Transcript
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Conversations from the front lines of marketing. This is be to be growth.
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Hey friends, welcome in. Excited
today to share with you an episode from
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another one of our sweet fish podcasts, attention, and the host of that
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show, Dan Sanchez, you will
know very well as he was a host
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here and you definitely still hear his
voice from time to time on be to
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be growth. But attention was started
out of this realization and this passion that
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without attention, our marketing actually flat
lines, our business could can go belly
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up. And with whether we say
it or not, attention is like this
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oxygen that were hoping for and we're
trying to get the right kind of so
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it can often feel like there's not
enough of it, that we don't know
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how to get attention and that you
have to pay a high price for it.
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But maybe there's a way to actually
attract a consistent stream, and that's
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Dan Sanchez. That's his pursuit in
this podcast, is to have conversations and
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to give some thought provoking ideas around
how to build an audience and how to
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get attention. And so today what
I want to do is want to share
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an episode called forget products become an
audience first company and you're going to learn
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the pros and cons of being a
product first company, how to start a
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company with an audience first mindset.
That could really, I think, work
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better and then also, Dan,
provide some practical steps just to becoming more
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audience focused right now in your current
company. So some really good takeaways here.
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Wanted to remind you of one housekeeping
item before we jump in. We
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are running an audience survey. We
would love your input and if you go
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to be tob growth podcom, you're
going to be able to just, I'd
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say three minutes or less, fill
out the survey have your voice be heard.
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It helps us pick topics for future
episodes, decide who we want to
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have as guests on future episodes and
just a general direction of the show.
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How are we doing? What can
I be doing better as a host?
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I would love to hear your voice
and get your feedback again. That's be
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tob growth podcom. All right,
let's jump in to today's episode. Forget
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product first, become an audience first
company with Dan Sanchez. Welcome back to
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the attention podcast. I'm Dan Sanchez
with sweet fish in today we're going to
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be stealing yet another concept from the
starter world to help us improve our audience
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growth. That is the product first
company, and in this episode I wanted
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to throw out the idea of an
audience first company to start. Let's quickly
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recap, though, what it means
to be a product first company. It's
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a reaction to the sales driven company, which has been most companies throughout history.
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Right. Every company wants to make
money, every company needs to have
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some revenue going, so they look
to sales and they've looked to marketing,
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working together to drive new users,
to drive new sales of new product,
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new acquisition. But the product first
company emphasized instead the product over the sale.
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Let's make the product so good,
they said that it will market itself.
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It optimizes for products usage and engagement. And it makes sense because if
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you're getting new sales all the time, but people try your service or product
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or Sass or whatever it is and
try and say, uh, it's okay,
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they're probably going to move on,
they'll probably forget about you and they'll
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probably never buy again, even for
just a C plus experience. So the
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product first movement has been fantastic because
it's because it says, let's make something
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remarkable, so that not only do
we retain our users longer, making more
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money, but those users are more
likely to become raving fans sharing the product,
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making it so much easier to grow. Now, naturally, the freemium
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SASS model has been the pioneer of
this movement. We think of a few
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examples, like mail chimp, who
of who were early to adopt like making
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it easy to send out an email
newsletter and then putting in little kinds of
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little delightful things in it that just
made it fun to use, because before,
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and I don't know if you can
remember this, like making an html
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email was a freaking pain. Mail
chip made it easy and they made all
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kinds of little illustration and copy thing
copywriting decisions in the product to just make
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it fun. So not only did
it become hard, but it actually became
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easy and fun to use, and
I was a big reason why male chimp
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was able to grow. A less
used option is a college by the name
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of Western governor's University. The reason
why I know about it was because I'm
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an alumni of the college. They
spend hardly any money on marketing because all
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their marketing comes from the alumni.
Like I'm talking about it right now,
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and it's because they focused on building
an awesome product. They focused on building
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something people would want to talk about. And the thing that Wgu does better
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than anybody else is creating a competency
based program which means essentially, if you
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know the material, you can essentially
test through or quickly jump to the papers
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that you need to write in order
to test out of every class, or
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not test out, but work your
way out of every class. So a
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class could take a day, it
could take a week, it could take
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two months if you don't know the
material, allowing you to go as fast
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as possible, and the faster you
go, the less it costs. Actually
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went through my whole bachelor's degree in
eight months and only paid about on fourteen
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hundred bucks, with some help from
the pail. But you hear things like
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that and you're like, Oh crap, I paid fifty grand. So when
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you share this with other people,
all of a sudden the value proposition just
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starts to look really good right,
and that's a product driven model. It's
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a great thing. But today I
want to explore a different concept, one
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we can take from this awesome model
of being a product driven first company and
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question if there's maybe a better model. I'd like to call an audience first
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company. Now I think there's room
for both the play. I think you
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can have a product driven company.
I think you can actually also have a
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audience driven company. Let's look at
some of the comparisons I'll make in order
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to make the case. One thing
I've noticed with product first companies is they
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tend to get out of the building
a little bit too late. There's a
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lot of product first companies out there
that we never hear about. We only
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hear the success stories of the drop
boxes and the mail chimps, but there's
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a lot of product first companies that
never make it because they focused all in
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on the product and they never actually
talked to the end user until it was
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too late. They invested too much
of their time, their energy, pop
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potentially lots of VC funds and or
if they did get out there and finally
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got a little something going, they
never talked to the audience enough, so
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they never really developed an intimacy and
a really strong understanding of what their target
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audience like, what their life is
like, what they think, what they
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feel, what keeps them up at
night, what they wish could be what
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they'd haven't even considered that would excite
hate them because they don't spend enough time
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with the people. Not Audience First
Company is focused primarily on the people,
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because the whole goal is not to
sell them something, but just to capture
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their attention. And the only way
you're going to capture their attention is by
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having a deep understanding of what they
think and what they feel and what they
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want out of life. Or is
specifically in the little corner of life that
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you're trying to capture their attention in. May Be related to their career,
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may be related to their job,
may be related to their finances, may
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be related to their nutrition, whatever
it is, you want to intimately understand
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how they think about that area of
their life. With an audience first company,
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in building an audience before you even
build the product, the go to
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market is actually remarkably faster right because
if you have an audience you can build
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rapid feedback into testing your product because
you have thousands of people, maybe more
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tens of thousands, over a hundred
thousand people, who are willing to give
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you feedback on any product idea you
come up with, and it's built in
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marketing. An Audience Focus Company doesn't
have to beg for attention from publications.
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The publications comes to you. There's
a reason why you're attracting an audience and
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if you're attracting a crowd, usually
the media entities in the industry are curious
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to see what you got going on. So one of the things I learned
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from Chris Walker this last year is
he's growing an audience and seas forget.
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Pr will comes to you if you
have an owned media entity, if you
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have at tension, the media will
come to you and they will publish your
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story. Another thing is an audience
first company only has to pay for advertising
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when the price is right because they
don't depend on advertising. They're not addicted
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to facebook ads or Google ads or
whatever the paid media of the day is.
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They don't have to pay for it, they already have it. Now
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I don't I'm not saying paid media
is bad. Paid media's fantastic. It's
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a great way to grow an audience, but you're not dependent on it if
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you already have your own audience.
And I think my favorite part about an
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audience first company is that it's not
dependent on the product. What company can
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say that what company can say look, we don't need this product, we
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have this massive audience and we can
just launch a new product. Not Very
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many, but that is something that
is more valuable than even like a solid
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productt going forward, because if you
have a lot of attention, you can
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come up with new products and tell
you find one that really hits. It
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makes it so much easier to launch
a product that it almost thinks it almost
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makes the product first focus look vulnerable. So two examples of an audience.
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First Company is sweet fish for starters, the company that I represent, being
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a BDB PODCAST agency. A lot
of our growth comes from our own POD
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CAST, be to be growth and
hopefully soon this podcast. A lot of
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it comes from the audience that we've
developed on Linkedin and social media. If
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it weren't for those things, sweet
fish wouldn't have the product that does today
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and honestly, if our agency went
away, we would still have the audience
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to be able to market something to
we could come up with a SASS product,
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we could come up with more resources. We have an audience in order
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to talk to and actually make things
better and better or to launch new products.
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To another one that comes to mind
and is talked about on Linkedin all
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the time is refined labs. Chris
Walker is a very strong personal brand with
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the massive audience. If Chris Walker
launched a new product offering, I'm pretty
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sure it would go well and if
it didn't, he'd be able to iterate
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very quickly because of the feedback of
his devoted audience. So how do you
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become a more audience focused company?
Here's three ideas to get started. First,
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if you want to be audience first, then it has to be a
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strategic priority. It has to come
from the top. We have to have
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buy in from leadership in order to
make this change, because the whole company
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has to be around it in order
for the company to be audience first.
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If you want to actually play and
be like a media company, yet come
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up with products like a product focus
company. If you want to walk and
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talk like a media company, then
you need to have an orientation like a
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media company. Number two is you
need to prioritize more of your marketing budget
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just to audience growth. Just us
towards the content development, just towards promoting
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the audience channels, just towards conversion
rate optimization to drive people down the funnel
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to becoming a subscriber. Yes,
you need your own funnel just for your
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audience growth initiatives. And lastly,
become obsessed with your target audience. You
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need to be in constant conversations,
both in person conversations, or zoom at
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least, and on social having engaging
conversations daily, hopefully, but even weekly
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would be better for some companies.
That way you're always in tune with what
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the audience is thinking, what they're
fearing, what's priority for them, and
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you can take those insights and turn
it into better content and, of course,
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use it to inform your products.
Thanks for listening. Since you've made
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it this far, I'd like to
ask for one favor. If you could,
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please just leave a rating for the
show, whether it's on apple or
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spotify, which now has ratings.
Praise God, every single rating apps be
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tob growth. Is brought to you
by the team at sweet fish media.
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Here at sweet fish, we produce
podcast for some of the most innovative brands
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in the world and we help them
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blog posts and more. We're on
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show. Want more information, visit
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