Neal O'Grady's 5 C's of un-ignorable content

[00:00:00] Neal O'Grady on Becoming Unignorable in Marketing

[00:00:00] Ramli John: Marketing is a game of attention.
[00:00:01] Ramli John: If you can't hook your audience to pay attention, they'll miss out on what you have to say or sell.
[00:00:06] Ramli John: And one of the masters teaching a course about becoming unignorable is Neil O'Grady.
[00:00:11] Ramli John: He is the cofounder of Demand Curve and has gone from a few thousand to 52,000 followers on LinkedIn in just a few months.
[00:00:18] Ramli John: Today, he shares his five C's for creating content that hooks people.
[00:00:22] Ramli John: In this Marketing Powerups episode, you learn, first of all, how to tap into people's curiosity.
[00:00:27] Ramli John: Second, how to build credibility without any followers.
[00:00:30] Ramli John: Third, how to craft content that is counterintuitive.
[00:00:32] Ramli John: And number four, a career Power up that's helped accelerate Neil's career.
[00:00:37] Ramli John: Before I get started, I created a free Power Up cheat sheet that you can download and apply Neil's five C's of unignorable content.
[00:00:43] Ramli John: You can find it at Marketing Powerups.com or in the show notes and description.

[00:00:48] Learning from Demand Curve's Success: Un-Ignorable Course and Social Media Strategy

[00:00:48] Ramli John: Are you ready?
[00:00:49] Neal O'Grady: Let's go.
[00:00:50] Ramli John: Marketing powerups ready.
[00:00:54] Ramli John: Go.
[00:00:57] Ramli John: Here's your host, Ramli.
[00:01:00] Ramli John: John, you've been teaching this course and I believe you have this student that applying the principles we're going to be talking about.
[00:01:09] Ramli John: I'm trying to get people excited.
[00:01:11] Ramli John: They were able to get 115,000 followers in what, six months?
[00:01:16] Neal O'Grady: Yeah, he's at 115,000 followers.
[00:01:19] Neal O'Grady: He did the course in January.
[00:01:20] Neal O'Grady: He basically didn't post before that.
[00:01:22] Neal O'Grady: He was lucky in that he was a very early LinkedIn user, like 1015 years ago.
[00:01:27] Neal O'Grady: And just through using that to connect with people, he had an amazing base of 20,000 followers, but he'd never actually posted anything before.
[00:01:37] Neal O'Grady: Interesting.
[00:01:37] Neal O'Grady: And our course unignorable cohort based it combination of just trying to help people refine their topic as well as learn the psychology of how to post engaging and interesting content.
[00:01:53] Neal O'Grady: That kind of sets you as an expert is also, like, one of the biggest reasons why people kind of fail at this is that they are constantly preparing for it to not actually starting and just having the accountability of I've paid for this.
[00:02:10] Neal O'Grady: There's other people doing.
[00:02:10] Neal O'Grady: It, I'm getting all these notifications that you end up doing it and through it, you're also meeting a whole bunch of other people with the same goal as you.
[00:02:19] Neal O'Grady: So he's absolutely crushed.
[00:02:24] Neal O'Grady: He's he was recently Ali Abdahal with four and a half million subscribers, also just made an entire video.
[00:02:30] Neal O'Grady: What it's like to work with him as a CEO coach, right?
[00:02:34] Ramli John: Oh, I think I saw that.
[00:02:35] Neal O'Grady: Yeah.
[00:02:36] Ramli John: So he's that guy.
[00:02:37] Ramli John: I just saw that video from Abdal.
[00:02:39] Neal O'Grady: Yeah, yeah, it's great.
[00:02:42] Neal O'Grady: Ali basically starts the video saying, this is Eric and he is very expensive.
[00:02:50] Ramli John: He doesn't usually take clients.
[00:02:51] Ramli John: Right.
[00:02:52] Ramli John: I think that's what Ali said was like, I had to almost beg him to take me on or something like that.
[00:02:58] Ramli John: He has like a backlog of clients.
[00:02:59] Neal O'Grady: That can take yeah, Eric is great in that he has essentially the highest conversion rate we've ever seen of somebody visiting his profile and following him.
[00:03:11] Neal O'Grady: I've also shown his profile to a bunch of people, and they're immediately like, oh, my God, this guy is a baller.
[00:03:17] Neal O'Grady: And part of that, I brought that up to him, and he's like, yeah, but I'm also 47.
[00:03:24] Neal O'Grady: You're 34.
[00:03:25] Neal O'Grady: I would rather exchange 13 years of my life and not have the credibility.
[00:03:32] Neal O'Grady: So for him, he was ranked CEO of the Year in 2019.
[00:03:37] Neal O'Grady: So to be a CEO coach and to see somebody that was ranked CEO of the year, it's kind of like kind of an obvious he worked with The Apprentice.
[00:03:49] Neal O'Grady: He's been featured in all these publications.
[00:03:51] Neal O'Grady: So, yeah, it's absolutely crazy.
[00:03:54] Neal O'Grady: And because he's got all these years of skills, he's extremely good at networking, basically.
[00:04:01] Neal O'Grady: He even started trading some of his skills with top creators to get them to engage with this stuff.
[00:04:08] Neal O'Grady: So he definitely leveraged his superpowers to grow really quickly.
[00:04:15] Neal O'Grady: And I'm biased, but I end up saving most a lot of his posts, probably more than I save anybody else's posts.
[00:04:23] Ramli John: I'm going to link this LinkedIn profile.
[00:04:25] Ramli John: Is it mainly LinkedIn?
[00:04:26] Ramli John: He's active on Twitter as well.
[00:04:28] Neal O'Grady: Yeah, he's only started posting on Twitter as well.
[00:04:31] Neal O'Grady: He's been quite focused on LinkedIn.
[00:04:34] Neal O'Grady: That's where founders mostly hang.
[00:04:37] Ramli John: Mean, you already mentioned it, and he's already in Ali Abdal's video.
[00:04:40] Ramli John: What is his name?
[00:04:41] Ramli John: So people listening to this, it's just like they don't have to go through the description.
[00:04:44] Neal O'Grady: It's Eric partaker, spelled exactly how it sounds.
[00:04:49] Neal O'Grady: It's cool.
[00:04:49] Ramli John: Like, people get a peek into this course.
[00:04:52] Ramli John: I'm going to link that course.
[00:04:53] Ramli John: I should sign up for that.
[00:04:54] Ramli John: I feel like I can learn a ton.
[00:04:57] Ramli John: We'd love to have you join the next Cohort.
[00:05:01] Ramli John: You can take my word.
[00:05:02] Neal O'Grady: Cohorts in October.
[00:05:03] Neal O'Grady: Figured, like, nobody wants to do this.
[00:05:05] Neal O'Grady: Nobody wants to join a month long cohort based thing where they need to be accountable during the summer.
[00:05:10] Ramli John: 100%.

[00:05:11] Credibility in Content Creation with Neal O'Grady

[00:05:11] Ramli John: Let's talk about that.
[00:05:12] Ramli John: I mean, you already kind of started digging into one.
[00:05:16] Ramli John: I'm going to be focusing you shared this post on LinkedIn.
[00:05:19] Ramli John: I'll share in the description twelve ways to capture people's attention and make unignorable content.
[00:05:26] Ramli John: But I want to pick on the C's.
[00:05:28] Ramli John: There's five, but I don't know how much we can cover today.
[00:05:31] Ramli John: But you already started digging into one of them.
[00:05:33] Ramli John: You mentioned credibility.
[00:05:34] Ramli John: I feel like that's such a powerful way to grab people's attention, is like, C of the Year, or I've looked at 100 onboarding experience or looked at different ads showing graphs.
[00:05:48] Ramli John: Why is that so effective?
[00:05:50] Ramli John: When people see that credibility markers in.
[00:05:54] Neal O'Grady: Posts, in a lot of ways it can kind of feel like bragging.
[00:05:57] Neal O'Grady: But it's funny that I think what's the stat like, people scroll through 300ft of content per day, and ultimately they want to know that the thing that they're going to learn is coming from somebody who actually knows something and has the credibility to do that.
[00:06:15] Neal O'Grady: So, for example, like Justin welsh saying, I made $3 million last year with my one person business.
[00:06:24] Neal O'Grady: Would you rather learn something about one person businesses from somebody who's made $3 million in a year?
[00:06:29] Neal O'Grady: Or would you rather learn it from somebody who just started?
[00:06:34] Neal O'Grady: And so it's it's kind of it's kind of hard to do at first because you feel like you're sort of bragging.
[00:06:43] Neal O'Grady: Like, you know, I have ones.
[00:06:44] Neal O'Grady: Like, I've helped I've worked with 100 plus startups where it's like, I've grown this quickly or I've done this.
[00:06:55] Neal O'Grady: There's three fundamental ways I think you can kind of leverage credibility.
[00:07:00] Neal O'Grady: One is, I've done this amazing thing.
[00:07:02] Neal O'Grady: I made $3 million from a year as a solopreneur.
[00:07:08] Neal O'Grady: There's kind of the, I guess, leveraging the credibility of somebody else.
[00:07:15] Neal O'Grady: So, for example, I have a post that did well, and I leveraged the success story of Eric.
[00:07:22] Neal O'Grady: And I've kind of attached myself to that because I say that he was my student.
[00:07:27] Neal O'Grady: So I get the one everyone who happens to know Eric will stop and look, especially since I have his face in the post, it kind of shows some amazing thing he's done.
[00:07:43] Neal O'Grady: So you want to learn how he did that and then kind of that credibility also somewhat gets transferred to me and also part of leveraging somebody else's credibility, say, like, you're just starting out, you're not CEO of the year.
[00:07:56] Neal O'Grady: How do you do?
[00:07:58] Neal O'Grady: Say, like, Eric does this a lot in his content.
[00:08:01] Neal O'Grady: It's like, this is something that I learned at McKinsey.
[00:08:04] Neal O'Grady: This is a study done by Harvard.
[00:08:06] Neal O'Grady: This is how Marcus Aurelius or Steve Jobs so people have heard of Harvard.
[00:08:12] Neal O'Grady: They respect Harvard.
[00:08:13] Neal O'Grady: They know McKinsey.
[00:08:14] Neal O'Grady: They know Steve Jobs.
[00:08:15] Neal O'Grady: Anyone who's a fan of them or recognizes them are more likely to stop and want to read.
[00:08:24] Neal O'Grady: I guess the last one would be kind of around.
[00:08:26] Neal O'Grady: I've done a ton of work, as you said.
[00:08:28] Neal O'Grady: It's like, I've spent 15 hours putting this together.
[00:08:33] Neal O'Grady: I've analyzed 1000 posts.
[00:08:35] Neal O'Grady: It's showing I've done all this work so you don't have to.
[00:08:40] Neal O'Grady: And it leverage the labor illusion, saying, like, if something took a lot of time, it must be valuable.
[00:08:48] Ramli John: That makes sense.
[00:08:49] Neal O'Grady: You see why this could be hard to go through all twelve because each one kind of deeply into it.
[00:08:56] Ramli John: Yeah, I love this.
[00:08:59] Ramli John: Essentially, I see credibility as a way to let people know why they should.
[00:09:04] Neal O'Grady: Listen to why should I care?
[00:09:07] Ramli John: Yeah.
[00:09:07] Ramli John: Why should I care?
[00:09:08] Neal O'Grady: You're constantly when somebody's scrolling, you're constantly trying to ask them, answer the question like, so what?
[00:09:16] Neal O'Grady: Why should I read this?
[00:09:18] Neal O'Grady: So it's just very much like just leaning into that, being like, look, I've done this thing or this person's done this thing.
[00:09:25] Neal O'Grady: Here's how they did it, or whatever.

[00:09:27] Building Credibility in Personal Branding

[00:09:27] Ramli John: Before I continue, I want to thank the sponsor for this Episode 42 Agency.
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[00:10:13] Ramli John: I love how you broke down.
[00:10:14] Ramli John: Like, you don't have to show your own credibility.
[00:10:18] Ramli John: You're talking about showing other people's credibility.
[00:10:21] Ramli John: It could be your student, like you mentioned.
[00:10:23] Ramli John: It could also be a famous person.
[00:10:25] Ramli John: Like, this is how Marcus Oralis did it.
[00:10:28] Ramli John: Another thing I've seen around credibility.
[00:10:30] Ramli John: I think Brendan Hufford does this a lot.
[00:10:33] Ramli John: I had on an episode where he does like a graph, like, look at this SEO, like this spike, and that kind of showcases result of your client.
[00:10:42] Ramli John: That could be, yeah.
[00:10:44] Neal O'Grady: He often goes like, I was able to scale their organic traffic from this to this in this time frame.
[00:10:54] Neal O'Grady: It's very powerful.
[00:10:55] Neal O'Grady: I find myself stopping at almost every single one of those that Brandon does.
[00:11:00] Neal O'Grady: And it's often the posts.
[00:11:08] Neal O'Grady: We'll probably get into this, but I talk a lot about how as you're trying to build personal brand, you're likely doing it probably because you want to make money, right?
[00:11:19] Neal O'Grady: Or you want to be able to grow your business or something.
[00:11:22] Neal O'Grady: Deep down, that's mostly why you're trying to do it.
[00:11:26] Neal O'Grady: So posting memes, posting platitudes, reposting other things that other people have said or done ultimately doesn't make somebody respect you as a trusted source or to respect your authority or credibility or want to work with you or pay you money.
[00:11:46] Neal O'Grady: It's like, yeah, sure, there's lots of Instagram accounts that have great cat memes.
[00:11:52] Neal O'Grady: Am I ever going to purchase something based on the recommendation of this?
[00:11:55] Neal O'Grady: No.
[00:11:55] Neal O'Grady: I also don't even care who runs it.
[00:11:58] Neal O'Grady: I just like that.
[00:11:59] Neal O'Grady: It's funny, whereas, like, Brendan, he's showing an example of how he grew somebody's blog.
[00:12:06] Neal O'Grady: If I needed somebody to run the SEO for my business, he'd be one of the first people I thought of just because he's clearly had results for other people.
[00:12:18] Neal O'Grady: And I find that one, it's like I posted that thing about Eric.
[00:12:21] Neal O'Grady: I started getting lots of messages being like, how did you work with Eric?
[00:12:24] Neal O'Grady: Can I work with you?
[00:12:25] Neal O'Grady: Stuff like that.
[00:12:26] Neal O'Grady: And those are the number one posts I find to kind of get that inbound is just kind of highlighting other people's success.
[00:12:39] Ramli John: What I'm hearing is that maybe sometimes early when you're building your personal brand or like your client, you don't really have a big client or result to show.
[00:12:47] Ramli John: Maybe start off like being a reporter where you're sharing other people's results and then slowly merge into once you have proof, sharing your own results.
[00:12:58] Ramli John: Is that like a suggestion that might make sense?
[00:13:03] Neal O'Grady: Totally.
[00:13:03] Neal O'Grady: I think James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, has talked quite a bit about this too.
[00:13:09] Neal O'Grady: It's like when he started writing about it.
[00:13:12] Neal O'Grady: I read his first posts when I was 23.
[00:13:15] Neal O'Grady: I'm now 34.
[00:13:16] Neal O'Grady: So he was not an expert in habit formation or achieving goals or anything at the time.
[00:13:23] Neal O'Grady: He was basically learning in public.
[00:13:25] Neal O'Grady: He was just, I've just read this thing, I've been thinking, whatever.
[00:13:29] Neal O'Grady: And then over time, because he spent so much time thinking about it and writing about it, that he is now basically seen as one of the utmost experts in this topic.
[00:13:40] Neal O'Grady: Right?
[00:13:41] Neal O'Grady: So it's like, even if you're 20 years old and you don't have a skill, it's just like, pick a topic that you're really obsessed and interested by, go learn it, and then you can just report back to the Internet what you've learned about it, and often that's you learning from other people and in that you kind of leverage their credibility.
[00:14:01] Neal O'Grady: And eventually you consume enough of that content.
[00:14:04] Neal O'Grady: You write about it enough.
[00:14:05] Neal O'Grady: You're going to have your own unique insights from that.

[00:14:09] How to Celebrate Success on Social Media Without Sounding Self-Centered

[00:14:09] Ramli John: That makes a lot of sense, I think, starting off with that, I think this ties to one of the other C's in terms of capturing people's attention is celebrate.
[00:14:19] Ramli John: Like you're building in public.
[00:14:21] Ramli John: It's great to share any kind of I'm so happy for you, for them, us is what you shared.
[00:14:28] Ramli John: Can you talk a little bit about more about how to celebrate without once again, sometimes it's like, oh, I did such a good job, let me pat my back.
[00:14:37] Ramli John: Everybody pat my back, without sounding like that.
[00:14:41] Neal O'Grady: Yes.
[00:14:42] Neal O'Grady: Celebrating wins is definitely a big one.
[00:14:48] Neal O'Grady: Every time I see somebody announce that they've gotten a new job, it's not a well written post, but it pops off right?
[00:14:55] Neal O'Grady: Or they've raised a bunch of money or whatever, or they say it's their birthday and then that kind of leads in.
[00:15:04] Neal O'Grady: Or I just achieved this revenue milestone.
[00:15:07] Neal O'Grady: I think part of the reason, it's like, one, they want to celebrate the win.
[00:15:13] Neal O'Grady: There's also some underlying thing of kind of our fear of being outdone.
[00:15:18] Neal O'Grady: So just seeing somebody else's success inherently triggers some sort of jealousy that either motivates you or demotivates you.
[00:15:27] Neal O'Grady: Hopefully it motivates them.
[00:15:29] Neal O'Grady: Especially if I've achieved this thing, here's how I did it, so that you can achieve it too.
[00:15:35] Neal O'Grady: That's kind of more of a motivating message, but fundamentally too, it's like when you post something, people need some sort of prompt to help them decide even what to say or comment.
[00:15:51] Neal O'Grady: When you say it's like, oh, it's my birthday today, it's like a very obvious response to go like, happy birthday, happy birthday, Ramley.
[00:16:03] Neal O'Grady: Or it's like, I just got a new job.
[00:16:05] Neal O'Grady: They're just like, oh, great, congratulations.
[00:16:07] Neal O'Grady: So it's like a very obvious kind of thing for them to be able to respond with and of just inherently how algorithms work is that things that get likes or comments will get seen by more people.
[00:16:19] Neal O'Grady: So there's like, a large mix of things, partly psychology of them just want to celebrate them at big number or something, kind of catch their eye.
[00:16:33] Neal O'Grady: Some sort of jealousy or fear of being outdone might be in there as well.
[00:16:38] Neal O'Grady: And then also just having uneasy prompts.
[00:16:41] Neal O'Grady: But in terms of it not feeling too braggy, I think it comes down mostly to how you say it and not just kind of like, purely draw the attention of like, oh, I've made $3 million this year.
[00:16:59] Neal O'Grady: Like, how that's fucking sick, right?
[00:17:02] Neal O'Grady: No, it's like, here's my photo of my Lambo that I just bought, and kind of, like, rubbing it in people's face.
[00:17:10] Neal O'Grady: Instead you just kind of say it and you can even be a little humble.
[00:17:16] Neal O'Grady: And it's like, this kind of blows my mind or something, and just kind of then tell people how you achieved it so they kind of feel like they've gotten something out of it, too.
[00:17:26] Ramli John: It also feels like you mentioned a lot about how you say it, but also, what is the next step?
[00:17:32] Ramli John: Some of the stuff that you shared in that Justin Walsh saying, oh, look, I've made $3 million.
[00:17:38] Ramli John: Now here's how I did it.
[00:17:41] Ramli John: It's not just like, cool, let's celebrate.
[00:17:44] Ramli John: Even J.
[00:17:45] Ramli John: Klaus, you share like, oh, it's my birthday.
[00:17:47] Ramli John: Here's 30 things I wish I knew in my twenty s.
[00:17:50] Ramli John: And that kind of, like, feeds that loop where happy birthday and also, thanks for sharing what you've learned.
[00:17:57] Neal O'Grady: Yeah, it would feel very different if Justin Welsh, I made $3 million last year.
[00:18:01] Neal O'Grady: Here's this sick house that I just bought.
[00:18:03] Neal O'Grady: You'd be like, Cool, Justin, good for you.
[00:18:07] Neal O'Grady: I'm glad.
[00:18:08] Neal O'Grady: So, yeah, it's kind of the next step or Why?
[00:18:15] Neal O'Grady: Again, like, the so what?
[00:18:17] Neal O'Grady: And basically somebody's answering the question of so what?
[00:18:19] Neal O'Grady: It always ties back to, like, why should they care that you just made $3 million?
[00:18:24] Neal O'Grady: Why should they care that it's your birthday?
[00:18:26] Neal O'Grady: It's an opportunity for you to have reflected on your life, and these are the things that you've learned.

[00:18:31] Maximizing the Power of Curiosity in Marketing

[00:18:31] Ramli John: I want to move on to the next one around curiosity.
[00:18:35] Ramli John: I love how you broke this down in that post, how when you think about curiosity, you can say something shocking like, I used to sell drugs.
[00:18:44] Ramli John: Please check promise value.
[00:18:46] Ramli John: Could be like, how to make money online in three days, even if it's possible.
[00:18:50] Ramli John: Or strong words like, this is how you steal other people's audience.
[00:18:54] Ramli John: The word steal is like, that sounds scammy.
[00:18:58] Ramli John: Can you talk a little bit about this curiosity?
[00:19:02] Ramli John: Like, the three things?
[00:19:03] Ramli John: Yeah, what is that all about and how can people use it?
[00:19:07] Neal O'Grady: Yeah, I like to tie it to kind of basically prompting something in their head, like, you want them to go, then what happened?
[00:19:16] Neal O'Grady: Or like, what then?
[00:19:18] Neal O'Grady: So I particularly love it when people do this with storytelling.
[00:19:26] Neal O'Grady: For example, like, Andrew Wilkinson does this one where he talked about how he lost $10 million, and he really kind of dives into being like that.
[00:19:39] Neal O'Grady: I could have retired on a quarter million dollar a year salary for the rest of my life if I hadn't blown $10 million.
[00:19:49] Neal O'Grady: And he just really kind of twists a knife and was like, how did he lose $10 million?
[00:19:55] Neal O'Grady: That's insane.
[00:19:55] Neal O'Grady: I've never had $10 million and this guy's lost it.
[00:20:00] Neal O'Grady: So kind of like talking about the outcome of a story and making them interested in what happens.
[00:20:09] Neal O'Grady: Or I quite liked Casey neistat.
[00:20:11] Neal O'Grady: He's a YouTuber.
[00:20:13] Neal O'Grady: He's had this great video.
[00:20:15] Neal O'Grady: Basically, it's called do what you can't.
[00:20:17] Neal O'Grady: And it was kind of this rallying cry for YouTubers to basically talk about this huge cultural shift of these weirdos posting videos on the Internet and becoming bigger than some broadcasting networks.
[00:20:32] Neal O'Grady: And he starts the whole video of just, like, a guy dangling from a ladder from a helicopter.
[00:20:38] Neal O'Grady: And it does that for 10 seconds.
[00:20:40] Neal O'Grady: And you're just like, what's going on here?
[00:20:45] Neal O'Grady: Why is someone hanging from a helicopter in the middle of nowhere?
[00:20:49] Neal O'Grady: So you just keep watching.
[00:20:51] Neal O'Grady: And then he builds with interesting music and cuts, and you end up watching the whole video without even really ever questioning whether you should stop.
[00:21:02] Neal O'Grady: And it's like this concept that's talked about, especially in videos or movies, is something called the curiosity gap.
[00:21:12] Neal O'Grady: So you tease at something, and then you kind of delay the satisfaction.
[00:21:18] Neal O'Grady: So one of my friends made this great video.
[00:21:20] Neal O'Grady: It's called his YouTube short.
[00:21:23] Neal O'Grady: The most psychopathic movie role of all.
[00:21:27] Neal O'Grady: Like, even that name is great.
[00:21:28] Neal O'Grady: Like OOH.
[00:21:29] Ramli John: Yeah, that's good.
[00:21:30] Neal O'Grady: It starts with the scene from Clockwork Orange where his eyes are being taped open.
[00:21:36] Neal O'Grady: So it's a strong imagery of that.
[00:21:38] Neal O'Grady: And it kind of also hints, like, oh, is it maybe this movie Clockwork Orange?
[00:21:43] Neal O'Grady: And then he delays his satisfaction by then talking about the credibility of some researcher who had dived in and had done this study, blah, blah, blah.
[00:21:53] Neal O'Grady: And then it starts showing movie covers to show all the different movies that they had looked at.
[00:21:59] Neal O'Grady: And it's not until, like, I don't know, 30 seconds in that it finally tells you what it is.
[00:22:05] Neal O'Grady: I imagine people listening to this are also just wondering, which movie was it?
[00:22:11] Neal O'Grady: It was no country for old men.
[00:22:13] Neal O'Grady: But it's like if he had just started the short saying the most psychopathic movie role of all time based this study was no country for Old Men, you'd just be like, cool, I just got the value.
[00:22:27] Neal O'Grady: I don't care to listen to the 1 minute or two minute explanation of this.
[00:22:31] Neal O'Grady: I'm just going to go to the next video.
[00:22:32] Neal O'Grady: So it's like teasing some sort of interesting value and then delaying it and getting that suspense, building it kind of contextualizing further why they should care and then only then kind of satisfying that curiosity.
[00:22:47] Neal O'Grady: And kind of like the best movies and videos actually have this they tried to have as one curiosity is about to be satisfied, they kind of like bring in another.
[00:23:02] Neal O'Grady: Like, I read this one of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami, often switches between two characters every chapter and he ends each chapter with some sort of interesting cliffhanger.
[00:23:15] Neal O'Grady: But you can't resolve that cliffhanger until you've finished an entire other chapter.
[00:23:21] Neal O'Grady: But that next chapter is resolving the cliffhanger from a chapter ago.
[00:23:27] Neal O'Grady: So you're just in this it's like this really thick book, but you just end up plowing through it because you're just constantly craving the finality and you have to just plow through the next chapter to figure out what that is.
[00:23:37] Neal O'Grady: And it's just never ending cycle of him just constantly teasing your curiosity and your need to just know.
[00:23:47] Neal O'Grady: Because when you finally find out, you actually get a big surge of dopamine for your curiosity to have been satisfied.
[00:23:53] Ramli John: I love this curiosity gap.
[00:23:55] Ramli John: Never thought about it.

[00:23:56] Neal O'Grady Discusses Content Marketing Strategy and the Importance of the 5 Cs

[00:23:56] Ramli John: You mentioned Casey Neistat.
[00:23:57] Ramli John: I feel like YouTubers are like I feel like YouTubers really have to figure this out because the YouTube algorithm kind of rewards people because within the first 5 seconds you have to grab people's attention.
[00:24:12] Ramli John: An example of this is Mr.
[00:24:13] Ramli John: Beast.
[00:24:14] Ramli John: One of his now his most watched video is that Billion Dollar Boat, or like a $1 boat versus a Billion Dollar Boat.
[00:24:23] Ramli John: And it's like this in the thumbnail, it's him.
[00:24:26] Ramli John: There's like a big yacht and it's covered in gold, but it's not covered in gold in real life, but you're like, is it covered in gold?
[00:24:35] Ramli John: So you want to see it.
[00:24:37] Ramli John: You want to see what's inside.
[00:24:38] Ramli John: What does a Billion Dollar boat yacht look like?
[00:24:41] Neal O'Grady: And I imagine he starts with the one dollars boat.
[00:24:43] Ramli John: He does.
[00:24:44] Ramli John: Yeah.
[00:24:46] Neal O'Grady: He's got another one that's great.
[00:24:47] Neal O'Grady: Where he compares the hotel different hotels.
[00:24:50] Ramli John: Yeah, I saw that one too.
[00:24:52] Neal O'Grady: It's like, of course you care most about the Million Dollar Hotel.
[00:24:55] Ramli John: Yeah, of course.
[00:24:56] Ramli John: But he builds up to that.
[00:24:58] Neal O'Grady: He builds up to that and you finally get there and yeah, Mr.
[00:25:02] Neal O'Grady: Beast is when I watch it, I know I'm not the target audience, but when I start a video, I finish it.
[00:25:10] Ramli John: Yeah, I can't stop it's so good.
[00:25:12] Neal O'Grady: And then I'll probably watch another one and I'm just like, yeah, I'm not 16 years old, but I'm still watching these.
[00:25:19] Neal O'Grady: Yeah, you talk to some of the biggest YouTubers, like Mr.
[00:25:24] Neal O'Grady: Beast or Ali Abdall, and their whole advice is like, don't care about an algorithm.
[00:25:30] Neal O'Grady: The algorithm is, is somebody intrigued enough to click on your video?
[00:25:37] Neal O'Grady: Do they watch the entire video and do they like it?
[00:25:41] Neal O'Grady: So much that they then watch your next video and that's all you should care about.
[00:25:46] Neal O'Grady: You don't need to game it.
[00:25:47] Neal O'Grady: It's just like one of my friends likes to say, replace the word algorithm with the word people in your vocabulary.
[00:25:57] Neal O'Grady: And I think that's very true with YouTube.
[00:26:01] Neal O'Grady: I think it's basically one of the hardest.
[00:26:04] Neal O'Grady: I was even talking to somebody.
[00:26:05] Neal O'Grady: It's like I very rarely subscribe to a channel on YouTube.
[00:26:10] Neal O'Grady: I subscribe to way fewer channels on YouTube than I am followers of people on LinkedIn or Twitter.
[00:26:18] Neal O'Grady: So Ali says, like 80% of the people who watches view his videos are not subscribers.
[00:26:25] Neal O'Grady: And I'm sure a lot of them have seen a lot of his videos, too.
[00:26:29] Neal O'Grady: And I've seen lots of his videos, and I didn't subscribe until he specifically called that out.
[00:26:35] Ramli John: And part of that is they really care about you talked about this curiosity link with your author, the author that you mentioned.
[00:26:45] Ramli John: There's also something a lot of YouTubers do because they know the retention plays such a big part of the success of their video.
[00:26:53] Ramli John: And you looping those curiosity.
[00:26:56] Ramli John: And I was talking about the Mr.
[00:26:57] Ramli John: Beast.
[00:26:58] Ramli John: You go to one dollars and then like $100 boat.
[00:27:01] Ramli John: I'm curious.
[00:27:02] Ramli John: Now you're curious as to what the $1,000 boat looks like or hotel.
[00:27:08] Neal O'Grady: He is really a master of just always kind of keeping you wanting to watch even the next minute and also just like, okay, where is this going to go from here?
[00:27:19] Neal O'Grady: Yeah, as you said, I've seen the $100.
[00:27:21] Neal O'Grady: Let's see the thousand.
[00:27:22] Neal O'Grady: I mostly care about the billion dollar one.
[00:27:25] Neal O'Grady: But it's also interesting to watch this progression.
[00:27:30] Ramli John: That makes a ton of sense.
[00:27:32] Ramli John: That's curiosity.
[00:27:33] Ramli John: We've talked about credibility, celebration, curiosity.
[00:27:35] Ramli John: I want to tie the last two C's together because they both start with counter, counter narrative and then counterintuitive, what is that all about?
[00:27:45] Ramli John: And it seems know if I just heard it, it would be almost like contrarian point of view or like what West Cow says as Spiky point of view.
[00:27:56] Ramli John: Is that what that's about?
[00:27:57] Neal O'Grady: Whenever I talk about narrative, I always mention West Cow's spiky point of views.
[00:28:03] Neal O'Grady: One of my favorite examples of counternarrative is that it's probably because I'm very biased.
[00:28:08] Neal O'Grady: Comes from my longtime friend and co founder Julian Shapiro.
[00:28:12] Neal O'Grady: He had this post that was, people don't have short attention spans, which know, it's hard to go a week without somebody saying that social media and everything has ruined our attention spans.
[00:28:27] Neal O'Grady: So it's like everyone believes that, right?
[00:28:30] Neal O'Grady: But he so he says that right up front, which makes you go like, this is not what I've normally thought.
[00:28:36] Neal O'Grady: What is this guy's point?
[00:28:38] Neal O'Grady: And then he says, we'll binge watch 10 hours of Netflix.
[00:28:42] Neal O'Grady: We'll listen to a three hour podcast episode on Lex Friedman or Joe Rogan.
[00:28:47] Neal O'Grady: It's not that we have short attention spans.
[00:28:49] Neal O'Grady: We have a short consideration span.
[00:28:51] Neal O'Grady: So as we said, it's like, yeah, if you don't hook somebody in the first 3 seconds of your video, they're just going to go to the next one because there's infinite content.
[00:29:01] Neal O'Grady: So it's a commonly held belief that you don't believe and you say it word it strongly.
[00:29:14] Neal O'Grady: Like Julian could have said something like, lots of people say that we have shortening attention spans.
[00:29:23] Neal O'Grady: I don't agree with this.
[00:29:27] Neal O'Grady: It doesn't hit you as hard as people don't have short attention span.
[00:29:34] Neal O'Grady: Just like Wes Cow, she has things where she mean if you go to her Twitter and you rank things by the most engagement, almost all of them are most ex suck at y.
[00:29:49] Neal O'Grady: So for example, most companies suck at onboarding their employees.
[00:29:54] Neal O'Grady: And then she gives it a framework on how to, like, somebody can onboard themselves and it's strong language that makes you stop and think.
[00:30:05] Neal O'Grady: And she if she had said most companies have suboptimal onboarding practices, leaving the employee to kind of do it themselves, here's a framework for how to do it.
[00:30:18] Neal O'Grady: It's just like it just doesn't hit as hard even though it's saying essentially the same thing.
[00:30:24] Neal O'Grady: So in combination with having strong language in view, challenging some commonly held belief will make them stop and think.
[00:30:34] Neal O'Grady: Like, one of the posts that we use to kind of get people on the waitlist for unignorable was Caitlin, caitlin Burgoyne.
[00:30:41] Neal O'Grady: She's got over 100,000 Twitter followers.
[00:30:44] Neal O'Grady: She said fuck building an audience, which somebody, you don't expect somebody that spends so much time posting on Twitter and has 100,000 followers to basically discard the thing that you think that she cares about most.
[00:31:03] Neal O'Grady: And her whole point of that was that kind of as I said, you don't just build an audience of people who like your cat memes.
[00:31:11] Neal O'Grady: You instead are building a group of people kind of like you're 1000 true fans that love you and would kind of work with you and pay you for anything.
[00:31:21] Neal O'Grady: So it's not about just getting attention and building an audience.
[00:31:24] Neal O'Grady: It's about having a network of people that care about you.
[00:31:26] Neal O'Grady: And like Justin Welsh again, he does it again where he says he challenges the concept of being rich.
[00:31:33] Neal O'Grady: And you don't expect somebody who's got $3 million a year business and keeps growing it to say that just like you don't need money.
[00:31:46] Neal O'Grady: It's kind of a hard thing to do because it's like you're really looking for either a commonly held belief that's wrong or you're looking for what I like to call a popular unpopular opinion.
[00:31:58] Neal O'Grady: So it might feel contrarian, but there's actually like a large group of people who believe this secretly or they haven't had it articulated properly by somebody else before.
[00:32:10] Neal O'Grady: And then when somebody says, here's an unpopular opinion, and then they say like, work life balance is dumb or something, there's a large group of people who love to work really hard that think work life balance is dumb and then they love that somebody's.
[00:32:26] Neal O'Grady: Challenged it.
[00:32:28] Neal O'Grady: And people on both sides, people who love work life balance or hate that you're now challenging this strongly held belief, and then people who actually secretly hate the concept of work life balance will also stop and read it because they just want somebody to validate or basically the confirmation bias validate the thing that they already believe is true.
[00:32:47] Ramli John: That's so good.

[00:32:48] Discussion on Un-Ignorable Posts and the Five C's of Effective Content

[00:32:48] Ramli John: I mean, you mentioned the formula almost like not x, which is commonly had belief, but y, another example that you gave on that post I really love from Naval, it's like it's not 10,000 hours, it's 10,000 iterations where we have this 10,000 rule that we believe that we've heard from Malcolm Gladwell in one of his books.
[00:33:10] Ramli John: That's how you become an expert, 10,000 hours.
[00:33:12] Ramli John: But you can spend 10,000 hours on something really poorly and only did it one iteration versus like 10,000 iterations about learning and building and feeling and doing it over and over again.
[00:33:25] Ramli John: I think that's another great example that you shared there.
[00:33:28] Neal O'Grady: Yeah, Shane Parrish has a great line about that.
[00:33:31] Neal O'Grady: It's like kind of as you alluded to it's not 10,000 hours.
[00:33:36] Neal O'Grady: It has to be 10,000 hours of you constantly trying to improve and doing new things.
[00:33:42] Neal O'Grady: So it's not the same 10,000 hours.
[00:33:45] Neal O'Grady: It's not just you screwing the head on the doll, it's you trying to figure out like, oh, how could the head get on this doll better?
[00:33:55] Neal O'Grady: And then iterating and trying to get to then you've eventually got a machine that puts the head on the doll perfectly and you're not just sitting there screwing the head on the doll 10,000 times.
[00:34:08] Neal O'Grady: Yeah, naval is quite good at finding these.
[00:34:13] Neal O'Grady: I mean you could probably quite systematically do this, just like go through popular books or famous people who are known for saying certain things and then just like if you believe the opposite, then just strongly say the opposite.
[00:34:28] Neal O'Grady: And one of my other friends has this like you can tweet your way into any room.
[00:34:37] Neal O'Grady: So it's just like your take just has to be interesting enough.
[00:34:41] Neal O'Grady: It's like if you are saying something that most people are not saying, then people automatically think you're an interesting, more interesting person and then want to talk to you and learn more about that.
[00:34:52] Ramli John: You just said something there and I feel like it's a great exercise.
[00:34:54] Ramli John: I just want to make sure people heard it.
[00:34:56] Ramli John: That commonly held advice from your industry.
[00:35:01] Ramli John: Put it like, let's say on it could be a spreadsheet or a table, commonly have beliefs and then find ones that are strongly believe against or there's different perspective that you could take.
[00:35:15] Ramli John: And now you have some ideas they build upon to take this counternarrative or counterintuitive approach there.
[00:35:23] Neal O'Grady: Yeah, I think everyone in them has some sort of they think their industry is doing something wrong or their job title fundamentally is doing things wrong.
[00:35:35] Neal O'Grady: I'm pretty sure I've seen you post things where you're saying you're challenging how marketers or growth marketers normally perceive or work on something.
[00:35:49] Neal O'Grady: One of the great benefits of writing online is that it's a form of introspection, to even try to see what you actually deeply believe and then to put ideas out there and have people hopefully challenge them so that you then learn things.
[00:36:10] Neal O'Grady: Like one thing I liked with Sahil Bloom talking to him, he said that he originally started doing it just as an exercise for him to learn.
[00:36:20] Neal O'Grady: It gave him kind of an excuse to really dive into a subject he wanted to learn.
[00:36:25] Neal O'Grady: And writing it forces you to think about it deeply.
[00:36:29] Neal O'Grady: I remember as an engineer, I was very interested by the inner workings of how, say, the blockchain or bitcoin even worked technically.
[00:36:40] Neal O'Grady: And I always thought I understood how it worked and then I started to write it down.
[00:36:45] Neal O'Grady: Then I was just like, actually, fundamentally, I really don't understand how this works.
[00:36:49] Neal O'Grady: And then I have to keep researching until I'm like, okay, I actually know how this works.
[00:36:52] Neal O'Grady: So the process of writing really helps you learn yourself and then also learn about you and what you actually believe about the then, you know, Sahil would just post it and if no one cared about that post, whatever, I've gained value from just having learned a thing and have better thought through something that I cared about.
[00:37:17] Ramli John: That's so good, I think.
[00:37:18] Ramli John: I really love that.
[00:37:19] Ramli John: We just talked about this five C's.
[00:37:21] Ramli John: Credibility, celebration, curiosity, counternarrative.
[00:37:25] Ramli John: Counterintuitive.

[00:37:27] Branding and Building your Online Presence with Neal O'Grady

[00:37:27] Ramli John: Before we move on to career power ups, do you have any advice, final advice to people who are trying to build up their personal brand and it could be anything that you've seen help you and your students?
[00:37:44] Neal O'Grady: Yeah, so I would say I have a few answers to this.
[00:37:49] Neal O'Grady: One is that fundamentally, most people fail because they never actually start.
[00:37:54] Neal O'Grady: It's this disease of tomorrow, you're constantly waiting for a better time to do it and part of that is you're just even I'm at fault of this myself.
[00:38:07] Neal O'Grady: Like, I've been wanting to get into video and I've been intending to record video for YouTube for about six months and I still haven't done it because it's a new format and I'm scared that it's going to be a bad video and put it online.
[00:38:21] Neal O'Grady: But fundamentally it's like nevsky reminding yourself that no one really cares and they're not even going to remember your bad.
[00:38:33] Neal O'Grady: It's like Mr.
[00:38:33] Neal O'Grady: Beast started posting when he's 13 years old.
[00:38:36] Neal O'Grady: Yeah, it took him, what is it, like three years before he hit 1000 subscribers.
[00:38:42] Neal O'Grady: But he continued to post.
[00:38:44] Neal O'Grady: Do you see anybody going back and insulting him for his first year of video?
[00:38:49] Neal O'Grady: Nobody cares.
[00:38:50] Neal O'Grady: They just look at his highlight reel now.
[00:38:53] Neal O'Grady: So that's one just like getting over that fear and just start posting.
[00:38:56] Neal O'Grady: And yes, it's going to suck.
[00:38:57] Neal O'Grady: Just give yourself the opportunity to do that.
[00:39:01] Neal O'Grady: I love how Ali Abdul breaks it down all into three steps.
[00:39:05] Neal O'Grady: It's get going, get good, get smart.
[00:39:07] Neal O'Grady: In the first bit, just like, just start posting anything.
[00:39:09] Neal O'Grady: It's just like something elena Verna has this great framework where she says if you found yourself explaining something three times, just write it down.
[00:39:19] Neal O'Grady: Write it down and post it.
[00:39:20] Neal O'Grady: Somebody's asking you a question, like, just write it down.
[00:39:23] Neal O'Grady: Or it's like, if you find yourself thinking about it, just write it down.
[00:39:25] Neal O'Grady: Post it.
[00:39:26] Neal O'Grady: Doesn't matter if it's the same topic.
[00:39:27] Neal O'Grady: Doesn't matter if it's really good.
[00:39:29] Neal O'Grady: Just get in the habit of posting it.
[00:39:30] Neal O'Grady: And then once you've proven that you can do something at least a little bit consistently, then you can worry about getting better at writing, picking a specific topic, things like that.
[00:39:41] Neal O'Grady: And then beyond that, it's just like, people will only want to follow you and be interested if they care about you specifically.
[00:39:51] Neal O'Grady: And part of that, you need to have your own unique perspective and opinions.
[00:39:56] Neal O'Grady: Part of that is kind of doing the counternarrative.
[00:40:00] Neal O'Grady: Don't be afraid of people not agreeing with you, because ultimately, if somebody doesn't agree with you, they're never going to agree.
[00:40:07] Neal O'Grady: But they're not going to become a customer, they're not going to become a friend, they're not going to be a member of your community if they don't agree.
[00:40:17] Neal O'Grady: Whatever, they can just not.
[00:40:18] Neal O'Grady: But the people who do agree with you, they'll like you more for it.
[00:40:23] Neal O'Grady: So inject your own unique opinion and stories, like some of the posts that I do that get the most amount of people DMing me, which I see as being a very strong signal, as it being a very good post, is that people just feel compelled to reach out.
[00:40:40] Neal O'Grady: To me, it's because I've shared some sort of, like, vulnerable part of my story and things I've overcome or things that have made me the person I am today.
[00:40:51] Neal O'Grady: And another sort of framework around that I got from Ali Abdal was finding your unfair advantage.
[00:41:01] Neal O'Grady: So, for example, he was when he started on YouTube, he was a medical student at Cambridge.
[00:41:07] Neal O'Grady: So what was his unfair advantage?
[00:41:09] Neal O'Grady: Helping people get into medical school at Cambridge.
[00:41:14] Neal O'Grady: Somebody who's 30 years old and is a marketer has no rights to tell somebody how to get into med school.
[00:41:23] Neal O'Grady: Just like Eric Partaker.
[00:41:24] Neal O'Grady: He was voted CEO of the Year.
[00:41:26] Neal O'Grady: So his unique unfair advantage is that he can tell people how to be a great CEO and leader.
[00:41:32] Neal O'Grady: So what is it specific to you and your story and the experiences that you've had that makes you uniquely qualified or interesting for a specific thing?
[00:41:45] Neal O'Grady: And then you can start with that and just do that.
[00:41:47] Ramli John: That makes sense.
[00:41:48] Ramli John: That's so good stuff, especially that what was that?
[00:41:51] Ramli John: Get going was the second one.
[00:41:53] Neal O'Grady: And then get smart, get going, get good, get smart.
[00:41:56] Neal O'Grady: Get going is just start doing get good, make better content, and then get Smart is learning to systematize it.
[00:42:03] Neal O'Grady: Maybe you bring in the concept of YouTube, start outsourcing, the video editing and things like that.
[00:42:12] Neal O'Grady: That way you can produce good content faster and more efficient.

[00:42:16] Neal O'Grady on Career Growth through Skill Optimization

[00:42:16] Ramli John: Well, I want to shift gears and talk about career power ups.
[00:42:20] Ramli John: Now you have had an interesting career journey.
[00:42:23] Ramli John: You started as a mechanical engineer turned programmer who fell into marketing.
[00:42:27] Ramli John: As you said it specifically your words when you co founded Bell Curve that went to Y Combinator.
[00:42:32] Ramli John: I'm curious what's a power up that's helped you accelerate your career?
[00:42:38] Neal O'Grady: I've never had a full time job so I'm just going to start there.
[00:42:42] Neal O'Grady: I did mechanical engineering and I had like co op jobs and fundamentally I had co op jobs that were with semi governmental positions.
[00:42:54] Neal O'Grady: So one was a federal research thing on fuel cells and the other was working at the Occupational Health and Safety Board of British Columbia.
[00:43:03] Neal O'Grady: So I was bored out of my mind and I was sitting at a desk and there was nothing to do because it's like compounding of it's a government job so there's often very little to do.
[00:43:13] Neal O'Grady: And then the other is that you're a co op student so you also don't have a lot of responsibility.
[00:43:18] Neal O'Grady: So that ground out any sort of desire for working in an office.
[00:43:23] Neal O'Grady: So I kind of took ownership of learning the skills that I needed to.
[00:43:30] Neal O'Grady: So I taught myself programming and then I started taking freelance contracts and then I completely self taught for marketing because I fell into and I started a marketing agency with a friend of mine who was a VP of marketing and webflow.
[00:43:47] Neal O'Grady: So I was just forced myself into an uncomfortable position where then I just had to learn.
[00:43:52] Neal O'Grady: It like I started taking freelance contracts to make people's websites when I'd never actually really made a website for somebody before.
[00:44:00] Neal O'Grady: And it's like I'm just going to have to figure this thing out to do it.
[00:44:05] Neal O'Grady: And kind of the benefit of just taking that ownership over your thing.
[00:44:09] Neal O'Grady: It's like nobody's going to take it on to make sure that you're developing and growing for your career any more than you.
[00:44:19] Neal O'Grady: It's like you fundamentally need to be the person to take ownership of that and you can climb the corporate ladder but I've always just kind of believed that you should try to take the helicopter or the elevator.
[00:44:31] Neal O'Grady: If I want to be somebody who works at an executive team of one of these large companies, I think I'm going to get there a lot faster.
[00:44:43] Neal O'Grady: If I go out, build my own business and prove that I have initiative and leadership and learn all these skills, they're way more likely to want to hire me to be on their executive team rather than if I just slowly started in the mailroom and worked my way up.
[00:45:02] Neal O'Grady: I think the ultimate tool these days is just start posting on social media.
[00:45:06] Neal O'Grady: It's just like find a thing that you want to learn and then learn in public and then people will love and respect you for that thing.
[00:45:16] Neal O'Grady: And then you can probably command a salary that's way higher than if you had just worked at some sort of job.
[00:45:24] Neal O'Grady: Just because there's really an allure to just people who have been able to crack and capture people's attention and gain their respect from lots of people.

[00:45:38] Building your Brand Online: Advice from Neal O'Grady

[00:45:38] Ramli John: You mentioned something there that's quite interesting around start posting online.
[00:45:44] Ramli John: I think the other benefit you talked earlier about, it helping you grow a business, but as well, if you're working as an employee somewhere, sarah stockdale who had it on the show, the CEO of grow class said this could be like a great backup.
[00:45:58] Ramli John: Or she call it golden parachute because it's much easier for somebody to hire you if you have that presence online already because they know that you've been sharing your thoughts there rather than somebody who has been a little bit less quiet.
[00:46:17] Ramli John: There's a little bit of social proof almost there, where if you are posting up something online, sometimes if it's like skills for skill, it's the same.
[00:46:27] Ramli John: Maybe I would choose somebody who has a little bit more presence online, especially if they're in marketing rather than somebody who's not.
[00:46:34] Neal O'Grady: Yeah, you're also probably going to have some maybe you've seen them before and you already have some sort of baseline affinity for them.
[00:46:41] Neal O'Grady: Right.
[00:46:41] Neal O'Grady: Or you see other people talking nicely about them online.
[00:46:46] Neal O'Grady: Yeah, it's an excellent tool to grow your business, but as an employee, it's either going to allow you to break off kind of as you said, golden parachute.
[00:46:58] Neal O'Grady: Like you can then start taking freelance contracts or you can get a better job.
[00:47:04] Neal O'Grady: And I've always kind of found the concept of unemployment to be a little funny because it's like fundamentally there's 8 billion people in the world and you only need to convince one person that you're worth employing and posting online.
[00:47:18] Neal O'Grady: It's like if you've got 50,000 followers, I imagine there's one of them that would be willing to hire you for the thing that you talk about.
[00:47:28] Neal O'Grady: I think it's easily one of the best things that somebody could do either for their business or their career.
[00:47:34] Neal O'Grady: And it's kind of funny.
[00:47:37] Neal O'Grady: We went through a hilarious cycle where our business got bootstrapped kind of off my co founder's personal brand.
[00:47:43] Neal O'Grady: And then we spent years and years trying to detach the company from the brand, trying to draw attention to bell curve and demand curve and not Julian.
[00:47:52] Neal O'Grady: Right.
[00:47:53] Neal O'Grady: And then we've just seen this trend.
[00:47:55] Neal O'Grady: It's like, oh wait, people don't connect or identify with brands nearly as much as they connect and identify with people.
[00:48:04] Neal O'Grady: And when I had that sort of light bulb moment, I was just like, wait, I need to start investing in this.
[00:48:10] Neal O'Grady: I need to become kind of the face of the business and try to encourage kind of other people on the team to start doing that, to show the people behind it.
[00:48:19] Neal O'Grady: And that's good for the business.
[00:48:21] Neal O'Grady: But it's also like maybe one day I stopped doing demand curve and bell curve and I want to start something else or do something else.
[00:48:27] Neal O'Grady: And am I going to be more likely to be successful at that thing now that I have the ability to channel people attention toward it or even just network my way into either investment for it or working having a great co founder for it or whatever?
[00:48:46] Neal O'Grady: It's the concept of increasing your luck surface area.
[00:48:50] Neal O'Grady: It's like you don't know what knowing more people or having more people like you is going to achieve.
[00:48:56] Neal O'Grady: And this is, I think, the number one way that exists in the world to do that.

[00:49:02] Marketing Powerups: Unlocking the Best Marketing Frameworks

[00:49:02] Ramli John: If you enjoyed this episode, you'd love the Marketing Powerups newsletter.
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[00:49:46] Discussing Marketing Strategies with Ramli John

[00:49:46] Ramli John: That's all for now.
[00:49:47] Ramli John: Have a powered update.
[00:49:48] Ramli John: Marketing power ups.
[00:49:53] Ramli John: Until the next episode.
[00:50:00] Ramli John: Our.