Ryan Alford [00:00:00] Hey guys, it's Ryan Alford for the Radical company podcast, really excited to be back. It's been a few weeks on the podcast. We're here at Camaraderie in our new podcast studio. Camaraderie is our agency's location at Radical's house. But it's also a co-working space here in Greenville. So if you are looking for someone where to work and want to come work with some cool people, you need to look up Camaraderie, coworkers, dotcom and check everything out. We're actually Logan and I, who I'll introduce shortly, are having a tasty beverage here straight from the kegerator, another benefit of camaraderie, shameless plugs all around for the cover space, but. Logan Brown, really excited to have you man, growth man and marketing manager at six a.m. city, really excited to have your man. 

Logan Brown [00:00:51] Yeah, thanks for having me. So awesome. 

Ryan Alford [00:00:53] So I'm actually really excited. Logan emailed me a couple of weeks ago. I was like, hey, man following stuff. I 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 and following with local news and marketing and journalism and journalism is dead versus you see the decline of newspapers and all these things and really kind of hit at the 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 GBL today, which is one of your core foundational products and the newsletter and things like that. So I know that. But six a.m. city, I'd love to kind of start there. let's give everybody that's listening that historical background. What problem are we trying to solve? Where why was six a.m. cities started Greenville today, I think was one of the first markets, but maybe not that that show's not all of my knowledge, but maybe just give everybody a little bit of that background and maybe some of your background previous to six a.m. city. 

Logan Brown [00:02:06] Yeah, totally. So I kind of came on board almost three years ago. GBL today was started under six a.m. City as an umbrella. The whole idea was delivering email newsletters that aggregated and curated local news and events. The whole idea there is that local, neat local news and media 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 on the best of the best and then bring it to you in one certain channel, which right now is email. And of course, this newsletter. 

Ryan Alford [00:02:50] So talk to me about you're not just in Greenville. What cities are you covering right now, besides just Greenville? 

Logan Brown [00:02:58] 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. 

Ryan Alford [00:03:14] So definitely a south eastern footprint for the most part right now. But ambitions further west and north, I imagine. 

Logan Brown [00:03:24] Kind of. I think the furthest west we've looked at currently is maybe like in Austin. Yeah. We kind of like what's going on there. But there's still a lot of opportunity here in the Southeast. 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. 

Ryan Alford [00:03:44] What's been some of the being a new, newer concept business, maybe talk a little bit about some of the ups and downs, both thought the great things coming into a new city maybe just some of the challenges of a new business model, can you talk a little bit about that? 

Logan Brown [00:04:10] I mean, the the cool thing about being close to all of our cities, Greenville being the center of the hub and spoke model of sorts to the founders and members of our team can go and kind of be boots on the ground there, meet the community, make handshakes that need to be made, and a lot of hype kind of gets built right there. When you go meet with the Chamber of Commerce and you meet the mayors of all these cities and you kind of get them behind the product and let them know what you're trying to do and the success stories that have happened already in Greenville and Columbia and these different cities, that's probably a lot of fun. I'd say it's a struggle on Mianus for marketing. 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 there's always product launches in marketing and for any business. So when we decide 60 days, we're going to go to some new city and we're going to 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 thing is that we can be there, boots on the ground. That is that the struggle is what do we do? How do we make this the coolest thing possible so that on day one where we're sitting in a good spot, it's interesting. 

Ryan Alford [00:05:26] I went down to pass to try to remember the second one as I go down the first, but. I see it from a marketing perspective, you've got B to B and B to C, don't you? I mean, it seems like for you guys, you're in any media company survives on working with businesses and selling advertising in some way, shape or form. And then the content side, which is consumed by consumers, the local people. So is it, in fact, a two fold marketing challenge of B2B and B2C at the same time when you're kind of coming into a new market? 

Logan Brown [00:06:04] Oh, absolutely. I think the positive of where we are currently as an organization is we have a lot of existing partnerships that have gone really well and we have all of this content and we have all these case studies that we're able to kind of curate and make so that we go to this new city. It's not just this brand new thing that no one knows how it's going to happen. We just know that we have a playbook. This is the content we make for our partners on the B2B side. We can really prove to them and show them how we've worked with others in their industry. And they'll be at the seaside. We create content up front to kind of get them excited about. We're doing and we have other newsletters we can show them. So there's other 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. 

Ryan Alford [00:06:48] Yeah, how's. What are the tactics, if you will, that when you're coming into a new market and trying to get consumers and trying it's all about reaching frequency and marketing as far as telling the messages or telling them what's in it for them a number of times. What are some of the marketing tactics that you deploy or how do you get in front of people? 

Logan Brown [00:07:18] Yeah, totally. I mean, you're kind of hitting on the spot, I think, for the growth marketing side of things we try to do is create more of a strategy overall, because, as 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 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 the first thing we do is a content strategy that gets distributed organically and paid through the social platforms. Because we know that's where they're spending their time. We had boots on the ground film video. And it's you guys who are really into video content, 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 away referrals. So that's incentivized a little bit. And that's not to mention the partnership. So when we go boots on 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. When 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. 

Ryan Alford [00:08:38] I love that is. Is there any blowback from other local media outlets when you guys come into a market, that's it's media's competitive, local media can be hyper competitive. You think about the news wars of I mean, they still do about the 70s and 80s like news channels back and forth and trying to get the story, getting all those things. What's the temperature, if you will, with other media outlets when you guys kind of come into a market? 

Logan Brown [00:09:11] It's a good question. And actually, the founders are pretty good. They've had a really good success rate just reaching out to all the major media players in a city and they go meet with them face to face and kind of explain the product. I would say the good thing is if you think about 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 it today as a newsletter and an email product, we kind of send a lot of traffic to them. We're not a social platform in the sense that people are maybe engaging right on it like you would 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 in the content way. We're giving them a place to push their content.

Ryan Alford [00:10:02] What's funny, I think of that, Push-Pull, you are more of a pull 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. Yeah, yeah. 80 percent of all our analytics for our client says it's all mobile, but it seems pretty right for you guys to. But it's really just kind of there because I go look at it every day, I get it. I'm a subscriber. How do you feel today? Subscriber. And it might be funny enough in the notes, a lot of today's stuff and news, but it might be four o'clock in the afternoon and I save it. It goes like one of my folders of stuff that I actually still read And I do want to get to that. The Jhilmil e-mail is a topic here shortly. But interesting enough, in that Push-Pull aspect, it is kind of more of a pull. You guys aggregate it, you put it there and people can kind of go to it when they need it, whereas other media kind of push, push radio, TV, other things. But I did wonder maybe just some of those dynamics as you go into a market that is pretty smart getting in front of them that can only talk about so bad and a face to face with. 

Logan Brown [00:11:27] Yeah, sure. I think all those funny enough, all those folks are trying to better themselves and everybody trying to work together towards a common goal. We've talked to folks here in town, like we've talked to some major players in the media world that want to partner with us. Yeah, we want to partner with them because they have an audience, too, and people that are paying attention. And I think any time we can all come together, all kind of get to that and know we're going to talk a little bit about the local media space. I think some consolidation and I think it's going to happen nationally. So it's going to happen on a local level. 

Ryan Alford [00:12:00] Well, let's go down that path and we kind of get right into it. I mean, I'd love to know your perspective. They've said forever. Newspapers did not hear to crush anyone's media. If you're listening and you're a newspaper journalist like that, but newspapers are almost dead if it's not dead, I mean, the numbers don't lie. When my parents aren't getting it in the driveway anymore, it's real close. Not that they don't have online products and other ways to get media. Not saying there's an entity of bringing news in some format, but the printed media of local news seems to be. Fading fast. It's interesting to me, it seems like on one hand it's going away, the printed media, local media, but then on the other, it's like hyper local stuff seems to be still relevant. So, I get like Agusta Road journal in the mailbox still. I read that. So it's like it's gotten real hyper local. But I'd love to know what you guys perspective and your perspective just on I don't know, the overall media landscape of local. 

Logan Brown [00:13:13] I have a lot of opinions on it that are definitely mine. We get on a couple of different paths, like I was thinking about this question and maybe 30, 40 years ago with someone having this exact same conversation when that eight track came out, sets said are in the cars. And it's like, oh, my gosh, am I going to like vinyl? And now you see Jack White in Nashville creating a vinyl shop that he can't even keep up demand with. So on one side, I do think there's going to be a come up of this, like they're going to want the nostalgia of the paper in their hands. An interesting perspective, though, is that a lot of these newspapers locally don't really control their own destiny. If you're a Ginnette product orlocally like gateway or something like that gateway, 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 that the niche thing, you're your own part, that I 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, with Apple News aggregating all the paper products and putting them into a digital marketplace, it's helpful as well. 

Ryan Alford [00:14:56] But still, you guys, I think of living and breathing this. I want to talk about how you get your some of your content in those with journalists. And just I know they're not probably called journalists, but you guys have what you call them, content curators or, some editors. But that's my editors, Ok, alright, then. This is pretty standard and in industry terminology. But, to get that local news, you still have that boots on the ground like all these national entities. And in all these, back to the newspaper discussion and AP news and all this stuff. But still, you still got to have feet on the ground and connectivity to that local community. 

Logan Brown [00:15:36] Yeah, I think that's important. I think it's just one of those things where, like how big of a team do you need to accomplish it? Maybe. I think it's interesting to me that I'm not a journalist. So you come into this world and you kind of start to see how it works and you see the funnel like. So there's information from someone that gets sent through some sort of PR push to another. Now the newspaper gets all the exclusive rights to a story when it breaks out. This is not talk 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. I don't 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 I don't know if local media shudders if a newspaper goes out. It's definitely impacted. But I think that we can all work together to come up with other solutions so that people stay informed. 

Ryan Alford [00:16:30] You guys have gotten to a scale now in Greenville and some of your more seated markets and things like that, I would think where. Does the machine feed itself are you guys people, they want their content to be seen and heard? Whether it's events or local things happening, or is it now to where the machine kind of feeds itself because people are sending you things and so versus it gets back to that. I guess we're good on that push pull analogy again, like your editors. How much polling are they having to do versus the community now feeding? Because they know that you can help get their stories out? 

Logan Brown [00:17:11] Yeah, totally. I mean, I think it takes a little bit of time for all those cities, each individual city to get to that point. But like I was talking about this playbook that we go into each city with, that's a part of it. So we are all the teams trying to make their partnerships and that's not an advertising thing. But they're going out and working with the who's who of each town and letting them know who we are and how you can contact us. And yeah, it becomes that because they have that relationship and people are sending us stuff. And yeah, it takes a while to create a relationship like that. But the good thing is, is that over time it develops and we end up getting some, some great content out of it and we're bringing value to the end user and those folks as well. 

Ryan Alford [00:17:51] So speaking of value to the end user, right now, we're newsletter based, but we've got some new things we've talked about that I'm aware of here in Greenville. But let's talk about what are those future products? What are those future added value features that, six a.m. cities kind of bringing to both the consumers and the businesses in the market? 

Logan Brown [00:18:14] I mean, the value 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 green been for three years, we've been able to accomplish that. So part of my job is going to working on special projects. How are we going to develop our product further and do two different things? So that kind of brings along Gvul. Plus the idea there is it's like a separate subscription product and the other side of a 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 of this product is that you pay ten dollars a month or hundred dollars a year and we give back twenty dollars 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 and your wife says, hey, I want to go out to eat tonight and 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, more thrifty next door. Yeah, um, not this is out of the way. But for someone who doesn't live on this side of town or doesn't frequent the trail, that's just not something they may have gone to before. So that's kind of our goal with plus. 

Ryan Alford [00:19:35] So is that in every one of your markets, the plus feature or the one that are live? 

Logan Brown [00:19:41] It's kind of working as a beta in Greenville. We're trying to figure that out and understand what the value prop is. And do people understand it as the messaging? Right. Um, 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, yeah. 

Ryan Alford [00:19:57] Is how do people learn? More about that product is specific, certainly on specific to Greensville right now. But if someone has interest in that, that is just GBL today, the typical outlets, but how people kind of dig in the more of the plus product. 

Logan Brown [00:20:14] I mean, plus dotcom people use that is a site on its own. But yeah, I mean, we've been trying to grow it. There are owned and operated channels. But yeah, if you want to check it out, dot com spot. 

Ryan Alford [00:20:27] I know we've had a couple of clients that Radical that have utilized it and so good pops from it. So there's a lot of new customers and different people, which is exactly what you said. There's kind of your every day trying to get new people in. I think it's a great outlet for that. It's great for businesses to kind of get people sampling something different because it's so funny. You talked about the local thing. I mean, my wife and I and boys, we live downtown and we're the worst at that, like you never. But our excuses we have four boys under the age of ten. So our excuse for not venturing out might be greater than most. But but but we try to do, we try to at least push it once a month, go somewhere different. 

Logan Brown [00:21:17] I think it's good to do that. I mean, we all kind of get stuck in our neighborhoods, but every now and then, it's nice to pop in the other side of town and do something I've been wanting to do, but just having that chance. 

Ryan Alford [00:21:26] So what? Give a little bit about your background on the marketing side what got you into marketing, what do you love about marketing? What's a little bit of background on you. 

Logan Brown [00:21:40] So classic marketing major in college. Right. But from Virginia, I went to school in Mississippi on my way here through the clothing industry local spot called Coast Apparel. This is back when they were independently owned. And so I kind of helped manage some of their social I was doing sales. We were a three man band, so everybody kind of holding different hats. But in college, I was an ambassador for a company called Chevies. So we have something in common. I used to work for the most radical shorts company in the world. You own a company called RAD. 

Ryan Alford [00:22:12] So I knew there was a connection. 

Logan Brown [00:22:14] So, yeah, well, I try to stay in contact with those folks pretty regularly. And so we kind of reached a point where they wanted to build out their customer service team. And so I was like, I want to jump on board those guys. So that's what I started doing for two years. I was still living in Greenville, but I was working for them and they were based in San Francisco. And that's when the marketing thing started really ticking. And they were doing crazy cool stuff on the content side and just really understanding how their team was thinking was very different than what I'd seen before. And unfortunately, I just didn't really have the opportunity to go much further with that company without moving. So I try to find something locally. That's when GBL today came around, started writing for them. We were only three people deep at that point. Now we're at twenty eight. 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 are bringing in and the churn and 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. Yeah, I just love trying to do tests and learning how people think and using science that's decades old, centuries old. That still holds true with the way that people interact with anything, even though it's media wasn't around back then in digital form. 

Ryan Alford [00:23:41] We talk about it here, radical, it's like equal parts art and science and all the art kind of gets the buzz. And, we're pretty good about putting our own art out there. It's harder to put the science out there. We tried to try to crack that code a little bit of making the data interesting beyond saying, oh, we had more sales and that's good. And that shows it. But there is. And Josh and I went to my digital media managers where we're probably the marketing geeks of the company overall. And so we geek out on Facebook data, all the analytics stuff, looking at time once I go up here and this go down there and trying to get behind it. But there's a lot to it, 

Logan Brown [00:24:34] Totally understanding how they're behaving and then how you can alter that behavior just on small tweaks and changes. 

Ryan Alford [00:24:40] And that's a lot of fun to do. Any podcasts, books, forms or recommendations for things or people you keep up with, it kind of keep you sharper of interest. 

Logan Brown [00:24:54] I listen to a lot of stuff and consume a lot of stuff. I would say that. So last year I was able the company put me through this cool program called Reforge. 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 Chan, is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a pretty well-known VC company out of Silicon Valley. So following both of them in general, you're going to learn a lot. There's this guy, a pregnant butcher. His name is James Gwilym. They call him. He was the marketing manager. Drift, follow any of his stuff. Listen to as many podcasts from him as you can. 

Ryan Alford [00:25:34] And for anybody listening, Dreft 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 it more conversational, more interesting. Used to just be how you can ask a question and hope you get an answer. And I think they've made it a little bit more conversational, both in UI and in, I guess, application. Yeah. So, yeah, I've thought a lot of that stuff and it's really cool.

Logan Brown [00:26:03] And I got to see him talk at this conference last year. And one of the coolest things from a marketing perspective, he was basically had a team sales team and they were very B2B. So they're trying to sell their product to other businesses that might need a chat board to help with their sales. But he actually built a bot that would mimic what the sales team would do physically as a human, and he would kind of compete with them together. And so as if the bot were to actually get more conversions, you would increase the amount of leads that come to the bot versus the sales people. So on the growth side, you think about B2C a lot. But it's interesting, 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. 

Ryan Alford [00:26:46] I joked with Logan a little bit on we're talking about topics for the podcast. And, I see the growth marketing blogged about a little bit. And I'm like always an all marketing trying to grow something, I guess. But I've never understood exactly what the difference is between growth marketing and marketing in general. 

Logan Brown [00:27:10] It's a buzz word for sure. I mean, but at the same time, when you look at the marketing landscape right now, you kind of have your performance marketers, you have your content marketers even have just like your media buyers that simply know every place you can buy. They're trying to figure that out as best as possible for a company. But on the growth side, I've learned a little bit about it over the last couple of years. And I think Facebook might have been the first company to kind of build this team, which started the buzz. 

Ryan Alford [00:27:36] Yeah, it just made you're responsible for sales 

Logan Brown [00:27:40] and maybe the opposite for me. You can definitely focus on the B2B side. I mean, for us and for Google today and all the other brands that we operate, I'm way more B2C. And I think a lot of people just think of it. You can call it top of funnel, but now they're trying to push loops, what 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 churn? What's your churn rate people talk about? It's great. Hey, I'm getting all these new leads from whatever channel. Maybe Facebook's bringing all these folks in a growth marketing manager is going to look at the cohort analysis to understand how valuable that channel is, because up front, you may get somebody on your site for two cents. What's the value of that over time? 

Ryan Alford [00:28:25] Yeah, lifetime value. And why the funnel went away and then McKinsey's customer loop or circle or I don't know the exact. Can't remember I used different stuff.

Logan Brown [00:28:37] Exactly. 

Ryan Alford [00:28:39] Yeah, but it's true, though, because it doesn't end at purchase. It almost begins, not supposed to, it's not supposed to unless you're selling. I don't know, not to be morbid, but coffins. That's right. The same thing, but yeah, exactly. What are. Like I talked a little bit about day to day for you what's the. What's a day in the life? 

Logan Brown [00:29:12] Well, right now it's been a little messier than normal, I guess, from someone who I try to be as organized as possible. But I kind of manage a little bit of tech support for the company. OK, so I am managing the relationship with one of our agencies in Charleston who manages the website. Everything's on their server. And so if anything's ever wrong or down or we need to make a change, I'm working with them. I help manage our creative folks. So we have somebody in house who does all of our creative. And so day to day for me it is basically trying to figure out how we are performing? So we have all these different channels that we're utilizing and people are coming in and they're working with their 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 analyses analyzing their Ingenico strategy that will fix that and then working a lot on Gevo 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 the marketing for sure what my capabilities are, I suppose. 

Ryan Alford [00:30:31] Do you guys segment your customers at all as far as like within a market? And I imagine now with the plus products and other things, some of this becomes more relevant. But, you get you have a newsletter product, you got your subscriber base. So 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? 

Logan Brown [00:31:02] Yeah, it's a good question.There's a lot that's possible, I would say that I'm analyzing a lot of.  

Ryan Alford [00:31:08] We got to get more at the top of the minute. You guys got to have so much so you don't have headroom like in a market or like an industry. And it's like that back. Obviously churn is important in any business, but like it's not it's just feeding the top as fast as you can because you've got so much headroom available. And I don't know, maybe that's more the focus. 

Logan Brown [00:31:29] Well, you bring up an interesting point. I would say that because we're so hyper local, there may not be as much headroom. Greensville. And let's just use Greenwall as an example. There's only a finite number of people who live here now. We have new people moving here all the time, and that's a whole new marketing thing on its own. How do you actually get in front of those people immediately? But then there's people leaving town as well, I'm sure, moving away. So I would say that for 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 that the best growth strategy, in my opinion, that you can get to.

Ryan Alford [00:32:23] You never know to get to.  

Logan Brown [00:32:32] 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've already segmented you based on whether or not you open the welcome email. Did you even take action within the welcome email a week later? Did you have you open an email from us in the seven days we sent daily to have you open one? If you 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 things are 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 all those things are possible and kind of what we're we're that's, I guess, how we're segmenting. But 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 never get out of because like certain things, yeah, we we don't want to let people decide what they like because we want them to be open to anything we can find, even if it's maybe not their interest today. We think it could be of interest to them in the future if we let them decide they don't want that, they'll never know about it. So anyway, that's that's kind of how we're using it currently. Well, I love it. 

Ryan Alford [00:34:12] We kind of wrap up, I mean, talk about we talked about some of the future products, the hair products with the plus, what's the future? Hold for six a.m. city, you're growing privately held, we're where we headed totally. 

Logan Brown [00:34:36] I mean, right now, first and foremost, it's new cities. So next year we're kind of working towards four, six, eight, as many as eight. And like I said, we're sticking to the southeast. I think that right there and of itself is a big task for us next year that we want to tackle. And I think that teams work really hard to create a playbook that will allow that to happen. It'll be fun to activate. But yeah, I mean, I think you asked a question about is email dying? And do what's happening with an email? Because there's a lot of people playing in that space and my email is getting full. I don't want to. I don't think email is our 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 will create a newsletter right now. But to that question, email is working currently. I don't think it's off the table that it could live in a different medium in the future. 

Ryan Alford [00:35:44] Maybe, I'm kind of high on high on anything, but this beer is right, my one beer. We're playing around a lot with Facebook Messenger and chat bots kind of leaning into that and just the notion that everybody has it on and is a medium for information and for. Another type of inbox of both content and. We're looking heavily into that in heavily into text, because the text is really opening up as a marketing vehicle, people are getting more accepted it's been around for ten plus years, but it was really taboo. Like nobody wanted you in your text, in their text chain or text box. It seems to be loosening up as long as you can send them relevant in relevancy is context is everything That’s why people hate advertising because it's not contextual, contextual. They suddenly like it. And so we're playing around in those spaces. So I could certainly see those being channels for information, content of other things. So there will always be a place for delivery. Yeah. So it sounds like you guys are. These things I tell people, I have clients all the time, they're always looking for they want to go farm somewhere else, might do this farm right here. You both are dead set on the newsletter or now we can still serve a lot of talk. I mean, to focus on enchiladas yet. 

Logan Brown [00:37:17] I mean, I think as long as it is as bad as this may sound, I feel pretty strongly that folks like to be distracted at work. And as long as email is their primary communication and as long as businesses allow emails like ours to come through and others like that, I mean, I think people will continue to subscribe to email products just because it's an easy way to remind yourself. 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 of a whole different subject. But there's a product called Stupe in a product called Subtract and Substance, making it very easy for people to create email newsletters just like they are for folks are doing for podcasts. And Stupe is becoming a platform to house all of those emails 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 Howl's 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 products. 

Ryan Alford [00:38:36] Interesting to check those out. The one thing I do love about email is you don't have to have an app or you're not locked into a platform. It's just it works. It goes to one mailbox, that's whether it's even his Gmail or different brands of it, you just have an email 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 met all the time and Instagram and then I've got friends that aren't even on Instagram, and it's like some messaging within six platforms. There's something about the. The greatness of email just being able to jump on and it goes without someone having a platform or things like that, so everybody's got an email. Exactly. Well, Logan Man really enjoyed having you on. Thanks for having me. Let's do it again. Let's wrap on some some of the latest marketing stuff, maybe down the road, really. Google today is growing in Greenville. It's been a really good part of the community, is really informative. So if you have it checked out, I definitely recommend subscribing. You can find them on all the social channels and online through six a.m. city dotcom. 

Logan Brown [00:39:49] Yeah, Today.com if you're local. But if you're not where like I said, we're in seven cities and just got a six a.m. city dotcom and you can find all the places that we're living longer and working people follow or keep up with anything that you're into. 

Logan Brown [00:40:02] Yeah, well, I'm pretty heavy on LinkedIn these days. Maybe that's not a preferred channel, but growing Logan Brown on LinkedIn and just Logan Brown on Twitter. On Twitter, there's a little difference, but it's fun growing the business of sports.

Ryan Alford [00:40:16] I love it. Thanks though, Goldman. Well, appreciate Logan being on and really appreciative of the partnership that we've had with Google today and these guys. And we'll continue to have really enjoyed today's podcast. Keep up with everything radical at Radical dot company online at Radical underscore results on Instagram were active there all the time. You can find the app Ryan Alford on Instagram. That's probably my biggest channel there, or LinkedIn and would love to hear any feedback on the podcast or tips recommendations or just if you want to come have a beer here. Camaraderie with Logan, check us out. Thanks.