Scott Stouffer is the Co-Founder & CTO of Market Brew, an SEO Testing Platform helping Fortune 100 companies & SEO agencies predict search rankings & outrank their competition with machine learning. Him and his company have several patents that are cited by Google and other search engine companies. They raised millions in VC funding and scaled up to 64,000 paying customers… but then they decided to risk it all and change their entire business model. This episode is a gold mine of SEO knowledge and insights into the history of SEO. Listen and learn folks!
Topics Covered:
- Scott’s SEO Advice as a Search Engineer
- ChatGPT and how it affects SEO
- Reverse Engineering Search Engines vs Building a Search Engine
- Selling to investors vs selling to users
- Seed Round vs Series A Round
- Angel Investors vs VC Funding / Venture Capital
- Black Hat SEO vs White Hat SEO
- Particle Swarm Optimization
- Genetic Algorithms
- Content Marketing
- Internal Linking
- Link Graphs
- Growing up in Ohio
- Gaming & Programming as a kid
- The Dot Com Bubble in the 90s & early 2000s
- and a whole lot more!
Follow Scott around the web:
- Website: https://marketbrew.ai/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottstouffer/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/scott_stouffer
Raw Transcript
paris_vega:
Welcome to the first customers podcast. We’re here with Scott Stafford today, the co founder of market brew Man O testing platform used by Fortune one hundred companies, Scott. welcome to the show.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Thanks. good to be here.
paris_vega:
Let’s start off by learning a little bit about your childhood. Where did you grow up?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Grew up in North East Ohio, and so grew up with a sort of a blue collar family, I would say just outside the city of Acron. Um,
paris_vega:
Oh, wow,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
So
paris_vega:
my wife’s
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
home
paris_vega:
from Akron.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
home home of La, Bron James,
paris_vega:
No way.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
So yeah and yeah, So went to went to school in North East Ohio, and then went to college not too far away in Pittsburgh, at Carnegie, Mellin University. So That’s sort
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
of my the beginning of my life there.
paris_vega:
Yeah, did you sell anything as a kid like lemonade stands, dort, or fun, raise or stuff? anything like that?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Um, I, oddly was not really into. I was not exposed to to too many business related activities. My father. Later on, he was in the tool and Diet industry and his whole life, and later on he started his own tool and Diet company called Palmer Old Engineering. And so I was able to sort of see the struggles and the challenges of somebody trying You know, start their own business that way. So but nothing early on, I was never sort of a very business oriented person. I was more of a technical person. I played a did a lot of gaming. Um, so yeah,
paris_vega:
All right, And what do you study when you went to university?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I studied computer engineering and electrical engineering. I actually got a bachelor’s and master’s degree in both. So I was coming out of high school and I was very good at math and science, and I kind of looked at the
paris_vega:
Guess
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Us.
paris_vega:
though,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
News and World Report list of the top the top fields to make money. I was always very interested in making a lot of money. And so I guess that that That’s one drive that I have shared with business owners and engineering was electrical engineering was at the top of that list. And so then I said Okay, Which what are the top three universities in the world that do that? It was in my T. Stanford and Cardie Mellen, Carnie, Mellen was two hours drive from from north east Ohio, where I grew up, so that was sort of what I chose. So yeah,
paris_vega:
So you are seriously doing some math? There? Basically
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, we did.
paris_vega:
four
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
We
paris_vega:
degrees.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
did like signals and systems. I was designing circuit boards. I was also designing counter intelligence technology for satellites. Also, you know, basic design for likeintellichips and stuff. I went out and almost
paris_vega:
Wow,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
worked for Intil out of college.
paris_vega:
And he bit coin miners.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Not at that time, but I was doing a lot of other boards. There was. I ended up doing an intern ship at I B. M, for two years, my junior and senior year down in Bokwarton, Florida, and this was a lot of signals and systems type systems, network adaptors, network adapt our cards basically for commercial operations. The funny thing is is that right out of college I’m down there at I, B. M. And I get a. I get a phone call from Body of mind that was in the Master’s program at Carne Mellen, by the name of Jeff Hendry, and he wanted to start up, a company had been working at Singular Wireless and he, he wanted to start a new company that was going to take advantage of all the g p. S. location information that cell phones were about to have, And he wanted to sort of build a location base services platform that people could
paris_vega:
M.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
build Apple Ations on top of, And he wanted to write it in Java. We had been exposed to sort of one of the first classes in Java in nineteen ninety six At Carnegie Mellen was one of the you know, the sort of the modern version of C Plus Plus. And so we had shared a lot of the background with all of that and he so immediately said yes, because it was just sort of awesome timing. It’s going to be pallalto California, and you know, right in the heart of Silken Valley, A sort of a dream that I always had. And and so yeah, then I immediately went into computer science. The funny thing is I had already been programming since I was six years old, so in six,
paris_vega:
Whoa.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
when I was six I got a my first computer, the Comedor Sixty Four. And and this was one of the life changing moments that kind of moved me towards, took me That kind of direction in life, and my my mom would go to stores and buy me books of basic programs. Programs. That were you know they, the basic code was in the book, And then you would sort of you have to transpose type that into the Comet, Six four and run it, And then you could play these games and of course there was no hard drive or floppy drive right away that could save any of this stuff, So you know the power would go out after you writing code for three. Ours,
paris_vega:
What,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and I have to start all over.
paris_vega:
My
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
And
paris_vega:
God.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so you do that over and over again and you just just I just started learning how to code. so I know, understood, sort of without even thinking about it after a while.
paris_vega:
What was the?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
And
paris_vega:
What was the reason
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah,
paris_vega:
for getting the Commodore Sixty Four in the first place? Were you interested in coding specifically, or is it just the parents are
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
You
paris_vega:
like,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
know,
paris_vega:
Have the boy technology,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I don’t think. I’m not sure if it was something I was asking for at the time. I don’t remember that I was, and it was sort of a gift. I think it was a gift from my my grandma, grandma, grandpa. And
paris_vega:
M.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so yeah, I just I don’t think I requested it. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but
paris_vega:
The
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah,
paris_vega:
Comedor
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so
paris_vega:
Sixty four. Was that like a gaming specific thing, or was it just a general early computer or
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
It was kind of both.
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
You know, at the time like a tar had been out
paris_vega:
Gotcha
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and some of the there had been a few predecessors to this, but Comedor Sixty Four was sort of the first main stream. It was sort of like. If you want t think about, like the Apple version of it, It was just
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
very marketed very well and it was packaged very well. So yeah,
paris_vega:
That’s crazy. That’s a wild gift from from grandma to a six year old. So were they?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I was a weird kid. I loved it. I gobbled it up and
paris_vega:
That’s amazing.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and then obviously I went into, you know, and as games came out for the conversing before I’d play, you know, Dr. J and Larry Bird and First Strike, First Eagle Strike, or Strike Eagle, Something like that
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
that really got me into flying, which I would later become a pilot, and later in
paris_vega:
Oh,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
life,
paris_vega:
wow.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
And so a lot of things that I learned on the comedy Six before that kind of parleyed in later things and got into gaming on the on the intent of the original intend. O,
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
you know, Duck Con and Mike Tyson’s Punch Out and all that stuff
paris_vega:
Heck, yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
used to be like. I grew up on that metal gear all all the kinds
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
of cool games.
paris_vega:
yeah. I can handle those. The ones you don’t have to code yourself.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Uh,
paris_vega:
That’s that’s
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
uh,
paris_vega:
where I ended in. Okay, So you started learning programming on your own six years old. And then I mean, when did you start like the business side of programming? Did you do any like free lance or anything through high school or anything like that?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I helped my dad a couple of times create like these, automatic and stollars, for for his business, he did a lot of you know, auto Cad, and an other
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
things that required lots of drivers and set up for for different computers. And you know back this is back when you know Auto Cad would come in like you get a hundred floppy disks to load them all in. And and
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so I would write like different Iver, as in Dose to like, facilitate M. s. Doss to facilitate, like the help of installation scripts and stuff. So it was just basically just for my father. I didn’t really get into the business side of coding until my that first start up out of college company called Gravitate, And this is my friend Jeff, Jeffrey Hendry’s company. I was one of the first employers there and just kind of learned how the Silcn valley worked. That was sort of my Traduction. Uh, The timing was really interesting because at that time two men by the name of Larry Page and Surge Brain were right down the street with a team that was just starting to build their company and we would often see them, and you know, I’m sure we were eating next to them all the time.
paris_vega:
That’s crazy.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
It was just kind of the same same place, same location. Our offices were literally right down the street from Stanford.
paris_vega:
Those
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
And
paris_vega:
are the Google founders for any
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
listener who doesn’t know who those two people are.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah, they founded Google. You know, So at the time the searchention was Alta Vista. I don’t know. I remember that, but
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
at the time I really wasn’t paying too much of at attention to it. We were just hard core coding. we had raised, I think around seven or eight million dollars for the company and did a lot of business with some Japanese Tell Communications companies. Then the dot com bub bubble burst and so I got to go through that as well. It’s sort of the lean years and figuring out like Okay like this is. It’s not just about like raising money with no business plan. You had to actually have a real real business plan to make money. and
paris_vega:
What
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
that,
paris_vega:
was that
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
really?
paris_vega:
first business? What was the? like? the actual service or product behind that gravitate business?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, it was a location based services company, so essentially
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
we had an a p. I that people could program you know the the Tell Communications companies could could effectively use to developed location based apse on their phones.
paris_vega:
Cha.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
This is back in early two thousand, two
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
thousand,
paris_vega:
that’s what you
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
one,
paris_vega:
were saying about the G P. S. related? Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, and
paris_vega:
Got,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so, And and if you old, if you remember, you know, with everything that happened, G, P. S, really kind of didn’t roll out as quickly as possible. O. we were doing a lot of things, And the meantime I have a patent called G voice, which is essentially the application that people could call in with their phone and answer a few questions about essentially where they were and it would detect their voice. That would do a voice detection, and translate that into actual text location, and then translate that into latitude, Longitude, and they would hang up and then their phone would now know where they were and all the Locations could work based off of those latitude. longitude. Qordnets.
paris_vega:
So
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I
paris_vega:
you
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
took
paris_vega:
would
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
the
paris_vega:
pull
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
entire
paris_vega:
their location?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
census. May I took the entire Us Census Tiger data base, and I wrote in Pearl, regular expression scripts to parse out the entire Tiger data base and hand basically put hirrkhey of data bases that could go an look up latitudes and longitudes based off the location. So so anyway,
paris_vega:
It’s
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so
paris_vega:
crazy.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah, So there were some things that we kind of like hurdles that were not in our control That you know where the g, p s h didn’t really roll out as quickly as we were thinking. Obviously, then nine eleven was had occurred, and the whole roll out of everything and the dot com bubble bursting. It just kind of slowed everything down. you know, the the I phone really wouldn’t come out until now. Like two thousand four. I think so, we were just a little a little bit earlier That
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
that specific product, but
paris_vega:
But
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah,
paris_vega:
the G P S technology itself, I guess, Wasn’t it like Clinton in the nineties That like signed something that made that available for the public
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Correct.
paris_vega:
use.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah,
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so it was available. It just wasn’t
paris_vega:
got
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
the
paris_vega:
you
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
phones that the phone hand sets where we’re not integrating the g. P. s as quickly as
paris_vega:
Gosh.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
we had planned. Essentially so
paris_vega:
Wow, you’re just too early.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, we were too early.
paris_vega:
Did you survive the dot com crash?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I did. Yeah, so I mean, I mean, you know, the, you know that wasn’t that was not my company. You know that I started. so obviously, you know, when I say I did, the company got sold off to company called Map Last,
paris_vega:
M,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
So that that basically I think it was Map Last. There was Map Quest and a bunch of
paris_vega:
Hm,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
other ones. I then went and did a couple other start up In San Francisco. One was like a a P. I services middleware and all of this was being done in job, so I really kind of fell back in love with computer science, and and the programming side of things, you know, we’re all getting paid six figures and having like just absolutely,
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
you know, an incredible career off of it. And so I just kind of stuck with it. And um, you know, here I am, like early twenties, you know, having hundreds of thousands of dollars
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Paid for me
paris_vega:
just
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
for doing
paris_vega:
falling.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
something that I was doing since I was six years old.
paris_vega:
Wow, does
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
But
paris_vega:
it feel
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so
paris_vega:
like play to you in a way like being able to just code a program? It is that natural
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
ice.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah,
paris_vega:
You started
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I mean,
paris_vega:
so
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
it’s
paris_vega:
early,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
not. It’s not very hard for me. It’s something that I’ve always just sort of. and maybe because I started so early in life, it’s just been so
paris_vega:
Right
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
natural, Kind of like typing or something. But yeah, so so I did that for a little while and then we, we actually moved to Florida, and in the process of doing that just sort of changing scenery. we wanted to sort Out of the Silicon valley. Me and my fiance. Ich would be eventually my wife, And we met a couple that had figured out how to hack Google Essentially, and they, They were able to rank all of their, their, their, their travel site above all of the travel and hotel sites on Google for for Key West for the Key West Region, And I just thought this is Fascinating. It was an amazing computer science problem,
paris_vega:
And could you put us in the time line? What year roughly? is this? Because so has such big eras of change and everything.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
So this would be somewhere around two thousand and four,
paris_vega:
Okay.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
two thousand, five
paris_vega:
All right.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
era, And so I come along and say Well, hey, you know, Why not? just why limit this to Key West, We. I could replicate everything that you’re doing here with every other city in the world. And so we did that. we actually started a company. the original. You know, my original introduction into to So, and In the meantime, right before that I think I was, I was building automated systems for the New York Stock Exchange in Nasdack, and I had tried to start a company called Double O Seven trader,
paris_vega:
M.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Double Eight Trader, and basically selling stock signals and stuff based off of these automated trading scripts that I had regression tested, and so I had just started. I kind of I was. I was Trying to figure out a way to use my programming skills to build a company because I knew sort of where I wanted to go in my career. I wanted to start some sort of company based off of that, but I was really struggling figuring out like what that, what that business model would look like or what models that I could do that would use. My. My ability is the best, and then all on all of a sudden this came along and it just kind of fell in my lap. I was just like Wow, this is actually very Sing to me. I don’t know too many people in the space that have the pedigree that I had. I don’t think
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I probably was one of the only ones. Maybe there’s probably you now room full of other guys. Girls that were you know, In that at that time doing being able to do like enterprise level, you know software, and so for for about a year we played this cat and mouse game. I got to know what what you know? You know. The Google Algar Updates were essentially, and Google ended up rolling out, I think, called the Supplemental Index to counteract all of my algorithm. So basically the the supplemental index was a way to counteract Uhaprogrammatic. Co. Is what what we would call it today, where we would
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
be able to take you know a list of all the cities in the world, and I could build the site that had all the content landing pages for every city. For every A specific key word that we’re trying to target you would give it a list of of key words. We called this the Shelby system, This code named Shelby, based off of the car, and this list. You could give a list of all these key words and it would then go and generate all this content and immediately just took over all of the number one spots on every search listing. And and then you know, if Google would catch that they would, they would introduce some some chain O whatever, And then I would try to manipulate that And it was just it was was truly like the black hat approached to, So I didn’t really know what Black hat met at that time or white hat. Everyone would seem to be
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
doing it and I was
paris_vega:
you’re
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
just
paris_vega:
just
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
like
paris_vega:
winning.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Okay, This is the thing you do. I don’t know.
paris_vega:
Got ya?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and so yeah, so I just I, really. I had known about Google. I, actually, we would go to in San Francisco would go to movies and see the Google adds before the movie And they were hiring and they were saying Hey, if you know If you know Python or uh, uh, See you know. we want to have you guys and I was doing job and I was like, you know, like I want to work for them, but like I don’t know, job, sort of my language, and I don’t want to be programming in Python or or or see, So it’s just an interesting way around that I came back to Google with having this system. So anyway, so we, we kind of looked at this and like this is not a long term game Plan, right, this cat and mouse game? You just, it’s a very short term window that you can capitalize off of and then get shut down. And so we had this epiphany. It was actually my wife’s Piphonymora staffer, And she, she had this idea of Hey, why don’t we build our own search engine just to show people how what search engines actually want to see? And obviously, back then Google was sharing a lot of its information, so it was easy to see You go to their their Arch console. Uh, you know, there was lots of data there That you can see. This was before the not provided fiasco or the started shutting off all the data.
paris_vega:
Yes,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
And and this is before an Earl Net. So it was very easy to track which algorithms did what this is before Rank Brain, so each search result behaved the same way. It was the same flavor of algorithms from one search result to the next And so
paris_vega:
So you’re
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
it was
paris_vega:
reversed
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
a great
paris_vega:
engineering
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
time.
paris_vega:
the
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
algorithm
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
it was Great
paris_vega:
they
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
time
paris_vega:
were
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
to reverse
paris_vega:
using
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
engineer all
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
the algroms. Because we we had, we had a very known quantity of alrthem. So this is before Panda and Penguin and all that stuff.
paris_vega:
Right, right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
And so once we had the search engine, We, every time they added a new algorithm, we already had a control group. So we, we had, We knew that this was regression tested, and this is the settings and everything, And then you know we would screw around trying to figure out what’s the algorithm for panda or penguin or whatever it happened to be, and we Be able to kind of get close to it. We figured out Okay, you know, this is now repplicating what we see on on Google search results. So so our first customer, we’ll get into this part of it. I guess
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
it leaves us into
paris_vega:
So
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
the
paris_vega:
this
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
first.
paris_vega:
is So
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
that’s when you started Market brew is when you met that couple
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, it was
paris_vega:
and
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
actually
paris_vega:
that’s
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
called
paris_vega:
the company.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yea, I was called Co engine.
paris_vega:
Okay.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Eah, originally called. it was called Co n G. It was we
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
called it Con, and then we turned it into Co Engine, and then eventually it became market market brows, sort of like the modern version of it, which is many years later
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
where we have whole. another first customers talked there. But
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah, the Co engine company We. I think one of our first big clients was Sponsor reviews Dot com. I don’t know. I, You remember, sponsor to reviews. They are basically like. what, what would call an advertorial agency, So they would you know, allow that was system that allowed people to go and write guest guest right stuff, And you know you could put links in there and and do essentially link earning or link building
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
based off of those those articles, And I remember the first time I was just doing the text side of things. At the time I wasn’t really involved The sales side and I remember all of a sudden our system is just going down one day, and I was like What’s going on like? You know, Why are we having like two hundred times more traffic than what we had before? And and you know, get on the phone and I’m like Hey, you know, it’s my business part. I’m like. What’s going on? Did you sign a deal or something? As did somebody? Oh yeah, I just, I, just we just gave access to you, know this, this company that’s now doing like you know, effectively two hundred times the amount of traffic that We’re doing before and we were still effectively in a bat. This is about two thousand eight, two thousand, Yeah, early, two thousand eight. And so we had already filed patents on all this stuff. We have a number of pretty seminal patents that Google sites and I B. M. sites. These all started in two thousand and six. And
paris_vega:
What
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so
paris_vega:
does that
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
this
paris_vega:
mean when
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
is.
paris_vega:
somebody sites a patent?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I mean. it basically means that they’re using your patent to incorporate part of their patent right, So they’re citing a specific patent saying. Based off of this, this is already known thing that somebody has already invented. We’re inventing this new thing based off of this idea. So um, so yeah, so we have over like a hundred thirty hundred forty citations to our patent. This is one of the mysteries. Why I’ve never. We’ve never really gotten a lot of publicity for this Uh Co industry is very strange. People talk about all kinds of cool things, but they don’t actually talk about the real cool stuff, which is like, I think all the patents co by the C. H. used to talk about that, obviously, but mostly just covered Google’s patents.
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
But anyway, so in two thousand eight we get this huge demand. The system was running on my. my. S. Q. L. I forget what version? Very early version back then And and so I. I. I. After Basically the system came to a halt, I spent forty eight hours creasing this and figuring out like limitation with my s. Q. l. There was. there was a right limitation to the data base and heavy amounts of rights. Essentially the way that we were using the data base wasn’t really going to work, so within a two week period, we re wrote the entire back end and post cast, so postcrast, basically another type of data base. And so that was our first customer, The technical side of our first customers, where we were just basically running around with their heads on fire, hair on fire. And and this is something that obviously is probably shared with a lot of startups and tectechcompanies. This is often you know you don’t. you don’t solve the scaling part in the beginning. You’re just basically doing minim viable product and you’re just trying to get it out the door and get somebody to buy it And then you know if you have early success, This is something that a lot of people run into all of a sudden. You know there’s the scale ability issue and you get all kinds of race conditions and all the performance issues that come with it That you never really thought about this when you were writing the code. So so yeah, so that was the first customer when we were in the beta stage and this was a small product. This was, you know, ninety nine dollars a month and less. I think we had thirty nine dollar month offering. We had sixty four thousand customers by the by two Nine, and really was a B to see product back then and
paris_vega:
So you’re competing
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
then.
paris_vega:
with like Mas, and maybe some of
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
the other
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I mean,
paris_vega:
early don’t Now Mas was around yet at that point.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, Moss and Hub Spot copied a lot of what we did.
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
So the website Greater Spots website, Greater. That was a direct
paris_vega:
M.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
copy of
paris_vega:
really.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
our software. Yeah, we never really did anything about that, but that was just you know and people talk about like it was just the right timing right. So you have different people inventing the same stuff and coming up with the same tools Because it was just sort of like the right, the right time and stuff like that.
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
but you know a lot of the A lot of the ideas and stuff I would see blogged about by ran fish kin later on that we had already kind of introduced on the market to people that we’re using this part of that sixty four thousand user base.
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Um, so we, We were sort of in the background because we weren’t very. You know, we weren’t content writers Blogwrters. We were a company, basically
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
building these tools, making people money using the tool set in the search engine that we had created.
paris_vega:
Was your
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
And
paris_vega:
partner
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so
paris_vega:
also like a technical founder?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
He wasn’t. No.
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, So
paris_vega:
so he was doing
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and
paris_vega:
the
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so
paris_vega:
sales focus stuff,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah, and so we? we. We basically came to heads and said Hey, We wanted to do more of a B, d B or enterprise offering here, Because this is. this is really. You know, having a surge engine. it’s really like an advanced. You know. it’s if you’re If you’re like the company test lay, you’re building the. The. The Super Charged. What’s their top end? A car they basically went after
paris_vega:
S
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
made
paris_vega:
plan
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
the most.
paris_vega:
or whatever.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, they made the most. It’s like making the most expensive product for the the most advanced teams,
paris_vega:
Oh, the roadster.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Um,
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
the road stare,
paris_vega:
yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
And so, and we had this argument. Sort of, you know, he wanted to go keep at B to C. and we were like Now it’s you know. everyone is going to build like a B to see platform. It’s going to be a commodity and that turned out to be right. Obviously there was, you know, Raven Tools, and all these other platforms that all kind of got in the In the mix. It became a very race to the bottom. If you want to think of it that way, a lot of people got washed out without kind of model and
paris_vega:
With sixty five thousand you said customers
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Sixty four thousand. Yeah,
paris_vega:
sixty four thousand you were like. Was it like the economic costs really weren’t lining up as far as like the cost
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Well, it’s
paris_vega:
of serving
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah. I mean,
paris_vega:
that many customers versus
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
you have
paris_vega:
what
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
to really
paris_vega:
you could charge
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
scale up.
paris_vega:
monthly.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
A. Yeah, you have to really scale up a company and the margins aren’t as high as
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
a sort of the high end products. Um. And so we just felt like the value we had opportunity to create like this huge margin product That required you know, far fewer employees, far fewer resources. Just a hire r. I approach and M. And so we, We bought the company from Partners. We moved on and spend a couple of years, kind of figuring out like what this is going to turn into, And then we moved operations back out to Pallowalto, California, and went and started. The idea was originally we were gonna go and raise a series or a seed round. Didn’t know which one was going to be, But we, we wanted to go out and kind of figure out what we’re goin a do. So we. we basically just drove out to hollow out, So we had a couple of. We had two dogs with us. Me and my wife basically just drove out there and we had a start up accelerator called Plug in Play. This is two thousand and fourteen. Two thousand, thirteen is, and you know Rented, rented a spot in that plug in that plug and Play accelerator. And the idea was to start, you know, pitching to investors going up to on Sand Hill, talk All v C’s and basically pitching this idea of sort of an enterprise product, for you know, the fortune five hundred, or the sort of large in house co teams for for brands, And so we. we. eventually, you know, there’s a whole story and the whole like chapter. We could talk about this.
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
You know, it was pretty nuts where we were just basically putting all the money that we were getting just back into the company. We’re sort of living Very frugally,
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Just like you know, a typical start up or just you know, we, We were running like Araby and bees in the beginning I think we don’t. We didn’t even have a place to stay, so we
paris_vega:
Man,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
were just you know, living in the office basically
paris_vega:
So you’re kind
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and
paris_vega:
of restarting the company as this new
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
restarting.
paris_vega:
enterprise,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
Focus
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
almost
paris_vega:
B To be focused.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah. Yeah,
paris_vega:
So how
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and
paris_vega:
did you go to that like transition of? Hey, sorry, customers. You can’t use our software anymore or like. What does that like to
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Well,
paris_vega:
those sixty
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so we
paris_vega:
four
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
kept.
paris_vega:
thousand?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
So we kept we grandfather everybody in. So we, we kept
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
all the old system in this in there for many years. A lot of our customers stayed with us for two, three, four, maybe even more than that, maybe up to eight or nine years, Because I think the last bad, the last retail account probably stopped almost only a couple of years ago.
paris_vega:
You just
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
H,
paris_vega:
weren’t adding new features and like
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
correct, Yes,
paris_vega:
Okay, got
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
was
paris_vega:
you.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
the old. We would create these little reports, basically that that that was sort of the the that product. And so anyway, so in two thousand fourteen we’re going and raising money. I was doing a lot of pitching to V. C’s. We would go and do. There would be investor days at at the start up accelerator. All these investors and advisors would come in now, potential advisors, People that were looking to be advisors to these companies and get a piece of the company, Get a role in that company. And so this public speaking was always a big thing for me. It was easy to do. I like to do it. I was always a performer in life, played the piano. I was a professional drum and bugle core called the Blue Coats, So I was a trumpet player and would play in front of like you know, thirty forty thousand people on a football football field. And so this was like, I always like to entertain and talk, So
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Took that role really seriously, and turned out to be very, very advantageous for our company, Because you know we’re in front of all these people that could be potential clients as well, And that’s essentially what happened. We. we picked up an advisor. This advisor had former ties to a fortunate one hundred company called Rourdonaly, and they eventually became one of our first clients and we started in general So much revenue that we just decided Hey, this is probably better to just you know, boot strap this from here on out than to accept a couple of these offers from V. C. as we had gotten a couple five million dollar term sheets for series and we just didn’t like the. We didn’t like the set up. We didn’t like the control portions of this. A couple of the V. C said that my wife had to leave, so that
paris_vega:
Leave
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
was
paris_vega:
the
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
a
paris_vega:
company like she
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
leave
paris_vega:
couldn’t
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
the
paris_vega:
be involved
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
company.
paris_vega:
in it.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
They didn’t want to A husband and wife do.
paris_vega:
What was her role?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
So she was the co. She was actually, uh,
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah, so
paris_vega:
running the business
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
we
paris_vega:
at
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
made
paris_vega:
Edmond,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
her the
paris_vega:
sort
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
co
paris_vega:
of things.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
like immediately when we went out to Palot, Because she. really. That was kind of a better role for her. She did all the legal.
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
she did all the contracts. She was involved in a lot of the sales. She had come up with this whole idea in the first place, So I was just kind of the tech person that that could turn you know ideas into Into real things, and that have always sort of done things throughout my career. But anyway, so so we just decided to turn down a couple of term sheets that that maybe a younger version of us would have accepted and probably regretted, I think.
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
but
paris_vega:
but you’ve
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so.
paris_vega:
got
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah,
paris_vega:
some recurring revenue coming in, so you’re
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah,
paris_vega:
not in
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so
paris_vega:
a
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
we
paris_vega:
desperate
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
had already booked.
paris_vega:
situation
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, so we had already been booking revenue based off of just pitching in front of companies pitching in front of Tonal investors or advisors, and got got an advisor involved in that he wanted to be involved with the company he thought he could bring in business. He ended up bringing in this. This very large company to start, got us our first few case studies that you know, the enterprise level case studies saying, Hey, this thing actually works. They had. they had a blog network of thirty different microblogs and they had had a major issue with Loss of traffic recently, and so we ran our search engine model on this and uncovered this huge problem with the way that there were no following links internally. They actually were like they had links that would link to these other. It was almost like a pin wheel. they were linking to each. Each microblog was linked in the next blog, and they had put a no follow link on this temple, and effectively created this massive loss of pay drink within that that link graph.
paris_vega:
And never
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
And
paris_vega:
linking internally to the site that the link was coming from.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, and so our system showed this visually. It showed what it was doing to the rankings. and then, of course, when they removed it, we could then forecast. This is one of the cool things about our software Now is that it’s an Co forecasting tool. You can actually run these calibrated models and see what’s going to happen. And so this is about two thousand fourteen, two thousand, fifteen, M. Then Google comes out with Rank Brain, which essentially changes the whole the game right. So I Seat of having these hard coated rules that set all the bias and weights of each of these algorithems that make up the search results. They have this thing called the Quality Raider Guide lines, and this is a list of of what they want their search results sort of to look like. they give it to the bunch of humans to to look at a bunch of sites and say yeah, this is a good site. This is a bad sites. effectively labeling this neural net that they created that they would then feed into this machine learning process, to you know, Create search results that looked like what the quality raiders were trying to say would be good results for the user, and what this effectively did was change all the bias and weight settings on all these algorithems from you know one search result to the next, and this, This was a huge problem that we had because you know one of the major issues when selling this was. People just didn’t believe that we had a search engine like Google like they were like. Well, they couldn’t fathom like. Well, Then why don’t you just be Google,
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
not understanding. Like, S, a whole different other problem to tackle what Google is doing versus just creating the statistical model of Google and H. And we would say you know we’ve regression tested all the algorithms. We know what the main algrithms are, and then then they would say you know. But how do you know what you know? Settings all the algrithms are, And this is. These are valid questions at the
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
time Because we really you know. here here we are with regression tested model, But now Google is changing, you know every month, The flavor of the search results. so we ended up having a major discovery in two thousand and fifteen, and this was just me looking through a bunch of machine learning, an artificial intelligence data over the years, and we came across this genetic algorithm called particle swarmoptimization And what this genetic algorithm does is it sort of simulates a swarm of insects or birds.
paris_vega:
M.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Uh, and in the way that it solves things it can be used in like a nailing, so problem solving for like a nealing, medals and liquids and stuff like that, And there’s whole list of different applications, But one of the applications that kind of the light ball went off in my head was Hey, we could. We could make all of the bias and weight settings of these algorithems, sort of each one of these could become like a particle that we, that we can then optimize Or use this particle storm optimization to H, to figure out what is the flavor of these algorithms such that our search engine model will produce what we see, And so that was a major discovery. that sort of catapulted what market brew is today. Where today now you can go in the system. You give it a key word. It pointed out specific search result. We pull ouwscmrushes, P. I, to just get the rankings for that search result. And then we say based on These rankings, adjust our algorithm such that it behaves the same way so that you can go in and search on Market Brew, And it looks just like Google. It’s like a Google simulator, If you want to think of it that way and you
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
can do this for
paris_vega:
yeah, that
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
you
paris_vega:
makes
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
now.
paris_vega:
sense.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Mobile desk Top, any region of Google, you can make up your own search results and have it try to calebrate. And as long as it makes sense, you know it’ll it’ll it’ll you know. Adapt its model. perform that way. Um, so yeah, so that’s that’s sort of the first customer. Was It was a. It was a life, you know, kind of a game changer for us because you know, we would have gone a totally different way, raised capital and sort of created our own job, if you want to think of it that way,
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
versus like what we have now, which was you know, we have full control of the company. We’ve been able to make you know organic decisions throughout the years to grow the company in a real way. A lot of this was really something we wanted to do based off back in the gravitate days. In early
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Thousands, we went through the whole dot com about what. we raised, millions of dollars, and found ourselves you know, trying to figure out what to do because we didn’t have enough revenue coming in for the amount of money that we had already raised, And that was
paris_vega:
M.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
a whole life lesson sort of hat
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
gone through. So it was that was you know, we would go and now I would go and talk to butting entrepreneurs and Sloan Valley. This is about, you know, Two thousand fourteen, two thousand fifteen, and I would talk to them After we had already kind of decided. Hey, we don’t need to raise money because we focused on actually generating revenue. And so Google had this thing called Google for Think, if, as Google for entrepreneurs, I think is the name of it and a man by name of Fadyvaser, That was heading up this. He had rented a house, and in Palaato, than he would invite entrepreneurs from all over the world to come to Silicon Valley to see sort of how Silicon Value worked, and he would give speakers every day. Ah, you know, different different speakers that would give different experiences of their time in the Silicon valley. In course, we had been there for almost a decade at that point with different companies,
paris_vega:
M.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and so I would get up, and actually my wife and I would. we would say there and talk about how, first of all, being husband and wife start up and and doing the search engine,
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and also just talking about high. Hey, you don’t need to raise money. Everybody else? All those other speakers were basically telling them how to raise money. How to how to build a pitch stack and all these things.
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
And here I come and I’m saying well, you don’t have to do that like that’s that. There’s another option is to sort of build a company and boot strap it. And you know there’s no one right way. You know. If you’re gonna go be to see, sometimes the best way to do it is scale quick and fast, and that’s the way to do it. I’m I’m sure you’ve already talked to a bunch of speakers who have
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
have have done that and done it successfully. so. but our, our path was slightly different And it’s turned out very well. I’m very happy the way things have turned out. You know, you end up having to do a little bit more. This way you don’t get to be in your little role that you like to do. You have to be a little bit more outside your comfort zone. You have to learn how to do all the aspects of everything in your company, So you know I had to get back into doing sales and doing the marketing and all this stuff, and build the everything out from top to top to bottom and all the different Parts of the company. So but that’s the. That’s sort of the two. I have two first customers
paris_vega:
That’s right
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
experiences with almost the same company Is
paris_vega:
right.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
same same
paris_vega:
that’s
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
idea.
paris_vega:
crazy.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Really two different companies. But yeah, that was. That
paris_vega:
I’ve got
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
was
paris_vega:
a couple
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
the.
paris_vega:
questions
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah.
paris_vega:
that came up while you were talking first. So you were talking about when you are pitching investors or potential investors, and when you were re launching the company and you were saying like you were considering either like series a round versus see around. Like, What’s the difference there between those two different types of funding? and like,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Well, it’s really just dependent on sort of where you are as a company right, So typically a seed round. As you don’t really have customers yet, You’re you don’t even have a product debt. Really Sometimes right, So it depends on what era of Silan value you’re talking about, but you know you’re typically coming up. You have an idea. You have the product in in motion. You may have come up with a minimum viable product. as they say, So you have sort of a prototype and so this is something where a seed round would would be appropriate where you have individual investors. Typically who would come in and say hey, I will. I will give you you know, fifty thousand or a hundred thousand to go and hire some engineers to finish this this product or hire. you know whoever you need to do to complete and get, get it to the point where you can start selling the product. Whereas a series is some sort of a company that Has already demonstrated that they have revenue generating business right. So they’ve already
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
have their first few customers and they’re trying to figure out how to scale scale everything. And so we didn’t really know where we were at the time Because the old, the old company, we were, kind of it a series. like we. We already had lots of customers and we were ready to scale. But the new company was an enterprise company, a totally new type of product and we had very few customers. It was just you know, Almost look like a prototype type of company. Even though we had the ten years of code based, We’ve had patents on everything trade marks. You know, all the things that you would see with a series company. So yeah, so we were kind of in a weird situation because not many people even last that long, right, like companies that
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
are are past two or three years there. Typically if they don’t they don’t make it. they’re done and it’s not a company anymore. So so that’s that’s sort of We. the challenges that we ran into between the two. But those are the differences.
paris_vega:
Do they take? They ask for like different amounts of ownership, Typically between the two Like seed versus series A, Like, what’s that dynamic look like?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, I mean so typically it’s it’s uh, it’s really not about the ownership. it’s about the control right. So
paris_vega:
M.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
in a seed round there’s not as much control desired. It’s usually individual investors that just want a piece of the pie, so that when a v C comes along eventually that you know they get, they get cashed out or they get rolled
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
into the series and and there, More advisors. Typically the know seed round investors want. Uh, want to be a little bit more involved Nd. that’s good or bad right. So if you get somebody
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
who is very helpful and somebody can help you doing something that that you wouldn’t be able to do, or connect you to people that you wouldn’t be able to be connected to before That’s great. There’s also horror stories where people just you know, want to be. You know what’s going on? What’s going on like every day, just basically the worst side of everything, where you’re just being mice managed and somebody who’s just you know, really worried about Their money, is doing every single minute of the day.
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
And so, which is something that’s very negative for start up trying to focus. They have. You have to be hyper focused and laser focused on something, and getting something done and shipping a product. Um, And whereas a series is is really, it’s a dance right for young entrepreneurs. It’s a very scary situation because they don’t understand what they’re signing. They just see the money right, so they get flashed. You know, five million, ten million, Any million depends on the obviously, the uh, the history of it. but what’s happening is effectively. You’ve got these sharks that know exactly how to write contracts exactly. You know where
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
they’re going to be in two years, and what they want to what they want. the structure of the company to look at. They’ll always ask for a board seat. You know they want to incorporate. You know, S. Corp. They want a board seat on the board or two. They’ll say that they’ll have a neutral board member, but really They really are tied to the V C, and they’ll just do what the V C is going to do eventually anyways. it’s it’s
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
It’s a little game that they play. That what ends up happening to a lot of these young investor, young entrepreneurs is that you know they’re so gungho about the money and the technology. They’re just like, Let’s do it, and then a couple of years later they don’t even run the company anymore, or they get fired. Some of us, some don’t even
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
like. they literally lose the company and they don’t. They don’t understand. Like The how much control means for a company. It’s not so much how much you how many shares you have in the company, Because if you control the company you can, you can effectively change the dilution rates and all kinds of different things as part of the structure of the company. Later on, so
paris_vega:
That makes sense. Thank you for explaining that, because I wasn’t sure some of those details and you’ve been through. It seems like the entire life cycle of Silicon Valley, or at least the last you know, twenty thirty years.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
A lot
paris_vega:
Um,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
of it.
paris_vega:
The other point that that stood out was when you said you know people would say well, why don’t you just start your own search engine? If if you’ve got all this, you know similar technology or your, you’re saying that you’re you know, similarly skilled and all that. Um, And you briefly mentioned how it’s It’s a totally different problem You’re solving a totally different volgrambecause. You touch on that difference a little More. Like what?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Sure,
paris_vega:
what would it require for you to be like? Yeah, we’re going to go after Google versus just having the model that you have or the simulator Versus Actually, I guess what, gathering the data and trying to store
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
it.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
it’s It’s just a larger scale problem right,
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
So we used to have a thing called like the Link neighborhood and this would go out and crawl, just like I would. I would presume like a druffswould have today or any of the other search engines in the past. You know, Blecco Was was a search engine a long time ago, and you dot com as as one here. That’s just come on this scene. So these are hugely scalable. you know, hugely, Uh, expensive problems. right like it’s not, It’s a different. In Order to play that game, you have to have a ton of funding right, you have to you. It’s a
paris_vega:
Let’s
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
huge
paris_vega:
see.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
risk up front. You’re basically just saying Hey, we need at least like twenty million just for the server farms
paris_vega:
Whoa,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
to go out and crawl
paris_vega:
gotcha.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
like, do the web, crawling and indexing and scoring and all that stuff. To keep that refreshed constantly.
paris_vega:
Because you
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
That’s
paris_vega:
can
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
not
paris_vega:
like you’re crawling the whole internet Basically, or as much as
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yes.
paris_vega:
is
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yes,
paris_vega:
worth
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and
paris_vega:
scanning.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
you have to like you can’t. The way that the parent calculation works. This goes back to the original Google Pay drink patent Is that you have to have the whole link graph in order to solve the calculation. It’s an iteratof calculation that requires not just the page that you’re looking at to to score, but you have to have all the links that linked to that page, and in other words, you have to have already crawled all the pages that linked to this page. Oh, by the way, you also need to know the pay drink of those pages well, so that means you’ve got to go crawl all the links that went to that, eat all those back link pages as well, and it just recursively keeps going and going and going. so you have to have essentially the whole link graph or a large part of it, large portion of it to get an accurate reading of what’s happening, Whereas what we do at Market brew is we build statistical models so you will put in as a user. You’ll put in a key word search. Let’s say dog food right, And you get the car Results for dog food, And what we will do is then crawl all the sites that are in that. ranking those ranking positions, We will go and pull a backing structure to each one of those sites, using you know backing tool like a traps, or something like that, to basically build that the backing structure behind all that what we’re doing is we’re building a statistical model of that link graph and we do it in a very smart way. Of course it has to be done, so that’s very precise. So you’re you’re scoring. You’re still scoring things at first principle Level, we go down to the individual links and we have all these linkalgorithums that get applied to each link so that we know exactly how much link equity each link is passing. So the the amount of processing at the lower layer is, it’s tremendous compared to what a typical traditional so tool would do. But what that results in is a very very precise picture of things like the link flow distribution or the link graph, And these are really important concepts when you’re And to model what’s actually happening inside of a search engine, Why things are ranking a certain way? Um,
paris_vega:
So, even though T’s a lot
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah,
paris_vega:
more than most other tools, probably,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
it’s a different problem that you’re solving
paris_vega:
but it’s still not the same
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
it
paris_vega:
level of processing or data storage and everything is running a full on search engine.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Correct. Now
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
if somebody came to me and said you know if you dot com or Uhmicrosoft or somebody said, Hey,
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
we’d like to integrate market brew into our search engine, Would you come on our team? and basically you know, would you? Would you take all your tooling and the statistical
paris_vega:
Yeah.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
modeling system, and we’ll just put it into our search engine? It would be pretty pretty painless transition because everything we’re doing in market brow effectively is being done at these these other search engine teams. They re all writing. It’s all the same stack right. Have you have crawling stack? You have the index saying the scoring the quaryparser on top. So all of the stuff is basically the same structure, The same idea. So yeah, it’s just a different scale. right? You’re doing things at a totally different scale.
paris_vega:
So when you’re crawling links, so you’re only crawling the links related to. you know whatever rankings associated with a given key word that somebody puts in. Um, Like how deep do you crawl like? So you crawl the links on those sites, I guess, or that the page related to whatever key word, Let’s say just that number one site that shows up as a competitor to
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Sure,
paris_vega:
somebody who put in a key word. You crawl all the links on those pages and then do you crawl the links on? Like How far
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
Out do you? you go?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
right. so that’s one of the things that you have to when you’re building this. The search engine models, you got to figure out where do you stop right?
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and it’s both forward and backwards right.
paris_vega:
Because
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
So
paris_vega:
it’s like
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
how
paris_vega:
anything
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
far
paris_vega:
on
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
back
paris_vega:
the internet.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
do you go? How far forward do you go with the link
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
structure? And that’s
paris_vega:
yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
a? That’s a. That’s a hyperperameter of these search engine modelogy. You have to figure
paris_vega:
Oh,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
out what what this looks like, And so yeah, so what you’re referring to is basically like how how broad that link graph is going to be. So we crawl
paris_vega:
M
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
these sites in the in the search Results, and then we got to visit all those links on each of these pages and then we, also, you know, have to go at least one level deeper right, so we got to go to the sites that it links to and crawl all those pages as well. And then we have obviously option to continue crawling just to. There’s a sort of a parameter that we set to figure out how much of the model that we need to do. We. we actually have a narrow net that will learn how precise it needs to be, and feed that back into the web crawlers so that we know exactly how much that we need to crawl. So for a site, Wal Mart, that has you know, tens of millions of pages. we don’t have to take their servers down every time we do a crawl. What we do is we just
paris_vega:
Got
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
run
paris_vega:
you.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
this and we build, We just visit certain pages in in the site so that we know that we have sort of a good model, a good, precise model of what’s actually happening for the whole entire link graph. So
paris_vega:
So
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
that’s
paris_vega:
your model?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
why we’re able
paris_vega:
Okay
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
to crawl a site like that in a few hours, versus like, If you use something like Screaming Frog, it might take like weeks, and it would take the server down and you get a bunch of phone calls.
paris_vega:
Go
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
The I. T. I. T staffs,
paris_vega:
because it’s just brute force crawling everything where yours.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Correct,
paris_vega:
You have kind of an A. I. That’s like we get the picture, we see
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
the enough of the data and
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Correct,
paris_vega:
it’s band. So you’ve got, I guess testing an evidence to where, even though you’re not crawling every single piece of the internet or every single piece of a site that your algorithm Ai is accurate based
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Correct,
paris_vega:
on
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah, yeah, so you.
paris_vega:
okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
you can. Actually, the whole point of the search Engenmodel is, it’s transparent so you don’t. It’s not a black box like Google is. today.
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
You can actually go in and see how everything works. You can see the predictions that it makes, and then you can just look at your rank trackers sixty days from now. Essentially it takes about forty five to sixty days Whenever you make a change to go through, Google get reindexrascored All the rankings change, and then the rake trackers scrape that and pick that up, and the rank trackers or your Google Enalytics, hover Look at it,
paris_vega:
Hm,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and you can confirm what market Bro predicted versus what you see on the rank trackers And there’s this relationship between the two. Of course, it’s not perfect relationship. Sometimes we overshoot, sometimes we undershoot, But there’s
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
a consistent ratio relationship that versus what we predict in in the models versus what you see in your rank trackers, And it holds pretty pretty linear through through time. You can kind of guess. Once you see at one time you can kind of see. Okay, and this is what it’s predicting. Now this is
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
what we expect to happen.
paris_vega:
So now, so you have like, and do you call it an A? Is it like an adaptive A that you can just You’re confident now that like, no matter what changes they make, it seems like it’s so flexible that because it’s
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
looking at what exists and just adjusting itself
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, so this
paris_vega:
like
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
is.
paris_vega:
whatever they do, it seems
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
this
paris_vega:
like
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
is a common problem with with neural nets and machine learning in general, right,
paris_vega:
Okay.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
it’s really hard to describe what it’s doing, even
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
even the machine learning engineers, who who build machine learning process right often, you
paris_vega:
M.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
know, sometimes only two three hundred lines of code. I think Andre, car Path, I just watched the video and ham build nano, g, p, T. and it was like
paris_vega:
Oh,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
three
paris_vega:
Wow,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
hundred lines of code. Basically, you know, it does everything it does, all the reenforcement learning and the uhuhstocastic gradient does not Link, minimizing all the losses and does all the machine learning. All he stuff. All that stuff can be done in two or three underlines ago. But to describe what it’s actually doing once it’s learned what the nurlthenrnat has learned, what the settings and all the biased weight settings that it needs to apply. It’s still very hard to understand what is what’s it actually doing? So we view
paris_vega:
Is
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
our
paris_vega:
it conscious
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
search engine
paris_vega:
at
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
model
paris_vega:
that point?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
is a specific applied machine learning machine learner, So
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
think That way right. So we have a machine learning system. That’s Chine learning, a machine learning system,
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and this is a specific version of it. It’s a. It’s a search engine machine learning system. You could probably
paris_vega:
So you don’t use
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
apply
paris_vega:
a I necessarily as a phrase.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Well. A I. So the particle storm optimization is itself an artificial intelligence
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
application. It’s a genetic algorithm that is a form of machine learning and artificial intelligence. We have a number of I type systems imbedded in a system to make it work. But yeah, think of it. I would ccategorize it as a machine learning machine learner if you want to think of it that way.
paris_vega:
So you can now. I guess it’s set up to analyze, obviously, like search engines and reverse engineer them basically and figure out the rankings right now.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
But if
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
any time the
paris_vega:
the
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
rankings
paris_vega:
war
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
change, we’ll see that in the rank trackers, we say Hey, that looks different than what our model looks like, and we can re trigger this calabration process effectively, Re, learn what the flavor of those search results are, now
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and then. In doing that, we can track over time what what changed so our users can go in and say you know, like December, we’re filming this in early two thousand twenty three. So the helpful content up date just occurred on Google
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
in. So the prognosticators and the gurus out there, you know on on social media often go back and forth on. Hey, this is what we need to do now, or this is what we you know. and Google will send out a bunch of p. R, which is all just you know. General advice. It doesn’t ever point you to what to actually do for obvious reasons, But with market brew you can just log in, look at your models and you can see Hey, like the expert is augur them that we developed a couple of years ago. This is mo Important now because Googles, now that you know the Quality Raider guidelines led these humans to basically rate sites that look more expert writing higher,
paris_vega:
Hm,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and that fed into the machine learning. and now of a sudden this expert tis algorithm that we modeled. It’s not the same code as Google. They may have
paris_vega:
Right.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
totally different systems that measure this, but we have the experts Algar that we embody, and the model, and this expertise algorithm Now is more important as Part of the model. And so you can see this in the model you can see. Hey, this, we should be spending more time on building you know topic clusters and filling out the gap and content that were this experts Algorithm is measuring so
paris_vega:
And
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah,
paris_vega:
do you
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so
paris_vega:
see that? Does it line up with what Google is saying Like Because the will announce and say Hey, Expert tease is more important or experience is more important, and you’re seeing that you feel like like in the algorithm as it measures what’s changing that That that is lining up with what they’re saying in that case.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Usually way later than what they say.
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
So so like you know, like Cora Web vitals was released, We didn’t see any correlation with Cora vitals for a while. Now we’re starting to see correlation with a lot of l. C, P, least content, full paint, largest content for paint. I forget
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
the
paris_vega:
yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
name, but
paris_vega:
right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
essentially the we’re seeing the expert tes algrithum right, So this is the E and the A. T. We’re starting to see more of this In a lot of the year. Money in your life. Key words, So you know, medical and legal. Those types of
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
those search results We’re seeing a little bit more swaying to that. That algorithm is being more dominant out of all the algorithems in the system. But it’s quite remarkable how often the algorithems change now, week to week. You can see slight variation in these boost factors instead of market brews model. You can see it like you know, almost, kind of like a noise signal. Uh,
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
And and that’s that’s uh. You know it’s unnerving for Cos, because you figure out how to do something in one search result. but that doesn’t translate to any other search result now.
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
In fact, it won’t even translate to you that search result in a month from now, because it’s likely that could be entirely different, and there’s so much noise involved that you could get. You could get faked out very easily. You could say Hey, this looks way more important, and you put all your resources into optimizing one thing at the expense of another, and now that other thing is now more important than the Later. So trying to trying to get a good signal, the noise ratio is very important. and to do that, you really have to have all this all all this tooling to figure out what’s going on, because you really can’t do it manually anymore.
paris_vega:
You could almost have like a daily or weekly show like Hey guys, Here’s what changed in the algorithm based on what our models are saying, but I guess in your
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yep,
paris_vega:
case, you don’t want to give that piece of gold unless they’re a customer,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
That’s what they pay for.
paris_vega:
right, right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Uh, yeah,
paris_vega:
man,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so
paris_vega:
be
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I
paris_vega:
a nice
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
mean
paris_vega:
little tool itself.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah, and going back to like, you know if Microsofht bought us or you dot com bought us or something like that, that would be something what we do right. So we could. You could. Basically you could, actually, you know, expose a lot of what Google is doing that way. If you were a competitor to Google or something like that, you
paris_vega:
Wow,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
could use us that way. We don’t. we try to play nice with Google. We want to be around in the era of good. Also we don’t. we don’t attack
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
the hand that feeds us, But
paris_vega:
Right, because you’re not now, Because earlier on let’s clear something up. You mentioned that maybe you were doing some black hat tactics way back in the day Because of that’s just how the market was, and not even knowing the different kind of lay of the land or the rules that Google had. But now you wouldn’t call anything that market brews doing black hat right. I mean, it’s just information that people can use to adjust stuff on their side. You’re not actually like
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
changing
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
we don’t.
paris_vega:
anything out
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
we
paris_vega:
on the
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
have
paris_vega:
Internet
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Au. So we have auto generating tasks in the system and we wouldn’t consider any of those black hat. We try to conform everything to what Googles guide lines are. We want to steer our customers away from any kind of red flags or Google penalties.
paris_vega:
Right?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Um, but it’s all subjective right. You see things like like the Chatgpt thing that’s coming out in all this
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
a
paris_vega:
yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
content generation? Right Is that black hat or white hat? right?
paris_vega:
I’d love
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Uh,
paris_vega:
to hear your thoughts on that
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
well, I mean one of the things that people are struggling with Can can Google understand if it’s a I generated and you know people are saying, Oh, there’s gonna be a water mark and all these now,
paris_vega:
Right
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
from a Serge engineer’s perspective, I can tell you that it’s very, very hard to detect what there’s something is Is is a I generated specifically because there’s so many ways to fool it. You can just chain one content writer with the next and boom the watermarks gone right, you can. you can take the output of Chat V T, and put it into quill bot, and
paris_vega:
Gotcha
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Basically rewrite the thing, and now of a sudden, any kind of pattern that you’re trying to look for as a search engineer to determine whether or not it’s a I generate or not is gone.
paris_vega:
So even with all the aid powers or the machine learning powers, you have to reverse engineer the freaging Google algorithm itself, but the output generated is a harder task than that.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, it’s yes and no right. So
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
given it’s hard to detect if it’s a I generate or not, But we still. we still have the ability to. We still have a bunch of tools that we can detect the quality right, So we can detect topic clustering. We can detect how well the level of experts that writing is, which, Obviously you know, these I content writers are going to generate higher experts scores. That’s you’re seeing a lot of like, S. Net and bank rate just came out with a bunch of content Performing very well on the market today. Um. but, but the idea that you can just generate hundreds of thousands of these pages. Uhoukprogrammatic, A lot of people
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
call it this way. you know. First of all, Google knew how to fix this back in the Shelby days Are Shelby Days Back In two thousand and seven, they created
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
the supplemental index because of it, and then Caffeen came along and merged the supplemental index with the regular index, and that you know, got clouded as to what exactly the supplemental Ex is anymore, But they had
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
the tooling to do that back then, and of course we figured out what they were doing and we wrote that in our model. So we have this thing called the Link neighborhood score and there’s an inbound score and an outbalance score And effectively what it’s doing is looking at the link graph for the pages that it’s been created. And it looks like. what? What is the average link equity per page that’s being calculated throughout the site? So if you have a small back link structure to a site and it’s doing very well, and you’re like Hey, the Aid contents rock, And now we’re just going to generate like a thousand more pages. Well, unless you, unless you increase that that link graph, that back link structure commenserately with your content, increase your average
paris_vega:
M,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
link equity per page is going to fall dramatically. I can. it can by by
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
a tenth or a hundred through however many pages you decide to generate, and once that gets to a certain point, these models can easily see. These algorithms can really easily see that this, this, there’s It’s what, Thin content. Essentially, you’ve got a lot of content but nobody’s linking to it and that just looks artificial. It’s very easy
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
to pick out and so you may have high experts scores across the board, but you’re
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
you’re. you’re Link neighborhood is going to be so low that you’re likely gonna get demoted
paris_vega:
M.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
if it’s even gonna get ranked at all in the first place. So
paris_vega:
Wow,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah, so there’s no way there’s no easy way around it. It’s not really. It’s not a golden Ticket to to o
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
success and dreams. It is for sites that have already established themselves who really just haven’t written all the content that they want to write about,
paris_vega:
Got
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
like
paris_vega:
you
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
domain experts on on whatever they are domain experts about. And they just
paris_vega:
Okay.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
you know they haven’t
paris_vega:
let’s have
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
gone.
paris_vega:
some gaps,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
And yeah, so any gaps of content or existing content that they have that they may want to rewrite, so that it’s more focused on certain key words. You know. it does really good
paris_vega:
Got
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
with the
paris_vega:
you.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
orthaganality Content. What I mean by that is you can put up. You can ask Chet G P. T. to put up two hundred pages of content, about two hundred different ideas, and they will be very little overlapping between all the pages. There’s very little duplicate
paris_vega:
M.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
content. What that means is that each page is going is gonna stand on its own. It’s going to generate its own revenue, its own traffic. You’re not going to have one page masking three or four other pages, Because Google tends to only want to pick the best of all the documents that come back in its index, So if you have, you know a hundred pages, but ninety nine of them are all talking about the same similar topics, and the content shows up as sort of like the similar topic cluster. It’s only going to pick one out of that ninety nine every time, so you really only effectively have two pages that you’re going to rank for out of the hundred.
paris_vega:
Wow,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
So yeah, so there’s different different strategies and stuff like that. The whole idea
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
with market brow is that we can kind of model that and see when what that’s happening and how it’s working In a lot of the Ai generated sites that we’re seeing today In Market brew is very orthogana. It’s you. don’t see a lot of that duplicate content. It helps with that tremendously.
paris_vega:
So with market row you can find whatever gaps you might have. Uh, so whether it’s a content gap or topic gap, you can say Hey, here’s that gap. Go right content.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
or if
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and
paris_vega:
it’s like
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
we
paris_vega:
a gap
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
use.
paris_vega:
in the
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
we
paris_vega:
link
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
use that.
paris_vega:
side, you don’t have enough links for this or that. Go get
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
more
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Any
paris_vega:
links.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
part of the Algorithems you can do this for market? The whole point is we created, and this took way too long for us to figure this out. We only figured this out maybe two or three years ago. Before then it was very complicated, I think as a tool, but today it’s very easy to read because we do this thing called task by comparison, So this is just shorthand, for we take the best out performing site in each algorithm in the search engine, and we use that as sort of the goal post. We say, copy what they do and it’s easy to just not worry about. like how this out Or the works. We can just copy what they do. Worry about the intricacies of how you know the semantic algorithm works.
paris_vega:
Hm.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
We’ll leave it up to like the hard core users of the advanced Dese professionals. But the whole idea is we wanted to take a team of ten people down to one person with this tool, not the other way around. And so for every algorithm it’ll tell you what you need to do it. it will say, Hey, here’s your content gap and we were talking about the topic clusters Here. it will show you the site that does Best with topic clustering. It says Here’s the best topic cluster in this search result and they’re performing the best. It’s you know, if if we found good correlation with this algorithm versus rankings, it’ll tie that directly to the ranking, so you can see exactly how that’s affecting. They’re ranking standing versus all the other sites that are performing less in that algorithm. So it’s it’s a. It’s a direct competitive analysis tool. Everything is in context, so you’re not just optimizing something for the pot Of optimizing or doing it with sort of no end goal. In mind, you have a specific site that is sort of the model candidate that you used to perform on.
paris_vega:
Incredible tool, Um, I feel like we need like a live question and answer feed. Once people start to realize what you’re saying that market brow can do for people, it’s like Hey, do you want to rank in Google or not
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
mused Market? What would you say is like the target audience for market be because you mentioned you know, you went from B to C to B To be. So who’s like the ideal customer?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I mean, our ideal customers before were sort of the the large brands and very competitive markets right where you know, tiny little ranking shifts mean illions of dollars of revenue.
paris_vega:
Right
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
So you know these in house teams. It was. we would do a few startups that wanted to compete with large companies and we would help them do that. That. Were you know, obviously back to B v C, money and they had the money to spend A. Have this all these powerful complex tooling set up
paris_vega:
All? Rigtbecause If
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Worked.
paris_vega:
you have
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Really,
paris_vega:
a new website, it seems like like you don’t even need a tool yet. It’s like you got a start. Or do you? can you work with like a new company at? They have funding
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
We
paris_vega:
and they’re
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
can’t.
paris_vega:
starting
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
with
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so
paris_vega:
Zero.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
we
paris_vega:
They’re just literally
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
we can’t.
paris_vega:
launching their site
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, we can. It takes longer. Obviously for
paris_vega:
Right.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
all of you. The, So it takes a long time. Get started Because you have to build this backing structure behind the domain. It has to be all connected to the rest of the link graph in the world. So it takes that takes time.
paris_vega:
Right?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
So it’s easier to do it with a company that already has a backing structure That their side is just not optimized right and it’s not set up correctly. Or maybe the contents missing, or sometin like that. So yeah, it’s definite Doll. What we’ve done in the last three or four years, though Is what we’re starting to realize is you know, Either we either have to turn into an agency ourselves is a bunch of search engineers and we don’t really want to do that. So what we’re doing is we’re partnering with agencies, And so what what we’re starting to become is sort of like the search engineer team for all the agencies, So a lot of agencies are looking to sort of gain a competitive advantage on the text side and have their own text stack, and part of that text Sta Is becoming market brow where we’re basically there as both advisors and tool tool tool keepers. Basically we’re building these tool stacks for all of them to go and use for their own clients, so we’re slowly moving into like the mass market. Now it’s kind of the test. The model we started with a the roadster, and then the model X, and now the models and model model three model. So that’s effectively what we’re doing is over time where making it more and more effici. Uh,
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and we’re letting these agencies price things that, at their own pricing levels, that can sell individual search engine models that you know are hosted on their own servers that we’ve set up for them, so you can have multiple tenants on the same server, and it’s cheaper offering for individual clients of those agencies, as opposed to just having to build their own servers. Have massive
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
investment in this. so
paris_vega:
So you are building back down towards a similar model what you had before. but maybe not. you know. you
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
know how far you’re going to go back that direction after
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah,
paris_vega:
going
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I mean,
paris_vega:
all
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
eventually,
paris_vega:
the way to the roadster,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, eventually we could get down to the H to that same pricing model. Eventually, if we have enough adoption. It’s really just a how well we do with you Now pushing our agency model and working with agencies. It’s so far it’s been really good. It only not even a year into it, so it’s still. We’re still in the prototoping stage and figuring out what agencies want what they don’t want and all this stuff. but it, Uh, it’s going to be an amazing journey. I know, So that’s where, sir, where we’re headed.
paris_vega:
And I guess Full disclosure, I’m a partner at the nine, which is an agency that has been using Market brew, And that’s how I met Scott and it has been amazing for the projects we’ve used it on So highly Recommend anybody listening or any agencies out there, or I guess, is that the current push more agencies, or is it more higher level or the agency push?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I mean we don’t. We’re not trying to service any of these brands anymore, so we just
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
hand them off to our agencies, so we don’t really care. You know, we continue to to do the marketing and promoting all the data that we find in all the research and stuff out there at the behest of all of the agencies, and obviously the agencies can do that on their own as well with their own internal case studies and the way that they promote their own business models and stuff. But yeah, we don’t really care Bout like we don’t have a specific target market In mind.
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
We know that we’ve done very well at the upper ascalon of sites, and these large companies tend to to be, have been the early adoptors essentially of the technology, primarily just because of the price point. It’s a larger price point than most. We set up Amazon a W S servers, and they’re just crunching, constantly crunching numbers and processing. It’s a heavy amount of processing
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
to do this. it’s It’s not a game where you just write a search engine one day And get it running takes a little bit.
paris_vega:
So this isn’t for somebody who’s just looking to replace like a drift or
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
No,
paris_vega:
s.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
no,
paris_vega:
M. rush. Like at the, That’s just a couple of hundred a month.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, we always recommend to have those tools anyways, like
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
a droffs, and an M. rush. An there’s a bunch of free tools out there as well.
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
You know. these are all things that give you sort of like the uh, you know, the starter package of what you need to do with. So when you get into the point where you’re at the second page of search results, where you’re at the bottom of the first page and you’re just you can’t figure out like what is separating your site from the top three sites. That’s where you turn to a tool like Market Brow, where
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
You know can make a difference in hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Revenue for you, then then Market brew is a very cheap alternative, if you think of it that way, because small investment, building these servers out for your team and getting the tooling so that the team can see exactly what they need to do and execute on that and then monitor it once you get there. then
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
obviously it makes sense,
paris_vega:
Yeah, that clarifies it. If you want to get to the very top of results market brew, but not for your random hobby blog site. It needs to be for a business you’re making money
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Maybe
paris_vega:
from.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
for a hobby blog, like if you’re going after a long tail key word that doesn’t have a lot of search traffic. That’s going to be. You know, you don’t need us for that.
paris_vega:
Yeah, all right, real quick. Let’s do a couple little rapid fire questions. M, and I think you’ve answered some of it along the way, as far as what tactics you’re using or have used to get customers over the years. Um, but let’s just go through a quick list and you can kind of yes or no, talk more about it if you want. Let’s start off with traditional marketing tactics. Um, do you ou, have you used in the past or do you guys currently use Like face to face meetings, cold calls or like cold malors, like physical mail
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, I mean, obviously we’ve been doing this for a while, so the
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
times have changed quite quite considerably. You know, when we were just starting out, you know, back in two thousand and six, I know our sales team would go to, you know, the Better Business Bureau, and they would go. and just like an agency model, Really like you.
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
You’re going in local businesses and setting out meetings where you’re physically. you know, going to the place and this is back in two thousand, six and seven. So this is a different. We didn’t have zoom and we didn’t have work from home type of thing, So um, so that that that was absolutely something that we did even when we went and did sort of like version two of Market Brew in Silcanvalley and two dozen, fourteen, two, Don. thirteen. You know, we were out there pitching to investors, pitching to other businesses. Um, So you know, if you’re in A, if you’re in a city like New York, San Francisco, A Seattle, You. now, this is a opportunity for you that you can go to the you know big big Events and put yourself out there and
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
try to try to sell that way, and obviously you’re physically local. You can. you can go and set up meetings with representatives of companies at their at their location, So absolutely we’ve done that in the past and definitely recommend it. Still.
paris_vega:
I guess you can’t really replace that whole living in the city where it’s totally related to your industry. Like with all the digital tools, there’s still something different about face to face even though we’ve got you know, these kind of zoom type interactions, but it’s still not exactly the same. Huh.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, I mean, person to person interaction is really different right? I mean, it’s just developing relationships. and uh, you know something about having a shared experiences, shared environment
paris_vega:
Yeah.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
at really makes a difference.
paris_vega:
What about newspaper magazine ads or like bulletin boards? We put a business card or flyer on it.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I mean we’ve we’ve. I guess the the version that we would be doing today would be industry publications. You know, so we would. we. We often will have an article published about something we’ve learned or something that we’ve done, and or just a sort of a advertorial type of thing Where well, we’ll say this is
paris_vega:
Hm.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
new new features that we have back in the day when press releases were like all all the big thing. you know, you can Just press releases and they would go out and
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
sort of sort of like the kind of modern version of it.
paris_vega:
And
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
some of those are print magazines or like, maybe
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, we. we had a few. We had a few. Actually, there was Visibility magazine, I think is a publication that would publish a magazine. of. like all the digital marketing stuff going on, this was in like two thousand, two thousand and nine, Two doesn’t tend. Maybe, And so we did that back then, I don’t think you have too much any more because people just don’t consume things like that any more.
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Like the same way.
paris_vega:
All righ. what about broadcast media like T. V or radio adds?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Ah, we haven’t really done a lot of broadcast media just mostly because we’ve gone from V C to be to be right, So it’s it’s just not the right venue to be doing a lot of that.
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Um, you know, it’s just not the right. not the right product for us,
paris_vega:
Right, um, I don’t know how this next one would apply, but ask anyway. What about? like loyalty cards or physical discount qu pons, Any kind of tactics like that?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Um, we, we’ve always. we’ve never really had a problem with. Uh. Well, as far as as far as loyalty, you know, we talked about that grandfathering our our
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
packages. And and so I would say, that’s sort of like the ultimate loyalty program where you know we hear we developed this massive new technology over the years, and obviously some of that gets rolled into the product that he had bought. You know a long time ago. and now you get To have all this because you were early adoptor, So I think that’s any time that you can sort of help your early adoptors and give back to what they did, because the value that they gave you in the beginning is just so much more than a customer today. As far as you know what they’ve developed for you and the feedback that they’ve given you over the year or so. Yeah,
paris_vega:
And earlier you said you did a bat. A launch was that like free customers who were just paying for it in the form of giving feedback and testing things.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
We had a free version. Yeah, so
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
we had a search bar that people could put on their their blog That Ou know. Basically you just type in your website and it would immediately go and produce
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
a you know a report for that score sheet we called it. And so you could see web page score sheet for whatever you that you put in, and then that that was a huge. You know. Obviously that helped that helped. Those things helped tremendously with building back links because you could have an option to Have like a power. buying. a lot of the bloggers
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
would add that so it would ave powered by our company, and it would link back to our site. So any time that people know, put a free tool or mention too. Maybe content writing is a good version today, or you write something really useful and people linked to it or site it. so any time that you can do something like that is obviously a huge signal for Google as far as authority and trustworthiness for for a brand.
paris_vega:
So that brings us right into the digital marketing side of things. You’ve got your own website, And are you consistently putting out your own blog content and using your website as like a legion source?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, we just started doing that again. I mean one of the things we’ve gone through different eras where we, you know. in the B C era, we were very into that. Obviously you wanted to be ranked number one for Uhwebsite grater or Co, software, whatever it was that we were trying to sell, And then when we kind of moved away doing B to B, we found that most of our conversions really. was it coming from organic? It was actually coming from just direct sales. Like actually going directly to these companies or referals. It was just a sort of a different conversion, funnel, sales, funnel, and U. And then so obviously, now what we’re doing is kind of slowly going back to that because we’re starting to realize that a lot of a lot of our potential clients could be agencies, because agencies were essentially giving a tool for agencies to make a lot of money. And so they like us now because we’re sort of like a technology that can enhance their sales. And so we want to be a little bit more focused on content, so we’re starting to build out a sort of like a f, a Q section of content that is sort of around our domain. Acknowledge right, So everything that is about search engines and search engine models and everything that we know about this, we try to publish content to do that. So yeah,
paris_vega:
And it seems like so in general, Like, as an industry has gone more main stream over the past decade or two, just because as the world digitizes
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
all the business S more and more realized. Oh, we want to be found for our services.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, I think I think we haven’t seen the huge wave yet. I think
paris_vega:
Really.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I think well now. so because I think when Covid hit, I think
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
when you saw a massive transformation of digital marketplace right, a lot of people are now going online. Everything is online from that. The problem with that is that our economy has been sort of a very fragile situation. There’s been a lot of inflation. We’re probably going to enter in Sort of a man recession here in two thousand twenty three, A lot of people think so you. You have a lot of businesses that may have lots of cash, but are are a little bit worrisome of like what to do like. They’re all just kind of sitting there waiting to see. what should we do? Make sure that the bottom doesn’t fall out because we don’t know. Like how far of a recession. this is going to be a type of thing. So I think you’ve got this big powder keg that’s been built up where everybody is Move Online. Everybody and their brother went to rank on Google because it’s the primary. You know. That is sort of the still the primary driver of visitors to their site in their business now. And there’s the scale of that is. I don’t think people understand the scale of it. Just How many how many people are Now you know, talking about having a website or having a social media account. You know, this is really just pushed everything online. but the the economy Not really converted that yet. I think I think
paris_vega:
M.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
what we’ll see in the next a year or two is as as we come out of this recession and a lot of the investment starts to occur. You’ll see just just instead of just coming back to what we were precovid. I think you’re gonna see like a five or a ten x, just a wave of of spending dollars into all areas of digital marketing.
paris_vega:
Wow, I like to hear that
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Of course
paris_vega:
It’s great news. All right, M. social media marketing. Are you guys using Facebook?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
We don’t use Facebook. Uh,
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
this again goes back to sort of like we’ve been
paris_vega:
The
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
focusing
paris_vega:
market,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
on just kind of the B B thing. Although now
paris_vega:
Hm,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
we’re trying to be a little bit more pushing. I think Facebook, and you know, Uhfacebook and some of these other like Tik Tok, These
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
are a very good be channels. You’re seeing this across the board with any kind of small consumer item. They’re great for Getting influencers to to promote a lot of these products. Instagram. So all of these are great channels to do this. And if you’re doing to be, it’s more linked in and Twitter, as what we’re finding is is really kind of the
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
the way the audience that you’re you’re focusing on. So we, we are mostly focused on linked in and Twitter. Right now, we’ll have an official Market brew Twitter account, for instance, And and then I try to personally promote market brew like, And just to have a more personal account. That’s That’s talking
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
about the areas of search engines right, So I talk a lot about machine learning and artificial intelligence, and all the things that kind of go from a search engineers perspective, not necessarily like an
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Co agency or co company. Um, and yeah, so do that on both Twitter and Linked in.
paris_vega:
Do you use you, tube or tik tok, or other video focused Abs?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, so we actually find that videos can be pretty transformative for your business In the sales funnel really scales very well, So you can. you can have either case studies or public testimonials or how two articles or videos in all of these things work very well for scaling up large audiences and getting getting in front of a lot of people. So we have a market brow Youtube account. We have You know anywhere, anything from like you know, promotional videos of new feathers in in the product to me giving speeches and nap in front of all the industry leaders. You know. It really just depends on like the type of video that that we’re producing, but all that kind of be kind of be located on the U Tube account. And then you could obviously imbed this in different pages and different locations where where it needs to be.
paris_vega:
So any of the other social media sites like Snap, Chat, pintrist, like Telegram, all the kind of consumer focused when you guys aren’t
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
We
paris_vega:
dealing
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
skip
paris_vega:
with any
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
for
paris_vega:
of those.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
now. Yeah,
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
but those are all really good ones for if you’re consumer focused,
paris_vega:
yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
absolutely, those are all things it can happen to.
paris_vega:
What about? uh, I think these kind of cross over, but like community focused or like discussion group type, like read it, Cora, discord slack channels and stuff.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, I think I think those are more advanced like you have to have a social media team that knows what they’re doing and you can’t just wade into the those communities without like understanding how they work, Because
paris_vega:
Hm.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
An, you know, I read it, for instance, that’s an anonymous community, And so you can
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
just have people sniping each other from even competitors. right competitors
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
can create like a bought army of people that just come and make you look silly and you have to understand like how that whole game is Played before you even walk into that, because I’ve seen lots of brands try to promote on like Read it for instance, and they do what they do on all these other channels thinking. Oh, I’ll just post my article and I’ll say Hey, here I am, and then all of a sudden they just get destroyed. You know, Ranfishkin is a good example of this Like people hate ran. fish.
paris_vega:
Really.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Get on. Read it, you know. I don’t know what it is like they, just,
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I think it’s a lot of the industry know, thinking that he’s too simplistic or r. He doesn’t deserve the success That God or something I don’t know. But you see, you have these weird interactions and when people become anonymous they don’t you know? it’s all no holds barred, right, Like
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
the niceties in He social contracts that we have with each other, go out the window. So you just have to
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
have to be very careful waiting into those. You make sure that you have a team that knows what they’re doing.
paris_vega:
Because you’re in there with the trolls on Red,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
It
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
you’re in there with the trolls.
paris_vega:
And Rand seems like such a nice polite person. like his persona at least, And this is what I’ve heard him talk on
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
podcast. Whatever. so
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
he’s
paris_vega:
yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
not the only one. If you go unto,
paris_vega:
yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
you can see like there are literally. There’s a lot of people that just get completely destroyed by. Just appears to be like an army of people that just come in
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and all pile on.
paris_vega:
it’s like
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
So
paris_vega:
a
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
you
paris_vega:
sport.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
have to be. Yeah, You got to go in all the way like you can’t. You can’t just claim something and expect that no one is going to like challenge you on it. right, So you better have like all of your references, your citations, your papers. Everything that backs up what you’re You can’t just go and say something because people will call you out on it and you
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
need to you know, And if you’re ready with all that information and you have all the the details of what you’re talking about than that as a force multiplier, right, you actually will end up with better marketing effect
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
if you have that. So you just have to. You have to do it correctly. It can be a very good channel, but it can also be. There’s high risk, so it’s high risk. High reward.
paris_vega:
It seems like Twitters kind of lean in that way as well that
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
It always
paris_vega:
it’s
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
has
paris_vega:
becoming
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
been.
paris_vega:
more
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Sort
paris_vega:
transparent.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
of. Yeah, I think with Twitter Blue, I think you’re getting a little less, little, little more transparent right like there’s less anonymous inter activity.
paris_vega:
Hm.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
The bots are kind of. Supposedly. If you’re not Twitter blue, you’re getting pushed to the bottom of all the comments, so most people are just signing out for Twitter Blue. And the, now you’re getting real identities interacting with each other, So it’s supposedly the idea is gonna. It’s going to be more civil. I’ve noticed that I don’t know if you, But I’ve
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
seen more civility on Twitter because of this, So it’s you know, I think it’s moving a little bit away from what red it is doing or those types of anonymous marketing
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
platforms.
paris_vega:
Really, this is a little off top, but it’s related to social media. And so, Um, can you speak just real quick about what’s your opinion on the effect of like social media on? So because it seems like I’ve heard some debate about that in the past. It’s like Hey, it’s external links, but it’s you know. it’s on a social platform or whatever like. Do you see that it has value like directly does to somebody’s rankings? Or is it just a little drop in the ocean or
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, I mean whether it’s direct or indirect Is it’s unclear? Obviously, but you, you certainly can understand that as a promotional platform, you know you have people out there writing content and they’re often citing Twitter and citing these conversations A lot of the lot of the studies that get cited in a lot of these papers or content articles are often you know, first published on Twitter as a promotion, promotional public Ation or something. So that’s clearly like a direct link to you know back links right, So you could get back links posting your articles on the social media platforms and then somebody says Hey, you know this is you know. References this this article because they saw it in one of their content
paris_vega:
Chi?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
articles, and of a sudden you’ve got back links coming from you know, blog or something in industry publication, so that
paris_vega:
Do you
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
it’s a definite correlation between you know posting on social media and having you know Lift and organic.
paris_vega:
Okay? And would you say, Twitters the best tool for kind of that type of exposure where you’re more easily quoted and that kind of thing, or is it just the fact that you’re just getting general brand awareness or just awareness on any platform could lead to more potential
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
It just
paris_vega:
itationwatever?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
depends on your yeah, where your audience where your customers are
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
right. So that’s that’s That’s The main idea is that you want to be on the place where your customers are, whether you want to be there or not. That’s a hint. Hint for the
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
world.
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
M.
paris_vega:
because I guess a lot of Os could start to think well as long as we rank for something. You know. They just focused a hundred percent on the ranking side, the content and Google’s relationship with it. and there is that the human side of. If people never find out about it, you’re missing out on all those potential organic links.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, and I think inkvpeople view, you know, promotion on Twitter is a little bit more organic than just posting it on like a industry publication These days That everybody knows. it’s been paid for
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
a lot of times that I even say sponsored by. So it’s it’s
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
the save people. Really. They’re looking for a little bit more organic, the ability to question you and have a conversation about it. not just like you know, posting something and then saying Okay Now I’m done. So I think Really where it’s moving towards And you see that like it’s really. That’s why influencers are really at the top of that food chain Now today in marketing Is it’s because people you know, most people believe that influencers are. now. they trust the influencer
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and they
paris_vega:
trust
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
still
paris_vega:
factor.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
a large percentage of people don’t think that they would ever like sell something to them as a sponsor, even though that’s how the whole industry works. Still Like the new version of You know the Forbes article back in, You know, Five, ten, ten years ago, Where you know you have all these Forbes articles written. They’re all paid for, but they all are written on under the guys of these mass media outlets. You see this still in a lot of the the mass media where you get articles published, and if you’re not in the marketing industry you, it’s totally believable. You understand what they’re saying and you eat it all up. And but if you’re in the marketing industry, you’re like. Oh, Who paid for this? Well? Who funded that? You know. It’s like everything. You can just see exactly
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
what what’s happening. So selling to marketers is one of the most challenging. It’s like you know eleven out of ten on the on the challenge scale
paris_vega:
Oh
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
for for a sales team, And so you know, it’s taking a lot for us to realize like what we need to do to sell to marketers Because you really can’t be fake. You have to just be straight forward. You got to tell them exactly what what the benefits of your prod Dare? and they have to you know, be able to trust you and believe you. So that’s it’s a very
paris_vega:
Yeah.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
big component that’s just for this industry. So it’s it’s It
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
applies just for us, but Ye,
paris_vega:
Do you use Google ads?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
We’ve done off and on. Google Adds as far as organic versus P. P. C.
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
H. it’s such a huge different difference in R. I. I mean, Google Ds have gotten so expensive compared to every everything else. So if that’s the only thing that you can do right off the bat, like if you don’t have a backing structure and you don’t have a content team or something, then Google adds is a quick. you know, Kind of at least get some people through the door and know who you are. But So you know we’ve got. We’ve gotten every once in a while, Will supplement it if we need to. If we need to promote like one specific thing very quickly. That’s a good way of using Google Adds. and obviously like it depends on the product that you’re selling. So if it’s you know for us like Google adds, don’t work as much for us, because our entire industry knows that Google Adds is just paid for, so it doesn’t have any trust factor right.
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
so, but for other industries it might work just great because you’re consume Is not. You know. They go to Google and they see the search results. They don’t know a difference between a sponsor, dad and organic link. So it doesn’t
paris_vega:
I
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
you
paris_vega:
imagine
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
know? It just depends.
paris_vega:
O tools or O software is pretty high cost per click for a Google head. Anyway,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, I think it’s like eighty or ninety dollars per click
paris_vega:
What?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
or something.
paris_vega:
That’s
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Um,
paris_vega:
great?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah, so
paris_vega:
That’s insane.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
yeah, so it just depends on like your your customer lifetime values, And you got to really know what you’re doing as far as that,
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Otherwise you can just end up burning a lot of cash for very little value. So
paris_vega:
Um, you mentioned you weren’t doing like organic content on Facebook. Do you run Facebook Adds or Instagram ads?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
We don’t do anything on Facebook or Instagram,
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
just because that’s not where our audience is.
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
But yeah,
paris_vega:
So Twittering, linked in is where you focus. Do you do the advertising side of Twitter and linked in?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
We haven’t yet.
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
We’ve we’ll probably we made. We may do this later in the year we have. Haven’t really? You know, we haven’t needed it yet. Honestly,
paris_vega:
Hm,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
but it just depends on the market conditions and everything, so we’ll figure out we’ll figure out what we need to do, but we probably run at least a few experiments on both just to see,
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
I think we’ve run linked in ads in the past and Twitter ads in the past, But this was like five six seven years ago and they just Never as uh, uh. The best we’ve ever gotten was just writing articles in industry publications. You know, we’ve been featured in Like Crunch, and we’ve been featured and um, um, all the industry journals, not as sponsor articles, but just reference in their expert articles.
paris_vega:
Like Search engine Journal or those
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Searching
paris_vega:
kind of
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
journal, search engine land,
paris_vega:
Okay?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
searing around table. I guess I don’t know, like
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Everything that you can imagine, because we’ve been around for a while.
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
One of the bigger ones was Tech Crunch, so having an article in Techcrunch was like a very big thing. We had a mass
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
of like ten thousand veers, and like the first hour or someting like that for that, so yeah, so it was you know, we, for us, the the biggest conversion is is just where you can find trust right So it’s not. You’re not trying to directly sell to people, And that’s hard to do to the marketing industry because everybody knows when you’re selling and everybody knows like what you know, sort of what you’re trying to do. So it’s um, You know, it’s even if you don’t want to be sales, and you’re just trying to promote like a new feature or something like that. It’s it’s still hard to not wade into those waters of promoting, So it’s the biggest thing is really you want to just any article. If you’re trying to promote yourself, Just eighty percent of the article. It should be about not promoting you. It should be helping helping the reader with their problem. And then obviously, the other twenty percent You can. you can say what products are features that you have that can augment that you know that solution to their problems?
paris_vega:
That rolls right into what I was gonna ask next, And that is C. O, as a search engineer and co found market brood. Are you guys using your tool Market Brow itself and other Co tactics to you know, as part of your own marketing
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yes,
paris_vega:
process,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yes, so we’ve done a number of sites which all I’m going to remain private about. but
paris_vega:
Okay,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
you know we’ve absolutely. I mean, you can imagine we have this tool that can. Literally. it’s a cheat code for Google. So
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
um, you know it’s It’s ere, almost a hundred per cent laser focused on building our search engine, But we do have some side projects and obviously we’re using our, or a lot of this new content that we’re doing. We’re running it through the model, so that we’re now doing what we should be doing as far as what we advise all of Clients to be doing. so,
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
um, yeah, one of the the biggest red flags is if you see a tectechstack where they’re not using their own text stack
paris_vega:
Right,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
right, So like Yeah, they should be eating their own food.
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
And And and if that’s not happening, the should be a big red flag. So the other thing is like we. One of the easiest ways to improve your product is just to use it as a user.
paris_vega:
Yeah.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
So you know it’s really a no brain or U want to. You want to constantly be using it for either Your own stuff or helping somebody with their stuff and listening to the customer and product feedback. Um, that’s a really crucial part of it.
paris_vega:
So for the market brew side itself, that’s like the public facing market brew site. Are you guys still on the journey of getting to the top of the ranking you want to rank for Or how’s that?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Oh, yeah, I mean, we’ve just started again, Like if you look at, I mean, we literally just started publishing a content in November, and we’ve been doing
paris_vega:
Yeah?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
about. I don’t know, probably about two articles a day. So we’ve been every every day. we published about two articles and we’re trying to, just you know, we used a combination of the A I generation and an editor reviewing, so we just kind of use that to to generate the The content, the structure, and then we
paris_vega:
Hm,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
then were constantly reviewing that and figuring out like Hey, what do we need to add to this or what things are not correct? And we can take this out so
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
we. It’s kind of like, kind of a hybrid approach,
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Just another tool, content writing tool. Um, so yeah, we just started. I think we went from like barely a few key words for the market, brute site, the corporate site that we have to, we have over like a hundred key words that we’re ranking for now just in the last month.
paris_vega:
Awesome.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
And it’s like I think we’re twenty two percent increase every every week or something right now, so
paris_vega:
Wow,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
checked back in about six months. I’m sure we’ll be up there.
paris_vega:
And before that you guys were just heads down, focused on the product serving customers like, and not really on growing. That
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah, We,
paris_vega:
corporate
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
organic
paris_vega:
site.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
wasn’t a driver of us for for our business That really wasn’t
paris_vega:
Got ya.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
we. Were you, Knwbecause. We, We were essentially were competing against. like other Co tools that Ar priced at like less than a hundred dollars a month. And this is like a mass market thing. And there they’re going after like small accounts, And if you look at like a lot of the enterprise, so companies that most of their business isn’t driven by organic. they’re just they’re all done by now directing Referrals and stuff like that. So
paris_vega:
So that so you guys still have like a sales team. That’s or, I guess now it’s more the agencies or
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Yeah,
paris_vega:
what’s
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
we’re
paris_vega:
that?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
offloading all the sales to our agency. So
paris_vega:
Okay?
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
if you’re an agency out there and you want to use this text stack
paris_vega:
There we go.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and be a market brewreseller, you can come to us. We will arm you with everything you need to know, and then we’ll give you the sort of the play book of how we sold into these large companies, so you can either do that or also take that go down market and sell to your normal customers. that you you know may be like a more of a mass market. Um, and so re, just we’re laser Us right now on the on the text stack, So we are just we’re a bunch of search engineers were gonna be focused on our search engine model and we don’t have to worry too much about like the you know, like all the sales and the entire sales funnel that we kind of had to do for the last five years, we had to sort of turn into an Co agency to figure this all out and get it.
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
get it running. and we did very well with that, But in order to scale, you know, we’re not interested in becoming a huge Co agency. We want to just off load that and share the. We’re basically trading. You know, fifty percent of our profits we we give to the agencies as part of this recall our program. So it’s a. It’s an awesome deal for agencies
paris_vega:
Yeah,
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
and so definitely go to the site, market, bro dot. A, you can read a little bit more about it,
paris_vega:
And I think that’s a perfect place to end it, Man, thank you so much for your time. I think that one little tag line you said earlier in passing is a good way to summarize market brew. It’s like the search engine cheat code or the Co cheat code for agencies, so if anybody’s interested, go check him out. M. we’ve loved using it and it’s been a huge improvement to our efforts for our clients, but Scott, thank you so much for your time.
scott_stouffer___market_brew:
Thanks Parris.
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