Radical Podcast - Ryan sits down with Logan Brown From GVL TODAY ( 6 AM CITY )

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's awesome. Yeah, so I'm actually really excited. Logan emailed me a couple of weeks ago. I was like, hey, man, following stuff, have a few topics. I think this would be cool for a podcast, and it was really kind of near and dear to my heart, as far as just trends and different things that I'm following with local news and marketing and journalism and as journalism dead versus, you see the decline of newspapers and all these things, and really kind of hit at a core. I think a really interesting topic. So really excited to kind of get into that. And really, Logan, I think, people in Greenville know GVL today, which is one of your core foundational products and the newsletter and things like that.

was a little fragmented and broken. We kind of have this idea that everyone creates content in some way and they share it in all different forms. So some people read the newspaper, some people watch local TV and some just stick to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. We thought what we could do is kind of listen on all channels, find the best of the best and then bring it to you in one certain channel, which right now is email and a cool succinct newsletter. Yeah, for sure. So talk to me about you're not just in Greenville. What cities are we coming right now besides just Greenville? Yeah, it's actually a really fun time that you brought me on because we're, so now we're in seven cities total. So we're all in the southeast,

everything from Lakeland, Florida, Charleston, Columbia, here in Greenville, Asheville, Chattanooga, and now we're in Raleigh, North Carolina as of this morning. So definitely a south eastern footprint for the most part right now. Yep. But ambitions further west and north, I imagine. Kinda, you know, I think the furthest west we've looked at currently is maybe like an Austin. We kinda like what's going on there, but there's still a lot of opportunity here in the southeast. You know, places like Birmingham, Richmond, Knoxville, all have vibrant communities that are growing and a lot of people are flocking there. So I think we'd probably stick to that first before going too far away. Yeah, what's been, you know, some of the, you know, being a newer concept, business, maybe talk a little bit about some of the ups and downs,

and let them know what you're trying to do and the success stories that have happened already in Greenville and Colombia in these different cities, that's probably a lot of fun. I'd say what's a struggle on Mayan this, you know, from marketing is how do I get as many people as possible to know about this product and get them amped for it, especially pre-product, because as you know, there's always product launches in marketing and for any business. So when we decide 60 days, we're gonna go to some new city and we're gonna launch the newsletter, well, how do you get somebody hyped about a product that doesn't exist yet and how do you get them excited to sign up and then when it does launch, get them sharing with their friends

and get the entire community behind it. So the good there is that we can be there of boots on the ground, the bad is that, or the struggle is that what do we, how do we make this the coolest thing possible so that on day one, we're sitting in a good spot? It's interesting. My mind went down to pass. I'm gonna try to remember the second one as I go down the first, but I see it, you know, from a marketing perspective, you've got B2B and B2C, don't you? I mean, it seems like for you guys, you're any media company, you know, survives on, you know, working with businesses and selling advertising in some way, shape, or form. And then the content side, which is, you know,

and show them how we've worked with others in their industry. And on the B2C side, we create content up front to kind of get them excited about what we're doing. And we have other newsletters, we can show them. So there's other models out here like this where they understand the concept, they just need to see it for their city. So that's how we kind of try to tackle the B2C side of that. Yeah, how's, what are the tactics, if you will, you know, that when you're coming into a new market and trying to get consumers and trying to, you know, it's all about region frequency and marketing, you know, as far as telling the messages or telling, conveying to them what, you know, what's in it for them, a number of times,

what are some of the marketing tactics that you kind of, you guys deploy or how do you get in front of people? Yeah, totally. So I mean, you're kind of hidden on the spot. I think for the growth marketing side of things what we try to do is create more of like a strategy overall because as you know, there's a zillion different buckets you can kind of go into. So we develop a strategy with certain buckets and there's tactics within all of those. I would say that the core ones that work well for us is that especially in a city like Raleigh, we'll use them since they're the newest market. We know that there's a lot of young folks that are on social media already there.

So first thing we do is a content strategy that gets distributed organically and paid through the social platforms, right? Cause we know that's where they're spinning their time. We had boots in the ground film video and it's you guys are really into video content. You know, kind of push that through the social networks as well to build buzz. And organic referral is a huge thing and then we have like more giveaway referrals so that's incentivized a little bit. And that's time to mention the partnerships. So when we go boots in the ground, we're meeting with the Movers and Shakers and trying to get in touch with their networks. A lot of those folks, the major businesses, if you think about a Michelin or a BMW here in Greenville,

we can go talk to those folks and we feel that there's an impact when their employees are reading GBL today or some major company in Raleigh. And you get your employees kind of investing in their city. They're happier and they want to be here longer and there's retention. So those are the kind of partnerships we try to work on and utilize as a growth mechanism for us. Yeah, I love that.

I would say the good thing is if you think about a Greenville news keeping it local, those guys are doing really good investigative journalism and trying to create stories about the community. When you think about GBL today as a newsletter and an email product, we kind of send a lot of traffic to them. You know, we're not a social platform in the sense that people are maybe engaging right on it like you will with a Facebook or Instagram, but since we're sharing these stories and aggregating them, someone who may have not seen a Greenville news article because it was lost in their feed. We're putting it right there front and center. So at the same time, we're not kind of competing with them on the content play.

We're giving them a place to push their content. Yeah, with this funny, I think of that push pool. You are more of a pool medium because you aggregate it and you put it in a newsletter form and you put an email box. And yeah, if I'm on my phone or computer desktop and people still do that, you know, yeah, 80% of all our analytics, our clients says it's all mobile. But it seems probably right for you guys to the, but it's really just kind of there that, because I go look at it every day, I get it. I'm a subscriber. I appreciate that. I'm proud GVL today, subscriber.

and we're, you know, maybe 30, 40 years ago as someone having this exact same conversation when the 8-track came out, you know, the sets are in the cars and it's like, oh my gosh, I'm going to do like vinyl. And now you see, you know, Jack White in Nashville creating a vinyl shop that he can't even keep up to man with. So on one side, I do think there's, there's going to be like a come-up of this. Like, I think they're going to want the nostalgia of the paper in their hands. Yeah. You know, an interesting perspective, though, is a lot of these newspapers locally don't really control their own destiny. If you're a good net product or, you know, locally, like Gateway or something like that,

a gatehouse, sorry, I mean, that company in general could be sitting at their headquarters and just say that they're going to close Greenville and Nashville and whatever paper products they have because it's just not working for the bottom line. So that's when local communities kind of struggle and it impacts us pretty hard. But I do think the niche thing, you're on par with that. Even if it were to shut down across the board and more and more local cities lose their paper, I think that brings on independent people who can sustain something that's not this massive product that needs to make millions and millions of dollars. They can create little niche products and have people on the ground that help push it for them. And all of a sudden, you've now got a paper

that talks about your neighborhood and your street and you kind of get excited for that and want to go pick it up again. Yeah, good work. It could live in a digital world, you know, with Apple News aggregating all the paper products and putting them into a digital marketplace to help us as well. Yeah, but you still, you know, you guys have to think of living and breathing this. I want to talk about how you get your, you know, some of your content that's connected, you know, with journalists and just, I think they're not probably called journalists with you guys, something about what you call and content curators or share, you know, some other editors, but that's fine. Editors, okay. All right. And then it's pretty standard in industry terminology.

to another, now the newspaper gets all the exclusive rights to a story when it breaks. Now this is not talking about investigative journalism, but when a development like top golf comes to Greenville, do we need a major company to break that story? I don't know. Yeah, you know, and you probably need some people on the ground to be relevant, especially in these smaller cities, but yeah, I don't know if local media shutters if a newspaper goes out, it's definitely impacted, but I think that we can all work together to come with other solutions so that people stay informed. You guys have gotten to a scale now in Greenville. It's like you're more seated markets and things like that. I would think where there's the machine feed itself.

and that I'm aware of here in Greenville, but let's talk about like, what are those future products? What are those future added value features that, you know, 6A of cities kind of bringing to both the consumers and the businesses in the market? Yeah, definitely. So the values of the company, it's always educating the market number one, right? So we want to give them the information they need, we try to stay as positive as possible. We think that specifically in some of the Greenville or you've been for three years, we've been able to accomplish that. So part of my job is kind of working on special projects, how are we going to develop our product further and do different things? So that kind of brings along GBL plus.

And the idea there is it's like a separate subscription product and the other side of our value proposition is activating the local community. So how do we activate these folks and getting them spending money locally, learning about new things? And the idea with this product is that you pay $10 a month or $100 a year and we give back $20 towards local restaurants and a free gym class trial. And so what we found out is that a lot of people kind of stick to their neighborhood. And so if you live over here, you have your spot. Your wife says, hey, I want to go out to eat tonight and you say, well, let's just go across the street. We've got our tried and true. Our whole goal is to kind of push people out of those

little neighborhood pockets and get to try something new, work to build 13 next door. Not that this is out of the way, but for someone who doesn't live on this side of town or doesn't frequent the trail, just not something they may have gone to before. So that's kind of our goal with GBO plus. So is that, is that in every one of your markets, the plus feature or the one that are live? Not yet, it's kind of working as a beta in Greenville or trying to figure that out and understand what the value prop is and do people understand it as the messaging, right? How are we going about onboarding partners and are they getting value out of the program? Once we nail that, we'd love to scale it.

was very different than what I'd seen before. And unfortunately, I didn't really have the opportunity to go much further with that company without moving. So I tried to find something locally. Because that's when GBL today came around. Started writing for them. We were only three people deep at that point. Now we're at 28, so it's wild. But so yeah, I was writing for them and then slowly moved into this marketing role because we were trying to expand all these different cities. I needed to understand the data behind the subscribers we're bringing in and the churn and the acquisition strategy. And so that's been a lot of fun. I think what I love most about marketing that maybe doesn't get talked about as much as the user psychology.

The guy who's behind it was the former growth marketing lead at HubSpot, which a lot of people use. And then his partner, Andrew Chinn, is a partner at Injury's in Horowitz, a pretty well known VC company at a Silicon Valley. So following both of them in general, you're going to learn a lot. They're just kind of a pregnant butcher's name, same as Gualame, they call him G. He was the growth marketing manager at Drift. Follow any of his stuff, listen to as many podcasts from him as you can. And for anybody listening, Drift is a chat. It is, they do a lot of things now, but they started. I believe they started. That's how I know them, at least, is website chat. Kind of really making a more conversational, more interesting.

And he would kind of compete them together. And so if the bot were to actually get more conversions, he would increase the amount of leads that come to the bot versus the sales people. So on growth side, you think B to see a lot. But it's interesting, like, as people are trying to sell a product on their website, how can you use technology to help with that? And he's a pretty smart guy when it comes to that. Yeah, it is funny. I joked with Logan a little bit on, we're talking about topics for the podcast. And I see the growth marketing lobby about a little bit, and I'm like, isn't all marketing trying to grow something? I guess I'm a, but I've never understood exactly

I mean, for us and for GBL today and all the other brands that we operate, I'm way more B to see. And I think a lot of people just think of, you can call it top of funnel, but now they're trying to push loops with they call it. So there's like linear channels and there's loops for acquiring customers. And I think with growth, it's all about thinking holistically about maybe the customer, the subscriber, like what's leading to your turn, what's your turn rate? People talk about, it's great. Hey, I'm getting all of these new leads from whatever channel, maybe Facebook's bringing all these folks in. A growth marketing manager's gonna look at the cohort analysis to understand how valuable that channel is. Because up front, you may get somebody in your site

for two cents. What's the value of that over time? Yeah, like time value. And you know, it's why the funnel went away and then McKinsey's customer loop or circle or, I don't know the exact, I can't remember. I use different stuff, flywheel. Yeah, exactly. But it's true though, because it doesn't end at purchase. They almost begin. It's not supposed to, it's not supposed to, unless you're selling, I don't know. Not to be morbid, but a coffin. That's right. A lot about the same thing, but. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

how we're performing, right? So we have all these different channels that we're utilizing and people are coming in and they're working with, they're in the product. And we want to learn more about how they're using the product. And if there is churn, why is there churn? And so I'm kind of analyzing and then coming up with a strategy to say fix that. Or we're going to improve a certain piece today. So I'm doing a lot of analyzing there and trying to cope with a strategy that'll fix that. And then working a lot on GVL Plus recently. I'm kind of doing that on my own because I feel pretty passionate about it and wanted to kind of scale. But that means I've got to go get the partnerships

and try to acquire customers. So it's a true test to marketing for sure. What my capabilities are, I suppose. Do you guys segment your customers at all as far as like within a market? I imagine now that with the Plus product and other things, some of this becomes more relevant. But you know, you get, you know, you have a newsletter product. You got your subscriber base. So any back to that kind of lifetime value and different ways of looking at customers. Are you guys doing much segmentation within that customer, the subscriber list? Yeah, it's a good question. There's a lot that's possible. I would say that I'm analyzing a lot of, or is it just so, we gotta get more at the top of the,

Yeah. But then there's people leaving town as well. I'm sure moving away. So I would say that pouring the top of the funnel is maybe not my first priority. I think you might have mentioned it in one of your other podcasts about retaining what's already there. I think that if we could retain a higher percentage of people that come in, then you don't need to fill the top of the funnel as fast or as frequently. So as far as back to your question about segmenting, we're always segmenting the ways that people came into the top of the funnel, right? So the best growth strategy, in my opinion, that you can get to, there we go. You never know. That's a good song. I don't know.

So that's my Skype thing. Just tell him to leave. No worries. Yes. It's all good. Yeah. So of course, you're always segmenting where people are coming from at the top of the funnel. But I think it's understanding where they came in, how they came in, and who sticks around the longest. And so that's a segment of its own, right? What channel you came in? But then there's an activity channel. So immediately, as soon as you subscribe, I already have already segmented you based on whether or not you opened the welcome email. Did you even take an action within the welcome email? A week later, did you have you open an email from us in the seven days? We'll be send daily to have you open one, to be open five.

That's great. You're a power user. What happens after three months? I'm sending you a follow-up campaign to make sure that things going well, maybe a survey involved. Did you take the survey? Now, I've got all this interesting data on you because I know how you want to interact with the company or with the brand, who you are, what makes you tick, so that all those things are possible, and that's how we're segmenting. So we're not sending campaigns based on any sort of data and changing the content within your campaign. And a little bit of the reason behind that is kind of these, what are they calling it on Facebook now, the different, you get in these pockets of information that you can't never get out of because you don't like certain things.

And like I said, we're sticking to the southeast. So I think that right there and of itself is a big task for us next year that we want to tackle. And I think the teams work really hard to create a playbook that'll allow that to happen. And it'll be, it'll be fun to activate on. But yeah, I mean, I think you asked a question about, is email dying and do you know, what's what's happening within email? Because there's a lot of people playing in that space and my email is getting full. I don't want to say, I don't, emails are a first distribution method, but I think what we do is as a newsletter. And I think there's something about the way that people create content that email newsletter

has become synonymous with, but it's really about the way that you're writing and how concise it is and how it flows, how it feels and who the writer is behind it. So we try to take out the fluff and just give you what you need and make it fun. And so I think we created a newsletter right now, but to that question, emails working currently, I don't think it's off the table that it could live in a different medium in the future. Yeah. Maybe I'm kind of high on, not high on anything, but this beer as one beer, we're playing around a lot with Facebook Messenger and chatbots kind of leading into that and just the notion that everybody has it on and as a medium for information and for another type of inbox

There's not a lot of programs out there, platforms where you can mark unread and kind of come back to it later. Yeah. So that's kind of a nice feature, but I'm kind of into this product, it's maybe a whole different subject, but there's a product called stoop and a product called substack and substacks making it very easy for people to create e-mail newsletters just like they are for folks who are doing for podcasts and stoop is becoming a platform to house all of those e-mails or the newsletters, rather, without having to worry about inbox deliverability or anything like that. So I think if you think about the world of podcasting and how many platforms and networks have been created to house podcasts, there's not really anything that lives yet to house

your newsletter. And if something catches on, you no longer really need your inbox anymore. You use that platform and that's your go-to space to consume and deliver newsletter product. Interesting. Yeah, check those out. The one thing I do love about e-mail is you don't have to have an app or you're not locked into a platform, you know, it's just, it works. It goes to one mailbox, you know, whether it's even if it's Gmail or different brands of it, you're just, you have an e-mail address and it goes there and you're not, it's kind of like the problem now, sometimes I have some of my friends, we message all the time on Instagram. Yeah, and then I've got friends that aren't even on Instagram, you know, and it's like,

seven cities, so just go to 6amCity.com and you can find all the places that we're living. Logan, where can people follow or keep up with anything that you're into? Yeah, well, I'm pretty heavy on LinkedIn these days. Okay. And then maybe that's not preferred channel, but yeah, Logan Brown on LinkedIn and just Logan B Brown on Twitter, my Twitter series are a little different, but it's fun. Great. Great business, little sports. I don't know. I love it. Well, appreciate Logan being on and really appreciate it for the partnership that we've had with GBL today and these guys and we'll continue to have really enjoyed today's podcast. Keep up with everything, radical at radical.com, company online at radical underscore results on Instagram. We're active there all the time.