Finder's $680M Success and What Agencies Get Wrong About the Algorithm

Nobody inside Finder had SEO in their job title, very purposely.

Wait, so you were changing people's job titles to prevent people poaching your top talent?

If anything, I would modify the job titles towards the talent I was trying to hire from other companies. It was designed to be patternless and stealth, where I realized we had top talent, so I wasn't going to go and put the label on it so it'd make it easy for somebody else to know who to hire.

You built Finder to a $680 million valuation across 23 countries, and you've not just done this once, but you've done this many times. You have an idea on how to build a moat around a business. You intend to spend so much that copying you would break the other company. Can you explain what you mean by this?

Like, if you overinvest in product and you never crack marketing, you might be stuck in this situation where your product's just going to sit on the shelf gathering dust. If I do this, I'm going to become the Wikipedia of personal finance.

You had 27,000 articles that you'd written and—

It was absurd to go and produce and publish 180 articles a day. When your competitors are maybe doing three or four a month, pre-AI, right? Pre-AI, pre-AI, and maintained for years. I would be like water and oil in every interview, trying to dissuade someone from joining your company as much as possible.

You would try to dissuade?

I try and dissuade anybody I can. Like why? I would think about where they've worked, and I'd look at characteristics of those companies that would be very clearly different to my own.

You're saying it's okay to sell something before it exists? Honestly, like most people would disagree with that.

Think about Kickstarter, right? And even in e-commerce works, right? It's like I've got this concept of a thing.

Give me. Jeremy Cabral, welcome to The Agency Podcast. Excited to have you here, man.

Likewise, man. Thanks for having me.

You built Finder to a $680 million valuation across 23 countries after raising $30 million. And you've not just done this once, but you've done this many times. I thought today would be a beautiful special edition of the episode where we could talk about what the algorithm of success looks like, how to bootstrap a business out of any situation, or if you're in a tangled web right now and you're listening, whatever the challenges you might see in front of you, there are a couple of modalities or frameworks or methods of thinking that you're going to introduce today to help people navigate out of those challenges. Is it right to assume that you believe people could navigate their business out of almost any situation?

That's certainly how I roll, man. Like, I'm like, I struggle to hear a no. I struggle to hear something's not possible. Um, whenever there's someone that's, you know, needing some sort of outcome or whatever, I just find a way. Like, it's just something that I'm just— I don't know why, like, I'm just built like this. But, and it's just, um, from deep empathy that I guess I make these kind of things happen for people.

What's the, the first frame of thinking or the first protocol you go through in your minds when a founder is, is faced with a difficult challenge?

Yeah, I think the key question is, what are you solving for? Break down the problem into its pieces and get really, really clear on what's playing out. Write out the themes. Here are the things that are important and considerations. If you break down each piece and what drives the variables into this outcome being a successful part of the formula, you can literally reverse engineer whatever outcome you want. So I think it's just about breaking down a complex problem into its parts. And I find that's the method that works. For me, a scenario that was really tough in the beginning of Finder was, you know, we're going back to 2011. We had, you know, we were pushing the limits, like, as a company. There were kind of parts of the algorithm and kind of these guidelines that Google didn't like companies breaking. That's why they built them. Ultimately, one was around buying links. They didn't like it when webmasters tried to manipulate Google rankings by buying links to their website. You know, in the SEO kind of equation, you really have a web page that's designed to be relevant and comprehensive and answer the question, links of which you're like votes to that page saying, yes, I agree, this is a good website. And, you know, the technical foundations, you know, fast to crawl, easy to index, and so on. So if you look at links, like if you can get higher quality links from websites that are more authoritative, whether it be the media or, you know, associations, government websites, that tends to lead to higher rankings. And often, you know, just to get a shortcut, SEOs were buying links from domains that were, you know, sometimes like the domains had no idea that people were selling the links, like, you know, websites like news publications or whatever, there'd be like an editor that was like making some side hustle money selling links on that domain. Webmasters would buy these links and eventually Google starts to analyze kind of these patterns like it's almost like a network diagram going, everybody's buying links from that website. That's really interesting. And we think that's activity that we can kind of isolate and anybody that's following that kind of pattern gets penalized. And Finder, yeah, we followed the pattern and we end up getting a webmaster-level penalty, which effectively led to no traffic to any of our websites. And we had— we didn't own finder.com or .com.au at the time. We owned a whole series of like microsites like creditcardfinder.com.au, savingsaccountfinder, etc.

That's back when SEO was all about domain authority.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Like we actually chose creditcardfinder because it was an exact match domain, which effectively meant that exact match keywords were like if you typed in credit card finder into Google, which people did, it would come up with the domain. Yeah, the closest domain to the search. Yeah, literally.

Is this the equivalent of someone making their domain registration restaurant near me? Literally, yeah.

And it's just because part of the algorithm was like, yeah, it must be about this topic. And then the links to your website are all effectively with that anchor text. So describing your domain name with the same thing that you—

How many domains did you guys have at the time?

We had— man, we literally have thousands of domains that we own, but we had about 28 at the time. And we ran them like really aggressively. Like we were publishing lots and lots of content, like 180 new articles a day.

And across each of these domains?

Um, yeah, spread across, you know, all the domains we owned. And it just, you know, we just got a speeding ticket. Um, more than a speeding ticket, I think we were kind of locked up for a little while and it was tough. Like, you know, we, um, you know, I had gotten us out of this situation multiple times before and I think, you know, for me it was just down to like a, you know, do a few things like kind of send some signals that Google would look at and be like, okay, they're legit. And they'd lift the kind of the ban and then off you'd go again. But this time it wasn't going to work. And for whatever reason, I felt this is permanent and like we're out of the game.

If you couldn't get this back online, what did that mean for the company?

Well, I think we had about like 13 staff at the time. So it was in the kind of early phase of the business, literally without any traffic. There is no money coming in. There's no way to send leads to the banks and insurers and everybody listening on Finder. And so it would be, you know, just a matter of time where we just ran out of cash and it'd be finished. And Google didn't give you any clue as to what was going on. It was like literally a black box and you just kind of like, oh yeah, I'm going to do these things and hopefully it works. I remember calling Fred. He was in the UK at a wedding.

So Fred is a co-founder of the business?

Yeah, yeah. I was like, hey Fred, we're in bad shape. He's like, man, you'll solve it. And I was like, sure, yeah, I'm going to solve it. And then, you know, called the best SEOs on the planet. There was a company called Distilled. And, you know, they all looked at it and said like, yeah, there's nothing else we would do in this scenario to try and recover it. But, you know, we tried a reconsideration request, which was effectively you kind of put your submission in for Google to review and didn't work. That was the first attempt. Tried a whole bunch of other things. You know, again, the second request and I had this spreadsheet which was like OCD level. I'm talking like, like a matrix of all the possible things it could be. And I just like, it was effectively building up evidence to support the case as well. And, you know, got to this point where like I was I was like, I don't think there's anything else we can do. Really randomly, well, not randomly, because I think it's like manufacturing serendipity, really. I go to this conference, I paid for a VIP ticket, and in the break, like on the VIP day, which is like an extra day where you get the advanced talks and stuff, I'm sat there eating a sandwich and the conference organizer goes, hey, do you mind if this person sits across from you? I look up and I was like, oh, I think that's the Googler. And the Googler sits down and—

A Googler?

Yeah, someone that works at Google. Okay.

I didn't know that was a thing. I don't know what that means.

Yeah, Google engineer. And they're in Australia and they had just presented on something which was to do with clear and transparent to webmasters as to what was going on with their websites. And I was like, hey, that was a really useful talk. I'm going through this scenario here where I don't know what to do. Do you mind if I give you some feedback on your products? And yeah, anyway, we get on Twitter DMs together. They gave me a special link which was allowing me to essentially submit this reconsideration request, but directly with a Google engineer. submit it, get a ticket back. And this is like, whoa, it's like an internal system essentially. And I remember waking up around 2:30 in the afternoon, just rolling over, looking at my phone and getting this email from Google saying, we've reviewed your application and over the next 72 hours, your traffic is gonna return to normal. I was like, whoa, this is insane. Jumped up out of bed, yelled out many expletives. And I Yeah, we were back, like we were back in business. But to get that situation to happen required so much luck as well as preparation and this kind of chance moment happening. But it was a key moment in time when we said, from here on, like we're playing the game white hat, we're going to become a brand and we're going to do whatever it takes to be the number one brand in this country in comparison. And the commitment led to these principles, which ultimately underpinned the ways of thinking, the way the behaviors inside Finder for our crew and the way we made decisions. In the end, we bootstrapped to over $100 mil in revenue rolling 12 months. In March 2020, we hit that number.

There was nothing in that list that could have solved the problem. It just so happened that you were at a conference sitting across from someone at Google.

I had to think about this mindset of like, okay, so their job is to achieve this outcome for Google. improving the quality of communication. So they're out in the wild, like the day they announced this product, they're in Sydney and I'm like, hey, I've got some early feedback for you. I've just looked at your product. So for them, they're quite pumped and excited that someone's able to give feedback for something they've kept under wraps for a while. Right. And so like I was helping them as much as they were helping me.

I see.

And they're like, oh, I wonder if we, you know, follow this trail and help this guy out in the way he's talking, you know, about and see if it gets him to the outcome he wants. But, you know, it's a good User feedback, right?

If you think about empathy more universally than just web domain portals and platforms, if you think about it as a general practice in business, what is the benefit of being empathetic and how do you actually live that as a behaviour?

Yeah, I mean, the benefit of being empathetic is like, I just think that a lot of the world isn't, right? So you suddenly like, you become a part of the minority, like where, you know, I think there's— I actually am a believer in being selfish to be able to serve others, you've got to realize that because most of the world isn't, I think people appreciate it and they come to build connection with you. Connection is powerful. It's something where, you know, people feel like they're getting scammed or feel like they're, you know, they're in a place of fear and concern in many scenarios. And if you can reassure them that you're looking after them and want the best outcomes for them, driven through empathy, I think that's a very powerful thing in business. So from my standpoint, being empathetic doesn't always have to be like being nice. I think it's about just helping people get to their goals and to their outcomes. So what we did at Finder was we incorporated our values into day-to-day operations, into day-to-day behaviours. Companies would have a squad in engineering, right? And we called ours OneCrews. OneCrew is effectively the value of collaboration. And so it's like, okay, we need to get something done. We need to build one crew around this. When we wanted to encourage people to be transparent and open with each other, our value was be straight up. So I literally was catching up with an ex-Finder employee. She worked with us for probably about 7 years last night and hasn't worked with the company probably for 7 years. And she said straight up and then led with her statement. I was like, wow, it's embedded. You know what I mean? And I think that's what value—

Even though you haven't worked there for years together.

Yeah.

And I think that's the thing is it's genuinely lived.

It's not just like written word, right? And, um, so yeah, the way we would reward people, like, you know, we had go live as another value. It's like if you had a bias towards action, it's like, you know, you're approving something, you're like, yes, that's approved. You'd be like, go live. And you're like, oh, let's go live. It's like, you know, let's launch that rocket, you know? Um, and I just think it was quite visceral. Like, you know, it kind of made us stand out. And people would always say like that this is the most values-driven company I've ever worked at. And I think that for me, like being a values-driven organisation again is probably rare. Like it's something that, you know, people talk about and they aspire to kind of have that for their companies.

How often do you think companies get their values or their internal team structure wrong?

First and foremost, a lot of people struggle with making tough decisions. You know, it's that kind of phase of like early on, like you've got this family and, you know, like people that have been there in the early days and whatever. And then you need to start hiring people that have done it before versus organically done the job right. And that's tough because people are like, why am I not in that role and not getting promoted? And I should be head of that and this and where's my pay rise? And I think that these things kind of emerge and that's really tough for people to realise. When you're hiring people who've done it before, you're not always going to get it right. And that's also challenging. But you need to place these bets. You need to find companies that have over-index on that particular, you know, thing you're trying to solve for, like, you know, design, marketing, paid ads, whatever it is, and bring those individuals in with the hope that they kind of fit with the team, they can help evolve your processes, and, you know, you kind of evolve as a business, not stay the same. And yeah, look, I think it's, it's not— I mean, I've made so many failed hires over the years, but, um, I think that it takes a certain type of individual. And I always think that people tend to overhire versus hire for what they need now. And they're like, oh, I'm going to hire this person that was like chief something at some really big brand, not realising that they're working at a really big brand and they're used to having thousands of people do the work for them. And actually they should hire for someone that's going to be on the tools, taking actions every single day today. That gap is just rarely ever able to be crossed. And when you hire the person, like, yeah, we're going to go and hire the team and you'll get everyone you need, right? And then You know, things turn and you're like, oh geez, I can't actually make those hires because, you know, things are a little tough right now. So that's why I'm a firm believer in like hire for who you need now, because if things get tough, they can roll up their sleeves and turn it around for you versus like relying on all these hires. Because then you go and hire that person and maybe use a recruiter and you paid all these fees and whatever, end up in a worse spot than before you even made the hire.

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I mean, depends in the beginning, right? In terms of are you a solo founder or, you know, if you've got co-founders. And I think that each of you should define your own values personally.

And can we break it into cohorts?

Yeah, totally.

So then what about if we categorize it from bootstrap startup, just the founder?

Yeah.

Building a small team around them. Perhaps to someone who's established $3 to $10 mil. Yeah, $10 to $50, $50 to $100. I'm sure that their needs and requirements around culture may be different.

Totally. Yeah. So I'd say first and foremost, every person should define their own values. They should go through this process and it starts with like what you value is where you spend your time and like what things you react to and don't react to, like really paying attention to those emotions. And I think defining those personal values help you then understand who are the type of people you want to work with. Like if you value, you know, honesty and integrity and I guess, you know, for me, I value 3 things like, you know, connection, growth, and helping people. So I'm always looking for opportunities to, I guess, express my values in my day. So yeah, I think defining your own values first. I think going through this process when you're hiring and always assessing people by the values that you're not willing to compromise on. And that starts with your first hire. Literally, it's like, hey, like, we really value iterating in public and we're not the sort of company that's going to be a big reveal like Apple or whatever. So like, I know that's going to be uncomfortable for you as a designer. Yeah. Potentially. But like, this is how we work. And like, I would be like warts and all in every interview trying to dissuade someone from joining your company as much as possible.

You would try to dissuade?

I try and dissuade anybody I can.

Like, why?

Yeah, because I think that if they survive that gauntlet and they really still want to work with you, then it's like, come on in and sign the contract.

Let's go. Okay, so you're actively in an interview trying to throw potentially material in front of them that, that would incur them to not want to work with you?

Yeah, it's like I'm like putting them through the toughest things that could happen. And like, I often think it was like, okay, I remember there was this one interview I had done where I was hiring for a writer for shopping and everybody wanted to work in that role. Like, you get free stuff, like you get like free gifts from retailers, you get to write about fun things. And so like, how do you then screen when there's like 100+ applicants for someone that's genuinely in it to work really hard and like outperform everybody else in the space? And like, for me, I was just like going through all the reasons why It's a tough job. And like, by the end of the day, like, you know, if they email me at the end of the day, I was like, that was a great interview. You know, I realize it's tough, but I'm still keen. I'm like, well, let's go. Like, it's, it's— yeah, I think that the lesson is a lot of people in interviewing just want to feel good in the moment and like, oh, how good's our company? And they're like, yeah, I'm so awesome too. And like, for me, it's like, I just think that is not the way to hire people. You've got to like reveal the things. It's like, you know, if you've got holes in your kind of P&L and balance sheet. It's like, you know, hey, things have been tough the last 6 months actually. And like, so this is what you're coming into. We actually really need you to perform in order to make this work. And like, you know, just give, you know, transparently, this is where we're at. Um, I think you're the sort of person that can help us do that. Are you up for the ride? And they're like, actually, yeah, I love this stuff. I'm a turnaround king, you know? And it's like, let's go. Um, versus, you know, the opposite is like people rock up and like, wow, you didn't tell me that in the interview process. That's frustrating. Um, this is not the sort of company I wanted to join. Yeah, I've always just done everything I could to actively and openly share things that I think would be potentially frustrating for the individual I was hiring.

And are there any tips as to how to do that candidly in a way that's not disrespectful?

I would think about where they've worked previously, looking at their work experience, and I'd look at characteristics of those companies that would be very clearly different to my own. So for example, if they worked for a large corporate that had a huge amount of revenue and funding, I'd be like, our marketing budget is $10,000 a month. And they're like, what, it's just $10,000? Like, yeah, actually it is. And if you can spend $10,000 to make $20,000, then we'll increase the budget proportionally. And they might be used to having like a $300,000 marketing budget or something, right? But you start with like the, the pointed things that they, you know, I guess the unknowns. Like, you don't get told this on a job ad. It's like, you know, you have $10,000 to spend each month on marketing. Um, decision-making is difficult because there's, you know, 3 founders, you know, like whatever. It's like You literally call out like how we're all different. But, you know, if you can navigate this scenario, it's actually an incredible opportunity for you because we're— we have so much growth ahead of us. We are a company that's here to win and we have been winning like, you know what I mean? So it's like you kind of share it like openly, like the things that would be different to where they worked previously. And you kind of can quiz and go like, you know, how many people do you have in your team last job? It's like, yeah, I had 5 people. Okay, cool. At the moment, there's no one in your team. Are you okay to do the work yourself? And assuming you do well, we can hire in potentially 3 to 6 months, but it's not a guaranteed hire, just so you know. Yep, that's fine. Tick. The normal things that people want to ask about, like when it comes to deciding which job to take, so they want to know their budget, you know, am I in the team, like what support do I have, what's it like working here, you know, um, what are the challenging parts of the culture. And you're like, look, um, you'll be leading the publishing team. There's a bit of friction between this team and this other team, just being open with you, like I'm here to support you through that. And I think that actually in the end, that level of transparency was refreshing. People go, wow, this is a cool company. Because instead of me kind of being surprised on what's on the other side, everybody thinks grass is greener. It never is. Like you're literally just calling it out for what it is. And they're like, you're living your values in that interview. It's like, you know, we value being straight up.

Yeah.

And this is an example of doing that today.

If you're building a team and you're telling the new hire that there are difficult times ahead, when they come on the team, how do you also create a moat around the company as to not have the team constantly look around to see if the grass is greener if they went somewhere else?

Look, I think that there's kind of these universal motivations of most people, like they want to learn at a job, right? And so what does learning at a job look like? It's being exposed to and given opportunity to do the things that they want and to stay ahead in their career. So I think that's the first piece, like creating time and space for your team to be upskilled and Literally market leading. So that's important. And the second is that they want to know, like nobody wants to be kind of caught off guard. So they want to understand how's the company performing, how can I help? And it often looks like going beyond their current job description. And yeah, I often think that people love stretch. It's like kind of they got hired to do something. And I genuinely believe people want change every 12 to 18 months is kind of my rule. And people want change. People want change every 12 to 18 months. And I think—

Meaning what exactly?

I think there's 5 ways that people like to experience some level of change in their career. It's like, first and foremost, the opportunity might be leadership. So it's like— and leadership is not management. Leadership is like, okay, we need to go and launch this new division, and we need someone to go and think about it and spend a few months figuring it out, do some reconnaissance, and come back with a plan. Are you willing to lead this for us? And it's like, yeah, that's awesome. And then they have this quest suddenly, and that's really key. The second is management. So you're like, okay, you've been really great as an individual contributor, but we think that you've got the opportunity to become a manager. And a manager looks like hiring people, firing people, making sure people are performing and assigning work and making sure it's getting done. I think the third is that people often want to change function. So they're like, okay, you got hired as a designer, but you're actually quite technical. I think you could be a programmer and we're going to invest behind you to help you recalibrate and reskill as a programmer. And they're like, Really? Yep, that's the truth. And off they go. And, you know, before you know it, like— and Finder had many examples of that. I think we had multiple office managers retrain from an office manager to the, you know, one to a programmer, one to a publisher, and possibly a third as well into HR or something. Like, it was just always something where I'd look at somebody's potential and try and, you know, move them, I guess, towards where I felt they had this, you know, next pathway in their career. I think the fourth is around skill. So it's like, how does that person learn something new in order to kind of, you know, really be in a position— and they can be in the same role, but it's like a skill-based thing might be like, okay, you're a great designer, but I think you should learn design systems. So we're going to get you on this 8-week course to do this thing. Or why don't you spend a half day every Friday, you know, learning design systems? Or I know somebody else that has an awesome person at Company X that knows design systems. I'm going to introduce you both, and why don't you guys like set up some sort of mentorship, you know, relationship together? So I think skill is important. And then the last is scope. Scope is like, you were managing, um, this vertical inside Finder. Now we want you to manage multiple verticals. So you go from like just managing mobile phone plans to now broadband plans and energy plans and things like that, and you're now at a group level. So we've increased the scope of what you're doing, but you don't necessarily have to be a manager, but you've got more scope. And I think that these things are the ways that you can constantly motivate your staff to feel like they've had a job change without ever having to leave your company. And I think it's the hack towards retention and also just ensuring people are completely satisfied when working at your business.

Also, you're thinking about the next milestone in front of you that you've been given from that company. Versus this has become quite monotonous. I wonder if the grass is greener out there somewhere else. I wonder if I can get that change somewhere else, right?

Yeah. So yeah, yeah, totally. And I just honestly think that, um, these moments would create story around them and people would come to know that you should speak to Jay, which is my nickname, nickname at Finder, about like, you know, a change in what you're doing. And I'd have these conversations which would often be hours long, literally digging in, trying to understand like, you know, when you're a smaller company, you get to be involved in the interview process all the time, but sometimes you're not. And often, you know, I might work with a certain part of the organization but not with every single part. So people like, you should speak to Jay, he's the sort of person that will help you find a solution here. And I was always seeking to find a solve where whatever the company needed and what that person wanted, there would be a perfect overlap, this Venn diagram, which would lead to the company getting its goal and the person being completely satisfied. And that was just My personal motivation, which I felt like at times was incredibly challenging. And the secret sauce really is to grow. Like, if you can grow your business, growth solves everything. And that's not easy unless you really are, you know, constantly evolving and trying to push yourself. But, um, that's the— that what drove me half the time was like, literally, like, if I don't grow the business, we're going to come to a crunch, a talent crunch, where people are going to start leaving and we're going to start having real issues in the company.

What do you mean by a talent crunch? What would that look like?

You know, it looks like your best— imagine you're known for something like SEO or paid search or, you know, doing great ads or whatever. And like in-market people know as a recruiter, I'm going to try and hunt for talent from Finder. So you can only assume that your top talent is getting messaged, if not daily, like pretty frequently on LinkedIn. So let's assume that's always the case. And I actually think that's a healthy Or maybe unhealthy, I don't know, like this constant, like, you know, paranoia. Um, and if you assume that, then every single day you should be thinking like, do I deserve this talent to work for me? Are they choosing to work at this job every single day, or do they just like kind of turn up like begrudgingly? And so like this talent crunch is like realizing that like you can never take for granted the team you have and that you have to constantly be investing into them in such a way that, you know, nobody else would. And I think that it needs to be something that's so remarkable so that they, you know, on a weekend and having, you know, time with their mates and like talking about how their work's going, it's like, my boss is amazing. He cares for me like nobody else has ever cared for me in my work. And, you know, I get all these opportunities, I get to do these cool things and like, you know, we're growing and the company's doing really well. And I think that's the reason why literally like Finder has had so many people work over 10 years inside the business. And I don't think tenure is the kind of metric for success. Unless you genuinely want the person to be working at the company for that period of time. But it certainly created a bit of a moat where, you know, our top talent didn't leave the company until over a decade in. Like, I remember, you know, nobody inside Finder had SEO in their job title very purposely. It was designed to be patternless and stealth where, you know, I realized we had top talent, so I wasn't going to go and put the label on it so it'd make it easy for somebody else to know who to hire.

Wait, so you were changing people's job titles to prevent People poaching your top talent.

Yeah, if anything, I would modify the job titles towards the talent I was trying to hire from other companies. So I remember I wanted to hire editorial staff from magazines and kind of online publications like Gizmodo, Lifehacker, and so on. So I started in, you know, a lot of people just go SEO writer as a title and it's like, okay, so find a writer who writes content and is good at SEO, hire that person. But instead I'd be like editor and like senior editor and like followed the kind of career paths that editorial staff wanted. And like if you worked between the commercial bridge of like, you know, editorial and the sales team, you're a publisher instead of an SEO manager. And a publisher would also exist in these editorial orgs. And for me, what's interesting is if you think about the talent inside another company, if they're not growing, they're fairly stale, there's no way up. And if you can provide the pathway, pathway, because you've got a company that is growing and you do have these open roles, it'd be like, hey, I know you're a senior writer over at Company X. We've got this editor role over here. And they're like, I've been wanting to be an editor for years, but there's no way to do that because the person on top of me, like in my org chart, is literally not leaving ever. So I think by building in these kind of structures that allow you to effectively create the positions that others want that are inside other companies, it allowed me to hire some of the best talent in Australia and around the world.

I think that's fascinating that you're changing the title to attract the talent and then also at the same time protecting yourself from getting poached from. Because if someone's looking for SEO writers and they see publisher, they're not— they're gonna just keep looking elsewhere.

Yeah, they're like, it would never come up in a keyword search. And that's the thing, right? It's like recruiters sitting there on LinkedIn typing in a keyword and they filter by location and they filter by companies. And so like, that's what they do. And they create lists and they put the list somewhere else and they go yes, no, yes, no, put in front of the client. It's like, do you like these companies? You know, does anyone on this list stand out, you know, as someone we should hire? And they go yes, no, yes, no. And they try and get them all to go into an interview process and then blah blah blah. So if you break the process that a recruiter follows by not having the keyword, you know, the person's job title, then that's kind of a bit of a hack.

I like that one. That's an interesting one. Now, before, you said something interesting about how to make sure you're doing a great job to retain your staff. How do you make sure that you're creating a great offering, one which they don't want to leave?

Yeah. So there's a great book that got recommended to me once, which was Brad Ham, Ownership Thinking. Ownership Thinking is where You give people this kind of benefit in the upside, and the upside could look like, okay, here's our baseline revenue today. If we get to 20% growth, I will share a portion of that revenue growth with you as an incentive. And we did that. We literally would find, you know, the metrics that mattered to the company and built incentive structures that would incentivize the behavior we wanted. So if we wanted follower growth on a social platform, we'd say, okay, here's the bonus for follower growth. If we wanted increased profitability, we shifted towards gross margin and those sorts of metrics over time. But aligning your staff to the metrics that I guess are driving what you need at your business at any point in time, I think is the most critical thing. They say that the behaviour determines the action that people take. And I think that's what I would do.

What might some of those methods be? If you're looking at a company, you're saying, okay, One is profitability.

Yeah.

2 is some kind of visible growth metric. What are all the other ones that might be relevant to building into some kind of motivational pipeline for your team?

Yeah. So there's a concept of input and output metrics. Input metrics are the things that lead to the outputs you want. So at any point in time, you need to figure out, am I seeking the output? I mean, in all scenarios you are, but often the activity is what leads to that output occurring. So If you want better rankings, you need high-quality articles and you need better links. So how can you incentivize, I don't know, the digital PR team to get high-quality links and the team that's producing content to produce high-quality content? How do you determine what quality is objectively? So you build like something on the website, like a little feedback mechanism where people rate the article out of 10 and you choose to kind of build these metrics into people's KPIs and If the KPIs when hit mean that you get a pay rise or don't get a pay rise or whatever, that's really the kind of day-to-day way to do it. In terms of, that's like a marketing example. If you've got an accounts team and you want to try and encourage behaviours to improve cash flow, like accounts receivable and so on, it's like you call out the metric and you share it company-wide. I think that's really important. We are the sort of business that would go, here are the key metrics in the business. And everybody would talk through their metrics in front of everybody. Like, this is my department's goals and what we're trying to hit. And if people understand how each of those metrics come together to ultimately lead to the outcomes your company wants to achieve that year, they'll know who's letting somebody down and who's letting down the team. So for me, and also, they also know who to support. It's like, hey, I saw you're behind on your target. What can we do to kind of help you on that? Like, from the engineering team, perspective, maybe we can automate something or we can unblock something that you need, right? Yeah.

What are the things that most CEOs or COOs don't pay attention to that you feel like gave you an edge at Finder?

Well, as a COO, I was quite unconventional as a growth-focused COO. And I think many are very—

Unusual, by the way.

Yeah, extremely unusual.

And most CEOs or COOs are more like, hey, just maintain what's already there.

Yeah, exactly. Optimise the to cost and not investing. And I was a risk taker and I was an innovator. I ran product, tech, growth, and operations. And that was also unusual because many of those functions report up to the CEO. Yeah, by running these 4 functions, it was by design. It was like there's always friction between leaders. Everyone has their patch. And it's like more than that, there's this calibration cost where it's like if you don't control the resource, then you have to convince the other department to create resource and that's all line up. And by the time this is done, you need this. It just was painful and challenging. So I remember speaking to Frank, I was like, I think we should organise in this way where it makes it extremely easy for me to align our engineering efforts towards our growth goals and our product roadmap towards the things that we need to achieve right now. And yeah, so as a COO, I guess I was like very operationally focused on the growth metrics and the core strategy that would lead to us innovating and winning.

You named one of your core principles after a video game. Explain Katamari to someone who's never heard of it.

Katamari Damacy is a Japanese arcade game, and it was spoken about by an early Google engineer, Matt Cutts. And he on YouTube was like— I remember his hands— he was like, um, he was describing this game as like you're a ball of energy essentially in this game, and, and you're sorry, you're a little character that's pushing around a ball of energy, and this energy has the ability to absorb objects. And with the more objects it absorbs, it expands, and then you can absorb bigger objects. So for example, like you're on a table and you're kind of pushing this ball around. It's like a paperclip, a pen, and a pen cup, whatever. Eventually, it just goes whoop and it grows. And then you're around the room and maybe you're absorbing tables and chairs and whatever, and you're like rolling through the office and it's like sweet. And then it's like down the lift onto the street, grows again, rolling up cars, trees, benches, whatever, bigger. And then like small buildings and huge buildings. And then eventually, you're absorbing stars and planets. So literally, that's the kind of progression. And he spoke about Katamari in a way that was around when you write about a topic, you're in a— like, to become an authority on that topic, you firstly need to have a comprehensive website and like the right links coming in. But to grow, you should find tangential opportunities, things that are, you know, also, you know, somewhat relevant or kind of like a side topic off the back of what you're normally writing about. So for Finder, the example was We wrote about frequent flyer credit cards and I was like, I think we should write about frequent flyer programs. And you can learn about how you earn points, how do you redeem points and whatever. So we did that next. And then more broadly, I was like, we should write about frequent flyer as a topic. And it's like you talk about business travel and all these sorts of things. And then eventually I was like, I actually think we should just talk about travel. And we started talking about travel and all the offshoots of that, travel money, flights, hotels, whatever. And we built a travel section on Finder. With each progression, we required like the kind of the tissue and that kind of, that kind of authority build was required in order to attack. We could never attack travel first and foremost. Like you'd have to build the steps and the kind of breadcrumbs that led towards you eventually being able to rank for travel. And we ranked for like cheap flights, I think in top 10 in Australia. Sorry, Jetstar flight sales. I think we ranked in position 1 or 2, like often above Jetstar. And it was because we built this authority, which You know, just took these investments in following this kind of approach that Matt Cutts, the engineer, spoke about.

I like this concept of Katamari, meaning like it reminds me of calamari. But well, when you think of this concept, I also think about branding and trying to become a thought leader in a field. If you think about, let's take someone like Alex Hormozi, obviously he was, you know, doing Katamari where he would do sales training around how to like have a good script and how to do a good call. And then that scaled into how to have a funnel and how to get people in the funnel so you can get them on the call. And then that turned into content as a medium and to the live events. So I've almost seen this play out many times with personal brands. When you think about Katamari as a concept, how else can it improve someone's company? How else can you apply it to an everyday business?

I often think about the upsells and cross-sells that companies can make. You know, if you are selling, you know, my wife rents out baby products, like if you're selling out a, you know, Renting a baby bassinet, you know, perhaps you could rent the, you know, or sell a baby blanket or, you know, baby products that, you know, toys and whatever, like, you know, along with that. And when it comes to, you know, the upsell, I see perhaps it's, you know, baby sleep consulting. But it's like, you know, in essence, what you're trying to understand is like, what are the other customer problems that this person has? I think the first thing is to have someone transact with you is not easy. Like, you've— they don't know who you are. They've read, you know, seen all these ads and eventually they click on your website and maybe another few at the same time. And they contact you, they speak to you and your competitors, they put in their money and they pay you. That's so hard to get to. So like, given you've built that opportunity and that relationship with them, I think the opportunity is to go, okay, what else can I sell this person and how else can I genuinely help them? That's really what should drive that. And, you know, if you build a connection across multiple different services, I think you become more deeply connected with that individual and known for, I guess, someone that just gets things done for them around that sort of thing that they're just trying to solve. So yeah, from my perspective, it's not just about, um, content and brand or whatever. Conceptually, it's like, what's nearby as an opportunity to me is really what we're talking about here, and what's the next action I can take to capitalize on that?

How has that served you, obviously being a CEO of a company, being inside of an organization and looking around constantly trying to optimize and improve things? Is this something that is just playing in the subconscious of your mind, or is this a skill that people can train themselves to have?

There are so many ways to grow. Finder used to think about, okay, if we're growing the company, is it into a new category? Is it into a new country? Is it selling more to the same customer? And as I mentioned before, growth is the most critical thing if you want to retain your staff. And ultimately growth leads to more revenue and ideally profitable outcomes where you can invest in better talent and so on. So for me, growth is not always about doing things the same way. And the way I would grow was put out a whole bunch of tests and see, let's validate which of those strategies has the most legs most easily. Because we were bootstrapped, it was like, okay, we would enter a new category with 5 landing pages and we're like, okay, that seems to be working. The traffic's coming in, we're ranking well, it's converting, we can send some leads here. So now's an opportunity to go and hire a role for this person because we think that If they go and created 200 pages and we ran these ads, there's a business that looks like roughly this sort of revenue and we'd bring that person in, they'd go and prove that out and you'd eventually just kind of added all these people that I guess were driving different parts of the flywheel on the machine for Finder. It's honestly just a mindset that's applicable to so many different ways of growing.

Yeah. And you mentioned before that your wife has a business where she's done that as well, because I can imagine, you know, she obviously— obviously we've rented one as well. This is a plug, but your wife has these products that are called Baby Snooze, uh, where basically you strap your baby up kind of like they're in a psych ward. You strap them into this beautiful little thing, and then it sounds horrendous, but it's quite soothing for the baby, and then it shushes them to sleep, and it has, um, like a rotation thing happening with some white noise. Um, but then it's like, okay, well, if you need that, then you might also have issues with the baby sleeping. So then can you offer them baby consulting around sleep consulting? Um, then you might need accessories and things to keep the baby warm. So, so you're saying that businesses should be more conscious of looking around how else they can serve the same customer they've fought so furiously to attain, how they can keep them engaged?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, you know, it's like you can expand horizontally or vertically, right? Like vertically is like you're perhaps like the answer there is you go and manufacture your own product or you kind of I don't know, move up the chain and you start doing other things that are more of a, like, you know, become like a product that— sorry, a supplier of many different baby products that you can rent out. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. So you kind of like move up the chain and like, or down the chain and then horizontally is like, you know, there's a whole different suite of services that people would be wanting to, I guess, have is, you know, when they have a child. So yeah. Yeah.

What do you think is the most common problem you see founders having in not going up, down, left or right when it comes to expanding or growing their businesses?

Yeah, I think sometimes like I look at a founder, I'm like, this person's ultra talented, they've got the capital, they're just playing the wrong game. And yeah, and like sometimes honestly, like it's just about realising that and not just being— I value persistence and people like being in the game and like just pushing as hard as possible. But it's really worth zooming out sometimes and going, you know what, like what if I apply my skill elsewhere? In another way. And it's not necessarily you have to shut down what you're doing, but like optimise what you're doing. Like, you know, put the appropriate amount of people and capital towards that so you still extract the value and revenue from it. But like, what else could I possibly do here to prove out another way to make money for my company?

What might that look like generally? Like, what are 2 or 3 things a business owner can do to start improving their cash flow and optimising what they've got?

Yeah, so I think to improve cash flow, first and foremost, I was on a call last week and I was looking at this company and I think there's just a bunch of different things. Firstly, charge a little bit more. If you're doing a great job, people are like, fair enough. And if you can kind of justify that, like costs have increased on our side or we want to raise the bar in terms of quality, so we're hiring better talent. So we want to pay our staff more. When we kicked off the company, unfortunately, we weren't in a position to pay market rate, but we really want to get to that so we don't lose great talent that are running your account. So that's important. All the tick, tick, tick things that they want to hear is like, yeah, okay, I support you on that. You've been great to us. Let's do a price rise. That's one thing. The second might be for cash flows, offering you service to a client and then say, because we have quite a lot of demand, it's a 2-month wait for this thing. But for companies that are paying upfront, we're going to bring them to the front of the list and we'll give them a 10% discount. And so you bring in cash early. And so yeah, there's a couple of ideas I'd shared with that business throughout the week. And the third was going, hey, through AI, I think you can automate a bunch of what you're able to do here. So take the opportunity to kind of test some of these new tools and see if you can deliver the same quality at a lower cost or increase the output of the same headcount, I guess. And so that's on the cash flow side of things.

Can I give you a scenario here of something I've noticed that comes up quite often is that in a very competitive field, I've seen it play out where similar brands compete over price and then it becomes a race to the bottom.

Totally.

What I noticed with Mark Ritson, who is a marketing teacher, is that he says there's different ways for a brand or company to orient themselves. One might be price. we might fight on price. That might be the smart play. Yeah. Either being the most expensive or the cheapest. He said, however, you might want to orient yourself to be, hey, we're product-centric, product above all else, or it might be people-centric or it might be geolocation-centric. When you think of different ways companies can throw their weight around, where have you seen the most effective ones be? Because I feel like price is something that people always go to immediately, but It does feel like maybe the worst one to fight over.

Yeah, at Finder, we, we fought on distribution first and foremost. Our goal was trying to send the highest volume of customers to our partners ultimately. And why that mattered was if we sent higher volume, we could demand better quality products to be listed on our platform and more budget. And I guess, you know, it's tough in the beginning. Like these brands didn't want to work with Finder. It was like, you know, you got no one using your website, it doesn't matter. So we were really obsessed with distribution. Like how can we have the platform that literally became the largest and had the most amount of users. So I can't think of many scenarios where competing on distribution leads to a bad thing.

And I give a better example of or a deeper understanding of how people might be able to comprehend distribution, what that might look like.

So like for Finder, it looked like website traffic.

Okay. Distribution meaning all the energy coming in to see the product. Yeah.

It's like, you know, you've got these funnels. It's like, you know, where are people coming from? So it's like they come, through rankings in Google, so that becomes website traffic. It's like viral social videos, so they lead to people in your LinkedIn bio or maybe just DMs or that creates the demand and they go and Google you separately. So it's like effectively all of your channels and the platforms you exist on.

Oh, I see.

Yeah. You might be running more ads than anybody else more profitably because you built stronger creative and you're better at running ads than other people. So if you solve for distribution in that sense, I think that's of the kind of the pieces there. I play like that. For me, it's like you can have a great product and if you don't find a great product channel fit, you'll never get to the outcome you want. So like for me, I'd rather go and solve for ranking for something or getting that traffic and then like, oh, you know what, it's worth investing in the product now. I've cracked the ads.

Would you, would you then challenge the idea that product is king?

I'm certainly of the view that if you can solve for getting the traction in marketing, that enables the opportunity to build a better product. I genuinely believe that if you overinvest in product and you never crack marketing, you might be stuck in this situation where your product's just going to sit on the shelf gathering dust.

Whereas if you invest or overinvest in marketing and go the other way, you can use that capital to make a better product.

Yeah. Well, I would say it's not overinvesting in marketing. It's investing for ROI. I think a lot of people invest for growth and that's the wrong way to think about it. Bootstrapping is about spending a dollar to make 2 or 3 or more, and getting that return on your spend with marketing is ultimately what gives you the cash flow to then reinvest into product. You know, with Finder, because we had such strong organic rankings over the years, we used to, you know, Frank and I talk about our organic rankings and organic revenue funded headcount, and then eventually we figured out how to make extremely profitable ads in Google. And that combination, that blended cost of acquisition would often rely on having strong rankings to be able to bid at the kind of the CPCs that we needed to do to compete in the Google auctions. And so without Google organic, it was very challenging. So, you know, and obviously search is changing a lot, like you need to have other ways of acquiring traffic. And, you know, we're now reinvesting back in brand and trying to, you know, incorporate member offers and other things like that. But it very much was underpinned by strength in search.

If you think about challenging the idea that product is king, what is it that people usually misunderstand about that? Because oftentimes when we're doing brand workshops, people love to tell me how their product is the best. Yeah, but they almost always have a marketing distribution challenge. Do you think that founders are avoiding distribution either because they don't understand it or they don't feel it's the right move?

I think that it's they don't understand it and they don't understand that it's a required part of the formula. It's rarely the case that a great product just sells itself. Truly, you can even have great marketing and a great product, but you still need excellent salespeople that can convince people to pay attention and give you budget and take a risk on you. I genuinely don't know many products that from the product itself, achieve those outcomes. And I think we overglorify the idea of like just building the perfect product and then like, you know, people will just come in, you know, hordes to come and buy it, right? So it's like there's very few scenarios like an Apple kind of line or whatever for an iPhone that occur out there.

And you talk about this a lot where there's different ways of looking at competitiveness. There's different ways to compete. Obviously you can compete on price or you can compete on product or you can compete on distribution. Like you said, you have a notion that is match and exceed. What's the difference between match and exceed or just copying what a competitor is doing?

Yeah. So first and foremost, I think that rarely are you the only person to have thought about that idea or have attempted to do something before. So there's all of this data out there around how others have attempted and either succeeded or failed prior. So when it comes to matching, you know, if you go, okay, and I'll use a Google ranking, then I'll talk about paid ads. Like with Google, you can see, you know, what are the top 10 ranking pages? What was the words that they put on a page? What are the links they got? And assuming that you got the same amount of links and the same amount of words on your page, if all things remained equal, what would be remaining to determine if you outrank them or not? So you have to start looking at factors like website speed and conversion rate and user engagement metrics. But I guess for me, when it comes to matching, it's like you look at the controllables and you at least ensure that you a matching on those variables. But that's never enough, right? So that the exceed piece is like, you go, okay, um, and I almost imagine it like, you know, this kind of switches. It's like red, green, red, green, red, green. Like, you know, is it— are we winning or not on these variables? And you just like knock them out one by one. It's like, you know, we have the same amount of links, we have the same quality of content, our conversion rate's better, we're faster, whatever, you know. And then it gets to in the end ultimately probably competing on brand. But, you know, for me, match and exceed is about You know, isolating the variables that lead to the outcome you want, at least matching them, and then finding where you can exceed. And that looks like inventing into the same variable for both companies, but doing it in an unfair way. Like, it's a, you know, if you take the example of, you know, earning PR, like, it's hard to get in the news. Like, that's why people are proud and they kind of tell their families like, I was on TV, or I was, you know, in some, you know, on some publication today. Um, but I actually think it's pretty easy to reverse engineer getting the news. Like, If you think about a news publication, every single day they need to publish something new to have news. And they rely on press releases to tell them about what's happening in the world, largely because news organizations are under-resourced. So they rely on this influx of information and kind of like what's happening out there, what's happening out there. And press releases do most of the heavy lifting for them. They've got all the information, stats, facts, you know, the headline partially written. And so like there's these formulas which exist in a news article. It's like a headline that's kind of talking about some problem or some event that occurred that, you know, X percent of people have this problem. And it's, you know, designed to shock and make you read the rest of the article. Like, it's like you're like, oh, like, what's this about? Like, this is a shocking headline. You go in, the subhead kind of reiterates it, but then kind of encourages you to start reading the paragraphs. And you go into the article and it's typically highlighting a thing and like says how many people have this problem. And then there's this company that's, you know, come to save the day. They'll save these company people money or time or whatever by doing this thing. But we can't make it just about that company because they're the one that gave us a press release. So we need to include a third-party kind of, uh, neutral commentator. Uh, and we also have to put in case study to make it like, you know, relatable to the reader. You do all that and there's your article, right? So So if that's the formula, how do you get press? For me, in 2009, I realized that there was this kind of easy way to generate stats. You'd basically pay 1,000 people to complete a series of questions. That's step 1. Step 2 is you'd get all this data and you look for the trend that occurred in that data set. It'd be like, you know, 72% of people have, you know, um, pay X amount of dollars per month on electricity. Cool. then I'd be like, that's your headline. And it's like winter. So let's do it. Like, you know, let's time this press release really well. It's like winter's hitting, so heating costs are going through the roof, right? So who's not going to write about that? Like, you know, it's hitting people's pockets. So that's it. And so did you know that you can switch energy providers and there's like new, like kind of switching offers that are only available to new customers? And so that's the solution. That's the cure. Like, that's the medicine, right? And so you kind of alert the media to this like, yeah, this is great timing. And the stats are like, you know, nationally representative. So we can write about this because you're talking about what matters to consumers, right? right now. And so you'd write the press release and then you'd build a landing page with, here are the best energy deals right now that we've compared, very structured and easy for you. And that was it. You'd put a quote from you as the CEO of Company X that ran the research and that was it. And you just turn that into a machine that does it continuously and that's how you get press.

Jeremy, how can I go interview 1,000 people? I want to know how I can do that.

Yeah. So there's these survey providers that literally have panels of individuals that effectively get money for completing answers.

Okay.

That's how all research works. So, and it's often like cents, it's not anything crazy. But, and then separately to that, like there's companies that actually call up people and like, you know, like, hey, do you have 5 minutes for a survey and whatever? And so these research houses exist and you just like, you know, Google or, you know, you just chat to people here, like, you know, online survey provider or whatever. You go and tell them, here's my brief. I wanna be able to ask 5, 10 questions, whatever it is. And those questions need to be worked backwards from the headline that you want to have in the paper. So if you don't have a question that helps you construct the stats, constructs the headline, you'll never be able to write the headline that is going to be—

Oh, I see.

A journalist wants to write. So again, with that kind of empathetic mindset from before, it's like, if I was a journalist, what type of story would I write? What stories have I written historically? And how can you follow the pattern that preexists? It's extremely hard to change someone's behavior. So instead, Feed what's already preexisting as a pattern. And so that's the match piece, right?

I like what you're saying here that rather than trying to invent something new, play to their patterns.

Yeah. So match their behavior. But then to exceed is like, how can you exceed? You can do a bigger panel of more data. You can have perhaps some research that was exclusive to that publication and no one's offered exclusive research before. It's like, hey, if you were to write a story about energy, and I've seen you've done this for the last 5 years, What's a question that you wish you had some data around? And like, oh, you know what? I've always wondered what people thought about this. Like, all right, in the next survey we run next month, I'm going to reserve 3 questions which are exclusively for your publication. And people are like, that's awesome. It gives you an excuse to like tell them, hey, ran that research that you wanted. This just is just yours. If you want to write that story, it's ready to go. And like, oh, well, I felt really special, like having this press around this kind of— sorry, this research done just for me, right? I don't get any resources inside my company as a—

How did you find these people though? Like, like, do you have friends in these networks? Oh no.

So the actual survey runs through companies that basically you get rewards for completing survey questions.

No, I understand that. But what I mean is, how do you get the journos' attention?

Yeah.

So you're connecting with these journalists. Yeah. And then you're trying to find out what's some data or some topics that they're trying to get some headwind on.

Yeah.

And then I need to think of a question that if I could give them the headline and go do the research, I can come back and do the work for them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the way I think about it is like, what's a journalist there to do? They need to write a story that for them success looks trying to get, you know, they want to try and get an article on the homepage of their publication. If they do that, that means that their article was high traffic and they won that day. So what does a homepage article look like? It looks like something that's relevant to anybody that picked up the paper that day. So you need to be like right in the zeitgeist. So like what is trending right now that this this publication has not written about because they didn't know about it or they've not prepared for this moment in time. And the news algorithm is really interesting because you actually read the Google patent around it. It says a unique angle will do really, really well in Google News. So how can you give a publication a unique angle? A unique angle is going to be something that's a unique insight or something that's data-driven. Because as a journalist, if you write a story that isn't backed on, you know, it's kind of backed up by data. It's an opinion piece. And so that's— they need to be able to— most journalists have a story they want to write. They just can't put their name to it as the person that came up with the idea. They need to externalize it. It's like they need some research, they need somebody else that's willing to be the quote and whatever, and they know what they need to write that day. And if you kind of just feed that machine because they know exactly what they need to do to kind of hit that kind of newsroom brief, it's like They'll meet in the morning. It's like, so what's happened today? Like, what do we need to write about? It's like, okay, this, this, this. Okay, these are the stories. Who can I call? Calling Finder. Finder's got this research. Easy done, right? And they are proud of the publication they write for. And so given all of that, my idea was like, I'm going to create a box of custom labeled beer and I'm going to get it delivered to this office on a Friday where all the journalists are kind of wrapping up their week. They've done their kind of final stories and they've just shipped them. Arrives at 3 p.m., they crack open this box like, what is this? And it was like literally Lifehacker labeled beer. And on the label it said creditcardfinder.com.au/lifehacker at the top. And it was basically a letter to the editor.

Yeah.

Saying, hey, we just launched in Australia. Wanted to let you know I've written this article. Would love to see it published on your website. The journalist reached out, was like, actually, your article sucks, but I'm open to having a coffee. Anyways, on the way to going to have that coffee, I was in the taxi on the way to the Harbourside Shopping Centre, which doesn't exist anymore. I got a little ping on my phone that Credit Card Finder has launched in Australia. It was literally Lifehack had written the article about us launching. And I think about that a lot because I was like, why did they write that story as I was on the way to see them? And I think that it's really hard to kind of eyeball someone and say like, I know you really need that thing. Like my platform can help or hurt your company. And I'm about to have coffee with you and tell you I didn't write about your company despite you doing the coolest thing ever and catching my attention. And you didn't just spam my inbox that day with a press release that was a doc file attached, right? You went to such high effort and you're catching up with me with no agenda. It's like, you're actually pretty cool. Here's your link. And that's how we got the press and we just turned that into a machine.

What is that? Is that the law of reciprocity?

I think it's In marketing, there was so many things at play. But I remember reading this article, this guy Todd Malkot, he wrote it in 2007 and it was about the hooks in marketing. Really, there's a few things playing out then. It was like an ego bait in some respect because they felt important. They were the person that had the box of beer arrive to their office and they got so much attention in that moment that like, you're like, I'm the cool person in the office. I got all this beer and everyone like, you know, is taking photos going like, this is nuts, how cool is this company? So I think that it was a psychological hook that probably tied back to ego. And I think that you're right in that, um, you know, one of the key habits in 7 Habits is like an exchange in abundance. Um, and like, well, it's not the habit, but it's this kind of concept. And for me, like, I've always felt that like, you know, I want to help people before I ask for help. And, you know, in that moment I hadn't helped them. But actually the fascinating thing is the kind of second part of that story where I kept on catching up with them every 3 months and I just wanted to learn about journalism. I was like, because like Finder created huge amounts of content, but I can't say it was high quality in the beginning. But I realized that we had to create high quality content eventually. So I was like, how do journalists do this? Like, I literally had no idea. started hanging out and started coaching me. And then I'd hire journos who would come along to these lunches and like meet this person and like be like learning from them and getting mentored by them. And eventually I remember them saying like, hey, um, we don't have enough personal finance content on our website. This is about 3 years into us having lunches. Do you think you could write some personal, like a personal finance column for us? And I was like, I would love to do that. The first article I published went live and made $7,000 like within an hour of literally going, going live. It was absurd because they had this email list. And so every time they published the article, it was like, here are the best products in market right now. And so it goes straight out to the database and like people just apply for the products like in our list. And what I did on the first launch articles, I replayed the same playbook. I was like, um, I called the column Rate Hacker and the art— the, the publication was called Lifehacker. So Rate Hacker was sub-branded and it felt like it belonged in the publication. It was like a part of it. And I created this little logo and I said, for the first 50 readers that reach out, we're going to give you a Rate Hacker t-shirt. And so like it created this kind of thing around it where it's like, you know, merch around this column and it's kind of cool. And so for the, I guess the true fans of this publication, they're like, this is amazing versus going like, why have you got this section and who are these Finder people? It just landed so much better. And I'd personally respond in the comments every single time. And I spent just huge amounts of effort to really make this some of my best work. I had plenty of writers at the time, but I personally wrote every single one of them. The crazy story is eventually that person ended up becoming our editor-in-chief. The person at Lifehacker that I met back in 2009 became someone that I hired probably like 7 years later.

Really?

Yeah. And I think it was because we became really good friends and had high trust in each other.

Yeah.

And going, threading the needle with something I'd said before, I felt that They weren't given the opportunity inside their publication that really would unlock the best of them. And so I hired them as our editor-in-chief, and they became the person that was like the guardian of quality at our business. And they're still working at Finder today and are one of the most remarkable individuals that has contributed to Finder being, I believe, the best comparison website in the country.

I'd like to move on to the next principle we have here, which is follow natural traction. So with what you were just talking about before, How do you make sure that as you're creating motion in your business, that you're not chasing the shiny object syndrome, but you're actually contributing time to what matters? So how do you follow natural attraction?

Yeah, I think it's about defining a test experiment. So especially when there's disagreement on priorities, if you like—

A test experiment?

Yeah. So it's like, you know, what is, um, if we did this thing, like publish an article created new products, started a new service, how could we quickly validate if there's demand that would justify further investment? So for me, I'm always looking for signal. If I'm— there's an epic story of 1-800-Flowers, a big US online flowers business, where before they offered that particular product or service, they put an icon, like a section on their homepage, which literally they were testing to see if people would click on it. And if people clicked on it, they're like, yeah, there's actually demand for this product. We're going to go and create it. And so 1800Flowers was a link, but there was actual domain like it where you go like Roses Only or whatever here in Australia and you'd go to the website and like they— it was an experiment. It was literally like a conversion rate optimisation experiment to see could we, you know, is there demand around what we're about to release before we go and actually create the product? So it was a way to get early signal before investing.

So what happened? There was a link that said 1800Flowers?

No, no. So you go to the 1800Flowers homepage. And on the homepage there was a section like a little panel of like, you know, we're now offering, I don't know, like a bundled, you know, flowers with a toy or something like that, like a soft toy. And like before they go and, you know, coordinate their logistics teams and operations teams or whatever to go and do that, they build that little panel as a section on the homepage and run it to maybe like, I don't know, 5% or 10% of the audience. If that resulted in more conversions or more clicks or, you know, people clicking on that to kind of of registered their interest, then they'll go ahead and actually create that service line. And yeah, so that's an example.

Okay. Now how do I follow natural traction? What are some other things I can do in my company to make sure I'm not chasing the wrong things?

Yeah, I think it's about not over-engineering something and just over-investing into a strategy, a tactic before you've got that signal. So for me at Finder, it'd look like an example was like, When we thought there was an opportunity to expand beyond personal finance, we wanted to go into online shopping. We launched something which was our promo code section. So I remember day one, we're like, I wonder if we could rank for ASOS promo codes. Put an article live and we're like, whoa, we just ranked number 1 in Google. That's crazy. And like, let's put the second one live. And we're like ranked for the Iconic discount codes, whatever. By the end of a few days, we literally ranked number 1 or in the top few spots for the top 10 most competitive discount code keywords that exist in Australia. So naturally the next step there is to then go and hire someone against that strategy to go and go, okay, there's literally 1,000 of these to launch. Here's the mission, off you go. But we didn't do that until we ran those first experiments.

I see. And so you wanted real validation, real evidence that it was working?

Yeah, exactly. And yeah, so that's how I like to do it. It's like you can often just overengineer and overinvest without knowing if it's going to work. It's about de-risking that. And then when you have that signal that it is working, it's about doubling down.

Are there different types of signals that you look for?

Yeah. So it kind of depends what the experiment's about. So when we expanded internationally, we were trying to understand, can we run ads profitably? And how difficult is the auction over here? And we realised that actually there were some online auctions which were just too competitive. So it meant that we couldn't just go and enter credit card comparison in the US. So you have to find these pockets of other niches that would work well, like comparing stock trading accounts or comparing crypto trading accounts. So yeah, I mean, the construct and the kind of that early team, you couldn't just run the same playbook of how you built Finder in Australia. You had to find people that had investment experience and understood those categories versus other areas of personal finance.

You talk about often looking at decisions that need to be made as it's best to have an emotionless decision.

Yes.

Most founders fall in love with their own ideas. How do you make sure you avoid having that instinct? Yeah.

So I would often say let the data decide. And that's really tough because often you have people with different opinions. And I think it's about saying, okay, so what's the success criteria? Like, let's just agree that together. Whether it's I'm right or you're right, I think that we can both agree that the outcomes are this that we're seeking. And if it works, then we'll give it some legs and we'll give it some budget and go for it. Let's assign some test budget to see if this is going to work before we shut it down and we'll review in say 3 months. So I remember sending these calendar invites all the time with Frank, like, hey, I'm pretty bullish on this idea working. I can't guarantee it's going to work, but this is my test budget I want to run with and let's go. And he'd be like, okay, go and assemble a squad, go and test it and see what happens. I remember one of those experiments was in crypto where I had just gotten married. I landed in New York and on the subway there were these ads for crypto exchanges. And I was like, what is this? If there's something happening on the subway in New York, it's a great signal that's probably coming for the rest of the world. 6 to 9 months later. And New York is just so early to everything. So anyway, I tell the team in the US, like, hey, can we start building out these pages around Bitcoin and so on? Bitcoin was $900 USD at the time. And in the end, by the end of the year, it literally was like, I can't remember what it cracked. It was something like $30,000 or $40,000 or even more. It just went berserk. But I had to go through this period where I had to persist in investing into this area of the business in a way that was kind of illogical. But I was watching the trend. I was like, because so many people are going to jump into this trend, there's all this new information, there's a need for aggregation. And that's what Finder—

What do you mean by aggregation?

As in consolidating all this information into a structured format so that people can consume and learn about it. So in Finder, we have comparison tables and filters and tools and so on. And kind of carving out this space for this experiment and seeing early signal that was working. But I could have called it early and said, you know what, there's not enough traction here. But by keeping enough investment and waiting it out, we ended up getting to a situation where it literally became one of the most profitable areas of the business and drove so much of our success internationally. And yeah, I would just say it's like that signal was really looking at Google Trends and going, wow, there's This is a micro trend, but with the price, if the price keeps increasing and the searches keep increasing, there's going to be a need for comparison. And I don't know when that kind of point is where the wall just blows up, but we need to have enough kind of on this bet so that when it happens, we're the winner. And that's how we approached it.

How often do you find that the signal of gut instinct is the thing that can lead you to the next part of the business that's going to create traction.

Yeah. So I think we're all human. And I think if you go back to what I was talking about before around empathy and trying to imagine if I had this stimulus, this situation happened to me, how would I react? What would my next action be? I think it's extremely powerful. And when you think about some of this stuff like crypto, it's like there's all this new information. I don't know what to do. How do I confidently make the right decisions here, you can start to simulate that people are going to need comparison, they're going to need reviews, they're going to need guides and tools just like any other category on Finder. And so from my standpoint, I think it's about just running the simulation before the data exists. And that's kind of in some ways goes against what I was saying, but I think that some of the best bets about being first and at Finder, we had this thing called Finder First. We still do. And it's like jumping on an opportunity before anybody else. And the first mover always wins.

You have this idea that you don't get to decide how fast your company grows.

Yeah.

The market does.

Yes.

Can you explain that?

Yeah. So the principle is about managing the critical path. I remember when I was first writing articles at Finder in 2009, I was like, my biggest competitor had 32 staff and I was like, I don't see how me on my own, I'm going to be able to compete with these guys. And they had engineers and like they'd been, you know, existed for a number of years prior to that. I was like, I need to innovate. I need to find a way to generate the outputs more quickly at a higher output and cheaper. And so I turned to a couple of things at that point in time. The first was I went to freelance writers that were, you know, able to scale me. And so really what they needed was these inputs, which was for me a clear strategy on what to write about, the structure of the article, and kind of removing a lot of the, the friction in writing a piece of content. So it was like a skeleton of a piece of content. It's like, put this section here, write these, you know, in this section, you know, write 1 to 2 sentences about this. So really clear and consistent briefs. And I found a writer who was based in Queensland and she was just so fast and she worked 24/7. So I was like, immediately I've got an advantage here as well. Like she's not just 9 to 5. I can message her at 9 PM and she'll reply and we'll jump on a Skype call together and literally be able to talk about this piece of content I need by 9 AM in the morning. And so that was cool. And then the second thing was like, I wonder if she can hire people in other time zones. So when we're asleep, other people are producing. So that became this crazy arbitrage where not only was it that, um, you know, other time zones were producing content, but they're producing at a lower cost. And she was always the final editor. The content quality was never noticeably different. And so it meant that we had this position where I turned one writer into effectively an agency who became this person that helped us produce over 180 articles a day. It was insane. I was publishing so much content that I got RSI from the same kind of motion of like publishing on WordPress. Like, it was absurd. I had to pay somebody literally to do that motion because like I physically couldn't. I was in so much pain.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's hilarious.

You're definitely managing the critical path by having leverage to that. So you actually sat down and calculated your competitors' publishing speed. Yeah. What did the math tell you?

Well, you know, it showed that— well, firstly, this is the thing, right? It's like it's one thing to match their speed, but to catch up and win market share, you had to outproduce them. And so that was the critical piece. I was like, you know, I'm going to match their pace initially, and then if I can get to outpacing them, we'll eventually have competitive distance. And that's what we did. And like, so for me, I was like, what are the limiting factors here? Like, how can I speed this up in such a way that like there, there's, there's no weight on me? It's literally like a queue. And so I built these very carefully constructed spreadsheets which were a system for content production. And it'd be like, here's the writer, here's the person reviewing it, here's the keyword. Here's the document skeleton, here's the draft in WordPress, the Google Doc, and the person that would QA to make sure the information was correct. And everybody had access to the spreadsheet. We were pretty early to use Google Sheets as a core system inside Finder. But this one sheet became the ecosystem or the core system that drove all this content production. I remember we had this diagram, we called it the content factory, where literally I think Meta had a pretty similar concept inside the hoodies in Facebook. They had like this kind of diagram inside the hoodie, like, and we, we were going to do it. We didn't. But it was this diagram which explained like how the machine worked. It was like you kind of mine for consumer intent and find the things that they were searching for, build high-quality guides, publish them on WordPress, you know, get the links into these pages, rank really well on Google, like build ads. And it was this like epic diagram. I'd love to get a copy of it actually. And Yeah, the content factory is what built Finder.

Okay, if you're to explain a content factory, like, what could someone do to recreate that success for themselves? Let's assume that they're trying to use it for TikTok or Instagram.

I recently decided to publish my own content on Instagram, and I had 800 followers, mostly friends and family. And I was thinking about it like, how do I get to the center of the dartboard with my first video? And the way to do that is just, you know, with any algorithm including Instagram, is to study the outliers. So what does studying the outliers look like? For me, what I did was I scraped 482 reels, and off the back of that, I was able to see all the views and engagement metrics for all these reels. Off the back of that, isolated down to the top 30, and the outliers were those that outperformed on the top metrics by 3 times or more. So they got 3 times more views or likes or comments, and these are all kind of important things for—

You're looking for an anomalous amount of extra, um, engagement on the— on a handful of the videos out of the 800-odd. Yeah, yeah.

Um, and there's, you know, you say 800 or 600? Uh, 482 reels. And then in isolation I looked at 30. But what I did off the back of that is I saw that there was 12 templates that people use to produce viral content in the AI space. And I was like, sweet. So it's like you have AI tool breakdowns, founder stories. Um, you know, it was like literally like this whole list of here are the templates. And I was like, cool. And then I grabbed all the transcripts of all the 482 reels and I kind of fed the AI what I wanted to talk about. And it literally spat out the exact scripts of what I needed to say in the hook, in the kind of re-hook, the kind of 6 tools to mention because they're the ones going viral right now. And it was like this formula. And combined with a great videographer who kind of, you know, led this process for me and really nailed this kind of understanding of like they were manually analyzing outliers. But I built a system to do the same thing. The estimation of views for this first reel was going to be somewhere between 50,000 and I think it was 500,000 views. I was like, you know, if you do this, this is what you'll get. And my first video got 352,000 views and 3,000 new followers. Wow. And that's insane. Yeah, it's crazy. It's still getting, you know, likes, comments, shares today. Um, but yeah, I think it's about this process of reverse engineering what's already working. And the way I thought about this was like, you know, these creators have, you know, big budgets already investing. They've done the testing before, they've failed, and they've iterated and improved. And so for me, I'm leveraging all of that past knowledge and experience, and I'm starting from where they're starting and where they are today versus me going through the same challenges and problems and landing in the same spot, like, which might be 2 years down the line. So I'm like leveraging I guess the public data that's available combined with my own understanding of how algorithms work to get to outcomes more easily.

Before, you made a comment about competitive distance. How should people look at their competitors in a sense of distance? I want to better understand what you mean by that.

Yeah. So I think that imagine you're an investor and you're trying to figure out who to invest in in your space. There's like your company, your competitors' companies, And you need a universal set of metrics to objectively compare all the businesses. That's what you should imagine. Build a dashboard that means you're competing on the metrics that a neutral party would look at and they'll decide which company to invest in based on who is performing the best, or a challenge that they needed more capital to outperform. And I think that's really important because sometimes people choose metrics to make themselves look good versus the metrics that are objectively the way to decide who the best company is. And so, you know, when I think about this, I'd be like, okay, obviously there's universal metrics for every company, like revenue, profit, OpEx, like the operating expenses of your company, like, you know, headcount, etc. And, you know, so these are kind of universal. And then if you start thinking about your category, it's like, okay, um, there's like certain, you know, sub-verticals inside your niche, you know, or sub-niches inside your, your type of business. Like if it's in, you know, you're a financial planning business, like there's different arms of that and like, you know, do you compete in this sector and perform better than other businesses? So you start breaking out these kind of markets, I guess, or segments of customers and trying to use data from third-party tools like whether it be, you know, Semrush does this pretty well, SimilarWeb, to try and understand where you objectively sit against your competitive set. And this becomes really useful data because you look at that and you're like, okay, well, they overindex in that category. Should we go and attack that or should we go to like a blue ocean, like somewhere with like less competition that, you know, we can kind of enter that first, win that kind of area. So you've got to make these strategic calls. And if you're going to go after the red ocean where it's more competitive, you've got to have a pretty good reason to go after that. You've got to genuinely believe that you can outperform on the variables that matter towards success in that. And again, going back to what we spoke about, is it a price-based thing? Is it, you know, a business model that's disruptive? Are you just better at selling or you have a better service or a better product? So it's like The same fundamentals, but I think that's the objective measure that I look at is this scoreboard that is, it's not there to fluff your feathers, right? It's there to objectively determine who's a winner.

You have an idea on how to build a moat around a business. You intend to spend so much that copying you would break the other company. Can you explain what you mean by this?

Yeah, I think for me it's about spotting Like where compounding is going to give you the most ridiculous competitive advantage. So I remember when it came to content production, it was absurd to go and produce and publish 180 articles a day when your competitors are maybe doing 3 or 4 a month. Can you imagine? That is just crazy, right?

Yeah.

But the way I looked at it, I was like, well, if I do this, I'm going to become the Wikipedia of personal finance. And Wikipedia is pretty popular, so I'm going to go on this path. And literally, the— I'll stop when there's nothing else to write about, and then I'll move on to the next thing and I'll write about that. And I just continuously did that to a point where Finder literally had over 100 categories that we wrote about. We literally were constantly testing the boundaries, like, of where we could get more traffic and help people compare products. You know, it got to a point where we'd finished personal finance, like insurance, home loans, like everything was done and we're like, let's enter retail. And I think that retail— Wait, wait.

When you said finished, how many articles are we talking about?

Dude, like at its peak, we had around 27,000 articles in Australia.

You had 27,000 articles that you'd written?

Written pre-AI, right?

Pre-AI.

Pre-AI. And maintained for years globally, about 50,000 articles. Yeah.

Jeez.

Okay. There's a lot. And, you know, so we were like, okay, if we go to retail, retail is kind of cool because sometimes people compare a financial product and switch every 5 to 7 years. But people making decisions every single day around like which dishwasher should I buy, which LCD monitor is the best one. And my thinking was like, if we become relevant in day-to-day decisions for people, We're going to become the brand that's most trusted, that they'll think about and use Finder for all comparisons. So we built out this retail awards section and the goal was like, we want to be the sticker on the side of the toaster at JB Hi-Fi where it's like the blue logo or like on the pack of meat at Coles or whatever. And it was really in service of becoming the biggest brand because we felt that if we build a brand around reviews and ratings of products, we become the most trusted authority on comparison and choosing products in Australia. So we went and did that and we built out this awards program, which, you know, for me, I'm really proud of because we don't charge for our awards and our competitors do. And I remember at the time, you know, really the goal was like, and like reverse engineering the pattern is like, again, this consistent thing is like you'd see billboards with a competitor's award on there, like, so, you know, most awarded bank and like So I have to create an award to get on the billboard as like Finder needs an award program to literally be one of those badges on the billboard or in someone's TV ad or on their homepage.

Or also I think of like our international audience might understand this, but Budget Direct have a billboard up at the moment and I think they have like 3 or 4 Canstar badges on their billboard. You're talking about how do I do the equivalent thing on big billboards?

Exactly. Yeah. And so like, how do you be— this is match and exceed in action. It's like, Well, to exceed on this is we're not charging for our awards. We're going to do them more frequently and we're going to have more categories. And our criteria for choosing is going to be better and we're going to have a better methodology. And we literally did that on every front and now have, in my view, I think it's— and we also objectively had it reviewed that we became the largest awards program in Australia. I'm not sure of the current status. It's been about 9, 12 months or so since I've looked at that. But That was a multi-year campaign to get to that outcome. And we knew that if we built an awards program, we'd enter more departments inside a bank. Other departments that cared about brand and product marketing would be like, okay, we want a Finder award. So how do we construct a better product? Let's start engaging with Finder more, understand how the comparisons work. And so it just became this thing that greased the wheels. If we go back to the very beginning of Finder, when I was talking about earning links when others were buying links, Those links we got from the bank websites became some of the most powerful links to our domain. You cannot buy that. You have to go and construct the most trusted awards program in the country to get to that outcome. It is doing the hard thing scalably, but starting off doing it in the most grindy way possible is challenging and you need to figure it out. So how do you create an awards program? It's leveraging all the bits and pieces and the assets that we've built over the years. It's a panel that we go and research and kind of figure out, okay, who are the best experts in the country that can help us build an objective methodology? How can we rate these products continuously on the same criteria and build a scoring system? How can we ensure that we have enough of the products in Australia so we have more products per awards category than our competitors so that on every measure, if a brand is looking at our awards program, they're going to say Finder is better. And that's what we set out to do. And Yeah, man, it's just going long is literally like, you know, it made no sense. People were like, why are you investing so much money into this awards program? And it took years and years and years before it got to this position where we were the most trusted. But, you know, that compounding investment, we can now say that, you know, people go into Google and they type in, you know, Finder Award credit cards, Finder Award. They've come to know that it's a stamp of authority and trust. And yeah, that was the goal.

You say the more obvious your success is, the more fragile it becomes.

Yep.

Why?

My wife has been offered twice to get press about her company in one of the most prestigious publications in Australia. And both times I've said, we should not do this. Most people would be frothing for that. And I was like, you know what? I don't think it's worth it because Because you're just highlighting that you found a really good niche that your company does well. And it's got all these other facets that I think would just bring unnecessary attention to what you're doing. And yeah, so from my perspective, I just don't think it's about flaunting success. Finder was fascinating. We had all these subdomains, or subdomains, we had all these separate domains. So creditcardfinder.com, savingsaccountfinder.com, They're all separate. And what's interesting about that is it was very patternless and stealth because on a report, if you were a bank or an insurance company or one of our competitors and you probably have more budget than us to pay for analytics software, you would see who our top referrers were. And we'd always be in isolation as separate domains in the mix. But when you combine them all, we actually were the biggest player. But nobody realised that until we consolidated under finder.com.au. And we became the brand out of nowhere. We literally was like, yonk, took all the domains together, launched it all up into Finder and started smashing TV ads about, you know, our domain name, which is like finder.com.au. And like it became this earworm which, um, drove so much of our success. It's like, and like, why do you sing out a jingle that's your domain name is also interesting, right? Like, I'm just trying to thread the needle between a whole bunch of things here, but like, well, the behavior we wanted was people going to Google, typing in finder.com.au, And if you type that in, you're going to see our domain name there at position 1 because, you know, we rank for our own domain. But you're creating type-in traffic for a brand. Type-in traffic is effectively people wanting that brand. So if you go relative to other brands in market, we are more wanted and in demand than other brands. The halo effect of that is that our rankings across all of our commercial keywords started improving, and that was That was the goal of the brand advertising, was to artificially boost our demand and improve our organic rankings. So everything in the end was in service of this machine we had built, and it was just another variable we hadn't tried to kind of optimise for yet. But it became an earworm for Australians and is something that's very powerful for our marketing.

I think it's so powerful what you say there because obviously you're building a jingle into the brand. that has a catchphrase attached to it. But the mechanism is if we could just get the viewer to type this in more frequently, we're going to rank above our competitors, therefore we're going to win.

Yeah.

When you're talking about being patentless and having stealth, what are some other things that companies often forget about the power of being or having stealth? And it does seem counterintuitive to then getting attention in the market, or do you see them as separate?

No, I think that, yeah, like just playing like a game where you like keep your heads down, like you keep pushing and you kind of get to this position that like, I think you should claim your success off the bat, like at some point because there is value in doing that. It's like, you know, we are now the biggest or we've had this growth, but it's at a point where you've got enough competitive distance by the time you make the claim that if someone were to pivot and try and react to the fact that you'd had the success, It'd be so hard for them because you've got so much momentum. So for me, I think that's important versus calling it early and saying like, this is what we're about to do. You've not even laid the first brick. Like, I just genuinely believe it's about building this momentum and distance first before you go and stake that claim.

How do you tell your team something is proven and that you just want them to execute it versus this is an experiment, expect it to be ugly? And how can those 2 different scenarios play out?

Sorry, I'm a firm believer in a tested and proven blueprint that's challenged by innovation. And what I mean by that is like, look, it may have been working up until now and it's going to continue working, but if you've got an idea on how to do it better, let's create space for that experiment. And if the data tells us that it is going to outperform what we're doing right now, then let's incorporate that into the blueprint. Let's don't, you know, not kind of create a fork in the road where you've got the experiment becomes this other blueprint and you've got 2 challenges out there. But, you know, and the reason why I'm so bullish on turning the experiment back into a blueprint So standardization is a prerequisite to automation. If you can get to a standard, there's a clear way to have a brief for technology to be built, and technology is the ultimate way to compound and have systems really just create massive scale for you. My role, when I mentioned that I ran product, tech, growth, and operations, often what I was seeking to do was build software that would give our team a competitive advantage. So As an example, like there was this key piece of software which allowed us to enter new categories more quickly. Up until that point, if you wanted to do a new comparison, it would take 2 to 3 months because you brief an engineer, you kind of map out the schema, and it would just take forever and you'd like wait in the queue. But I realized that with every new category launch, we had growth. So instead I was like, how can we make this so that if people want a new category on Finder, they can do it themselves? And so we built the tech to do that. And if you're non-technical, like not an engineer, It needed to be self-service technology that you could jump in and build out that new comparison yourself. And we did that. And that allows Finder to expand not only into hundreds of categories in Australia, but to expand internationally and have the technology not be a limiter towards our growth.

When you think about what it means to bootstrap a business, what are the few things that someone should have in their mind as they're about to set out on a journey of trying to build something with little to nothing? to be able to develop that idea or that plan?

Yeah, well, I think firstly you can sell something before it exists. Honestly, like there's nothing stopping you from having a conversation and going, hey, I can help you with this thing.

Most people would disagree with that. You're saying it's okay to sell something before it exists?

Yeah. Well, think about Kickstarter, right? And even in e-com it works, right? It's like I've got this concept of a thing, give me some money and maybe I'll be able to ship it to you in like 6 months' time. So like that's an example in e-com, but imagine like you you're like about to go and build a website for someone, or you want to go and help them with, I don't know, like a service that you're considering launching. Um, I'm a firm believer that you can sell it before you go and have to build it. And I think the reason why I like that is like you can waste a lot of time building something if you don't know how to sell it, you don't know how to market it, you're just gonna be literally, you know, wasting energy. So yeah, that's my first thing. The second is that I think that most people should just start and just stop overthinking it. And that often looks like just having a crack and putting that first thing live, the first landing page, the first reel, the first whatever it is. Because once you've done the first, I think the next question is like, when can you do the next? And like compounding over time, those, those things just stack up. Like, genuinely, like I was talking to someone last night and they were telling me, you know, I've been working in AI for 12 months And until I launched my dedicated Instagram account on AI, no one approached me about AI consultancy. And it literally took 3 reels and then they had a flood of demand coming to them. So I feel like for me it's like it's just about staying at it. But, you know, bootstrapping is, is just kind of like you ultimately need to find ways to generate the revenue you need to reinvest into the company. So, you know, I coach a lot of startups and the thing that I often tell them is like, I think you should generate, you know, even if you're a SaaS, you should try and find a way to generate revenue through a service. So offer a manual way of doing that thing and just use technology to kind of augment it and make it quick to deliver it. But it doesn't need to be self-service. It can be something that exists and people are paying for an outcome. They're not paying for a login and like, you know, it to be this, you know, software that just exists without your support. So I think that some of the best SaaS that I've seen more recently launch are almost like service as a software where conceptually you're selling a service that's backed by software. And then eventually people can log in and use it, but they don't need to do that in the beginning. So yeah, from my standpoint, selling a service upfront is a great way to bootstrap.

I see what you're saying. So that, yeah, a lot of people are getting into the SaaS space, but they're waiting until their product is perfect and fully manufactured before they go live.

Yeah.

You're saying that you're going to have a unique advantage if you truly want to be a bootstrapper to try to find a way to get the cash to come in as soon as possible.

Totally. And then also it informs your product, like what's working, what's not, because you're putting in the hands of people before kind of simulating all the ways that this product could be used. or might be used versus one real customer and building the software around the problems that they're trying to solve and the feedback they have. Right.

And in their mind, they're not paying you for the software, they're paying you for the service.

Totally.

And then they'll bear with bad software in the interim.

Well, and they might even be more bought into the process, a bit more connected because they're helping mould the product. And that's pretty cool. It's an experience that you can offer that customer that is pretty rare.

I saw a stat somewhere that was showing that the amount of products that are entering the market right now at such a high velocity that there's not enough people to adopt these platforms. What are some other things people can do around their SaaS or their technology to scapegoat or stay away from being obsolete in a market where there's a tremendous amount of new products coming out every day?

Yeah, well, I think that SaaS is a fast-moving space right now. Like you mentioned, personal brands really matter. And I think that audience that you can develop to be a distribution channel also matters. And in my view, the most important thing there is the ability to pivot as things change. Like, you just literally, you never know when Anthropic is going to enter your industry and be like, okay, we've got Claude this, Claude that, right? And I think that if you can build customer love through connection, through them being an audience to your content, that's a great opportunity to be able to pivot and kind of take those customers on a journey to where you're ultimately wanting to go. And yeah, I've just seen some great brands do that recently.

When you think about customer love, could you explain what you mean by this? A lot of people try to just go straight for the close or, or the sale or the adoption of the software. But I think trying to build a connection with an audience that actually truly loves what you do is a bit of a different thing. Could you, could you make that distinction?

Yeah, on Personal Branders Club, I, I watched, um, when Daniel Priestley was talking about this, and he was saying that for someone to become like a super fan, they need to watch 200 hours of your content. And I think that's probably an example here where people have gone through that journey, they've watched so much of your content that they just want to see you win because they're in your world, right? And, um, Yeah, I think that, you know, founder-led content is just this thing that's untapped. A lot of people, you know, release a SaaS and it's like expect for it to succeed on its own. And that's a tough battle. Like when there's like literally you're in this situation where code is becoming commoditized, anyone can release the same thing. So you need to figure out on like how you're going to compete. And I think the best way to compete in the beginning is by building connection with your audience so that people give you a chance and just want to to back you to see you succeed.

What is it about people tapping into story that you think can act as a mechanism for them to want to buy something?

I think story is a vehicle for a message to kind of pass through time and to be shared with others more easily. If you kind of just led with marketing and kind of ads and without story, I think it's tough because people are kind of fed all this information in their feed every single day and they forget things. But it's hard to forget story. Story really impacts you. It's something that, you know, generationally, like, we've had, you know, story from, you know, great-grandparents and grandparents and religion and all these things that, like, really story we just know is this very powerful way to get a message across. So I think that, um, you know, sharing publicly the journey that you're doing and building in public is a great little hack where you're able to kind of do something and it's low risk because you're taking people through all those the turmoils, all the success. And I think just, it's like a mini Netflix series, but it's living out through your Instagram account. And I just think that's an epic thing to do.

Very cool. Out of these 8 principles, which one do you think people most underestimate?

I think it's match and exceed. I genuinely believe that people think it's enough just to match what the competitors are doing. But if you just match what your competitors are doing, I just I just think that's just, that's tough to have margin. It's tough to have success because exceeding is what it takes to really get to massive success. And it looks like obsession, honestly. It looks like finding a way to build that better creative, to, you know, obsess on your customer acquisition funnel. Like, it just, yeah, you've got to find and honestly probably isolate each variable one by one and exceed on each and every one of them. Starting matching is okay. But you need to end the game by exceeding.

Hmm. It brings to mind a brand I've seen recently. Have you seen the brand Nothing?

Which one's that?

It's a phone brand.

Oh yeah. Yeah, I saw the Kumar Method, uh, he did. Is it a UK-based phone brand? Yeah, yeah, that's right.

It's just really interesting where, where people were, um, attacking him based on the fact that he can't do all the same things an iPhone can, having the counterargument about, hey, This is a small company and I'm a founder that's bootstrapping this and it's still pretty cool. When you think about match and exceed, does it always have to be a superior product or could it be a superior story or a more endearing founder or a more exciting adventure that the founder's going on? Like, are there other things you could leverage?

Absolutely. I just genuinely believe that there's many variables at play and often it just is about brand preference. And brand preference is not always about being the best product. It's just like, you know, the product could be inferior in some way, shape, or form, but they just care what the company stands for.

Yeah.

You know, they care what the founder stands for, or like, you know, the founder is just cooler, or like, you know, is just someone they can relate to. I just think that, you know, we, you know, we're interesting creatures and we're driven by, you know, so many different things. And it's just not an— it's not an objective game. Like, if it was, then branding wouldn't exist, right? I think I think branding is the ultimate game that we're playing here.

What is it that you think that people mainly connect with when it comes to brands?

If there are a few ingredients, people want brands to be a reflection of themselves, the ambition they have for their own identity. And we're billions of people on this planet, and I just think people want ways to kind of express themselves through the brands they align with. And it's like the way they dress, the products they choose, the Like everything is ultimately a reflection of who they are. And yeah, that's, that's what I think is happening when people are choosing one brand over another.

Jeremy, one last question we ask everyone on the show is that, you know, as a guy who runs an agency and is obsessed with people who take agency, we named the show Agency. What's your definition of what agency means to you?

I think agency is owning the outcome. And realizing that there's no one in your way but yourself. And I genuinely believe that most outcomes can be made possible by reverse engineering the inputs required to get to the output and the outcome you want. So like, I live by this and I always have, and I don't know why, but it's just something that's just constantly driven me. Like, I feel like it might start from when I was, you know, a young guy. Like, you know, my parents were migrants, and I just feel like You know, my dad also started a business when I was, you know, a young guy as well. I feel like these things like kind of mold you. And, um, you know, if you kind of set up in such a way where like everything you get in your life was off the back of your own push and your own effort, I think you come to know that, um, that's what's required by default. And I think when you can see enough times that when you persist at the pursuit of achieving a goal. And when you kind of carefully consider the inputs genuinely, these things can be possible. So that's how I think about agency.

Jeremy, thank you so much for giving us your time. I appreciate you, brother, and I look forward to having you back in the future.

Thanks for having me.