Bahr: So when you're thinking about auditing content, are you starting with Google Analytics?
[00:05:21] Jess Bahr: Where do you take a first stab at that?
[00:05:23] Justin Simon: Yeah, I'm probably starting within Ga and looking at kind of the lay of the land and then maybe expanding out to Search Console, then expanding out to maybe SEMrush or Hrefs or something like that, and just trying to build a more holistic view of what the content is doing and understand what a company's distribution strategy.
[00:05:43] Understanding Content Marketing Strategies with Justin Simon

[00:05:43] Justin Simon: Know, for some companies that's, well, we're on Twitter and we're on LinkedIn, and we do email sometimes, and we do this rather than, okay, like, well, what's your plan for this next piece of content that's coming out?
[00:05:55] Justin Simon: And it's like, hit publish on it.
[00:05:58] Justin Simon: And go.
[00:06:00] Jess Bahr: Do you find most companies don't even have a distribution plan?
[00:06:05] Justin Simon: Correct?
[00:06:06] Justin Simon: Yeah, I read a stat.
[00:06:09] Justin Simon: It was an older stat, but I'm guessing it hasn't changed too much that only 39% of companies have a written content marketing plan.
[00:06:19] Justin Simon: So now you're talking about companies who have a written content distribution plan.
[00:06:25] Justin Simon: It's probably 1%.
[00:06:26] Justin Simon: It's probably less than 1% of companies that actually have like, hey, when we publish a podcast, this is the motion that gets put in place.
[00:06:34] Justin Simon: When we publish a blog post, this is the motion that puts in place.
[00:06:36] Justin Simon: And the whole idea of distribution first is to understand even where you're going.
[00:06:41] Justin Simon: So to say, we do LinkedIn and we do email.
[00:06:45] Justin Simon: Okay.
[00:06:45] Justin Simon: How many emails are you sending every week?
[00:06:47] Justin Simon: We send one.
[00:06:48] Justin Simon: Okay, so you need one email send a week.
[00:06:50] Justin Simon: Okay.
[00:06:51] Justin Simon: How many times are you posting on LinkedIn?
[00:06:52] Justin Simon: Three.
[00:06:53] Justin Simon: Five.
[00:06:54] Justin Simon: Okay, so you need five pieces of content for that given week.
[00:06:58] Justin Simon: How much content do you have to create to be able to fill that distribution and really understand what that is?
[00:07:05] Justin Simon: Because most companies are creating infinitely more things than they could ever distribute and get out to their audience.
[00:07:12] Jess Bahr: Yeah, it's interesting because I'm just thinking through even as a marketer, plans that I have built as a marketer, and I like to think my content plans include distribution, but I definitely typically approach it from the we're going to make this content, we're going to make a new gated asset because we need more leads.
[00:07:34] Jess Bahr: And then how do we get it out there?
[00:07:35] Jess Bahr: And then also we have this evergreen kind of content plan for social or for our partners, and how does it fit in and kind of melding it together?
[00:07:45] Jess Bahr: Is it difficult for clients to start thinking about it distribution first?
[00:07:49] Jess Bahr: Or does it kind of come naturally once you get into it?
[00:07:51] Justin Simon: I think it's easy to see why it would be effective.
[00:07:57] Justin Simon: It's harder to implement because there's a lot of upstream processes that have to change or people in place.
[00:08:03] Justin Simon: So, hey, we've got two content writers.
[00:08:06] Justin Simon: What do we have them do?
[00:08:07] Justin Simon: Or we don't have a social media marketer.
[00:08:12] Justin Simon: Our writers write blogs.
[00:08:13] Justin Simon: They don't write social content.
[00:08:14] Justin Simon: So there's a disconnect there in terms of or our writers write blogs, they don't write email content.
[00:08:19] Justin Simon: So there's a disconnect between the creation and the distribution side and how those things meld together.
[00:08:27] Justin Simon: That's a gap I see in a lot of organizations.
[00:08:29] Justin Simon: And a lot of folks that I talk to is like, we just aren't connecting the dots.
[00:08:33] Justin Simon: We are not properly communicating, understanding, having this 30,000 foot view of like, when we create something, the goal cannot be to push, publish and hope Google picks it up and then eventually hope it will rank for keywords and hope that it'll eventually get out there.
[00:08:49] Justin Simon: That might be fine.
[00:08:50] Justin Simon: I actually think SEO is great for long term because that stuff can last.
[00:08:54] Justin Simon: But what's going to happen in the two to four months of that piece starting to try to rank?
[00:09:01] Justin Simon: Is it just going to sit there and do nothing?
[00:09:03] Jess Bahr: I've been seeing speaking of SEO, I've been seeing more and more programmatic SEO approaches where companies are putting out like 200 300 pages at a time of very similar content with very specific changes to it.
[00:09:17] Jess Bahr: And it feels like that's another example of would that even work?
[00:09:21] Jess Bahr: Or is that just flooding your site with hope?
[00:09:24] Jess Bahr: Almost like the 80 20 rule.
[00:09:26] Jess Bahr: Like, if I put enough content out, something will hit, something will work?
[00:09:31] Justin Simon: Yeah, I think philosophically, that I think can make sense.
[00:09:35] Justin Simon: But I think you also have to understand what is the experience you're giving to a user and then what's the experience that you have as that content marketer, that marketer managing all that.
[00:09:47] Justin Simon: You're now managing 300 pieces of content that you have to keep up to date and understand and manage and really get all of that honed in to say, this is our X content, this is our Y content.
[00:09:59] Justin Simon: It's a lot to undertake and to manage if you want to do it well, versus like just, well, we've got 300 things and they're all going to rank eventually, or we're going to flood this.
[00:10:11] Justin Simon: So that 30 of them, 10% rank.
[00:10:16] Justin Simon: It depends on what your goal is.
[00:10:18] Justin Simon: If your goal is keywords ranking sessions, maybe even that could all be fine.
[00:10:24] Justin Simon: But one of the things I've learned over my career is that all of those things are super subjective at the end of the day anyway, because a session isn't a session.
[00:10:32] Justin Simon: Somebody clicks on a particular post and it's at a particular part in the customer lifecycle, it doesn't really matter.
[00:10:40] Justin Simon: Versus if somebody else clicks a different piece, they might be more willing to try or buy or whatever off of that.
[00:10:46] Justin Simon: But also it's not this instant thing, right?
[00:10:50] Justin Simon: Like, when's the last time you read a blog and were like, yes, I'm buying this thing right now, or Googled something.
[00:10:56] Justin Simon: This is a thing I don't think people realize either with SEO distribution is like, and it's fine, but I am never associated with a brand after Googling them, I'm like, cool, got my answer, thank you.
[00:11:09] Justin Simon: I'm moving on to my life again.
[00:11:11] Justin Simon: It's not like, oh, that brand was so helpful.
[00:11:13] Justin Simon: I'm so glad I clicked on that and saw their name at the top and they gave me the information I've.
[00:11:19] Jess Bahr: Definitely had a few times where I was looking for templates and tools and I found them and I was like, oh, this is a good site.
[00:11:25] Jess Bahr: I'm going to earmark it for later.
[00:11:27] Jess Bahr: And do I ever go to my BOOKMARKS tab?
[00:11:30] Jess Bahr: No, I go and I Google something else and I maybe come back to it and it's like, after enough repetition, I start remembering just to go to that site.
[00:11:39] Jess Bahr: But it's maybe three, and one of them is SparkToro, which is also just.
[00:11:44] Justin Simon: Like but SparkToro has done a great job of building their brand as wouldn't I actually heard both Amanda and Rand talk.
[00:11:53] Justin Simon: They think of SEO as kind of like which is hilarious to hear Rand talk like that, but as this sort of thing that they're not really interested in, which is wild.
[00:12:04] Jess Bahr: They put out so much good content.
[00:12:06] Jess Bahr: I think that's the Golden State or the ideal is if you put out good content, it will attract the right audiences.
[00:12:16] Jess Bahr: But you have to make that gap between your good content and where your audience is currently living.
[00:12:21] Jess Bahr: But definitely they put out such great this is now just a Spark Tarot fan podcast.
[00:12:28] Jess Bahr: The last episode they came up too.
[00:12:30] Justin Simon: There you go.
[00:12:32] Jess Bahr: But it's good content too.
[00:12:33] Jess Bahr: So it's valuable, right?
[00:12:35] Jess Bahr: That's what really builds the affinity with it.
[00:12:38] The Value of Email Marketing & Newsletter Subscription

[00:12:38] Jess Bahr: Do you have a favorite distribution channel?
[00:12:42] Justin Simon: I think my favorite distribution channel is becoming email.
[00:12:47] Justin Simon: Funny enough, like, we're going back to email days, but I just think newsletters, email, having something that you can own and communicate with at will is very valuable.
[00:12:57] Justin Simon: And also having folks give up their email is more just it's a higher level of sort of community or audience building than a social follow.
[00:13:09] Justin Simon: Like, for me to give you my email is like, I'll follow you on social, but to give it my inbox takes a little bit more effort.
[00:13:16] Justin Simon: And so I think email is probably my favorite distribution channel for that.
[00:13:22] Justin Simon: Because once you build the audience, you can create whatever you want.
[00:13:26] Justin Simon: You don't have to worry about an algorithm like, oh, LinkedIn doesn't like videos.
[00:13:30] Justin Simon: I can't post videos.
[00:13:31] Justin Simon: Oh, Twitter doesn't like this.
[00:13:33] Justin Simon: I can't do know Instagram doesn't like this.
[00:13:36] Justin Simon: You can literally just post whatever you want.
[00:13:38] Justin Simon: And if your audience finds it valuable, they'll consume it.
[00:13:41] Jess Bahr: Yeah, it really is the only place where people are opting in to interact with you.
[00:13:47] Jess Bahr: Because even if you follow a page, you know you're not going to see 100% the content.
[00:13:50] Justin Simon: No, not at all.
[00:13:52] Jess Bahr: I love email marketing.
[00:13:53] Jess Bahr: I think people honestly, I'm also into some old school stuff like direct mailing.
[00:13:58] Jess Bahr: But I think a lot of people, they kind of shit on email marketing and they'll talk about open rates being low and this and that.
[00:14:04] Jess Bahr: But if you do it well and you do it right, and you hit your list respectfully and not spam the heck out of them, it can be valuable.
[00:14:13] Jess Bahr: I bought so much stuff from emails.
[00:14:15] Justin Simon: Yeah, you're building that over time and then it's easy to and again, it's not like every email that or newsletter I'm subscribed to, a lot of them I just delete.
[00:14:27] Justin Simon: But I'm not unsubscribing.
[00:14:28] Justin Simon: And I'm still seeing them pop up in my feed.
[00:14:30] Justin Simon: So it's like, oh yeah, they exist.
[00:14:34] Justin Simon: But that is true.
[00:14:35] Justin Simon: And that's something to think about with distribution as well.
[00:14:38] Justin Simon: As even for email.
[00:14:40] Justin Simon: Right.
[00:14:40] Justin Simon: Like if you had a 50% open rate, which is solid, that's still 50% that are not seeing the content that you have.
[00:14:48] Justin Simon: Right.
[00:14:49] Justin Simon: And so it's like you got to think about these ways to get that content back out there.
[00:14:53] Jess Bahr: Yeah, I'm subscribed to your email list.
[00:14:56] Jess Bahr: I don't read every email, but I do read probably like every five or six and then I'll come in and yeah, so I think I agree with that.
[00:15:04] Jess Bahr: I've been looking more at I keep saying stack overflow substack.
[00:15:09] Jess Bahr: I think it's interesting how substack in the rise of being able to more easily monetize newsletters in general where it makes it more of almost a commercial product instead of this one to one intimate conversation in your inbox that I think email marketing used to be more.
[00:15:25] Justin Simon: Positioned as yeah I think just that individual human to human connection of a newsletter.
[00:15:35] Justin Simon: I would say the vast majority of newsletters that I subscribe to, even if they're from a business, come from a person and so like a person at that business and so it humanizes the business to where even on social company page that's a slog.
[00:15:55] Justin Simon: Right.
[00:15:56] Justin Simon: On any platform because it's just an icon.
[00:16:00] Justin Simon: It's just X company with their icon and there's the personality.
[00:16:06] Justin Simon: It's really hard to break through on that.
[00:16:08] Justin Simon: Versus an email can be a little bit more personal, a little bit more, hey, this is who it's coming from at the company.
[00:16:14] Justin Simon: Oh yeah, I like that gal.
[00:16:16] Justin Simon: I like that guy.
[00:16:17] Justin Simon: I'm glad he's sending me this email.
[00:16:19] Jess Bahr: We ran a test, I want to say four or five years ago I was running marketing for a company that sold to developers.
[00:16:24] Jess Bahr: And so we tested different people internally and we found that someone who I think to them was more relatable.
[00:16:30] Jess Bahr: So using a head of or maybe a director or manager person and coming from a woman had the highest open rates and the highest engagement rates when it was versus like a CEO or VP with.
[00:16:45] Jess Bahr: Would we lean into that a little bit?
[00:16:48] Jess Bahr: Where is Melissa sending it from Melissa today instead of Mike?
[00:16:55] Jess Bahr: Oh, I've been seeing more and more success with using plain text formatted emails from companies but using it from a human like the director of demand gen but plain text emails over visually formatted ones.
[00:17:11] Justin Simon: Mean that's what we did when we started revamping stuff at metadata.
[00:17:15] Justin Simon: It all came from Mark and it was a plain text, whether it was a demand session promotion or it was a demand genu podcast episode or it was just a news really trying to just again play to that.
[00:17:31] Justin Simon: Like this is the type of thing that shows up in my inbox from my friend versus this is the type of thing that shows up in my inbox from Kohl's or from somebody who's just trying to sell me something.
[00:17:47] Justin Simon: It's a different vibe.
[00:17:48] Discussing a Shift towards More Organic Marketing Content

[00:17:48] Jess Bahr: Yeah.
[00:17:49] Jess Bahr: Do you think we're getting a little fatigued of those beautifully formatted emails.
[00:17:54] Jess Bahr: I see it on Social, too, people moving towards more organic, raw feeling images versus ones that are clearly staged and.
[00:18:00] Justin Simon: Photoshopped, I think so.
[00:18:02] Justin Simon: I think the sort of rise of YouTube shorts TikTok reels on the video side is helping influence that in other creative avenues as well, to where I'm much more drawn to something that I'm sure somebody's done a study.
[00:18:20] Justin Simon: On this, but if you just look at your own patterns, how fast when you're scrolling you could recognize an ad and keep on moving is unbelievable.
[00:18:30] Justin Simon: And so I think understanding your content can't look like an ad and your ads can't look like ads.
[00:18:39] Justin Simon: And most of the time in a lot of traditional B to B, even some B to C, it's like everything looks like an ad.
[00:18:48] Justin Simon: It looks professional, looks polished, it looks clean, it looks put together.
[00:18:52] Justin Simon: And that, to me, feels like a spot where companies are starting to move away from.
[00:18:59] Justin Simon: But it also feels risky for companies to do that because it doesn't feel professional, quote unquote.
[00:19:06] Justin Simon: It doesn't feel, how are we going to sell into the enterprise, to an enterprise if we're doing that?
[00:19:14] Jess Bahr: Before joining metadata, I was at another company and we were working on our content.
[00:19:19] Jess Bahr: I was like, Metadata is so fun.
[00:19:21] Jess Bahr: Their content is so fun and human.
[00:19:23] Jess Bahr: And they have memes and they're like, Legal will not approve memes.
[00:19:28] Jess Bahr: You cannot use someone else's character for commercialization.
[00:19:31] Jess Bahr: Memes are not allowed to be used for any corporate communications.
[00:19:35] Jess Bahr: I was like, But I just want to share a meme.
[00:19:37] Jess Bahr: And they're like, no.
[00:19:38] Jess Bahr: And I look at Metadata, I was like, Why do they get memes?
[00:19:42] Jess Bahr: Why can't we be fun?
[00:19:44] Jess Bahr: Why can't we be human?
[00:19:46] Jess Bahr: Because I feel like that helped the brand grow.
[00:19:49] Jess Bahr: Right.
[00:19:49] Jess Bahr: That human side of it.
[00:19:51] Jess Bahr: And the Benjamin Franklin everywhere.
[00:19:54] Justin Simon: Right?
[00:19:55] Justin Simon: Yeah.
[00:19:56] Justin Simon: No, that's a great point.
[00:19:58] Justin Simon: The bigger the gets, the harder it is to kind of tap into that sometimes.
[00:20:04] Jess Bahr: Yeah, and that was their fear, was if they used a meme or something in pop culture or made a TikTok with a trending sound that they would get sued.
[00:20:14] Jess Bahr: And it was a lawsuit waiting to happen.
[00:20:16] Jess Bahr: It's like, well, we're just missing out on being human.
[00:20:20] Jess Bahr: And I think especially selling to marketers.
[00:20:23] Justin Simon: It's a tough way to live when you're just constantly trying to play, like, defense.
[00:20:27] Jess Bahr: Yeah, 100%.
[00:20:29] Jess Bahr: It's exhausting.
[00:20:31] Jess Bahr: Get rid of legal teams.
[00:20:32] Jess Bahr: That's the takeaway, is to make your content distribution better.
[00:20:36] Jess Bahr: Get rid of your legal team.
[00:20:38] Jess Bahr: Have them only do client contracts.
[00:20:40] Jess Bahr: Get them out of marketing.
[00:20:42] Justin Simon: I don't advise this.
[00:20:44] Justin Simon: That's jess's.
[00:20:47] Jess Bahr: The views and opinions shared on this podcast do not reflect either of our companies.
[00:20:53] Justin Simon: Agreed.
[00:20:57] Jess Bahr: Disclaimer I think you've been in roles, right?
[00:21:03] Jess Bahr: You're sold into marketers.
[00:21:05] Jess Bahr: Marketers.
[00:21:06] Jess Bahr: We're the ones typically producing content, too.
[00:21:08] Jess Bahr: So I think when we see it, we see it right away.
[00:21:11] Jess Bahr: As an ad and we see the thought process behind it.
[00:21:14] Jess Bahr: And I've seen many TikTok videos that came out like four months after the trend was done.
[00:21:20] Jess Bahr: And you're just like, oh yeah, that was a lot of meanings to get that done.
[00:21:25] Jess Bahr: And it probably took long and delayed.
[00:21:27] Jess Bahr: You can think through the back end of it.
[00:21:30] Jess Bahr: I can't imagine if you sell into certain demographics that are just not as in tune to the marketing world where they could see those ads and be like, oh yeah, no, this is just normal content.
[00:21:42] Jess Bahr: That celebrity really uses those whitening strips.
[00:21:44] Jess Bahr: That's exactly how I'm going to get white teeth.
[00:21:47] Jess Bahr: Exactly.
[00:21:48] Justin Simon: Yeah, I'm with you.
[00:21:50] Jess Bahr: They fall for it.
[00:21:54] Jess Bahr: Our black magic we do as marketers.
[00:21:56] Digital Detox and New Digital Platforms

[00:21:56] Jess Bahr: Have you been on threads yet?
[00:21:59] Jess Bahr: I also have noted on an iPhone.
[00:22:02] Justin Simon: I woke up the other day and it was just like threads.
[00:22:06] Justin Simon: So I don't have disclaimer, I don't have social or email on my phone right now.
[00:22:11] Justin Simon: Like, I'm going through a tell me about that.
[00:22:14] Justin Simon: Life a detox.
[00:22:16] Justin Simon: I did it for a vacation.
[00:22:18] Justin Simon: I went on vacation.
[00:22:19] Justin Simon: I said, I'm just going to delete all these so I can be present with my family and actually enjoy the vacation.
[00:22:25] Justin Simon: Because even if you're not running your own business, it's too easy to get sucked into.
[00:22:30] Justin Simon: Like, well, let me just check that slack.
[00:22:33] Justin Simon: Let me just check that email.
[00:22:35] Justin Simon: What if something comes through?
[00:22:37] Justin Simon: And then even if it's something good, like, oh, contracts are ready to be signed, or yes, this has been approved.
[00:22:44] Justin Simon: It's like, now you're thinking about that.
[00:22:47] Justin Simon: And so it was a very conscious effort for me to not do that.
[00:22:52] Justin Simon: I just deleted them and I was pretty hardcore about it.
[00:22:56] Justin Simon: And I came back from vacation and I'm like, oh, I don't think I'm going to add these back on.
[00:23:02] Justin Simon: And it's been awesome because I would find myself, especially running my own business, checking email all the time.
[00:23:11] Justin Simon: And again, there was never any fires.
[00:23:14] Justin Simon: There was never anything that I couldn't go respond to the next morning and get it figured out.
[00:23:21] Justin Simon: Never.
[00:23:21] Justin Simon: And so it's really taken some of that off, all that to say, no, I haven't tried Threads because I'm going through this time where I'm like, oh, I don't really want anything on my phone.
[00:23:32] Justin Simon: And I don't want to I don't know, I'll probably get sucked into it at some point, but I'm just kind of curious to see where it goes.
[00:23:40] Justin Simon: I've been paying attention to it though, it sounds like you said you haven't been on either.
[00:23:44] Jess Bahr: No, I built my own PC in 2017 and never looked back and never went back to iPhone.
[00:23:51] Jess Bahr: So I have an iPad that I use for one of our for calls sometimes.
[00:23:55] Jess Bahr: But I don't have an iPhone and it's iPhone only got you.
[00:24:00] Jess Bahr: I just don't have it.
[00:24:01] Jess Bahr: And does it hurt me a little bit?
[00:24:04] Jess Bahr: Yes.
[00:24:04] Jess Bahr: Am I sad yes, I understand why companies develop for iPhone first.
[00:24:09] Jess Bahr: It's much simpler, but it is a bit.
[00:24:11] Jess Bahr: I was like, man, I feel like I'm kind of like missing out on it.
[00:24:15] Jess Bahr: But I feel like I've been early user to so many platforms that I'm okay, kind of sitting this one out.
[00:24:21] Jess Bahr: Similar to your journey, but much less severe.
[00:24:25] Jess Bahr: I removed all Slack instances off my phone except for my main work one because I found that I was sitting on there continuously checking things.
[00:24:34] Jess Bahr: And so now I just have it on my work computer.
[00:24:37] Jess Bahr: And so when I'm not at the computer, I'm then not working.
[00:24:41] Jess Bahr: I'm trying to not work outside of a normal working schedule and it's been really quite difficult.
[00:24:49] Jess Bahr: But yeah, nothing.
[00:24:51] Jess Bahr: I've joined some conversations late and what I found is people were tagging me and asking what I thought on it.
[00:24:57] Jess Bahr: So instead of me being there right away, people were starting to ask.
[00:25:02] Jess Bahr: It felt good to be wanted, but yeah, nothing catastrophic happened.
[00:25:07] Balancing Work and Personal Life in the Remote Working Era

[00:25:07] Jess Bahr: What do you have on your phone?
[00:25:08] Jess Bahr: Is it just like phone text message?
[00:25:10] Justin Simon: Yeah, if you open my screen, it's literally I have it set up to where it's nothing on there right now.
[00:25:17] Justin Simon: And then I have one tiny button with stuff.
[00:25:19] Justin Simon: So I try to limit the temptation of opening and now that nothing's there, it's really like, what is there to look at?
[00:25:28] Justin Simon: So I have Chromecast all over my that's how I watch TV and stuff.
[00:25:31] Justin Simon: So I have all my shows and apps and stuff on there.
[00:25:34] Justin Simon: I have like I watch a ton of YouTube videos and podcasts, Spotify, stuff like that.
[00:25:39] Justin Simon: So I still have content that I consume.
[00:25:42] Justin Simon: So I'm not perfect in that regard.
[00:25:43] Justin Simon: I can still sit there and flip through YouTube shorts.
[00:25:45] Justin Simon: That's probably the one demise to this whole idea that I have in my head is shorts.
[00:25:52] Justin Simon: But I think for the most part it's been really good to just not trying to not be on screens as much.
[00:26:01] Justin Simon: I'm on screens all day, working, talking to people, doing, so I'm trying to do a better job of getting off them and to not feel the constant pressure to be on all the time.
[00:26:13] Justin Simon: And so it's been really good.
[00:26:16] Jess Bahr: It's so weird for me to say this because I've worked remote forever.
[00:26:20] Jess Bahr: I worked remote as an intern for a while in college and was always in a role where I was like, traveling a lot.
[00:26:25] Jess Bahr: So I'd work from wherever I got a physical office because I was having such difficulty removing myself from working in the evening.
[00:26:34] Jess Bahr: And I also play Call of Duty.
[00:26:37] Jess Bahr: It's like my only hobby.
[00:26:38] Jess Bahr: And so if I was on calls all day, maybe at an early morning start, I would be on the computer for like 12 hours and I have a sit stand computer, but I'm like, this is not okay.
[00:26:50] Jess Bahr: And I'm like, well, I miss at least when I was in the office.
[00:26:52] Jess Bahr: I'd walk between meetings.
[00:26:54] Jess Bahr: I would get up and move around more.
[00:26:56] Jess Bahr: And so I actually got we're in my office.
[00:26:59] Jess Bahr: I got a physical office so that I would have to leave my house at least once a day.
[00:27:04] Jess Bahr: And not just I went like a week and a half once without leaving the house at all.
[00:27:09] Jess Bahr: And I was like, this is not good.
[00:27:12] Jess Bahr: This is not a thing that a sane person does because I instacarted my groceries in.
[00:27:17] Jess Bahr: And so I just didn't have to leave my house.
[00:27:20] Jess Bahr: I went outside.
[00:27:20] Jess Bahr: I went into my backyard.
[00:27:22] Justin Simon: There you go.
[00:27:23] Jess Bahr: But I didn't go anywhere.
[00:27:24] Jess Bahr: And I think since getting the physical office and having and I have employees in the area, and I have friends that can come over, and I kind of use it like a social environment too.
[00:27:36] Jess Bahr: But it really helped me try and build that separation.
[00:27:41] Jess Bahr: And now I prefer to come here to work most days.
[00:27:44] Justin Simon: Oh, yeah.
[00:27:45] Justin Simon: I typically will work from my favorite coffee shop at least once a week, probably twice a week for long periods of time where I could just be heads down and then, yeah, same.
[00:27:58] Justin Simon: I had to move my entire office situation around.
[00:28:01] Justin Simon: Thankfully, we have a basement and stuff.
[00:28:03] Justin Simon: My whole thing is in my basement, but that way it's literally I moved it to the furthest corner down here, so if I'm down there, I don't have to look at my computer.
[00:28:13] Justin Simon: I can't even really see it if I'm hanging out.
[00:28:15] Justin Simon: And otherwise it's just like, be upstairs, don't come down.
[00:28:19] Justin Simon: That's where work happens.
[00:28:21] Justin Simon: So I'm trying to do a better job of that too.
[00:28:24] Jess Bahr: Yeah.
[00:28:24] Jess Bahr: The modern challenges.
[00:28:26] Jess Bahr: Who would have thought in the 70s, these were not challenges people had?
[00:28:30] Justin Simon: No, totally different.
[00:28:32] Justin Simon: Totally different.
[00:28:33] Justin Simon: Again, like pros and cons to it all.
[00:28:34] Justin Simon: It's just, I think trying to for me, it's been trying to be more aware of the effect that something like that might have, where it's like, oh, I've got to be down here all day long.
[00:28:46] Justin Simon: It's like, well, you don't have to.
[00:28:48] Justin Simon: You could get an office space.
[00:28:49] Justin Simon: You could go to the coffee shop.
[00:28:51] Justin Simon: You could go for a walk.
[00:28:52] Justin Simon: There's these things you could do to not be chained.
[00:28:55] A Conversation with Justin Simon about his Addictive Tech Stack and Meeting Recorder Fathom

[00:28:55] Jess Bahr: Well, we're coming up on time.
[00:28:57] Jess Bahr: The end question for every guest, always the same.
[00:29:00] Jess Bahr: Do you have a favorite piece of your tech stack, a favorite tool or something that you really hate?
[00:29:09] Jess Bahr: Sometimes people go the hate route, so throwing that out as an option.
[00:29:14] Justin Simon: My favorite, and again, this is something I started using.
[00:29:19] Justin Simon: And there are a bunch of different tools like this, but this is something I started using when I built up the consultancy is a tool called Fathom.
[00:29:27] Jess Bahr: I've heard of them.
[00:29:28] Justin Simon: It's essentially a call recorder.
[00:29:30] Justin Simon: It'll hop on, but it's got some AI stuff built in.
[00:29:33] Justin Simon: And I love it because I can record all my meetings and.
[00:29:37] Justin Simon: Then just if there are things I need to follow up in that meeting, rather than writing things down and then trying to feel like, what was that chicken scratch?
[00:29:43] Justin Simon: I can just review or check on this or make a note and it'll highlight it, and I can just go back to that call after and play the highlights and say, oh, yeah, that's what I need to do that's on my checklist.
[00:29:55] Justin Simon: Yes.
[00:29:55] Justin Simon: Okay.
[00:29:55] Justin Simon: I need to get them that yes, that's what that is.
[00:29:57] Justin Simon: And so it's just a super helpful way to be able to do that to where I'm not having to just try to remember everything.
[00:30:06] Justin Simon: I can just be present in the call and if something's interesting, I can just click a button real quick.
[00:30:09] Jess Bahr: Yeah, I love that.
[00:30:11] Jess Bahr: Well, thank you for sharing your tool.
[00:30:13] Jess Bahr: Thank you for joining us today.
[00:30:14] Jess Bahr: It was a great conversation.
[00:30:16] Jess Bahr: If anyone listening or watching wants to learn more, all of Justin's links will be in the description below.
[00:30:21] Jess Bahr: Leave a comment.
[00:30:22] Jess Bahr: Of course, follow on on social.
[00:30:25] Jess Bahr: We're both everywhere.
[00:30:28] Justin Simon: Come hang out.
[00:30:30] Jess Bahr: All right, well, thank you for joining us and have a great rest of your day, everyone.
[00:30:34] Jess Bahr: Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Marketers Talking Marketing.
[00:30:38] Jess Bahr: We have a ton of great content coming out to make sure you don't miss any of our future episodes.
[00:30:43] Jess Bahr: Make sure you subscribe and hit the bell.
[00:30:45] Jess Bahr: Notification below.