David Fallarme is the VP Marketing at Owner.com (Series D, valued at $2.3B), an AI platform for restaurant owners. Before Owner.com, he ran marketing for Asia at HubSpot.
Owner.com built one of the most prominent founder brands and Youtube channels in B2B. They invested $1m into brand when they were still doing only $10m in ARR (now doing over $100m), resulting in 27M impressions last year, with organic generating 20% of pipeline every month.
In this episode, we talk about their approach to Youtube and leveraging the founder brand early.
Listen on: YouTube, Apple Podcast & Spotify
We discuss:
How to crush Youtube as a B2B company
The #1 mistake B2B companies make when they try to leverage Youtube
First order irrational, second order rational: why Owner.com invests so much into brand
How and why Owner.com CEO Adam Guild spent 10 hours every Saturday to produce videos
Variables to success and comparing 2 videos: same title and thumbnail, one with 100k views, the other with 3.4k views (30x less)
Brand strategy -> topics -> script flow
The 5 stages of building an organic motion from scratch
Why a great Youtube editor is worth 10-100x a good one (they pay $120-150k to people straight out of college)
David’s advice for founders who want to build their founder brand
Show Notes:
Connect with David Fallarme:
David Fallarme's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dfallarme/
Owner.com: https://www.owner.com/
Connect with Finn:
Finn's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/
Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/
Mentioned in the episode:
Owner.com’s Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@owner-com/
Ahrefs’ Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AhrefsCom
Owner.com Founder Adam Guild: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamharrisonguild/
In-N-Out video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbx8EG9I0tY
Five Guys video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQnNJF79psk
NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google/
Full Transcript:
Finn Thormeier: My guest today is David Fallarme. David is the VP Marketing at Owner.com, where he joined almost three years ago. Owner.com is a Series C startup valued at a billion dollars. It’s an AI platform for restaurant owners to grow their restaurant. Before Owner.com, David was Marketing Director at ODF, or called On Deck back then, and Head of Marketing for Asia at HubSpot. David, thank you for joining.
David Fallarme: Thank you, Finn. Glad to be here.
Finn Thormeier: Cool. The reason why I wanted to have you on is the way that I think about Marketing these days, it’s a barbell and there’s two sides of the barbell. There’s brand and there’s AI. AI is all about kind of efficiency and automating things and making sure you can do things with a lean team. And then brand, I think, is how do you actually get people to care about your shit? And you guys do well at both. You guys build a very big brand and you guys are very AI forward. So we’re going to talk about both of those things. We’re going to talk about YouTube. We’re going to talk about Founder Brand. So those are the things I want to dive into. But let’s start with the brand part first now. When I talked to Kyle Norton, your CRO, he told me that you guys were investing a million dollars into Brand back when you guys were doing 10 million in revenue, which is an insane amount. Obviously, now you guys are doing way over 10 million in revenue, but Brand is still a very important part of what you guys care about. Talk to me about that philosophy because that is an amount of money relative to revenue that very few companies come even close at.
David Fallarme: Yeah, I think it’s because we just started with the market and how they behave and then work backwards from there. So it wasn’t like, oh yeah, we believe in brand because everybody must invest in brand immediately. Like it’s not dogmatic like that. We serve almost like blue collar target audience. And our category is super crowded. Like there’s a lot of companies that say they’re going to grow restaurant revenue or a platform. You know, there’s all this jargony from their perspective, right? And so what we found is that the way-
Finn Thormeier: Toast is probably the biggest, like-
David Fallarme: Yeah, Toast is one of the bigger ones.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah.
David Fallarme: And they say a lot of the same things that all the other companies say. We’re going to grow your revenue. We’re going to do this and do that. We’re like, tech is going to save your life, you know? But we found that a lot of our ICP makes decisions kind of like through heuristics. It’s like, oh, yeah, that brand makes me feel good or they’re teaching me a lot of stuff. And so I feel more educated by them. I’m just going to trust them more because it’s an ICP that, you know, it’s very real life, handshaking community. You know, the restaurant owner life is very lonely. And so they try to self-educate a lot. And so we started with Market Insight that said, hey, it actually makes sense for you to be the brand that they go to first for education. And once they build up enough trust with you, all the brand stuff that we know kicks in. When they see your ad, they’re more likely to click. When they get in a demo, they’re more likely to just fly through the process because you spent hours and hours with them beforehand. So it wasn’t like this, oh yeah, brand, like, you know, we must invest early. It just, it made rational sense.
Finn Thormeier: I feel like that’s almost even more rare because you almost backed into brand from like it just performs better if we do this. But most companies never get to that because the problem with brand is that it’s harder to measure and it’s a longer payoff period. So if you do not have that strong conviction that this is just important to do because. I feel like it’s almost harder to even back into there because you need to have patience and stick through the low, long period where you don’t see long results. You can’t measure it perfectly. So anything to say to that?
David Fallarme: Yeah. And you’re totally right. And there’s two things I’ll say. One is that Adam, our CEO, is just the total believer in it. So that just removes a lot of the, hey, show me the spreadsheet and what’s the payback. This removes a lot of that. And he’s the one personally making the content. So there’s like skin in the game to make sure it does well. And it’s not like this marketing thing. It’s like, it’s his face, again, blue collar target audience that associates the brand credibility with the founder itself. So that removes a lot of the strategic rigmarole that we have to do. And the other thing is this concept that’s like, I think I read it from a VC a long time ago where it’s called first order irrational, second order rational. So it’s an investment thesis, which is like, if you invest in things that are first order rational, you’re never going to find alpha anywhere. So the things that have the most alpha are the ones where it doesn’t make any sense. You know, most people are going to say, no, this is irrational, but it becomes rational because it’s irrational. So the value is that few people will do this because it’s hard to measure, it’s hard to put on a spreadsheet, but that’s exactly what gives it the value. So it’s just like managing that paradox, I think, is one of the ways to unlock brand.
Finn Thormeier: Right. Now, you guys did, you wrote about on LinkedIn, you guys did 27 million in impressions or views last year, which I assume is mostly YouTube and then Instagram slash Facebook slash Meta. And you said that organic contributes roughly 20% of pipeline on any given month. You talked about the five stages of building an organic pipeline. content motion. Can we talk about those five stages a little bit? Do you still remember those five stages?
David Fallarme: I don’t, but let me see.
Finn Thormeier: So I’ll read them to you and then you riff off of the headline.
David Fallarme: Sure, perfect.
Finn Thormeier: So stage one is trust the process, aka just don’t quit.
David Fallarme: This is just like, I have a New Year’s resolution to lose 10 pounds this year. All you gotta do is just go to the gym. Just keep going to the gym. Kind of don’t think about how much weight you’re losing Until like month two, month three, just prove that you can actually have this repeatable process that you can build on. You know, most people are like, oh, I’m not losing five pounds in January. So I stopped and that’s why New Year’s resolutions are a joke. But same thing in content, like if you can invest in it, you’ve got to build the repeatable process.
Finn Thormeier: I think most people would agree. I think that the thing that stood out to me in that post, you said two quarters, which I think that’s longer than most people are comfortable with.
David Fallarme: Yeah, because you’re going to find that, oh, it actually takes me longer to produce some content than I expected. Or, you know, two quarters is enough time for you to really find the things that are going to challenge your process. Oh, yeah, this new priority is going to come into place. Well, how important really is content that you can make sure it’s resilient enough to withstand all the important priorities that come up? And I’ve just found, you know, one of the things you didn’t mention in my intro is before I was doing marketing consulting. I was doing the fractional thing. And a big part of what I did was standing up these content organic motions. And every single time it’s like, you know, it’s six weeks minimum. Sorry.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah.
David Fallarme: Like six weeks minimum to prove that there’s something, but really two quarters for the full thing to play out.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah.
David Fallarme: So it just takes longer and it’s a longer commitment than you think.
Finn Thormeier: Stage two was you see kind of your first viral spikes, but they’re super random and long space between them.
David Fallarme: And that’s one of the reasons why it’s such a long time is because let’s say you post a couple of times a week in the best case. Most teams are going to post maybe once a week as they build this muscle, right? If they’re lucky. And what I’ve just found is there’s a power law of content and it’s maybe one in 10 will hit, two in 10 will hit. So you really need that amount of time to get enough out for you to see, oh, like this is the thing that people are responding to. And so if you quit too early, you’re not gonna get that spike and you’re not gonna get enough signal.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah. I just looked at your YouTube. I think you just had one, right? Like your last YouTube videos about the In-N-Out $6 billion empire got 100,000 views. And then before that, you have like 3.5K views, 2.5K views, 26K views, 4,000 views. So like you just had one of your outliers, I guess.
David Fallarme: Yeah. Yeah.
Finn Thormeier: Stage three was more operators, better operators.
David Fallarme: So once you have some repeatable process, you have some hint of what the market wants from you, then you can bring on people to amplify the system or people who are better than you at creating content, scripting, people who are better on camera. So now you have like something that’s kind of like embers of a fire, right? And I just want to put more fuel on it.
Finn Thormeier: How do you determine that it’s working? Because obviously one of the notorious things about organic and brand is that it is hard to measure. It is hard to attribute. You can’t perfectly see it. Everything in terms of ROI. So how do you, what are you looking for?
David Fallarme: There’s engagement on the content itself is a signal. All you’re doing at this stage is triangulating, getting signals, qualitative, right? And then around, yeah, probably like the second quarter mark of us really taking content seriously and professionalizing it, it started showing up in more and more sales calls. It’s like, oh yeah, I’ve been watching your videos on YouTube. You know, there was a couple of instances where somebody said they binge watched everything and they’re like ripping the product out of our hands and it was like a one call close. So you start to get hints of that as long as you’re consistent and as long as you start to get a couple of hits that tell you what the market wants to do.
Finn Thormeier: Phase four is the algorithm finally notices.
David Fallarme: Yeah, it makes you work for it. The algorithm is just not going to reward you unless you’re somebody who’s consistently making the deposit into the algorithm. Because otherwise, if you think about it from their perspective, they’re going to show you views, but then you stop posting. They kind of wasted all that attention on you. They want you to keep posting so they get more views and they get more ad revenue. And this is all kind of like the black box, like black magic. I have no idea if this is how it actually works, but this is just a pattern I’ve seen again and again. There’s a level of content velocity that you have to get. You have to push beyond. And then the algorithm is like, oh, this person is taking it seriously. Let me send more impressions their way. And we want this person to keep posting because it looks like they’re getting more and more impressions. They’re getting more and more people to come back to the platform so we can serve ads. So I think there’s something here around getting rewarded by the algorithm. This happened to us when we were posting on Facebook for six months and nothing was happening. Like just zero. And we were doing the same exact posts on Instagram. But then just like something changed at some point where even though we’re just cross posting, it started taking off. We don’t know why. I wonder whether it might be the algorithm.
Finn Thormeier: My first instinct always when people say that’s the algorithm, I’m like, what’s the human psychology behind it? And I wonder when I see a video on YouTube and it does well, I watch it and the next thing I do after that is I check out that person’s channel. And if I see only that video or I see three videos, I’m like, I’m not going to subscribe to that person, even though I like that one video just because like they haven’t put out anything. But if I like that person, I check out their channel and then I see, holy shit, this person has put out 50 similar videos to this and they’re putting a new one out every single week. I’m going to subscribe because I want to see more of that.
David Fallarme: That’s true. That tracks. And that’s definitely my behavior with LinkedIn as well. If I see a good post by someone. Oh, this person’s amazing. Let me like try to understand more from what they know. Then I go to their profile. The last post is like a press release from their company or it’s like four months old. I’m like, oh man, like I was hoping this person would be a new addition to my feed. So that also turns out.
Finn Thormeier: One of my favorite quotes from this post, you had it in the first stage, aka, just don’t quit phase, but I think it also fits here where you quoted MrBeast and he has this thing where he says, just make a hundred videos, then ask me for advice.
David Fallarme: Yeah. It’s the same. It shows up in every, in a lot of domains, I think, where it’s like, just keep doing things. Like Alex Hormozi has this thing where It’s like you have to do more volume than you think. Somebody asked him for advice and he’s like, how often are you posting? Oh yeah, it’s like once a day, once a week. And Hormozi’s like, you have to do like five a day. Don’t even talk to me until...
Finn Thormeier: Just don’t ask Gary Vee. He’ll tell you to do like 379 a day.
David Fallarme: Yeah, I read, I don’t know which book by Russell Brunson, the kind of ClickFunnels guy. And he says the same thing about podcasts. He’s like, do one podcast every single day for a year, then ask me for advice.
Finn Thormeier: Stage five is channel expansion luck. And you talk about Michael Lim came on board.
David Fallarme: Yeah. So once you understand the dynamics of your audience and how they engage with your content and how that looks like on one platform, it’s time to apply some of those things and expand to different platforms. And you’re going to get more lucky. More shots on goal equals more luck equals, you know, faster content flywheel spinning. And at this point, we’re lucky to bring on Michael Lim, who is ex-Hormozi, ex-MrBeast. So we’re just very lucky to have him aboard. And the flywheel is spinning even faster.
Finn Thormeier: Let’s talk about YouTube because you guys crush on YouTube and I think if a B2B brand wants to look at how to do YouTube well, they should check out the Owner.com YouTube channel. Do you think YouTube works for you guys only because you sell SMB and it’s almost at the edge of kind of B2C marketing where you’re talking to restaurant owners or do you think a B2B company is selling into mid-market enterprise?
David Fallarme: I think it can work. I mean, look at Ahrefs, right? I think their YouTube channel is one of the ones I look up to because, yeah, mid-market, not a super cheap product, certainly selling to some enterprise. I think it’s just everybody is on YouTube now.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah.
David Fallarme: And people are not realizing this. And this is such a huge opportunity because people associate YouTube with just consumer or like for kids or music only. But if you look at the usage stats of YouTube, it’s like everybody... Opens YouTube, spends half an hour minimum. Some people spend hours on it. So it’s just a huge opportunity. And I think given that everybody’s on it, that means your target market is on it, which just means it’s an untapped opportunity. And for your topic, probably less crowded if you’re a B2B company, because there’s just not a lot of B2B companies who are doing it well.
Finn Thormeier: So what advice do you have if you’re talking to a head of marketing, VP marketing, they want to approach YouTube, attack YouTube, like what have you learned? What has worked for you guys? How would you approach this channel?
David Fallarme: The most important thing is to realize that it’s not a library of your webinars. So I think this is like the greatest sin you can make as a B2B marketer. It’s like, we have a bunch of content. Let’s like repurpose it and like put some bumpers in the beginning and just to put it on YouTube. Like who is watching these? Like, I can’t imagine that anybody’s watching these. So you have to treat it like, what is the way to succeed natively on YouTube? Like, how do you, you’re not competing with other B2B companies. You’re competing with MrBeast. You’re competing with like movie clips, you know, you’re competing with Joe Rogan podcast or whatever. Like viral thing is happening. So you have to make sure that your content is native to the platform and that if somebody falls down a rabbit hole of something that’s within your category, your thumbnail looks great, the packaging looks great. There’s like a logical reason that somebody would follow you outside of whatever your company is. So Ahrefs, I can just go back to their example. They have a lot of different like fun ways to explain SEO. You know, I’m going to try to rank a website in 24 hours. So that’s way better than here was a webinar we did with some thought leaders about three tips for how to do AI in 2027. Something you would actually watch for fun, I think is one of the baseline expectations you should have when you start on YouTube.
Finn Thormeier: And it seems like kind of length for YouTube, at least for you guys is like 10 to 20 minutes, which is shorter than a webinar, right? Most webinars are like 60 minutes, 45 minutes, but it’s longer than just repurposing your, I don’t know, LinkedIn post and making a video for it.
David Fallarme: And that’s the hard part about YouTube. So I can talk all day about it’s an untapped opportunity and like the strategy behind it. At the end of the day, it’s just a new muscle you have to build. You know, a lot of B2B marketers today, I think came up in the era of content marketing, SEO, let’s write a bunch of blog content, you know, myself, I’m including myself in this list, which is what is the keyword volume or let’s think about, you know, text content for Twitter or for Facebook or for Instagram. Very, very few marketers came up in a world of thinking video first, scripting first, packaging first. I think that’s starting to change now with a lot of Gen Z folks who were like, you know, TikTok first or Instagram first. So it’s just a new muscle that people have to build where you’re thinking about the packaging first, what would get you to click on this thumbnail when you have an option to watch, I don’t know, Spider-Man movie trailer. It’s just a very, very different way of thinking.
Finn Thormeier: But I mean, your content is still educational, right? I mean, let me share my screen here. We can actually look at your YouTube channel. You seen the YouTube channel?
David Fallarme: Yeah.
Finn Thormeier: Cool. It is packaged in a very engaging way. I think people should watch some of the video to get a sense of the feel. There’s B-roll. It’s very tight. It’s clear that you guys scripted this video, not in the sense that it feels robotic, but it’s tight pace. The person isn’t just improv-ing and saying some random things, but it is still... If someone just wants pure entertainment, they’re not going to watch this. This is a restaurant owner that’s like, I want to grow my restaurant. I want to improve my margins.
David Fallarme: Yeah. It’s like edutainment. There’s a bunch of channels that are doing this thing where it’s like business breakdowns or how much money does this person make? So it’s riding that line of education, entertainment, which I think is where to make it valuable for the business. Because you made a good point. The point is not to get 100,000 views for the sake of 100,000 views. There needs to be some kind of connection one or two degrees away from the product or service that you sell. And that is the hard part of YouTube.
Finn Thormeier: And I think it’s also interesting when people look at this, I think they’ll see that you guys are learning lots of things from MrBeast in terms of the thumbnails. There’s a big face on here, right? There’s kind of very little text, but some text before, after, big announcement. You know, you do a lot of the kind of very open face, open eyes, open mouth, which MrBeast does a lot. So I think there’s a lot to learn here from the B2C world I take.
David Fallarme: Thank you, Tom.
Finn Thormeier: And then I think what’s interesting, so tell me about how this, how you guys started, because I believe I saw Kyle talk about that in the beginning. It was just your founder, Adam Guild, who’s this guy in most of the videos. I think spending 10 hours every single Saturday recording one video.
David Fallarme: Yes. So, you know, kudos to him for getting the momentum off the ground. You know, I mentioned like just don’t quit. And the only reason the YouTube channel is in the place where it is. It’s because he did that. If you just keep scrolling down, it’s actually crazy how bad the first videos were.
Finn Thormeier: Well, let’s do that actually, I think.
David Fallarme: It’s insane if you just do the, you know, how we started, how we got here. Two years ago, three years ago. There you go. It’s insane. He doesn’t even do his hair, you know? It’s some of these like iPhone videos. So it’s literally just, okay, let’s keep posting. Let’s get some momentum. Let’s just see what works.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah.
David Fallarme: The lighting is terrible. The microphone doesn’t, you know, his editing was bad, but it was just enough to make sure that we were seeing the signals and traction we can keep building on and building on it. And I think that’s the hard part about YouTube is the iteration cycle is slower than say social or text social or on like blog posts. Like you put something out there, but it takes, yeah, like 10 hours of filming and then there’s the editing and then you have to come up with a thumbnail, you know? So it’s very expensive from a time feedback cycle wise, but eventually you put in enough reps and you start to get a feel for it and everything gets a lot faster.
Finn Thormeier: Before we dive a little bit more into the process there, do you have a sense, I saw, I think it was a podcast by Hormozi some time ago where he talked about their best performing YouTube videos in terms of sales, in terms of people who book the workshop, which is their kind of entry product. And it was not the one with the most views. It was something that has a decent amount of views, but definitely not the most viral post. Do you have a sense of which of the recent videos you guys did the best in terms of?
David Fallarme: Sales? It’s gonna be the same dynamic, I think, across any content channel, which is, you know, you have your pieces that draw people into the ecosystem. So the In-N-Out is an example of that. It’s like, hey, who are these guys, right? But then you have some like mid funnel ones where you’re a little more forward around, hey, there’s like some software that we sell behind this. And then there’s a few that we used to do, but we haven’t done as often, which is like purely about, you know, product updates, feature updates. So it’s the middle ones that do the most lifting. Which is, oh, like there’s a problem that is relevant to me that you solve. So it’s the ones that are talking about SEO strategies, the ones that talk about how to grow your sales using some particular tactic like catering. So when somebody is like problem aware mode and you give them a way to solve that problem without necessarily saying that you must buy a product, those are really effective.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah. It’s also super interesting. I’m just seeing this now. These two videos, this is the genius system behind In-N-Out $6 Billion Empire. This is the genius system behind Five Guys $2 Billion Empires. It’s just, I guess it’s, I mean, it’s the same title basically. It’s both burger chains, but then this one did 3.4K and this one did 100K.
David Fallarme: Yeah.
Finn Thormeier: That’s insane. So talk to me about, so I think the second kind of interesting thing there is it seems like you guys are in the process of taking Adam out of that. You brought in, I think her name is Enga, who’s now kind of the main face of the YouTube channel. What’s the process? How do you guys come up with the topic? What’s the process for writing a script? What makes a good script? What are the highest leverage things, subtasks of creating a YouTube video that have the biggest impact on how it performs?
David Fallarme: You have to have, I think, at least the outlines of a brand strategy before you do any of that stuff. Like, what is the thing we are trying to change in the market? Is it perception? Is it just pure awareness? So you need to have an idea of what you’re trying to accomplish, and YouTube is just one of the vehicles you can use to get there. So one of the things for us is we want to make sure that we are seen as a trusted source of education for restaurant owners, right? And so that gives us some creative balance. Okay, like we talk about things that are relevant to us and not just about every restaurant topic under the sun. Like typically we’ll talk about how to hire labor as an example, just because it’s so far from a product. So it’s generally around growth, making money, you know, systems, hands-off, because those are things that are relevant to our platform. Then from there, again, you’re just trying to re... Restrict the creative variants that you can come up with. So from there is that, okay, we probably want a mix of our portfolio of content bets to have some stuff that’s really top of funnel that gets a lot of attention, like In-N-Out. I think we did like a Boston Market, Chipotle breakdown. So things that people would find in the feed and click on out of curiosity, find that we are a credible source because we spend a lot of time in the scripts to make sure we’re uncovering useful novel insights. Then if we earn a subscription or earn a second view from you, Then you’re going to see us in the feed or you’re going to see us in your next video that’s, oh, there’s something around making more money for my restaurant that is really relevant to me or is top of mind for me. This is like, you know, reducing food costs is very topical right now because of the whole economic situation. How to increase online ordering because people are always trying to get more direct orders that are more profitable. Then inevitably, those are going to come... Into your feed, you’re going to find more and more of us. And for us, it gives us a lot more signal around which types of those content are resonating. So now we start to get this feedback loop around what to build, what types of scripts are working, what types of topics are getting engagement, what are types of content that’s getting reference and sales calls. And that allows us to make sure everything’s more efficient in one way.
Finn Thormeier: I think the fact that Adam spent 10 hours every Saturday also gives you an insight of how much work it takes to create a good YouTube video because obviously the actual video is 10, 20 minutes long, but he spends 10 hours figuring out what should I talk about. Comparing that video, writing the script, probably doing multiple takes of that 10 to 20 minute video. And then there’s the kind of post-production, clipping it, coming up with a thumbnail, all of that, which is, that’s a lot of work compared to using Claude to write a link, to write a blog post.
David Fallarme: So you get that brand strategy, right? Just to make it a bit more concrete. So that is just really important because what I didn’t want to say is, oh yeah, the script takes 45 minutes or two hours. Like you have to have all that in place for the other stuff downstream to be rational. So scripting takes anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours, just depending on how easily it comes out as with all content, right? The recording for that, for a 10, 20 minute video is probably like an hour just because you’re doing multiple stuff. Some stuff doesn’t come out during the recording itself. Sometimes you find that the script is actually weaker in some spots and so you’re doing some live editing. The editing is probably the biggest constraint of this whole thing. So I think the recording and scripting, a lot of it is a solvable problem in a way. But editing is like really great YouTube editors are one of the scarcest resource in all of tech and marketing right now. Because you’re not just competing with other B2B companies. You’re competing with like Ali Abdaal. You’re competing with, you know, really big podcasters. You’re competing with Diary. You’re competing with everybody.
Finn Thormeier: But can’t you pay better if you’re a VC funded startup?
David Fallarme: You could, but sometimes you’ll get outbid depending if they’re really, really good. Like you’d be surprised at the salaries for really great editors. I remember we paid somebody out of college, like 120, 150K for the first job. That’s what they’re making because they’re an extremely good YouTube editor because that’s the part that takes a ton of time.
Finn Thormeier: Interesting. I would not have guessed that.
David Fallarme: Maybe we’re doing something wrong, but this is just what I see.
Finn Thormeier: I mean, you also don’t have the coolness factor as a B2B company generally, right? If someone can go to MrBeast or Hormozi, it’s like, yeah.
David Fallarme: They’re thinking about their long-term portfolio as well.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah, I saw you guys created kind of like this media page, landing page to attract investors. Talent, right? Where you kind of outline, and I think one of the bigger benefits that you guys have is, I mean, one, you guys have a good mission. Two, you guys can maybe actually offer equity, which is really the case for people who work with a creator. Interesting. Why is it so, like, how come? It’s just really surprising to me that editing is a bottleneck.
David Fallarme: The difference between a good editor and a great editor is huge.
Finn Thormeier: Like what? 10x? 100x?
David Fallarme: At least 10x. At least 10x. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s 100x. The reason is the time, right? Because it’s so expensive to make these videos just from a time perspective. It’s not just editing a blog post and saying, hey, can you look at this draft? It’s like, okay, I have to go into Premiere, Final Cut, and do all these things and make sure it’s great. Oh, no, this animation doesn’t look great. Let me go back and redo that. So the cycle time is really long. And if you have somebody whose tastes aren’t aligned with yours or the standards is not good or is like missing things, costs you days, potentially a week. And so having somebody who can think of stuff you wouldn’t have thought of as an editor just takes a ton of time.
Finn Thormeier: What is there in the editing, the highest leverage part? Is it just them choosing the right clips of what to put into the video and what to cut out? Or is it coming up with interesting animations to kind of highlight the point that you’re making?
David Fallarme: A really great editor is going to have feedback for the next script. So I think that’s like the highest thing. Like, hey, I’m noticing in our retention curves, there’s a drop off whenever we do this thing in the script. So next time you do a script, spend less time doing this. So then like this person is affecting now the whole process. The other part is with YouTube, like the first 30 second retention is extremely important. So how good are they at structuring that first part in terms of either transitions or teasing, you know, what’s the biggest parts of the video, thinking about the angles and all this like animations that you could stack in the first 30 seconds. If you watch a MrBeast video, like the first 30 seconds, they’re working extremely hard. It’s like, just notice all the cuts that they’re making, all the animations they’re making, just to keep you past the 30 seconds and compare that to like what a B2B company uploads on YouTube. Again, it’s like welcome to our webinar on like-
Finn Thormeier: Have a logo animation with someone.
David Fallarme: Yeah.
Finn Thormeier: Interesting. Okay. How does it compare to Instagram? I mean, similar to YouTube, obviously, most B2B companies are not on Instagram or meta Facebook, or if they are, it’s kind of like an afterthought. How does it compare to YouTube? How does it work differently to YouTube? What would your advice be for VP marketing to think through? If Instagram even makes sense as a platform for them.
David Fallarme: We started off just using the long form videos on YouTube and clipping them and putting them on Instagram. And then that five steps just kind of start thinking like, just don’t stop. Okay. Like learn what the signals, what the market telling you, double down on what’s working and then scale it up. So it’s that exact same process. And we didn’t want to invest too much in the beginning because we didn’t know what the value of Instagram was. Once we started posting regularly, we saw our views and our engagement start to climb. And again, it started to show up in sales calls. I was watching your Instagram videos or I saw this clip you did on this one topic and we knew that that one topic really popped on Instagram. So it started feeding our conviction that Instagram that there was something. The endpoint you get to is you have separate people managing the platforms just because the algorithms are different. Like the YouTube algorithm behaves a certain way. So does the Instagram. And so does TikTok annoyingly, like the TikTok algorithm and the Instagram algorithm, completely different. And so that’s kind of the end state if you prove that these channels have commercial value to your business, is that you’re going to have somebody managing each platform and thinking about native content for each of them.
Finn Thormeier: Now, Founder Brand is a big channel or maybe vehicle for you guys. Your founder and CEO Adam Guild is very present. I mean, in the YouTube videos, that’s kind of fading out now in the Instagram content, obviously from the clips, LinkedIn. How much of your success or growth do you credit to that decision of Adam back in the day and then the team to build The Founder Brand and use that vehicle?
David Fallarme: Yeah. We’re still going to have Adam come back to the channel. We’re just using Enga as a way to diversify. Because, you know, the cool thing about Enga, she’s an active restaurant owner.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah.
David Fallarme: So she can speak about topics that Adam can’t, as Adam has never owned a restaurant, but Enga runs like an eight location pizzeria. So they’re just an insight that we wouldn’t have. And so it’s a way of us, we’re not thinking of like abandoning Founder Brand. In a way, Enga is like a founder in her own right. And she can speak with the authority of a founder because she is a founder of her own business, right? So in a way, we’re doubling down on Founder Brand in that way. If we could have gotten here without Adam, it would have just been way, way, way harder. Not only in the sense of the investment conviction in the channel, because he’s in there, so that sped up our progress because we just had fewer debates about is this worth it? Like he was totally invested in happening. And the other is just, you know, you can’t replicate the Founder effect on a target audience. We used to do these webinars for our customers and Adam would run them. And the response we would get just because he’s Adam and he’s our CEO and the natural enthusiasm he has and natural passion he has, like the webinars were like incredible and amazing and everybody was so much engaged and happy. When we do like, when I would lead a webinar, it’s like totally not the same, even though I would say the same things because, you know, I designed the slides. So there’s just some intangible magic you get with The Founder Brand that is really, really hard to replicate.
Finn Thormeier: Why did you stop the webinars?
David Fallarme: We still are doing the webinars, just Adam doesn’t have the time to do them himself. Like there were product demos or like, hey, we launched this feature, we do this recap. So we’re bringing them back. That’s one of the reasons we have Enga is so we can do them again with a different level of credibility than were I to run them. But again, it’s just different when it’s The Founder.
Finn Thormeier: From just working with Adam and then seeing him do his thing, what advice do you have for founders who want to build their founder brand?
David Fallarme: You have to commit. That’s the only thing you’ve got to do. You just really have to commit. You have to decide, is this important or not? And if it’s important, then that just means you’ve got to do whatever it takes to be consistent, to make sure that you’re showing up regularly, that you dedicate time to it. There’s a zillion things you have to do as a CEO. There’s always some good reason to not do it. There’s always some good reason to deprioritize it. But then again, is it a priority? If it’s not a priority, just completely stop and outsource it and do something else. So I think it is as binary as that, I think, which simplifies it a lot for folks. Oh, I need to have to build a founder brand, but I also need to do this other thing. If it’s priority two or three, it’s just not going to happen.
Finn Thormeier: Do you agree that you should pick one channel and then only later expand into a different channel?
David Fallarme: Yes.
Finn Thormeier: Because what is a lot of, let’s say, time and investment?
David Fallarme: It really depends on the person.
Finn Thormeier: Let’s say you’re a founder. I know Adam is working crazy hours, but let’s say you’re working 60 hours a week. What do you think is a, if you make it a priority out of your 60 hours a week that you’re working on this company, what do you think is an investment in time that shows that you actually mean it, but obviously you still have other parts of the business to run?
David Fallarme: It depends on the channel, I think. So if your investment strategy is going to change, if it’s YouTube, there’s no way you can do it in one hour a week, especially at the beginning. It probably is closer to 5, 10. Adam would do it on Saturdays, right? So if it’s YouTube, it’s probably that.
Finn Thormeier: So I guess it’s the seventh, right? He has seven work days. I assume he works weekends. So like one seventh of his time is YouTube.
David Fallarme: If it’s YouTube, yeah, in the beginning. He doesn’t do that now because now we have a machine around it. But if it’s like text-based, like Twitter or LinkedIn, I think it actually comes down to your personal... Ability to be prolific. So some people, once they decide that, hey, I’m going to start building Founder Brand, they just have a lot of things to say and they have a low threshold for what they’ll publish. So they’re able to get up and running very quickly because it’s like, I just don’t care about what other people think. I’m going to post what I want. And then they can get up really going and they’re not really thinking about it. But for some people who are maybe a little more gun shy or it’s like the ramp is slower, then it’s probably a few hours a week. For the text-based platforms, for you to be taking that seriously, because you’re brainstorming posts, you’re maybe massaging the content a little bit. I’m helping a few people on our team right now, right on LinkedIn. And it’s probably like three to four hours to get a couple of posts out in the early days. So that’s what I would assume.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah, I do feel, I mean, now that we talk about it, like I do work with a lot of founders on LinkedIn and I talk to a lot of them. I think that the top people like land in that 10 hour per week range easily. Like post every day, five times a week. And then, you know, a lot of them are just super active. They engage, they comment, they are on the platform.
David Fallarme: I think that’s the big variable. It’s like, are you naturally like every, everybody has their own natural, uh, social media channel, right? Like personalities match with different things. Like Adam is just always video first. So like, If he wanted to start writing on LinkedIn, it would actually take him more than 10 hours in the beginning because his brain just doesn’t map to that, whereas video is more natural. So I think it really depends on the channel. It depends on your personal fit. There is such a thing as founder channel fit, I think, when it comes to personal brand.
Finn Thormeier: What have you learned about the right way for the marketing team to support and leverage the founder as they’re building The Founder Brand? Because obviously, on the one hand, you do need their deep involvement and can’t just be like, You know, write something and then you just edit it a little bit, but they also should do everything. So what are the, where, where can you gain leverage and what should stay with the founder?
David Fallarme: I think that in the beginning it’s like productive, helping the founders set up productive guardrails around what types of content you should be creating. Cause one instinct that many people might have in the beginning is, oh, let me just post anything just so I can build the muscle. You could do that, but it’s better if you just constrain the universe of things you post about so you get more productive signals coming out of the thing. So I think that’s a big part of it. And then eventually you want to get to a point where the founder is only doing the things that only they can do. So whether that’s showing up on camera or injecting personal anecdotes into stories, you know, I think that’s the point you should aspire to where it’s purely the un- Outsourceable things that they are doing and everything else runs on the machine.
Finn Thormeier: But I mean, it’s also, I agree with that. And it’s also, if you’re the founder, you hopefully understand your market better than anyone else. You have a very unique point of view. So I think just handing them a script and be like, we, the marketing team decided this is going to be the video. This is going to be the title. This is what you say. And now you just read off the teleprompter because we need your face in the video. I feel like. I mean, MrBeast is heavily involved in deciding what the video is and what the thumbnail is.
David Fallarme: Yeah, I would totally agree with that. The best founders will push back on just read the teleprompter. That’s why I think that in the beginning, the productive guardrails is not marketing imposing guardrails. It’s a two-way conversation around, hey, what are the things we should be talking about? What are the topics that we should use as a beginning set of content pillars? I think this is a two-way conversation. So the marketer comes in with kind of like the product marketing, commercial strategy element to it. How does this connect to other touch points we might have? And the founder comes in with a market view where it’s like, no, no. If we do that, it’s too salesy or this is the core insight that I have from working with our target audience or building this product. So I think that is a way that for most companies is the right way to get started.
Finn Thormeier: I think the guardrails point is such a good point because I think oftentimes what happens for founders, they have their people or channels that they follow. They are competitive. So they’re like, I like the Hormozi thing or I like the MrBeast thing. So it’s almost, they want to get to that level of views when it’s like, no, no, no, you have a very narrow ICP and you want to get them to buy that product. So you shouldn’t make a video about You know, handing 100 Lamborghinis to, you know, giving away 100 Lamborghinis to get 100 million views on your video. You want to find the topic where you address a pain point that your ICP actually has that then ties into the actual product or service that you sell. And you can learn from how they design the thumbnails or how they structure the first 30 seconds of the video. But you will naturally end up with videos that have maybe 2,000 views or 10,000 views. And that might be a great outcome for... This is good. How do you guys use AI? Where do you use AI? What workflows tools have you found? Give you guys leverage.
David Fallarme: It is everywhere. Yeah, it’s completely embedded in our marketing team.
Finn Thormeier: What’s the workflow agent tool? Or let’s say if you had to delete everything, And you can only keep three workflows, play tables, tools. Which three do you keep?
David Fallarme: I think it’s going to depend on the person. So we’ve gotten to a point with our AI adoption where like every team member kind of has their own bespoke system. So I can speak for myself and I think for the team, you know, they’re going to have their own thing. Like we would all delete different things. It’s kind of an unsatisfying answer to your question. I’ll give you, I’ll invert the question as a good product marketer and answer the question I want to answer. Here’s some of my favorite ones. So, and I’ll use one that’s related to our topic and then kind of some general marketing ones. So one is a general like, sorry, one is for the media team, like scanning competitive topics, scanning competitors, And looking at what’s outlier topics for them. And then thinking about how that might apply to our own scripts. So we’ll have agents kind of look at audience competitors, not category competitors. Who else is in our audience? What’s working for them? What are some formats or things that we can take inspiration from? Feed that into us. What are some trends in our restaurant technology or restaurant news industry that might Inform future scripts. And so that goes into some agents and like informs our script writing process. Um, that just saves a lot of time and gives us a lot more higher. The percentage of shots on goal is just way higher as a result. There’s a lot of also like AI reporting that happens. So a lot of, um, our reporting is like proactive. Like it tells us stuff as opposed to, Hey, what was the outlier video this week? Or what was the video retention? It just like puts that into Slack. So that’s huge. Some of the more general ones are way for me to keep in touch with what’s going on in the company and thinking about how that can apply to my role. So I have an agent that scans like all our Slack and Notion related to our product team, Slack and Notion related to our sales and CS and go to market function. And then I have Claude create weekly briefings for those things because it knows who I am, what my top priorities are. And then I put those into NotebookLM and then I have like podcasts based on those things. So I can walk my dog and kind of keep up with what’s going on in our product world and our sales world. And that just allows me to make better decisions so that you catch me on a Monday today. So I listened to them this morning. So I go into my week in context without having to read a lot of stuff. We’re feeling like I’m out of the loop. And these are things like, you know, what, what feature launches are coming up and what the product team is working on and where future launches might be stuck on. Incidents, any issues we’re seeing around retention that might be relevant. So, you know, a lot of the stuff I work on now is like brand and product marketing. So what promises are we making on the front end that maybe we’re not fulfilling totally on the back end. So we need to make sure that there’s, that customer journey is solid, that we’re fulfilling the promises. That we’re doing. So where’s the weaknesses in that funnel? Or if there’s a recurring pain point that’s coming up in sales calls, oh, like people don’t think we have this feature, but we actually totally have this feature, which means I need to do a better job of bringing that earlier in the sales deck, you know, working with our sales directors to make sure that’s in the top track, putting that on the website, making sure it’s in our ads. So it just allows me to have like this ambient awareness of where the weaknesses and limiting steps are in our company from a go-to-market and product perspective.
Finn Thormeier: The turning it into a podcast is a cool thing. You’re basically doing the thing that Sam Altman tweeted about.
David Fallarme: Yeah, but less dystopian.
Finn Thormeier: You’re doing it for yourself, you know?
David Fallarme: Yeah.
Finn Thormeier: Interesting. Less, yeah. In general, what is your advice? Because we talk so much about kind of content, brand, creative, founder brand. Where do you think are the right places for To get leverage from in your content creation process, and what are the things that humans should still do?
David Fallarme: AI is good in the middle parts. I think that as we speak today, I mean, anything can happen with the models improving. As we speak today, I think the humans are really good at the beginning and the end, and AI is good at the middle. So I think Balaji said that. AI is really good at middle to middle. It’s not good from beginning to end. So humans should come up with the idea, and that can be informed by AI, but ultimately the best ideas we’ve had are still, you know, the synthesis made by human judgment. And it’s still really good. Humans are still really good at the end when it’s like, hmm, this edit doesn’t feel great. My interest drops off at this point because of this reason. The packaging, this thumbnail is better than this packaging for reasons I can’t articulate but just feels right. So I think AI is good in the middle. So it’s good at doing the first, second, third pass and edit for something based off what’s worked in your corpus of data. And it’s getting better and better there because you can start to put an eval around, hey, don’t show me an edit until it passes these like five checks around what our voice and tone is, represent our product properly, make sure you mention at least two customers. So I think that’s where the highest leverage is. The big fail is if you’re like just feeding an LLM And like give me 10 scripts or give me 10 LinkedIn posts. And this is why you end up with so much AI slop is because everybody wants to live in this world where you’re AI enabled and you can, you know, increase your content output and it’s really good. And you could do that. You’re just going to end up in the middle part of the bell curve where kind of like it’s generic stuff and it doesn’t totally hit the way it’s supposed to.
Finn Thormeier: You posted something a while ago on LinkedIn that went uber viral. Back then, I think it had like 28,000 likes. You know the posts I’m talking about. How many impressions is that?
David Fallarme: Seven million, I think.
Finn Thormeier: Seven million. Yeah, crazy. And the post was basically around a lesson that you learned where a CEO pulled you away at some point and they’re like, you’re doing great marketing work, but on the wrong things that are kind of low priority, low leverage. Maybe to flip the question a little bit, what do you think you’re spending right now time on over perfecting it that actually has a lower impact than you think it does?
David Fallarme: This turned into a performance review thing.
Finn Thormeier: Yes.
David Fallarme: I’ll tell you one broad theme that I’m noticing, and I think this is just, maybe it’s just me, but it’s also relevant in the AI era. And that is a lot of marketers who are creative brained or think of themselves as creative brained. We are spending too much time being artisans of our work where we need to shift to become more architects of our work. So your job is less to like craft every single thing about the thing you create and feel very precious about every single thing you put onto the world. I think that is still very valuable. I just talked about how the human is really valuable at the beginning of the end. I think that it’s important, especially as you get more familiarity with where the AI tools are strong, where it can plug into your workflow. Your job as a marketer is supposed to shift more into an architect role so you can help other people in your company raise the floor of their output. So instead of, I’ll give you a very concrete example. Again, I’m right now focused on brand and product marketing. And our team is getting bigger, which means everybody’s creating more content all around the company. And that’s just not just the marketing, that’s CS teams creating decks, that is sales teams creating cold outbound stuff, right? And maybe in a previous world, I would have wanted to put myself as a Gatekeeper of sorts to be like, Hey, this is not representing the brand. Well, you know, I catch in a cold email in the wild and like a ping that sales manager, like, Hey, like you shouldn’t message it like this. So that’s an artisan mindset where an architect mindset is really, how can I give everybody just a base set of markdown files that they can, you know, everybody’s going to use LLM anyway. How can you make sure that you can give them this base set of product positioning, voice and tone, word choice, um, company boilerplate. That this way everybody can lift the level of their output without you having to personally insert yourself. So I think that is, you know, the thinking of high leverage stops becoming you are the arbiter of really great content and taste. And maybe you could still do that for a small set of things, but it’s higher impact and higher leverage to make sure that you’re raising the floor of everybody else’s output and you’re uniquely able to do that today because of AI.
Finn Thormeier: Which is kind of the guardrails we talked about and guidelines and training people. Time. This was awesome, David. Thank you for your time. If people want to check you out or want to check out Owner.com, all of those things will be in the description below. Is your LinkedIn your main thing or where should we send people?
David Fallarme: Yeah, just LinkedIn. LinkedIn is good.
Finn Thormeier: LinkedIn. Very nice. Cool. Anything you feel like we should have covered that I should have asked you but didn’t? Any kind of last thought that you – Have bouncing around your head if the answer’s no, it’s fine. But if you have something where you like had another thought that I feel like I didn’t get to.
David Fallarme: I think that it’s easy to be hand wavy about brand and say that like, oh yeah, it’s just brand. You shouldn’t try to measure it Or you should be okay with like pure anecdotes. You know, I think I mentioned that in the beginning, but I think as a brand focused marketer, it’s your responsibility to make sure that there’s a commercial impact through the line that you could justify to a CFO that isn’t just like, oh yeah, don’t worry about it, we can’t measure it. Like you should be able to have that conversation and have credibility and have them walking away feeling like you know what you’re doing from a business perspective. Like one of the things that triggers me the most on LinkedIn is like, oh yeah, CEOs don’t get it. Or like, you know, like fine, you know, just life’s too short to work for a CEO doesn’t get it. It’s like, no, it’s your job to educate the CEO, CFO.
Finn Thormeier: It’s a little lazy.
David Fallarme: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it’s, it’s really important to say that’s a wild brand and product marketing is important and it is hard to directly measure it in the way you would measure performance marketing or outbound sales. It’s still your responsibility to make sure it is commercially rationalized. So I think that’s just important to reinforce because we wrap today.
Finn Thormeier: I think you said it’s a marketer’s job to make the company rich, famous and loved in that order.
David Fallarme: Yeah. Yeah. Here we go.
Finn Thormeier: Thank you, David.
David Fallarme: All right.
