The Jennifer Kamara Podcast

Rob Hoffman: I was just a writer at this point. So

yeah, I got fired. Like I was one of the people who got let go.

And so for me, to be honest, that was actually one of the best things that could ever happen to me. I was looking at back, get back to Metagene, and so when I got let go as part of this big round of layoffs, I was like, this is my opportunity. And so I almost immediately, I booked a one-way plane ticket to

Jennifer Kamara: Welcome y'all. We have Rob Hoffman with us today, so happy to have him here. He's the founder and c e o of contact studios. They are a content as a service business. They create video and ss e o content for brands like Shopify and many more. They work with both big and small brands.

They work similar to productize design companies. But instead of providing unlimited design, they provide unlimited video and ss e o content as a monthly subscription service. Um, Rob was born in Toronto and interestingly moved to Meine where he then started the company. He has been bootstrapped a hundred percent and profitable from day one.

I'm so looking forward to learning more. Welcome, Rob. Thanks for being here with us.

Rob Hoffman: Thank you so much. Excited to be here.

Jennifer Kamara: I would love to start by inviting you to tell us in your own words, who is Rob today? Never wanna assume, so always wanna give you the chance to describe yourself.

Rob Hoffman: Absolutely. Well, I think you did a lot of the work for me. Um, so this might be a bit repetitive, but I am Rob Hoffman. I'm the c e o and Co-founder of Contact Studios. Uh, what we do is we create video, uh, and ss e o blog content as a monthly subscription service. And as you mentioned, we've worked with companies like Shopify, Hearst Media, R B C Bank, uh, and many more. Um, to kind of go over, you know, more of the professional side of things. First, the need that we fill or why clients like working with us is because they get a personalized content strategy, totally managed content production, and access to a dedicated content team for one fixed monthly rate, which costs less than one senior hire. And then to kind of put aside the professional stuff and talk a little bit more about me personally. Aside from contact studios, me personally, as you mentioned, I'm from Toronto, Canada, but I live in Mej, Columbia. I speak English and Spanish fluently. Uh, and I love nature travel adventure, and I'm a huge podcast nerd.

So I'm very excited to, uh, be on your podcast today,

Jennifer Kamara: That's right. I think we connected because we both rest in the same way. We both rest by going on hikes and being in flow outside, out and about and doing things that get our minds into flow state, and then also loving the podcast nerd aspect. Okay. So kind of given who Rob is today. I am curious to understand more about how and what influenced the person you are today.

So I like to ask the question, what are some formative experiences? And could be from any period of your life.

Rob Hoffman: I gotta be honest, the first 19 years of my life were pretty uneventful. But the next 10 years are pretty exciting. And so the reason is that I grew up in a suburb of Toronto, which is kind of one of the most wonderfully boring places on earth.

And I say that not as a bad thing. Toronto is, I think, literally the most multicultural city in the world.

And the reason that so many people come to Toronto from other parts of the world is because they want stability, uh, safety, comfort. So that makes Toronto a very ideal place if you're looking to raise a family. But it's not necessarily an ideal place if you're a young person seeking adventure. And so, growing up, you know, my entire life I wanted to be a journalist. Uh, I even went to university to study journalism, but after one year, I kind of became totally disillusioned. With the university system, I found it just very boring and useless and expensive. Uh, and um, on the other side, I also had probably read one too many Jack Kerouac books. And so, uh, my best friends and I, two of which are my co-founders to this day,

Jennifer Kamara: Hmm,

Rob Hoffman: decided to drop out.

So we dropped outta university and we went to live on the road. And

Jennifer Kamara: and where was that?

Rob Hoffman: So that was in Canada. Um, I went to university in London, Ontario, but we, we, when we dropped out and we decided to kinda live on the road, we'd spent the summer hitchhiking out west. And so we were kind of living out of our backpacks. Sleeping onto the stars, you know, it was all very romantic and kind of beat generation esque.

Uh, and what happened was, along the way we met a ton of interesting people who were also living on the road, uh, kind of living this niche vagabond lifestyle. And they had a lot more experience than us living this type of lifestyle.

So they were living in tricked out sprinter vans or on sail, uh, sailboats, or in some cases in these kind of, Self-sustaining lawless, uh, communities on the peripheries of society. And so one day we were sitting on a beach, me and my two other now, uh, co-founders, and we realized that there was no media company that was telling the stories of these people who took the road less traveled. And so when we got back to Toronto, we launched a media company that was focused on unconventional lifestyles. And it ended up actually being a hit. So before we

knew it, we had a full editorial team on staff. We had an office in Toronto, and we grew it to 2 million monthly readers.

Jennifer Kamara: Amazing. Wow.

What were some of the interesting stories? Because it sounds like you're covering all interesting stories, so did any stories stand out that you still remember of living the unconventional path Less traveled? I.

Rob Hoffman: Yeah. One really interesting story was actually one of these Quote unquote lawless communities on the peripheries of society that I've mentioned before. Uh, when we had got to Tofino, which is this small town on the edge of the earth, it's on Vancouver Island. And so, and

Jennifer Kamara: Mm.

Rob Hoffman: West End side.

So it's one of the most beautiful places on earth.

It's, uh, rainforest and, and beach

and, um, In this small kind of town of Tofino, there was this kind of hippie commune. And in this hippie commune there were people, it was self-sustaining. People grew food like from the ground. Um,

and one of the most interesting parts was that it was owned by this very charismatic, uh, old kind of hippie guy named Michael Poole. And people could live in this kind of community for free. And it was this really interesting large plot of land with these long boardwalks that would snake through the forest and he would let you live there for free. And if you worked for him on your property, he would actually pay you in magic mushrooms, So it was a very interesting situation. We just thought, wow, like what a great story in this,

uh, yeah, this, this guy

Michael Poole and nobody knows about it. And we, we really wanted to tell stories like those.

Jennifer Kamara: On the back of Burning Man and everyone having come back from Burning Man, it kind of reminds me of like a northern burning man, minus the things that you set up and the burning of things, but like the sustainable living and the, the drugs and the hippiness. Um, so, so fascinating. So then how did that go?

Did you and your co-founders build that for a couple years? What did you learn and how did that set you on this path that you're on today?

Rob Hoffman: So in the beginning we felt pretty cool because we went from being university dropouts to now employing people with, you know, master's degrees. And we had this

office in, in Toronto. We were like, oh, we're pretty, we're pretty,

cool.

Jennifer Kamara: yeah.

Rob Hoffman: We were not,

Jennifer Kamara: We figured it out.

Rob Hoffman: yeah, we did not figure it out. That was totally wrong.

Um, we, so the main problem is we had no idea how to monetize the traffic that we were getting.

We had grown it, uh, you know, to 2 million monthly readers. It was going really well from a readership and audience growth perspective, but we had no idea how to monetize the traffic we were getting. And, uh, in the end, kind of because of that, There. We didn't raise like a, a ton of money for this. It was only like a couple hundred

thousand dollars from these investors. But because we didn't know how to monetize, that kind of gave them power, uh, where they wanted to take. They wanted to take the magazine in a direction that creatively we were just not a fan of. And so we ended up kind of moving a different direction.

But luckily what happened was because we grew this, uh, unconventional lifestyle magazine, We caught the attention of a young c e o in Toronto who had just raised a $4 million seed round. And what he was trying to do was build the world, essentially the world's largest cannabis media company. And so

he

Jennifer Kamara: what is that?

Rob Hoffman: um, it is exactly what it sounds like. It's, it basically like a, a cannabis media company. I guess, kinda like a new age, high times, uh, would

maybe be a good way of describing it.

Jennifer Kamara: Got it. 'cause my first thought was, is it advertising cannabis products? Is it what the companies that are selling cannabis would come to, to distribute, but got it.

Rob Hoffman: Exactly. It's basically if you have cannabis products that you're trying to sell. We have a, like articles that are getting

a ton of traffic via sa, s e o, we have a large audience across social channels. Email newsletter, and we're basically able to advertise your products to this

community of cannabis consumers.

And so, uh, but this was in the early days when we started, right? This was

the c e o was trying to grow

Jennifer Kamara: Back then.

Rob Hoffman: company and, um,

Jennifer Kamara: many years? When was that? Was that 2000 and

Rob Hoffman: think it was around 20, gosh, I think around 20 16, 20 17. It was literally like right when cannabis was getting legalized in Canada

because it's. A hundred percent legal in Canada.

It's just like alcohol.

Jennifer Kamara: Mm-hmm.

Rob Hoffman: and so it was right around that time

Jennifer Kamara: so like inflection point. All systems running . and did he end up recruiting you guys?

Rob Hoffman: he ended up recruiting us, uh, because of the kind of notoriety that we had from building this unconventional lifestyle magazine. And what happened

is, so my two other, I I have three co-founders and two of my co-founders are named, uh, Tyler Fife and Connor Fife. They're brothers.

And the Connor, Tyler and myself got hired to essentially run the editorial team at this company, and I got hired personally as a writer and

it ended up also being at the same company where we met the SS e o wizard, who had later become our fourth co-founder, whose name is Mike Terry. But that's kind of later on. At this time, I was just a writer for this company. Again, I always wanted to be a journalist. I always thought that was the route I was gonna take. I never saw myself as an entrepreneur, and so for the first six months that I was working for this company, they actually let me work remotely.

Jennifer Kamara: Mm-hmm.

Rob Hoffman: me being someone who liked to pursue adventure, I took the opportunity to spend those six months living in Meine Columbia.

Jennifer Kamara: Hmm.

Rob Hoffman: I learned to speak Spanish and um, that was always something I wanted to do. And I just love, uh, Latin America. I think it's, you know, a very special part of the world. And so I always, I, I took the opportunity to live in Meine, Columbia, those six months. And surprise, surprise, I fell in love with, uh, with the country and, and with the city of Meine.

I.

Jennifer Kamara: So I hear it's gorgeous and, I don't think anyone can blame you, but what inspired specifically Columbia and Latin America for you?

Rob Hoffman: So basically when I was, um, in my early twenties, I did a two month backpacking trip through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. And I didn't have time to go to Columbia

and, uh, but in every single country, in every city, in every hostel that I was staying at, everybody that I met was like, you didn't,

Jennifer Kamara: You should check it out.

Rob Hoffman: And I heard that so many times that it ended up just getting annoying to the point where I was like, I need to go and see this place. so

when I had the opportunity, because I was allowed to work remotely, I took that opportunity and I was like, I'm moving to Metagene for, for six months.

Jennifer Kamara: Amazing. And what was that like for you?

Rob Hoffman: mean, it was, it was one of the most formative experiences of my entire life. Um, I. I totally fell in love with the, the language, the culture, the people, the weather, the nature, uh, all that. And so for me, like I just, all I wanted in life was basically to live in this place. But unfortunately, what kind of ended up happening was I had to be back to Toronto because the company that I was working for ended up getting this like big fancy office in like the trendiest part of Toronto and everyone kind of needed that was working remote and needed to come and work at the office. So I had to move back to Toronto. Uh, but like I was miserable in Toronto, right? Like I never really wanted to live in Toronto. I don't like the cold, the lack of nature, uh, and the familiarity as well.

Like I'd grown up there my entire life. So it was just kind of boring to me. And I had always dreamed about getting back to, uh, getting back to Columbia.

Jennifer Kamara: Yeah.

Rob Hoffman: And so. What happened? It was kind of like a Be careful what you wish for situation though. Right? Because what happened is the company ended up falling on hard times and they ended up having to let go of basically like 90% of the staff in a single day.

Jennifer Kamara: Oh my goodness.

Rob Hoffman: Yeah. And so

Jennifer Kamara: were any of you and your co-founders affected? were you involved in the decision making? I think that's always a tough period and. Can you tell us more about going through that?

Rob Hoffman: A hundred percent. I was just a writer at this point. So

yeah, I got fired. Like I was one of the people who got let go.

And so for me, to be honest, that was actually one of the best things that could ever happen to me. I was looking at back, get back to Metagene, and so when I got let go as part of this big round of layoffs, I was like, this is my opportunity. And so I almost immediately, I booked a one-way plane ticket to, uh, Meine.

Jennifer Kamara: Okay. And you had savings that you brought with you, right?

Rob Hoffman: Yeah.

So kind of what happened was before I had left, Um, my, again, my other co-founders and I, we kind of, we were sitting around at a bar having a beer, and we had this idea for an amazing company. We saw that the world of media and, uh, marketing were merging, but the problem is, is that most marketers have no idea how to grow a media company.

It's just not within the Their, their skillset.

But, but we did, so we wanted to start, uh, a company that could kind of bridge that gap. You hear these days, you know, every founder with a, with a Twitter account says like, every company now is a media company. And that's kind of this like

cliche thing. But at that time we were like, this is the way that the world's going and we're gonna try to grow this company. I obviously was like, okay, I'm gonna try to do this. We're gonna work on this together, but all remotely, I'm gonna move back to Metagene. And again, I booked this one way flight to Metagene and I had nothing lined up and I had just my life savings. It wasn't very much, and the goal was kind of to get to Metagene and just build up this company, which became contact studios before my money ran out.

Jennifer Kamara: run out. Mm-hmm.

Rob Hoffman: And what happened was the first six months that I had spent living in Meine, the very first time that I, I lived in Meine, instead of going and living in the touristy area, um, I decided to live in kind of like a more local, like working class kind of blue collar neighborhood. 'cause you know, I didn't wanna go to Mej to hang out with a bunch of other Canadians, right?

I wanted to actually kind of, um, yeah, like soak up the culture and immerse

Jennifer Kamara: right. Get immersed.

Rob Hoffman: Yeah, so I ended up making a bunch of friends that are, you know, local and they are from Metje and they live here. And so when I moved back, um,

Jennifer Kamara: You already had these friends built in.

Rob Hoffman: exactly, I had these friends built in and I just wanted to live with my friends. And

the problem was, is that my friends, the neighborhood that they're from and that they live in, was what? Every well-meaning taxi driver would describe to me as a dangerous neighborhood

Jennifer Kamara: and

what did they mean by that? Rob

Rob Hoffman: Well, I think that most people conflate dangerous with poor.

Jennifer Kamara: Yeah.

Rob Hoffman: I don't think it's necessarily a dangerous neighborhood. I think that it's just not an economically like neighborhood. And so I never had any issues with moving there. And the other thing was that in this neighborhood, rent cost $70 a month for me.

I was paying $70 a month for rent, which is,

Jennifer Kamara: Wow. I'm so jealous.

Rob Hoffman: yeah, I mean, it was kind

of perfect because I, yeah, I was living on my life savings trying to build up this company. Right. But um, so having cheap rent was great. The downside to that was, We had no hot water. There were like, you know, holes in the, in the walls and in, in the ceilings.

And our next door neighbor were literally a gang of like motorcycle thieves and, uh, drug dealers who would throw like parties, uh, multiple times per

Jennifer Kamara: Wow.

Rob Hoffman: And, uh,

Jennifer Kamara: Tell me about these neighbors. Did you befriend them? What was your approach? What were your interactions like?

Rob Hoffman: I did have a few interactions for sure. I mean, you get to know people in your neighborhood and

that's kind of one of the things I love about this neighborhood is there's a sense of community. Um, and look, I didn't become best friends with like the local, like motorcycle thieves and gangsters, but of course we'd, I'd walk by and we would kind of say hello and give the handshake and Hey, how's it going and all that. Um, For the most part, you kind of just ignore it and, and just kind of let them do what they're gonna do. For example, they'd have massive rages until like 5:00 AM on like a Wednesday,

and you're not gonna go and you're not gonna go and tell these people like, Hey, keep it down So, um, that was a really interesting, uh, situation.

Jennifer Kamara: It is interesting. I'm so glad you bring it up. Uh, Again, I think kinda my worldview is like, humans are humans, right? There's, there's like no, like good and bad people. There are people and there are people who are born into circumstances and are making the best of their circumstances. And so I really appreciate you sharing that.

Um, I. And at least when we think about, like we're talking about poor neighborhoods or not good neighborhoods, a lot of the time, like obviously there's a ton of nuance, but a lot of the time folks are just making the best of their circumstances trying to survive. And at the end of the day, folks all have similar needs, which is to be safe, to have food, to have like loved ones safe and all of this.

And, um, I think most people are doing their best, best at that. So, It's always,

Rob Hoffman: right.

Jennifer Kamara: it's always good to get to know the folks and understand what the motivations are, what, like, how did you get here and all of this. Um, I also love so much that you prioritize getting to know the locals. Uh, and I think I'd love to hear just your, 'cause I, we, we both know so many folks that travel to a place and, um, Maybe don't feel as safe or don't feel as comfortable.

And just in your case, you did this so wonderfully it looks like, uh, and obviously various degrees of comfort for different people, but just given your experience, do you have any advice or suggestions for maybe assimilating into a different culture for folks that are moving to a new place that you found helpful for yourself?

Rob Hoffman: Well, you kind of said it best where it's like people all over the world, it's like we have different cultures, but we all want the same things. We want love and happiness and to be accepted and so. Um, I think if you arrive somewhere that's outta your comfort zone, maybe you don't know the language that well yet. Uh, I think a good attitude, a smile being open, those things will take you a very long way, uh, in many parts of the world. I do find that in Canada, in the us, um, we can be a little bit more closed off, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to kind of move away. From that part of

the world. Um, but in many other parts of the world, people are very open and accepting and I had such an incredible experience where I was accepted by, uh, you know, my friend group here, despite in the beginning, barely speaking Spanish.

I'm fluent now, but I couldn't imagine, you know, in Toronto and many parts of the US, if you arrive and you don't speak English and you're trying to make friends, like people

kind of want nothing to do with you. Here people were patient with me. And, um, and

again, I think it just, yeah, they're very kind and, and I had just such a wonderful experience. And again, I think it just comes down to having that positive attitude and you kind of, um,

Jennifer Kamara: yeah.

Rob Hoffman: get what you attract. Right. So.

Jennifer Kamara: Yeah, absolutely. It's also wonderful for learning the new language, just getting straight up assimilated and surrounding yourself with it. So kudos, huge kudos there. I think that's so great.

Rob Hoffman: thank you very much.

Jennifer Kamara: That's awesome. Um, okay, so you're here, you're with your friends, you are, um, at the same time attempting to build and get it off the ground.

So what happens next?

Rob Hoffman: right. So what happened was, despite my best efforts, um, eight months later, we still weren't making money. So I had basically failed at my mission to move here and learn how to I. Make money with, with this business, um, and, and, and live in Metagene. So my savings had all but evaporated at this point. And if I wanted to stay in Metagene, then I needed to make some money. And coincidentally, just at this time, I got a message from that same startup that had fired me the year prior the cannabis media company. And after falling on some hard times, they were rebuilding the company and they needed writers again. So they

asked me if I was interested in working with them because I was actually their top writer

Jennifer Kamara: Mm-hmm.

Rob Hoffman: when I did work with them. And I accepted the job. But at this point, I didn't see myself as just a writer anymore. I wanted to grow a great company, and I saw myself more as an entrepreneur. So when I joined the company again for the second time, I started seeking out ways that I could help the company thrive. Um, I proposed new revenue opportunities to the C E O.

I asked if I could help sell 'cause uh, I also am good at sales and I think the c e o, he saw me as a writer and not as, know, like a business person.

And so he was skeptical. He basically told me to put all of my, like, brilliant ideas into an actual plan before I could start selling. Uh, and so that's exactly what I did, is I put together this 30 slide deck where I outlined all of the company's missed revenue opportunities, how I thought that we could add. An additional, you know, seven figures or more of, of yearly revenue, all the products that I thought that we could sell that we weren't selling. And when I finished, finished presenting this, sorry, when I finished presenting this, uh, revenue proposal to the company, like the whole team, like started clapping.

And I think the, the c e O was kind of like, okay, maybe, maybe we should let this guy sell after all. So, He was like, okay, go ahead. You can, you can start selling, you can start actioning some of this plan. And it turned out that I was pretty good at selling. Uh, and on my first

day I closed like a $15,000 deal, which was,

uh, one of the, uh, thank you very much. And, um, yeah, for, from there, like sales

were good and, and things were starting to pick up and I was starting to. Get my footing in the company and the c e o was starting to see me more as somebody who could be a leader, uh, within the company. I had a new challenge,

and the challenge was I was doing sales, but I was doing it outta this apartment, this $70 a month, uh, apartment. Um, just a very modest little place. And I would struggle to find where to position my computer on a Zoom call in a way that looked.

Legitimate

Jennifer Kamara: Mm-hmm.

Rob Hoffman: right now, as an example, you can tell I have like a very pro, uh, procured like

background,

Jennifer Kamara: background. Mm-hmm.

Rob Hoffman: right? And so it's important, like we all know now that it's important to have like a kind of legitimate looking zoom setup if you're gonna be doing sales calls. But at the time, like we just, I, I was living at this apartment and I kind of just imagined. My clients or people I did sales calls with being like, yeah, you know this, this all sounds good, but if you can make us money, like why are you living in a favela? And so like the best I could do is basically there. The best that I could do in terms of making a somewhat legitimate setup was there was this really crappy Superman poster that we had on our wall. And again, the wall is just like all unfinished concrete. And so what I would do is just take this Superman poster

and like put it up.

behind me and kind of like prop up my computer

on my legs and sit like cross-legged on my bed so that I'd have like somewhat of a legitimate background, this like stupid

Superman poster. Um, that I guess kind of became my like good luck charm and that was the only thing I could do to make myself look like somewhat legitimate. Um, It actually kind of worked because that year I went on to sell half a million dollars of, uh,

of marketing campaigns.

Jennifer Kamara: Mm-hmm. . And so now that you established yourself as a legitimate salesperson, more entrepreneurial thinking, did you do it in-house of that other company, or did you then break free? How did those beginnings go?

Rob Hoffman: So we were basically, What had happened was we were growing contact studios at the same time that, you know, I was working

at this other company, uh, my other co-founders were working at, um, other companies as well. We were kind of just trying to do it on the side

Jennifer Kamara: Yeah.

Rob Hoffman: and I ended up growing, uh, within this, uh, cannabis media company that, that I'm telling you about. Um, again, just like showing more leadership. Uh, eventually I, I moved up in the company from being a writer to editor-in-chief to head of content and eventually, uh, chief Operating Officer. And

so it was kind of like this business bootcamp for me.

It was a very intense startup environment working at this company and I cut my teeth on business and how to grow a company. Uh, it was kinda like a business bootcamp and I, I used a lot of those learnings and applied them to contact studios, uh, to kind of help get that off the ground. Uh, you know, with the help of my other co-founders

Jennifer Kamara: What are some of those learnings?

Rob Hoffman: Well, I think it's just basic stuff, right? Which is like how to do a proper sales call, how to position your product, how to price your product, how to, um, yeah, like market your product or, or, or service. How to work with your clients, how to work with your team. What project management tools do you use? How do you communicate with your clients?

It's just all these kinda small things that add up.

Jennifer Kamara: Yeah.

Rob Hoffman: So,

Jennifer Kamara: Uh,

Rob Hoffman: um, yeah, from that point on, basically like I was growing these two companies, uh, at once. Um, this is throughout the pandemic and eventually what had happened was when contact hit about a million dollars of a r r I said, okay, I can't be

splitting my focus across these two companies. Exactly. And that's when I. This was in 2021. That's when I came on to contact full-time as a c e o. And uh, the rest is history.

Jennifer Kamara: Okay, so I didn't realize this piece. So it sounds like you were, you were both full-time at the cannabis media company, correct.

Rob Hoffman: So I was

Jennifer Kamara: had.

Rob Hoffman: I was full-time. And my other co-founders were, were working 'cause this is after the, the layoff. So they had all gotten other jobs. Um,

Jennifer Kamara: Okay, you were full-time at the Cannabis media company where you had risen up to a C O O while you and your co-founders who were not at the cannabis media company, you all together were building contact studios.

Rob Hoffman: Exactly. Yes.

Jennifer Kamara: Okay. Well that's fascinating of like, we see so many of these stories too, right? Of folks starting a company as a side hustle while keeping their main job, where it's not always that that was the plan.

Like in your case, you had attempted to build contact studios on your own. It didn't work out, and then you went back and . Ended up getting all of these skills that ended up being so useful to the journey. So it, another example of it's never a straight road and all the wines are, are helpful, like all of these moments are, are useful.

Tell me about your first few customers then at contact. How did you y'all get those? What or who? Yeah.

Rob Hoffman: So a lot of it was very organic and it was from connections that I had.

Um, or, you know, for example, one of our first clients was actually a friend of a friend. Who they were. They operate a C B D company. They sell, uh, like C B D products and they had needed ss e o at the time.

Um, we had gotten connected and I just basically went through the, the sales process where I explained, Hey, this is what we do.

Here's our process, here's why we are legitimate. Here is the experience that our director of SS e o has. Um, do you wanna work with us? And. enough, uh, they took a risk on us and, uh, worked with us from there. A lot of it just comes as anybody growing an agency type business knows through referral and word of mouth, which if I were to start again, I would probably do things very differently. But that is how we, uh, got our first few clients.

Jennifer Kamara: Great. I'm glad we're talking about this because I think for many businesses like agency businesses or B two B businesses, it's always like, where do you get your first 10 customers? And is it, are you doing cold outreach? Are you doing warm intros? Are you doing friends? Like helping friends first and then referrals.

So sounds like your first one was a friend. Who had a business that needed your support, and then sounds like after that, like one to 10 or like two to 10, were those also friends or a combination of friends and referrals?

Rob Hoffman: It was basically all referrals. And just to make this very

tactical and like actionable and useful to the people listening to the podcast. Uh, one, there's a few pieces of advice that I would give if you're trying to get your first, um, 10 customers. Number one is a lot of people under index on brand in the beginning 'cause they don't see it as important. They kind of see it as this like, mm, nebulous, like hard to pin down thing like brand. What does that even mean? Um, but. In the beginning, I do think it is very important for you to have a website that is well designed, well put together. You look like a big company. Part of becoming a big company is first you have to act as if you have to look like a big company so that when you do get referrals or when people do find you, whether it is from outbound, uh, inbound marketing, and I can get into that in a moment, they see you as being legitimate. So step number one, I think is like, Put a legitimate website together with solid branding that is designed well. Um, and in the beginning, unless you get lucky where you have people within your network. And I, I think that most people do have people in their network that they can kind of tap into to become those first customers. And ideally, have your first customers be paying customers like they were for us. If that's not the case, I think it's the classic. Find people in your network who, uh, have the need that you're trying to service and just start by doing free work for them so that you can get those case studies, that those, uh, testimonials and social proof. Um, in terms of outbound and, and inbound marketing. And how do you get, uh, your first clients? I, if I could do it again, I would start building an audience and producing content and publishing content essentially from day one. I think if you do not yet have an established business, then you can do the classic build in public.

And you can do that on Twitter, on LinkedIn, uh, video content, on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram.

And that's gonna kind of generate awareness for what you do. But you can also talk about things such as your philosophy for fulfilling your service. So what is our philosophy when it comes to creating great video content that can attract clients? What is our strategy or frameworks or storytelling ingredients that we use to tell a great story? And you can start publishing these things that have nothing to even do with case studies 'cause you might not have those yet and start to attract inbound interest. And it can happen very quickly if you do a good job of creating content. A lot of people make the mistake that building an audience and actually generating leads from that audience is Something that takes a lot of time and it does to build up and compound, but if you put out quality content out there and learn how to distribute it, you can get a ton of inbound leads very quickly.

And I wish that we would've done that earlier on, um, in the journey of our company.

Jennifer Kamara: Essentially positioning yourself as the expert, so folks that are looking for this type of information find you and then associate you with this expert status and then come to you via inbound

Rob Hoffman: Exactly. If you think about it, it's pretty simple. It's like you determine what is the type of person who is your ideal buyer. So for example, creating videos. Uh, an ideal buyer is a B two B SaaS company. They are really looking to invest into their demand generation efforts. So now I think what is content that could help that type of person, um, or would appeal to that type of person and what they're trying to achieve? Then you create that content, you publish it, you see what works, you see what doesn't, and you iterate based on your results and you make sure that you have a proper funnel set up.

And what I mean by this is you have a landing page on your website where it is Easy to book a call with you and you can link to that landing page from your content. So on LinkedIn, what you'll see me doing is I publish a piece of content, and then in the comments I have a link that goes to a landing page where it's just my Calendly, essentially, where people can go and book a call with us very easily, and you want to reduce friction.

So at every stage in the process, you're looking for ways to reduce friction. What specifically do I mean by reduce friction? I mean, Number one, provide social proof if you can, via testimonials via case studies. This will help people answer the question, why should I even trust this company to begin with? piece of friction is like, you are early on in, earlier on in your journey, don't make your leads jump through a million hoops, which is like right now as an example, we are more focused on qualified pipeline rather than just getting any lead in the door. 'cause we wanna make sure we're working with the right companies. And qualifying out the ones that we don't wanna work with in the beginning. Don't have any kind of qualifying process where you're making your leads, fill out a type form or anything like that, because in the beginning you just wanna talk to as many people as as possible. And then from there, it's really just an iterative process of looking at what's working and what's not, and just doubling down on the things that work and cutting the things that don't.

Jennifer Kamara: Yeah. Getting to product market fit. Love that. You started telling us about this. How did you, how did you find product market fit? What was working and not working for you?

Rob Hoffman: I think number one, it's you start with a hypothesis, right?

Where you go, I believe that this service or product is the best possible fit for this. Type of buyer, right? Where it's like, this is the type of company that has the exact problem that my service can solve. From there, it's really just about testing it out.

So what that means is, again, whether it's you are doing outbound sales, so you are targeting people that are within that, uh, specific like ideal customer persona. So let's just use an example. Let's say that you're targeting B two B SaaS companies. And you want to be targeting people who have a title like Head of Demand generation, right? You're gonna find those people, and if you're doing cold outbound, you're gonna be doing cold outbound to those types of people. And if it works, great, if not, then maybe you're not targeting the right ideal customer persona. Same with inbound marketing, is you're gonna create content. After researching this ideal customer persona, seeing what are their problems, what are their goals, what languages, what language do they use, incorporating those learnings into your content and then seeing if you're getting inbound lead flow from that. Once you have solved the problem of actually getting leads and getting people on the phone, it's gonna come down to, and you, and once you start actually closing your first, uh, leads and you, you're now you have clients to work with. It's really just about are these clients happy? Are they sticking with you?

Do you have a high churn rate or a low churn rate? For us, it was really like, this is the exact SS e o and video service that we would want. Like this is what we think is gonna provide a ton of value to this particular ideal customer persona and that we ourselves would want, and this is a fair price, we believe for this. You go and you test it. Fortunately, we are able to sell those services pretty easily. So that tells us, okay, we have something that people want.

Jennifer Kamara: Mm-hmm.

Rob Hoffman: it's about, okay, are your clients sticking with you for a long period of time? Fortunately, we have a very low churn rate and our clients stick with us for you.

We have clients who have been with us for three, four years now. Um, I would, I would say there's not a single client of ours that has churned, uh, before like six months. We have a low churn rate that tells us that our product is actually doing a good job of providing ongoing value,

uh, to that, um, you know, ideal customer persona.

Jennifer Kamara: So coming from zero to 10 customers to finding product market fit to now in the growth phase, it sounds like what you're describing, like you're getting a ton of organic growth. what are your growth activities?

Rob Hoffman: We are focused on creating amazing content.

Jennifer Kamara: Hmm.

Rob Hoffman: We believe in investing into marketing channels that compound and provide leverage over time. What does this mean? If you are doing outbound, there is a direct correlation between your inputs and your outputs. You send a hundred emails.

Jennifer Kamara: Garbage and garbage. Garbage out.

Rob Hoffman: Yes, exactly. And let's say that 1% of the number of emails you send turn into a lead.

It's like the way to scale that up is you have to do more of that thing, which requires more resources. On the flip side, if you're creating content, The inputs are not directly related to the outputs, and what that means is that I might, in the beginning, let's say that I create a LinkedIn post or a YouTube video, and let's say that I spend like one day working on that in the beginning, I might get no leads from that. The next time I do it, I might get two leads from that. Six months, 12 months down the road, once I've established myself and built up an audience through this content, I can put in that same amount of time or less to create that exact same video or that exact same blog article, or that exact same LinkedIn post, and I might get 20 leads from that. So now all of a sudden I have leverage and I have also something that I own. There's nothing that you really own when you're doing.

Jennifer Kamara: Yeah.

Rob Hoffman: Pursuing marketing channels like cold outbound. If you invest into content, you are essentially building your reputation and that is something that you will carry with you for life. And that is something that will grow and compound. And it's almost like any agency business. They're gonna tell you that probably, at least in the beginning, and normally just in general, referrals and word of mouth continues to be one of their main of, of uh, like lead

Jennifer Kamara: Growth Channels. Yeah.

Rob Hoffman: channels.

Thank you. And so what is content? Like what is building an audience? It's basically just like amplifying and applying scale to a referral or word of mouth, uh, um, growth channel

to Business.

Yeah.

exactly.

Jennifer Kamara: Awesome. So I kind of wanna come back, given where you are today, and ask, so where is the business now? What can you tell us about operationally, how y'all are doing? I.

Rob Hoffman: We are still very small. We're growing quickly. We have about 25 team members. Um, And we are actually just about to relaunch a new website and new rebrand. So very excited about that. By the time this podcast comes out, it should be live. Um, and we are just

again, focused on creating the best content in the world. I think that, um, now, especially with the kind of like with ai, With content becoming a more popular growth channel, there is this wave of mediocrity and there is so much content out there that is just garbage. You can tell it was written by chat, g b t or is just spun up without a lot of thought. And so I actually think that there, there is an amazing opportunity right now for companies who do want to take the time to produce great content. To build a moat around their business because right now the world does not need more content. What the world needs is better content, and so that's what we're focused on.

We're focused on creating incredible content for our clients and incredible content for ourselves.

Jennifer Kamara: That's amazing. That's such a cool mission. I'm intrigued by, since this is your world, you're living, breathing, making great content, what to you? Makes good unique content

Rob Hoffman: there's a few different things. Number one is knowing how to tell a great story, and this is why there are so many companies out there where They will take a, an approach to content where they're trying to achieve scale before they achieve quality. what I mean by that is they're thinking in terms of, okay, I wanna do video, uh, content. I. How can I just create as much as possible? I wanna just get to a hundred videos published as fast as possible so they forget completely about telling a great story or providing useful information or entertaining the user. And they just take these kind of growth hacks where maybe they'll spin up a podcast, um, and they'll use some AI tool to like make cutdowns. They're like, cool. I can create like a podcast. It takes one hour per week. I just hop on with one of my, uh, co-founders and we kind of shoot the shit, and then I just use some kind of AI tool to create these cutdowns that I can distribute. Well, the thing that's wrong with that is that number one, AI tools, they're not even, they're not actually editing your content, they're just creating cutdowns and transcribing what editing actually is. What good content is is making creative decisions within the context of a story. And if you're a good editor, if you're a good producer, creative director, you know how to create, uh, content. There are a number of ingredients, storytelling ingredients, storytelling frameworks, uh, that you are going to use to tell a great story that simply cannot be achieved by again, just pumping out some mass AI produced content. And I can go into a little bit more of examples of what these storytelling ingredients are, if you'd like. Um, or you know,

Jennifer Kamara: maybe

you can give us a couple of examples before we wrap up today.

Rob Hoffman: A hundred percent. So one, so I, I love this one, which is, if you want to tell a great story, you need to have three storytelling ingredients. You need to have an inciting incident, you need to have conflict, and you need to have motivation. What is an example of these three things? Let's use Harry Potter because everybody knows that. The inciting incident in Harry Potter is that Harry is vi visited by Hagrid and wants to take Harry to a wizarding school. So Harry discovers he's a wizard. The conflict, it is Voldemort wants to take over the world and you know, kill all the mud bloods.

Jennifer Kamara: Yeah.

Rob Hoffman: The motivation is that Harry wants to save his friends and the world, right? So how do you now take inciting incident conflict and motivation and apply that to. Let's say like a B two B style video. Well, what you're gonna see out there, the content that people currently create, which is very boring, would sound something like this. I'm gonna show you the best three techniques to write a better sales email. Does that sound interesting to you? Like, does that sound entertaining? Does

Jennifer Kamara: No,

Rob Hoffman: not sound entertaining to me.

So

Jennifer Kamara: it sounds generic and like all the emails that you get, the spam emails.

Rob Hoffman: Exactly. So why would anyone in their right mind wanna watch that? So what you want to do is you want to use these storytelling ingredients, inciting incident conflict, and motivation to package educational content within entertainment. And so here's an example for this exact same video. We're not gonna go, we're not gonna open the video and go, I'm gonna show you the best three techniques to write a better sales email. I'm gonna open the video by saying, this was the worst cold email I ever received, and that is your inciting incident.

Jennifer Kamara: Now I'm so curious. To open and see what this email was.

Rob Hoffman: thank you for humoring me.

But, uh,

Jennifer Kamara: no. And great, great example.

Rob Hoffman: So it's a bit more interesting. It grabs attention.

That's your inciting incident. What is the conflict? The conflict in this video is that Bob is the sales rep who wrote the email, and Bob is your coworker who you really like. You like Bob, you don't want him to get fired, so Bob needs to learn how to write a better sales email.

Jennifer Kamara: Oh no. Now I actually care.

Rob Hoffman: Now you actually care. You're invested. So your attention has been grabbed. Now you're invested in the story.

Jennifer Kamara: I'm like, oh no Bob, we gotta help Bob. Okay.

Rob Hoffman: love, we love Bob, right?

Bob's awesome. So what's your motivation Bob from getting fired by rewriting the email for him. And

Jennifer Kamara: Yes.

Rob Hoffman: how you create a great of video content.

Jennifer Kamara: Oh man, that was super useful. Uh, I think . I can certainly use that in my communication. I feel like everyone listening can benefit from that. So that was gold. Thank you so much, Rob. I wanna end though, by asking you and everyone can check out Rob and contact Studio for more on content.

I'm sure he has many more tips. But I wanna end on this note.

Rob, you mentioned, or we talked about your journey to building contact Studio and . Um, I love, I'm sorry. I love the fact that it wasn't linear because I think it's always makes sense looking back, but moving forward, lots of things don't always make sense.

And you were working on it the first time in Ma Me, I'm sorry, I'm not pronouncing it right. Uh, and it didn't work out. You go, went back to your old job, learned a ton there and built it. On the side and eventually worked out. What are lessons that you pull from that, and what would you, what would you tell maybe a younger version of yourself or other listeners who may be in a similar situation as you were, uh, to, to keep going?

Like what, what inspirational words would you leave with them from your experience

Rob Hoffman: Inspirational words. Um, I

think

Jennifer Kamara: just your lessons learned? Yeah,

Rob Hoffman: so what I'll say for inspiration is this is I never thought that I would be an entrepreneur. This was never the path that I was going to take. And so I think a lot of people out there, they look at the competition, these people who maybe went to Stanford and they wanted to their entire lives wanting to grow a company. Um, don't worry. Like you can still grow a successful company, even if. You hadn't been working on this since you were like six years old.

Um, so there's my, my little injection of, of inspiration

Jennifer Kamara: Anyone can do it.

Rob Hoffman: yeah, I mean, I think it is not as difficult, but it's not as difficult as people make it seem. I think a lot of people have a tendency to try to make it more difficult than it is because it serves their best interest because you're almost gatekeeping and trying to keep people. Uh, from competing with you and because it

obviously plays up to your own ego, being like, oh, building a business is so tough. And guess what? It is tough, but it's also tough just, you know, trying to work and have career progression at any other job.

Uh,

Jennifer Kamara: Oh yeah.

Rob Hoffman: most things in life are tough. So that's kinda number one. I think number two, there's this great quote where it's like, if you learn how to build and you learn how to sell, then you're unstoppable. So learn how to create and then learn how to sell. I also think one thing that's really benefited me is that I didn't do this alone. Like there are, there's myself and then there are three other co-founders, and I'm very fortunate for that because we all have wildly different skill sets and co-founders who are very good at selling, good at operations and good at fulfillment. And if you can check those three boxes where it's like I am going to work with. A team in the beginning, I am going to recruit co-founders or whatever it is. If you have somebody who is a very good practitioner, so they're very good at fulfilling the work. For example, our, uh, Mike Terry, our director of s e o is world class, uh, practitioner and sss e o you have somebody who is strong in operations, which means that they can manage a team, they can, you know, put systems in place for the business to run smoothly. And you have somebody who is good at selling. You are. If you do it long enough, you're gonna succeed.

Jennifer Kamara: Beautiful. Rob, this was great to have you and learn from your journey. I enjoyed our time together. Thank you so much for coming on and looking forward to staying in touch.

Rob Hoffman: Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. I love your pod and, uh, looking forward to staying in touch as well.