#260 Jeremy Cabral - How Finder Found Success

Hello legends, today I catch up with my good friend and Cub member, Jeremy Cabral, the co-founder and COO of $600 million tech, fintech and comparison website finder.com. Jeremy is one of Australia's most quietly influential founders. He's a growth hacking and operation automation expert that took finder from a simple blog to over $100 million in annual revenue and serving over 10 million people every year. In this episode, we discuss AI agents, SEO trends, and growth hacks. He's a great friend of mine and one of the smartest people I know. Enjoy the show. It is hard to believe that you've actually never been on the podcast before.

Dude, never been invited.

I know.

Crazy.

It's actually so rude of me.

It's an honor to be here, brother.

Well, it's an honor to have you here. In fact, I tell everybody, like all my Cub friends, I tell them all that you are like one of my great mentors, particularly in the technology world. Ever since we launched Boa, I'm always calling you, harassing you, asking questions, asking for things. So no, it's such a— I actually am dumbfounded how we haven't had you on, but—

Well, I'm pumped to be here, dude. Thank you.

Now, do you wanna keep— You're one of kind of Australia's most, I guess, quiet, ultra-successful tech entrepreneurs. Like, you've never really been at the forefront, like, doing the personal branding thing and getting out there. You've always been in the back engine building finder.com, which is one of Australia's most successful tech companies. Do you want to just give, uh, give us a bit of a, uh, just explain kind of how you got involved in Finder, at what stage, and kind of what your journey was there?

Yeah, so for me, I actually, how I originally met Fred, we were exchanging a couple of tweets. He put out a tweet which was, should I get the iPhone or the Nokia N95? And I'd literally gotten the first iPhone that came out in Australia and was like, dude, this thing's a game changer. So we went and caught up at one of the marketing conferences and basically I think we were chatting about one of his existing businesses which had been sold, and then a couple of minutes in, we're like, nah, screw that, I've got this new idea, which is effectively Finder. And yeah, we just talked about how we wanted to take the traffic back from the Yanks and like, you know, we need some bigger websites here in Australia, so on. And for me, I had, you know, cut my teeth in SEO with my parents' company and had, I think, good strong academic ability, but I really wanted to test myself in one of the most competitive industries I could. So in meeting Fred, He gave me a couple of challenges. He's like, mate, give me a plan for how we can turn Credit Card Finder around in the next 24 hours. And I basically, I don't think I slept that night, went through the night, prepared a bit of a proposal, went off to uni and yeah, he read it and was like, yeah, all right, go live with it. And a couple weeks later I got the results we were looking for and said, mate, come on board, let's get this thing done. And so yeah, joined as a co-founder and helped kick it all off back in '09.

And so what was the premise of Finder? What was the concept and business model originally?

Yeah, look, we essentially compare financial products and we send a referral of a new customer onto the banks, insurers, whatever it might be. And we get some commission in return. It's a free service and we think that education is really critical for us. So we focus on building all these guides and tools that help people choose better products. And so, yeah, in developing Finder, we spent, such a huge amount of time on education and building out the blog content. And the really interesting thing is nobody really was doing it back then. And the other crazy thing is that we built Finder on WordPress, which is wild. And so, we've got this Frankenstein WordPress where originally, I remember hand editing every single page on Finder to add all the rates and tables and all that sort of stuff. And then about 6 months in, having a chat with Fred and Frank, I was like, "Dudes, we need some database or something because this is wild." So, it's not on—

WordPress anymore, is it?

Or is it still— Technically it is, the blog section is, but we built our own customer applications and all the text's largely separate. It's just more that how you see it on the website, the content itself, is based on WordPress.

But so essentially you guys are kind of like a— you're a comparison website that educates people looking for financial products and to help them choose the product that's best for them, and then they choose that product the— obviously the lead goes to whichever financial institution that is, and that financial institution pays you guys. But it's a great service because you're not promoting any one financial institution. You're actually giving the client as much information as they can, or at least the important information they need to choose the best one for them. So it's really a win for everybody. Win for you guys, win for the client, and win for the financial institution.

100%. And honestly, we invest so much time trying to make sure we cover as much of the market as possible on the platform. And I think we brought a lot of competition to the space in Australia. We really have seen, and we probably should share more about it, but the amount of competition we've brought has really improved financial products in the market. You know, banks and insurers and so on are really looking at the data on our platform and trying to understand how can we do better, how can we acquire more customers. And we kind of help them develop constructs for these products and saying like, look, if you want to have a market-leading product, this is what it looks like. Mm-hmm. Nobody has that product out there right now. So, if you can work with us and you develop that product, I think you'd do well on the platform. So, we do a lot behind the scenes to really make sure that we're increasing competition in the space here in Australia and I think it's quite effective.

Yeah, but essentially it's just a giant SEO company. So, you have to create content, put it out onto the internet. When people search for specific topics, your content comes up, takes them to your website and your website becomes the lead funnel to then a lot of other big companies?

Yeah, it's— I think we have a lot of channels. Um, SEO is critical, you know, in those early days it really allowed us to build a strong, um, base of traffic for the site. Um, but yeah, for us, we're a marketplace, we obviously need traffic and a lot of people using the platform to have the scale we want in order to attract the partners onto the platform. And we've been fortunate enough to build out a whole bunch of channels that have been very successful for us, but Yeah, in the early days, certainly Fred and I really jammed on the SEO strategies and developed, I think, some pretty cool stuff. Uh, it took probably 10 years before some of our competitors even caught up on some of the strategies we were developing. So, um, yeah, it's a fun game, man.

And so it— give us insight into those strategies. So like, what were the strategies that worked in the past to get people to your website, and what are the current trends? Like, what are the current things people could be doing? Because like I mean, me and you spoke about this yesterday. Everybody wants more traffic to their website. Like when Kaba has people come to their website, to our website, they're always our highest quality leads or potential members that submit because they've been on our website, they've looked. So getting people to your website is essential. You guys mastered getting people to your website, although that kind of has changed, like the environment to how you do it has changed. So what strategies work towards getting people to your website back then and what are the strategies now that are currently working? Because that space has changed dramatically. Yeah.

Yeah. So, I still remember sitting at a desk in my studio apartment. I think it was like a $35 glass desk and punching out these articles every day and just going like, this is never going to scale. We're never going to grow. This just can't be. And I remember looking at one of our competitors at the time. I think they had about 50-odd staff and going, I've got to change the game. And so, what I did was I read 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss, and he spoke a lot about VAs and how you can scale your business. And I spent the next couple of weeks effectively trialing delegating tasks. And what I was looking to do is really unitize the work that we were doing on a daily basis and try to figure out how could I get it done without me doing it myself. And it was very successful. I think I had two streams of work running side by side. The first was like, I guess, the administration of what I was doing and, you know, things like publishing the content, adding it to the website, updating it, and so on. Monitoring competitors. And the second stream was about writing. And so, I remember I found a freelance writer in Queensland and I was like, hey, can you write this content? And she was like, yeah, awesome. She was really fast, super responsive, 24/7. And let's be real, we were 24/7. And I basically helped her change her business from being a freelance writer to an agency. So, I said, okay, cool. I love your writing. I love your speed and communication. I need you to find other writers. And it got to a point where we were publishing over 180 new articles a day manually, mainly human-written articles. And I remember we even had someone that literally their only job was to copy-paste from Google Docs into WordPress so I could go in there and press publish. And I had— I legit got RSI from just doing that continuously every day. Like, it was insane. Um, and yeah, so I think what we did was we just set a different bar. Like, I remember going to every single page of search results in Australia going, I'm going to be the Wikipedia of comparison, like cover every single topic you can imagine. And we went to like, I remember like page 100 of Google or something like that and going, there's nothing left. I've consumed all the content we have here in Australia. And then going to websites like in Germany, UK, US, Canada, you name it, and translating them, trying to find new concepts. And literally that was the game. I remember watching this video, um, an early Google engineer, Matt Cutts, he spoke about this Japanese arcade game called Katamari Damacy. And essentially what he was talking about is like, how do you roll up topics that are nearby to your website in that relevancy standpoint? And as you write about each topic, it helps you expand in your authority and have all these kind of tangential topics around. So, I was like, alright, if this engineer is obsessed with this game, I'm going to be obsessed about it. And I created a principle internally called Katamari. And what we wanted to do was ensure that we were absorbing topics near to Finder and growing it continuously. And so, we did that and it was a key growth strategy for us, dude. Literally, there was nothing left to write about. And then from there, like, you know, the, I guess the genius in what we did is we found a way to develop a larger scale or volume that we could send to our partners. And the early innovation was coming up with the idea of how do we execute the inclusion of a comparison table inside a piece of content. And so we use something called ExecPHP. I remember very specifically what it was. And because we were on WordPress and we had this PHP application which would allow us to show comparison tables on a page, we took that and we were able to include a comparison table on every single blog that we had. And so in all scenarios, if we ranked more highly than our competitors and we had more pages, more traffic, we would always be able to send more leads onto our partners. And that was the, I guess, the secret to how we scaled so much because we just had this infinite amount of volume we could send through, and that was massive for us.

And so how could companies today do that for themselves? So let's say today I wanted to do that same strategy for Cubs. So it doesn't matter what you typed in, in anything to do with anything to do with Cubs, we're popping up multiple different pages, multiple different angles. How could a company do that?

I'm not sure what the timestamp is. It must be 3 minutes in, but I'm going to talk a little bit about AI. So I think it's easier than ever to do some of the things I'm talking about. Actually, what's really fascinating is I had a conversation the other day. That piece, working with that virtual assistant that was able to take my tasks and really write up standard operating procedures and do those continuously each day, I think that is more available to anybody today than ever in terms of a concept using AI to do some of those steps. Bringing automation into your business. So for me, I think it's always a simple game firstly, um, and it's about just doing the same thing, the same boring thing over and over again, but it's going to compound over time. So it's not too late to start in SEO, and I know it's adapting and everything's changing. I'm sure we'll talk about that today, but I think it just starts with understanding how your customers are trying to solve the problems they're trying to solve, how they're searching for it, What are the things they want to read about to get more confident in choosing a service or a product that you're trying to sell? There's a bunch of tools that can help you out with that. But honestly, just go and sit down with a bunch of customers, ask some questions, better understand them. If they can agree to have that conversation transcribed, grab those transcriptions, put them into whether it's ChatGPT, whatever you want to use, and draw out content ideas, things that haven't been written about before. Yeah. But also, if it's been written about before, don't even try to publish it unless it's better than what's out there. There's no point. You need to set a baseline that is always ensuring that you're matching and exceeding what's out there in the market.

Okay, so you've got to look at content topics, search around those topics. If you don't find what you want to find or what you want to create, then you know there's a gap in the content and you can actually create something for that.

Yeah, 100%.

So for example, like, if I went— you gave me an idea before— if I went and looked for like a webpage that compared all the different business communities in Australia to help you find one. Maybe you should do that on Finder, to help you find one or to help you choose one that was best for you. That doesn't exist. So I could create something like that so people could type business communities, it would pop up and be like, uh, you know, compare communities or something.

100%. And I think often people overthink things. And you know what? I think it's about getting the idea live as fast as possible. One of our values inside Finder is go live. So the moment you think of that concept, what's the next action you can take to validate that idea to see if it's worth investing into? I remember something really specific. We had pretty much expanded into all of the finance categories, insurance and so on. And we like, we want to eventually compare everything on Finder. That's the goal. And we got to this point, we're like, okay, retail, this is interesting. What could we possibly do in this space? And I remember we had a page which we published, which was on ASOS promo codes. It's like, all right, our goal is to publish this page. We published that one page, it ranked number 1 in Google. We're like, damn, that's pretty cool. And then it was like, what can we do next? The Iconic. And we did that. And we did about 2 or 3 of these pages. And then in 24 hours, we had enough of a signal where we were like, we're going to just double down on this thing. We hired into it and we basically built out Finder Shopping, where we became a massive referrer of new customers in the retail space in Australia.

So, But what was the content you were creating, and how do people— how does Google know to rank that first?

So the content we were creating was essentially these coupon codes where what we provided was— a lot of these sites were pretty crap. They would provide codes that didn't work, and our goal was to make sure that if we put a code live, it actually worked. We wanted to meet the intent of the customer, and so we put up these literally hand-curated pages which in a space where there was largely programmatic content, just nailed it. And so that really was a really amazing strategy. And then in terms of making it work, I think there's a whole bunch of factors that matter when it comes to SEO. Ultimately, it's a combination of having a really great landing page that meets intent, high quality, a website that's fast and got a good UX.

And can it be on your existing website?

Yeah.

So new content you post, or do you have to create new websites?

We chose to test the limits of where Finder could go topically. And so we launched Finder originally on the main domain. We've actually split it out since because Google's changed a little bit in terms of what it's looking for. They wanted like big brand signals and consolidating onto one domain. And so we went for that. And then the trend became, okay, splitting up websites into smaller websites is what ultimately happened. And some interesting case studies out there on big domains like about.com was this monster website and they split it up built a whole bunch of sub, um, areas of interest and actually did an incredible job doing over 50 million visits a month in the US across all their websites. So the game does change, but the principles are often the same.

And what's it like partnering with Google? Because essentially they're your partner. Like, essentially you've got to work your business in their world. Like, literally they own this digital world and you've got to live in it. How do you guys— because you're such a big website and obviously such a big content creator for Google, which is essentially all Google is, is a content client organization platform. And do they work closely with you guys, or do you have communication with them, or are you treated the same way like someone like we would be treated?

Yeah, uh, look, um, I'll start with one of the earliest principles I had was, as a Google engineer, what would I do? What would I think about this piece of content? What I think about this website? And that's how I started to build out Findr. I was like, if I'm looking at this, how would I design an algorithm to determine if this website should rank more highly than website A or B. And so I started just thinking like that continuously. Another one I always have is like, you know, as a customer, what would I think? How would I, you know, treat this information? But Google was historically pretty bad at communicating with webmasters. Actually, they didn't at all.

By absolute— Webmasters.

Yeah, I'd say webmasters. Yeah, that's actually the old language. They call it creators nowadays.

I way prefer webmaster.

Yeah. Webmaster is like the person employed to make sure you could update the website for the library or whatever it is. Because, man, websites for businesses weren't even a thing. But I got into the game pretty young. I was coding websites in, I think it was like 1999 or something like that. Bought this HTML Bible, 1,000 pages. Every Thursday night, I'd go to Dick Smith Electronics, tell my mum, please buy me the book, please buy me the book, please buy me the book. Eventually bought it, read it 3 times through and had no use for it. But yeah, my first website was actually building a website for the Sydney 2000 Olympics on a floppy disk and gave it to my sister for a university assignment. She, I think, got 99 out of 100.

No way.

But yeah, she nailed it. But yeah, look, I think webmasters— going back, webmasters typically had no communication from Google. I randomly met the webmaster— sorry, the Google engineer that was responsible for webmaster communication, rolling it out. And they came to Australia and the day they rolled it out, I just happened to be sitting across from them having a sandwich. And I was like, hey, I got some feedback for you. I think that you can improve things on that product you've just launched. I know you're over here in Sydney and enjoying your time, but do you mind if I kind of send you some ideas? And off the back of that, it was insane for Finder. Honestly, I think we just learned a lot.

Because he or she was telling you.

Well, yeah, I got a direct communication with a Google engineer. That was just unheard of, especially for a website of our size. I think if you're a bigger player, that's something that is probably not too uncommon, though they would never admit that. But yeah, the beginnings of that were terrible. You'd kind of see these websites which would just disappear overnight, and they would have no way of asking Google what to do and so on. So I think a lot of my success in this industry has been around building relationships early and having sustained connections over a long period of time. With SEO, I think I remember in 2007 I was on a forum called Threadwatch with this guy Rand Fishkin, and I had done like a mini thesis in uni. It was like a, what do you call, like for 4 units on e-marketing is what they called it. And I was like, hey dude, I'm trying to figure out this SEO space and I don't have definitions for some of these things. I think I'd written like a 20,000 or 30,000 word doc. I was like, what do you reckon? So we're exchanging DMs now, we call it, on the forum. But I'm still mates with Rand today. I just caught up with him in New York about a month ago. And at that moment he was blogging about SEO. And then he became one of the biggest SEO software companies on the planet, um, and a company called Moz, which he ultimately sold.

Um, it sounds like, you know, so do you personally, like, obviously being at the top of the tech world in Australia, have you met all the other big tech players?

Um, yeah, in Australia I would say, um, I've been fortunate enough to meet a bunch of people that have done incredibly well. Um, A different state. Sorry.

No, I was going to ask, what are— Do they all have something in common? Are they all just super computer-y or like, you know, what's their— What lessons have you learned from them?

Yeah, I think—

Who's the smartest person you've met?

I think I've met some incredibly smart people and they're all expert at very different things. I've really— I try to ensure that whenever I'm trying to learn something, I go deep. And so if I want to understand a topic, I'll speak to the author of the book. I'll read 2 or 3 books on the plane ride, literally don't even turn on my entertainment system, back to back, whatever it is on matrix organizations, land in Seattle and then go and speak to someone at GE because they've got like 9 levels of matrix in their organization. And so, yeah, I read up on something, I meet the author, try and understand why they wrote the book that way and challenge them on an area where I'm like, I didn't agree with that. And what's crazy is like they often go, you know what, if I could rewrite the book, I would have changed that section. But yeah, for me in Australia, I think probably one of the most well-known founders that I met was Scott Farquhar early on in about, I think, 2012, 2013. We're both training at the same gym together.

Was that before Atlassian was giant or were they giant at that point?

I think they raised from Accel maybe a year or so before, but they definitely weren't in like billion-dollar territory. But yeah, we used to just hang out at the same cafe after training. We had the same trainer. And I always had this thing like, you know, one of the most impactful books I ever read was Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.. And I wanted to have this exchange in abundance. It's like, I'm not going to even contact him, approach him, even though I see him sitting over there, unless I have something of value I can share with him. And so, I mentioned 4-Hour Workweek before and I had read the book. I went and met Tim Ferriss, had this chat with him. He'd been in Sydney for an event. I had done this— in the book, there was, I think the company was called Elance. Possibly, and then ultimately it's called Upwork nowadays. And so I was flying to the US and I was like, you know what, I'm going to go and meet with this company. So I met with the CEO of now Upwork and met with their executive team, went to their offices in Redwood in California, and I just wanted to go as deep as possible. And I was giving feedback to them on the platform and how to ensure that, you know, the success rate anytime you tried to hire a freelancer was Freelancer was improved. They loved all that. So, I came back to Sydney and I was like, all right, I'm sat across from Scott. I'm going to tell him about this concept I learned about called brain extension where basically every employee should have at least one or two virtual assistants working with them. And I think this would be of extreme value to him. So, I said to him, hey man, you give me some book recommendations lately and I just met the gentleman from Upwork. Would you be interested in chatting to him? He was like— Sorry, the company is called oDesk at the time. He's like, yep, sounds good. Introduce them. And I thought that at the time was actually a pretty significant introduction. In Australia, I think one of the most, I guess, unsaid things is that Finder had a pretty significant role in building out this large distributed team and the playbook of having a team that was offshore but ensuring they're effective and had a great culture around them. So, yeah, early on—

Wait, but how does this tie back into Scott Farquhar?

So, he— I introduced him into Upwork and oDesk and my idea was like, I think it's a key concept. No one's really doing offshore well. I knew he was doing some development in Vietnam, I think maybe at the time, but for—

Oh, so you introduced him to the concept of remote work?

I'm not sure. I think he would have probably been aware of it, but the CEO of Upwork as a connection was really what I was trying to give him the value of and the concept of brain extension. Like how do you have additional, you know, set of hands or a couple of people that can help you 24/7 to scale you.

And have you gotten to know him better now since that point?

I think it's interesting 'cause I talk about that exchange in abundance. I really value the advice he gave me early on. In 2013, he gave me all these books and I read them all.

What were the key lessons he taught you?

Yeah, for me, there's a book that he shared which was called Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish. That's a good book. Excellent book. And so Vern was in Sydney a couple of weeks later, I went and met him and I, you know, same thing. I was like, Vern, what about that chapter? I don't agree with that section. He was like, yeah, I would've changed it. And then I was like, okay, I wanna apply this framework for planning and company strategy inside Findr. So then I made sure a friend of Frank met him. So I organized for us to join his workshop happening the next week.

Vern?

Yeah, Vern's workshop. Oh, okay, cool. Yeah, yeah. I think it was like a, through the Growth Summit or one of those kind of groups. We all went in and that was how Finder ultimately started building out these strategic themes and these rocks and pillars are what we had to focus on. And Scott was really generous in sharing how he was planning forward with Atlassian. And he had this concept of a painted picture. The painted picture was effectively a very clear crystallization of how the company would look in a few years from now. Yeah. Down to the metric level. And I was like, man, this is nuts. I took that really seriously. So I shared back with him a vision of my future for Finder and also some personal things as well in there. And I remember writing back to him, I'm pretty sure on the date of the letter that I'd written, I was like, okay, so this is a letter to you in like, say, 2 years from now on where Finder's gonna be at and what I'm achieving personally. And I messaged him on that day and I sent through effectively a scorecard against my vision of the future of Finder. I was like, this was a crazy idea, nailed this one, far exceeded expectations here. But yeah, I shared that spreadsheet and he said something like, man, I don't think many people have ever taken that level of advice to the level that you did. And so congrats to you. And that was huge. I think for me it was a big thing. And I still am fortunate enough to connect with him occasionally. But again, on that exchange, you know, that's like a win-win for both parties. I— there was a really interesting scenario where, um, we both used to live in Piermont. I remember walking outside my house and I saw Scott. I had an Uber booked and Scott was walking past and he used to do this walk into the city, and I actually chose to go in my Uber instead of walk with him. I felt like I hadn't earned that conversation with him. Um, and yeah, so I, I honestly, I need to reconnect with him. I'm training for a marathon at the moment. I know Scott's massive into his fitness and health, so My plan is to complete the marathon and chat to him again later this year.

One thing it sounds like you're an expert in, like it keeps coming up anyway and it's been a huge part of your success, is you keep referencing like VAs and automating and things like that. Now you said something actually further on the conversation was like, how can I get this done without doing it myself? That question I think is pretty much just what business is.

Yeah.

You know, it's like how can I service thousands of people without serving them myself, without doing anything myself. And when you can say you've done that is when you've built a business, you know?

100%. And I think this is where people get it wrong. I think that you need to do it yourself first before you can scale and delegate.

I agree.

And I think it's Jason Fried from 37signals Basecamp. He wrote a book called Rework, and that's one of the lessons I got from the book is ultimately before you can effectively delegate, you need to do it yourself. And I think that's where as a founder, you really find the pieces of that process where you can innovate and have a competitive edge. So for me, the first point is like learning, going deep, going through that journey, chat to the authors, go to the conferences, read every book, listen to every podcast, and then find your clear position on that. And then break down where can I find the alpha in this? How can I do this better? What are the inventions that I can put into this process to do something better than any competitor trying to do the same thing?

Or exactly that, but with a question of how can I make my team's life better by improving this role? You know what I mean? So like, I'm doing this role as a salesperson or as a dev or as whatever it is. By me experiencing this role, what can— what changes and upgrades can I make that will make this role far more enjoyable, far easier, far more effective? Because then by do— that's what I think of as leading from the front. You know, you might not be in the front all the time in every role, but you've gone into that role, you've worked it alongside everyone else, you've seen what you can. You know, normally the entrepreneur has got that brain. They can— they're problem-solving. They're a problem-solving breed, if you will. You know, so they see like, um, okay, shit, this is horrible. We can do this. This is easy fix, blah, blah, blah. And entrepreneurs often make the impossible possible. So to what other people think, "Oh, you can't fix this. It's impossible." Someone like yourself is very possible. You're like, "No, that's not true. This is definitely— you can fix that and this is how we do it." But I think if you go into— it's a good exercise to go into a team member's role and to make that role better for them. And you can cycle that. You go do sales this quarter, you could do operations next quarter, you could do client services the quarter after. You can cycle it.

100%. And making the impossible possible is a phrase that's actually embroidered onto my jacket at Finder. We celebrate 10-year Finder-versaries by giving someone a bomber jacket and it's got this gold thread and the gold logo and all that sort of stuff on there. So I really resonate with that concept. For me, I love problem solving, man. And I think I'm, there's very few things that I'd be confidently able to say I'm good at it, but I think I've got a reputation around problem solving. Where I've— I just hate not getting to the result. I have to. I can't take a no. And so for me, yeah, I really— that really fires me up.

And a lot of it is around research. Like, you keep referencing, or you've got books in your head that you can reference in 2 seconds. You go fly to companies and meet with the author or meet with the company to discuss the topic of a book. Like, what's your process towards solving the big problems? Within your business?

Yeah, so I think immersion is the step, first step. I remember when I was trying to be the best at SEO, I read every single article in Google Reader, this old app, every single day. It was like at least 200 articles a day. I literally would click them all and read them all, and I'm like, there's nothing left to consume. And so let my brain do synthesis while I was sleeping and wake up, you know, better than the day before. And I think that's the thing, is like breaking down something into the repetitive tasks. They're boring, and don't overthink things. You just got to do the reps. And so, yeah, that's always been my approach. And that's, you know, I think there's incredible knowledge out there that's not even published. So, you need to meet people. You need to spend the time going to find those people. And they're not going to be easy to chat to. They're not going to just respond to a cold message. We're like, hey, whatever. No, like you've got to find a way to get their attention. I remember I was at a conference in Seattle and I had this idea. I was like, Okay, going back to that company Moz, it's called MozCon, this conference. We just, you know, send a whole bunch of people every year. And I was like, I want to meet as many speakers as possible this year. That's my goal because I want to build out my network so that, you know, in 5, 10 years from now, I'm not having to pay, you know, fees to work with their agencies. And I only want to speak with the founder. I only want to speak to the owner of that company, the person that had that spark in the beginning. So I was like, okay, cool. This thing called Whiteboard Fridays. So every Friday on the Moz blog, they would release a video and they had this famous whiteboard inside their offices in Seattle where you'd come in and you'd draw up a concept and probably 10-15 minute video, talk it through. And so I was like, all right, I'm going to check this out. And I actually found a bit of a loophole in this platform called Wistia where for whatever reason they had an exposed endpoint which told you how many views every single video on Wistia had. And I never publicly shared that, but basically got every video on Moz on their Vimeo account or Vimeo or Wistia, wherever it was. I think it was Wistia. And scraped out all the views. From there, I built a leaderboard of who had the most watched Moz Whiteboard Friday videos. And there's a lot of ego if you're a speaker on a circuit, right? So, I remember The conference was starting at 9 AM. I think I went to bed at 6:45 AM, slept for about 45 minutes, rolled in, barely could keep my eyes open, dropped a tweet as like, here's the most popular speakers from these videos or whatever it said. And I remember some of the speakers in the breaks would be like, dude, how did you do that? You're insane. And some of these people are now friends today. Will Reynolds was one of those guys and he actually—

Will Reynolds.

Has a very successful agency called Sear Interactive in the US in Philadelphia. I did the sleep hacking stuff last year and he responded to one of my tweets. It was like, man, like, why are you not drinking? I'm like, it's all good, man. I'm socially drinking now. Let's like chill. But then we exchanged some back and forth and he basically was the guy that convinced me to do a marathon. And so, that's a connection that, you know, probably I think it's like maybe 7 years ago I built, but you know.

But you have prioritised. Having the correct relationships. Like, you've got the right network around you, you— and not just that, but you actually learn from your network. That, that's really what it sounds like. The, um, the value that the people around you are giving you, it's, it's knowledge. You're taking inspiration from them, you're learning from them, you're implementing concepts, and you're going on a fucking marathon. Now I, I want to get into AI, um, because it's a, it's a huge tool towards solving problems, uh, in today's business, as well as, um, automating things, which is how you referenced it before. What are the, like, essential AI platforms or tools that you believe business owners should all either be using or at least be aware of?

Yeah, so the obvious one is ChatGPT, and I think that people should use it just continuously. I think it needs context. And so if you're in a meeting and you've got a transcription, make that normal. Tell your team in advance or the client you're meeting with or whoever it is, hey, is it okay I'm recording this? Yep, we're cool. From that, you've got transcripts that you can put into any platform. So ChatGPT is, I think, a base one. It just needs as much context as possible.

But how? So like everyone knows ChatGPT, but what are the unique ways or what are the ways you think people should be using ChatGPT that they may not be doing currently?

Yeah. So the worst thing you can do is just send a single-shot prompt and expect to get, you know, something better than a generic answer. Like ChatGPT isn't always right. I think that what it needs is grounding to give you unique responses that are extremely valuable. Grounding being uploading a file into that prompt, giving it clear instruction, providing it a template on how to respond. I think there's a whole bunch of things that you can easily do to improve the quality of the response. And most people aren't doing that at this point. So there's a cool feature called projects inside ChatGPT. Upload those files that you've got. It's a constant reference point for every single time it responds to your questions of it, essentially. So yeah, that would be as a baseline tool. ChatGPT is excellent, but I think there's a lot of exciting things coming down the line as well.

Like what? Like I've heard these AI assistants and bots and things like that. Are there any other AI tools that you're using?

Absolutely. So yeah, AI agents are insane. I think that ultimately the really interesting thing is with an AI agent, it's kind of similar to what I was talking about before in the beginning of Finder when I really broke down those repetitive tasks and I found people to go and do them on my behalf. With an AI agent, you're about to do the same thing. You've got to give it a job description, you've got to give it a goal, you've got to give it tools that it get, you know, to have access to. And so there are platforms out there, you know, an Aussie one called Relevance AI is pretty cool over in Surry Hills. You can check them out. Um, but I think that with AI, it's about starting, starting simply first. And a lot of people try and expect things of AI that you couldn't even expect a human to do consistently well. So yeah, the best advice I had was like, it's kind of like a junior employee where you're just onboarding them and they're going to get some things right, some things wrong. But the fact that they're still there and learning every day, that's how you should commit to your AI agents and when you're building them out. But, you know—

So an AI agent is just kind of like a bot that can do a repeated task for you, whatever that task may be.

Yeah, that's right. And the difference is there's kind of two things. There's AI agents for agentic workflows. So you give it a job description, a goal, access to tools,. And these AI agents are kind of like when you use ChatGPT, you ask questions, right? Whereas these AI agents can prompt themselves to do the next task. And so that's the really impressive thing about them. But then there's also AI automation workflows that are deterministic and more like an if that, then this, similar to Zapier, the tool which connects a whole bunch of software platforms. So with those, I think that's where people should start. And actually the best step you can do is just write down your processes. Because that's the pre-step to being able to use AI well. And I don't think a lot of companies do that well. And I think the more you can unitize it and get it down to a very clear task, like the less, like the more specific and not broad, the more it's compatible with building these workflows and using AI agents.

And yeah, so because when you, I mean, like when you give someone a job and need them to be successful, you gotta write down a very strict, basically operations pro— or at least process for that role. AI needs that but on steroids, really, because it's a ro— well, I don't want to call it a robot, but like, don't kill me, chat. Uh, but it's, it's a technology, so it needs to have very explicit operations, no, to— in order to function.

100%. And so the more precise, the more specific, the greater the, the success rate of that AI agent that you're going to be building.

I think— have you met these Relevance AI guys? I might organize a meeting with them.

Yeah, Jackie and, um, um, And Daniel, two of the founders, are, yeah, pretty close.

Good guys.

Yeah, great guys.

I might organize a meeting with them. Yeah, happy to make like— can you? That'd be awesome.

Yeah.

Um, something you talk about all the time, in fact I heard you talk about it at an event once, was, um, growth hacking or growth engines. And in your eyes, what is a growth engine?

A growth engine for me is something that you can do every single day in your company, and you know that with that input, you're going to get the output you want, which is growth. So it's really interesting. I think the most canonical example of this is Amazon. They've got this concept of a flywheel. There's like this back of a napkin drawing. If you type Amazon flywheel on Google, you'll see it. But the thing is, their flywheel is probably something that's relevant to any e-commerce business. If you literally took away the Amazon logo and put whatever brand at the top, it would be the same flywheel. But what was unique about Amazon is they broke down each of those parts of the flywheel. So, when you do this thing, it leads to the next step and so on. So, in their case, it was building traffic and a better customer experience led to more repeat users and lowering of costs as well. That was a key part of it. And selection, like Amazon's the A to Z of products. So, all these parts of their flywheel, but they took each part and they invented into it. So if you take traffic, actually we talked about Finder's model earlier, how do we ultimately generate revenue through referrals to partners? They invented the model of affiliate. They actually invented the model and they had, you probably wouldn't see it on the website.

Amazon did.

Amazon did, yeah. They basically built these little widgets that would go on blogs and it'd be like top books, top DVDs, whatever it was. And these blogs would send traffic into Amazon. So they built that model and so that solved their traffic problem. They also figured out early on how to ensure the pages they were publishing were getting traction on Google. They used to have this strategy of building up what they call product detail pages and to make sure they focus only on the right type of products, they ensured that it was, what was it? It was instead of just the number of product detail pages live, it was like the number of product detail pages live that are with demand, so people actually want the product, it's in stock and able to be delivered within 2 days free. And so that was the ultimate guiding metric for them. So yeah, they sold for traffic, for selection. If you look at the Wikipedia of Amazon acquisitions, it's— I love that Wikipedia. It basically goes through the companies they acquired early on, companies like IMDb, they acquired Goodreads, and these were basically ways to build out scale but also to add that unique information back into the Amazon platform.

But what you're saying is these were inputs that they knew resulted in growth.

Correct.

Is that so? Like in Amazon's case, we want to grow, what are inputs we can do to grow? We got to find those inputs. So like as a company, like how can we bring that to reality for the regular SME here in Australia?

Yeah.

Like you got to look at your business and what's the process? How do you actually build that flywheel or that growth engine?

Yeah, I think for me, I always start with studying your competitors. That's for me the same principle around learning something new. Everything out there is public, just about, right? And anything that's not, you can also get access to. Go and meet with ex-employees, go and meet with people that have intel on that business, maybe an agency that used to work with them. I think there's a lot of information you can get and those playbooks are largely repeatable. So I think that a lot of people try and obsess on doing something new that's never been done before. But you know what, sometimes it's about just doing the same boring thing every day at scale. And the way to do it at scale in a way that I think gives you that competitive edge is to build a culture around it being fun. Because like inside Finder, like one of our, I think the best things we ever did was we hired a whole bunch of graduates from the local universities in Sydney. And we all, you know, kind of were a similar age and they came on board. They're all really hungry, first job. But we just built this culture around like camaraderie and hustling hard. And I used to say to people like early on in Finder, I was like, man, I'd hate to compete with Finder. Like there's no chance you could. Like literally it was like a Spartan culture. Like it was, you know, we were small but mighty. It was insane. And I think from my standpoint, yeah, it's about, doing those things that, yeah, they're repetitive and maybe that's not where the fun's at, but make it fun.

But again, back to building out your growth wheel, I guess studying the market is the first thing you need to do. You need to study your competitors, but how do you actually choose what your growth wheel is? How do you actually build that wheel?

Yeah, so I think once you've done that reconnaissance and you've figured out exactly how these competitors are doing things, I always used to say this thing and I still do actually, it's If you're trying to build a self-driving car, hire someone that's had a crack at it before or done a very good job of it. I remember there's a very good example. Um, Apple was behind on AI, so they went and hired the head of AI from Google. So if you're trying to spin up a content team, who's done well in content in Australia? Well, definitely Finder. And if you look at some of the organizations out there, there's some great examples where some of the early hires were ex-Finder employees, and they've done an incredible job over those businesses. So For me, I think it's about isolating the input metric, that thing that you know when you repeatedly do it drives growth and finding people that are capable of doing that repeatedly at a high quality. Or as I said before, you're gonna have to figure out yourself and then break apart those little pieces and find a grad that can do one part, find somebody else that can do another. But you've gotta build a process and a workflow that when repeated gets success and results.

And so there can be multiple flywheels in the sense. It's not just one flywheel for the business. The business could have multiple flywheels because there's multiple inputs?

Definitely. I mean, every algorithm, every platform has these repeatable things that you need to be continuously striving to optimize for. I think the first and foremost is having the simplest view possible for your company. One flywheel.

For example, can you kind of talk like, can you create one, like a draft one for Boa right now?

Yeah.

Like to our listeners who don't know what Boa is, it's our digital networking platform that enables entrepreneurs across the country, thousands of them, to connect through local networking chapters. Um, incredible high-quality networking events in the major city and tons of digital advisory and events as well. So how could— like, what would be an example of that we could implement for Boa as a flywheel?

Yeah, so when I think of Boa, I think about what you're trying to tap into, which is the notification stream. So how do you get that? And I think that's interesting. So that's one part that comes to my mind. The second is connecting with other people and trying to get them into the platform so that when you're on the platform, you know the people you want to listen to or, you know, kind of see writing the messages are also on there. So one of the early hacks that Twitter used was ultimately connecting your contact list and getting them all, you know, invited into Twitter. And I think that would be a key strategy for BoA is like, how do you get your connections into the platform? And then how do you get them following topics of interest to them? So that's also important because—

Yeah.

You want to be able to get these notifications that are relevant and interesting to you daily so you're engaging, you want to tap into them to load up the app. So that's going to be important. So I think having that kind of base schema of topics that people can follow, um, and then you need to incentivize people to post. I think what's really interesting is when you think of platforms and how they had their early success, one— a story that comes to my mind is medium.com. So the founder of Medium, um, is Ev Williams, and he actually started Twitter as well. He's one of the co-founders. He's probably less popular than Jack. But what he solved for was the fact that a lot of tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley had no time to load up a WordPress and host their website or whatever, but he had these epic connections and he made it extremely easy for these people to post onto medium.com. And what that became was this sort of laddering thing where it's like, you know, if you've got these really famous tech people on there blogging and you knew that you could also blog at medium.com as well, there's an incentive for people to kind of associate with those individuals. So I think for Boa, for me, if you can find a way for influential people that can post regularly on the platform, whether that be, you know, mates of yours, connections of yours initially, that will give the signal that Boa users want to also post alongside that for the chance that one of these people might see their, their content, reply to them and comment. And maybe actually that's what you need to ask these people to do as well, is to interact with some of those messages. And I think that loop, it's like make it remarkable, something they'll remark about to their mates. They're like, oh my gosh, I was on Boa today, did this post, and a famous entrepreneur liked and commented. It's insane. And they responded to my DM. And I think that kind of effect eventually will have impact. So that's some, a few ideas at least.

I like the idea of like making something remarkable. Like one of the inputs could be like having a remarkable effect that then creates growth. You know what I mean? So like in any— like with Amazon, there were a lot of remarkable effects, like the speed of delivery, the cost of delivery, the ease of just buying whatever the fuck I want. Like, you know, so like any business owner can ask, like, how can my product actually be remarkable in comparison to the competition?

100%. I think, um, one of the things you're doing with Boa, which is an edge, is the fact that you have these events. People are connecting with people. Now that's amazing. I went to the launch for the app and I was like Man, some of those people since that event, you know, I've been hanging out with them so much since. The connections I got were incredible. And I think that that's something you offer, that real life in-person connection. Actually, I remember when Twitter was launching in Australia, I used to go to in-person meetups in Surry Hills and it was called Tweetups or something like that.

No way.

Seriously. And they were like, we were the early Twitter users in Sydney in whatever it was, 2008. And we all connected. And so, I think there's a playbook there that you're already following, which is key. I think The other thing for me is if you look at how some of these platforms have kicked off in the beginning, there's this a principle that always seems to be true. So for example, BuzzFeed, the way it cranked up its traffic early on is it got all the funny stuff from Reddit and posted it onto Facebook. It didn't even do anything creative. It just— The fact that the content didn't exist on that platform allowed it to post this viral content, which got more Facebook page followers for BuzzFeed, which ultimately allowed them to be a publication and have a website that they ultimately are today. But that was the first pre-step. If you think about Instagram, it had, you know, these photos that had filters, and those photos would post onto Facebook, and people like, how do I get that filter? That looks amazing. There's like, you know, remember those early— if you got everyone's early Instagram photos, these filters on the, on the, on the photos they had. And so I think the opportunity is to do a better job at networking with the Bower app than LinkedIn. and LinkedIn, let's be real, it's like Windows 95, it sucks. So the opportunity is how do you effectively harvest LinkedIn for new users and harvest LinkedIn for those connections? Because I don't think they're doing a good job. LinkedIn Groups sucks. So yeah, we could go on for days about this and I love the Bower app.

Yeah, no, I just wanted to get like a glimpse into your mind how it thinks about solving a particular problem. Now, we do have to wrap up soon. So I wanted to just finish with though, question, what were the things you did, you know, Finder's been incredibly successful. I think you did like a raise a couple years ago at a $600 million valuation. You're global as well. You've just expanded dramatically. And what were the things that you did at the start or in the earlier days that you think set you up for success?

Well, yeah, I think early on we've spoken about some of those things that were really important. We ultimately built an org chart around an algorithm. That was really important. And we broke down these roles. And I remember writing up that these roles did not exist in market. So convincing someone to come and work for you made no— they just were like, I don't know what you mean. Nobody had SEO in their job title in Finder, I think for about 13, 14 years. Yet we crushed it and we're one of the best SEO platforms in the country. So for me, I think that was important. And a little tweak we made when we wanted to hire editorial staff was like, okay, let's start hiring publishers and journalists and all this sort of stuff. And what we noticed is that they typically work for companies that had pretty poor business models, you know, ad impression-based business models and didn't pay well. So we found all this expertise and when it, you know, really drew out some of the best talent to come and work on the Finder platform as well. So the quality of the content improved But, you know, if you look back, like, those things were all important. But the thing that I feel we've done consistently is we ride waves. We don't let them crash on us. You know, we've always been able to capitalize on trends. I remember crypto, I think it was early 2017. I'd just gotten married. I was in New York on the subway and I saw these ads for Bitcoin and crypto exchanges. I was like, what is this stuff? I'd heard about crypto, you know, but not enough to, pay attention to it properly. But I was like, something's cooking up here. I think Bitcoin was probably $900 USD at the time. I actually gave a project to our US team and a few months later I decided to take it on as a personal project because I felt that the pace wasn't reflective of the trend that was building. I think a couple, you know, probably 4 or 5 months later I was up for about a few thousand dollars. And I, again, it was one of those scenarios where I went deep. I literally consumed everything I could on the topic, but The goal was, how do I capitalize on this trend? And whenever there's something new, there's more things to compare. And Finder has a culture around go live, and we do scale well. So I was like, we're going to build the best crypto education out there. And so we did. We literally— and nobody wrote about crypto. So how do you go and find someone that actually knows about crypto? I remember going to these events, and, um, there was one just before Christmas, and I met a couple of people I think it was over one of those networking hubs or something like that. And what happened was we connected, and then I remember Boxing Day, the price of Ripple was— and Bitcoin was exploding, and I just was like, I'm just going to contact these people to write content. That's it. And I remember hitting them up. I was like, I know it's Christmas, but can you write me an article? And those people did, and some of those articles got 250,000 views per article, which is insane. And we ultimately became one of the biggest referrers globally, I think in the top 10 globally, to crypto exchanges. Binance globally, we're a massive provider of new customers. And here in Australia, we're definitely the number one platform. So I think capitalizing on trends often looks like, you know, zigging when others are zagging. Um, and internally there was not much support for me working on crypto. People were complaining. They're like, what are you doing? Like, but you know, In the end, I think we scaled up from like 2 or 3 people working over that kind of summer to a few weeks later about 18. We literally just swarmed on it.

And did you guys become the biggest platform for crypto purchasing, or what did you— how did you position yourself?

The positioning is like anything else. It's like when there's all of this new information, you need to standardize it and structure it in a way to make sense for consumers. How do they choose which platform to go for? How do they decide, you know, What are the steps for buying Bitcoin? But like, these are all things people had no answer to. And I think Finder being a credible brand, highly trusted, we brought something to the space which was not present. And so that was a critical move for us. And so yeah, we focus on education like we always have, and that proved to be a very successful play. And we've done that probably 4 or 5 times over our history. And I think those waves each and every time have brought a lot of growth for us, but also a culturally defining— like, there were moments to find a culture, made it normal to chase something big and outrageous. And, um, yeah, I think, man, like, those are the things— it's like you're not going to get alignment on that necessarily, and it's like a founder-level move where you just make a commitment and you go for it. You swing big, and, um, sometimes they pay off, sometimes they don't. But certainly, um, I think for us in history, most of those have done pretty well for us.

I love it. We're gonna leave it there. If you want to get in contact with Jeremy, you can go to cub.club/podcast and find more key information about him there— tips, tricks, valuable content, book recommendations, favorite quotes, and all sorts of other things. If you want to catch up with Cub on socials, it's @clubunitedbusiness on Instagram. And we mentioned BOA, so you should check out BOA. It's boa.app is the website. Actually, I shouldn't even say the website, I should say the Instagram. What's the Instagram, Laura? Oh, the Instagram is also boa.app. Check it out on Instagram, it's also awesome. Jeremy, Jay, thank you so much for coming on today.

Thanks for having me, man. That was so much fun.

Awesome. Hope you enjoyed the show.