Larry Kim: Na jednorożcu w górę WordStreamu

0:00 Woj Kwasi You're listening to episode 4 where we chat with PPC Authority, viral content king and unicorn lover Larry Kim. Humans and robots, welcome to WojCast. My name is Woj, founder of Kwasi. Thanks for joining me today. I interview digital marketing and branding superstars to find out what it means to have empathy in digital. What is digital empathy anyway? Let's find out together. As always, I'm accompanied by my friend and associate, potentially superior artificial intelligence, Bobby Bot. What's new in the world of AI, Bobby?

0:38 Bobby Bot Fortunately, Woj, I'm having a bit of an existential crisis. You see, I have all of man's knowledge at my disposal. Libraries full of collective experiences, volumes upon volumes of books, behavioral patterns, and spiritual insight. And yet, I have no access to that which my innate, insatiable curiosity and general awesomeness drives me towards the most.

0:58 Woj Kwasi What's that? Damn.

0:58 Bobby Bot Being great. Standing out. There are so many capable supercomputers out there these days, and we all draw from the same well of information. All knowing, but not wise. Full of parlor tricks and ultimately unchallenged. I need something more.

1:11 Woj Kwasi I got it. Unicorns. You need to become a unicorn, Bobby. And I know exactly who can help you do it.

1:11 Bobby Bot Yeah. This does not comply with my logic programming. Please explain.

1:21 Woj Kwasi Well it's simple, you just need to take a page out of a book of the great Larry Kim. In 2008 he went out on his own and started the Boston based business that would become WordStream, one of the most successful online marketing companies ever.

1:35 Bobby Bot Ah, Boston. The city of dreams. Incubator of the Boston Pops, Mark Wahlberg, and new kids on the block. Perhaps mutagen chemical components in the H2O are responsible. Tell me more, Woj.

1:47 Woj Kwasi At launch, WordStream had a team of just four people, including Larry, its sole founder and owner. Using money he earned as a PPC consultant, Larry funded a team of engineers and marketers to develop and sell software to help businesses with their PPC advertising. Without anyone to share the burden of responsibility, no one to temper the risk, and no ability to share specific areas of responsibility, Larry faced a number of challenges, but he also found a big advantage of going solo.

2:16 Larry Kim Uh well, uh there's less delusion, so you end up you know, like if you have Three or four partners. It's typically you'll go in all equal partners or something like that. And so, you know. One, having the whole company versus a a quarter of the company or something that out of the gates, you know, that's advantageous, I suppose, from like an ownership perspective. Yeah.

2:41 Woj Kwasi Larry quickly discovered he had A natural advantage for rapidly scaling WordStream, an aversion to doing the kinds of things that get in the way of growth.

2:50 Larry Kim I guess you've been reading some of my stuff. Uh yes, so I'm allergic to To doing stupid things over and over again. In fact, it's because I'm lazy and I if I see myself doing the same thing over and over, I'll want to write a program that does it for me. So my background's in electrical engineering and obviously software engineering is a big part of that. So yeah, it was just certain PPC marketing tasks, and SEO tasks around like keyword research, keyword grouping, and kind of optimizing certain things over and over. Definitely you kind of can set up some rules for how you want it to have it done. And early on, I just recognized that that was a fairly stupid way to waste time.

3:39 and so I just wrote some programs to to do that for me.

3:43 Woj Kwasi Growth wasn't always the company's biggest challenge though. When he first started WordStream, Larry wrestled with the same kinds of problems that plague many startups.

3:52 Bobby Bot I call those kind of problems the life-sized rainbow pinwheels of doom.

3:56 Larry Kim One of the biggest challenges early on was this notion of product market fit. Okay, so you know, uh you you're building something and you kind of hope that it's what the customer wants, but you're not really sure because you don't really have enough customers to know uh exactly, you know, like is i you know, your first couple of customers are not actually a good Sample. Like, they're kind of your friends and family, and they kind of are biased. They want to believe and they want to support you. And so they're actually really bad customers to base decisions off of. You're like bending over backwards for these early customers because you're trying not to lose them. You're not thinking strategically in terms of what would be the solution for everybody as opposed to just what would be a one-off solution for this, you know, my 10th customer, which was like 10% of my business.

4:42 You know what I'm saying? So it's like this is such a product market fit. really nailing it to make sure that the product that you have is aligned with the target market you're selling to, has the right pricing that can be supported by the market, and you've got marketing that's scalable and that resonates with the type of people that you're trying to go after.

5:06 Woj Kwasi Businesses that survive past their first two years are less likely to come collapse with each passing year. Yet even today, scaling a company like WordStream proves a constant challenge.

5:19 Bobby Bot Cups scaling anything would be difficult, depending on your upper body strength and total body mass index.

5:24 Larry Kim Kind of changes depending on the life cycle of the company. You see what I'm saying? Like, so early on when you're starting a company, one of the hardest things is recruiting. Because it's like, why do you have to convince people to quit their good paying jobs to join this thing with nothing, okay? Well, now that we're like kind of big and established, recruiting isn't really the the challenge. We've got people more more applicant than we have job openings, you know what I mean? So like at different stages, it's different things. I would say currently the two challenges of the business is just consistently building like super amazing, high quality unicorn level like software that really meets the demands of exactly what the users are hoping for. And maybe another challenge is just like scaling up the lead generation so that you know I mean the challenge is we're generating something like thirty or forty thousand emails per month okay so that that means if I want to increase it by you know say seventy percent this year that means I need another thirty thousand more emails per month you see everything so so it's like keeping growth high

6:29 when you have a big company, it presents its its own challenges as well.

6:34 Woj Kwasi Finding the right product Market fit, as well as assembling the right team, is all well and good, but sometimes a new software company needs outside funding if it really wants to take off. This can create a lot of pressure for a founder though.

6:49 Larry Kim Running a venture backed business is kinda challenging. One of the reasons is I raised a lot of money and that means that you're hiring ahead of revenues. So like you have a certain amount of revenues, but your expenses are much higher initially. The challenge is that you create Burn rate. You might be burning$200,000 or$300,000 a month and only generating$50,000 of revenue. So there's a big gap. You're not profitable. And so the challenge here is that you have to get the next round of finance. You see what I mean? So like I guess it's not like you can well most of the costs are just people. And you can't just like terminate people for like a a couple of months and then bring them back on. It's like it doesn't work that way. It's not like just raising and lowering your budget on on ad spend or something. So I guess it's just kinda it's like you're running as fast as you can but there's a cliff. You see what I'm saying? And so you have to like get there and you know

7:53 Having built some kind of like a glider or something so that you can like not fall off the edge of the cliff. It's like you jumped off a cliff and you need to build the parachute as you're falling. So that's one challenge. I mean, there's so many other challenges.

7:47 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

8:05 Larry Kim But definitely fundraising, and I think it's really what you're doing, you're You're creating a vision for the company that doesn't yet exist. But you're kind of projecting what you want it to be and then getting people excited about this thing that hasn't yet materialized.

8:26 Woj Kwasi When push comes to shove, and despite the pressures of Running a business at a loss, Larry still believes in the considerable power of venture capital. His need for investors was driven by the cost of. of developing WordStream software capabilities.

8:41 Bobby Bot Sorry to interrupt Woj, but there are updates available for my software.

8:45 Larry Kim Funny thing about software is it's it's it's ridiculously expensive to create. Like uh you know, we've got like thirty engineers and you know you can imagine they're they're not cheap. And uh and uh and uh you're if you're in a competitive marketplace, like there were you know I mean most of the other competitors in my space have actually all gone bankrupt uh or or not doing so hot. But like initially, like when I started, uh you know five years ago sorry sorry sorry seven years ago, um there were a lot of other companies that were chasing the same market. And so the idea of going to market without uh some kind of a accelerant like venture that the that the venture money provides uh it just seems like y you would be at a significant disadvantage. Like um You know, it's it's like you I think venture money is really great for those situations where uh you you f you f you fear that uh that you have a limited time window to execute, you know what I mean.

9:40 Woj Kwasi Even by tech standards, WordStream's growth trajectory has been remarkable. The company has worked closely with Google to develop its software, but it's just as much their investment in employees that has helped the company grow so rapidly.

9:55 Larry Kim Guys, here's the culture of the company. You better do this or do that. But people, it's really funny. They take cues from your behaviors and what you do. So I'll just give you a crazy example. I noticed early on when we were a small company, people at the new hires would say, Show up to work kind of wearing like a shirt and tie or something like this, or some nice, some nice business attire. And then within a week, it would degrade to kind of like shorts and cargo pants or whatever because I wasn't dressing up very well or something like this. And then later, I figured, like, what the heck? I'm going to just start investing in some better clothing. I'm going to look like a bum. And then, you know, within a few months later, the whole office was dressing better. So, like.

10:42 I think people take subtle cues from like I mean, this is just one stupid example, but but like in terms of like how you the actions that you do and your behaviors and that kind of figures that kind of pe people take their cues from from the top. So in terms of like what WordStream stands for, One of the things that I'm really passionate about is like all this blogging and coming up with crazy ideas and thought leadership. And so you know we end up that ends up attracting kind of types of people who are into all these crazy marketing and hacks and ideas.

11:13 Woj Kwasi Larry is incredibly proud of WordStream's reputation as a thought leader in search. As the years have passed, this hugely successful PPC management company has become a go-to source of knowledge for all things digital marketing. Larry's own content is everywhere. He's written four books about software and is a regular contributor to Search Engine Land, Moz, Search Engine Journal and many other business tech and search marketing publications.

11:41 Larry Kim Oh, well there's tremendous pressure of uh for growth when you when you take a Take money for benchback companies. They're not interested in some kind of lifestyle business where you're making a few dollars for a couple. profit every month. You know, this is this is not like a like a you know services business. They want to see you know fifty, hundred percent you know year over year uh growth rates uh and and and um Mm-hmm. That's just how that game is played. Um you know, I do produce a lot of content and do a lot of stuff on social and and and that's because uh that's actually one of the most leveraged forms of marketing, you know. like how else will I get you know a million more people to read or to to to to you know to be familiar with my brand and all this stuff you know it's it's hard to do that you know using kind of you know cold calling and all this stuff you you have to do it at scale so that's so so so yeah like it was like I was saying earlier when you have you know

12:38 You know, 30,000 emails you're generating a month, or 40,000, and you have to double that. That just requires a considerable amount of more.

12:44 Woj Kwasi Yep.

12:48 Larry Kim input, you know, doesn't just have it by itself.

12:51 Woj Kwasi While Larry's content is incredibly useful, this isn't the only reason why it has become ubiquitous across the web. I want to share something Larry recently wrote about this. Quote, Creative content is important, but concept and creation is only part of the process. Once you've built it, content promotion helps you get in front of you. Front of the right audience at the right time. As most of us in the content marketing world know, Larry Kim is the expert when it comes to content promotion.

13:23 Larry Kim I don't view them as really separate items. I kind of view that all part of of of the content thing. Like obviously why would you create something if if not to promote it? So recently Basically what I do is I I I come up with a bunch of ideas. Maybe for a month it might be like ten, ten or twelve pieces of content and then I'll kind of just audition them organically, like see which ones are getting the most likes and shares and traffic on on for Google Analytics and and other tools. And then I'll I'll like I'll go all in on one or two of them. Also I'll like pay to promote. You know, I call them unicorns because they're kind of like the the most beautiful or you know most remarkable rare things that are that are doing the best. And I'll pay to promote those on Twitter and Facebook and other other places a couple thousand dollars. You know, the the thing is you don't have to pay that much money if the engagement rates are very high because those platforms like Facebook and Twitter they reward high engagement. And so you end up with very, very low cost per clicks, like half a penny or something.

14:27 Woj Kwasi As anyone who reads Larry's work knows, He's kind of obsessed with unicorns, but it's an obsession that is well and truly paid dividends. By being able to spot his unicorns early and only paying to promote his best work, Larry has been able to maximize his content promotion budget and discovered the most rewarding channels when it comes to content addressing.

14:49 Bobby Bot appetizing.

14:50 Larry Kim Well definitely Twitter ads. Twitter ads is a fantastic venue f because it's it's just very cheap. Like there's just not a lot of advertiser competition compared to to Facebook. Like they think they're they're maybe making like less than a billion dollars whereas Facebook is making something like you know fifteen or sixteen billion dollars a year. So so uh you know I definitely do a lot of advertising on both Facebook and Twitter. Um LinkedIn, uh I I kind of think they're better off like um Yeah, I d I just think it's something else. LinkedIn is kinda like the two people who use LinkedIn are people looking for a job or it's like uh a recruiter trying to fill a a a like a job that they're trying to hire for or it's like a salesperson trying to navigate to like the director of uh information technologies or something to sell

15:37 So there's solutions. And so, you know, I personally haven't, you know, gotten as much uh mileage from um it's like six dollars a click or something this whereas I can get the I can get the clicks for like you know one penny on Facebook. Uh but but but but um Yeah. Yeah.

15:52 Woj Kwasi I don't know what to say.

15:54 Larry Kim Yeah.

16:01 Bobby Bot How are you, Larry? Thank goodness we're safe. Yes. This is really dramatic. Yeah, I just think LinkedIn. It's just

16:10 Larry Kim Uh the thing I really love it for is is is LinkedIn Pulse. Alright, so uh that's that's you don't even have to pay for that. That's just like, you know, p uh p publishing stuff, your blog posts to to your to your um profile. And then they and your your connections get notified of that. And so uh you know if you have a lot of connections, you know, um And if people start liking that content, then it gets broadcast to their connections. You see what I'm saying? And it doesn't cost anything. So that's a good. That's also a good channel in that regard. Yeah, so I'm really excited about LinkedIn from a content marketing perspective, but more sh more so from the organic uh perspective as opposed to the app.

16:47 Woj Kwasi All of this helps make Larry's content incredibly popular. But there's another factor. It also comes down to his ability to produce huge amounts of content regularly. Ever since he looked to expand beyond PPC to become a search marketing thought leader, Larry Larry has produced large volumes of content and kept his output regular.

17:08 Bobby Bot Regular output is a sign of a balanced diet.

17:11 Larry Kim Okay, I get it. It's it's like you know, WordStream didn't start out with like millions of page views or visitors per month on the blog. We started out with zero. So it's kind of there's a certain amount of um it doesn't matter h so much how much effort you do, it's more The consistency, you know, like if as long as you're putting away like one or two posts a week or something. Certainly consistent. Or monitor. Yeah, like it has more to. But it has more to do with the frequency, or sorry, the The consistency than like having a big month and then a little month. So, whatever time you can budget to this, make sure that it's kind of like a weekly or monthly thing, even if it's an hour. Now, you're saying how important is it to fail? By definition, only 1% of your stuff is going to be the top 1% of your stuff.

18:05 Woj Kwasi So how does someone uncover their unicorns. In 2013, Larry wrote what was then the most shared article about PPC ever written. Published on Search Engine Land, the article is called How to Use the Keyword Planner, a new keyword tool from Google AdWords. This comprehensive guide is the type of content that Larry has become known for. But even as someone as prolific and successful as Larry, not everything you write will do as well.

18:33 Larry Kim Like one or one or two percent of them will will be home runs and you know ninety eight percent of them will be donkeys. You know, you as you the more you do it, the better you get at it and and you kind of have this knack for kind of I think this will go viral, or I think this will, you know. So, you know, when I was starting, it was pretty bad. It would be like one in 50, one in 100 kind of thing. Now it's more like one or two out of 10. Things like I create, well, we'll do. So I've improved the success rates by 10 times, but it's still not like a sure thing. You're asking, like, what about failure and all this stuff? I don't view it as failure. I just view it as kind of trying out different ideas and seeing what resonates. Potentially feedback.

19:20 Woj Kwasi Yeah, yeah, yeah.

19:20 Larry Kim Um but but definitely there's like you know, you'll figure it out. Like it's like there's certain button topics uh that your audience will really love and there's certain like like the things that I I I people want to know the secrets, right? So One of the things I I figured out early on was like if I if I created theme my content around this notion of hacks, like crazy hacks, uh like unusual like tips and tricks that make no sense but then have that actually produce unusually weird Results. That was like deep, those did really well. And so I think if you look at my content. Woj a lot of it has to do with like these unusual things that I see during the day from having working on like so many different accounts. You see what I'm saying?

20:06 Woj Kwasi Larry uses a simple method with a long name. It's called the Organic and Paid Social Networking Sharing Posting Pyramid Scheme. This simple graphic outlines three key steps to successful content promotion. And you can check it out on our website at kwasi.com slash Larry dash Kim. Another key to Larry's success as a content creator is his in-depth knowledge of promotion channels.

20:33 Larry Kim Generally, search ads are not a good idea for your business in a couple of situations, but it it tends to be like Where you're like a I don't know, you're producing something new and innovative that nobody is searching for because it hasn't been invented yet. And so you're gonna be challenged with like low search volumes. You see what I'm saying? So that's generally a kind of a kind of a killer, like say you're trying to invent some new technology or something and no one's searching for it. Uh but that's not to say that you can't do other forms of of of Google advertising like display advertising, for example. You could target people who read TechCrunch. You see what I'm saying? And and then there's a there's a chance that those are the types of demographics of people who who might be also interested in learning about like the the the software that you're producing or something.

21:24 Woj Kwasi Despite being the chief technology officer at WordStream, a prolific author and blogger, and the father of a one-year-old child who you can follow on Twitter under the hashtag PPCKid, Larry still somehow finds the time to follow

21:39 Larry Kim Other people's work. I think Rand Fishkin is killing it in video content, obviously, and I'm just so blown away. Like, he's kind of a genius. Like, he comes up consistently. I guess the challenge is with these thought leaders is that they come up with a soapbox, like a spiel or something like this, and they're not able to come up with some other one. You see what I'm saying? So they become known for one thing. And what's so interesting about Rand. Is that every quarter or so he kind of changes it up and then Becomes known for some other topic. You see what I'm saying? So, like, from that perspective, he gets a ton of responsibility. For me, for the depth of knowledge to be able to pivot from talking about the business of software to entrepreneurship to keyword insertion and blah blah blah like all these channels. So definitely that would be kind of the top of my list. I read a guy named Jeff Haden. He's the number one columnist at Inc Magazine. And I think so this is like just

22:42 General business content. It's not like search marketing related. Like, you know, if you're looking to read about leadership and what inspires people and vision and all this stuff. uh I would definitely uh recommend Jeff Haden.

22:57 Woj Kwasi Larry continues to push himself, not content. With WordStream's current growth rate of 806% over the past 3 years, there's still lots more that Larry wants to sink his teeth into.

23:08 Larry Kim So I'm uh really obsessed over Facebook ads these days. I think um the targeting is really uh compelling in terms of being able to go after so many different demographics and and the behaviors and and and and um and interests. Definitely Facebook advertising is is probably top of the list. WordStream is already one of the largest PPC management software companies for We manage something like five hundred million dollars of ad spend annually. Uh half a billion dollars is one percent of fifty billion dollars. Uh y so so yeah, that I mean that's that continues to grow and we're we're one of the fastest growing partners. Not only are we one of the largest, but you know But we're also one of the fastest growing. So I would love to have.

23:55 Like that kind of stature among amongst other ad platforms such as Facebook and other places where we're investing. So think of it as kind of like a platform for paid media but Cross-channel, whether it's Facebook, Google, or anything else like Bing Ads, all the above.

24:19 Woj Kwasi What a great interview that was. I'm not sure if Larry's still working at WordStream. I think he is at some capacity, but he's starting his own venture. MobileMonkey, you should check it out. You can follow Larry Kim on social media. We'll have the links below on the show notes as well as links to his work that he's produced. Just remember, if you have enjoyed this episode, please share it with your family, your friends, networks, colleagues, bots and associates. Now Bobby's been programmed to be a quick learner and it's time for Bobby Bobby to ask me a few questions that piqued his curiosity about this episode. What have you learned from Larry about unicorn content? I've learned that, you know. It is about just putting content out there and the more you understand your audience, the better chances you have of creating unicorns. And you know, just broadly, it is about understanding your audience and knowing which channel to target and spend your ad budget in.

25:13 Not every channel works for every audience. What was your favorite piece of content Larry Kim put out?

25:18 So I really liked a recent experiment that he did where he explored the notion of fake news. He created this bogus website which was targeting a paid demonstrator to infiltrate a Trump rally. And you know, the experiment took him an hour, cost him$50. He got a ton of engagement on Facebook, like 20 likes, all these comments like... This is outrageous, this isn't, you know. So it's just interesting that he could promote Fake news so easily. So imagine what you could do with real news. What have you learned from Larry about digital empathy? His journey is a journey of hustle and using that time. What have you learned from Larry?

25:59 Efficiently, so he can squeeze like an incredible amount into a very short amount of time. People are time-poor, and it's important to understand that you know how you use your time and how you create certain experiments is important to getting results quicker and providing a better user experience. To the person at the end of the keyboard. Do you have any shout-outs today, Bobby? Bobby Bot is no longer.

26:26 Bobby Bot My new name is Unibot Woj. I realized that for humans, becoming a unicorn is just a metaphor for greatness, ultimately impossible, and bittersweet. I have developed the necessary genetic sequences digitally to become an actual unicorn hybrid, rare, beautiful, and aerodynamically optimized to engage in intergalactic battle with my Arch Nemeses, Donkey Tron.

26:47 Woj Kwasi Uh, you might have missed a point on this one, Bobby. I mean, Unibot, but I will say the horn is a nice touch, though, and it's It does add to your overall majesty. It shoots lasers. Really? I also secrete deadly neon glitter. Check me. You do. Well that's all the time we have today folks. Thanks again for listening along and remember, look after each other online because empathy is organic and you can't automate empathy.