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In this video, we explore how the founder of Repvue, Ryan Walsh leverages data and networking to achieve success in the B2B world. We'll cover the challenges of building a network-based business, the importance of data in today's sales environment, and Ryan's vision for scaling professional matchmaking. Whether you're in sales, marketing, or leadership, this discussion will provide practical insights and strategies to help you navigate the complexities of modern B2B business. Don't miss this chance to learn from a leader who's transforming the industry!
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Andy:
Is that mostly what you're focusing on, the influencer stuff, to drive traffic to Repvue? Or are you guys doing cold email, cold calling? You're a nimble team. Or has just the influencer marketing for your product been the best bang for your buck?
Ryan: It's been the best bang for our buck. We don't do any cold email or cold calling. That's crazy.
Andy: Today, my guest is Ryan Walsh, the founder and CEO of Repvue. Ryan is a seasoned entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in sales, who has built an amazing platform that's changing how salespeople make career decisions and how companies hire top talent. Repvue under Ryan's leadership has become the go-to resource for sales professionals looking to understand their market value and for companies aiming to attract the best sales talent. Now, what sets Repvue apart is its commitment to transparency and data-driven insights, which provides a unique lens into the sales industry that was previously unavailable. What I love about Ryan is his innovative approach to solving longstanding problems in the sales industry. He's not just building product, he's really creating a movement towards greater transparency and fairness in sales compensation and career development. Now, Ryan's deep understanding of the sales landscape combined with its entrepreneur spirit has allowed him to identify and address a critical need in the market. So in this episode, we're going to dive into Ryan's journey, building RepView, exploring everything from their unique influencer marketing strategies to their expansion into new markets like medical sales. We'll discuss the challenges of building a network effect business, the importance of data in today's sales landscape, and Ryan's vision for the future of professional matchmaking at scale. So whether you're a sales professional looking to advance your career, a company trying to attract top sales talent, or an entrepreneur interested in building a data-driven platform, I guarantee you'll walk away from this conversation with valuable insights and a fresh perspective on the sales industry. And if you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it will help the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Ryan Walsh.
Ryan: How are you? Nice to see you.
Andy: I've never seen you in the wild. It's crazy. I don't know if this is a rare thing or what.
Ryan: Having a beard is rare for me. My wife gets mad. I'm just letting it grow until she says something to me. Usually, it's like a week and a half before this. I'm just going to see how long I can go before she might just not be paying attention to me. I think that's probably what it is. Yeah, she may not even she may not even know that it's there. Look at that.
Andy: Well, I'll tell you I can't even grow a beard. So I'm a little bit jealous.
Ryan: So yeah, yeah, it took me a while but mine was like mostly by the time I was finally able to grow a beard is mostly gray. So you know how it is.
Andy: Oh yeah, what age were you when that was? I know I'm not supposed to ask about age.
Ryan: Oh, that's a little tongue in cheek. I'd say I was probably, I could probably end up like, probably not in college was not so good, but maybe mid twenties I could probably grow a beard. And there are a couple pictures of this when it's like fully brown. Wow.
Andy: Okay. See, I'm in my thirties, man, and I still can't do it. So it's just, I've given up. I've given up. Yeah. I'm good. Totally. Well, dude, excited to chat with you today about just everything go to market, right? You know, rep view, I think what I've seen y'all do an amazing job of is like getting all the influencers, you know, B2B sales influencers to post on LinkedIn, to be quite honest, like huge compliment, because I think y'all have done it better than most people that I've seen. Yeah. You know, and I think a lot of people are, are trying to model you right. In terms of how you do it, what it's, it's got this like feeling of being a little subtle, but you still kind of know it's rep view at the, at the, you know, at a certain point, but it's also valuable to the niche that you're targeting. Right. So it's a good mix, but man, I mean, I know we have the structure that we typically do, but you know, three go to market tactics that like, you know, have worked for you, which I think one of them is the influencer thing. Correct me if I'm wrong. And then we'll get into some stuff you're experimenting with and stuff that's failed. But, um, we'd love to start there. Like, how are you thinking about this whole influencer marketing when it comes to rep view and, and has it evolved? Like, I feel like I haven't seen it as much, but maybe I'm wrong.
Ryan: Um, yeah, I would say, yeah, we've been doing it since the very early days. I think one of our first, like our, our first partner, um, is the daily sales. If you know, daily sales. Yeah. And we, we, we worked really well with Daniel and that that's really, that's really more of a macro influencer, right? He has, you know, a million followers and it's, it's a business for Daniel. Um,
Andy: Yeah.
Ryan: And so so with with Daniel, that was great. And then and then we started transitioning into and I do think we were one of the first, if not the first that was like, all right, we should just kind of let's try these what we call we call micro influencers who. Yeah. Somebody that has a has a following. It doesn't even have to be a huge following. You know, even somebody with seventy five hundred followers or ten thousand followers on on LinkedIn. will reach out. And what's really important is that they already recognize Repvue and get value out of it. So somebody that's a proponent of it, right? We don't want to fake things, right? So everybody that posts for us as an influencer is certainly a user of Repvue and sees the value and gets value out of it. And so how it's evolved is you know, we've learned a ton, right? We would work with an influencer like, oh, and that's that worked well, do a post every month. And we'd see, yeah, you'll wear out your audience pretty quick doing that. So then we might scale back to quarterly. And we just try and experiment with new people, new audiences. there was a statistic that we actually measured this. I don't remember exactly how we measured it a couple of years ago. And there was a couple larger kind of sales voices out there that we worked with. We were able to take their audience of large influencer A and compare large influencer B's audience. And my hypothesis was it'll be the same. right? And these are people that you would know. I'm not going to mention names necessarily because it's not really important, but people that you would know, like, oh, this person, they have X number of followers, like tens of thousands, maybe a hundred plus thousand followers. Their overlap was small, was very small, like very small of followers. And I was, frankly, I was shocked. I was like, man, this is really interesting that the overlap is so small. and we did it for like not just like two big influencers to test it we did it for like 15 you know, sales gurus or whatever you want to call people. Yeah. And so that told us like that, that informed us of like, all right, well, we should, we should continue to explore new people. And we, we will work with somebody for a while, and then the results might tail off. And we don't see that as they them doing something wrong or bad. It's just like, maybe you were at that audience. So we'll say, alright, let's pause it. And then we might revisit, you know, in nine months or a year or 12 months and come back to that person and do more. And the other factor that's important for social is for us, we do get a lot of, like a lot of the posts you see, they're kind of subtle. Like a lot of them are not paid influencer posts. They're just people who like got some value out of RepVue, maybe it helped them with the decision, or they liked the RepVue t-shirt or something like that. And they just share. And so that's a really a core part of our strategy as well, is just give people, such a great experience with helping them with their careers and really staying true to our mission that people will just share, you know, organically, which drives a big network effect for us as well. But, you know, I think influencers are always going to be part of our strategy. A lot of it, like, like, I think we were doing it way before LinkedIn started doing, you know, the brand partnership tag promoted by whatever. Yeah. We recommend all of our folks if they're, if it's paid from rep view, then it will have that. If it doesn't have that, they didn't follow our, our instructions for how to do it because the person who posts not us, but actually the person who posts you know, they can be the one that quote unquote gets in trouble for not doing it. Not. Oh, really? Yeah. It's not. Okay. I don't think that's a big risk necessarily, but yeah, you'll, you'll, you will see issues for like major Kardashian level influencers on like Instagram and things where they're not being clear about it. There's, you know, sec or, um, you know, FCC, um, yeah. Yeah. Issues with that, that you have to be cognizant of as well. So,
Andy: Interesting. And, and two, well, two things that you said one was that, like, you have to make sure that influencers are like, find value in your product. Right. And I think that's like, the biggest thing because I see a lot today, where in my opinion, people are dropping the ball because they're like, oh, we're going to pay these influencers, but the influencers have never used, actually use the product or actually find it valuable. And you can kind of see through that a little bit, you know, which is interesting. So Repvue, I mean, everyone wants to know who's getting paid, right? Like, so you guys have like a good moat in that sense where like any seller is actually going to find value out of that. Cause like it has to do with how much you're getting paid. Right. And like, competitiveness in the market, who's paying the best, who's actually hitting quote, all that stuff. That's like the basis of what people want to know. So you guys kind of have that, that natural product value that everyone in that area is going to find.
Ryan: Yeah. One thing I'll add on the influencer piece too, that I think is important. is that there's this, over the last several years, there's been this rise of like solopreneur, like Wi-Fi money, like thing. And I think, I don't think that's necessarily right for everybody. I think there's certainly, you know, there's value in doing that. But I think we actually are really excited for people that obviously are still gainfully employed. Obviously, most of them are in sales roles. But like, and they've got 5,000 or 10,000 followers, like, they can make a couple hundred bucks from rep view, like, yeah, extract value out of building that network. And they're so excited to do that, right? No, it's not gonna make anybody rich necessarily. But it's not a huge time sink, you have a cool post, and we'll give you a few hundred bucks, you know, and it's like, we're excited to enable really small, you know, creators to, to, to extract some value out of some of the work that they've put in to, to, to spend time growing their network as well, which is really something else that we like about that, that kind of this micro influencer.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. And you hit the nail on the head too, about your thesis, which is like on LinkedIn these days, like. number of fall and I think a lot of the algorithms are going these ways this way, but like number of followers doesn't really matter. Right? I think it's, it's, it matters in some way, but like in terms of how much engagement you get, it doesn't really matter, right? It matters for like the accolade like, oh my gosh, you know, I get people saying like, you have like 200,000 followers, right? And it's like a whoa, and it's almost like a time in market thing. Like how long have you been doing it is what I look at it as personally, having that big number, right? It's like, okay, they've probably been doing it for a while. That's it. Versus, but that doesn't mean there's some people out there and I'll go out and say it, they have 15, 20,000 followers, they get way more engagement than me. And like, just have way more, yeah, overall engagement. And I'm like, heck yeah, that's freaking awesome, right? So it's definitely one of those things where I don't think that just, LinkedIn has kind of always been like that, whereas I think all the other algorithms are going that way, right? Is it useful? Then it's going to get lots of engagement if people find it entertaining.
Ryan: Yeah. And also, you know, some of the very large followers, they're not as targeted, right? If you're, if you're trying to engage, like we, you know, we've done stuff with folks with many hundreds of thousands and it just kind of hasn't worked. And it's just, so why hasn't it worked? It was like, I mean, we're really targeting salespeople, right? Like, and that's it, right. If it's, if you're not in sales or CS or kind of, Very closely related right we're going to end up spending money and not getting, you know, the return that we need it just doesn't, you know, it doesn't work and so I think it's like, I know like. I could go get a lot more followers very quickly if I posted, you know, random, you know, memes and, you know, the aspirational quotes with a little picture of like, I don't want to, it's not going to help the business, right? I'm not in it for vanity metrics. I'm in it to help the business. And so, if I, yeah, would 300,000 followers be great? Sure. But if they're all, you know, not relevant to my audience helps nobody. It doesn't, it certainly doesn't help me or it doesn't help rep for you.
Andy: So, yeah. Yeah. It's well, it's funny. Cause, um, me, Adam Robinson and Chris Walker, we're all like good, good friends. We're all in Austin. So we're all, you know, we hang out every, on the week, every week and in our text group, we're like, Looking at this new video thing that BlinkedIn is pushing out, right? And just this morning, I have a video that I pushed yesterday, which is like, it's like 150 likes, you know, I think it's over a million views now. And I'm, and I'm like, what? But I look at him like, Okay, has it brought me any money? No. Like, it's like, great, cool. But like, what is it doing? And so I'm kind of like, we're sharing our thoughts. And my thoughts on it are like, look, it's being pushed to a lot of people. But is it really leading to what I care about, which is revenue? You know, and for distribute and I have a friend that says like, likes, likes aren't cash, right? Which is like, okay, great. So I'm looking at this million views. I'm like, cool. It's a little dopamine hit where it's like, awesome. But I'm like, okay, either one, there's something interesting going on here and I need to figure out how to formulate the post to drive, you know, conversations. Or I need to just continue, like, maybe I just continue experimenting to find out what that is, you know? And so, but it is interesting. I don't know. Have you guys toyed around with that on the influencer side yet? Or is it still too early for you on the video? Oh, video?
Ryan: Yeah, we have, I think. I mean, I think my personal, it's a Repu, Repu account. So, so one of the things I would say, Repu account has probably 55,000 followers or so. So like, it's okay. Um, but people people and that's cool. They we have some fun memes and some other things that are It's a little lighter and then we'll mix in some sales strategy stuff Um, and I think people like that but people like hearing from people right people want to hear and so like I have like maybe twice that followers And my content was like people kept saying it was doing really really poorly My content was like doing really really well over the last few months and it wasn't video it was just kind of you know, we would post just stories. We're just telling stories is what our core strategy is. I would say over the last three or four months, maybe the last two months, we've started doing video. And it's a lot of them, like I'm posting videos, not on my personal, we're doing the videos and we're posting them on our rep view page. And it's me answering a sales-ish related question. And so I'm gonna probably, I'm gonna start testing those as well with my personal page here in the next month or two as well to see how those do.
Andy: Yeah, well yet do because the stuff you write is amazing. Like I'm like, whenever I see you, I'm like, why doesn't Ryan? Well, it's hard to do stuff like that every day, right? Like being a creator myself, but um, Yeah, you've got a knack for it. And I'm like, Ryan should like, I want to see more of Ryan, right? Because Ryan posts like you got some like really hard hitting opinions, and then really good stuff. And so I would like to see that personally. I'm like, Oh, when Ryan posts, I read, right? I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna see what Ryan has to say. And it typically hits very well. So I'm almost thinking for you, you can even take the same text and just do a video and like literally reading what you've said on the freaking on the thing, you know?
Ryan: Yeah, I should. We recorded a couple where we spent like an hour and just like kind of went through 15 or 20 topics or something and we're chopping them up and you can see some of them on the Repvue page that we're doing. But yeah, we're definitely experimenting. We're always experimenting. Yeah, I don't understand what works and what doesn't and you know how it is. Sometimes things surprise.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah, good and bad. That's good and bad. Yeah, it's always like it's the I call it like the content phenomena, which is like stuff you think is going to be amazing is like always a flop and stuff that you post on the fly. You think it's going to suck is like the stuff that always do so well, right? It's like There's no like, you just never know. It's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah. So I think Ryan, what people would get out of value that listen to this is I, I get a lot of questions of going, trying to go like zero to one in building an influencer program. Right. And so what I want to hear from you is like, how do you build one of these programs to, if you were to do it again today, how would you build it from zero to one? Let's talk about what budget would you use? Right. Like who would you target? And then what would be the cadence of posting? I know I've worked with you guys in the past and you had me do like one post a month. So it didn't like saturate the market, but like, how would you do that? So that people listening can walk away from this and be like, okay, Ryan's the man. I'm going to go implement like exactly what he mentioned here.
Ryan: Yeah. You may have to remind me. You asked a few questions in there. I'll try and I'll try and remember them. But I think, um, Yeah. First I would start with, so for us, we're pretty, we're pretty tight in terms of like knowing what return we want to get. Okay. So like when we offer somebody some money, so like the first time we work with somebody, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll test almost anybody at a low cost. Right. And we'll basically say, we'll pay you, you know, a few hundred bucks a post. If they have a larger audience, it might be a little bit more. Um, And, and let's just do three and let's just see how it goes. And if it goes really well, we will actually tell people how much. Like how much traffic we got. We'll show them like, Hey, this is how many clicks we got. This, how many of this is, I mean, that, and the reason we do that is because we just know like what we can and can't pay. And we want to be transparent, right? Transparency is obviously a, a theme for review generally. So, and most of the time it works out fine. Some people, you know, that can not be like, oh, I'm, I, I have this audience and I would never do it for this. Well, that's okay too. If we don't, we might not work together. Um, and that's fine. But we, and I think the reason I say this is important for every business and company, you can't just spend money willy nilly, right? You have to understand, like if you're going to pay an influencer to post, um, especially in an ongoing manner, like what are you getting out of it? And it's, and it's even harder for us because. we're doing it not to drive revenue. We're doing it to drive users and ratings on Repvue, knowing that if the more of that we generate, the bigger our network is. And then over time, it's easier for us to drive revenue through our commercial businesses that we have, like employers and hiring primarily. And then, you know, we have another business that's just kind of selling data to researchers and things like that. But that's two steps away from the ROI. And so then for us, it's like, well, we know we have a ratings acquisition cost target. And so we'll kind of know how much we'll pay. So the first thing I would say would be just really understand what ROI you need to get out of it, because you can end up throwing away a lot of money really quick. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and then, you know, other other points to think about if you're if you're thinking about influencer program, you know, you have to try and get a little broader and not as deep in terms of the people what I mean by that is. You know, having Andy post every day for a month, right? Yeah, it's not gonna work, right? No, even even once a month can be aggressive, right? Yeah. And so we have a few that we might do once a month for a while. But really, we're, you know, every couple months or every quarter is probably better. So then. Do you, you know, so, so you have to find a large enough influencer base. We might work with 25 or 30 at any given time.
Andy: Oh, wow. I was just going to ask how many you work with.
Ryan: So you were at maybe 25 or 30 at any given time, but they're not put, but, but we, and, and, but it's usually, usually not more than one per day. We'll go out and then ref you, people are like, I see you guys everywhere. That's part of it, but it's also the organic posts that we do, um, that we get from people and my posts. So you kind of need to be broad on influencer. And the other reason you need to be broad on your account is because they're just not all going to work. And you might post, if you're working with a brand to do a post, it might blow up in month one and you feel like you post again in month two or month three or whenever you post again. And you feel like, oh, this one's even better and it does nothing. Right. It just, you know, the nature of it. So you have to you have to think about it like that. And just kind of we think about it like it's just part of our marketing strategy. And it's a drumbeat of like, yeah, this is make sure each week we have a few. you know, influencers and we also are strategic about mixing in, you know, if it's somebody new with a much smaller audience. Okay. You know, we don't, we don't want that 10 days in a row. And then for like big, you know, maybe we're four or five that have larger audience. You want to spread those out from a traffic standpoint and awareness standpoint. Yeah. You know, so I think that's also, um, Also really important, um, to, to, to think about that mix. You just can't, I don't think that you can really have a successful. Influencer program ongoing. If you're too reliant on like one or two on the medium that is LinkedIn. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. We, we do work with, with, um, influencers on other channels. Um, but it's just the reality of it is that B2B sales. LinkedIn is where that's at. There's a few folks on like TikTok, a few folks on Insta, but it's just a much smaller. Yeah, so we might have two or three on each of those channels kind of versus 20 on LinkedIn.
Andy: I was just going to ask, have you experimented with other channels? And it sounds like, yeah.
Ryan: We've seen success on other channels as well. But it's just, there's just not as many of those influencers out there.
Andy: Yeah. B2B is mostly LinkedIn, right? Like that's, that's where they're at. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. And when did you, dude, I have so many questions. Okay. So this is gold. I think we're getting into the nitty gritty, which is awesome. So you're trying to, even though it's not the same influencer, are you trying to, I think you mentioned you're trying to get out a post every day for Repvue, but it could be from some, it's going to be from someone different, but it's at least once a day, you kind of have an influencer posting about RepView. Is that, that's kind of your goal right there. Yeah, pretty much.
Ryan: Yeah. So, so every day, uh, business account will typically have two posts, I believe. And then we'll have like an influencer post as well. And then I usually post almost every day. Um, and then we also will generally get an organic or two posts that happen every day as well. Just from random people that like something about the business.
Andy: Nice. Okay. And so every day, and then how that's LinkedIn, how about on the other channels? I'm guessing because there's less influencers, maybe you're trying to do once a week or like what's that cadence typically look like?
Ryan: Yeah, I would say it's a couple times a week on Instagram. And there's a couple of kind of like, you know, we've got a couple meme accounts that we work with on Instagram that just have, they're like sales memes.
Andy: God, and it's not Repvue, but it's like one of the sales accounts that like tags RepView or something like that.
Ryan: Yeah, and yeah, they'll post a meme. And we actually create almost all of our own memes, even the ones that we give to the users or to the- Oh, really? Yeah, we create all of them. I create a lot of them myself, like we will do it. Really? Okay.
Andy: Founder mode, right?
Ryan: You've been hearing that whole time. Yeah, I mean, I see something. Yeah, I've been I've been in sales for 25 years. And, you know, you know, I also, you know, I don't take myself too seriously most of the time as well. So I have a good eye for memes. And so we just, I see something, I send it in our Slack. I'm like, look at this one, here's a couple ideas. And then we just kind of create it. And sometimes we'll get stuff out like same day, some, you know, we have a schedule, but sometimes we'll get stuff out. We're like, Hey, this one's topical. We've got to move. And then we'll send it to like, like on Instagram, a couple of partners or like, um, you know, sales humor is a, is a great account. Oh, they're amazing. They're amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So we work with sales humor and they love, you know, they love the memes and, and, um, and them and the daily sales are two, two of the larger business accounts we work with. Um, and so, um, yeah, we, we would, I would say a couple of times a week and then tick tock is maybe one a week, just simply from the standpoint of we haven't been as successful finding, um, finding the right people to do it. We've got a couple on tick tock that have shown some promise lately. So we're kind of cautiously excited about that.
Andy: Yeah. Interesting. And, and my question for you on this next is, is, I think you have you have one person kind of managing like the content calendar for all these influencers, right? Like, hey, we have here's the bucket of 30 people. And then of those 30 people, Johnny's posting tomorrow, Sally's Thursday, and they're kind of like, they're managing that relationship, right? And being like, Hey, can you post on this day? Here's your link and all that. And you typically have someone just kind of running that that whole process pretty much right. Yeah. Is there anyone else that I'm missing that's like kind of not part of that? Or is there another behind the scene?
Ryan: Not really. We're a small lean team. We have 14 employees total. That's Gage. Gage is our social media.
Andy: Yep.
Ryan: So he's our social media kind of coordinator and he, he posts all of our rep view stuff across all of our channels, creates all the content, creates the, you know, whether it's video editing, all that. And he also maintains the influencer calendar, um, and coordinates to make sure, you know, all this stuff that I talked about in terms of scheduling and like, he's kind of. Kind of managing that and knows like, yeah, we don't want somebody, you know, kind of you know, the, the, you know, we don't want four whales in a row, so to speak, mix in your trout and your minnows and, you know, we use Slack and he's got, you know, all the, all the typical, like to, to communicate. And then we use notion for calendars, like wonder type stuff. And, um, yeah, it's, it's, it, he does a great job running all that really seamlessly.
Andy: Yeah, no, he does a great job. Yeah, because when I when I worked on the past, I was like, Oh, they're running a tight ship here. I have to like, talk to Ryan about this whole thing at some point. This was like a year ago. And finally, we made it happen. But that's super interesting. So you would say you're kind of level success so far, just on how you've experimented has been like, one LinkedIn, which is kind of the obvious choice if you're doing b2b, Instagram, you know, a couple times a week, and then also, you're kind of like getting into the whole tick tock world. How about YouTube? Have you dipped your toes into YouTube yet or anything? Because I know that's kind of becoming a hot thing on the B2B side.
Ryan: We, we have, um, but not in a major way. So, I mean, we haven't, I think we've, we've looked at a couple of influencers and I think there's probably a couple of things that we've done and I think we've seen it as something that has promised. We did roll out our own YouTube channel, but we haven't really leaned in too much with it with like the short as well. Um, and so we're starting to experiment with that. Um, you know, Part of it too is like because we're such a small lean team, right? We just don't have like for myself personally even like Gage and the team or they I think I have I think they created a rep view like Ryan at rep view TikTok and a Ryan at rep view Instagram. I probably have a personal I don't have TikTok necessary, but I have Instagram. I don't really use it but And, and I was like, they're like, you need to have a presence on these channels. And I was like, well, I was like, I don't have the bandwidth to do it. I was like, if you guys want to do it, I'm happy to like support and, and, and post. And so we're trying to start like the founder brand, Instagram and Tik TOK. And I think, you know, I think we've still struggled a little bit on Instagram to really get over the hump and like, I don't know if we have five or 10,000 somewhere in there followers. So it's not nothing, but we haven't like kind of hit a viral inflection point. And I think some of that's the type of content that we're posting as well, but which is really sales and business focused. Um, But I think YouTube would be like next up sort of thing for us. And we have experimented with it a little bit. Yeah.
Andy: Yeah. That's what we're going to. I think LinkedIn, we've kind of figured out a good, uh, good cadence of stuff we're doing, not from Influencer, just from founder brand perspective. And then next, I think we're going to go to YouTube just because I like YouTube where it's more evergreen, right. Where you evergreen content and it's like the second largest search engine in the world. Right. And so you think about it, I'm like, okay. How do we leverage that? It's more evergreen. We've got kind of this like LinkedIn thing down. I think personally, I search a lot of stuff on YouTube. I'm like, Oh, what are people doing for X, Y, and Z? You know? So. Um, yeah, definitely video. Let me ask you this about the meme accounts. What's the strategy there? You're posting a meme. And then on the meme, it has like, it just is it just brand awareness is kind of your goal there? Or are you are you actually in the like, primary text linking to like, a rep view page to see reviews of stuff? I guess I could go look but like, You know, I've tried a couple of that and have failed miserably. So what's really like the the key there? Maybe it's the right accounts like, yeah, what's the Yeah, yeah.
Ryan: I think I can get most of this right. I'm not as in the weeds, but I would say like, so if you look at Instagram, if you do an Instagram story, you can embed a link in there, I believe. But, but really the meme is, is our strategy would be have something like as funny, fun, ridiculous as possible to just drive virality first. Okay. With, you know, and then I'll have, it'll have a meme or it might be a video meme. It might be a, you know, snapshot, but or an image and, and I'll have the refute logo in there. Instagram, you, you can link, if it's a story, we can link the story. Um, and so we'll be able to, we'll be able to track that, but, but, but it is really more like on Instagram or YouTube. It's like the, or Instagram or Tik TOK. If we do take talk, It's really that brand awareness. And if we can get like the meme to go viral, we will see a lot of traffic from it. Sometimes it will be attributable through the direct link in the story. And then sometimes we'll just see the lift in traffic and we know like what our traffic Cause you know who posts every day, right? Yeah. And so we'll be like, what, why do we have, well, why do we have that big spike in traffic from 8 PM last night till now? And it's like, oh, and then we'll look, oh, we did this on Instagram with this partner. Oh, that's probably what it is. And it'll be some, you know, 50, 50 traffic tribute available. And then just a bump that we'll see. And we'll see, we'll see significant bumps in our organic traffic when we have a big viral post as well, because like you're, you know, a lot of people will see it and be like, Oh, I'll check out rep view, but they just don't want to click that. They'll just go to Google and type in rep view.
Andy: Really? I was just going to say, are people actually just like, go like typing in rep view after they see that it's on the meme.
Ryan: Wow. Yeah. So we track, so, so we'll look at, I mean, we, we have estimates and same with, with Tik TOK. I don't think there's any way you can do that. the direct link. People, our TikTok partners and Instagram partners too, they'll include Repvue like in a link tree as one way to do it, but we just don't see a ton of volume come through there necessarily. With TikTok, if it goes really viral, we'll see the traffic. It'll just be through organic search and direct. And we'll know that it's from that, we'll know that it's from that video because usually like TikTok will go at a different time of day. We'll do it later in the day and in the evenings and we'll see that spike later in the day. And so we'll be able to track and we'll be able to know, even though, you know, marketing attribution is a, is a, is a long challenge for many. Oh yeah. Yeah. And I think that's, it's always going to be like that. So, so you have to kind of, have other means to understand if something is successful. And so we'll look closely at the, the other traffic sources, knowing what influencer campaigns were going on during that time. And I think we generally estimate even LinkedIn, right. If you see like, Oh, that's a rep view. Partner posts that they're paying. It might say brand partnership and it, you know, it's some of them are obvious that that link that's in there. You know, people click it. That's cool. We would probably estimate that we would estimate that the traffic is probably 60 to 100% more than the directly attributable traffic for most of them. in some, in some for the big ones, for the small, for like a really viral post, you know, if it's, if it doesn't get a lot of attention, it's not going to be much anyway. So it doesn't matter. But if it's something, if it's something that's really viral, we know that a lot of people, it's just the behavior that we see is that people won't click those links. They'll, they'll go directly to rep you. So we try and account for that as well.
Andy: Interesting. That's so crazy. Cause I was wondering, cause I think I've seen you guys like have your logo on a meme. And I'm like, how do they get people to like, go from the meme to, you know, like, and I'm like, I don't see a link anywhere. This is crazy. And so it sounds like it still works, which is like, just super interesting. And do they say anything in the primary or the text of the post, like the caption about rep view? Like, is there any strategies you have there? Like, funny meme, you have your logo and then in the body, is there something of the caption that you guys try and do or what's that?
Ryan: Are you talking about like Instagram or which? Yeah, Instagram, Instagram. Yeah. So, so for Instagram, a lot of times, yeah, there'll be, there'll be something in the body of the post. That mentions you guys too.
Andy: Yeah.
Ryan: And it's usually something very short. Yeah, you know, like see, you know, see if you're paid fairly at rep view or, you know, something just very short and to the point, which we found works, works better. But, but at the end of the day, like there, there's, there's a conversion metric set in there, right. Where it's like meme with no link sentence underneath the, the image. blank, you know, it's, it becomes a numbers game from that standpoint.
Andy: You know what I mean?
Ryan: Like it's just, so, so our whole goal would be let's create the best content that people think is funny, fun, funny, you know, or appropriate. Um, sometimes the content is like salary data as well. And that works well in many cases also.
Andy: Yeah.
Ryan: A few data.
Andy: Yeah. And if I were to work with one of these accounts, and I'll probably offline email you Ryan and be like, Hey, who should I work with? But you know, if I were to like, what's the budget for each kind of meme that you're you're trying to target there to make it worth it? Um, and again, it goes back is dependent on your every business, right? But like, for y'all, what's, you know, for budgetary purposes, what are you paying? And you don't have to give me an exact number, but… Yeah, I mean, no, it's fine.
Ryan: It really varies significantly based on the size of the account. And I don't know off the top of my head some of the Instagram details necessarily, but… Like with LinkedIn, somebody that's got a 10K or less following might just say, Hey, do you want to do two posts over the next two months? We'll give you 200 bucks each and we'll provide the content. I guess test out. And most people are like, yeah, I'll try it. And then what we tell them too is like, Hey, based on the results, we might offer you more money. like to keep going right yeah generally right and you know and then and then we most of them we also say it's like and and then you know somebody you know we don't have many that we pay more than like very few that's probably like that kind of four figures is kind of a stretch for us but yeah maybe a couple here and there but it's it's not many Um, and then, um, you know, we typically don't do long-term contracts with folks either, or just like, Hey, you do three months or something, right. Or a couple, something like that. Usually the first we'll do like, Hey, let's, we'll give you, you know, two, 300 bucks, depending on what your following is. Um, and and for each post and let's let's agree that we'll do three and then we'll evaluate and then if it works let's kind of do it on a monthly basis and or or quarterly basis yeah and then um yeah they could turn it off or you know whatever it's pretty um it's it's pretty easy it's not some kind of heavy engagement yeah and are you guys
Andy: So you guys got this down or you've got a whole system in place for it, right? Like, which is and I've seen it. I'm like, okay, this is the this is a key strategy for them. Is that mostly what you're focusing on the influencer stuff to drive traffic to rep view? Or you guys doing cold email cold calling it you're a nimble team. So like, or has just influencer marketing for your product been the best bang for your buck?
Ryan: It's been, it's been the best bang for our buck. We don't, we don't do any cold emailing or cold calling. Um, we, we've thought about it. I mean, with emailing, with, with emailing, I think we could get a system that. I, we kind of have some stuff behind the scenes, some operational teams, some offshore stuff that, that we use for a lot of different things. I just don't believe with the email rules, the way they are today, like emailing salespeople about, Hey, go join Repvue. We would be violating most of those if they haven't provided consent. And so we've avoided that. And I think it would, it would be hard to get efficient enough because the value of a rating for us is just a rating. It's just data. And we get a ton of data and then we got to sell, you know, commercial products that's based on all this stuff and users. And it's just hard to get an ROI for those kinds of manual things. So really where our focus areas are influencers work really well, our own Influencer accounts work well. And then we're working more on network effects and SEO is a big part of what our current focus is around. We're going to have a lot of stuff coming out in the next couple of months related to jobs. There's going to be a significant increase in the count of jobs on our website over the next three to four months. So we probably have seven, 800 jobs, sales jobs on there. I would expect that to maybe 10X in the next three to five months. Um, and then, and then there's kind of a network effect involved in that. And then we are, um, actually in the process of expanding into medical sales. So med device, pharma, biotech, healthcare, and hospitals. Um, so we've already laid some of the foundation for that. So if you're a medical salesperson, you go to rep view a year ago, it's like, well, this is for tech salespeople. I'm not an enterprise. Yeah. Now you can go there and when you select your role, it's like, I'm a clinical territory manager for orthopedics, you know, and so that's already in place. We're starting to roll out salaries. That's a growth strategy. I mentioned SEO, tough nut to crack, long play there. But that's another strategy. We got a few other things in the hopper, but I think like the influencer piece, I think is a nice foundational item for us that will, it works, it's consistent. It's not that expensive. We can make the ROI work because we manage it tightly. And like I said earlier, we like giving people an opportunity to monetize some of the work that they've put in to establish even 10,000 followers. And we like being a part of that.
Andy: Yeah, that's great. And I have another tactical question for you in that. And this is probably a question a lot of people are thinking about right now, which is for the content of the posts. Right. There's so many factors on what's going to work, what's not going to work. Typically on LinkedIn, it doesn't matter how many followers you have. If you have a banger post, it will do well. Right. Just like on Instagram, if you have a sick meme, it'll probably do pretty well. You have to have a good size account for it. But, you know, I think on LinkedIn more than any other network, what's your, what's your mindset when it comes to, do you give them something to post or let them do their own posts? Either.
Ryan: We'll do both. I mean, I think we'd like to see it first, just to kind of make sure it's totally on brand and whatnot. But if people have ideas, like some folks want to do their own. Some folks are like, hey, can you send me something? Um, sometimes, you know, and we've in the past, we've been like, you know, we'll give them like one or two of my posts that I've done and say, just kind of, I did that.
Andy: Yeah, I did that. I did that with gauge actually, when I was doing stuff with you guys back in the day or like a year ago or something. And I was like, I'm like, Gage, you guys already have posts that, you know, do well, let's just kind of reformulate those. And I think a few people actually messaged you and were like, Hey, this guy's plagiarizing. And yeah, I remember that.
Ryan: And I'm like, Oh, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Somebody commented on it. And my take on that, like, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, Yeah. I don't think I'd like necessarily appreciate if somebody just randomly took my post and posted it as their own, because I don't know if it's really happened to me. It probably has. I may not have even noticed it, but in this case, like we're advertising for the business and like, I don't care. Like I really don't care. Like I don't care either.
Andy: Like I was like, yeah, I know it works. I'm just going to take Ryan's thing. Cause this is totally fine.
Ryan: Totally fine with that. Um, you know, like I said, I bet you're, you have a very large audience, you know, I have a pretty large audience too. And, and like, I, I believe like there's way less overlap in our audiences than you or I, like you would think actually. So, um, I think that's one of the reasons why influencer programs, if you're a business and you're thinking about should do it, and it's one of the reasons why they, they work well. And I, I don't know about other channels, but I bet other channels too, I bet there's like, two accounts that look like, oh, it's a sales meme account here, it's a sales meme account here. I bet the overlap is less than what you think in those accounts.
Andy: Yeah, it might be. Yeah, because I'll see a new one every day and I'm like, oh shit, I've never seen that one. You know, sales humor, I think is the biggest one, right? And all that fun stuff. So, man, this is interesting. Well, thank you, Ryan. This has been crazy because it's been like a whole masterclass, I think, in influencer marketing for B2B. because I'm going to be quite honest. I haven't seen, as I mentioned at the beginning, going full circle here. I haven't seen anyone do it like y'all. Now we kind of have all the inside tactics to that, right? And so, man, now let me ask you this. You're going into medical. That's basically not a new product, but a whole new segment. I don't see a lot of medical device influencers. So what are you thinking there, right?
Ryan: Yeah, we've got a list, right? So like whenever I see anybody, I… capture it and send it to Slack. I'm like, Hey, this could be somebody and we add it to the list. So there's not right. So, so tech salespeople, what are they doing right now? They're sitting on LinkedIn screwing around. Hopefully they're making calls. Hopefully they're on a call. Hopefully they're closing something. If they're not, they're probably on LinkedIn. Medical salespeople, I use this, this kind of phrase all the time. They're, they're heading down the interstate in their Ford Explorer with a bunch of suitcases in the back filled with equipment going from doctor to doctor, right? They're not, right? So, so that's why there's not, that's why there's not that many influencers. They can't, there's not people to influence. You know, we've found some, we're going to do it. We've got some other partnership opportunities that we're looking at for medical sales. as well. I think that also brings up the opportunity for us to create kind of a community. There you go, yeah. You know, ourselves. And so there's a few things that we're going to do, but it takes time, right? Like we say it, like if we start collecting great data now, how do we monetize that data with companies? Maybe they want to hire, maybe they want to do things with Repvue on a partnership standpoint, like that's a year from now, right? You got to, you know, it's like the today is the best day to plant a tree, I guess is or whatever, you know, whatever, whatever that saying is.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's that Charlie Munger quote I heard recently, which is like, um, like there's no money in buying and selling the money's in waiting. Right. Yeah. Like, yeah. Yeah. And it's like, Oh, okay. Like simple quote, but I'm like, yeah. Interesting. Which kind of like is, is a marketing quote, I think too. Right. It's like, you know, when you think about it, it's not like doing these quick posts, like once a day that you're going to make a crazy amount of money, but that over time and waiting to build that kind of moat, as y'all have on the influencer side. Right. So anyways, man, this has been great. So you've got some strategies you can work on the medical sales stuff. And then are y'all, let me ask you this. Are you guys bootstrapped? Are you a bootstrap company?
Ryan: Did you raise cash? Okay. We have raised about $6 million. in BC. We're very, very close right now, like several months probably from being cashflow positive. So we're right there. So we'll get there probably possibly by the end of this year, we'll be cashflow positive. If not, it'll be early next year. And we'll have optionality. I mean, the markets are tough. So we want to be in a position where Would we raise more money? Maybe, maybe not. That's to be determined. I'm pretty frugal in general. The reality of it is to create a network effect business like Repvue, it's cost intensive because you can't really extract dollars from the network effect, from the model.
Andy: for a few years until you get sufficient.
Ryan: Obviously, we're close to cash flow positive. We have 14 employees. So now we're in a position where we are able to extract money from this network effect. But the first few years, it's really, really hard. And that was the decision was if we want to do this, we'll need to raise capital. And so we did, but now given macroeconomic conditions, we haven't taken, you know, the seed round was $5 million. We did that was two and a half years ago. And so you kind of made the decision that we need to get to cashflow break even, and then we'll have optionality.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. And in your vision, it sounds like it's not, you started to kind of niche in tech sales and then you're, you want to go to medical sales and then, you know, maybe like door to door sales, you know, all those other, like, so you kind of can get all these different categories. I don't know if there's a money in a lot of them, but is that your vision or are you going to kind of stick to two initially?
Ryan: Well, over time we will expand. I don't, you know, I think that the vision is really about, um, Solving professional matchmaking at scale from a from an employer standpoint, the vision and the mission for users is. making better career decisions, right? On the employer side, on the product side, specific to employers, which is kind of the product we're most well known for, is really like, like I said, how do you solve professional, and I say professional matchmaking versus like a personal matchmaking, like a dating app. Like how do you solve the professional version of that at a massive scale without having recruiters, without a lot of manual intervention, without this? And the reason that we think that we're in a really good position to do that is because of the data that we have, not only on users, but on companies. If a recruiter is on LinkedIn and they see your profile, they know where you work, what your role is, and how long you've been there. That's it. What if I could tell you their comp, what their deal size is, what their sales cycle length is, what they care about in their careers, what the buyer persona is, what the industry is, like we have so much of that. And then we have all that and more on companies. And so when you think about dating apps, The reason those have been successful is because somebody spends 45 minutes filling out all this detailed information. Well, that's not really going to work. Nobody like really wants to do that, right? For a job site, right? Nobody wants it. So how do you, how do you extract that information on both sides of that equation with the least amount of effort possible and do it at a massive scale? And if you solve that, then you can, then you have the underlying foundational elements of professional matchmaking at scale. And we think we have that. And so we're, we actually, we have a beta right now with some of our customers, um, for this product that we're, that we're working on.
Andy: Nice. Nice little preview here. Let's go. Yeah, no, this is good. And, and you know, for you, you're in this world of, sales and how much people are making, who's hitting quota. And you kind of see all that data, right? Like, from my perspective, anecdotally with Distribute, digital sales room platform, really like notion for salespeople is really what we are. But if if you look at like our deals like it's freaking hard right now right like it is tough like and this is kind of from someone you know i was early at outreach and been in this whole world and i'm like holy shit like doing selling us other software companies right now is very hard like they were they've been oversold too it's kind of what i feel like right everyone's just kind of like like in like, oh, it's saturated, you know, like, yes, things can get done, but it's very, it's way harder than it was in 2017, 18. You know, of course, 2021, people were buying everything, which I think is part of the problem. So I'm feeling it, but I want to get your sense from all the data that you've seen. Yeah. What are you saying? Right? Cause you have all the numbers. Like what's your, I would love to see your whole take on, on everything going on.
Ryan: Yeah, I would say that your assessment is accurate. I think that it was really easy for a while. It got really, really hard. I think it's leveled off, but it's leveled off at heart, right? Yeah. The data is telling us it's not necessarily getting worse, but it's getting still hard. And I think a lot of people haven't yet adjusted fully to the fact that it's getting really, really hard. And I think that many companies realize that they overhired. That's why you saw a lot of the layoffs and. we've seen some signals in the last few months, like on the hiring side, that it might, you know, maybe that's getting a little bit better, but we're not really seeing it as much in the quota attainment metrics yet. So I think where we're at, like, you know, we have a hiring product, right? So, you know, we got, we got crushed on that for six or 12 months when things went south. And where we're seeing now is like maybe a little bit of bounce back. Um, but the overall to your question, the overall selling environment is, is, is, is, is hard. It's very difficult. It's not anything like it was to your point, 2020 or 20, you know, 2021. Um, and I don't see that like jumping back up. There could be a slow climb and I use this phrase a lot. You're always taking the elevator down and the stairs back up. Uh, and you know, we might be in reach of the stairs, but I don't think we've climbed too many of them just yet.
Andy: Yeah. Oh, I like that analogy. Yeah. I like that analogy. And it's, that's what I'm feeling. And I'm like, am I, do I just suck at this now? Or what is going on? What's happening? You know? And, um, and that's where, you know, my head's at. And so I'm glad the data kind of resonates with that as well, which is like, yes, it's, it's, it's plateaued at hard, which I think a lot of people have felt as well. And, On top of that, too, you have like what's interesting, this A.I. We're building software products now. You know, I came from being an engineer, so I look at the way we build now and I'm like, dude, I could spin up something that used to take me three weeks and three hours, which is just insane, you know. And so I look at that and I'm like, OK, now what's happening, too, is it's becoming like software is becoming more of a commodity. And because it's becoming a commodity, how do you win? Distribution and brand, right? Which is like exactly what you guys kind of started with early, which is why I'm like, oh, Reppy is kind of like on the great trajectory there with the influencer marketing. And so that's kind of where my head's at now too, is like, we have to be a media company, right? At the end of the day is like, that's how we have to do it. Cause someone can come and build what we build and you know, super quickly, right?
Ryan: You should always think about what is your strategy around moats, right? you know if your moat is this a widget you're probably not going to last too long if your moat is we're, you know, we have a really good go to market, like that's going to be disrupted as well. So, you know, what, what is your mode? Like for us, we think about the mode in terms of, you know, data and longevity, like for us, what's valuable in our data is not only the data, but the history of the data. So every month and a quarter that goes on, our moat gets bigger because we have other commercial businesses where we sell data and history is important. It's hard to sell that stuff when you don't have much of it. So moats are really important. And really, really good software is hard to really call that. It's going to be harder and harder to call that a moat in the future because of the ability to spin stuff up, which has been, it's been compacting for probably 20 years now, like going back to like the first, you know, hyperscale or cloud computing where you don't have to have a closet full of servers. to start a software company. That was like the first step where you can share it. And now the next phase that we're seeing is like, well, the coding is becoming so much easier with co-pilot and then will it be not even a co-pilot, the pilot. So like the software stuff that's going to be interesting to monitor. And I think go-to-market, smart go-to-market operators can replicate go-to-market.
Andy: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, and it's it for sure. And, you know, right now, I think the phase we're in is like, you probably remember this, it used to be like, how do I find the 10x engineer, right? That's like really solid and all that. And now it's like, how do I find the 10x marketer is kind of where it's like, what I see, right? It's like someone that can figure something out, get things distributed, build the influencer program, get, you know, get the word out. Like, And I feel like that's kind of where we're shifting there, which is just super interesting, man. But hey, this is I know you probably have to run. I know I do in a minute here. Ryan, but dude, this has been amazing. You know, we did a couple of things, influencer marketing, freaking masterclass, talk a little bit about the state of sales, and then Um, man, I'm going to hit you up offline for some, some partners that you would recommend. And then also shoot me your address. Cause I'll, I'll send that in a note. Cause I want to send you a nice gift for coming on. So. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, man. Awesome. Yeah, it's great meeting you, man. Yeah.
Ryan: Yeah, great chatting with you. Yeah, I'm here, so ping me whenever if you need anything. Yeah. I'm happy to help.
Andy: Yeah, man. Same here, dude. Well, thank you so much, man. I appreciate it. And then, Ryan, this will also go out. I have my newsletter's 31,000 people, so we're going to, once we, we'll probably have this done editing either next week or the following week, and I'll have it go out, and then I'll send you this Riverside recording too. Yeah. And you'll get the whole clip, so your team can clip it up. Yeah. you know, do all that stuff too.
Ryan: Yeah. We'd love that. Yeah. We've got, yeah, we've got folks. We'll, we'll, we'll cut it out and find some good clips too and share it out there.
Andy: Yeah. Let's do it, man. You're the man, right? Hey, great meeting you, dude. I'll chat with you soon. All right. Thank you so much, man. Have a good one.
