How a Bus Commute Helped Build a Speaking Career

Today’s guest is a brilliant entrepreneur who has seen more landing pages than anyone on the planet — in fact, he looks at 1,000 pages per week.

He is co-founder of Unbounce, a company that allows marketers to build, publish and A/B test landing pages without an IT department or knowledge of HTML.

Prior to starting Unbounce, he honed his branding skills as Creative Director at Bodog, an online poker powerhouse.

He coined the term Conversion Centered Design. He is also an opinionated writer and speaker.

Now, let’s hack …

Oli Gardner.

In this 34-minute episode Oli Gardner and I discuss:

  • That one thing that Oli does to be successful
  • What G.A.S. means (and how it can help your business)
  • The Oli Gardner Method for writing epic blog posts
  • Oli’s thoughts on speaking, and how to become a better speaker
  • How a bus commute helped him become a sought-after speaker
  • Being wrong vs. being right
  • How the early struggles in business have shaped his success

[episode]

The Show Notes

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[episode_transcript]

How a Bus Commute Helped Build a Speaking Career

Voiceover: Welcome to Hack the Entrepreneur, the show which reveals the fears, habits, and inner battles behind big name entrepreneurs and those on their way to joining them. Now here is your host, Jon Nastor.

Jonny Nastor: Welcome to Hack the Entrepreneur. I am so glad you decided to join me today. I am your host Jon Nastor, but you can call me Jonny. Today’s guest is a brilliant entrepreneur who has seen more landing pages than anyone on the planet. In fact, he still looks at over a thousand every single week.

He is co-founder of Unbounce, a company that allows marketers to build, publish, and split-test landing pages without an IT department or knowledge of HTML. Prior to starting Unbounce, he honed his branding skills as creative director at Bodog, an online gambling powerhouse. He coined the term ‘conversion centered design,’ and he is also a very opinionated writer and speaker.

Now, let’s hack Oli Gardner.

Before we get going, I want to take a minute to thank the awesome sponsor of Hack the Entrepreneur, FreshBooks, for making my life easier and for sponsoring the show. What is the one thing that I am not good at? I am absolutely horrible at staying on top of my bookkeeping and accounting for my business. I am just terrible at it. FreshBooks is designed for small business owners like you and like me.

FreshBooks integrates directly with three things I use every day in my business: PayPal, Stripe, and MailChimp. It goes beyond that now. I can fully integrate it with my credit card and my bank accounts, so I don’t even have to worry about keeping track of my expenses. It does it all for me. Really, I think the only thing it doesn’t do for my business is actually make the money, but it keeps track of it all on the other side, which is amazing to me.

To start your 30-day free trial today, go to FreshBooks.com/hack, and don’t forget to enter Hack the Entrepreneur in the ‘How did you hear about us?’ section.

Welcome back to Hack the Entrepreneur. We have an awesome Canadian entrepreneur today.

Oli, thank you for joining me.

Oli Gardner: My pleasure, Jon.

That One Thing That Oli Does to be Successful

Jonny Nastor: All right, let’s go straight into this. Oli, as an entrepreneur, can you tell me what is the one thing that you do that you feel has been the biggest contributor to your successes so far?

Oli Gardner: It’s something that I call G.A.S.

What G.A.S. Means (and How It Can Help Your Business)

Oli Gardner: It’s kind of an unofficial core value we have at Unbounce here that I came up with. It stands for ‘giving a shit.’ Lots of people do, but not as many as I’d like to see. It’s kind of my leadership style. If people can see that you care on that level, then they see what’s possible and they can become empowered to do the same thing, to really go for it. Every piece of content I write or talk I deliver has to be exceptional. I push myself very hard to try and do something that’s better than everything else that’s out there.

You know when we started Unbounce, there were two moments at the start that really had an impact in our growth. One was a technical integration with a tool, Mailchimp, but the other was a big blog post I wrote for the Moz blog. Now, I’d done one before, and then Rand said “Hey, you should come back and write another one.” I said, “Yeah, and it’s going to be epic.” That’s also something I like to do. I tell people what I’m going to do, so then you’re forced to do it. So for that it became this 15,000 word blog post with a 15-million pixel infographic. It smashed all of their records, and it’s been translated into 12 languages. It was huge. It was a really big thing for us, and that’s just because, you know, just really wanted to do something … be very generous with your content and your time.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, I love that. “And it’s going to be epic. I will do it, and it’s going to be epic.” And then actually step up and do it though.

Oli Gardner: Yeah, and it was so big that I couldn’t write on their blog anymore. It’s great for exposure, but I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t live up to that. It was too hard! It took me three years to go back and write again, and they said, “Hey come back and write something else.” So I said “OK, I’m going to write the most entertaining guide to landing page optimization you’ve ever read.” And the guy I was dealing with, he told me afterwards he didn’t really believe me, he’s like “How do you do that?” It was really funny. It was good. It was exactly what I said I was going to do.

Jonny Nastor: And how do you do it? How do you do that? Where do you get this style?

The Oli Gardner Method for Writing Epic Blog Posts

Oli Gardner: Write drunk, edit sober.

Jonny Nastor: Classic advice.

Oli Gardner: Well, someone asked me a few weeks ago, someone on the marketing team, they were writing an email that was going out under my name, which I never used to do. Usually they’ll come up with just a brief little blurb about what the email is, then I’ll go in, and I’ll rewrite it or whatever. And I completely rewrote one, and they said, “Well, how do I write it in more in your tone, or the Unbounce voice?” My advice was push it as hard as you can. Be sarcastic. Be rude. Be funny, whatever it is. Go as far as you can, and let someone else pull you back because that’s what worked really well for me. I’d go just ridiculous. Then, our Director of Marketing, Georgiana, she would kind of rein it back in.

Jonny Nastor: Dude, “No, you can’t do that … you can’t say that. You can’t say that in an email.” That’s awesome. Wow. Yeah, that’s cool. That’s part of giving a shit, right? You’re really sincerely trying to help, and you probably know that you do have to, to a certain degree, entertain or else people will just be bored. I don’t care what you’re providing, if it’s boring as hell, nobody cares.

Oli Gardner: Yeah, edutainment is everything to us. It has to be. Like you say, if someone can’t get past that first paragraph, then you’re done. So I like to be a little contrary or ridiculous.

Jonny Nastor: Do you write drunk?

Oli Gardner: Oh yeah. All the time.

Jonny Nastor: Do you podcast drunk?

Oli Gardner: I did … I wasn’t drunk, but I was drinking during one, but that was their thing. It was like an evening.

Jonny Nastor: Oh, OK, nice, yeah. That’s fair enough.

Oli Gardner: Yeah, this is a little early for that I think.

Jonny Nastor: I want to go back to the beginning. There’s a time I’ve found in every entrepreneur’s life when they realize, it seems to be one of two things. Either they have this calling to make something different and a difference in the world. Or they simply — which seems to be most of the people I interview — they simply can’t work for somebody else. Can you please tell me where you fit in between those two and when you sort of discovered this about yourself?

Oli Gardner: Well I think changing the world is a little dramatic for marketing software.

Jonny Nastor: Fair enough, fair enough.

Oli Gardner: When I started, I just wanted to create something and see if we could stop working for other people. We have six co-founders, and five of us are in our 40s. It had got to that point — I’m also terrible with money, and I’ve never saved a single penny in my life — so I wanted an opportunity to go a bit bigger and see if I could solve that problem.

Having said that, our vision for Unbounce is to empower every business to create better marketing experiences. The benefit of that is that people on the receiving end have more delightful marketing, and there’s a better experience for them. Also, the job of marketing is more fun and effective. I guess in that way, the hope is that it changes a portion of how the world operates, obviously a microcosm. We’re not saving lives.

Jonny Nastor: Right. Unless that company’s business is saving lives, and you’re helping them get their message out.

Oli Gardner: Right, yeah.

Jonny Nastor: Are we going too far now? I’m trying to help you out there, man.

Oli Gardner: I’m going to poll our customers to see how many lives have been saved by landing pages. We try to create an amazing experience in every aspect and lead by example. Our Customer Success team is just phenomenal, and the culture they’ve been able to create and how they deal with our customers is just phenomenal. If you’ve heard of the NPS, Net Promoters Score — how likely someone is to refer you to someone else — it’s a scale. So a score of about 20 is average. You’re doing well there. Apple is 80.

Jonny Nastor: Oh, wow.

Oli Gardner: Right there. Way up there. We’re 81.

Jonny Nastor: Geez.

Oli Gardner: We’ve really pushed ourselves hard to be that excellent. I guess there, as well, we’re trying to change things. Give people that higher level experience. Just being an employee, I was a great employee, but I am a terrible manager.

Jonny Nastor: Really? Did you know this originally?

Oli Gardner: No, I didn’t. Well, I had an inkling.

Jonny Nastor: We all have an inkling.

Oli Gardner: When we started growing and I was hiring, building the marketing team, I found it stressful, and I’m too nice to people. I don’t know how to be that hard ass when you need to be, kind of thing. I could be a nice a manager but not an effective one, so now I’m just a co-founder. I have no other title. Individual contributor.

Jonny Nastor: You seem to publicly out there a lot, right? PR and stuff must be part of your thing.

Oli’s Thoughts on Speaking, and How to Become a Better Speaker

Oli Gardner: Yeah, I recently became a public speaker, and that as well, I’m a very non-pitchy speaker. I’m just there to entertain and to give people a framework for doing their work better. If that results in some serendipitous circle, they come back and become a customer, that’s great. But the goal is to just make things better and hope by doing that, by being excellent, it will come back in some way.

Jonny Nastor: The goal is to make things better. I like that. I’ve been on your Twitter for a couple years, and I thought I remembered you being a speaker for years now. You seem to speak a lot, at a lot of places.

Oli Gardner: People have been asking me for years. “You gotta speak at our event. Speak at our event.” I was terrified, so I just didn’t want to do it. I wrote a Medium post called It’s Okay to Puke When You’re a Public Speaker. Just kind of my journey of how this speaking thing began. Yeah, it was just shockingly scary. That was last April when I started.

Jonny Nastor: That was last April?!

Oli Gardner: Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: How did you do it? Just full disclosure, man, I’m freaked out, and I’ve been asked to speak now.

Oli Gardner: Right.

Jonny Nastor: I know it’s something I have to do. It’s something I want to do, but I didn’t know it was OK to puke. I can’t even imagine it right now. If I could set up a desk and put the mic there and I could just sit, I’d probably be OK.

Oli Gardner: Right. It’s interesting because — I’ll just go back to the start. I was nudged, let’s say, by our director of marketing to go and speak at an event, and I was like, “No, no, no.” She’s like, “It’s a panel. It’s landing page critiques. This is what you do.” I even got to the very last second of speaker pitches, and well actually, it was 5pm on a certain day, and we were having Beer Friday. I saw the clock go past five o’clock, and I’m like, “Yes! I don’t have to do it.”

Jonny Nastor: Nobody remembered.

Oli Gardner: But then I said it, and she’s like, “Go and do it now. Do it now.” I was like “It’s too late.” She’s like, “No it’s not.” And I don’t pitch to speak. I never had. I’d been asked by the organizer, the CEO of this company, he said, “Come and speak.” On the pitch form, it said, ‘Why do you want to speak? What do you want to speak about?’ I said, “Your boss told me I should do this.” I just clicked the button.

I’d get so nauseous, and I would throw up in my mouth or whatever. But I’d wake up the day of and I’d hate myself. “What am I doing? Why am I doing this to myself?” But in that, I’m like, “We can’t critique pages without some context.” We need to teach the people something before we start shitting on their pages. So I pitched the other two guys on the panel, “Hey, we need an introduction. I’ll do it. I’ll do a 10-minute intro.” They’re like, “Sure, that’s awesome. Go for it.” So I gave a 10-minute talk to kick it off. There were 65 speakers at the event, and I got an award for best presentation, my first gig.

Jonny Nastor: Wow.

Oli Gardner: At that point, I’m, “Oh God, I have to do this now.”

Jonny Nastor: You’re just natural at it or what?

Oli Gardner: Yeah. I worked really hard at it. I was obsessed. Whenever I change something — I’ve changed roles a lot in my life. I’ve done many, many things, and so when I decide to do something, I push — I get obsessed about it. So for this, I did two things really. I read How to Deliver a TED Talk by Jeremy Donovan, which is the best book I’ve ever read, its impact.

He’s analyzed hundreds of TED talks and pulled out some of the things, the way people design flow to create an experience through a talk. So I used that and some of Nancy Duarte’s ideas as well. I spend time, before I even touch or open Keynote to do a presentation, I draw the flow on a giant whiteboard, a 20-foot whiteboard wall we have in the office. I plan moments throughout. Like, “I need an aha moment here. I need a laugh here.” I design an experience to get those things, so I have this flow that is enjoyable to be a part of.

Jonny Nastor: Wow.

How a Bus Commute Helped Him Become a Sought-After Speaker

Oli Gardner: The other thing I did was, my commute to work when I was in Vancouver was exactly 18 minutes on the bus. A TED talk is 18 minutes. So I watched a TED talk on my phone every morning on my commute to work. By the time I got to work I’m like, “I’m going to change the world!” You just watch these inspiring talks.

Jonny Nastor: I know.

Oli Gardner: That’s kind of how it began.

Jonny Nastor: Wow. So then you could just do it. I was really hoping for more of a stumbling sort of struggle. “I was freaked out. I was freaked out.” Then, “How ’bout I do the 10-minute introduction, and then I got an award. And now I just kind of rule.” That was so not helpful to me, man.
I was like, “He’s going to have the trick for me, and that’s it.” But no, there’s no trick.

Oli Gardner: It was Hero Conf, it’s a hardcore PPC conference. It’s actually the next gig I’m speaking at, again, which is next month in Portland. At the end of it, I didn’t know, they pulled up the four award winners for different awards. They got us up on stage, mic’d us all up, and then it was open Q&A from the whole place. Now I’m really nervous. My knees are shaking, and they ask a question, “Given Google’s big announcement the other day, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah impact on PPC blah, blah, blah. I’m like, “Oh no. I’m a landing page guy. I know a bit about PPC, but really, this is way over my head.”

So they went down the line asking the question, and they’re delivering brilliant answers because it’s their thing. It gets to me, and I think, “Well, I have three options here. I can say I don’t know. I can lie. Or I can be funny.” So I leaned into my mic and say, “Google made an announcement?” And there’s little ripples of laughter. I said, “Oh, I must’ve missed it while I was working on my best presentation.” Raucous laughter just breaks out. I look over to the table to our team, and they’re like, “Oh, what’s he doing?” But it went down well.

Jonny Nastor: That’s awesome. Well-played, man. Well-played. Let’s go to a struggle then. Or a failure. Let’s talk business, not the speaking part of it, but as entrepreneurs, as human beings, one of our greatest struggles is the fear of being wrong, making mistakes and failing. Oli, can you walk me through how to be wrong?

Being Wrong vs. Being Right

Oli Gardner: First of all, I’m never wrong.

Jonny Nastor: That’s the attitude I like.

Oli Gardner: I think the secret to being wrong is to try to be right in the correct manner. Now what I mean by that is, I’m less concerned with being wrong than making sure I can learn from it, which that sounds a bit trite and obvious, but I compare to the concept of A-B testing. You should never run a test without a hypothesis that will teach you something no matter what the outcome is. If you test a button color, you’re going to learn nothing from a failed test. “Oh, they didn’t like that color.” That’s useless.

But if you tested the labels on your pricing page grid to let people self-identify with labels, such as “This one’s for growth hackers. This one’s for entrepreneurs,” and you the track the results all the way through your funnel to the point where you know the quality of the customers you’re getting — like an ideal plan, whether they churn at a certain rate or not, or activation metrics — and you’re attracting the wrong type of person, then you’ve learned that you are misrepresenting to your target audience. You’re acquiring the wrong people. You learn something from that. I think as long as you set yourself up in the right way, when you fail, it doesn’t really matter. Because you get something out of it.

Jonny Nastor: Nice. I like it. To try to be wrong in the correct manner.

Oli Gardner: Yeah, approached in the right way. We did something similar. We had low pricing plans for Unbounce, it was a $10 a month and $25 a month. We were just getting the complete wrong people, people who didn’t even know what marketing was, and we’d spend so much time on the phone for support. The support burden was so expensive. As soon we took those plans away, effectively doubling and tripling the prices, we start getting amazing customers.

Jonny Nastor: That’s awesome. I love how that works. Unbounce is a super, super impressive business, man. Founded, I believe, 2009. You’re going on six years, or you’re at six years now?

Oli Gardner: Six in August.

Jonny Nastor: Nice. A company of this scale, at this point, it’s not a brand-new company anymore. You’re still growing. You’re still adapting to markets and doing things. Let’s talk projects. Projects can be anything you guys want to take on, a new direction you want to head, something you guys want to do. How, at this point, between you and your other founders, do you guys figure out that a project is right for Unbounce to take on and go full into, head down?

Oli Gardner: Right now, because we are growing fast — we have 93 employees now, and we’re doubling every year, revenue and headcount — we’re in that dangerous place where scaling becomes an issue. We were just talking about prioritization yesterday actually. We’re kind of like the idea of a landing page, which is a single goal, right? It’s very focused. We’re laser focused on just doing one thing exceptionally well. We resist the urge to run off and trying to be more, becoming a larger tool set or something. Just do one thing exceptionally well. That helps us. Whenever there’s a new idea like, “Yeah, that doesn’t align with our vision, our mission.” So we don’t go there. Does that answer that?

Jonny Nastor: Kind of, yeah. Maybe the answer was, so you guys are all discussing prioritization. Is it hard? Is there ever a time — I don’t know how to phrase this question, but I’m wondering if a business that’s growing at your scale, you started six years ago, is there ever times where you guys are kind of blown away by it and like, “Wow, there’s a lot to figure out here.” You know what I mean?

It’s like you’re being thrown into situations. Well, you’ve kind of thrown yourself into this amazing situation. You know what I mean? You guys obviously know what you’re doing, but ahead of you, there’s always so many thousands of things probably coming at you that you don’t really know the exact answers to at this point. Because it’s business. That’s part of it, right?

How the Early Struggles in Business Have Shaped His Success

Oli Gardner: Yeah. We’re fortunate in many ways that we picked a great idea with a real problem. I can’t think of a single thing we’ve done that we really planned on doing that was wrong, the wrong direction. Almost, I really struggle to think of one. We still haven’t built the thing we envisioned five and half years ago. But it’s a big problem for the product management team, which is new in Unbounce, trying to find those priorities and trying to balance. I’m going there saying, “Okay. As part of my speaking, I need access to data. I need the data from our backend. I need to be able to go out and talk about things that nobody else in the world knows.”

And that needs someone from the BI team. It needs someone from engineering. They’re like, “Well, you can’t just throw up the founder hot hand and say, ‘We’re going to do that.’ We have to find a way of putting that on the roadmap. And how is that beneficial in other ways?” It’s hard for me as a new thing. It’s maybe hard to relate that to benefit to the company, even though it makes us more of a thought leader and a place to go for information that no one else has. That was a discussion we had last night.

Jonny Nastor: Nice. Which is your job. That’s your job, right? Being out there, being that person.

Oli Gardner: Yeah, exactly.

Jonny Nastor: You need that data, but you can’t now just throw up your hand and be like, “No, I said this is what we’re doing.” There’s a process to this actually.

Oli Gardner: Yeah, yeah. Every growing company goes through that, where you start having to put processes in place when you didn’t want to. You like to be able to wing it a little bit, but we can’t do that anymore.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, that’s a great answer. That’s kind of what I was trying to ask, and I didn’t know how to ask it because I’ve never been in your position. I could see by way you were trying to answer that that’s probably what happens, and that’s cool. That’s awesome. It’s amazing to see from the inside like that. Let’s end off with something that I’ve recently started calling the ‘entrepreneurial gap.’ There’s this thing that I think that we deal with as entrepreneurs, especially earlier on in our careers. You’ve done some amazing things, and now you’ve completely tackled and get awarded for doing your public speaking when you started a year ago. That’s amazing.

But I find that as entrepreneurs, we often times are always looking into the future. I will always be like, “Just in six months I’ll be … I’ll have done that now. I’ll have accomplished that. The company will have done this. In a year. In five years.” As we get to that goal, we sometimes don’t even hit that goal, and we’ve already set five loftier goals into the future. We never stop to actually turn around and look back at where the hell we’ve come from and the amazing stuff we’ve accomplished.

Oli Gardner: Right.

Jonny Nastor: Can I get you, Oli, just to stop right now, look back at where you’ve come from as an entrepreneur and as a person and the cool stuff you’ve done. Tell me if you appreciate what it is you have accomplished at this point. Of course you want to go to big things, but do you appreciate what it is right now, and are you in awe, at times, of it?

Oli Gardner: I am, yes. Particularly when I look around the office and see what people are doing. Especially in Vancouver because I’m in our small Montréal office now, and there’s 12 of us. It’s kind of like a new startup over there. When I’m here and I just see all these passionate people, I’m like, “Ah! How did we do this?” This our baby. I’m a big branding geek. I came up with the name. I came up with most of the names of all the things we do. It blows my mind. On a personal note, my parents, they tell everybody, “Oh, he speaks all around the world, and da da da.”

Jonny Nastor: That’s awesome. They should.

Oli Gardner: Yeah. It makes my mum quite happy. It was very hard, the first three and half years were just tragically hard. You’re working 16, 18 hour days. Not making any money. You don’t know if things are going to work out. It’s to the point now where it’s just an absolute delight to walk in the office every day. I love what I do.

Jonny Nastor: Beautiful answer, man. I love it. Well I want to thank you so much. It’s been a great conversation. We got to talk about you and your business just in passing, but can you specifically tell the listener where to find out more about you and your business?

Oli Gardner: Yeah. Personally, @oligardener on Twitter. I’m very active there. That’s a great place to have a conversation, or if you want to reach out, I’m very open, so Oli@unbounce.com — you can just email me. For Unbounce, obviously we have our website, Unbounce.com, and we’re very generous about content. We really focus on that. So there’s a lot of resources on there that people can benefit from. Actually, we have an Inside.Unbounce.com blog, as well, which is our Moz buffer, groove. It’s our transparent blog. Entrepreneurs can probably get more from reading some of the stuff we put on there.

Jonny Nastor: On which blog?

Oli Gardner: Inside.Unbounce.com

Jonny Nastor: Oh, inside. There we go. Excellent. I will link to Inside.Unbounce.com, link to Unbounce.com, and to your Twitter. And I’m looking up that article on Medium, and I’m going to link to that for everyone.

Oli Gardner: Yeah. Do. Actually, there are two. It’s Okay to Puke, and then there is Seven Books to Make You an Exceptional Public Speaker with Seven Tips. That’s later. After I’d actually done more speaking, I came back to talk more about it. That’s a good one, too. Both on Medium.

Jonny Nastor: Thank you, so much. I truly, truly appreciate you stopping by. Please keep doing what you’re doing, man, because it’s awesome to watch.

Oli Gardner: Thank you. It was great to be on here, really fun interview.

Jonny Nastor: Absolutely. My pleasure.

Jonny Nastor: Today’s episode of Hack the Entrepreneur is brought to you by Authority Rainmaker, a carefully designed, live educational experience that presents a complete and effective online marketing strategy to help you immediately accelerate your business. Do not miss the opportunity to see Dan Pink, Sally Hogshead, and punk legend Henry Rollins. I’m going to be there, too. Come and meet me. It’ll be fun. Not to mention the secret sauce of it all, building real-world relationships with other attendees. Get all the details right now at Rainmaker.FM/meetjon. We look forward to seeing you in Denver this May. That’s Rainmaker.FM/meetjon, and I will see you in May.

Now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Oli said some smart, smart things, didn’t he? He did. But he said one thing, one thing. Did you get it? Did you hear it? Let’s do it. Let’s find the hack.

Oli Gardner: And they said, “Well, how do I write it in more in your tone, or the Unbounce voice?” My advice was push it as hard as you can. Be sarcastic. Be rude. Be funny, whatever it is. Go as far as you can, and let someone else pull you back.

Jonny Nastor: And that’s the hack.

Oli, beautifully said. This doesn’t have to go for just speaking in the Unbounce voice, and he says wait until somebody else pulls you back. He has an editor that can pull you back, and not all of us do. That’s fine. But you’ve heard me say this before, and if you haven’t, I’m going to say it again. When you are writing, when you are writing a blog post, when you’re writing an article, when you’re writing an e-book or a book, an email, anything, don’t be boring.

Just don’t be boring. Force yourself to not be boring because, think about it, you don’t want to read things that are boring. You want to read things that are interesting and exciting. Trust me, the reason why I’m taking this as the hack, because Oli is the master of writing stuff that is not boring. He absolutely draws you into his content and makes things that shouldn’t be that exciting to read, they just are. I’m not super into conversion. I’m just not. But his whole thing about the conversion centered design, the way he writes it, the way he explains it, the way he just brings you into a story and the posts that he writes on Medium — they’re amazing.

It’s like he’s literally talking in your head. Going through it and making jokes, and it’s amazing. It truly is. When he’s speaking, when he’s writing, when he’s writing an email, it’s just how it is. If he’s doing graphics … It’s amazing. Really, really push it. Try and be sarcastic. Try and be funny. Try and do anything you can and push it. When you send out that email or when you write a blog post, the person doesn’t have to be an editor that will tell you to pull it back. Trust me, people will tell you. People will tell you to pull it back, and that is totally fine.

That’s totally fine. Listen to them if you want, but at least you’re getting some interaction. You’re getting some resonance with people, and it’s doing something, affecting them in a way that they are at least responding to you. You don’t want everybody to love you. It’s just part of it. They’re either going to love you or they’re going to hate you. What I mostly want to say is, you don’t want them just to be bored and to not acknowledge that they are out there reading your stuff, or listening to your stuff, or watching your stuff.

So, Oli, thank you for that because I truly, truly respect what it is you do and how you write.
I loved that piece of advice of just pushing it as far as you can and let somebody else pull you back. Don’t keep pulling yourself back.

That was a lot of fun and I thank you, Oli, for stopping by. I really appreciate it. That was just a super, super fun conversation. You should now go to the website. New URL for you, hte.io and get onto my email list. I will write you an email every Sunday afternoon. It will not be boring. You’ll either love it or you’ll hate it. That’s just how it is. It’s the best stuff that I’m going through.

I’m having amazingly brilliant conversations with people every week for this show. It’s just a lot of stuff about business and a lot of things. It’s about life and about figuring out how to do this entrepreneurial journey. I am just laying it all out to you on Sunday, quite unfiltered and just out there. I’m getting a lot of awesome feedback, and I would love to have you there. Hte.io. Go there and get on the list. I would love to speak to you and have you reply to even the welcome email.

Tell me what you’re listening to. Tell me what you think of the show. Even if you don’t like it, that’s cool. This has been a lot of fun. I really, really, truly appreciate you stopping by. I know you have a lot of options out there for podcasts, and I really do appreciate you taking the time to join me. This has been a lot of fun. Until next time, please, keep Hacking the Entrepreneur.

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