Sam speaks with Modern Marketing Co-founders Hayden Cashion and Essam Aboukoube. Together, they discuss how social media marketing has evolved over the past few years, how to get the most out of your social media & newsletter initiatives, and how to ensure you’re tracking the correct metrics while using those metrics to implement the right changes to your marketing funnel.
Resources from the episode:
Episode transcript:
[00:00:00] Essam Aboukoube: And I know really using this example, but I think it’s good. I went to Hayden and I was like: “the average watch time of our webinar is like 28 minutes. Ours is an hour long. We need to take it and make it 30 minutes long.”
[00:00:10] Essam Aboukoube: And he was like: “yeah, but the people that end up buying are the ones that stay till the end.” And what we found is the people who don’t stay until the end are actually very unqualified. even though it’s easy to be like, oh yeah, the average watch time is 28 minutes. We need to make it 28 minutes. And like, we’re going to get more conversions.
[00:00:29] Hayden Cashion: then your metric of completion is going to go up, but your qualification and then your sales down the road. Is either not going to change or potentially do worse. And so you got to always think about it a layer deeper I always tell Essam sometimes metrics can get you in trouble because you’re looking at things the wrong way and you’re trying
[00:00:45] Hayden Cashion: to boost the wrong metrics and you can boost those metrics by bad behavior.
[00:00:48] Hayden Cashion: You want to boost your completion rate? We’ll do a shorter webinar. I’m like, that’s not actually solving the problem. And so, me and Essam have really good chats about making sure like the psychology behind the decision making is sound.
[00:00:58] Designing Growth Intro Music Plays
[00:01:07] Sam Chlebowski: Happy Thursday, everybody, and welcome back to designing growth
[00:01:13] Sam Chlebowski: here on the podcast today. I have two very special guests joining us. This is actually the first time I believe we are hosting a podcast with two guests at once. Typically, it’s one on one, so I’m excited to dive into this. But today on the podcast, I have Hayden Cashin and Esam Abukube joining us on the podcast from modern marketing. two of you doing today? How’s everything going?
[00:01:36] Hayden Cashion: Wonderful. Wonderful. Every day is a blessing. So I like to look at life.
[00:01:40] Essam Aboukoube: Love that can add much more to it.
[00:01:43] Sam Chlebowski: Well, very cool. So we had the. Chance to connect last week, and had this amazing discussion about marketing, about the way that things have changed in the past couple of years about the things that business owners of all shapes and [00:02:00] sizes industries are doing. And I want to dive into a lot of that in this episode, but I do want to first ask both of you the question and Essam or Hayden, I don’t. know who wants to go first, but if you could just give me the rundown of how you got started doing what you’re doing now,
[00:02:16] Hayden Cashion: Yeah. I’ll take this one on. Cause it, it starts with my personal journey.
[00:02:20] Hayden Cashion: so long story short back in 2017, I took this thing called the digital marketing certificate, which was a side course to my university degree that I was in. And it was a course through the summer that taught you all about this new world of digital marketing. And I went through it quite intensive program. And it allowed me to get my first internship in digital marketing in 2018. So I was running paid advertising for a sports organization here in Canada. And I was doing that while I was still a student. So that was the impetus of it. ended up starting my own company, digital ads agency in 2019. then the pandemic hit and the digital marketing certificate that I had taken shut down. And I was curious cause I was always telling them, I was like, you guys need to scale this business. It’s such a good business. And they did it geographically, kept it local. They didn’t do it online. And I was like the pandemic hit, this is like the best excuse to just go online and do the same thing online. And instead they did the reverse and shut it down. And so
[00:03:16] Sam Chlebowski: it’s so counterintuitive that a digital marketing certificate would be local.
[00:03:22] Hayden Cashion: well, the thing is that the guys that did it, ran a big agency and this was a side project that they partnered with the university. And I don’t know if they did it from like a uh, you know, to have a partnership with the university. I don’t know exactly, but anyway, it was always a side thing for them. And I was like, wow, this is like the thing, in my opinion. And so when they shut it down, I was like, you know what? Let me take a stab at it. I see where it could be a little bit different. See where it could be a little bit better. And this is where the universe comes in the magic. So through my paid ad agency, I’d worked with the Essam because he ran a tutoring company and I ran their digital ads. And so when I started to think about who I wanted to partner with for this new venture, I was [00:04:00] like, the only person I know in online education is Essam As the universe would have it, Essam had reached out to me about some personal branding stuff we’d meant to go for a coffee and I bailed on it last minute and we never ended up going for the coffee. And so we’re just living life, it was during the pandemic. So gyms were closed. My buddy had a gym in his garage, like a full gym. He was a trainer. So he would let me use it. And this is where things get crazy. This is like a residential neighborhood. I would go to this guy’s garage to train in his gym. I come out of the garage one day. And who’s pulling up on the side of the road, Essam because his best friend happens to live next door.
[00:04:35] Sam Chlebowski: Oh my gosh,
[00:04:37] Hayden Cashion: we meet in the street in the middle of the street. And I’m like, he Sam, like, we start talking personal branding. So that’s what you want to talk about. I was like, Look, I wanted to run this idea by you. I’m thinking this, I’m thinking this, and he was looking for a new opportunity at the time, as the universe would have it. And that was the first connection point on it. We explored it over a couple of sessions and decided to take it on. This was in 2021.
[00:04:58] Sam Chlebowski: sometimes the universe is like screaming in your face to do something and you can’t even look away and I love stories like that it also, I think, takes a specific type of person to realize what has just happened and Opportunity out of that, somebody different, maybe you said, Hey, oh, Hey, we should grab another coffee another time.
[00:05:20] Sam Chlebowski: And then, one of you bails again and nothing happens from there. So you connected and you decided to start building this business. What did some of those early stages look like
[00:05:32] Essam Aboukoube: just before that, I want to talk a little bit about my story and really show how the universe works So when I was running my company it was the end of 2020 and it wasn’t going well at all.
[00:05:42] Essam Aboukoube: And I just knew that I didn’t have any. Corporate experience at that time. And so there was a company in Ottawa that did almost exactly what we’re currently doing very similar, like almost 95 percent similar. you know, they were doing quite well. They had like 30 to 40 employees and I [00:06:00] applied to work there I did four interviews with them, the hiring manager, the CEO, the sales manager. Like it was like wild. I did four interviews in the span of a few days and it was my dream job. It was Thursday night. I get an offer from them.
[00:06:14] Essam Aboukoube: I obviously sign it right away and I’m supposed to start on Tuesday because Monday is a holiday. Right. And so then Monday night, I still remember it. I was in my car at 7 PM. I was planning to go to bed at like nine so that I can wake up and go to the office or whatever. And at 7 PM, I’m trying to log into the new email that I.
[00:06:34] Essam Aboukoube: That they gave me and it’s not working. And I was like, Oh, what’s going on here? So I check my normal email and I get an email from the hiring manager, basically saying like, Hey, I’m really sorry, but we decided to go with someone more And so like, we’re taking away your offer. This is literally like 12 hours before I’m supposed to start.
[00:06:52] Sam Chlebowski: and you had signed the offer already
[00:06:54] Essam Aboukoube: I had signed the offer. Everything was good. they were about to ship me the laptop. Everything was planned. Like my calendar was booked that whole week I was like about to sleep in a few hours and wake up and just go to their office here in Ottawa.
[00:07:05] Essam Aboukoube: And yeah, so that, that happened. you know, I’m not someone who’s a major believer in like the, you know, or at that time, like the universe gives you signs and things like that. But I was like, there must be something here. there’s no way this just happened by accident. Right. And so funny enough, a year later is when we uh, started the company in the early days, the agency would partner with the University of Ottawa and that was sort of their leverage of how to bring people in. But what I really wanted to do and what Hayden wanted to do as well is like, provide more value to the people taking it. And so one of the ways in which we would do that is helping them get interviews and potential opportunities to work for companies that want to hire digital marketers. what we did was we really went out there and talk to companies and basically said, what should we teach that you’re looking for in someone you would like to hire?
[00:07:55] Essam Aboukoube: What things do you want them to have? What things do you want them to know? And so through their [00:08:00] help, we designed the curriculum of like what we’re going to teach. Then we said, who are the best instructors for each of these things that need to be taught? And then after that was the last step, which is just getting the students, it was three pieces of validation. It was are the instructors good and willing to teach? Are companies open to interviewing and hiring people out of this program? And then are students interested in. Committing, 198 hours over a summer or over a period of time to uh, level up the career.
[00:08:30] Sam Chlebowski: that validation piece is something that I haven’t heard of people doing in a business model like this, and I think it speaks to a lot of the success that you’ve experienced since then, because it’s something that’s really common in the startup world from my experience, and even with motion dot I o now before we ever decided to even Legally become a business.
[00:08:55] Sam Chlebowski: We went out and we tried to speak with people and said, Hey, is this tool that we have this idea for something that would be valuable to you? Just reaching out, scraping the bottom of the barrel of our networks to find people who. Were a fit within the product market that we were targeting. And also had a use for a tool like this and just asking them straight up and translating that to this business model. It makes total sense to me. And maybe it’s just because it’s not something that I’ve been involved with as much that I hear stories about people doing this, but the fact that you went. To companies and then your instructors and then also your students to validate that basically a hat trick of validation and you were able to validate that I think speaks really strongly to that success. And then also, your combined skills of building a successful business.
[00:09:50] Essam Aboukoube: not sure if you read the book called The Lean Startup, but yeah, when I was trying to build a tutoring company, my goal was to make it into a tech company. So like a marketplace and the [00:10:00] major lessons that everyone would tell me is like, validate before you build, like I would watch uh, Y Combinator content. Of like how to validate an idea. Because I mean, as someone who’s like super passionate about something, it’s so easy to like, tell yourself a narrative of this is valuable, this is valuable, but it’s like the end of the day, if your end user doesn’t share that belief, then you’re ultimately not going to have a successful business.
[00:10:22] Hayden Cashion: And I think what we, needed to understand on top of that is that people don’t want to learn digital marketing. People want to learn digital marketing to achieve something past that right?
[00:10:33] Hayden Cashion: And so when we’re talking to students, they don’t want to learn digital marketing. They want to get a job in digital marketing, right? When we’re talking to business owners, they don’t want to learn digital marketing. They want to grow their business.
[00:10:42] Hayden Cashion: And we’re talking to people within companies, they don’t want to learn digital marketing and they want to promotion. Right. And so looking beyond the product of like, sure, you need to teach the skills. So there’s substance, but how do we actually support and the other mechanics to allow them to achieve their overarching objective and not just leave them halfway there. So I think that’s something that we really iterated on
[00:11:03] Sam Chlebowski: that is incredibly insightful. And it’s interesting because while there are differences in our business models, that’s something that’s also really helped us. And I think that once we stopped asking, like, what is the feature? And we started asking, what is the goal and how does this feature support that end goal?
[00:11:25] Sam Chlebowski: Some of the best work that has ever been done on the product that got it to its current stage has allowed this to happen. so I think that’s something that can really apply. To anyone, whether you are a service based business, like a digital marketing agency, or you are a web designer, ask what the goal of your customer ultimately is, because I think it can be really useful in almost every facet of your business from sales and marketing to process, to what that overall customer experience looks like. And even for my example about the website [00:12:00] designer, Clients are not coming to you really for a website. They are looking for something else. 99 percent of the time they want more sales. They want more impressions. They want to build a more, reputable and well known brand.
[00:12:16] Hayden Cashion: 100%. There’s a correlation between this and even like looking at an instructor, right? When we look at our instructors, we’re not looking For people that know the material Vastly period it’s another layer deeper You have to know the material but more importantly you have to be able to convey the material You have to be able to get people excited about the material so they pay attention we’ve gone through a number of instructors Now they’re all qualified to teach from a a knowledge base, but we see variance in performance, which then trickles down to the students based on the other things about it.
[00:12:51] Hayden Cashion: And I think same thing with a business, you can be technically sound, but if you’re not looking at it from the, entrepreneurial lens of how do I serve this customers and result, you could be missing the mark.
[00:13:02] Sam Chlebowski: Yeah, totally agree. So this is going to be a little bit of an interesting question for me, but I think that it’s a really good look at inside how your company works. So I know when we spoke before you have about 20 people working with you and I would love to know Hayden first from you and then Sam next from you, what does the breakdown of what you are doing and focusing in a week look like for you? Hayden is CEO and then a song for you as COO.
[00:13:30] Hayden Cashion: Yeah. So as a two person executive team. We flow into things that are important in the time being. Right. So right now we’re really focused on marketing because we’re actually pivoting the company from a cohort base to an e commerce base. And so the way we market the actual. Thing that we’re trying to sell is now completely different.
[00:13:51] Hayden Cashion: We’re no longer pushing people to a masterclass to watch for an hour, to fill out a sales form, to get on a sales call we’re now selling e commerce products, where it’s literally going to go from [00:14:00] social to e commerce site and sale. There’s not even going to be a salesperson in the middle. And so currently, now that we’ve wrapped up the most recent cohort, we’re now focused on that. Whereas two months ago, when we were in cohort, really focused on making sure the students are showing up, doing the deliverables, getting their final projects done. They’re getting connected with hiring partners, X, Y, Z. So our priority shift based on where we are in the business.
[00:14:24] Hayden Cashion: So yeah, we’re always focused on different stuff, kind of depending on the season
[00:14:28] Sam Chlebowski: Yeah. And I can absolutely understand that. As a owner, as an executive, a person leading an organization of that size, you have no choice. But to flow into the areas that are more important, and that I imagine is going to shift over time. you know, We’re a small team.
[00:14:45] Sam Chlebowski: It’s still just, you know, the three of us founders here at Motion. io. But at the previous business my co founder Perry and I were a part of, he was the CEO and I was leading our sales customer success and marketing departments and it all, it seemed like basically every month I was pivoting to one of those departments and that’s where I would spend 80 percent of my time. And then maybe 20 percent would be divvied up between the other two, that constant rotation. I feel like once you do get to that size, because you can’t. Do everything at once. If you try to, you are going to end up doing things to a quarter of completion or halfway completion,
[00:15:24] Sam Chlebowski: so you have to prioritize and know what you can put on the back burner for a little while.
[00:15:28] Sam Chlebowski: Like what is going okay at the
[00:15:31] Hayden Cashion: I think one thing that, that me and he, Sam have really got aligned on in the last year is sequencing priority. So really understanding, okay, what does this quarter look like? What do we need to get done, but then flowing it back and understanding, okay, cool. This is everything we need to get done.
[00:15:45] Hayden Cashion: These are your strengths. These are my strengths. These are top priority, but these need to get done to make this happen. This has to be done in this timeframe in order to actually execute putting the puzzle together and then reversing back our time and understanding is this practical?
[00:15:57] Hayden Cashion: Do we need to cut things? Do we need to double down here? [00:16:00] Do we need to hire there? And I think in the earlier days, it was like, what’s the to do list. Okay, go, so becoming a lot more, detail oriented around like the priority of things has been a massive learning lesson this year.
[00:16:11] Sam Chlebowski: Yeah. How do you track that? do you have any sort of formal system that helps you prioritize those things or are you just like meeting whiteboard going, Hey, this is a category 1,
[00:16:22] Essam Aboukoube: Yeah. You know, What’s funny is like, used to use a lot of different softwares. I used to use HubSpot, Trello, like so many things. And now I honestly just try my best to just use Excel or Google sheets and track everything on there and just track everything that I’m working on. Like start simple, you know what I mean? with everything that I’m trying to measure with everything that I’m trying to see, it’s like start simple. What are we doing? What are we testing? Let’s see what the numbers look like. That’s another thing that I focus a lot of my time on is like seeing if things are working or if they’re not working and what changes we need to make and like really digging deep into it because I think a big lesson that I learned is like you can do a lot of things.
[00:17:02] Essam Aboukoube: But if you don’t do a lot of things very well, then you’re going to go nowhere. And so it’s really important to see what’s actually working, what’s not working, what do we need to abandon and what do we need to continue doing?
[00:17:13] Sam Chlebowski: When it comes to those things that you are tracking, what does that look like? For example, if you’re going in Monday morning and you are saying, Hey, I have this spreadsheet or a couple of different spreadsheets of these important metrics that are driving the business forward. What are the first things that you are looking at there?
[00:17:31] Essam Aboukoube: Yeah. I’ll give an example with our webinar the thing that we had at the middle of our funnel, for example, how many registrations are we getting? How many people are showing up? How many people are showing up and staying until the end?
[00:17:44] Essam Aboukoube: How many people are filling out our form? And then out of the people that fill out our form, how many people do we sell? for instance, let’s say there’s a lot of registrations. But there’s not a lot of people showing up. Well, that probably means that after someone registers, the follow up with them isn’t [00:18:00] effective.
[00:18:00] Essam Aboukoube: So it’s important to focus time there and fix that. Right? If a lot of people are showing up, but not a lot of them are like filling out the type form at the end, well, that means that the webinar is probably not effective. It’s probably not engaging. So we’re not keeping them in and so we’ll look to like make changes there, but I also think that a layer above that, that I’ve learned a lot from Hayden through time as well as like, it’s easy to come up with quick, hypothesis around like why something’s not working, but I think it’s important to like, look deeper into it.
[00:18:31] Essam Aboukoube: And I know really using this example, but I think it’s good. I went to Hayden and I was like. the average watch time of our webinar is like 28 minutes. And ours is an hour long. we need to take it and make it 30 minutes long.
[00:18:42] Essam Aboukoube: And he was like, yeah, but the people that end up buying are the ones that stay till the end. because we tested calling everyone registers to our webinar. And what we found is like the people that don’t stay until the end are actually very unqualified. And so when I went to Hayden and said, we should make the webinar shorter.
[00:19:00] Essam Aboukoube: He was like, yeah, but those are the same people that are unqualified. And so even though it’s easy to be like, oh yeah, the average watch time is 28 minutes. We need to make it 28 minutes. And like, we’re going to get more conversions.
[00:19:11] Hayden Cashion: then your metric of completion is going to go up, but your qualification and then your sales down the road. Is either not going to change or potentially do worse. And so you got to always think about it a layer deeper I always tell Essam sometimes metrics can get you in trouble because you’re looking at things the wrong way and you’re trying
[00:19:27] Hayden Cashion: to boost the wrong metrics and you can boost those metrics by bad behavior.
[00:19:31] Hayden Cashion: You want to boost your completion rate? We’ll do a shorter webinar. I’m like, that’s not actually solving the problem. And so, me and Essam have really good chats about making sure like the psychology behind the decision making is is sound.
[00:19:41] Sam Chlebowski: I love the example because it’s one that I have seen firsthand and I had two kind of corporate gigs. I would call them, big organizations one of them. We were responsible for MQLs, marketing qualified leads. . And one of the ways we would drive those leads through webinars, the sales team [00:20:00] kept telling us. Hey, only, two to five to 10 percent of these leads are qualified. But when we raised that concern, it was like, well, we don’t care.
[00:20:10] Sam Chlebowski: The executive team didn’t care. And ultimately that’s the goal that they had set for us was just drive marketing, qualified leads. It didn’t matter how qualified they were to buy, just get that number up. And that is a part of the reason why I love startups and entrepreneurship, because When you are running lean, it really helps you focus on the things that matter because not focusing on the things that matter is a death sentence a lot of the time taking that more granular look, especially if it’s a big time consuming initiative, like a webinar going from the high level data and then digging in further is it. One of the best things that you can do to make sure that you’re spending your time in the right ways and you’re spending your money and focusing on doing the right thing. So I absolutely love that example. I think that is a nugget of gold right there.
[00:21:04] Essam Aboukoube: Yeah,
[00:21:04] Hayden Cashion: agree.
[00:21:05] Essam Aboukoube: for sure.
[00:21:06] Sam Chlebowski: Something that we had talked about when we spoke about a week ago is. Influencer marketing and social media marketing and how there’s a way to do that, where it can really work, but also talking about how the funnel has changed and for, I would call them small to medium sized businesses, the SMB category, what are the things that they should know about 1 an organic social presence and how that’s changed. And then 2 exploring things like influencer marketing.
[00:21:38] Hayden Cashion: So 1 influencer marketing should be 2nd You want to be very tight and clear on who your audience is and what your message is before even deciding to go into influencers. And this parlays perfectly into step one, which is organic social media, because now that it’s changed. To a platform where there is organic reach for for a period of time.
[00:21:59] Hayden Cashion: There was [00:22:00] just no organic reach. You had to run ads to get more reach. Now there is organic reach. What does that mean? You now have a testing ground where you can actually tap into the market and validate things and see the truth before investing a dollar into ads or influencers. And so what I would encourage businesses to do is to actually look at social media as their testing ground from an organic standpoint. And what I think a lot of entrepreneurs don’t think about is. Past the idea, you want to find things that are efficient, right? So you don’t just want to have, Oh, these are great ideas. These are great ideas, come up with great ideas that take you two minutes to produce, or take you five minutes to produce, not four hours to produce and start testing a bunch of those ideas.
[00:22:38] Hayden Cashion: So for instance, like on TikTok you do the green screen effect in the background where you just put up a photo and then you commentate on it. Or you do the thing where it’s just like a B roll video and you have words on the screen, right? Two minutes, two minutes, like all these things take two minutes. And you can just start testing new ideas, start testing new messaging and wait for things to hit. When things start to hit, then you start to understand, okay who’s it hitting to, what’s the customer and what is the messaging that’s hitting, right? When you find that customer-message match, that’s where you can start investing in ads, where I would just take the best performing pieces of content and run them as ads.
[00:23:11] Hayden Cashion: So once again, take your testing ground and just scale it. And then I would also take the message match to a customer. And look for particular influencers that match the audience and be very clear on the messaging you want them to do, but then leave it up to them. That’s how I’d paint the whole picture.
[00:23:27] Sam Chlebowski: Mic drop. Man, that was awesome. And it’s something that for me, as I had admitted on the call, some of that’s a little bit new to me. because that was the things that I had seen before too. It’s like organic social. Like we did that we felt like we had to more so than It was driving results.
[00:23:47] Sam Chlebowski: And this was, mind you, almost a decade ago now seven, eight years ago. And we had a really great newsletter though. Our newsletter did have that organic sort of presence but our organic social channels [00:24:00] hadn’t.
[00:24:00] Hayden Cashion: 100%. And I actually have a question flipping back to you. You mentioned email newsletter that drove a lot of stuff. You did it really well. That’s something that now in reverse, we’re trying to do better. We’re pretty good at social. We’re trying to figure out the email newsletter side. What would you say is the one on one starter pack for a business owner to get their email newsletter rocking?
[00:24:18] Sam Chlebowski: the big things are expectations. People know what content roughly to expect every week, what kind of valuable information that they are going to get out of that. But then with those expectations, at times do things that are unexpected. maybe it’s a piece of content that is a YouTube video with a guest. And you’re, interviewing them for 10 minutes. Maybe it is a blog post answering a question that a lot of your audience has, but maybe is outside of kind of your traditional content that you would put out. I think that anytime you can find that kind of balance between those two things, it can be really helpful. And then on top of that, something that we did is the live events were amazing for us. I don’t think you need any tips on that because I know that you do a lot of webinars, as we talked about in the example before, but that was another great thing that we built in and we set out, I think it was 2018 or 2019. We basically said, Hey, we’re going to do two brand new webinars every single month. And we are going to get. Guess from our customers, people in our network thought leaders in the space and bring them on. And doing that was like one of the single best things we did to grow our newsletter
[00:25:40] Sam Chlebowski: because it’s truly that compounding growth where you’re sharing it to your newsletter, but then this person who was features as a guest, they’re sharing it to theirs and they’re signing up. They’re subscribing, they’re finding the value. So that would be my rundown.
[00:25:52] Hayden Cashion: Stealing all that.
[00:25:53] Sam Chlebowski: I love it. I love it. So just a couple of quick questions for you to wrap things up here[00:26:00] and Hayden. Sam, thank you so much for your time. This has been an absolute blast talking with both of you. My first question is if people want to learn more about modern marketing and the work that you two are doing Where should they go?
[00:26:14] Hayden Cashion: Modernmarketingcertificate.com is the website. Then at @ModernMarketing on TikTok, or at @Modern.mktg on Instagram. We’ll get that official handle soon. But that’s where we’re, we’re sitting right now.
[00:26:28] Sam Chlebowski: I just messaged somebody who has the motion. io handle on instagram On my personal instagram account asking if I could buy it still hasn’t responded. Have you guys tried that at
[00:26:38] Hayden Cashion: Oh, I’ve
[00:26:39] Hayden Cashion: tried. So this, this is how I got the official name on, TikTok. This is hilarious story. it was a while ago, but I went to the page that owned it. And it was like some page I think had like no videos and was following like three people. And so I was like, cool, let’s hope he’s following like his personal. And so it was only following like one human and then the other two were like pages. So I was like, cool. I go to this human and then it’s his Snapchat in his bio of his personal. I add them on Snapchat and I call him on the Snapchat feature. He’s like a 15 year old in the UK. I’m like, listen, brother, like my mom’s from the UK.
[00:27:18] Hayden Cashion: We’re like saying blood and stuff. Like you want to just send me this handle. I can, I can see you’re not using it. And I would have paid if he asked for it, but he was like, yeah, man, no worries. I’m like cool. Just go into your settings right now. Just like change your name. I’m going to go claim it. And yeah, shout out to uh, I think his name is Justin. So we’ll call him Justin. Shout out, Justin. I told you, we were going to take that handle and blow it up. And now we’re at 148, 000 followers. So I appreciate it.
[00:27:41] Sam Chlebowski: Talk about cyber sleuthing, man. That is cool. I was totally unlucky because the Motion.io handle on Instagram, it’s somebody with zero follows, zero followers and nothing. It’s literally just a blank page.
[00:27:58] Hayden Cashion: No, literally I had a music [00:28:00] artist hit me the other day. He’s like, I want the official name. It’s this girl’s page. She hasn’t posted since 2011. So I told him, I’m like, Hey, go to her, photos, go to her comments, click on her friends and start calling them through the DM, and then reverse back, and so hopefully he figures it out.
[00:28:15] Hayden Cashion: It’s a wild world out there trying to get handled.
[00:28:17] Sam Chlebowski: That is amazing. Two final questions for you. First one is a business one. Second one’s a fun one over the next three months. And I’ll ask you both this question. I’d love to hear both of your answers. What are the most exciting things that you’re working on?
[00:28:33] Hayden Cashion: Sam, go for it,
[00:28:34] Essam Aboukoube: Yeah, for sure. I think the most exciting thing is really focusing more and Hayden might have a similar answer, but like really focusing on our e commerce. I just think it’s a better business. Obviously, I love what we do and we’re going to continue doing it in terms of the live cohorts, but very excited about, having more of a social media, less of a.
[00:28:54] Essam Aboukoube: A sales call and just more direct to e commerce store. That, that’s something that’s very exciting. It’s challenging obviously because it’s different, but it’s definitely exciting.
[00:29:03] Hayden Cashion: I’d have to agree 100 percent like the marketing challenge of selling a digital course online through a logo, not through a personal brand. I’m up for it. I’m excited for it. It’s going to be a slight pivot as to what we were doing before, because there’s much more of a sales funnel on the backend before, which means you Sam get on the call and then there’s a touch point. This is just boom. And so, Yeah, excited to iterate the business and hopefully create, a revenue model that is much more consistent and scalable when you’re running live cohorts. It’s like you get a boom and then you’re like doing the cohort and then you got to do another boom. And so it’s like an interesting fluctuation, whereas this model is much more exponential.
[00:29:40] Sam Chlebowski: Thank you both so much for your time. One quick question just to wrap it up When the two of you are not working What do you like to do?
[00:29:47] Essam Aboukoube: I love traveling. I’m actually going to Morocco tomorrow for a
[00:29:50] Sam Chlebowski: Oh, where?
[00:29:52] Essam Aboukoube: in Casablanca, Morocco.
[00:29:54] Sam Chlebowski: No way.
[00:29:55] Essam Aboukoube: Yeah, so I’m very excited about that. I love to travel. I love experiences, honestly. A lot [00:30:00] of times on the weekends, like we live in Ottawa, I’ll go to Montreal. I’ll go to different, two hour ride places.
[00:30:06] Essam Aboukoube: I love doing that. Love hanging out with friends, exercising, and just being outside. Honestly that’s something I love to do.
[00:30:12] Sam Chlebowski: Amazing. We went to Marrakesh a year and a half ago, and it was. one of the most fascinating places I have ever been to.
[00:30:21] Hayden Cashion: For me, I like to golf I like to be out in nature Just chilling and then I also do a lot of like personal development that i’m interested into. It’s like personal tasks Not necessarily business related. And then I gym I hit the gym a little bit But I’m pretty, pretty focused in the business realm.
[00:30:37] Hayden Cashion: And yeah, that, that’s where me and Sam are at most of the time. I mean, when I’m not working and Sam likes to text me business questions, that’s all I know.
[00:30:43] Sam Chlebowski: That’s the way it always goes, right? It’s like, my co founders too, it’s like, if one of them are on a trip, I’m texting them business questions. And then if I’m on a trip, one of them is texting me business questions. Just funny how that works.[00:30:55] Sam Chlebowski: So, well, thank you both so much for your time. This has been another great episode of designing growth. Have fun, good luck and go crush it. See you next Thursday, everybody. Bye bye.
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