How To Start Growth Hacking With Nick Kullin

Founder/CEO of Second Flight Consultancy and Academy – Nick Kullin

The simplest way to read your customer’s mind and turn that insight into words that make them want to buy. How to think about your problems and finding solutions without going into paralysis mode. How to “turn the tables” and start selling to your Linkedin prospects and NEVER look like a sleazy car salesman or come across as needy. How easy it actually is to “growth hack” your business?

MeetMe.so/NickKullin

Check out SecondFlightAcademy.com?for more info.

Thanks so much for listening!

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Jamie:	Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jamie Masters, and today on the show, we have Nick Kullin. Now, he runs Second Flight Academy and has a digital marketing agency, and I'm really excited to dive deep on anti-conformity and marketing craziness. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Nick.

Nick:	What's going on? I'm really psyched about this and this is gonna be a lot of fun for you and us and all your listeners, so I'm excited.

Jamie:	Thank you. You're like, okay, I'm listening to rockin' music before we hop on, he's talking about, like, how can I deliver the most possible to your listeners. So we're gonna dive right into it.

	We started talking about growth hacking. We'll talk about your story later; nobody cares about that right now. So you said you have some very specific thoughts on growth hacking, and I feel like it's one of those terms where people are like, oh, it's a buzzword. So tell me more about the whole point of growth hacking and what your thoughts are on it.

Nick:	Yeah, yeah. So growth hacking's been one of the coolest words out there. It's like you mentioned, it's like a cool buzzword. It makes people think, like, oh, that sounds sexy, I wanna know more about it, right? Before, it was like social media marketing: oh, that's cool. Then online marketing: oh, that's cool. Now people are like, oh, growth hacking, what the hell is that? That sounds really cool.

	But the thing that most people think when they think growth hacking - and there is a lot of application processes that revolve around that, from A/B split testing to all this nuance and application of configuring things and really looking at the minute details. 

	But when people start to think about growth hacking in that context, it makes people kinda get that business paralysis of like, okay, this is a lot that's entailed; where do I go; how do I start; I don't think growth hacking maybe is for me, right? But really, in a nutshell, I always try to tell people growth hacking is more of a mindset, right? The best way to describe growth hacking is instead of looking how to look outside the box, you wanna try figuring out how to make that box smaller so it's more easier and more accessible.

	So when you think of growth hacking, I tell people whatever the objective is, figure out that one main thing and how you're gonna make that box smaller so you can achieve it at the most optimal level.

	So when you think about a problem and you think about figuring out a solution, don't think about all the while and crazy cool ideas because what ends up happening? You don't end up doing them because you kinda go into that paralysis. You're like, wow, alright, I gotta do this, gotta do this, gotta do this, but I don't even know where to start. But when you think about what's the one main thing and how can I make that easier for me, how could I hack that one thing, make that box smaller, then you start to really think about the main actionable items that could make that easier for you. And then it makes a world of a difference and the biggest impact into your life, into your business.

	So I look at growth hacking more as a mindset. And when you really start developing that third eye with your business, then amazing, amazing things start to happen. And that's really what I start educating in the academy and what I even apply to my agency for my agency clients, and it does some really cool stuff.

Jamie:	Okay, how do we do that? Because that's the thing, it's like, okay, great, thanks, appreciate it. Either give me an example or tell me how we can actually change our mindset. Because like you said, we were bombarded with information. Everyone's like, now I have to do a thousand things. How do we pick that one thing and how do we know what is gonna make it easier?

Nick:	Yeah, so a prime example, right: prospecting, right, in the sales world. So prospecting, one of the biggest things that is a problem for people is the time suck of it. It absorbs a huge amount of time. It's the mental warfare of doing all that hard work and getting minimal results or getting the no's, right? And all you're trying to do is just get an appointment, so you still gotta close the people, right?

	So, for most people, it's like, I don't have the time or I just can't deal with spending another week grinding and seeing not really a lot as results. And what I -

Jamie:	Yeah, I call it hitting the pavement. You're like -

[Crosstalk]

Nick:	Yeah. Yep.

Jamie:	That's what I gotta do, yep.

Nick:	So when you think about, like, okay, how do we grow this to get you more appointments and how do we figure out a way that you are hacking the methodology of what you're doing, you start thinking about clever ideas and what you currently do. 

A prime example of this, of how we kinda like growth hack this through our mindset, is through LinkedIn, right? So LinkedIn, it's a great tool, it's a great database, but you gotta admit, the UI on it is pretty clunky, right?  

Jamie:	It's horrible.

Nick:	It's horrible.

Jamie:	Yeah, I was just talking about this last night with another millionaire that I was hanging out with. We're like, this is so stupid.

Nick:	It's horrible. Because here's the thing: Everyone's lazy on LinkedIn. I don't care who you are; you're lazy on LinkedIn, right? If I have to get another message of someone who wants to connect with me, saying like, I'd like to add you to my professional network, dash full name, I'm gonna blow my  mind off.

	You know, but what's crazy is that hacking that system is more because people are not taking advantage of it because of the inefficiencies of it, right? So no one's taking the extra time to personalize that connection request message. Nobody is taking the time to spend all their days and hours on LinkedIn to see when that person connects back to do a proper follow-up.

	So in my head, I'm like, okay, what if I developed and programmed like a AI that could connect with people automatically for you, personalized that message, and then record when that person connects back to send that follow-up message in an efficient manner? So for someone who's prospecting, they have a decision maker who they need to connect with, right? 

So a growth hack that I developed for a lot of my clients is similar to this LinkedIn strategy. So I would say alright, who are you trying to connect with? And what we would set up is, like, we'll set up the advanced targeting, and then we'll build this custom script to hack their prospecting efforts and do 100 connection requests a day. And then all those connection requests have a personalized message. And what's great is that every person who connects back with you, you're gonna touch. And if they don't respond back to that message, it's gonna send a follow-up message on your behalf.

So literally, for someone who's in a sales role or trying to get more B to B business, or even for PR efforts, like a lot of people use it for all these different things. The best thing about it is that you're not burning the time, you're just - I like to call it, you're playing catcher. You're just waiting for that opportunity to come through or someone to book through your online booking link and say, oh, wow, I actually got a client on demand through this, and it's like pretty frickin cool, and I didn't spend any time doing it.

Jamie:	Okay, so everybody's all like, oh, okay, I want that. But what are the real conversion rates on it? And you have to be marketing or pitching something that they actually want, and there's so many nuances to it too, so it's easy for you because you've done this many times before, but how can somebody actually do this? And if we don't have a script, are we just screwed?

Nick:	Well, here's the cool thing. Part of being with the academy and my agency is we build this stuff for you and run it for you. So it's all completely hands-off, you just gotta wait for it to run for you, pretty much. It's really cool.

	But what's cool about - we ran - we have almost like 40 clients running through this with their profiles, and the results are all the same. So in sales, it's all a numbers game, especially when it comes to prospecting, right? You have more numbers on your side, there's better success with it, too. 

But if you think about it, if you're sending 100 connection requests a day, what we find within a 24 hour period, around 30 to 40 percent of those people connect back. And if you're looking at sending 30 to 40 emails to these people who already said you maybe have a question about what they do, and then you follow up saying here's my question, I wanna take this on a phone call to talk more about it, our clients see anywhere from one to five appointments made from that per day.

	But what's the beauty about this is that it compounds over time. Because if you're sending 100 connection requests every single day, by day ten, you send 1,000 of them. And by day ten, a lot of those people may finally get onto LinkedIn and accept you then, right? So you may start seeing 30 messages that were sent out, 100 messages that were sent out, over 150 messages were sent out because all these people are starting to finally connect back.

	So it's an amazing tool. And for staffing companies, sales guys, marketers, whoever, who just need to get in front of people and they don't wanna spend the time doing it, this allows them to free up a ton of time and get the actual results. That's like a really interesting growth hack that many people could take advantage of that just involves thinking about how do I make my life easier and free up time and just create a solution that hacks my problem?

	And that's kinda like how you gotta think with anything. How do I automate it? How do I make it easier? How do I get to my objective faster and make that box smaller?

Jamie:	I have so many more questions, but I wanna dive a little bit deeper into the LinkedIn side. Because what has a tendency to happen, you add somebody, you send a - not a generic, but you're like, "Hey, nice to meet you, blah blah blah." What are those templates? Because I know I have a lot of clients who do outbound sales strategy just like this. They have great conversion rates, but a lot of the times, it's annoying because even if you direct target, if you're asking them a question, usually they're like, "Oh, maybe somebody's interested in my stuff." How do you turn the tables and start selling them your stuff without looking like a sleazy car salesman, where you're like, "Oh, by the way, I got something for ya," you know?

Nick:	Mm-hmm. Well, oftentimes it's just being completely upfront, right? You know, transparency is the beauty in business now, right? If you?re transparent with someone, they respect that more.

	So if in the connection request message, we say, ?Hey, listen ?? you know, ?Hey, Jamie, I saw your profile. I really would love to talk to you because I believe you could help me out with a few things and I believe I could help you out with a few things on my end too.? So what you wanna look at using LinkedIn for, especially for this sort of message, is like you wanna try figuring out a person or a business objective that you know you also equally add value to.

	What?s great is we have a lot of lawyers and financial planners who use this, and they need and want to connect with other accountants and lawyers and whoever because they exchange business a lot, and oftentimes you can cross-pollinate. So if you?re looking at cross-pollinating, it?s really easy to put and place yourself in a position where you?re like, okay, I?m opening up a door. They may have opportunities for me, but I also know I could add value to them in some capacity.

	Another big thing that you maybe wanna do if you're direct selling is just simply say, "Hey, I checked out your profile. I wanna talk to you." And when they connect back, you'll be like, "Hey, the main thing I wanna really talk to you about is this because I know this is an issue and I know this might be a problem for you. And if this is, I wanna entertain a conversation to learn more about it, and I may have a solution that could make your life easier." You know, a very simple and transparent thing. 

But if you're going vague and you're like, "Hey, I wanna talk. Maybe we could-" you know, and they don't know anything about the call, they don't know anything about it, and you're not even telling them what maybe their value might be, or even state what the problem maybe they're encountering and you have the solution, and they've just gotta click that button and book a time with you. You're gonna be running into failure or just really awkward phone conversations with people. 

Jamie:	Well, exactly -

[Crosstalk]

Jamie:	- so you save your time on the automation, then you waste your time going on talking to people and they don't have a clue, and then you're like, "Oh, it was nice to meet you. Have a nice day. Bye." And that's not worth your time either, and that -

Nick:	Yep. No, yeah, it's all about being transparent and just explain, in that moment, this is what I would like to talk to you about.

Jamie:	Do you think it's easy to quote/unquote growth hack your own business? I feel like sometimes people are kind of too close to their own business, and so even asking the question, how do I make this box smaller, I mean, most people will sort of get blank stares, like I don't know how to make the box smaller. And then they consume more information, and they're like, maybe so-and-so will tell me how. Jamie, please tell me how I can make my box smaller.

	So tell me more about how they can actually do this for themselves.

Nick:	Yeah, the number one thing that they wanna try looking at - oftentimes, the easiest thing to growth hack is your time, right? What are you doing that spends the most amount of time that you do more than once, right, during a day?

	So if it's a matter of, let's say, you're looking up this information, or it's data entry, or whatever it might be, look at the small stuff and figure out, like, if I'm doing it more than once, or I'm doing this and trying to figure this out and it involves repetition, how do I automate that process? How do I make that part of my life easier?

	Or if you're thinking about your business, right, and how to market to people, growth hack the persona of those people, right? You wanna figure out what makes them tick, what's their pain point, what keeps them up at night? And then start from there, and then moving around to, like, okay, this is their pain point. Now how to I illustrate that in my copy? How do I illustrate that in my ask? How do I illustrate that in everything?

	Because oftentimes, especially people who have products, we get too close to our product and we wanna just spew out all the value and all the cool things and nuts, bolts, and whistles of it. But we're not talking about, like, okay; maybe they're just interested in that bolt. Because that bolt is the actual pain point they have. They don't care about the whistles and all the other good stuff.

	And oftentimes, when I talk to software companies or people who have a product, I'm like, hey, listen, it's all great that you have these 12 bullet point cool feature benefit list, but what's that one thing that would make people buy? Because oftentimes it is that one thing. They don't - all the other stuff is good, but just the one thing that makes people buy. 

	And you know, people just don't understand how to read their customer's mind and really understand what it is. If someone was looking at how they growth hack in that sense, it's more like, alright, dive deeper into your actual buyer's persona and really understand what's keeping them up at night.

Jamie:	Okay, how do we do that? So I have questions about the time and the automation in just a second, but how do you actually - I know ask them; that's simple. So ask. But then what do you do once you have that information? You talk to them; you ask them. And this is where I think clarification is really important because people who will go and listen to a podcast like this and go, "I was told to run a survey, or ask people, or call people," and then they have all this information, and they're like, "Now what? What do I change on my sales page in order to make this work? And how do I do this?" And then they're stuck because it's all gray at that point. How do we help them there?

Nick:	So the best thing that you wanna do - once you absorb all the information, right, and you even look on - one of the best ways to kinda understand what people are saying using their own words in your copy is I reference Amazon, and looking at, let's say if you're selling a product or a service, there's usually a book that's written about the topic. 

And one of the coolest things that you could do is read the reviews and actually what people are saying about it, and maybe even what they read from the book, like what they are missing from that book that they wish they had. I like to call - you can find your sticky words, right? The words that people are saying from their own mouths that you know as your consumer, and utilize that and put that into your copy.

	But this is where the application of growth hacking kind of exists, doing multiple A/B split testing and figuring out what headline copy is gonna resonate to who. But when you start identifying like the silos of your persona, then you can start filtering them out in, like, let's say an email campaign. 

	A good example of this is that we have a client called Academy of Responsible Tattooing. So they teach people how to become tattoo artists. It's a really cool company. But they have like three or four different personas. They have the people who wanna be a tattoo artist; they have the career switchers, the other people who went to art school. Each one of these people are different types of people. So their headline copy of like, you know, "If you love ink and you wanna become the next ink master, do this." And that might be the person who's really into the culture of tattooing.

	But that may not resonate to the art school person who reads that. The art school person may be like, "Turn your passion into a profession." You know, "Take your skill of drawing and apply to the best canvas that you could possibly put your art to." You know? It's a matter of understanding what really is their core values and beliefs, and then constructing that around your copy and around the persona. But you gotta understand what really makes them happy and what makes them enjoy what they do, and then personalize it from there.

Jamie:	So if we were to give everybody sort of a step-by-step, because I think this is awesome and people sort of get overwhelmed going, oh, how I need four sales pages, or four opt-ins, or four - you know what I mean- Great, thanks so much, Nick, now you gave me ten times the work. Thank you. So how can we - hopefully ten times the conversion also, right? So that's sort of the whole point.

	But how can we make it super easy for people? So give me like a step 1, step 2, step 3, so that way they can start breaking into - we call them avatars, personas, however you wanna describe them. Ryan Lebeck calls them buckets. How do they figure out what those are, and then how do we actually - what is the step-by-step on actually trying to at least get one of these funnels converting a little bit, so that way they have some cash coming in so they have more time so that they can do more of the rest of it.

Nick:	Yep, yep. So one of the coolest strategies that we put - a lot of times, people don't have like their avatars or personas at all, they just have a giant clunky email list of let's say 1,000-plus people, and they're like, "I don't know who any of these people are, they just opted into my lead magnet that was pretty generic too," right?

Jamie:	Yep, exactly.

Nick:	So one of the things that this is - bringing back to the Academy of Responsible Tattooing and that story, they had the same thing. They had 30,000 emails of uncategorized people. And we didn't know who they were, what they were. And there's this cool platform out there called Typeform. Are you familiar with it?

Jamie:	I use Typeform all the time. I was just in it earlier today.

Nick:	Awesome. One of the things that we help do, and it seems the most obvious, it's like, alright, the most obvious thing is to ask people. But you can't ask all those thousands of people, like, "Well, who are you?" But you can use platforms like Typeform to help auto categorize people based on their answers. Kinda similar to a Buzzfeed survey, you know, like, "What Disney character do you look like?" Or do you -

Jamie:	So Ryan Lebeck talked about that all the time with his Ask Funnel. Exactly. That's why we're doing Typeform. We're doing the Ask Funnel and stuff like that. Okay.

Nick:	Awesome, awesome. So one of the first things I would suggest is instead of, of course, going straight for, like, the Ask, like, make it enjoyable; make it an experience; find out what they are by saying like, "Hey, this is the offer. If you do this, you're gonna get this in return." But it's this cool, interactive way of understanding who they are.

	Based on those questions and if certain people answer certain things, you can say, "Alright, every person who answered this question, they're automatically gonna be thrown into this little area." And if you use like HubSpot or AWeber, you could then start building your funnels to like, if they open this headline, subject line copy, then this is how they're gonna flow. Or if they click on this link, maybe this is the type of content they like. Some people like podcasts, some people like blogs, but you're never gonna know, if you wanna keep throwing podcast content to them, if they never click any of the emails that have podcast content, you know? You wanna start automatically shifting them to the other form of content.

Jamie:	That's what's so confusing to people, and that's why I wanted sort of the step-by-step, because there are so many nuances that people can do. Even just audio visual reading, like they're so - I mean, my funnels are kind of insane, to go down the rabbit hole of if they don't do this, then they do this, and then they do - and literally looking at it gives me a headache. I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is nuts.

	So how do we give people -?

Nick:	So the easiest - yeah.

Jamie:	Exactly, thank you.

Nick:	Easiest thing, right? I look at it like the power of four, right? If you had your first email in a 30 day kinda trend of like how the next few are gonna go, right? And each email is gonna have a different categorization of headlines that you wanna have two different subject lines for, and then you wanna flow into the two different types of content in that email, long form that kinda gives most of, let's say, a blog information in with like a few links, or a short and sweet, like a very Neil Patel kinda blog and throw that in there.

	First you could start by organizing and seeing like, okay, are people mainly liking to read my content, or are they just looking to look at my email and go right to it? Then you can start understanding the people who have a lot of time to look on their phone, because most of the time people look on their phone at their email. So you start to understand your audience's preference.

	Once you understand that, the next level is the type of content. Are you giving them the offer of, you know, let's say if you have infographics or blogs or case studies or whatever it is, you now wanna say, okay, if people are clicking this, then it automatically is gonna start funneling to this type of content. So now you're shifting from your standard four different types of content to now if they click on this particular type of content, now it's gonna be moving into, alright, this is the type of content they're gonna see, and I'm gonna throw maybe one different type, let's say I'll throw a podcast piece of content, and see if they click on it. 

If they don't click on it, then I'm gonna move back into my same four emails and maybe throw another one in there, another podcast interview in there. And then if they don't click that one, then I kinda know like, alright, this person really doesn't like this, but every time I send them a blog link, I'm able to see that they're clicking on the blog link.

	And you wanna start seeing - if someone opens it and they click on the type of content, a good reference point is if they at least click on that link at like a 20 to 40 percent rate.

Jamie:	Alright, that's what I was gonna ask you. Give me the good rates. I wrote "good rates." Okay, so tell me what are typical open rates, especially for funnels and autoresponders, and what are typical click through rates?

Nick:	For what we see, when you don't have a categorized list, the open rates vary, right? So you can't really tell. I mean, we have guys as low as 1 percent, but we also had people who generated closer to 10 to 15 percent. 

	But when you start organizing your personas and get to that level, now you start seeing your open rate flow to the 25 to 35 percent rate, and the click through rates being anywhere from 40 to 60 percent rates. 

	But it's a matter of sifting out of that smoke of who's who, which is why I really emphasize, like, develop a type form and start getting them to answer their own questions, but in a cool, interactive, and fun way. And then once you do that, you could then really start saying, okay, cool so these are all the people who love cats. Maybe we could figure out a way to incorporate innuendos with cat terminology, just throw it into our subject line or throw it into these things because these people like cats, you know?

	But it sounds silly and it sounds like it could be complicated for some people who are just listening to this, but it's a matter of just saying, like, okay, if it was me and I really like this certain thing, I would only - it would capture my attention and intrigue me enough to take that extra two minutes to look at it. And you just can't be lazy with your approach of saying everything likes this stuff, because everyone doesn't. And you just gotta understand what they actually like, and it will make the biggest improvement to everything you're trying to do with your business.

Jamie:	Yeah, because we're getting bombarded by everything and we really need - I mean, where everything's going is personalization. I only wanna look at the stuff that I actually care about. Who knew we only have so much time? But when you're talking to a small business owner that doesn't have that much time and is trying to learn digital marketing, and they're like, okay, okay, this is a lot. 

	So just to sort of condense what you're saying, just asking yourself if you were in that piece where they are, what do you want, right? So pretend you're that persona and then go through and be like, oh, I clicked on this because - or I didn't click on this. And if we can sort of put it down to one persona and figure out one person at a time, or one persona at a time, that would probably be a little easier, right?

	So if we work on one funnel - or do you suggest having a separate funnel for each persona?

Nick:	Yes. Yes, I do. So let's say the easiest way to figure out your persona is simply ask. Like if you have a product, let's say you have fitness equipment, right, and one of your stuff that you're trying to build is yoga equipment, right? So you have a yoga mat and all that stuff. But yogis typically like a bunch of different things. Some are really into the fitness, but also some people are into the lifestyle of it. Some people are into the health recipes and all that stuff, or the meditation of it.

	So you should really think about, alright, what kinda people do I normally attract in this particular area, and how do I develop - like people who buy my yoga mats. There's maybe two or three different types of folks who buy my yoga mat. 

And then figure out, like, okay, people who are really into the meditation element of it. I need to make those people into a very specialized area that talks about the meditation, maybe some deep breathing exercises, and how maybe this particular mat and the cushion of it really helps keep your zen, or things like that. But maybe some people are just really into the workout of it, and maybe like the Jillian Michaels hardcore kinda yoga experience. You need to have it very focused around that.  

It's like you need to really think about, like, even though you had maybe one product or one service, there's usually three different types of people who buy or use your service who have three different types of methodologies of why they would even use it or buy it. And you just need to silo them. And the only way you could silo them is by really asking them what it is that they even wanted to buy it for.

Jamie:	I feel like we're in a mystery novel. We're like Sherlock Holmes going "Okay, I have a magnifying glass." Wow. What did this person do as we're going through? And that might be sort of a good idea to sort of think of it that way because otherwise it starts to get so massive because there are so many options, and I think that's the thing where people sort of get carried down the river with everything else. They're like, "I've got no clue. I'm just gonna float down the river and generically say it to everyone and hope that that works okay."

	And then people aren't seeing the rates they want, and then they get frustrated. So picking that one side of things, I think, would be really, really huge for people to do.

	So what do you suggest on the quiz side though, like you were saying, like how many questions do you think it should be? How do we make it easy for somebody to do that and implement the segmentation as simple as humanly possible so we can give them a point to start, or a blog post you wrote, or something so they can dive in a little deeper on that?

Nick:	Yeah, so if you're, let's say, using Typeform, right? I normally like to have it anywhere, in total, around ten questions. And it sounds like a lot, but the way you wanna design it is use split logic. And split logic pretty much means if someone answers a certain question, they're not going to question 2 like everyone else. 

If someone says, let's say it's a yes or no question, right? Do you like having hair, right? I mean, clearly I don't because I'm bald. But I would say "no," and it wouldn't say, "Oh; what kinda hair products do you like?" because I don't really use hair products. It would automatically go into "Okay, you answered no, so you don't have maybe hair, so what kind of razors do you like to use?" instead of asking me hair products.

	So I think what people need to ask and kind of think about is if they were trying to sell it to a person, and they were doing a proper needs analysis, right? How would they go down the rabbit hole if they were asking someone a question and wanting to learn more about them? And using the split logic really helps ask the core question, which is usually what you want as like question No. 2 on this, like a Typeform. And what I like to use - and with Typeform, I don't know if you use it on yours, I like to use GIFs to kinda create like a cool, animated, kinda interactive feel, right? 

	So you may wanna say, "Which one describes you?" Almost ask them, but you use the GIFs to kinda showcase the different lifestyles of types of people. And if they choose, like, "Oh, I'm this type of person," then automatically, that's like bucket No. 1 of persona. They're already kind of sitting there. And then you can put them through to split logic of like, alright, they already said they think they're this persona, but let's see if they actually match that kinda look.

Jamie:	Oh, okay.

Nick:	Yeah.

Jamie:	So that's interesting. That's not what I'm doing on mine that I'm coming out with, so now you're giving me other things to think about. So we were trying to do it as easy as humanly possible, so we literally - one question sort of buckets them into four separate buckets in general, and then we give them the results based on what that is, and then we send them to another Typeform, which goes deeper into their business and what they do, depending on which funnel they go into. Which can be very complicated, when we're starting to go and segment like a bazillion times, hence the reason why we're trying to make it simple.

	If we could actually - okay, now I'm thinking about my own stuff. So when you're thinking about conversion rates for quizzes, what can we expect? Like if people are doing paid advertising, even my board of mentors was like, "You should use a quiz, Jamie." I'm like, "I know. People keep telling me this." So we're finally getting it up and going after a ridiculous long time, and I don't know what to expect for conversion rates. What should I be shooting for?

Nick:	So what's really interesting, and I actually would quickly go into the Typeform where my clients have this really quick, and I could kinda quickly give you the actual stats.

Jamie:	Good, I want real numbers.

Nick:	And I'll give it one second as it loads. But here's what's cool: The completion rate is actually really high. And when you look at how much time people spend on this, it's sometimes like five minutes long, you know, and we typically -

[Crosstalk]

Jamie:	- learning about themselves. Yay -

[Crosstalk]

Nick:	Yeah, people really do. People really do. And what's really interesting about it is if you make it fun and interactive - think Buzzfeed. It's fun. You know, when you see images that move and it's kinda humorous or it adds to the question of what you're asking, but you see this cool little picture or animated thing that kinda makes it flow nice, it makes the experience more fun. They're like, "Oh, I wonder what the next cool question's gonna be with this cool little image," or whatever.

	But let me tell you what I'm seeing on my end. So right now, I'm seeing about - people who got onto - like unique visits. So one of them had around 200 unique visits, right? And the completed - so it looks like there's about 168 that actually completed it. So that conversion rate is extremely well. And it -

Jamie:	What's the -

[Crosstalk]

Jamie:	- look like on that? Because that's impressive.

Nick:	So that's actually from the uncategorized people who clicked on the link from the email. So they didn't know who they were and they simply just said, "Hey, they're offering $50.00 off." So like, "Hey, if you complete a fun survey, we're gonna give you a $50.00 coupon."

Jamie:	Ah, that makes sense. Okay.

Nick:	So that's -

Jamie:	So they're already on their list, kinda thing. So it's -

[Crosstalk]

Nick:	Yep, so they're already on their list.

Jamie:	- going like, "Hey, give me information." That'd be insane. Okay.

Nick:	But we do have one that is for that. So we were doing, let's say, YouTube ads. So we're doing YouTube ads, Facebook ads, and was kinda saying like, "Hey, if you wanna do this and fill out this survey to help get you started." 

	Now, that one's, of course, are much higher. That one has well over 1,000. It's actually, to be exact, 1,273 people, and that was within a two-week span. And with that, that has over a 64 percent completion rate.

Jamie:	Wow. Yeah, that is good. Cold YouTube ads?

Nick:	So that's - yeah, cold YouTube ads. So what's -

[Crosstalk]

Jamie:	- on that though, too? Like what are the - how do you get people to take the test in that high regard?

Nick:	So we - since if you're using Typeform you could do - if you're doing through, let's say, a Facebook ad, right? You could just drive people right to the mobile look Typeform.

Jamie:	Oh. It doesn't even - it says whatever the name of the quiz is and people are like, "Yay," and they just take it?

Nick:	Exactly.

Jamie:	Oh, I thought I need a learning page. Okay. Good to know.

Nick:	No, no. I would say, especially if you're doing that, keep it mobile-focused. Because fortunately for Typeform, it's very, very mobile friendly. I actually think it's cooler on mobile than desktop. But if you're gonna do it, just do it simply through - set up all your ads for mobile. And if you're gonna do desktop, just use your iFrame embed and just have it set up through there, and just have it flow completely like that.

Jamie:	Okay, so we've given people so much stuff. Like I want -

[Crosstalk]

Nick:	"My brain hurts!"

Jamie:	I know. Which is good, and I mean, I'm going, "Oh, I could do this," and that's awesome. 

	So I wanna sort of circle back, because you talked about, sort of in the middle, about growth hacking your time. And I care so much about productivity and I feel like I'm extremely efficient with what I do have for time, but I wanna know how I can growth hack my time. I don't know how to do that. How do you - because the question that you were talking about beforehand, which I ended up writing down, is looking at the things that you're talking a lot of time on. But what if you don't have the resource? What if I can't code a script that's gonna make this faster for me? Or how do I find those solutions, even if I know what the problem is, for my time? 

Nick:	Mm-hmm. So oftentimes, most people don't know how to code, right? As awesome as it is, people some - it's a time suck just doing and learning that, right? But we are fortunate in today's age to have like a global kind of economy of resources of personnel. 

Even if someone simply just even went on Upwork, right? And just found someone who could develop JavaScript. And you explain to them, like, "Hey, listen. I need to send these emails out every single day," or "I have a huge Excel spreadsheet of all these people that I wanna reach out to or send an email out, but I don't wanna individually keep sending all these emails out all the time. I wanna automate it." Anything, especially with JavaScript, you could create the code because it just follows the same steps you normally would take, but it could do it in milliseconds, which is even crazier.

Jamie:	Okay, so let's talk about that. It's funny because I'm a geek, right' We used to run [inaudible] [00:39:20] but most people don't even know that they need a JavaScript programmer in order to get some of this stuff. 

	So let's say they're looking at their time, and sort of a step-by-step form would be like, okay, start tracking your time and figuring out what you're spending the most time on. How do we know what to ask the people? Like, "Oh, we need a JavaScript code that does this, that, and the other thing?" 

Nick:	Well, here's actually a really prime example. One of the things that I like to do is influence our outreach, right? So one of the things that I used to do manually before I used to do any of this was simply going on YouTube, and typing my keyword in, and seeing all those people. 

And then I would be like, alright, that's - I wanna get every single - let's say the 100 video pages there are, which is 25 videos per page. I would click on it, go into their About, copy and paste their message - not message, but like video views, channel subscribers, the video's name, and then go through the Captcha code of saying I'm not a bot, and then I finally get their email address, and be like, "Okay, now I can put this into my list." And then off to the next one.

And that process would take me, sometimes, five minutes to do and go through. And by the time I got through page 1, I already wasted almost an hour of my time. 

So, one of the things was like alright, I gotta automate this. So fortunately for me, I know this stuff and I also have a great team behind me of other programmers. So I was like, "Guys, here's what I'm doing." And it's as simple as you recording what you do that's like on a repetition, and say, "This is what I do." And just handing it over to a JavaScript coder, he would know, like, okay, this is what I gotta build and this is the code I gotta do.

So it's as simple as that, guys. If you just show, like in a video share, this is what I'm doing and it's over and over and over again. Can you just program this to do this? It's as simple as that. I wish I had a cooler answer, but it's that easy for people to really think about, like, alright, if I just hand this over and this is what I'm looking for, this is how they could develop it.

Jamie:	So most of the time, people are like, oh, I'll just hire somebody like in the Philippines, or hire an executive assistant and have them do it all for you, but the capability of code makes a huge difference. And that's me going like, hmm, how can we automate - because I don't have like a hardcore programmer on my team where I can go, oh, go do this, and oh, go do this. And now I'm thinking that maybe I should.

Nick:	It's worthwhile having a project-based person. Because when you start thinking about that stuff, like to give you an insight how fast that it scraped through, it was probably around close to 15,000 videos. By the time that was done, it only took around eight hours to finish, and it generated over like 3,000 emails and all this contact information.

Jamie:	So what do you do with those - exactly. So they have all this contact information of all these influencers. Then what did you do? Because that's the boring side of it. Like, okay, great, I have the automated, I did the emails, now what?

Nick:	Now, so what I would do for my clients that I'm doing like an influencer outreach for, I would use Yesware. Are you familiar with Yesware?

Jamie:	Yeah, but tell everybody else.

Nick:	Alright, perfect. Yeah, so Yesware is this like awesome, awesome tool that helps also automate your mail merges and - but what I like about the Yesware compared to like MailChimp is that it looks like it actually sends from your actual email address. It's not like, you know, looking like it has all the tags from like AWeber and all that good stuff. It looks -

[Crosstalk]

Nick:	Yeah, there's a little Unsubscribe subtly on the bottom. But actually, the way it's set up, it sends from your inbox. So it sends individual emails, but you can mail merge them, and automate them, and make them look really good.

	So if I'm grabbing, let's say for in this case, their channel name, their video, and their video link, and all that good stuff, I'll use Yesware to do a mail blast to all those people. And I'll set up very similar to how you would use MailChimp and AWeber, like I would set up like if they don't reply back, a follow-up message that will send out, and it will just completely automate that process.

	So what's cool with that is now I've got all these emails, now I set up the blast, I don't have to do any extra effort because I have the template there, it pulls the information that I pulled, like the channel name, and I'll craft the message that'll feel personalized that pulls all those elements that I scraped, and I just hit go, and it'll send out all those messages for me. And all I literally have to do is wait for them to reply back and say like, "Yeah, I'm interested. Send me more information." 

And if they reply back, they're not gonna get that second message. If they don't reply back in like three or four business days, a simple message is gonna say, "Hey, I just wanna make sure you got my email. Really interested in doing work together and maybe having you do a product market review for my product." 

	But what's even cooler with that is that most people who wanna advertise on YouTube, they rely too heavily on YouTube's targeting metrics. So like demographic targeting and interest targeting is the main ones, right? But again, you gotta think about your buyer. You gotta think about their mindset. You gotta figure out how you growth hack that. 

	So the way you do that is if let's say I'm your - let's say for you, right? You would probably wanna have - I would be your key person if I wanted to enroll into your programs, Jamie. So if you were putting an ad, you would target business owners? interests and all these different things, but at that time I'm on YouTube, maybe I'm not in the mindset of your services. Maybe I just wanna look at sport highlights and maybe I wanna just watch a cooking video. I'm not in the mindset of like, "I actually really wanna get trained and coached for my business."

	But if I'm looking at videos that are revolving around coaching, marketing myself, these things, that thing, and there's those pre-rolls, and oftentimes you see the random Geico commercials that are coming up. You're like, "Okay, I have no idea." But that's the feeling that people would get if your ad was on like a cat video, right?

Jamie:	Yeah. I was gonna do that. I thought that would be - no, I'm kidding. But you see Tai Lopez on like every single entrepreneur video anywhere. I'm like, "Oh, there's Tai Lopez again." He's in front of every video ever.

Nick:	But there's a way to do that. So the way you do that with - it's kinda killing two birds with one stone with that [inaudible] [00:45:33] developed. It pulls the URL of every one of those videos. So if I'm targeting them as an influencer, I'm also targeting their videos and their channel. So I could set up an advertisement that has all the URLs to have my ad only specific on those videos.

Jamie:	You can import to that, specifically.

Nick:	Yep. Only to those -

Jamie:	Those specific keywords.

Nick:	Yep. So what's cool - I like to call it the hijacking method, right? I'm essentially gonna be hijacking that pre-ad space of people that I know if they're watching a marketing tutorial, I want my ad to say pretty much like, "Hey, why are you watching marketing tutorials? The best way for you to really learn how to do this is by checking out this."

	Tai Lopez does do a really good job with kinda like his placements because they're relevant, so relevant - he's like a sniper with it. But the thing is, the only way you can do that is you need the max quantity, and that's where the time suck comes in. Oftentimes what people used to do is people used to literally have it where they were copy and pasting all these URLs into their portal, so by the time you got to like the 100th URL, you're like, "Alright, this is not worth it. I?m just gonna go back to the demographic targeting."

Jamie:	Well, so let me ask you this then too, because I know we have to start wrapping up in a second, but how does a small business owner determine what the best marketing tactic would be? Even if they have a quiz there, it's like do I do YouTube ads? Do I do direct outreach on LinkedIn? Do I do Facebook ads? Do I do - there's a thousand things that they could be doing, and they're all separate learning curves, usually.

Nick:	Yes, yes, totally, totally. So the best thing for you really to think about is if you have a market, you gotta really figure out what the mean portal they're on, right? You see it probably all the time, too. People like to do the be everywhere approach, where -

[Crosstalk]

Nick:	"I'm gonna be on Snapchat. I'm gonna be on Facebook. I'm gonna be on all these things." But what happens is everyone becomes half baked. It doesn't look good.

	I like to say instead of being everywhere, just beware. Just beware 80 percent of your market is actively on - so if they're actively on Pinterest, just only focus on Pinterest. Kick butt on Pinterest. And the only way you really understand that, it kinda goes back into really kinda just asking a little bit, right? And even if you use Typeform, like for that Academy of Responsible Tattooing, they thought a lot of the audience was on Twitter. One of the questions that we asked, we used like their little icons of ratings, be like, "Hey, how often are you on Twitter? How often are you on Facebook? Do you watch YouTube tutorials on tattooing?" Because they didn't think people did that. 

And they found, just by those quick little answers and using the cute little icons, they're like, "Holy crap, no one really uses Twitter, and we thought everyone used Twitter." You know, now they saw like actually, most of our audience watches, you know, how to, like, the DIY kinda tattoo artists kind of - and they're like, "Wow, this is a big problem. We need to really be on here because all the other channels that we thought we were on is actually they're on this."

	So I would say if you really wanna understand where you wanna put most of your focus, just simply ask, but do it in a really interactive way that you just kinda like throw that quick little zinger of like, "Hey, how often are you on this?" And if you start seeing that your audience is mainly on one platform, just go balls to the wall and make it work and just focus on that platform.

Jamie:	Well, I think what comes up is beginner's mind, right? We all think we know our - we're like, "Oh, but I know them really - they're like me, and I know that I would do this,"and people are like, "Oh, God." You really need to make sure you're actually asking and finding out from data, and let that tell you where to go, instead of being like, "I think it's here," because half the time we're freakin wrong. We think we're smarter than we technically are, most of the time. 

I mean, usually data will prove us wrong. We can have assumptions, but we'll be like scientists. Instead of just going, "Oh, I'm gonna go on YouTube because I think people are on YouTube watching this kinda stuff in general."

Okay, so I know we have to start wrapping up. I know we sort of went through a whole bunch of pieces. But what's one action - I'll give you that. What's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million?

Nick:	I would say one action, figure out the one thing that you do every single day that you take more than one hour thinking of how to organize or doing that you could easily offset and now focus on that hour now having on how you could grow your business and other aspects. And then repeat that step. And when you run into another area, you're like, "I'm spending an hour doing this manually. How do I offset that and have it going further?" 

	Because if you could do that, what's great about it is if you could automate as many things as you can in your life and in your business, it doesn't mean that you have to hire someone. So essentially, if you could have pretty much robots working for you, you essentially are making more money.

Jamie:	Heck yeah, I want robots working for - I'm gonna hire somebody to - I'm gonna hire a robot to ask you questions; therefore, I don't have to do anymore millionaire interviews [inaudible] [00:50:29]

Nick:	You could have like a JibJab kinda thing. Your mouth would just move. 

Jamie:	I know, right? Thank you so much for coming on, Nick. Where can we find more about you and the Second Flight Academy and all that?

Nick:	Totally. So anyone can connect with me on Twitter, @NickKullin. But also if you want to actually meet with me or chat with me, you could go on Second Flight Academy and I have an online booking link there. Or you could just simply use, you know meetme.so/nickkullin, and you could schedule a time to just chat and we could figure out what we could do to growth hack your business.

Jamie:	Okay, be prepared, though. Some of my people are just like, "I wanna talk to Nick!" So - 

Nick:	Well, hey, I'll open up my calendar for you guys. I know Jamie's audience is a pretty cool crew, so I'm willing to talk to them. 

Jamie:	They are awesome. We have to say that because they're amazing. Awesome. Thank you so much, Nick. I hope you have a fantastic day.

Nick:	No, thank you. See ya!

Video Transcription provided by GMR Transcription Services

Tags: Business Growth, Conversion, growth hack, growth hacking strategies, growth hacking strategy, LinkedIn, millionaire interview, Mindset, Nick Kullin, Split Testing, youtube

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews, Sales

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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