Growth Strategies and Tools To Scale Early-Stage Startups

Intro: 00:00

Welcome back to the Response Drivers podcast, where we feature top marketing minds and dig in to their inspiring stories. Learn how these leaders think and find big ideas to push your results and sales to the next level. Now let’s get started.

Rick Rappe: 00:19

Hey, I’m Rick Rappe, host of the Response Drivers podcast. Here we dive deep with marketing experts and innovators to uncover how they approach targeted marketing and use data driven strategies to acquire and retain customers. We’ll talk about what’s working, what’s changing, and how we can stay ahead in an evolving marketing landscape. Response Drivers is brought to you by RPM Direct Marketing. RPM helps companies develop hard hitting, direct mail creative and utilize advanced testing and targeting methodologies so you can fully optimize your marketing performance to drive more sales and exceed growth expectations.

With a proven track record, RPM delivers smarter, more profitable direct mail solutions so you can turn your direct mail programs into a predictable, efficient sales channel. Check out rpmdm.com to learn more. Well, my guest today is Andrew Lee Miller. Andrew is a seasoned startup marketing expert, Founder of GrowthExpertz fractional agency, and a global keynote speaker with nearly 20 years of experience driving early stage growth. He’s led three successful startup exits and specializes in digital marketing, growth hacking, and scaling tech businesses in the early stages. 

Andrew is also the author of The Startup Growth Book and the host of the Funded, Now What?! podcast, where he shares insights on navigating post-funding challenges and accelerating startup success. You can learn more about him at andrewstartups.com. Thanks for joining me today Andrew.

Andrew Lee Miller: 01:50

Dude, thank you so much. That was a lovely intro. Appreciate that.

Rick Rappe: 01:54

Well, my research says that you’ve been consulted for over 100 startups across various industries and and other countries. And you’ve led marketing efforts, as I mentioned, for three VC backed startup exits. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background and what inspired you to specialize in startup marketing?

Andrew Lee Miller: 02:12

Yeah, sure. So to be honest, I had no idea what I was doing at the beginning. I kind of just followed whatever I wanted to do, and it led into this life. But it started in college, like you said, over 20 years ago, I had an idea for making resumes, a tech based product, and found a co-founder, built a product, launched it, and quickly realized I was very talented at marketing. We got, you know, thousands of kids using it.

We raised a little bit of money far away from the venture capital world, had no idea what we were doing at a small university in Ohio, and I realized I didn’t care about or wasn’t passionate about fundraising or product or anything. I just really loved marketing, and so I actually ended up stepping away from that company and going after other companies that had already solidified their product and just helping them with marketing. And my real goal, to be honest, Rick, was to just travel the world and work remotely from a very early in my career. And so marketing enabled me to do that, and I knew I was talented at it and I could make money and like, reduce my risk. I didn’t want to spend all my 20s working at a computer myself, you know, as a founder. 

And so I was lucky enough to find exciting opportunities with products I really believed in and drive some success because marketing was the single missing piece there. And, you know, like as I tell my interns that work for me now, you just get more and more confident as you go on and as you build a portfolio of wins and you charge more money and you get more success, and then you charge more money. And, you know, every time I was head of marketing of a company that exited. I took an entire year off and went traveling, and then would move to a different part of the world after that. And so it’s AI optimized for fun over money, and the money still followed. 

And I think that’s a key thing there. But the difference between me and a normal marketer is I work specifically with early stage tech companies that often don’t have a lot of resources. Even if they raised a couple million dollars, they’re not going to go below that on marketing. And so I was lucky enough to pick that arena, which enabled me to learn, like every aspect of marketing. I mean, you, you, you sit in the direct marketing space. 

I’ve done that 5 to 10 times. I’ve done lots of I mean, anything you can imagine marketing wise, even beyond digital stuff, anything that we need to test that will grow a company, I’ve done it. I’ve learned it from A to Z, because we didn’t have the resources to hire multiple agencies and multiple team members, and that’s what led me to writing a book to equip founders who don’t have the resources to scale. You can just read that book and learn how to basically do every channel. And that’s what I’m all about.

Rick Rappe: 04:59

Oh that’s amazing. Wow. So you’re a digital nomad. You’re traveling the world and working from remote locations.

Andrew Lee Miller: 05:06

Trying not to be. I have a house in San Francisco. I want to live there full-time. The AI boom has been so incredible, and I definitely want to move back there. But you know, the call of the wild is strong and you still want to keep going.

And now that I don’t really party and like, you know, do online dating or anything too crazy, it’s pretty easy to have work life balance anywhere in the past. You know, the excitement of new cities enabled me to have fun, but took a bite out of the work side of the work life balance. And so yeah, I think it’s possible, but, you know, to have that. But I definitely am looking forward to living full-time in San Francisco again. I just got a couple more bucket list items to scratch off. 

So I say I’m a retired digital nomad, I just.

Rick Rappe: 05:51

Okay. Okay. Wow. I’m sure we could spend a whole another hour talking about just your travels and where you’ve been and all that stuff. Well, we’ll save that for another time.

Okay. A little bit about your book, The Startup Growth Book. I know your book. You talked about how your book emphasizes scaling without a marketing budget. Can you share a little bit more of a success story where this approach, you know, where you were able to use that approach and get significant growth?

Andrew Lee Miller: 06:21

Oh, of course. So, you know, the first thing, if you’re ever going to write a book, you should have in mind a book that is going to lead companies or people that read it to work with you, I did not do that. I have never made any money from the book. It’s designed instead to just give back to people that don’t have money for paying me as a consultant. So I should probably write another book about how great it is to work with me, and they’ll make it more of a sales pitch.

This is not that. This is basically a textbook. That is, it walks you through eight, I believe, different channels and teaches you from 0 to 100 how to do them without spending months on it. You can read a chapter in a day and you can go. And it makes perfect sense how to execute that strategy. 

All organic channels, which have become since I wrote the book a couple years ago, exceedingly more and more important, because paid advertising is no longer a real way to grow your company, you cannot trust the paid channels to continue to deliver results for you, so you can’t build a business around it. So what I teach people in the book is how to do PR yourself, how to do SEO yourself. I don’t have a chapter about direct marketing. You should write that book. But so yeah, I have, you know, dozens of examples and I share them in the book from my own career and from other famous companies that are now famous. 

But I mean, overall, you know, just picking one, there’s probably about 50 different strategies that people can implement from the book across those eight channels. But, you know, how.

Rick Rappe: 07:51

Should startups, how should startups determine which channels to focus on initially? Like which ones? How do you make the choice?

Andrew Lee Miller: 07:59

Yeah, that’s a good question. So I think, you know every it’s different for different industries different target different price points, and what you’re selling if you’re B2C versus B2B. But you know, I have that trouble when I do my workshops at startup events and stuff. Because how do you know who’s in the audience without polling them? And there’s a couple things that everybody has to do.

Like, I don’t, it doesn’t matter what your business is, you should at least do the basics of SEO. And I kind of considered a few things to be foundational to any company. And so what I always say when I consult with companies is the first thing we do is we finalize your marketing foundation, and that marketing foundation is going to have a couple core elements. So finalizing your website to make it convert as much as possible, unless you’re a mobile app, then that, then the website doesn’t really matter, but for most businesses, website and optimizing it, making sure the right pages are there with the right you know, your structure for SEO, the right keyword density, the right elements on the page, not, you know, above the fold and below the fold to make people convert. So that’s important. 

Then your analytics are really important, making sure that you’re tracking the right things, your search marketing to make sure that you’re going to come up organically. Your social media strategy. Even for a B2B company like yours and mine, it’s maybe not going to drive new clients into client acquisition like it would for a, you know, a dating app or a lotion company. But it’s important foundationally to show Google and to show people that you’re reaching out to, that you’re an active business, that you’re really a real company, and that they can trust that message that you sent them when you’re trying to build leads. So, you know, the book teaches people how to go from A to Z on getting that set up. 

You know how to do it with very little resources. I’ll just go into it really quick. For instance, with social media, we teach people how to build a big batch of content, how to make a strategy and a voice really quickly, which is even easier now with ChatGPT. But then how to create a lot of content that you can just schedule across all of those pages and kind of spray and pray and see what sticks. So you want to be able to post every day on every page. 

Whereas most business owners are stuck on what do we post today? What do we post tomorrow? Even with ChatGPT, it’s not the end all you know, if you grab a bunch of crap from ChatGPT and you post it on all your pages, you’re not going to get any engagement because the platforms now recognize what’s created by AI and you need to work around that. And so yeah, the book basically just teaches you how to growth hack every channel.

Rick Rappe: 10:29

Wow. Wow. Sounds like a real shortcut for people that are starting things up. They should definitely get your book. And you have a website just specifically for your book startupgrowthbook.com.

So if I will put that in the show notes and go there and check it out for sure. You also have a podcast, and I know on your podcast you’ve discussed some challenges that startups face after they’ve been funded. What are some of the common missteps that startups make when they’ve got fresh money in the bank?

Andrew Lee Miller: 11:03

Yeah, that’s a great question. So the first thing I think is trying to do everything themselves forever. You know, once you get the money, you need to start bringing in people that are smarter than you. And, you know, that’s the joke that really, really smart founders say to me like, oh, I like hiring people that are smarter than me, you know? But the reality is usually companies have been in the trenches, the founders doing everything themselves, and they just kind of continue with that a little bit.

The second mistake they always make with marketing is just throwing a ton of money at paid advertising. You know, they’re just like, oh, now I have money. Let me do some experiments on Google and Facebook ads. And then, oh my god, I’ve blown $100k and got nothing because I didn’t work on that marketing foundation first that I mentioned. The third thing I think is hiring big logos. 

A lot of times they get a lead investor. The lead investor has someone that’s in their network, like, you should hire this person and they’re coming from a big logo company, but they’re not used to working at an early stage startup, which means you need to roll your sleeves up. You have to even if your director or C level, you got to do the work, wear multiple hats, be the chief trash taker outer or whatever it is. You kind of just gotta humble yourself at an early stage startup because if you don’t do it, it’s not going to get done. Yeah. 

And so those are like the core mistakes and GrowthExpertz. The whole idea, even with the book, is just helping people realize that there’s another option besides those. And, you know, I started before we were even fractional just consulting myself as a hired gun. You mentioned I had this third exit and I realized, okay, this is very replicable, especially for B2B software companies. But across the board, it’s like the same problems over and over again. 

We finalized that marketing foundation. Then we go to market with organic strategies, and then we take the learning from those organic strategies, and we scale up with paid spend or building a team. And if you replicate that over and over again, it just keeps winning and winning. Winning it just reduces the failure rate quite a bit for companies.

Rick Rappe: 13:04

So in our business, when we start talking with a startup, what we find a lot of times is they they want to test direct mail, but they don’t want to put much budget to it. And so they kind of go out with one, one idea and direct mail. And that’s a risky approach. When we start with companies, we want them to have a little bit more budget, and that allows us to do aggressive testing early on. So instead of A/B testing we do a, b, v, d, e, f, g testing.

And we test a lot of different metrics and ideas sort of all at the same time. So that gives us a much, much better chance of finding success. And you know, a lot of startups dabble with direct mail and they kind of walk away from it and say, well, direct mail doesn’t work. Well, that’s not really true. It’s just that they didn’t go about it in the right way. 

So we specialize in kind of the startups that we’ve worked with. They appreciated our expertise coming alongside them and their marketing team. And then we actually kind of bolt on as an external direct marketing, you know, team and help them find success and then scale up because when, when their direct mail, when we can crack the code. Direct mail can become a super scalable channel, you know, really totally driving growth dramatically. So all right, I’ll get off my soapbox now and get on to a question for you over your career, how has your mindset towards marketing and growth evolved?

Andrew Lee Miller: 14:34

It has not. I feel like with all these new tools, there’s always new tools, there’s always new things. And people are like, marketing is dead, growth hacking is dead. It’s not dead. It’s the same things over and over again.

Like I said, you first you need to optimize the product for marketing, the messaging, conversion rate optimization, getting people to share at certain points, you know, making it easy for people to become little referral engines for your business. And then you need to test the waters with organic strategies. Even if you have raised a ton of money, you still need to do PR, you need to do SEO, you need to do social media to prove to the world that you’re legitimate. It’s kind of like having a really nice website design. If they see a bunch of leads and links and things coming up when they search for your business, they trust you. 

If nothing comes up and you’re just running paid, paid ads, you can spend a lot of money to kind of put a Band-Aid on that and move quicker. But at the end of the day, people are still not going to really trust your business. We all see this. If you see a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad that you like, and then you click and you go see that business, their page and they have no followers. You don’t really usually convert for that business. 

Anyone can make an ad really quickly and scam you. So it’s kind of the same framework over and over. And you know, the book is now like 3 or 4 years old and it’s still 90% rings true today, even with all the AI stuff that’s out. And so I think, like, you know, young people, like I said, that work in the company are like, oh, marketing is so different. I’m like, no, it’s not. 

You just have been around for such a short period of time that you think it’s different, but it’s not. It’s the same stuff. You gotta, you know, at the end of the day, marketing boils down to just trying to help people. If you’re not helping people at the core, like you mentioned, you know, help get their business out there, they’re the clients that we work are helping people we don’t work with, you know, cigarette and alcohol and things like that because we don’t believe in those things. And so if you have passion and you feel like you’re really trying to help people and what you do, then you can put in those long hours. 

And I think that’s really the ethos behind good marketing.

Rick Rappe: 16:36

And yeah.

Andrew Lee Miller: 16:37

It’s still the same.

Rick Rappe: 16:38

Well, and it seems like your startup approach is to test test in small increments and learn and, and and roll out and continue what works and scale those things up that work. And that’s, that’s, that’s I’ve always been around for a long, long time. It’s not going anywhere. Exactly. I just had a really interesting podcast episode with Rick Cesari, who was an old DRTV guy who created like Sonicare and Omni Clean and the George Foreman Grill and things like that.

And he said the same thing, and he, you know, that’s how they approached DRTV was test, iterate, optimize, repeat over and over again. So it’s a timeless approach. Yeah. I had a couple more questions I want to ask you about your current company GrowthExpertz. How does your fractional model benefit early stage startups?

Andrew Lee Miller: 17:38

Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s very new. There’s only like a handful of companies that are really offering it. And for us it came out of client need. Basically, I was working full time for each company I was working with previously, you know, until about five years ago

And we started offering the fractional stuff. And so that means, you know, $15,000-$25,000 a month, you work with Andrew, and Andrew builds out your marketing. He is the marketing team for 12 months post funding. And that already was extreme cost savings. But for a very small fraction of companies that are usually like engineering focused founders, they’re software engineers. 

They don’t really have the marketing mind and they don’t want to learn the hard way. So they would just like, give it to me and go run with it. And that worked really well for years. But it was cost prohibitive for a lot of companies, and I wanted to work with a more wide array of companies. And so I just started reducing my rate and then reducing the time I would spend with them. 

And it worked. I just realized, wow, companies really can benefit from even a one hour call per week, and I can make it super cost effective for them. And they love the cost savings, but they still get access to me. And over time it evolved. This is really as a fractional CMO program. 

It evolved into me getting interns inside the company that then move into full time roles, and then they building their building with me, a marketing team that has a junior marketer that’s super passionate and wants to work 40 or 60 or whatever hours they can work per week to really get shit done. And then me over top of that, bringing all that experience and the combo together is lower than the salary of one senior level marketer, but you’re getting two humans with wide array of skills. And so that started working. And then clients would eventually need recruitment help. And so then I reached out to a friend who I knew as an amazing recruiter. 

Ex-amazon worked with startups for ten years, blah blah blah, same as me and brought him on as a head of talent. And then he does fractional recruitment for the company as well. So instead of a company paying a recruiter $25,000 every time they fill a role, they just pay him a low monthly salary all year to fill multiple roles for the company, build out hiring processes, bring in applicant tracking systems, et cetera, et cetera. 

And then they wanted sales, and then they wanted partnerships and business development. And then we cut it off. Anything outside of that? We refer to partners. If they need a fractional CFO or fractional chief product officer. 

We have people that we trust in our network, but we’re really just the growth related thing. So recruitment, marketing, sales, these kind of areas that are really core to growing a company that engineers are often really not skilled at, instead of trying to go at it on their own, they just hire us. We bring in some experts for like $5k a month each expert, which is super cost-effective. I mean the price of one C-level salary, you can have like five fractional experts in your company. And that’s what we provide.

Rick Rappe: 20:35

Yeah. Wow. That sounds like a great approach. How do you define direct response marketing in today’s digital landscape? And how does direct mail fit into your strategy?

Andrew Lee Miller: 20:48

I was going to ask you, even 20 years into marketing, I do not know what direct response means, because if I think about it, nothing is faster response than digital marketing. And so wouldn’t everything be a direct response. So you can answer that, but.

Rick Rappe: 21:02

Direct a lot of things fall under that category for sure.

Andrew Lee Miller: 21:04

Right?

Rick Rappe: 21:05

Absolutely.

Andrew Lee Miller: 21:06

When I hear direct mail, I think about sending flyers to houses. And I think that it can be, you know, as a marketer and as a marketer who’s had success in online and offline growth hacks, I think you got to test everything. And so when this would make sense for me to test, you know, is in two areas. One is if you are a geo specific business, is there a way that you can definitely segment someone by where they live and what kind of house they have or something like that, then you need to test direct mail. The second phase is when you get to big enough budgets where you’ve like maxed out digital things.

You should be testing direct mail. I mean, some startups that have gotten major success in direct mail off the top of my head are like Casper and Nectar, like the very high ticket products that, you know, someone who owns a home is likely to be interested in your product. You should be using direct mail. I can’t think of the name of the company that there was a company that specifically did direct mail. We won’t name them anyway, but they had like a black envelope of and it was always startup stuff in. 

And they sent out these black envelopes of, you know, unique startup deals. And it was always like $500 off your mattress with Casper or, you know, this wine tech subscription box or whatever. And so it definitely does work. But, you know, at the earliest stages, like you said, you do need a legitimate budget to really know if it’s going to work. And so it might not be the best thing early on.

Rick Rappe: 22:36

Yeah. That shared mailings where you have, you know, multiple different brands going out in one envelope. It’s a it’s a good it’s a good idea if you’re if you’re kind of blanketing the market with with an offer solo direct mail where where it’s just you’re you develop your own direct mail piece and send that out. That can be even more targeted. And the targeting in direct mail is where we really can make performance climb, you know, dramatically.

This direct mail can be super wasteful if it’s not very well targeted, but if it’s super well targeted, then it becomes, you know, a totally different story where you get a high return on your investment. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, well, we can talk more about direct mail down the road, but there’s definitely opportunities for startups to use direct mail. Well, earlier we were talking a little bit before we started. 

We were talking about direct mail. And you know, one thing you can do with direct mail is when someone visits your website, you can find that person’s address and immediately send them something in the mail, which is a very powerful tool because you know, that person is shopping and they’re interested in what you’re selling. And so hitting them with an offer outside of the digital space is, is actually a really good idea. I don’t know, there’s been some neuroscience testing on direct mail and digital. And did you know that direct mail actually lights up a whole different area of your brain than digital marketing? 

Really?

Andrew Lee Miller: 24:07

I did.

Rick Rappe: 24:08

Not know that, but it makes sense.

Andrew Lee Miller: 24:11

We’re raised to love physical things. And when you get something in the mail, like we’re also, you know, multi-generational. We used to run to the mailbox to see what came for you. There’s not much good stuff that comes in the mail anymore. Like I was just visiting my parents in Ohio and, you know, they’re like old.

I would walk down to the mailbox and get the mail, and it was always just like direct mail flyers. But you still look through it, at least for me, and not necessarily from a marketing advertising point of view. It’s just because nothing else is coming. So you’re opening it like, oh, what’s this? It’s not as noisy of a space. 

Whereas digital, we’re seeing like 4000 ads a day. So it’s hard to make someone interested. You know, we run a lot of campaigns for clients and it’s definitely not our secret sauce. I’ve spent 15 or maybe even $20 million on paid advertising now across my career, but it’s not something that I even sell or mention. I just do it for clients that I really love, and when they’re ready and they’re at that phase because I think, like anybody can do paid ads, it’s not a unique selling point anymore for a marketer. 

But when we do it, we often have to hit the person multiple times. We have to do retargeting. We have to hit them again. You have to pay multiple times because they’re not really engaged, they’re not really looking at it. And it makes sense to me that they’re engaged when they’re physically picking something up. 

They’re looking at just that thing.

Rick Rappe: 25:29

Yeah, we totally study what people do with their mail when they bring it in from the mailbox and they, you know, they go through and sort it into different piles and they look for they immediately go through and look for what’s in it for me as they go through. And, you know, we can make offers really tangible. So if you send somebody a certificate or a, you know, coupon or these types of things, I mean, it makes it harder to, to ignore, you feel like you’re throwing away something valuable. If you throw it away, it’s a little bit easier to click off of a digital ad and well, I’m sure you’ve heard the term banner blindness. I mean, people are just getting better at filtering out, you know, all the digital marketing that we see every day.

Right, right. I think it’s interesting to look at how we can integrate digital marketing with online offline tactics and how we can bring things together. There’s some really cool things we can do with targeting, so that we can kind of create that surround sound effect on a very targeted audience, which is really cool.

Andrew Lee Miller: 26:35

Cool.

Rick Rappe: 26:37

I think in my notes it says, my notes say you’ve interviewed an AI that raised funding. Is that true?

Andrew Lee Miller: 26:45

Yes. So one of the — so my podcast is all about interviewing recently funded founders. Okay. And giving them marketing advice because again, like I said, they make a lot of mistakes. You know, it started as an idea that I would start working with a lot of them.

But it’s mostly just been a labor of love. Giving back, giving advice and then but also really putting out there the proof of my knowledge and everything that I know. Because you can listen to this and be like, Holy shit, that guy really knows what he’s talking about. And I did that because there’s so many people out there saying that they’re a marketing expert on LinkedIn these days, that it’s actually annoying. You can’t call yourself a guru. 

You can’t say you’re a marketing expert. So I do all these interviews and then it shows, you know, it’s all right there. You can listen to me giving advice to people as if they were paying me to be their consultant. And, you know, this example was a startup called Boardy. Boardy.ai and they’re in Toronto, Canada. 

And Andrew D’Souza, who’s already built a $1 billion company, has built this startup that has an AI that’s like a networking tool for you. So you call in this phone number and you converse with this AI, and then it goes out and sends messages on your behalf and tries to make intros for you. So I used it myself. My wife has used it and gotten some interesting intros out of it, and it’s still totally free. And I called Andrew and I said, hey, I want you to come on my podcast. 

And he said, hey, why don’t you interview me yourself? And so I did that and it was very interesting. We didn’t edit it. It’s exactly the same speed as if you’re talking to the eye. So it’s still a little bit slower than ideal situation, but the fact that it’s thinking and responding and giving you know, like and I’m giving it tasks, I’m telling it, hey, you should tell your team this. 

You should do this, you should do this. And it’s creating a report for the guys based on my advice. It’s pretty amazing. And it’s a sign of where we’re going. I mean, we’re going to be having AI that makes calls for us. 

We’re going to be having AI that does, you know, major, major tasks for us, not just creating content. But I mean, it’s basically like our assistant, everyone’s going to have a virtual assistant for the rest of our lives, like starting like this year, not like years down the line. It’s getting crazy. And so yeah, that was a special moment and to date, it is the least listen to episode that I have. I think people avoid it more than — because most people are still not utilizing AI as much as they need to, you know? 

And I’m sure there’s even a way that AI can be valuable in, in your company, you know, like, oh yeah, you have large data sets, you know, of all these millions of people. And it can come through that. And I’m sure there’s an AI agent that could help you guys with your targeting and stuff, but it’s only about 15% of people, I think, in the United States when I read recently, are using AI, which is up from 5% at the beginning of the year. So it’s growing. But yeah.

Rick Rappe: 29:48

We’re studying AI and learning about AI as fast as we can. And I mean, I’m going to a training later this afternoon to learn about, you know, getting AI to do work for us instead of just developing content and things like that. Yeah. You mentioned targeting, and we definitely do use AI for targeting. Predictive models are a thing that we create for direct mail targeting.

So when you have customer groups that have responded, we use those and we can basically find the append that information into a database, find the variables that are super predictive, and then build an algorithm that predicts lookalikes and build lookalike audiences. So AI has rapidly has totally accelerated that process. It used to take like a month and a team of statisticians to do those kinds of predictive models. Now we can do it in 15 minutes. It’s crazy. So yeah.

Andrew Lee Miller: 30:47

It is crazy. But at the end of the day, you know, people are super scared about it. I saw a picture someone shared recently of like a street in Chicago in 1903, and it was just covered in horses and horse drawn carriages, and in 1913 there was no horses. And it was talking about. Yeah, the horse was probably really scared about that.

But then it benefited humanity overall. And at the end of the day, you have a choice to be the horse and get eradicated, or be the car and be ready to drive a car and learn how to drive a car. And you’re ready to drive into the new era. And you know, there’s definitely going to be bad things that happen when people, the wrong people, get this technology into their hands and do bad things. But overall, this is a great tool for humanity. 

Like the internet, like the cell phone. I mean, cell phone is terrible. We’ll look back 20, 30, 50 years from now, and the mobile phone will be worse than cigarettes on humanity. And, you know, it’s really bad, but overall it has helped us more than it’s hurt us. I mean, when you know how to use the tool, I don’t use it. 

I don’t play games. I don’t do anything on my phone with social media, and that’s by design. But so if you use it right, then it’s going to really help you. But it can hurt a lot of people too. And so I try to be what I call a techno optimist.

Rick Rappe: 32:04

Yeah for sure.

Andrew Lee Miller: 32:05

Just be optimistic about the future. But not stupid either.

Rick Rappe: 32:10

Well, there’s no doubt it’s going to disrupt some jobs. But like, the internet disrupted some jobs and created a lot more jobs, you know, so there’s going to be no new jobs created.

Andrew Lee Miller: 32:21

We’re going to have major problems. That’s for sure true. 25 million software developers are going to be out of jobs eventually. And I just had a call with a guy that owns a development agency, you know, similar to this, you know, looking to partner and chat about trends and things. And he is considering starting a university to help software developers develop new skills because they generally have been the highest paid people in the world over the last two decades, job wise and salary wise, and have not developed sales abilities or ability to sell themselves or job interview because companies have been fawning over them and throwing themselves.

And that’s scary because when AI makes you obsolete, it’s not going to happen. Over the course of years, it happens. A company releases something like Google, Gemini, Google released Codex. I think it was just last night, late last night, a new tool that is essentially an executive assistant. Boom. 

Executive assistants are almost obsolete. And when that starts to happen for software developers, there’s 20 plus million of those usually guys that are not going to be able to find a new role for a long time. And that’s really scary. I mean, there’s a meme going around right now, a video of a cardiologist that is looking at an x-ray of two lungs that are filling with fluid, and he’s saying it took me 20 years to precisely predict what or analyze these images. And now I can do it in minutes. 

And he’s like, I’m going to be looking for a job at McDonald’s later today after work. And he’s joking. But, you know, I feel more comfortable with doing that job and, you know, even the coding, the reason why it’s going to make those people obsolete is because they make mistakes. There’s a whole industry of bug fixing and QA testing that is no longer going to be needed, because AI doesn’t make mistakes. So the end all is us moving forwards as a human race. 

But it’s definitely going to break a few eggs to make that omelet.

Rick Rappe: 34:22

Yeah. Do you think it’s I mean, I know it feels like it’s adding tools to our toolbox for marketers, which is exciting and fun as we learn new things and implement them, implement them into our businesses and into our clients businesses. But do you see it having such an impact in the long run that where it’s actually taking on developing strategy and creating marketing without human intervention?

Andrew Lee Miller: 34:50

Yes and no. I think like your entry-level marketers now are going to be easily replaceable, like, you know, it can like it’s it’s still not going to have the experience that I have in the sense that it can be like, oh, I worked on this project, but it’s going to stop a lot of companies from working with someone. I mean, I’m definitely expanding into other things outside of just marketing consultancy. I, you know, I’m investing in real estate. I’m investing in companies myself and setting myself up to not be beholden to constantly needing clients.

And I think that’s about mitigating risk. But also, you know, it’s time I started working for equity only and really profiting off of the skills that I have. So that’s fine for me. But an early stage marketer that’s just started, you know, most of what you can do is going to be replaced by AI. I think, like, you know, your high level strategy stuff, a company like that is going to be willing to pay to have a human in the seat working with them for customized stuff. 

But I’ll just make the example for me, you know, everybody immediately. In 2022, when ChatGPT came out to the masses, everyone was like, Andrew, aren’t you scared? Marketers are obsolete. And I was like, absolutely not. I’m going to be an expert in using this tool to ten x what I can do. 

And in reality, what happened was lawyers are almost obsolete because the law is now easily read by software. And what we’re doing even at GrowthExpertz. And we need a lawyer instead of paying for ten billable hours. We’re doing nine hours of that with ChatGPT and then just paying them for one hour to review what we’ve created. And I think that’ll probably be what marketing will get to eventually as well. 

So instead of working with a full time consultant for the month, you do most of it in ChatGPT and then you pay the marketer hourly to review that and make sure that it’s ideal for your company. Something like that will probably be the case.

Rick Rappe: 36:46

Yeah, there’s always a place for strategic thinking and creativity and things like that, which I think, you know, ChatGPT or I can do some of. But maybe human, maybe the human mind is still going to be.

Andrew Lee Miller: 37:00

Maybe.

Rick Rappe: 37:01

The source for more creativity. We’ll see.

Andrew Lee Miller: 37:04

It’s going to be interesting. I think AI is also going to drop the cost of doing business. So think the price of things will go down quite a bit. Yeah. And you know we’ll see.

So like there might be lots of unemployed people but then things will be lower cost. I wouldn’t be surprised if you know like generationally we go back to, you know, blue collar things being the main way that we make money. Yeah. Like far down the future.

Rick Rappe: 37:30

I see it shortening timelines dramatically on kind of everything. I mean, it’s just cutting the amount of time that it takes to do things so, so drastically. And I feel like that’s good and bad for marketing. It can be bad because, I mean, I think that’s one of the things that I see in digital marketing is it’s very quick to put things out there. So it’s a lot of like throw it out there and see what happens.

And you know, direct mail is a lot more costly and it has a longer timeline because we’re physically producing mail pieces. So I feel like a lot of times it’s, it’s more it’s better, more thought out and more carefully crafted, I guess, if you will. But it’s still accelerating, even the way we do things so dramatically shortening like creative development times and things like that.

Andrew Lee Miller: 38:16

So those are good things. I think overall.

Rick Rappe: 38:19

I think so too. As long as you still have a chance to. Filter out bad ideas and be selective. Okay, one more quick question. I’m and then I’m going to get into a few wrap up questions.

But I guess you said that you’ve worked in over 70 countries. Yeah. What marketing insights have you gained from working in different cultures?

Andrew Lee Miller: 38:45

Oh man. I’ll be honest. You know, I am not super like America’s the best and greatest, but we are when it comes to business. I’ve worked in tons of countries, and I use that to my advantage that everybody wishes that they moved at the speed of an American worker. We work harder, we work faster, and we work more creatively than anyone on the planet.

And I will die on that hill. I mean, generally there’s — I’m sure there’s outliers everywhere. And the UK is incredible with design and creativity, and the Australia is amazing, but really like the amount of times where I just land at a company in a different country, I’m paid to be there for a week and it accelerates everything that the company is doing. And then for years later, employees email me like, oh, you lit a fire under our ass, Andrew, and we’re doing this and that. And so, you know, I know I’m more fast paced even for an American and, you know, but I think like that, that that’s the biggest takeaway for me is you get more and more patriotic the more you travel. 

You know, we’ve got plenty of things you can complain about In the US, we’re not the best in education or healthcare or anything, but when it comes to business, we’re the best. Period by far. And but beyond that, you know some things that stand out for me. I worked in a Thai startup in an office with the founder for a month, and like their reverence and respect that they have for each other was just like, incredible. And like, you know, the bringing in gifts for each other and like, really using specific words to show respect for teammates, you know, that that really sat with me. 

And we don’t do that enough in other cultures, you know, you know, I don’t want to talk bad, but definitely some countries drink and party like way too much. And so the work life balance is like and it’s not the ones you would think. It’s not like Ireland and Russia as much. It’s like Czech Republic and Australia and, you know, places where like going to have a Korea do drink a ton. I hope I don’t get in trouble for saying any of that. 

Yeah. I mean, so I’ve worked all over, I mean, a lot of it as being a digital nomad as you’re working on your own, like it’s the same stack I use, like Airbnb, I use Uber and I used like Tinder before I got married to like, meet people and I would and I used to work at Tinder so I can shout them out. It’s fine, but I, you know, so you do the world’s kind of all the same. Like, we make all this excuses up to think that it’s us versus them and that everyone’s different, but we’re all really the same. We’re all actually one family. 

There’s slight nuances, but there’s nice apartments. There’s places by the beach, there’s businesses, there’s startup events, there’s everywhere. It’s pretty much the same. And, you know, I think you just generally learn to love everyone. The more you travel.

Rick Rappe: 41:30

That’s great. Yeah. Well, that’s good advice too for young people to get out there and see the world. Oh yeah. Okay.

A couple more quick questions while we wrap it up. What’s one tool or resource in marketing that you can’t live without?

Andrew Lee Miller: 41:49

Well, it would be easy for me to say ChatGPT now, but I’m not really using it as much for marketing stuff. I think, like you said earlier, it’s not really that great. It’s great if you don’t have access to anything else, but if you’re just slapping up some stuff on LinkedIn. For me, I really love, I mean, for cleaning out our email list, I love NeverBounce. Shout out to NeverBounce for I love I.

You were talking about ways to partner with direct mail. I love retention and inboundinsight.com and Visitor Connect and tools that identify your website traffic, which can be plugged into direct mail and sending mail. But for GrowthExpertz, we see the company, LinkedIn’s and emails of the people who are visiting our website, even if they don’t fill out a form, and then we get in contact with them and actually do meet with them eventually. For the number one thing that I use right now is a tool called Dux-Soup, and they are a LinkedIn outreach tool. They’re the original tool. 

There’s many competitors, but it really does work. And I make a lot of money just sending LinkedIn messages to people, but it’s also grown a massive audience for me on LinkedIn. And so that tool is really powerful.

Rick Rappe: 43:07

Wow, that’s great advice. I’m going to check that out right away. Yeah. Sounds good. All right.

One final question for entrepreneurs that are listening. What’s one piece of advice that you’d offer them to help them navigate the modern marketing landscape?

Andrew Lee Miller: 43:27

One piece of advice would be to start with marketing, not advertising. I think, like a lot of people think that. I mean, it’s too far. Two parts if you’re one, don’t waste your time with social media. I don’t care what kind of business you are trying to grow a social media audience to sell stuff to.

It’s important and everybody is saying, you know, you have to build a community, but it’s very hard to build this social media audience without any spend. Now, these are pay to play environments. Mark Zuckerberg’s the richest person in the world, not because people are scaling their audience for free, because they’re running paid ads budgets to grow their audience. So the young people, especially that think that they can be a creator and get tons of followers and make money off of that. You need hundreds of millions of impressions to earn a living from your content. 

So instead, you know, reach out to people, test your messaging, see what they if they like what you’re going to be building, and even before you build it and then go build it, whether it’s a physical product or a service or an agency, you know, just reach out to people for free and see if they’d be interested and then go build it, then go back to people. And then once you get money, you can invest in running ads to grow your social media and stuff.

Rick Rappe: 44:39

That’s great advice. Nice. All right. Well, thank you so much for this opportunity to talk with you and learn. Learn from you today, Andrew.

It was great to get to know you. Where can people learn more and get in touch with you?

Andrew Lee Miller: 44:51

Yeah. So I’m Andrew Lee Miller. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m the only one. But I go by Andrew startups one word on all social media.

And then my company is called GrowthExpertz. So GrowthExpertz with a Z at the end. And if you’re looking for fractional experts on marketing, sales partnerships and recruitment, you can definitely find us there and reach out. Thank you for having me. It was really fun.

Outro: 45:14

That’s a wrap for this episode of Response Drivers. Thanks for tuning in. If you found today’s insights valuable, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left a review. Got a question or a topic you’d like us to cover?

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