How Devin Bramhall helped Animalz scale from $1m to $16m ARR... by doing the unscalable
How Devin Bramhall helped Animalz scale from $1m to $16m ARR... by doing the unscalable
Devin Bramhall (00:02):
Doing unscalable stuff ended up being the things that helped us scale.
Peep Laja (00:09):
I'm Peep Laja. I don't do fluff. I don't do filler. I don't do emojis. What I do is study winners in B2B because I want to know how much is strategy, how much is luck, and how do they win? This week, Devin Bramhall, CEO of probably the best content marketing agency in the world, Animalz. The amount of competition they face is ridiculous. There are 500 content marketing agencies listed on G2 alone, and the industry is growing fast. So how did Animalz win in such a competitive landscape? In this episode, we'll learn all about their unusual strategies for growth.
Devin Bramhall (00:48):
I think that's a strategy, too, but one that people don't always think about.
Peep Laja (00:49):
Solving unique challenges when scaling a people business.
Devin Bramhall (00:52):
You come up with a perfect process and structure and all that, and then 50 people later it's broken again.
Peep Laja (00:59):
And hear a different take on thought leadership.
Devin Bramhall (01:01):
We're doing the opposite of the HubSpot approach, right? We're going in the other direction.
Peep Laja (01:05):
And I drop in thoughts of my own, as well. Let's get into it.
Peep Laja (01:11):
Devin, there is no shortage of content marketing agencies and content marketing freelancers and all these things. So if I wanted to outsource content, there's a million places to go. Yet you guys at Animalz, in six years, you're now at a hundred something people. So how'd you do it?
Devin Bramhall (01:29):
Yeah, so Walter founded the company in 2015.
Peep Laja (01:32):
That's the founder and ex-CEO, Walter Chen.
Devin Bramhall (01:36):
And he was really good at content marketing. That's how he grew his previous company, which then got sold. And so he had a bunch of other startups coming and saying, "Hey, man, how'd you do that?" Thus the agency was formed. But I think he really ran up against that 18 to 20 person mark, where he just couldn't... Getting it bigger than that, he needed help. Then he brought in Jimmy-
Peep Laja (01:56):
Ex-VP of growth Jimmy Daly.
Devin Bramhall (01:59):
... to run sales and grow our marketing so that the company could grow, obviously, and then brought in Haley and me-
Peep Laja (02:05):
Haley Bryant, chief operating officer.
Devin Bramhall (02:08):
... me to run marketing internally, so customer marketing, help with their strategy and all of that, and then Haley to run customer ops, because those were his two pain points, right? He'd gotten there because he was really good at content and he hired some people who were really good at content, but he needed a process around it, right? They were lacking consistency. He needed people to create process so that they could deliver a consistent product and a consistent customer experience.
Peep Laja (02:40):
So for the first three years, Animalz's success was founder-led. Walter Chan had a great network for referrals. He managed the business by walking around holding the standard up high. But I think that when you get to around 10 to 15 people, that becomes bottleneck. It doesn't scale. For Animalz to grow, they needed to hire more people, but the content quality was inconsistent and hiring more people resulted in more inconsistencies.
Devin Bramhall (03:05):
I knew marketing really well, Haley knew customer ops really well, and so the two of us came together, and then we saw a bunch of opportunities on the team to add definitions around roles. No one really understood what their role was. They didn't know how to get promoted. They just got there and didn't know what to do, and so they were languishing a little bit and needed help. So we gave people a direction. We're like, look, here's a vision for the future. Here's better communication, better process, and then what are our standards, what are our first principles of a high-quality piece? Documenting that, sharing that with people in onboarding, creating a team and a process around first principles of strategy, and that allows us to really go into every customer no matter who they are and say, yeah, we can help you.
Peep Laja (03:53):
But the competitive challenge, I would say, was still there, where there's so many agencies out there. Did you make a strategic bet or did you have a particular focus like, hey, we're going to double down on this thing and that's how we're going to win and get bigger and so on?
Devin Bramhall (04:08):
It was the product, and our product is a service, right? So it's quality of articles, quality of customer experience, which seems really simple, but think of all the things I just mentioned that go behind that, like having dedicated editors, dedicated strategists, and the process for creating and delivering that service. So we invested heavily in the product, you could say. How we do that and how we create them has changed. We're still delivering articles, but managing a team of 50, for example, our processes were a little different than now at 100, and we're about to have to change them again because when you're delivering on a service product, you're always adding people. My old boss Walter told me the other day, he's like, "Devin, scaling a people business is the hardest thing that you can do."
Walter Chen (04:58):
I would say the way I've summed it up is that business is a people business. That's good. It's fun. It makes it fun. But all of the biggest mistakes we've made have been around, I think, dealing with people, and that's one of the hardest things.
Devin Bramhall (05:11):
And I get it because you come up with a perfect process and structure and all that, and then 50 people later it's broken again, so you're continuously reinvesting back in the product to make sure it stays good.
Peep Laja (05:24):
Anything else you can think of that you did in terms of marketing to outmarket others of your competition?
Devin Bramhall (05:32):
Our marketing, for being experts in marketing, our marketing of our own company has been terrible. We have not done a lot. Our problem statement is different than a lot of places. You should take whatever we do with a huge grain of salt, right? I will say the website redesign really helped. I worked with this really badass designer and we put something really cool together. The perception of us was elevated when we launched that new website because it's really hip.
Peep Laja (06:05):
I've said it before. The fact that people even know you exist goes a long way. Market penetration is far more important than differentiation. Often I see freelancers on social media recommending optimizing. They've never run AB tests in their life. They don't know anything about statistics, but they recommend it. Why? Because they've heard of it. That's everything.
Peep Laja (06:27):
In consulting and in agency business, often you're in the business of expertise, meaning that people need to believe that you're the best, and sounds like you guys double down in quality, and if I now think about content marketing and who is the best, Animalz for me is number one. I'll never use your services. I'm not even reading your blog posts. Somehow I still believe that to be true. So tell me, what have you guys done specifically to make me and others believe that you're the best?
Devin Bramhall (06:56):
Well, one, we write what we know. The blog has been a really good validation for folks who come to us. I've gotten on sales calls with directors or whoever of content marketing departments who are excited to talk to us because they've been reading our blog for a while, because we're not writing top of funnel content. We're writing really deep conceptual stuff about content marketing. We're doing the opposite of the HubSpot approach, right? HubSpot's like, "I will teach you the basics."
Speaker 4 (07:29):
This is a beginner's guide to content marketing brought to you by HubSpot.
Devin Bramhall (07:34):
We're going in the other direction, the expert level, sitting in a velvet chair with our cigars talking about content marketing,
Peep Laja (07:43):
Did that come about organically or was just, hey, nobody's writing about this stuff. This is our opportunity.
Devin Bramhall (07:49):
It was really both. I know that when Jimmy was here, that was his philosophy was like, look. And Walter's, too, actually. They understood that most of what's out there about content marketing is pretty beginner level.
Walter Chen (08:02):
I felt like a lot of content sucked, so that was the mission, which was to bring better content into the world.
Devin Bramhall (08:09):
And so there was a gap to fill. Jimmy is, because of his proximity to the customer, he was an expert in what our customers were worried about and how that changed over time. And so those two opportunities together, it's a no brainer. Look, the way we did not, we intentionally focused on thought leadership on the blog, wrote very deeply about what we know from perspectives that other people aren't currently taking. That is what we did that helped our reputation enormously, even though we don't get a ton of traffic on our blog. It made the people who follow us really devoted, huge fans, and like you, think we're hot shit, whether they even know if we are or not.
Peep Laja (08:52):
Hot shit. Being hot is a form of differentiation. I think of this as the Kim Kardashian strategy. You're popular for being popular.
Kim Kardashian (09:01):
What's up, Las Vegas? I'm Kim Kardashian. Well, I don't know about you guys, but I'm feeling really dirty tonight.
Peep Laja (09:09):
Zoom has been the hottest thing during this COVID crisis. It could've been Skype, Google Meet, GoToMeeting, anyone, but Zoom became hot, and that led to way more hotness. Being hot can get you some altitude, but remember, it's a transient advantage. It needs to develop into something else. It needs to have substance, like with Animalz.
Devin Bramhall (09:28):
And then also having strong word of mouth really helps, right? Because this is one of those businesses where if someone needs a content marketing agency, they're not going to Google it. They're going to ask a friend who they really trust, right? Or even if they do Google it, they're like, "How do I choose? All these websites look the same." So they need a recommendation, a really strong recommendation, right? If you think about it, B2B SaaS is still somewhat of a small, very tight, or it feels like a very small industry, right? It's a small area to float around in, so it elevates it automatically.
Peep Laja (10:04):
I also see a lot of your people be very active on social. Is that a strategic effort?
Devin Bramhall (10:10):
Organic. That's what happens when you hire a bunch of really passionate marketers, right? They're going to talk. So no, it's really organic. I mean, certainly if there's certain things we want to amplify, we have a Slack channel where if they release a big asset or something on behalf of a customer, they'll ask the team to amplify. I think long term, I will probably make a more concerted effort to leverage that. For me, it's always about where is the need.
Devin Bramhall (10:36):
The company is doing well with the level of marketing we're doing currently, and so it's like I almost can't handle any more demand. So it's choosing when to use the levers at my disposal. This was something Walter taught Haley and I that I've always really valued is you have a certain amount of leverage, but you don't want to use all of that all at once.
Devin Bramhall (10:56):
So for me, it's about being really smart about what I leverage and when based on what the needs are. And if I'm like, okay, well, if the marketing we're doing is working and the word of mouth is strong and there's a lot of demand generally right now, so some of it is that we're just benefiting from a moment in the world, I don't want to pull my other levers. I want to save those for a rainy day. I think that's a strategy, too. Reticence and holding back is also a strategy, but one that people don't always think about because it doesn't sound that sexy.
Peep Laja (11:26):
Mm-hmm (affirmative). You said being active on social happens when you hire passionate marketers, so is that something that you specifically look for? Hey, this guy or girl is active on social and vocal about these things.
Devin Bramhall (11:41):
Definitely not. There are some folks on the team who aren't active on social at all and they are outstanding. It's not our requirement. We certainly do look at folks' social profiles, but we wouldn't rule someone out based on how active they are on social, because nowadays, social is different. It's more personal. It's more a way to tell if you're insane or not than are you a great marketer?
Peep Laja (12:05):
So all in all, if we have to just zoom in, then the big strategic bet you made was we need to have really, really high standards, high, high quality, and then you created processes and you're hiring good people and just focusing on the product and less so the marketing and those things, and it has worked out really well for you.
Devin Bramhall (12:25):
Yes. Building community, too.
Peep Laja (12:27):
How do you define community right here?
Devin Bramhall (12:30):
The network of startups around us, right? And the network of marketers, right? Because even the people we don't hire, making sure to nurture those, making the hiring process really strong and trying to keep those relationships even with the people we part with strong. We've had people leave Animalz, go work at places that then hired us. It's really nurturing that community and paying close attention to it. It works in unscalable ways, right?
Devin Bramhall (12:57):
Doing unscalable stuff ended up being the things that helped us scale, right? Think about it. We're focusing on really high quality and building deep personal relationships. Like those things seem like they don't scale, but in the end they were the things that helped us go from... I think we were doing a million in ARR when Haley and I joined. We'll be at 16 this year or something.
Peep Laja (13:24):
Some lessons here. Identify your key differentiators, double down on them, then optimize your business machine to deliver on that promise. Are you faster? Then make it 10 time faster. Are you cheaper? Make it all about cheaper. In Animalz's case, their differentiators were better quality and better customer experience.
Peep Laja (13:44):
Writing words seems like an easy thing to copy. "We can write a better article," says your competitor, and you've also published all your processes, so somebody could technically come and try to do as good quality or better quality content. Is that something that you ever think about or worry about?
Devin Bramhall (14:04):
No. Because, look, publishing a blog post about the principles behind our process is one thing, but you need someone who can execute on those. And so we also understand the way to hire the right people to execute on those things. We also have a process behind those items, the way editors work with their writers and then develop OKRs with that writer's manager to help them grow in meta ways that support the editing stuff. So we invest so much in the people who write those words.
Peep Laja (14:39):
How do you specifically invest?
Devin Bramhall (14:41):
It goes back to process, right? So we have editing team. OKRs are a huge one. Very, very big. Managers, the way our one-on-ones are structured, et cetera. Subscriptions, too. So things like we have access to newspapers and information and all that stuff.
Peep Laja (15:01):
So employee perks of various sorts and support systems.
Devin Bramhall (15:05):
Yeah. Education-focused stuff. Oh, and we just this year launched a learning and development department. Soon we're going to start our own internal course, as it were, for strategy, for writing. Everyone's doing these external courses where we want to do this internally. You can certainly purchase all that stuff, but we find that applying our principles to something just makes it better and more easily adoptable. That list will continue to grow, I would say,
Peep Laja (15:36):
Yeah. As we're looking into the future, maybe you can tell me a little bit about specific goals or milestones, business goals that you guys are wanting to hit. And maybe it's three, five, whatever years out. And then what's the strategy to get there?
Devin Bramhall (15:53):
The number one thing I'm focused on right now is diversifying our product line. So we have a really strong core product, but scaling that product is, as you just heard, a lot of work. I'm really looking out into seeing, okay, what other things do we want to offer? People occasionally ask us for things like podcast or video. Where's the opportunity for us?
Devin Bramhall (16:17):
The second big thing that I'm focused on is really good talent is consistently hard to find. Because we've built learning into our process and the way we operate, we're able to bring people on at various levels and then train them up to the level we want, but there's still a top of funnel problem. And so I'm really interested in two things to solve that problem. One, I'm interested in increasing top of the funnel with higher quality candidates, and two diversifying content marketing as an industry, because it's very homogenous right now.
Devin Bramhall (16:49):
I'm interested in following a similar path to what engineering has done, where they've created all these ways for people to become engineers that don't involve going through the higher education system. So there's boot camps and certifications. You can basically become a rich developer and never go to college, right? So seeing how we can get access to people at the potential stage, high school or something, find some way to provide an education, train them with an internship, and then bring them in to work here. So we're getting people way early at the point where they're thinking about their future, putting them through a content marketing track, and delivering ourselves higher quality candidates. They may not stay with us, right? But the idea is that we're diversifying and heightening the quality of the content marketing talent pipeline.
Peep Laja (17:42):
Thank you so much.
Devin Bramhall (17:45):
Thank you.
Peep Laja (17:46):
So what were the three key strategic decisions Animalz made in order to grow and succeed? One, they scaled using the unscalable. They're not focused on speed and low cost. They've gone the other way.
Devin Bramhall (17:57):
Quality of articles, quality of customer experience.
Peep Laja (18:00):
Two, they focused on processes. What works at 15 head count doesn't work at 50.
Devin Bramhall (18:06):
When you're delivering on a service product, you're always adding people.
Peep Laja (18:09):
Three, they wrote deeply about what they know, offering a different perspective to what was already out there.
Devin Bramhall (18:16):
They're excited to talk to us because they've been reading our blog for a while.
Peep Laja (18:21):
Bonus idea. It's damn inspiring to build something that's the best. Even if you're nowhere, the promise of the destination itself is inspiring. Don't settle for mediocrity. You've got to be the best at something to compete. That's how you win.
Peep Laja (18:40):
For more tips on how to win, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
