Dave Kellogg is a consultant, startup advisor, and founder of Kellblog.com. He built one of the most senior audiences I’ve ever seen, which is why I’ve been wanting to have him on the show for a loooong time (thanks for the intro Tom Wentworth).
Before starting his consulting career in 2019, Dave spent over 30 years in various executive roles at enterprise software companies: CEO at Planful (then Host Analytics), SVP / GM of the $500m Service Cloud business at Salesforce, CEO of MarkLogic, and CMO at Business Objects as they grew from $30M to over $1B in revenues. He’s currently an EIR at Balderton Capital and sits on the board of various tech startups
Throughout all of this, Dave built one of the most respected executive brands in B2B software, which is what we talk about in this episode: the lessons, mistakes, and stories.
Listen on: YouTube, Apple Podcast & Spotify
We discuss:
The story of Kellblog: how it started, how it’s going
The meeting with Ben Horowitz that made Dave never “write for the algorithm” ever again
How to build an audience of very senior executives
Why most thought leadership isn’t
Dave’s definition of branding (as it applies to executive/founder branding)
How he writes: note files, outlines, AI
Lessons on voice using Jack Daniel’s “Postcards from Lynchburg” as an example
How to get the word out in a world of “walled gardens”: blog vs LinkedIn vs X vs newsletter
Why chasing 100k followers would cost him the audience he has (quality vs quantity)
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Show Notes:
Connect with Dave Kellogg:
Dave Kellogg’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelloggdave/
Kellblog: https://www.kellblog.com/
The Metrics Brothers podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-metrics-brothers/id1687214133
Balderton Capital: https://www.balderton.com/
Connect with Finn:
Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier
Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/
Mentioned in the episode:
Obviously Awesome by April Dunford: https://www.aprildunford.com/books
The Men That Don’t Fit In by Robert Service: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58012/the-men-that-dont-fit-in
The GitLab Handbook: https://handbook.gitlab.com/
Planful: https://planful.com/
MarkLogic: https://www.progress.com/marklogic
Pigment: https://www.pigment.com/
Ghost: https://ghost.org/
The Diary of a CEO: https://stevenbartlett.com/doac/
Full Transcript:
Finn Thormeier: Alright, my guest today is Dave Kellogg. Dave is an independent consultant, executive in residence at Balderton Capital and a startup advisor. Before starting his consulting career in 2019, he spent over 30 years in various executive roles at enterprise software companies. Including, but not limited to, CEO at Planful, then called Host Analytics, where they quintupled ARR during his time, SVP and general manager of the 500 million Service Cloud business at Salesforce, CEO of MarkLogic. He also invested in and sits on the board of various tech startups. Dave, thank you so much for taking the time.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, Finn, thanks for having me.
Finn Thormeier: Cool. And maybe a little bit on the why. I mean, beyond all of this that I just mentioned, the reason why I wanted to have you on, Dave, is you built one of the most respected executive brands in B2B software. Your blog, Kellblog, is read and respected by many CEOs and CMOs that I know and, well, Maybe your audience on LinkedIn is not the biggest, though certainly not the smallest with 25,000 followers. It is one of the most senior ones I’ve seen, again, with many notable founders, CEOs, and CMOs engaging with your content regularly, which is what we’re going to be discussing on this podcast. First, I want to talk a little bit about your journey and then we’ll talk a little bit about some lessons, points of views, and thoughts that you have on writing on the internet and building a brand. I believe you started your blog, which I guess was the starting point of your journey of building a brand on the internet when you were CEO at MarkLogic, kind of as a side gig, which must have been then early 2000s. Can you take me back to that and why you started the blog back then?
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, it was early 2000s. I started it because MarkLogic was an XML database company. And one of the industry sectors that needed XML databases was information and media. So I was selling to publishing companies. Is there any good marketer? I’m like, well, we need to talk about the business issues that matter to them. And one of the business issues that matter to them was blogging. So it was like, okay, well, maybe I should start blogging so I can kind of get firsthand experience with this thing my customers are dealing with. And that’s how it started.
Finn Thormeier: That’s the marketer in you. And I believe you told me a story about how the name of Kellblog came to be. I don’t know how early or late that was in the journey. I think it had to do with a partner at Sequoia, but how did the name come to be?
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, so the name, I mean, the funny thing about the name was it was, I tend to be very descriptive. One of my marketing rules is when in doubt, be clear. So like, well, what is this thing? It’s the MarkLogic CEO blog. And I started doing more side essays. And one day it was actually Mike Mike Moritz at Sequoia. I saw him in the hallway there and he’s like, ah, Mr. Kellblog. And I’m like, ah, Kellblog. That might not be a bad name. So I renamed it Kellblog. And then several years later, my wife is French and I lived in France for a while. A French guy came up to me and said, is that homophone an accident? Because Kellblog in French, transliterated, literally means what a blog. And I’m like, no, that’s a total accident. It was named basically because Mike Moritz called me Kellblog one day, and I thought, wow, that’s a good name. I mean, if Mike Moritz calls you that, then I guess you kind of got to go with it.
Finn Thormeier: And then since then, you publish almost 800 blog posts. Was it a linear story of, I don’t know, one blog post every week, or how did it go?
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, so I tend to be inspiration driven. So if you look at my process, and this hasn’t really changed over the 20 years, I keep a folder with one file per idea, and there’s hundreds and hundreds of files in that folder. And when I get one, I accumulate notes over time, right? So I’m talking to a CEO about an issue, I don’t know, called branding. I’ll crack open one of the files that talks about branding, and then I’ll dump some thoughts in there. And over time, you end up with this pretty rich... Collection of topics. So that’s my process. And then the question is always, what gets you over the hump? What takes it from this notes file? And usually there is an event or a conversation where it’s like, okay, I’ve had that conversation one too many times. I need to write a blog post. So there’s almost always a catalyst, but sometimes people think I’m writing about them, and that makes me nervous, frankly.
So I always try to insert several weeks of delay from the catalyst, part It just takes that long to finish the post. And partly, if somehow I write the post quickly, I’ll still schedule it in the future because I don’t want people to think I’m writing about them because I truly am not. Like, no, that file’s eight years old and it’s got eight different notes from eight different conversations. But that’s my process. And for me, content-wise, I’m a sprinter, not a marathoner. So kind of map... You got to map who you are to this. And that’s the way I work. And that’s why I’ve never written a book, just because I think books are for marathoners. And I’m a sprinter. So I just accumulate my notes. And then something hits me. I say, I got to write a blog post. I’ll spend the next six hours on it, right, in mad frenzy. And then stop and then maybe do it again and then post it.
Finn Thormeier: And then I guess during most of your, let’s say, blogging career, if you want to call it that, you had very active operational roles at companies. So I believe when we chatted, you also said that you had to kind of balance the idea that sometimes that can come across to other people, like you’re not actually focused on the main thing, which is running the company.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, this is always a risk. There’s two things there. That was another reason why I had to have the notes file. Because if you’re running a company as your day job and you get an idea, you don’t take six hours to write a post, right? You take five minutes, dump all the thoughts to a file, and then go on with your life. So thanks for the reminder there. In terms of... Look, I think any CEO or CMO who gets a little too active in the community, their board and their coworkers and peers get nervous. Like, hey, is Nick in this, hypothetical Nick, is Nick in this for himself? Is he just out promoting the Nick brand? Or is Nick doing this because it really helps our business in some way? And you have to be careful. And the MarkLogic CEO blog, The Founder Brand. Autonomy’s acquisition of Verity or any various competitor moves. And the kind of pseudo third party hot take didn’t work because I wasn’t a third party. I was in the middle of it all. But I think at Host Analytics slash Planful, I think that did work better because I was writing content for my customers about stuff I saw at customers. That worked.
Finn Thormeier: Right. Do you think that has changed since you started? I mean, Founder Brand is now an established idea and go to market motions and some of the, I mean, I don’t know how, it feels like Elon Musk is tweeting a lot. I don’t follow it too closely, but do you think that has changed?
Dave Kellogg: Look, I think it’s one of these things. So it’s definitely changed. It’s now more acceptable. When I did a lot of this stuff, it was borderline unacceptable. I had board members like, you’ve got to take this post down. And I had a shorter leash, partly because I wasn’t a founder and partly because it was 15 years ago when I was doing some of this stuff. I do think Founder Brand is a big thing right now. I do think founders have pretty long leashes. And my general advice is going to sound stupid, I think, but it’s As long as it works, it’s okay. Everyone’s in favor of success. If you’re pulling it off and you’re building a brand that everyone will be in favor of it, the risky place is if you’re half doing it and it’s not very good or it’s cheesy or painful or embarrassing, Or particularly, I’m going to stick with CMOs because I work with a lot of them. If your sales team thinks you’re off promoting yourself for your next job and not promoting your product to make them sell more, that’s a serious problem.
So I think you have to look at it differently as a Founder CEO versus a CMO because CMOs like to be active in the marketing community. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t see CROs do that. I don’t know many CROs I work with who are accused of spending too much time at CRO conferences. It just doesn’t happen. But for CMOs, it does. I don’t know for CFOs. But that’s the trade-off. When people look at it, they think, oh, Dave’s building his brand and that’s going to help the company, which I think you could argue it did at Planful. Or is Dave out for Dave? And is this a side project? At least I think some of my board members were suspicious at Planful. In the end, I was trying to do both. I was just writing about stuff that interested me, and I happened to be very interested in financial planning, and I happened to be interested in how to build startups.
Finn Thormeier: I guess the one take that I hear when I talk to executives who are not the founder, if your company sells to CFOs and you’re the CMO talking about marketing, you’re not going to help attract the ICP, but it might help with recruiting, right? Because you’re going to build an audience of marketers who might look up to you and see you as an expert that they want to work for.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, I think the best you could do in that situation is get the CFO. I mean, like Ramp has a guy, Dave, I can’t ever pronounce his last name, Wieseneck, who is a former customer who they made, I don’t know his title, evangelist of some sort. And he’s like finance guy talking to finance guys, right? And that works. But you’re correct. Marketing person talking to finance people, not so much. So, and by the way, at Planful, we used our CFO, Ian, a lot in a pre-sales capacity because he was an excellent spokesperson and he was kind of part of the tribe, if you will. He was part of their in-group. And so that’s important. So I hear you on that one. But yeah, a marketer, they’re not going to write a CFO blog. I mean, ironically, I did. I have a lot of CFOs who follow my stuff, but it’s also because I view myself as a kind of closet finance person.
Finn Thormeier: Now to another story involving a very famous VC. You told me when we chatted previously that there’s a story with Ben Horowitz, obviously one of the founders of a16z, that happened, I believe, relatively early in your blogging journey that taught you a big lesson. What happened there?
Dave Kellogg: Relatively early in the history of Andreessen Horowitz, too. The firm was probably only a year or two old at the time of this meeting. So I had left MarkLogic. I was off doing a little bit of independent advising and consulting. And a friend of mine was friends with the people partner, Jeff Stump at the time at a16z. And Jeff was like, hey, you should come in and meet Ben. So that’s the context for the story. The other piece of context is as a blogger, I’m always wrestling with, should I write only well thought out deep posts about passionate topics, which is my general process, or should I try and work for the algorithm? And if the algorithm wants post of this length at this frequency, should I do that? And of course, these two tracks collided one day, where the day before I met Ben Horowitz, I had written kind of a half-hearted post on open source and how open source can press markets. And of course, two things happen.
So I get to the meeting, they open the door to his office, I walk in, I trip on the carpet, I almost fall. So this is not a great start to a meeting, right? I’m six inches from going down. I get up, I pull myself over, sit down. I think it was a couch. And the first thing he wants to talk about is this blog post, which at one level makes perfect sense, right? If you do the quick homework on me and he’s drilling me on this post, And the whole time I’m sitting there just saying, God damn it, I’m never going to write another post for the algorithm again, right? Because this, of course, would be the post, one of the least well-thought-out posts I’ve ever written. And this is the one I find myself in Ben Horowitz’s office having to defend. And literally, at times, I’m just like, could you please read any of the 300 other posts? Like, ask me about any other post. But of course, I got drilled in on that one. So yeah, that taught me a big lesson, which... I’ve had stories like that happen in other companies, other contexts, but like every time I try to put out a bad piece of work, it’s the one that somehow gets pulled out of the pile and examined.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah. So the lesson here is don’t play to the algorithm and never publish anything that’s below your own bar or below what you can fully stand behind.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah. It’s actually interesting because in hindsight, I actually... I think the post was more right than I gave it credit for in that moment, but I wasn’t ready to defend it. I didn’t want to defend it because to me it was a throwaway post. When I went back and looked at it, I was like, no, this post wasn’t bad. I should have defended it harder. But I think the moral I took from it. Let’s try and generalize it. For Dave Kellogg, if you’re going to be known as somebody who writes deep, thoughtful posts, don’t ever post a throwaway one. Or if it is, make it clear it’s a throwaway. Just a quick post to say I’m speaking at this conference next week. This relates to my whole thing of branding, which is staying in character. If your character is Dave Kellogg, deep thinker, long poster, ready to debate any posts, don’t go work for the algorithm and compromise that.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah. And this comes back to the core of what I think is the most interesting thing about you, which is you have built not the biggest audience, but a very sizable audience of very, very senior people. And I think this directly ties into how you were able to achieve that. Obviously, with the one notable exception of that blog post that then Ben Horowitz picked out. But it’s the point that you do publish very thought out, lengthy. It’s insightful things that naturally might detract a very surface level audience who’s looking for a quick takeaway, but it attracts an audience of more senior people who are looking for deep insights.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, I mean, that’s where we’ve ended up. I can’t say it was a mindful strategy at the beginning, right? But the result of having my post be long, thoughtful, deep, operational is I have a stunning number of founders who read and senior executives, but even just founders alone. I’m always shocked how many people read the blog or at least the bare minimum who are exposed to some of the more popular posts.
Finn Thormeier: Now, you said that most thought leadership isn’t. Why is that?
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, I think a lot of marketers and companies, when they try to do thought leadership, they just, the question really is that the acid test is, is your thought leadership actually thought leading or is it just recycled consensus? Because it’s pretty easy. If I’m a product marketing person and you want a topical white paper on topic, it’s not hard to gin up a white paper that just repackages the consensus. It’s pretty easy.
Finn Thormeier: Especially now with AI.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, but it’s even easier. And And, you know, the good news about that is you’re not going to get ripped apart, right? It’s safe in some sense. Now, maybe because it’s so easy with AI, you are going to get accused of AI slop, which is a different issue. But I don’t know. It’s just not thought leadership, right? If it’s not novel or interesting, it’s not thought leadership. It’s just repackaged consensus.
Finn Thormeier: One of the interesting things you sent me as we were prepping this episode is you said if no intelligent person could disagree, it probably isn’t thought leadership.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, that’s another good test. Look, I have another test. I’ll give you all the tests I have. That’s one. If nobody can disagree with it, it’s too safe. It’s not thought leadership. If you’re being a thought leader, you’re going to take an unsafe position, right? If it’s safe, then it’s not thought leadership. The other one was back in the early days of Gartner, the research firm. They used to put probabilities on notes. Every note had a probability. So you’d have to make a prediction and say probability equals zero point blah. And the rule in Gartner was if you’re going to say 0.5, don’t write the note. And I thought it was a perfect kind of.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah. And then your other test was start with what do I actually believe, not what should I post?
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, I think that’s an important test. I mean, I have two other tests there. I mean, one is always start with a blank sheet of paper. Particularly for presentations, when people open up another presentation and start there, that’s like the road to hell. Particularly board slides. If you’re going to present to the board and you start by opening an analyst deck and renaming slides, I guarantee you that board session is not going to go well. Or the classic product marketing mistake is you take an analyst tour deck and turn it into sales training, it’s not going to go well. Start with a blank, start with the audience, start with what you want to say, and then go find stuff to go fill it in. Most people get that backwards in the name of efficiency. So same thing on thought leadership. It starts with a point of view. What do I believe? Not what do people want to hear? Because, again, if you start in the wrong place, if you start with what should I post, you’re never going to make anything interesting, right? You’ve got to start with, hey, what do we believe? Ideally, what do we believe that’s maybe novel that people aren’t saying yet? Or you’re going to create something for the algorithm like the one, the blog post that Ben Horowitz picked out.
Finn Thormeier: I think when you say start with a blank, to me, that’s because it forces you to actually think about what you want to say and how you want to say it and how to structure it, which... I’m curious to hear your take because I think that to me is one of the biggest traps with AI. I think there’s immense benefits with AI. I think there’s great use cases for using AI as a thought partner, as a writing partner, etc. But whenever I start with a draft from AI, it’s pretty decent, but you always never end up completely rewriting it because it’s quite good. But if you start with a blank page, you really have to think from scratch, what do I actually want to say and how?
Dave Kellogg: So I think two things. When I say, let me just unpack what I mean by start with a blank.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah.
Dave Kellogg: Because what I mean, literally I’m thinking of PowerPoint, like do I start, do I open a blank presentation or do I open one of my existing slide desks if I need to make a deck?
Finn Thormeier: Yeah.
Dave Kellogg: My answer is always start with a blank. The reason is really if you unpack it, You should be starting with the audience. All marketers, like start with the audience. Who are we talking to? And therefore, what do we want to say? And the issue is when you open another deck, it may not have the same audience. That’s the actual problem. The reason the analyst tour deck fails in front of the board is you wrote it for analysts. So if you’re speaking to the board, don’t open the analyst deck. So I think ultimately it comes back to audience. I would say on the AI writing process, I’ll just tell you what I like to do when I use AI. I mean, first, you know I have all these notes, right? So literally speaking, I can’t start with a blank because I’ve got a file full of notes. I will tend to say, read the notes file. And then I say, I like outlines. Call me old school.
But I’d say, I want to build an outline. So let’s build an outline for this topic. And then I go back and forth at the outline where I can say, I move this here, move this there, cut that. And then once I have the outline, then I might say, try to generate an article. But I like... I like using it. Basically, I like the outline to really be me. AI can help me build it, but I don’t want to just say, hey, AI, go generate an outline for an article on branding. Who knows what it’s going to come up with? I know what I want to say. Stay in character. Be consistent. It’s about how you look and how you sound. It’s about trust. Those are the points. I want to feed it that and then say, okay, take a crack at it.
Finn Thormeier: Now that brings me to the next question, which is the second part of executive or founder brand is obviously brand. How do you define brand? How should people think about what branding is?
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, so branding, just a couple random thoughts on it. One, branding, that’s what it means, right? Like this is triple bar ranch brand cow. That’s where it all started. So you’re stamping your mark on something generic to say, no, this is not just branding. Gelatin, this is Jell-O brand gelatin, or Band-Aid brand, Band-Aids, or Kleenex brand tissue, right? That’s the whole idea. And then people figured out that brands became about trust, ultimately. You went from that pretty basic notion of burning something on to a generic cow to this notion of, well, wait a minute, what does it mean when Triple Bar is branded on it? Or what does it mean when Jack Daniel’s is branded on it? And people realize that brands had meaning. And the meaning to me came to be all about trust. And I always say, if I had to pick one word for branding, it would be trust. And it’s trust that you will look like you. So will Jack Daniel’s communication look like Jack Daniel’s?
That you will sound like you? Will your voice be, oh, that doesn’t sound like Dave. That doesn’t sound like Jack Daniel’s. That doesn’t sound like Nike. Will you look like you? Will you sound like you? Will you act like you? And of course, most important, will you act like you? Well, you’re not treating me like a Nordstrom’s retail rep should. You’re treating me badly. I expect to be treated a certain way at Nordstrom or whatever consumer product you’d like, Four Seasons, high-end hotels. So to me, brand ultimately is about trust. Will you look like you? Will you sound like you? Will you act like you? For food, will you taste like you? For Public Benefit Corps and B Corps, will you source like you? If you’re all about healthy sourcing and fair trade sourcing, are you actually sourcing that way? Are you building your shoes in Indonesia and your sweatshops? So it’s will you be you?
Finn Thormeier: Four, I’m curious, when we apply that to companies, obviously a company doesn’t yet exist. So you need to define this. You need to decide, I want my company to be like that and feel like that and look like that and sound like that and have these values because it’s a completely new entity. It’s a new construct. When it’s a founder brand or an executive brand, you’re starting from something existing, which is you. You’re a person that actually exists in the world who acts in a certain way, who has certain existing values, who speaks in a certain way. Do you think for you specifically, your path to kind of finding your voice and your style and what people know and recognize you for and the Kellblog, is this a deliberate process where you need to sit down or define these things? Or is it just... Allowing yourself to be the way that you are and that’s what your brand is going to be.
Dave Kellogg: So to me, because I want to answer in two contexts. One is a former CEO of two companies and one is a blogger. As a blogger to me, you’re a one man shop. So it’s. It’s easier, right? It’s just, Dave, you be you. And the Horowitz lesson is that here’s what happens if you don’t, right? I got one word wrong on a LinkedIn poll the other day, and I had like three friends smash me on it. So it’s like, okay, I’ve built this audience. They have certain expectations. I said, rather than saying what are the top goals for your major events, I said what should be. And it wasn’t a mistake. It was stupid. But I had literally three people like, Dave, you shouldn’t say should be. That was dumb.
Finn Thormeier: Wow.
Dave Kellogg: And so that’s my audience and that’s who follows me, right? It’s a reflection of me and they expect better from me. So I think largely you be you works for a one-person shop. It’s much harder when you’re starting a company, right? And companies use various mechanisms to try and kind of You can do them, they’re fine. But in the end, they all sound the same, right? There’s been enough work on that. So other companies did something that I thought I invented when I was at Planful, which is operating principles. Because I kind of realized the values, we had them, but they weren’t different. But we made rules. Like one of them at Host was a case of tie, I win. Or when in doubt, motor on. Those were our operating principles because I wanted it to be Applicable to your day to day life at the company. Like you get to motor on. If you give somebody 24 hours notice and say, if I don’t get approval, I’m motoring on, then you get to motor on and then you won’t get in trouble.
Right? So that was an operating principle. A lot of companies do that. The thing I’ve seen more lately, like I stumbled into the GitLab handbook for the first time somehow two days ago, and I’m like, oh my God, they took operating principles and encoded it into an entire handbook, and it’s really good. So to me, that’s the continuum of... How do you imprint a founder on their organization? It can either just be osmosis, a strong founder out there. It could be values which only work. It could be operating principles which really do work in my opinion, or you can take it all the way up to the handbook level. If you’ve never looked at it, go look at the GitLab handbook. It’s an impressive work.
Finn Thormeier: On voice, you sent me examples of Jack Daniel’s ads. Which I’m going to pull up. I’ve never seen these. And I found it really fun and interesting to look through them. And you sent them as an example of having a distinct voice and what a distinct voice is. Let me just share my screen here.
Dave Kellogg: So the series he’s bringing up is called Postcards from Lynchburg. And it was, I don’t know, a multi-decade campaign run by Jack Daniel’s. It was actually taught to me in a marketing class. I can’t remember which one, business school or somewhere else. I can’t remember. But yeah, that first line of copy right there, I love it. Bateman, Burns, and Branch sound like Philadelphia lawyers. Actually, they’re Rickers from Tennessee. There aren’t many men who can take a stack of hard made You can’t just go read the postcards from Lynchburg if you want to know what voice sounds like. Because once again, I could pull that, right? In 1955, a young Jack Bateman learned about how to make Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey at Lantwood’s knee. That he applied what he learned from Mr. Wood for the next 33 years. If you just look at that copy and pull it out, you’re going to know who’s talking. So the postcards from Lynchburg, the entire concept of the ad, and again, they did these over the course of decades.
Are you going to look like you? They all look the same. Are you going to sound like you? They all sound the same. Are you going to act like you? You don’t want to act in an ad, but to the extent they talk about action, the answer is yes. And by the way, for marketers, there’s no adjectives here. They don’t use adjectives. Adjectives to describe our whiskey is made the old-fashioned way. Because most marketers try to be descriptive and it almost always fails. The way you know you’re trying to be descriptive is by loading up on adjectives. Think about menus. This is the free-range, organic, pasture-raised, eco-friendly chicken. There’s eight adjectives jammed in front of it. That’s the wrong way to do it. The right way to do it is through the storytelling itself. By the way, storytelling is super popular. So these ads, if you want to know about branding, look at postcards from Lynchburg.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah, so much storytelling and such a condensed, I mean, it’s so little text.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, it’s a postcard, right? Like they don’t have many words to work with, but they do it incredibly well. So if you want to, yeah, I just think it’s one of the things, staying in character, right? That series stayed in character for decades and Nondescriptive writing, storytelling with nondescriptive writing. They’re not describing the product with adjectives. In this case, they’re talking about the guys who make the product.
Finn Thormeier: That obviously then also comes down to consistency. You never yourself boxed yourself in and said, you’re going to be this person or persona. But eventually, I think people gave you a label. They understood who you are and your voice. First time someone called you the SaaS guy, you got upset?
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, surprised more than anything. I’m a SaaS guy, I’m a software guy. Yeah, it’s very interesting. Look, as a marketer, you have to accept it, which is... Positioning exists in the mind of the customer, right? That’s the first rule. So you are what the market perceives you to be. And most good marketers, because you’re rarely starting from scratch, once in a while you start a company and you are, but most of the time you’re starting with an existing firm or existing product. So half the brilliance of marketing is distilling the essence and just saying, okay, what is this thing really? And then kind of doubling down on the good qualities of it. So, yeah, I never made an active effort to position myself. I think it would have been really hard, by the way, because it’s almost like some weird music genre that includes a lot of marketing and a lot of finance. Like, tell me, if I set out to write a blog that was read by as many CFOs as CMOs, like, no, that’s never going to happen, right?
But somehow I did it because of the nature of the subject I write for, that the CFOs tend to want to learn about marketing, and conversely, or I get the quantitative CMOs, and you get a lot of founders. So... But I think the short answer is, yeah, I never made a mindful, Dave, let’s go position yourself as blah. I just did what I wanted to do and then let the market position me. And when I saw a clear positioning coming out as like SaaS guy, I’m like, okay, I can roll with that. And then when SaaS started to be a four-letter word, right? Let’s say, uh-oh, I better un-be the SaaS guy because I don’t want to be a relic here. So I’m going to need to kind of reposition. So I talk, I’m back full circle just saying I’m an enterprise software person because that’s what I’ve always done.
Finn Thormeier: To me personally, that is one of the more interesting and exciting things about the difference between a founder or executive brand relative to a company brand, which is, I think, Traditionally, when you’re branding a company, you want something simple, distilled. There should be one audience, one persona. You should stand for one thing, one mission. But when it comes to people, as you said, the common denominator is you. And you tend to be interested both in marketing and in finance topic. If you sat down with a strategist, they probably would have told you, you need to pick one. Pick a line.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, for sure.
Finn Thormeier: But you didn’t. And that’s what makes you interesting. That’s part of what makes you interesting.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, I agree with that. That it’s not like positioning a product. Because in a product, everything you said is true, right? You’ve got to have a category. Pick one. What’s the one word you stand for? All that logic works. I think for founders, it should be much more of an essence distillation process. Even for products, I feel that. But for people, it’s definitely that. Let’s go figure out your essence. Because you’re not going to be able to pretend to be somebody else. It’s just too hard. So let’s go distill your essence. Let’s find out how to communicate that and position that. But if you’re interested in both marketing and finance, that’s fine. And in the end, that’s what’s going to make you different. But no, you’re not going to get confused with Seth Godin, right?
Finn Thormeier: Yeah.
Dave Kellogg: You know, I didn’t tell you this story yet, but when I first read the book, Obviously Awesome by April Dunford, I was like, damn, this is a good book. And it is. And I was like, damn, you should have wrote it. And I could have, right? Like, I agree with 90% of it. And I could have, you know, it’s a great book. She did a great job.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah.
Dave Kellogg: We actually have relatively similar backgrounds. And then I thought about it and I was like, do I want to position myself as the positioning person? And like, what does it mean to be April Dunford? And it means you do a lot of positioning workshops. That’s what it means. And that’s if you read, that’s why she created the book. It was marketing for her positioning workshops at work. And I actually participated in one of her workshops. And I was like, oh man, I couldn’t do this. I mean, even more respect for her because I couldn’t sit all day in back-to-back positioning workshops. So to me, it all comes down to pick what you want to be, but then be that. And she correctly, for her, picked positioning, has built a great career as the positioning expert. But for me, that would have been a terrible outcome. I like positioning, but not that much.
Finn Thormeier: I’ll throw out two more quotes that you sent me. One is from you, another one is from a poem. You said, and this is on consistency, individual posts come and go, a body of work accumulates. Eventually, readers know how you think, not just what you wrote this week.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, true. I said that. Hey, pretty good.
Finn Thormeier: You don’t have to react to it, but I think that’s almost the goal. To me, this means less over-optimizing for any particular post. Obviously, you want to have a high bar and you want to say things that you have conviction in, but it’s the body of work that actually represents you. It’s not the one piece of work, the one post that represents you.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, it’s true. And when you look at posts, the most popular post I ever wrote was one about the difference between a manager, a VP, and a director, which, by the way, has nothing to do with either finance or marketing, right? So see positioning question. So yeah, I do think for my audience, it’s the body of work that represents you. It’s how you think about problems. If you ask people why they read me, I think they’d say, yeah, I like the way Dave thinks about marketing and sales and metrics. But the posts themselves They’re really both. They can have a life of their own. That post has a life of its own. By the way, the second most popular post is Answer the Question, also known as ATFQ, Answer the F***ing Question. Those are the two most popular posts. Again, nothing to do with finance or marketing. Those two posts have, I don’t know, 100x the visibility of some of the other ones. So a post can live and a post can bring you to new audiences, but it is the body of work that represents you.
Finn Thormeier: And I think, again, just I’m throwing out things that it makes me think of, but if you are the mosaic of the things that you publish and it’s the body of work that represents you, this works only if you do what we discussed earlier, which is you don’t play by the algorithm because If you fall into the trap of saying things because you think you should say them or you’re posting things because you think you should post them or you’re copying someone else because they’re doing well and they’re getting engagement and so you just emulate that style, then even though any individual post Or blog posts might do well through that strategy. Over time, you’re almost like assembling a Frankenstein version of yourself that might end up representing the complete opposite of who you actually are and what you want to be represented as.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, I think you’ve got to be really careful on this because, I mean, look, if you want massive audiences, you need to go play the game. So it all depends what your goal is, but you’re not You will have compromised yourself to do that potentially. Maybe you’re just natural and you want to play the game. Awesome. Go play the game. If that’s naturally you, then you have no conflict. But what gets hard is wanting to be both. If you kind of want to be a deep, independent thinker and play the game, because literally when I’ve tried to play the game, I told you the Horowitz story, but there are other examples where I wrote a post I didn’t like, or particularly on LinkedIn I do this, where I use my blog for Only deep, long-thinking posts at this point, prior lessons. But on LinkedIn, I’ll still mess around with throwaway stuff. And that’s where I get burned sometimes, where my audience calls me out. I just think it’s really hard to be both.
And one of the benefits about being older is you get to watch how this plays out over time. And you see people get super famous and then, hey, what happened to that guy? Or you see them surf the fads, but they go both ways. And or I think they burn out. It’s a tough lifestyle to be either an influencer, right, where you’re making all the short videos that take hours to make, or even kind of a pop B2B blogger. I know guys, I won’t name them. But I could just see that when they started to play the game, the quality of their work’s gone down. Because they used to only interview super amazing people, and now they interview anybody because they need a show this week. Or they used to only write about stuff where you could tell they had a really powerful point of view, but I need an article this week or every other day. And if you can manage to do that without degrading your content, then good on you.
Or you can just be a news publication, right? But then where’s your value? So I guess the real point is there’s trade-offs here. And if you’re going to play for the algo, first, the algo’s fickle, right? Like the algorithm, it could change and you’re, you know, Everything you’ve done is wrong. Also, I just think it’s super stressful. I don’t know how you don’t compromise quality. That’s all.
Finn Thormeier: I think Nassim Taleb takes this to the extreme. I think he said something like, anyone who publishes on a regular schedule, just disregard.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, it’s very hard and you can see it. I have friends who write blogs and do podcasts and it starts out awesome always because they’re working through the stuff they really wanted to say. And then, you know, they’re at episode 187 and they’re kind of scratching.
Finn Thormeier: Yep. The other quote, and you don’t necessarily have to comment on it, but I really loved it. You sent it to me that I want to read. It’s an excerpt from the poem, The Men That Don’t Fit In by Robert Service. And it’s a small, small excerpt from the poem. People should read the whole poem, but it says... But they’re always tired of the things that are and they want the strange and new. They say, could I find my proper groove? What a deep mark I could make. So they chop and change and each fresh move is only a fresh mistake.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, I love that. I will react to it. I love that quote. It’s an unusual place to go for branding. Robert Service is a... He was a Scottish poet who lived in the Yukon territory and he wrote kind of ballads about all the colorful characters who lived up at the Yukon with him. And I love the line, so they chop and change and each fresh move is only a fresh mistake because that’s how branding happens a lot, right? They’re tired of the things that are and want the strange and new. That’s why I like the quote, because you get bored of your own brand, right? The number one risk in marketing is you get bored with your own message. And David Ogilvy always said this, you’re not advertising to a standing army, you’re advertising to a parade, right? So marketers act like they put up a billboard and the whole market is just standing there staring at the billboard and therefore you should change it.
And Ogilvie’s metaphor is, no, you put the billboard up and people are walking by it. There’s constantly new people walking by. It’s a parade, right? And the service poem, it’s the same thing, which is... I know you might be bored with your message and you may want to chop and change, but what percent of the market has even heard from us once, let alone multiple times? They probably need to hear it from us five times before it sticks in. The last metaphor I’ll use here is politicians talk about a stump speech. I don’t know if they do this in Europe, but the stump, like you used to go stand on a stump in a park and give your speech. That’s why it’s called a stump speech because you’re standing on a stump and the stump speech It has to be the same, right? Because imagine the days before media, right? You’re literally just going from town to town, standing in the stump, going, I’m Dave Kellogg, and here’s what I stand for.
It has to be the same every time, right? So I think politicians get this. You have to imagine how bored politicians... When I watch a politician speak, my first reaction is, This is probably the 215th time he’s said this. It’s got to be so boring for him, but God bless him for staying on message. And that’s the way it is with your marketing. I don’t care if you’re bored.
Finn Thormeier: I feel like the... The small nuance there is maybe the stump speech. Yes, you have the same core message, but every time you get a little feedback from the audience where you lose them, where some people leave, where you get the cheers from the crowd and you slightly adapt the things, you double down on the things where you got the cheers and you You remove the sentence or you change the sentence where people nodded off or they walked off. Over time, you iterate yourself to something better.
Dave Kellogg: Absolutely true. I got to tell you a funny story that hopefully you’ll like. So true. As a stump speech, you should be improving it every time. It’s the same core message, but you’re improving it. I lived in New York for a couple months this spring, and I went to comedy clubs a few times. And I never realized this, but you can see A-list comedians in a venue with like 150 people. And I’m like, why is this person performing in this teeny venue? And the answer is they’re testing their new material. They’re working it out. And I never understood that. And some of them weren’t that good, by the way.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah.
Dave Kellogg: So you understand why they’re doing it. But yeah, the other inspiration there is improv comedians. Like by the time you see it at HBO, they’ve done it 150 times and they’re tweaking it each time for the laughs, for the delivery, for the timing.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah, I think maybe at this point we’re overdue in this one, but I think there is a Seth Godin quote where he says, any website you sufficiently A-B test turns into a porn site. Where you could argue for a comedian, the only thing they’re optimizing for is maximizing laughs. And so they might do a joke that they believe in, but if it doesn’t get you laughs, they just delete the joke. Well, if you stand for something, you might have an unpopular message. You don’t want to over optimize for only the thing that gets you cheers because then you are people, then you’re a crowd pleaser, right? You don’t actually stand for something anymore.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, that’s actually an excellent metaphor. We should unpack the analogy more. But yeah, you’re right. The comedian is optimizing for laughs. So if it’s dead, kill it. They’re not primarily a communications vehicle. They’re an entertainment vehicle. So they’re effectively A-B testing what gets laughs. As a vendor or as a person trying to drive a message... You want to work on delivery and timing, yeah, but you’re not optimizing for laughs, you’re optimizing for changing minds, right? And you want to, to the extent you want to measure something, people agreeing with some of your conclusions, right? Do you agree that, you know, I do market research testing agreement on statements and that’s the needle I would try to move. And obviously, look, first rule of marketing, if the audience is asleep, they’re not even going to hear you. This is one of the challenges of marketing. How entertaining do you make marketing? Do you turn it into comedy? Pop, pop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is. You’re just having fun and getting people laughing at your message. Well, there’s lots of examples of great entertainment that was terrible marketing. And on the flip side, if you’re too serious and too deadpan, you know, wow, what a great message, but the whole audience was asleep. Nobody heard it. So it’s a trade-off.
Finn Thormeier: Now on platforms, what’s your take on picking the right platforms? You obviously started out with blogging. You’re also quite active on LinkedIn, which as you said, you partly distribute the blog, but you also post things separate from the blog on LinkedIn. I believe you used to use X or Twitter at some point, but not super active anymore. How do you think about this, especially with what you told me previously about the death of the open web, walled gardens, how to get the world out these days?
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, it’s tricky. I mean, look, in general, the marketing rule is you got to go where your audience is, right? So, you know, I always tell this to vertical enterprise marketers, like, where’s your audience? Like, you might read TechCrunch, but they’re not reading TechCrunch. They’re reading Forestry today or whatever it is if you’re selling to Forestry. So you got to go where the audience is. That applies to platforms, too. So my personal journey on platforms was I started out on Blogger. I moved to WordPress. Basically, what I’m looking for in a platform is something that will last a long time because it’s a high fixed cost and changing. Recently moved to Ghost. I’m pretty happy with it. There are platform functionality questions like does it support newsletters? And that was like super important to me. Ghost has better newsletter support than WordPress did or at least my plugins on WordPress. The newsletter is the answer to the walled garden problem because Twitter wants you to post on Twitter using their editor.
LinkedIn wants you to write a LinkedIn article. Substack wants you to write a Substack and they want you to use Substack as Twitter because they have a feed. The Internet, sadly, is becoming walled gardens. This all started the day people started punishing external links. That was a very bad day. I was very depressed that day because it was like, oh, the open web is dead. LinkedIn now punishes external links. I think they may have backed off on that. Twitter definitely punishes external links. The question is, how do you reach your audience? And my frustration is the word follow doesn’t mean anything anymore. Because if I have 25,000 followers on Twitter, which I do, I can post stuff and 300 people see it. Now I know not all 25,000 are active and alive, but still, more than 300 people should get it. So I’m now at the mercy of the algorithm. Follow doesn’t mean anything. So basically, Twitter gave me no choice but to write for the algorithm.
Well, what’s the first thing I told you I don’t like doing? Writing for the algorithm, right? Therefore, need a new platform. LinkedIn, same problem. Substack does not have that problem, but when I did my eval, I was more comfortable with Ghost than Substack. But to me, first-party audience control right now is the buzzword, which is I can’t rely on the platforms to get my message to my audience. These people said they want to follow me, and you’ve put yourself in the middle using the algorithm to decide what they see. Well, that’s not a good trend if you’re a content producer. So that’s why the world is going to newsletters right now. Everything is becoming a newsletter.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah, it’s a full circle moment. I’m definitely leaning more into my newsletter. I think podcasts are also still in that world. When I go on Spotify, it gives me for the podcast that I follow a chronological feed that just shows me every single episode published by all the people that I subscribe to in chronological order. And I just get to look at the headline and decide whether I want to listen to that or not. And that’s roughly what your LinkedIn feed used to be. It’s roughly what your Twitter feed used to be, right? But they’re so far from that today. It’s gone.
Dave Kellogg: I totally agree with you. Apple Podcasts follow means something. It shows me exactly what Spotify shows you. It’s kind of interesting.
Finn Thormeier: I mean, I believe X or Twitter has a follow feed where you only see content by the people that you follow. I believe it’s not super successful. I wonder if they would introduce that on LinkedIn, if people would even use that. I wonder if that is just a... Is it a matter of people actually truly believe, prefer the algorithmic feed despite what they say? Or it’s just a matter of, well, if you put, you know, I don’t know, a cheeseburger right next to broccoli and you offer both to them, to a person at the same time, it’s just much harder to resist the cheeseburger. And so if you have both of these options so present, people were going to pick the one that’s more dopamine optimized, let’s say.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, I think it’s an excellent question. So yes, they have a for you feed and they have a following feed. The following feed still has boosting, right? But I do believe it’s not going to show you people you don’t follow, but they still have to decide what order to put things in. So there’s some boosting going on there, but the... The For You feed is boosted all over the place. We’ll show you people you’re not following, etc. And I agree with you on the marshmallow test kind of thing. And I failed the marshmallow test on this one. I’ll hit the For You feed. But the issue is, it’s fascinating. It is the marshmallow. I’ll eat the marshmallow and take the For You feed, but it leaves me feeling sick when I’m done. Same thing. It charges the dopamine, but I feel like I had information junk food, so then I try to hit the following link, but it’s there. I like podcasts better. You made me realize that podcasts worked the way news feeds used to work when they were back in RSS feeds, we used to call them. I think humans failed the dopamine test, which is one reason why social media companies are so big, because we like it.
Finn Thormeier: Now, you used to run a podcast. It was called The Metrics Brothers Podcast for a while, and then you stopped. Any lessons or takeaways there for people who might be thinking about
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, so I enjoyed podcasting. It’s why I have the fancy mic. I did a podcast called The Metrics Brothers with Ray Rike, who’s another SaaS Metrics person. I liked it for me, by the way, from a branding point of view. I like doing it because Because it was topical, right? It wasn’t the Dave Kellogg podcast or the Dave and Ray podcast. It was like, no, we’re going to talk about metrics. Because Kellblog is kind of me, right? It’s my name tied up in it. So it’s all the stuff I’m interested in. The Metrics Brothers was like, no, this is Dave and Ray and we’re going to talk about metrics. And so I like the topical focus of it. I think that brought value. We didn’t interview people. That was an unusual format. Because there were two of us and we wanted to go for sub-30 minute episodes, we figured we didn’t need guests. So we just talk, argued, bantered about topics. Like, you know, what’s the CAC ratio and how do you measure it?
Yeah, we could talk about that for half an hour. Or what’s the remaining performance obligation. It turns out there’s, once again, around 25,000 people was the audience size. There’s about 25,000 people who want to hear that. So we ran it. We stopped after 122 episodes. We haven’t killed it. We just put it on hold. Because I’m not sure what I want to do with it. We built a nice size audience. We had good engagements. We were top 20 to top 50 in Apple podcast management, which blew me away for such an incredibly tight topic to get that high in the management category because their category granularity is Lessons we learned from it. I mean, it’s a lot of work. Don’t have to tell you that. And that was always the question to me. The blog was suffering. I felt I had to make a choice. Ray had his reasons, but from my side, Kellblog posts had fallen in half. I was stuck on WordPress and hadn’t migrated off.
I had made no progress to moving to a newsletter. Because once again, it’s almost the dopamine hit of, oh, there’s an episode this week because we’re doing weekly episodes. So there’s always 48 hours of work on an episode. And it’s always interesting topics because we don’t pick them unless we’re interested. So it kept me very up on current affairs. I like that. But the opportunity cost was really high. So I don’t know if I have any big lessons from it, but it started to feel like work and it started out fun. Like in the beginning was just me and Ray kind of shooting the shit about metrics. And that was relatively easy and fun. But once again, you get 122 episodes deep and you’re kind of out of all the low hanging fruit. Any topic you can just talk about extemporaneously is gone. So now you’re having to do homework. So But I do think we reach different people. I get a lot of feedback on it. We had good metrics. I don’t know. I don’t have any, I think it’s a good brand building tool for a company. If I were in a company, I’d run one.
Finn Thormeier: Yes. I wonder if it also had to do with the fact that you were on a schedule, right? Like your blog, you publish when you want. There might be gaps in between. I wonder if, and it’s harder to do when you do it together with someone, but if there is a way to just say, we don’t have to do one every week. But when we are excited, let’s just hop on a Zoom call, talk about it, and that’s going to be the episode. And maybe that’s sometimes it’s two a week, sometimes there’s none for a month, and then there’s another one, you know?
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, we may do that, by the way, if we go back to doing it, which we may. It’s on hold, as I mentioned. That would be a better format. But it was the weekly grind. The exact thing I didn’t sign up for on the blog, I signed up for on the podcast. And to me, it’s what made the podcast unsustainable. And the other issue was once in a while we were putting out episodes that neither one of us thought were great. And we’re like, okay, we got to decide here because we can either keep the weekly schedule or we can keep the quality bar, but we’re... We’re missing. I have no idea what that’ll do to the metrics, but I think it’s not a bad idea to just do infrequent podcasts. Ultimately, it was the grind that killed it, killed the fun, and it started to hurt the quality. That’s why we stopped it.
Finn Thormeier: I believe this is one of the big takeaways of this episode. It ties into the last point that I want to discuss with you, and then we’ll wrap it up, which is Audience size versus audience quality. I think this is a big running theme here that we have and or that you have and you clearly optimized for audience quality. And I think the interesting thing that that you sent me, there were two interesting things that I would like you to expand on a little bit is that the first one and this comes to the heart of it is instead of asking how many followers do I have to ask who is following me?
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, I think it’s easy to go with the first order metric, which is size. But, you know, I’m trying to reach founders, right? I’m trying to reach founders and high level executives building their careers. So I want, you know, I’ll just pick in a finance department, I want the VP of FP&A, I want the CFO. In a marketing department, I want the CMO, I want the head of demand gen, the head of product marketing. Like those are the people I’m writing for.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah.
Dave Kellogg: And if I get them, I’m happy. And so to me, and also I’m writing for founders, by the way, because a lot of my posts are basically Dear Founder. Like some of them are literally written as letters. So I think the thing I came to realize over time, the thing I learned from experience was, one, if you write for the algo, you can burn yourself out and you can hurt your quality. But if your strategy is to maximize that and make money being an influencer on that, then go do it. But my model was never that. My model was brand building, not direct monetization. So I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with those people. I’m saying they’re just signed up for a different thing. And I think over time, gravity is going to pull them towards worse content and it’s going to pull them to more superficial, more topical, more, right? It’s going to pull you. You can’t fight gravity. My gravity, I chose as I’m going to stick for this audience and therefore I’m going to measure my success.
And I don’t measure it that tightly, but, but. I don’t have a list that says how many CEOs follow me. I just go look at my followers and go, wow, CEO of this, CEO of that. Or I get fan mail. It’s almost always from a founder. Very often, I’ve read your blog for 15 years and never reached out before, but I wanted to tell you this. That’s a pretty common email to get. And I like getting them, by the way. But yeah, so anecdotally, I think I’m getting through to who I want to get through. And I think knowing what you’re doing is important because if I was just trying to be a big SaaS blogger, I’d want to quadruple my followers. But I’m not. I’m trying to write for people, pretty senior executives in enterprise software who care about marketing strategy and finance.
Finn Thormeier: And you also said every time that you did go broad or viral, you’re not loving the comments or engagements that you’re getting.
Dave Kellogg: Oh yeah. The engagements are another big clue that, that I can tell what I’ve hit outside my audience, but I could tell what I’m inside my audience where people are saying, you should have said is not should be like, okay, that that’s a Kellblog reader. I want somebody who’s paying attention and calling me out. And I could tell them outside when I get just very random comments or just bad engagement or ad hominem attacks or whatever it is, I can see like, oh, I’ve stepped outside the zone. And this person probably shouldn’t be reading Kellblog. So that’s another, it’s an interesting anecdotal way to do it is I just look at the engagement and some of the posts that get super viral get pretty strange engagement.
Finn Thormeier: And I think the, to add one more nuance in here, I think if you do end up trying to make the transition to a broader audience, what happens is that the overall makeup of your audience changes. You don’t just add new people. You lose people on the journey. I noticed this with, I don’t know, you probably don’t listen to any of this, but there’s a podcast by Steven Bartlett called Diary of a CEO. It’s a very big podcast. It’s one of the biggest podcasts out there. And I used to listen to it more regularly because I felt like he had very legitimate guests and he would ask very thoughtful, deep questions. And It feels to me that he has been going much broader trying to reach a mass audience and in the pursuit of that the questions and topics that he now covers have been almost like dumbed down to very basic questions like recently he had an entrepreneur on who I look up to and I want to learn from.
And he asked him the most basic questions around what is ARR. And he lost me there, right? Because I’m like, I want to listen to what this person can think about a couple levels deeper, but you’re asking the most surface level questions to reach the big audience. So in the pursuit of going from, let’s say, 25,000 followers that you have right now, To 100,000 followers, you wouldn’t just keep your existing 25,000 followers and add on 75,000 followers. You would lose those 25,000 followers that you currently have because they’re not interested in that more basic, broader, high-level, dumped-down content.
Dave Kellogg: Yeah, there’s a reality slash denial thing here. Like sometimes you’ll meet a startup that their deck will be all enterprise. Oh, we’re focused on enterprises and big companies. And you look at the customer list and it’s all mid-market. And you’re like, okay, now which is it? You’re telling me you want to be enterprise, but you’re actually selling to mid-market. And I guarantee you, over time, you’re going to start catering to your actual customers. So if you want to be enterprise, stop selling mid-market. And by the way, Pigment, as a European startup, did a tremendous job of avoiding that problem. They said they were enterprise, and they only sold to enterprises. And they kind of pick their first 10 customers. The CEO gave a great talk on that. Eléonore Crespo has a good talk on how to pick your first customers. But anyway, your point is you end up catering to who your audience is, not who you wanted it to be. So if you start catering to lower level executives or a broader audience, then you’re going to start writing content.
And over time, you’re going to become that audience, right? Like you cater to who’s following you. And therefore, you have to have some kind of editorial discipline about, no, no, no, this is where I’m going to stay. Look, I’d love to have four times as many followers, but not if it means I have to write kind of pop content. That’s what I call it. So I’ll take my audience size. And the point you made that I actually hadn’t realized is if I did that, you’re right. I could get to 100,000 followers, but I’d probably lose 10 of the 20 today, right? Because there’s just trade-offs.
Finn Thormeier: Yep. All right, Dave, this was awesome. Lots of lessons and insights here. Thank you so much for taking the time. Obviously, if people do want to check you out, I’m going to link Kellblog as well as your LinkedIn and any other things that we discussed here, the poem we discussed, et cetera, in the show notes. Dave, thank you so much for your time.
Dave Kellogg: Thanks, Finn. Thanks for having me.
