Adam Robinson: My guest today is Chase Dimond. He is a top email marketer. He’s generated hundreds of millions of dollars in email revenue for his clients. A few of his current clients include Poo~Pourri, Health-Ade, Mixtiles, and Eight Sleep. I want those as customers. How do I get them, Chase Dimond? Anyway, I'm really looking forward to today's chat and here's why. This is my personal story. I have never been involved in social media really in any way, aside from one six-month stint where my wife and I did Facebook ads and it worked really well. But like I kind of guessed, I don't know how to use these platforms. Certainly, I've always been just like very intimidated by achieving organic reach or whatever. And then I got put on to you because I started stalking Triple Whale because I was really interested that they were growing their following on Twitter without the founders having to do the work. And then we started talking a ton. You joined us as an advisor.

And like what initially caught my attention is you write about email for e-commerce and you have 80,000 Twitter followers, right? Like wtf like can you give me the five-minute sort of arc of your career on how someone ends up at this spot? And this is certainly not the only thing that you're doing, which I want to talk about later but like, how do you become Chase Dimond?

Chase Dimond: Wow. That's a great question. And again, it's like we all start the same, right? Like, I've been doing this for a long time. People just start finding me over the past like two years. I've been creating content on social for like six years and six years ago was like literally my mom was like the only person that followed me and semi-cared on what I had to say and knew nothing about what I was actually saying, right? And back then I was very broad on what I was talking about. I was talking about like marketing and thoughts and this, that, and the other. And then I kind of had the conscious decision to focus specifically on the thing I was best at, which was email. So, I think for me, like honing the message down to a specific topic is super important. And I think the other thing too is like you have to build like this muscle for creating content. It’s something that needs to happen every single day and it has to be a hybrid of quality and quantity. You need to actually have both, right?

A lot of the content in reality is going to be absolute garbage but you need that muscle working and you need those reps and you need that almost AB testing of sorts to see what sticks. So, I just found that people love email marketing 101, email marketing 201-type content. And every single day I've been trying to create different piecemeals of that. And over time, as my following has grown, I've kind of expanded talking about like copywriting and entrepreneurship and agency and whatnot but really the center thing is email. And I think the big thing for me was focusing on a single platform. So, Twitter has really been the thing that I focused on, on dominating and I've been using that platform to then build my newsletter and build my LinkedIn and build other platforms and the content from there, because I have a big following, I'm able to see it pretty quickly what's going to work, and then I'm able to quickly repurpose that elsewhere.

So, long-winded, I've been at it for a really, really long time. It's kind of like people look at you like, “Wow. You run an eight-figure company like you just started. And it's like, "Well, true, I started this company a few years ago but I've started companies for the last 5, 10, 15 years.” Right? So, I think that's kind of the story is like I think people often throw in the towel too quickly that they don't have enough time to see the compounding effort and the effect of their work.

Adam Robinson: I'm going to bring us back to the title of this podcast. The title of this podcast is Ten Years in the Making. The reason it's called Ten Years in the Making is there is this killer quote, which I'm sure a lot of these people are listening to this have heard. It's credited to Tom Clancy or at least the version that I saw was and the quote is, "An overnight success is ten years in the making.” I believe that so deeply that I call my podcast that. It pops up in every interview I do. And you just literally said it. It's like people throw in the towel too quickly. Like, my business now is my dream business. It is literally like the entire time I was running my last business, which was just a grind every single day that I was doing it, like either emotionally or physically or both, right? This thing is absolutely taking off. I couldn't stop it if I wanted to, ten years after I started my other one, almost to the day. And like everyone is learning about it now. Because of you, actually, I'm doing all this social media stuff.

And I wanted to say kudos or whatever double-clicking that muscle thing because like now when I started this effort and I'm making 18 pieces of content per week that are getting published, I'm making a podcast, I have a work in public content line that's meant to attract employees. I have a content line similar to yours that talks about best practices of email and SMS and list growth because that's kind of the core to what we do and abandonment since abandonment revenue platforms. And I'm creating a bunch of video right now to like someday it’s - we're using on LinkedIn but like LinkedIn's kind of a text-based platform. I just like really deeply believe in the power of video. And TikTok is really pushing the educational content. The idea is get like 300 videos and then start that flywheel over there too. I now think of I'm like riding my bike home and I'm like, “Oh, great. I really love this idea of sell something magical.” So, I'm like, "That's a great founder philosophical post or whatever.”

And you're right. It’s just things occur to you when you're doing it all the time and you're used to it but you have to commit, right? Like, I mean, you can't be half into this. And for me, it took a really long time. If you need coaxing, I would recommend reading Founder Brand by Dave Gerhardt. Incredible argument for anyone in the position who's building any kind of company. If you were at the helm, you will experience exponentially faster brand build by definition of humans connecting to what you were doing when they're connecting to your face and not this word like we have a huge domain, Retention.com, still what I'm doing is growing twice as fast as the company pages. And I think I'm posting more interesting content on the company page, which is just an interesting thing.

Chase Dimond: Yeah. It’s a great thing. Yeah. A couple of thoughts like, one, I mean, the number of times I'm driving, I'm doing something and I'm telling Siri, "Hey, Siri, remind me about this post idea,” or hey, the number of times I'm creating voice content. Look, I'm talking to myself just recording content ideas so I don't forget later. So, really is this muscle. And once you get into the groove, it really is in this flow state. So, I think content now it's so much easier because you have all these reps under your belt. I think that's one. Two is I always tell my team and I always tell people the reason that we're winning today and the reason that things are working today is because the work we did six months ago and the work that we did today is going to pay off in six months, right? So, I think too many people think, “I'm going to create a post today. I'm going to win today.” It's like, well, you're going to have a small win the fact that you post it but those wins aren't going to really be magnified like the way that you want until about that three or six months of time. So, those are my thoughts there.

Adam Robinson: So, the next question I have for you is like you have this big audience, how are you measuring the ROI of this reach? So, I just want to bring up an interesting part of it, right? Like, because of your audience, you are now like an equity owner in my business, right? Like, how could you possibly quantify that? You know what I mean? Like, some weird guy who's got this crazy company that like he's going to reach out to you and be like, “I'm dying for you to share your secrets with me. Take equity in my company to like show me some stuff.” So, how do you measure? Can you talk about like benefits, qualitative and quantitative, of this? And if you measure it, then how you do?

Chase Dimond: Yeah. So, I guess kind of like how I measure it is kind of equivalent to like how do I monetize it in a sense, right? And I've got a couple of things. I've got an agency. We've got 120, 130 employees, 150 brands, all e-commerce brands doing 7 to 9 figures. So, when people see my content on social media and they think about email and they have the need for a service, they think about me. So, the agency has grown greatly because of the social stuff. I think I'm probably contributing mid-seven figures to the agency this year alone. You know, the work that I'm doing on social probably will drive between $4 million to $6 million for the agency this year, if not more. I also have courses, so I started my first course almost exactly two years ago and I've had in the ballpark of like 3,000 to 4,000 people purchased my courses with like pretty much zero ad spend. And they've done probably about $1.7 million to about $2 million in revenue, almost all profit in the past like 18 to 24 months with that. My audience is decent but it's still going to be a lot bigger. So, that directly gone to my pocket has been great.

Adam Robinson: They can't complain about that. Yeah. There's not a lot of cogs to info products, are there?

Chase Dimond: Not at all. And then the other things that are like kind of intangible to like what you mentioned is like I got in very, very early with Triple Whale and they in the next probably 12 to 18 months will become a unicorn. You know, you guys were crushing it. I feel like I've gotten kind of semi-early with you guys because your roadmap is so vast and where you guys are now at eight-figures is going to be small when you’re at nine-figures in revenue, right?

Adam Robinson: 100% in 24 months.

Chase Dimond: Or 10 or so. Exactly. So, I've been really lucky to get equity and kind of ownership in you guys, Triple Whale, and a couple of other really cool companies which again, yeah, I still don't know how this has happened but thankfully it has. So, that's like the actual quantifiable one. The intangibles for me is the messages that I get every single day from people that like, "Hey, you're free content, you're paid content.” Whatever it might be has changed my life. It's changed my business. It's allowed me to quit my job. It's allowed me to provide for my business. So, for me, myself, it's put seven, eight figures in value into my pocket in the short term, mid-term, long term. And that's also put just as much, if not more money, probably even eight or nine figures at this point into other people's pockets out of consume my free content or paid content. And that's really the piece. It's like this flywheel. That's what motivates me and I'm sure I know I'm going to benefit from it as well but I want to serve other people at this point. I want to give back. I want to teach. I want to empower.

Adam Robinson: Look, we're six weeks in with the work that you have inspired me to do but it's just like there are exponentially more people listening to what I have to say today than there were six weeks ago. And like what I was doing was already flying off the shelf. Like, I just can't even imagine the effect this is going to have posting 18 things per week, all sorts of different media, all sorts of different channels for years. And that is a very concrete example. The dude you're talking to was inspired by you to do this. You know, like I may not be reading the copywriting tips or whatever but like just how you were running your business life, I was like, man, like I should probably be doing some of that, you know?

Chase Dimond: One other quick thing, yesterday, the CSO of Constant Contact, I was on a call with. The CEO of Constant Contact kept sending her my tweets and she's like, "Oh, I got to hop on a call with him.” Just yesterday, a company called Freshworks, which is a public company, they paid me a bunch of money to do a demo call for them that was recorded. A few weeks before that, Airtable paid me money to talk about them. So, that's like the other thing that I was thinking about too, is like these companies that like you grew up thinking that like, "Oh, public company, like they don't want to deal with you.” These companies that are worth 9, 10 figures are hitting me up and they're looking at me like I'm the expert. So, it's pretty crazy and I'm really proud of stuff that you're doing. It’s really cool.

Adam Robinson: Well, thank you. I’m in the early days. I'm still finding my voice I think we could say but I'm having fun with it. Okay. So, next thing I want to talk about is, and this is exactly this, right? It's like work habits, time management, like everybody that I speak to about you, they're like, "That dude is awesome.” I think my theory is, one of the reasons is your energy is amazing and you have organized your life in a way to where you are super reliable and you are very, very on top of what you're doing. And you kind of don't take on too much. Right? So, if I'm looking at your social presence, I'm thinking this is all this dude does, and like what does your day look like? And do you have a situation where like they’re similar day-to-day? Your days are like is it just at the whim of whatever's going on? I mean, how do you think about that? So, you talk about yours and then I'll talk about the system that I put together with your help to manage my content.

Chase Dimond: Cool. Okay. I love it. Me being on social all day is partially true. I do feel like I live in my inbox and on my social but that's intentional. So, at the agency, we're at the point now we’re north of a hundred employees, we've got directors and senior folks and junior folks. So, there's all these layers of management. So, I've been able to get out of the day-to-day of my agency, and I think that is the hardest part for agency owners, service providers, operators is like getting out of their own way. And that was really hard. But two-and-a-half years ago when I had my daughter, I went on like a few week paternity leave, which I never thought would be possible. And that gave me like all the clarity of like I need balance. I can't just keep burning out. So, I would structure my day where every morning I wake up with my daughter. Thankfully, she's been sleeping in lately so I can get more things done in the morning before she’s up.

Adam Robinson: God bless her.

Chase Dimond: Yeah, yeah. I know you’re in the stages where...

Adam Robinson: I’m eight-and-a-half weeks in here.

Chase Dimond: Yeah. Oh, man. And I've got another one coming in January. So, I have to go through what you're going through again but my daughter wakes up around like 7:00, 7:30. I’ll hang out with her for like a half hour, 45 minutes in the morning. We’ll grab breakfast. We're going to walk. My wife will then get up, hang out with her. Then basically the first thing I do is I start creating content. So, I like to do a morning post on every single platform I have. I try to get a post out between 8 a.m. or 9 a.m., and I typically lead with something that's around copywriting. That's like the thing that I feel like most people are really excited about right now, and it's kind of probably the most universal, and that's helping me scale my audience probably the quickest is this copywriting stuff. So, every morning around 8:00 or 9:00, I'll write a pretty short form LinkedIn post.

Adam Robinson: Can I jump in and ask you one question about that? Is this something that was swinging around your head the prior day or do you sit down, Zen mind, begin your mind, and you're just like, “I'm going to come up with a completely original idea right now.” Like, how does it…?

Chase Dimond: Most of it is stuff that I’ve thought about like the day prior. Like, every night before bed, I'll look at my calendar for the day and I'll think about the things that I learned. And I'll just take a couple of notes of like, "Oh, like I tried this copywriting thing or I saw my team try this AB test.” So, I'll just think about all the inputs that we had throughout that day. And then the next morning, the first thing I think about is the one I'll roll with. I'm like, "Okay. That thing that we ran the actual AB test on that subject line for this client was the most interesting. Why did that subject line win?” And in the morning I'll kind of dive into the account and be like, "Oh, maybe this one because it was a little bit more mysterious and then had better use of like the preview text with the subject line.” And then I'll talk about, okay, the preview text is actually your second subject line, right? You want it to kind of intrigue and create this urgency or this mystery of kind of this burning desire within you to open the email and it needs to be related to the content.

So, I'll kind of like almost pre-think about things. I'll have a list of things that are really interesting to me and whatever when I wake up thinking about in the morning is the one that I'll be like, “This is the thing I have to write about right now.” And all the other ones end up being post two or post three of the day. So, most days I try to post three times a day, sometimes two, sometimes four. One is at least about copywriting, one’s typically about email, and then one is something random like, “Hey, I'm thinking about seven business models I really like. I really like growth agencies for B2B SaaS. I really like this whole concept of repurposing videos.” So, I kind of try to create content that's like interesting for other people that helps inspire them, think about side hustles or opportunities. So, that's kind of how I think about it. And I try to post morning, afternoon, and evening to kind of tackle different audiences.

Adam Robinson: One post that I remember along those lines just so that you know it like emotionally moved me, even though it's not relevant to my life at all. The Post was, “Once you realize that you can make $2,500 a month spending one hour a week on something, that it will change your opinion of business forever.” And I was like, “That is f*cking beautiful.” It doesn't apply to me at all like I do not have a second in the day to do consulting work of any kind but like what a great message. Most people are sweating. They're like sweating it out for $5,000 a month like working around the clock or whatever. You get five or six clients. Like, I watched my wife do this. She does PR for eco startups and her niche was originally helping people really nail their Kickstarter launch. And then she got a couple of brands that were like it's really for entrepreneurs that would launch over and over again, tangential products, and she was on every one of them. So, now she's got like eight customers paying her $5,000 a month, two girls doing everything in Argentina. Like, it's an amazing business.

Like, she just had a kid. She's taking off until January, running perfectly. She's getting inbound leads, doesn't even know what to do with them. She's like, “I got to hire more people.” So, like, I don't want to work but I got to hire more people. Like, “Helen, this is a great problem.” But this is like, to me, this is a dream business for a lot of people. Maybe some people would need more security but people come to me and be like, "Oh, you can make this like three times as big, whatever.” It's like for a young mother to be able to work, not kidding you, 6 to 8 hours a week and make like a couple hundred thousand dollars a year or something like that. Like that, to me, is the American dream. That's like the best iteration of it. I'm doing a crazy thing right now involving a huge amount of personal risk with I'm trying to get like a mega outcome. That is not the American dream. That's just a crazy person. What my wife is doing is like truly inspiring to me. You know, she was like doing this SDR job before that she didn't like. She loves the work now. It's just such a great like that little post that you wrote resonates with me in so many different ways.

Chase Dimond: I love that. I think it's a couple of things. I think one is like you have to stack wins. I think what you're doing today doesn't make sense for a lot of people but it makes sense for you. Again, ten years in the making, you've done it. You want to go big.

Adam Robinson: Yeah. I just feel it. Right now is the time. There's like the stars are aligning. It wasn't the time of year ago. It may not be the time in three years but like right now, I am going to go as big and powerful. Yeah.

Chase Dimond: I'm glad that you are so thank you. I think stack wins is one. And I'm a huge believer in momentum. The more momentum, the more win at your back, the better, right? So, I think wins compounds kind of like what we talked about before. I think, too is like with that post that you mentioned, like it's this concept of leverage and the more leverage you have, the better. And having the audience gives you leverage, right? If people want to work with you in the case of myself, your wife, a bunch of other people that are probably listening, you get to dictate your price and dictate your terms. And that's the benefit of inbound. So, with our agency and with creating content, people come in. The cycle of closing a lead is so much closer because they have the social proof. They've been following you for a few weeks, a few months, often even a few years. And the sales cycle, typically in people building the trust as long and then when they actually come to close, it's quick. You name your price.

So, with that post, you know the concept and the number obviously for everyone is different. Some people might be happy with $500. Some people might need $10,000 or something. It's just about having leverage and then being able to have scale through hiring other people that then also benefit the people that she's hiring. They've got jobs, they've got security. So, they're also winning, right? It kind of creates this flywheel. So, I think it's really important. To round it out and then I want to hear about yours. So, morning, afternoon, evening, copywriting, email, something related to motivation, inspiration, building, etcetera. And I also at this point like have a somewhat global audience. So, I want to be able to get people content like when they're most receptive to it. So, I noticed like in the morning, it's typically people in the US or if I posted like 9 a.m. PST that are consuming it midday, it's kind of like when people like in Australia and elsewhere are kind of online. And then in the evening, I've got folks in like the Philippines and India and elsewhere that are kind of consuming the content. So, it's really interesting to see and kind of understand that.

Adam Robinson: Okay. Here's how I'm going about it. And keep in mind, this is like a dude starting from zero like absolutely zero, no muscle, like no direction, and six weeks later, I've picked up 3,500 LinkedIn followers. Our company page has 50. Yeah, I'm up to like 6,000 or something but like, yeah, it happens. Anyway, but it's growing like very fast. The company page is growing like crazy also, which I was shocked about because for a while it was just stuck and then all of a sudden something happened and like everyone's looking at both now, which is great. And also if I could screenshot my calendar, it would make people vomit. And so, I needed to like not be creating content three times a day. I still have not removed myself even remotely from this job yet. Like, I had done so about a year ago and then what we're trying to do is totally different. So, like, I'm as deep in the weeds as I've ever been. It's just calls all day. So, I had to convince and I look at my calendar, in Monday mornings, I always have nothing. So, I'm like, that has to be my content creation day.

And I have two people helping me with ideas and like I want to call it like structure. Like, when we're going to hit what and like what the strategies are going to be for audience building on both channels or whatever. You actually hook me up with both of them. So, we meet once a month and we talk about with Diana also, who's we're building her LinkedIn presence also. So, we talk about basically like what the next four weeks of content are going to be. And I want to do one video post and one text LinkedIn post per day, two newsletters per week. One’s basically taking the email and text strategy that we LinkedIn post it and making a newsletter and then the other one is like a philosophical topic that when I'm saying from being in the business for ten years, this is what I think now. And I think those are interesting because like the reason that I think this stuff is because of these massive failures that I've had along the way. You know, like I'm writing one right now that's like about how I believe that you need to sell things that seem almost magical to people.

I just have this belief. You need to lead with something that is very exciting. And it's like the idea is the Seth Godin purple cow idea. Like, the way you're going to get word of mouth is by creating something that is as remarkable as a purple cow. If you passed a brown cow on your way to your mom's house, you're not going to tell your mom about the brown cow. If you passed purple cow, you’re going to tell your mom about the purple cow. So, I have this example where like the last business I was in was email marketing space. It is a tough space. I mean, MailChimp, Klaviyo, huge brands making billions of dollars. They're spending billions on advertising. They have great products. They have great brands. Everybody's excited about it, huge communities. And then you have 100 vendors making like 2 million or 3 million in revenue every year that like can't grow, right? Like, this is the way it is. Everybody's selling the same thing. All the features are the same, whatever.

And the first attempt that I made and the next venture that we had was like building an upmarket email marketing platform to Mailchimp but like under sort of Salesforce marketing cloud or whatever. I’m like spent $2 million, built the software, like went to go like launch it at Traffic & Conversion because we were going this like specific sort of digital marketing type audience. Like, I had this huge domain for that one too but I had it on a lease thankfully. That was like a revenue share so I didn't have to pay anything for it. It's called Lead.com. Hired 20 models, dressed them up in skimpy Lead.com clothes. I'm sure I'll get cancer for this now because you're not allowed to do that anymore. Maybe you. I don't even know. I still think sex sells. I'm walking around this place and I'm talking to these people who I think are the ideal customer profiles for it, and they're just, like, glazed over. Do not care. Absolutely could not give a crap about what I'm saying. It was devastating. I spent $20,000 on this stunt. I was not making a ton of money at the time.

And then to every one of them at the same time, I'd come up with this idea that GetEmails was possible, which is like the prior company name of Retention.com. And what GetEmails is for those who don't know, we resolve anonymous traffic to a deliverable email address without this person filling out a form. That is magic, right? If you've never heard of that, it is crazy. So, the same people that were just glossed over on this, "Hey, I got another thing for you that you already have that you should, whatever,” they were like, "Excuse me? Say that again.” Like, the excitement was palpable, right? So, from that day, I decided that I was going to figure out how to do this GetEmails thing. Took me 18 months to figure out how to actually provide the product. And then day one, it was just like we spent $5,000 on ads the first month and on these Facebook video campaign ads and got $10,000 a month recurring revenue. If I spent $5,000 on Robly, my last company, I might have gotten $250 of monthly recurring revenue just because the channel is so crowded.

Anyway, so like all that is to say we all have this wisdom built up ten years in the making that needs to get shared, right? Like, that's like a really interesting story for people. It's like if you're walking around like just talking about something and like people are just not even reacting, you might want to like try to go a different direction. You know what I mean?

Chase Dimond: I love it.

Adam Robinson: So, talk to me about where Chase Dimond is going to be in 5 and 10 years. Like, what is all this for? What is it all leading up to?

Chase Dimond: Yeah. It's a good question. I've been really fixated on this concept of a few things. Like, one, like a holding company, I guess, or two kind of like a fund where we build, acquire, invest into tools that help email marketers, help copywriters, etcetera. So, I'm actually building like an email design tool, right? Like, I think there are tools around like deliverability. I think what you're doing is really cool. So, I just envisioned kind of in five years doing similar things I'm doing today at a much larger scale, much larger marginal audience, multiple tools kind of in the portfolio. So, I'm just really interested in this space. I really like the space and just want to double down and own and kind of build and advise and operate a dozen type of these tools in the next five years that are all doing seven, eight figures, nine figures in revenue, etcetera.

Adam Robinson: Five years they’re going to be calling them solutions and not tools. That is one early sort of software thing that you realize. You're like, “Oh, people perceive this as a tool. If I just say that it's a solution, there will be so much more perceived value.”

Chase Dimond: Yeah. Solution, I like that.

Adam Robinson: I mean, whatever. I mean, I’m just busting your balls. So, we kind of touched on this earlier but like I just want to ask a specific question. People are wondering, you’re an advisor for like five super cool companies, right?

Chase Dimond: Yeah.

Adam Robinson: If somebody were like, “I want to be on a five-year path to that,” what would you tell them to try? Like, do you have any sort of philosophical career governing perspectives to like put yourself in the position of being that in demand for roles like that?

Chase Dimond: Yeah. For one, I never thought that this was something that was feasible or possible. It wasn't like five years ago I’d thought I’d be doing this today. Now, I'm doing this. I think it's possible. I think for one is like subject matter expertise. I think you have to know your sh*t. You have to become an expert at something. For me, it was email. For you, it could be email. It could be SMS. It could be paid search. It could be paid social. It could be CRO. You know, there's like an infinite number of things that you can become an expert at but you have to be an expert at something. I think that's one. And you become an expert by practicing, right? You have to be doing it. You have to be good. You have to be iterating. You have to be learning. So, that's one. I think two is you have to be willing to share the stuff that you know, the good, the bad, the ugly, the great, the secrets. Right? Like, I don't really hold back anything. I believe that by sharing what I know, other people in return will share what they know. So, lots of people will take what I've taught them and then they'll have a pivot of it and they'll report back to me.

So, I've infinitely scaled the number of AB tests that I'm able to run. I just giving up the test that I'm running and then everyone else interprets that slightly differently and then they report back to me, right? So, now I have this feedback of I share some of that's working for me. I'm sharing this and testing this across 100 Klaviyo accounts or 100 email accounts of brands that are having scale, right? Can other people go replicate that thing or come up with an offshoot of it? So, now I've got folks that like Klaviyo and Sendy and then ESPs giving me insights on what's working. I've got other agencies and other brands that are feeding me. So, I've got all these inputs coming into me, telling me what they're doing is working because I'm so open and adamant about telling them what's working for me. So, I think fostering this community and giving content and giving value is super important. And then over time, if you become better and you do more of that and you find out the channel that resonates with your content and you just go 100X that, you go all in, then you start to deliver scale.

So, I think it's just a combination of the things we talked about. Do it for long enough, be good enough at it, be open, be a nice person, act with integrity, and then people come in. Like, I haven't seeked out any of these advisor opportunities. They come in. I was at lunch yesterday with this AI tool that they literally came from Israel to meet with us and meet with a few people because they want us to advise them. So, everything is becoming inbound. I wish I knew how to go out and ask for it.

Adam Robinson: Yeah, yeah. And then what do those deals actually look like? I mean, I know what our deals look like but like just for the audience, like you don't have to give like exact numbers but like just generally speaking, when somebody says like, “I'm an advisor for Triple Whale,” like what are you doing for them and what are you getting in exchange?

Chase Dimond: Yes. So, generally speaking, on the comp side, it's a mixture of three things. It's one is options, shares, equity, whatever you want to call it, that's one. And that with them invested over like a year. With other people, doesn't invest. To other people, invest longer. There's different terms for that. Two is some exchanging of cash, right? So, they want to sponsor events. They want to sponsor my newsletter. They pay for it. And then three is some kind of performance compensation, right? So, outside of them paying for it, outside the advisory things if we run ads, if I talk about it, if we do webinars, if we do these different types of things, they'll often pay a percentage of deals earned, right? So, 10%, 15%, 20%, etcetera, different terms, two years, lifetime. So, it's a combination of shares, options, equity, cash, and then performance-based things. And then what I do, everyone's different. For some companies, it's introductions. With other people, it's like teaching them about the things I know on social. For other people, it's literally paying to get in front of the audience. So, it's kind of a combination of like giving them advice on product, on growth, making introductions.

Adam Robinson: And I'll tell you what, I'll tell everybody what you're doing for us. So, tons of intros out of the gate. We decided that I needed to become more visible in this world that Chase is very visible in. So, started identifying platforms to do that with. And that was like sponsoring your show, sponsoring Nick’s show, Geek Out, getting on Steve Hutt's podcast, getting on Curt's podcast, Unofficial Shopify Podcast. And then it got to the point where I just realized where the benefit would be so massive if I actually had one of these platforms also to my company that the first, which by the way, I want to go back to my content sort of strategy because we got distracted and I think it's like probably interesting for people to hear how I do it in 3 hours per week, one block of time. So, it was connecting me with people to help me execute my content plan and make it to where it was something that I could visualize fitting into my life because I could never visualize three times a day going in and creating original content to post on these platforms. It just doesn't work.

But the great news is if you can get people to help you, there is an alternative. And we are tomorrow running our first co-webinar. So, we both have the same view. We're in a recessionary inflationary environment and you need to be pursuing strategies to enhance LTV, email, SMS, own channels. We're going to show you ways to basically grow that. And that will very likely result in like what you were talking about, like a 20% sort of referral or whatever. And, I mean, it has been fantastic for me. It's like I'm just doing things that I never would have done otherwise that you have been an expert in.

Chase Dimond: Yeah. One quick thing and I realize that too like in the beginning of my journey with social, I leveraged other people's platforms, right? You went on the podcast. You're doing that. You have to leverage other people's and then you realize over time that while those are valuable and you still need to do that, the distribution of doing that versus your own changes. In the beginning, you're 100% other people's platform because you don't have a platform. And then over time, you end up being maybe like 50/50. 50% of the time I was going to show up on other people's events, other people's podcast, other people's shows. And the other half is you're going to allocate towards building your own stuff. And for me, I'm almost now at the point of like I'm so over-indexed on my own stuff. Like, people ask me all the time when you come on my podcast. We do this, do that. I'm just like, “Do I want to spend an hour on their podcast or doing an hour with my own podcast?”

And no offense to them, I'm sure they're great but an hour on my own podcast is going to be 10X worth my time over time because I own the audience. I own the control. They're building the relationship with me. There's one podcast I listen to where it's like they’re celebrities, right? They’re well known. They're well known. And then these guys for my first million, same as Sean, they want to say that they're known well. There's a difference in being well-known and known well. I want to be known well. I want people to instantly know who I am. I want them to know that I have a family, that I have all these businesses, that I do all these things, and I want to help them across all the facets of their life. So, that was kind of like my evolution of like only doing others to realizing that like there's a lot of equity and kind of weight in owning your own more so.

Adam Robinson: Two thoughts. I have three thoughts that are reacting to several things you said. One, this is why I'm going so deep into video. It's less breadth but like 700 people have watched this video that I put about the new sales deck that I made two weeks ago, like the comedy. You know what I mean? Like, if you watch that, it's like 13 minutes long. You really have a sense for who I am and how I think about things. I want these people that we’re hiring to watch that. I want them to be able to watch 20 different ways that I've thought about different parts of our business in the way I'm approaching it. Number two, which leads me into a lot of people as entrepreneurs I have found are scared to share their ideas. I think that is crazy.

Chase Dimond: Yeah.

Adam Robinson: Let me tell you, and I'm sure you will agree, Chase, anybody who could copy it and make it work is already doing something that they think is more valuable. Like, never in the history that someone dropped what they're doing and then like, "This guy's crazy idea I'm going to pursue and rip off,” like maybe one in a trillion, right? And that is just my belief. And I think that this working in public stuff of, like you said, sharing information, this to me, it's like getting as intimate is like here are the thoughts that I have about this pricing page versus the one that we were doing before, right? I'm not worried about the customers hearing and being upset about it or whatever. It's like, this is why we're doing this, right? I just think it creates that known well thing that you're talking about. And so does video. It's like so much more rich of a media than text, right? So, I mean, I may be doing it the wrong way but like I'm tripling down on the video. So, anyway, I want to hit - go ahead.

Chase Dimond: Yeah. One last thing and then we'll let you wrap up with what you're going to say is I think there's different types of content formats for different types of people. When I think about content, there's this content that I create that's kind of like mass market mass appeal that's just for garnering attention, garnering views, right? There's that kind of content that is a little bit more like motivational, inspirational, kind of like a catch-all, like that's that type of thing. Then there's the kind of time that you're talking about that's video-based where inherently you're going to have way less people view it and watch it. But the people that are going to watch it are going to be very engaged and those are going to be like the die-hard loyalists, right? So, when you think about the content streams, like there's these videos that we're doing right now. If someone watches the 40 minutes that we've done, these are the people that are like in our community that love us and know us and want to be a part of everything we're saying.

And then there's other kind of content that's like TikTok, 10-second, 20-second really quick educational tidbit and then you move on, right? So, I think keeping in mind the type of content you're creating for the different audiences is super important.

Adam Robinson: Totally. Okay. I'm going to go back to my content creation schedule because I stopped halfway through. So, we have a planning meeting once a month and we basically get the calendar straightened out, right? I have Tommy creating hooks for me on Sunday night that I can walk into on Monday morning and say, “What are the five best ways that I know to grow an SMS list?” Like, what are three huge mistakes that I've made growing my business? So, it's like things that are based on my experience but he's feeding me the ideas for the hooks, right? Then I create bullets and I make seven videos or however many it is, five videos, whatever it is. And with the bullets, he actually takes the bullets and makes them LinkedIn-worthy, if you want to call it that. He knows how to write for LinkedIn. This is something that basically, the timing in like how to present and like all that stuff I'm giving to him but it's actually my words that he's taking and making it into the correct format.

And same idea with Mason, with the newsletters. It's like he is taking things that I am saying and he is putting it in a form to where it's easy to digest as a newsletter and then showing it to me and I say yes.

Chase Dimond: Like, he's LinkedIn-fying. He’s newletter-fying. You have the content and the structure. They’re just making it interesting for the media.

Adam Robinson: Right. And then during that day, I make my weekly work-in-public post, which I have people that are they make subtitles and whatever and post it on YouTube then I post it on LinkedIn. And so, for instance, for the Friday newsletter, I'm always three weeks ahead of what Mason's writing for my philosophical piece. So, he watches the 12-minute-long YouTube of me saying like telling the story of this sell something magical, and then he uses my words to create a newsletter out of it. And then the podcast thing is this is episode two. I interviewed Ryan Pamplin last week. I have six more before Friday. Literally, tomorrow I have six more of these things. So, I'm going to do this weekly and I just think it's the best thing ever because like our customers are these incredible guys or women, excuse me. They're these incredible people who are guys and gals who are like the Shopify Plus space in particular I think is like the perfect interview because it's largely someone who is crushing it but they're still running their business and they're still super in the weeds.

But they're faced with all of these things like what's going to come of this someday? Like, surely this is very valuable. What are my options? Like, I have gotten far enough to where this should be, if I'm not trying to make this into my final act or at least a financial outcome to where I don't have to worry about it after like I'm doing something silly because like I am helping millions of people with my products. So, it's such a great and they all want to talk about this stuff, especially I'm just like, “Yo, I got a podcast called Ten Years in the Making. Do you want to come on it?” Everybody's like, “Absolutely. That's exactly the story that I want to tell about this.” You know what I mean? Like exactly the story. So, podcast a week, two newsletters a week, and then 14 LinkedIn posts. The plan is get as soon as we've done six months of video, start a TikTok, and then Twitter will become a viable platform very soon because two posts today on LinkedIn very quickly becomes my Twitter account getting reposted when something like you said has success there.

Adam Robinson: So, I have not put UTMs in any of the links in my LinkedIn like this is purely like I have this belief that we are in such an interesting competitive position for exactly what we are doing. We have these indirect competitors that don't care about this space that we're going after and it's like the top of the Shopify stores that works really, really well for. We have these two guys who are way higher in the market. They have a way different service than we do. And like, we have this huge domain and I think we have the chance to just create this absolutely dominant brand that wins this market. So, like we’ve changed our pricing. It's insanely valuable for this audience. And I think that the way that most people are going to hear about it is if I'm doing all this stuff. If I'm like just talking about, like you said, email and SMS and list growth and audience growth and abandonment and abandonment revenues like all of it relates to what we're doing. And interviewing amazing people like you, right?

Everybody is going to love listening to this, right? Like it's a mystery. It's a total mystery how you f*cking got… You got like an 80,000-person following on Twitter or whatever. So, man, what a great chat. What is one marketing tip that if you could write it on a billboard, you would say, "Boom, signed Chase Dimond?”

Chase Dimond: I think focus on the customer, right? Like, being customer-centric is so important, like listening to them, talking to them, getting feedback. It doesn't matter what you do or what you sell. I think focusing on the customer, I mean, obviously not taking the stance of the customer's always right but listening to their feedback and genuinely creating products and solutions that are going to meet their needs I think is exactly right. Focus on the customer.

Adam Robinson: Boom. Love that. Customer obsessed. All right. The final five here before we end. Favorite book?

Chase Dimond: Embarrassed that I can’t remember the last book I read. I don't even have a prayer book. I do a lot of consumption of Twitter threads, Twitter content, LinkedIn stuff, and newsletter but I couldn't tell you the last book I read.

Adam Robinson: What’s your favorite newsletter?

Chase Dimond: Favorite newsletter? Oh, man. There's a lot that I really like. One of the guys in the space, Nik Sharma, has a really great one for all things DTC. Yeah. I'd say his is pretty interesting.

Adam Robinson: I’m interviewing his head of growth, Ari, on like next Friday. Yeah, I've heard of them. Is there a CEO out there that you're following? Chase is like, “I don't follow. I get followed.” He’s like, “I don't read. I write.”

Chase Dimond: Yeah, exactly. Back in the day, like before I was taking LinkedIn seriously, I really like the LinkedIn CEO. His name was like Jeff. I think his last name was like Wainer or Wiener, Jeff Weiner, which sounds funny. But he was really interesting, like what he was doing with LinkedIn a few years back. I don't really follow too many people too closely like that, to be honest. I guess I think the one guy I'm blanking on his name is this guy out of Canada who has a company called Tiny. Oh, Andrew Wilkinson is really interesting. And then I really like the guys, Sam Parr and Shaan Puri. I think they’re really interesting.

Adam Robinson: We talked about this already. You're married with kids. That was going to be one of my questions. Where do you live?

Chase Dimond: I live in Orange County, California.

Adam Robinson: What is your favorite vacation you've ever been on?

Chase Dimond: Favorite vacation. I love when we go to Hawaii. I don't know. There's just something about Hawaii. I love golf, so going to Hawaiian golf courses are amazing. I love being able to go the beach and the pool.

Adam Robinson: Coconut, palm trees.

Chase Dimond: That’s probably Miami.

Adam Robinson: Ocean. So nice.

Chase Dimond: Yeah. Hawaii or Miami are probably the two that I like the most.

Adam Robinson: Well, Chase, this has been fantastic. Where can people follow you, learn more about you, learn from you? Where should they go?

Chase Dimond: Yeah. On Twitter, I’m ecomchasedimond. No A in Dimond. So, it's D-I-M-O-N-D and then just look me up on LinkedIn under Chase Dimond.

Adam Robinson: Rock and roll. Thanks, Chase.

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