A Better Way to Manage Facebook Ads with Dan Stocke

Intro: Hello, welcome to episode 112 of How I Built It. Today my guest is Dan Stocke of Buzz Frenzy. Now, Dan has a very interesting product. One that allows you to quickly and easily take existing Facebook posts based on a hashtag and create a Facebook ad. As somebody who has tried to navigate the stormy seas that is the Facebook ad manager, I appreciate a product like this because it makes things a lot easier for the ad creator. His unique approach and quotable advice is worth the listen here. I wrote down a lot of one-off quotes that I liked from him that I hope you’ll enjoy too. I won’t spoil any of them, of course. So with that, I will leave you to listen to this episode, but of course first a word from our sponsors.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Plesk. Do you spend too much time doing server admin work, and not enough time building websites? Plesk helps you manage servers, websites, and customers in one dashboard. Helping you do those tasks up to 10 times faster than manually coding everything. Let me tell you, I recently checked out their new and improved WordPress toolkit, and I was super impressed by how easy it was to spin up new WordPress sites, clone sites, and even manage multiple updates to themes and plugins. With the click of one button, I was able to update all of my WordPress sites. I was incredibly impressed by how great their WordPress toolkit is. You can learn more and try Plesk for free today at Plesk.com/build. This episode is sponsored by our friends at Castos. Castos is a podcast hosting platform built specifically for WordPress. Their Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin lets you manage all of your episodes and podcast RSS  from your WordPress site, but have your files hosted on a dedicated media hosting platform. If you use WordPress, this is by far the easiest platform that I have used for podcasting. I also really love how the Castos team takes a commonsense approach to their pricing. You can create as many episodes and podcasts as you want and you don’t have to worry about how much storage you’re using or bandwidth restrictions. If you’re like me and you already have a ton of episodes from an old host, they’ve got you covered. Castos will import all of your podcast content into their platform completely free of charge. It’s literally one click of a button in your WordPress dashboard. I could not believe my eyes when I saw this in action. It’s stuff like this which is why I built my own podcasting course on top of Castos. They have put together a really special opportunity for the show today. You can get 50% off your first three months with the code BUILTIT19. Just head over to Castos.com/HowIBuiltIt to learn more.

Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Dan Stocke of Buzz Frenzy. Dan, how are you today?

Dan Stocke: I’m well, thank you very much. How are you?

Joe: I am fantastic. I just realized that you could not see me. This is an audio-only podcast, but I like to have the videos on when we record because I feel it makes for a better conversation.

Dan: Now that I can see you it makes me feel a lot more comfortable.

Joe: Excellent. I’m glad to hear that. Comfort is my number one goal for the guests on this show. Dan, you and I met at Word Camp Minneapolis just a few weeks ago as we record this, right?

Dan: Yes, we did.

Joe: Cool. Very cool. You’re a company, so you’re the founder and CEO of Buzz Frenzy, which was one of the sponsors. Why don’t we start off with who you are and what you do?

Dan: Sure. I am Dan Stocke, and I’m from Duluth Minnesota. How about that? We’ll start with the basics. I’m a serial entrepreneur, so I get my fingers in a whole lot of things. Most notably three things, the first is zip it. Have you heard of that?

Joe: I have heard of that, yes.

Dan: It’s a long thin piece of plastic with barbs on it. You stuff it down a clogged drain, you pull it out, it yanks the clog out.

Joe: Yes. I was going to say, and I have used that before.

Dan: Thank you very much. I owe you a nickel.

Joe: Thank you very much, you saved me a lot of time.

Dan: We try our damnedest. My uncle invented that, we started a company together to manufacture and distribute it and then we licensed it off after a while. So now we collect a royalty check, which is the best job I’ve ever had.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely.

Dan: The other thing is I own a company called World Block. We build steel forms for the concrete industry. So, when I say that, people are like “You’re in concrete.” No, I’m in steel fabrication. We bring in big chunks of a ten gauge steel, we cut them on a plasma table, bend them on a 250-ton press break, and we have four robots that weld them up.

Joe: Nice.

Dan: Yeah. Then Buzz Frenzy, of course, is the third one that we’re going to be talking about today, and it’s my most recent venture. What we do there is automate Facebook advertising using hashtags as the trigger.

Joe: Nice. That sounds– First of all, I should say that all of these sound very interesting to me because I know nothing about creating real products in the real world. I’m always curious about that. But we will stay on top of it. I’ll make sure to link to all of those things in the show notes.

Dan: The stories meld together in a way, just because everything is about automation and making it easier and processes and that kind of thing. So when we talk about Buzz Frenzy, like “How’d you get there?” It’s like, “That’s the way my brain works.”

Joe: Absolutely. Why don’t we talk about that, how did you how did you come up with the idea for Buzz Frenzy? Was it like, you were doing Facebook ads for World Block, and you realized there’s a tool that that doesn’t exist? Or is it something else?

Dan: No, it was something else. Buzz Frenzy ultimately is a love story. So, get your tissues out, it’s going to be so sad at the end. My wife is also a small business owner, and she owns a fitness studio with a partner. When she started up she’s trying to figure out how to market herself, so she comes to me, and she says “Dan, can you help me with my marketing?” Which of course you know means “Dan, can you do my marketing?” Yeah, I get it. I being the dutiful husband that I am, “Of course honey. I can absolutely show you everything you need to know about marketing.” So when it comes to a fitness studio or really any small business, Facebook is the low hanging fruit. It’s an 800-pound gorilla, and it’s where you can find everybody quickly. So I’m like, “Let me show you how that works,” because that would be the easiest way for her to get the job done. So I go onto Facebook, and I’m showing her how to boost posts and do the targeting and all the rest of stuff. Not that she doesn’t have the capacity, or wasn’t smart enough for it, it’s she looks at it like– She goes, “I don’t have time for this. I got to do that too?” She’s already greeting customers, and she’s doing classes, she’s mopping floors, doing the books, changing toilet paper. Whatever needs to be done in a small business, she’s doing it. Being an expert marketer, all that does is force her to have the time and the energy to do that too. So, as I was showing this, I’m like “This is really– This is stupid. As a guy who loves processes and making things easy, we’re not going to do this at all.” I’m like, “Babe, what if I were to just have it so that you could just trigger and add whenever you wanted it to happen?” And she’s like, “That would that be great.” So ultimately I made a few phone calls and checked around and found out that it’s possible to do, and went ahead and did it. So she’s been my– She was my first guinea pig, so has been using it since day one. She’s had the most success with it, and she started in a 2,000 square foot space doing Zumba and whatnot. Now she’s in a 6,000 square foot space.

Joe: Wow.

Dan: The only thing she has ever used is Buzz Frenzy to market herself.

Joe: Wow. That is such a great success story.

Dan: Yeah. Makes me happy, it makes my wife happy. If it makes my wife happy, then it makes me happy. I think that’s how that works.

Joe: Yes. As they say, I’m a little over two years married, and the most common advice I got was “Happy wife, happy life.” Luckily that’s in my DNA to make sure my wife is happy, as the dutiful husband. It sounds like you are much the same way.

Dan: Absolutely. You got to know where your bread is buttered and that kind of thing.

Joe: Absolutely. So that’s super interesting, your wife and you saw a need, because I’ve gone through the process of setting up Facebook ads. First of all, I’m not a marketer by any stretch. People who have listened to the show before know how I’ll say that I’m like a field of dreams marketer. “If I build it, surely they will come.”

Dan: A lot of people are like that. It’s, “This is wonderful. Why isn’t anyone showing up?”

Joe: Yeah, exactly. It worked for Google and Facebook, but now Google and Facebook are the things that everybody knows, so you need to find a different way. I know the process can be time-consuming and difficult. I also know that there are just a ton of social media tools and ad managers out there. I’m curious, what research did you do to determine “This is definitely a product that I should build?”

Dan: Surprisingly very little. I was one of those, once I got it working because it was a pretty easy setup. Matter of fact, when we first made it work, it was really “Let’s just make this thing work.” But it functioned so well, so I was like “I’ve got to make a business out of this.” I couldn’t find anyone doing what I was proposing to do, which was to trigger the ad. There is a lot of content creators out there, and there’s a lot of somewhat marketing and automation programs that will help you more than anything get organized around marketing. But there isn’t anything that does the heavy lifting once you need to create the ad. So, ultimately what Buzz Frenzy is a targeting company. What I do well is target people, so Facebook allows all of these touch points and all of these ways to dig into your audience and say “This is the type of person who’s going to be interested in my product.” I’m good at that. Once you’re set up on Buzz Frenzy, my customer doesn’t have to do that. The targeting is already set. It’s already taken care of. It’s done. So, you have a lot of the other automation tools that are out there that will schedule out your posts, and Buzz Frenzy works with those things. There wasn’t a lot of competition necessarily.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s interesting. I guess, let me back up for a second here. When you say that the ad is triggered you said by a hashtag, is that to say that I can use– I use social pilot or buffer or whatever to post at the optimal time to my Facebook page, and if I use the hashtag build something, Buzz Frenzy will take that post and make an ad out of it?

Dan: Correct.

Joe: That’s neat.

Dan: It’s a lot of fun. It sounds really simple, and one of the hardest things that I’ve had to deal with in trying to sell it is this rabbit out of a hat thing. I go, “OK just add this hashtag, and it turns into an ad.” And people are like, “Yeah. What else? What do we have to do? It’s got to be something more than that.” Like, “No. That’s literally, rabbit out of the hat, walk away. Go have a beer. Enjoy yourself. You just saved a lot of time.”

Joe: Yeah. That’s great. Now I want to ask, going through the process, you mentioned that Buzz Frenzy is a targeting company and that targeting is essentially set for them. What’s the onboarding process for using Buzz Frenzy? Do I answer a series of questions, do I pick my demographic?

Dan: I’m glad you asked. What a good question, that’s a good question to ask. There are four things that we need to get set up, for anyone to set up Buzz Frenzy. You can do this all online at BuzzFrenzy.com, and it’s pretty straightforward. The first thing we need to do is we need a Facebook URL. What’s your Facebook page? When you log in, you’ll log in with your personal Facebook ID, and then you’re an admin of your business page. We go through that process, and it’s more like Facebook sign up than our sign up. Then we ask you for the hashtag that you want to use, and we call it a buzz tag. It looks just like a hashtag, functions just like a hashtag, except that our software is scanning that Facebook URL for that hashtag. So that little connection is where the magic is. We call it a buzz tag because it does something different.

Joe: Gotcha, nice.

Dan: We need that, then we need your business category. We have it set up as a parent and child setup, so you pick a top-level category which is a broad category, and then a child category which hones in on it. Our targeting is built off of those business categories, those verticals. We’ve pre-built, I think I’m up to 220 different targeting verticals. So I’ve got a fitness studio, and wellness centers, and yoga, and insurance, and health care. Whatever anyone needs, we build for them. That’s the other thing too if we don’t have it we build it for you. Then the fourth thing that we need to set up is what we call community engagement zone. It is the central point of your business or where you want to advertise, and for a lot of small businesses especially brick and mortar type of mom and pop places, that’s their front door. But it really can be anywhere. Then once an advertisement is triggered we keep that ad set in a 20-mile diameter circle around that center point, and that is traditionally where the community that’s going to be using your services, that’s where you’re going to find them. That’s where you want to have your conversation. So, it does all of that automatically. Then once you’re set up, you don’t even think about it.

Joe: Wow, that’s fantastic. So just again, to reiterate something I said because this process confirms it. That onboard process is basically the only thing I have to do. You said it too. I don’t– I’m not introducing a new tool, I don’t have to create posts through your interface if I want them to be ads. I can use whatever social media manager I’m already using, and your tool scans my Facebook page for the hashtag or buzz tag.

Dan: Yeah. It’s great. I can’t say that enough, so thank you for agreeing with it. I’m a little bit biased. The other thing too is we do this for a set fee for a month, and we’ve got four levels. $50, $100, $250 and $500 dollars a month. That is the media spend and our fee. So, you don’t get charged any more than that, and it’s a set fee. What we do, or what our software does is it meters out that budget depending on how you use the system. The more you use it, it just starts to learn how you use it, and it gets good at dripping out that budget. We’ve got people who use it maybe one time a week, and they’re getting a bigger or more money placed on that individual ad more so than someone who’s using it more often.

Joe: Gotcha. Absolutely. That was my next question, so you’ve answered that already. How did the Facebook ads get paid for? It sounds like you’re essentially the Facebook version of a billboard ad seller. There are people who sell billboard ads and take some fee for selling the spot, and then the rest of the money goes towards the ad spot, maybe.

Dan: Yeah, it works that way. What we really– Or I wanted to try to do is make it as easy as possible for small businesses to get on board. My entire philosophy behind this company is “Keep it simple.” Because as soon as you complicate it, as soon as you say “Here’s my fee and then here’s the media budget,” then people are– They have to think too much about it, and things get messy. This way it’s just straightforward, it happens the way you go.

Joe: Absolutely. And it’s easy to lump in that if I’m paying $100 a month and I’m seeing an ROI of $200 bucks a month, I know that your tool is worth it. I don’t care how much money got spent on the Facebook ads. I know that I paid one hundred bucks and I’ve doubled my investment.

Dan: Yeah. You want to see that ROI grow, and matter of fact we’re seeing about a three times better engagement than a boosted posted, five times better than a campaign ad using Buzz Frenzy. So that means for $100 bucks a month you’d need to spend $300 yourself to match what we are giving you. And really, that’s all about it being software as a service. There’s all this thinking that’s going on in the background that you don’t even have to worry about. There is no place for you to screw up, which I think Facebook is built in a certain way to allow people to screw up to Facebook’s advantage. Like, “You overspent a little bit there. You made two broad of a category.” They’re tricky. We prevent any of that from happening.

Joe: That’s fantastic. And I should say, this is not a paid sponsor episode, and I’ve never used Buzz Frenzy before, but if I were to do regular Facebook ads 100%, I would do this. Because it saves me just a ton of time. The last Facebook ad I ran it probably took me like an hour and a half to set up. To pick the right link and the whatever, and then choosing the audience. I burnt out, and then I tried to do it on my phone, and that didn’t work out, so I had to move to my computer and redo the whole thing. So, it’s just–.

Dan: Matter of fact, Buzz Frenzy will work on your phone. If you do all that work on the phone, and then you add the buzz tag, hit publish and it works. We don’t care if you’re using your phone at all.

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Joe: Just a heads up and a spoiler alert, I’m going to ask you tips for Facebook ads later, but we are halfway through the show, and I haven’t even asked the title question yet. Which is, how did you build it? You said you’re a serial entrepreneur. This sounds like your first big foray into software as a service. Are you a developer? Are you a programmer?

Dan: No.

Joe: OK.

Dan: I’m a dude with an idea. I know how to program just enough to get myself into trouble, so I shouldn’t be doing it, but I can at least have a conversation with my programmers so that I know what they’re doing. I don’t have to know the nitty gritty, I can understand enough that I can direct them where they need to go. I hired everything out.

Joe: Gotcha–

Dan: Which–

Joe: And–

Dan: Go ahead–

Joe: I was going to say, that’s a process that I’m very curious about because I am a developer and for a long time before I had a family I was like “I’ll do everything myself. Time is the cheapest thing for me.” Now time is perhaps the most expensive thing for me, and I would rather hire out. So what do you look for when you go to hire out a team like this?

Dan: What’s interesting is that in my career I have become very good friends with some programmers. When I had this idea, I made one phone call to my one friend who is good at this stuff. And I’m like, “Is this possible?” He bonked it around his head for a little bit and said, “Yes it is.” “All right, let’s build it then.” So there are two sides of the site, the front side and the one that our customers are seeing is a WordPress site. Then once they log in or get into the sign-up section, it turns to cake.

Joe: Ok.

Dan: Because cake is– It has more flexibility for what we’re trying to do when we’re dealing with the Facebook API and all that jazz. We need to be able to have more of ground level thing that we can build off of rather than a structure that already existed. That’s the big tricky part with it, is that we are on two platforms.

Joe: Gotcha. When you say that the front end basically, would you say that’s like the marketing site? The informational site? OK. Then the SaaS itself is built on top of cake. That’s cake PHP is the framework. OK. Cool, very cool. That makes a lot of sense. Then something that you said before, basically this interacts with your Facebook account. Did you have to build a login component or do you rely completely on Facebook for that?

Dan: We rely as much on Facebook as we can, keep it simpler on our end, which– Working with Facebook. If anyone out there is working with Facebook, they know that my eyes just rolled and I choked on myself a little bit. Facebook has a tendency to change things at their pace.

Joe: Yeah.

Dan: With no regard whatsoever with what you’re doing or how things might be functioning for you as is. We’re going through a huge Facebook API change right now, and it is– Actually, the application right now, the Buzz Frenzy app has to be re-approved by Facebook. They’re going through all applications and I guess weeding out the bad eggs is what it is, so ultimately it’s a good thing. But at the same time it’s like “Wow, they are making us do some work.” What’s nice about that though is we’re doing this  B.S. work on the backside where our customers don’t have to see it. If something applies to one of our customers, we’ll contact them specifically, but for the most part, no one bumps into those things, so they don’t have to think about it. There is some advantage there to our customers that I’m dealing with the Facebook heartburn. They don’t have to.

Joe: That’s great. That’s the way it should be. If we want to make our customers jobs as easy as possible, are you referring to the new API change where you can’t post directly to a personal Facebook? Did that affect you guys at all?

Dan: No, not yet. I guess the things that are affecting us the most right now are you can’t advertise a shared anything, so I’m going to share–  Someone mentions me in a post, I’m going to share it and say “Wow that’s great. How I Built, it said something about Buzz Frenzy on their Facebook page. I’m going to share that and then advertise it on my page.” I can’t do that because it’s intellectual property and plagiarism violations.

Joe: Your account isn’t necessarily the point of origin for that post.

Dan: Exactly. And even if I get you to say, “No problem Dan you go ahead. Have at it, advertise away.” Facebook is just taking a look at it saying something like “We’re not even going to get into muddy waters. It’s an all or nothing deal.” So I’ve got a lot of people who are trying to advertise shared content and struggling with that because it used to be pretty easy. And the other thing that I’m bumping into interestingly enough is political content. I didn’t think I would at all, but I have an accountant who uses Buzz Frenzy. Yes, Buzz Frenzy works for accountants, and they will post– They’ll talk about an article that talks about the recent tax code changes, and then Facebook says “No, that’s political content. You can’t you can’t talk about.” So I have to appeal that ad on my customers behalf, and I say, “This isn’t political. This is taxes. The tax code changed. They’re not saying whether they like it or dislike it, what they’re saying is it changed. Everyone should be aware of it. I’m an accountant, let me talk about it with you.”

Joe: Yeah.

Dan: I have maybe 50/50 success rate appealing those political ads for my accountant customer. It’s been annoying because their Facebook definition of political content is incredibly broad. And they’re just trying to get themselves out of it.

Joe: Absolutely. That’s interesting. It brings us back to another point about Buzz Frenzy handling everything, is that your customer doesn’t have to go through the appeals process, you are doing it on his or her behalf.

Dan: Yes.

Joe: Cool. Again, that’s another– That is another big time saver. That’s been my focus this year 2018, as we record this, is what can I automate to save myself time? And in the course of this 20 minute half hour conversation, it sounds like if I were to do Facebook ads regularly which I would like to do at some point, Buzz Frenzy is just saving me a ton of time.

Dan: It’s going to save you a ton of time, a ton of money, and a ton of heartache. It truly is, it’s magic. Of course, here I am a marketer too, so I’m like “It’s magic. Everybody use this it’s great.” Which it is, darn it.

Joe: Yeah.

Dan: People should be signing up for it right now, as we’re talking.

Joe: As a programmer, I do some of that magic, but it still sounds like magic to me because I’m not a marketer. But I did have one more question about that. What is scaling like with the–  If you have to do– Are you at a point where you’re getting so many appeals that you have to do on your customers behalf, that it’s very time-consuming? Have you thought about that and how would you handle it?

Dan: It’s time-consuming. We haven’t reached a critical point where ultimately you’d have to put someone dedicated on that specifically. Right now between the few of us that are here, we can juggle that load. There may be some opportunity for us to automate some of those issues going forward because when our software gets an error, we see that error on our side. So, Facebook sends back a little thing that says “You’ve got political content. That’s why it failed.” If we’re getting back a very specific error like that from Facebook, we can then, in turn, send an email directly to the customer giving that information to them. One of the things that’s nice about dealing with Buzz Frenzy, or at least I hope it is, is that when Facebook throws an error, I can explain it to my customers a lot better than Facebook will. Facebook gives some esoteric– “What are we even talking about?” I have to diffuse those errors and say, “OK if I was just a person, like most everyone is, how would I like this information presented?” Shared content is one of those “I’m explaining it in a bunch of different ways trying to get the right vibe.” So that people get it. What will happen too, is when Facebook goes through these changes, also they’re doing a lot of work with algorithm– I’m not even going to try to say that word. So, I know that when they put in a process and start pumping through these algorithms, the algorithms get better and better and better and better. I’m hoping that with my accountant they start to see that when an accountant talks about taxes it’s not necessarily a political thing, and as they get better I don’t have to deal with it as much. It’s almost like I have to put some timeline on it and say, “OK this has been a problem for a number of months now. It doesn’t look like it’s getting any better, so now we should probably deal with this in some other way.”.

Joe: Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense. Because if it is getting markedly better, you wouldn’t want to hire somebody and then a couple months later “We don’t need you because Facebook has fixed the process.”.

Dan: Right.

Joe: Cool. We are getting very close to time, and I have a couple more questions for you. One was the one I alluded to before. If people want to effectively do Facebook marketing, what are some tips that you have for that?

Dan: If they’re going to do boosting or campaign ads on their own, spend some time in that targeting bucket and think about what your customers, and who your customers are. A good example of this is real estate. A realtor might say, “I want people who are looking for houses,” that might be something Facebook would target for, “And I want them in this price range.” Then they don’t know what to do. Really what you have to think in a weird way, “Who’s going to buy a house? Normally it’s going to be someone who’s going through a life-changing event. You want to find people who have just gotten a raise or just got fired, or they had a baby, they just got married, they just got divorced, their kids have gone off to college, they’re retiring. These are the moments when people are going to start either upscaling their houses or downscaling their houses. It’s not necessarily just people looking for a house, obviously, someone who has applied for a mortgage, you want those on the list. But there’s also these other ones that are a little more– It’s not as much science, it’s more art. Spend some time thinking about why your customer would be using your service, and then find that target because that’s a lot of fun.

Joe: Right, and then that, just understanding that and spending some time there. In the example, I’m married and I have a kid. We’re looking for a house but maybe if I saw that Facebook ad that could be the trigger for, “Erin, maybe we should think about buying a house.”

Dan: The other thing too, and this is a really important one. Probably the most important one. On Facebook, why is everyone– Anyone on social? Hold on for a second, wait for it. It’s because they want to be social. Freaky. So, what they are looking for is they want to see what their family is doing, what their friends are doing, what’s happening in the community. They don’t necessarily want to be sold. They don’t want to see an ad. What we’re seeing across the Buzz Frenzy platform is we get a better engagement when the post isn’t as pretty as an ad should be. Things are a little out of focus, a misspelling here and there. Anything that shows them to be human is effective. People want to know that there’s a human being behind the “We are open” sign on the front door. When you can show them that you’re human, that you’re part of the community, that you’re trying to do better by the community. Wow. People respond well to that. If you’re going to be on Facebook, and you’re going to be advertising on Facebook, be real.

Joe: Wow, I like that. Because that makes sense. Again, talking about my own experiences, I tried to ask the infomercial “Do you have trouble with blah blah blah?” And I’m like, “I need the perfect image.” That makes so much more sense. Spoiler alert, my ads did not do very well. My last question in this area is, do you find certain types of content or calls to action that do better? Let’s call it types of content if we’re trying to say “Don’t make an ad look like an ad.”

Dan: That’s hard to say across industry, what ads are going to work better. Just on the dashboard, everyone gets a Buzz Frenzy dashboard, and we rank things by what we call a resonance goal. Every ad that’s running on Buzz Frenzy, we’re looking at engagement, and we’re looking at impressions, and then we divide one by the other, and we get essentially the percentage of people who are engaged. Who this ad resonated with. We call that the resonance score. Again, trying to keep things easy, is one score to look and go “Wow that one did better than the other one.” So, we have this easy methodology of sorting your ads by that resonant score, and you can see what’s working for you and what’s not. Across all industry, it’s really hard to gauge why anything is working better than other stuff. But the more human it is, the better it is. That’s the one big takeaway. We’re looking at this score that lets us know that’s exactly the case.

Joe: Gotcha.

Dan: It’s fun.

Joe: That’s cool too because again the Facebook ads stats area is– I think I’m a pretty smart guy and I’m like “I don’t even want to know what I’m looking at right now.”

Dan: Yeah. We give you a one metric because get in. “Wow. It’s doing great.” Then get out. There you go.

Joe: Cool. Your advice hearkens to a book I read last year called Contagious, which I will link in the show notes. It’s basically why people share. I thought the book was very good and it was written in a very approachable manner. It basically talks about the human aspect of your content and why people share it, tapping into emotions and things like that. I’ll be sure to link that in the show notes if you’re interested in more of that. Right now I want to know two things, what are your plans for the future? And of course, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Dan: I’ve been practicing this. Trade secrets?!

Joe: Wow.

Dan: Thanks for the warning–

Joe: I’m going to go change my headphones.

Dan: Thanks for the warning on that one, I appreciate it.

Joe: No problem.

Dan: Trade secrets. Yeah, If I told you then they wouldn’t be secrets anymore. Right?

Joe: Yeah, absolutely.

Dan: So, trade secrets? Yeah, I got trade secrets. I’m not telling you.

Joe: Aw, man

Dan: I’m sorry. It’s not that I don’t love you. You know I love you.

Joe: Yeah. Keep it close to the chest. Absolutely.

Dan: Yeah. Once we get to a certain spot in this world, I’ll come back on and give you all the trade secrets in the world.

Joe: Perfect. He is securing his spot for a follow-up interview. I like that. That’s the trade secret, kids.

Dan: That’s it.

Joe: Don’t give it all away on the first date.

Dan: Very good advice, damn. For the future, right now we are trying to ramp up. Up to this point we have been running pretty much in beta for a good long while, and what we did– I’m in Duluth Minnesota, and I kept pretty much my entire client base right here in Duluth. I’d sit down and have coffee with them, and I’d talk to them face to face. They’ve got my phone number. I have this really strong connection with all of these customers because of what I wanted was their feedback. I needed this thing to work and break, and I needed to fix it, and I needed to know why it fixed it and why it broke, and just all of these things. I wanted my customers to be pretty close to me, and now we have it set, and it’s working well, and we’re going out. So, the very first thing we’re doing now is getting our marketing message correct, which means throwing out this wide net and figuring out what works in that net and then honing in on whatever works. We’re in the wide net stage of that process. So, hopefully, in a years time, we’ll have it honed very well.

Joe: Nice.

Dan: Yeah. What else? That’s it. Right now we are in early stages of growth. By next year at this time I want to be growing so fast that’s my problem.

Joe: Gotcha. I like that a lot. Again, there’s a really good piece of advice here that I think, at least, is often lost on me because I’m not a marketer. But you are casting a wide net, and then you’re honing in on what works. I think, at least, I’m like “I need to define my perfect ideal candidate and my perfect user right now. That will be what I stick with.” I probably defined too narrowly at times, and I’m missing a good portion of the market, so “Cast a wide net and then hone in on what seems to be working,” is a good piece of marketing advice.

Dan: I have with my marketing team right now, the saying “What do you like better? This one or that one?” I’m like, “It doesn’t matter what I like. I like B better. But if the customers respond better to A, I want to know that.” I always think I’m the biggest idiot in the room. “What works?” That’s what I want to know.

Joe: That’s great. It’s not what I like, and it’s what my customer likes ultimately.

Dan: Yeah.

Joe: Cool. Dan, thanks so much for joining me today. Where can people find you?

Dan: They can find me at BuzzFrenzy.com. They can e-mail me directly if they want at Dan@BuzzFrenzy.com, and I think do a Google search: Buzz Frenzy. You’ll find me all over it.

Joe: Awesome. I will link those and everything that we talked about in the show notes. Once again Dan, thanks for joining me today. I appreciate your time.

Dan: Joe, thank you very much for having me. This was a lot of fun.

Outro: Thanks so much to Dan for joining me today, and for securing his spot on a future episode so that he can give us all of those trade secrets. But he did provide us of course with a lot of advice. What went into his research and using this product that he knew he and his wife needed, being able to talk to programmers and understanding that time at one point in your life could be cheapest, and now it’s maybe the most expensive or when it becomes the most expensive, and a whole lot of other things. Just advice on effective Facebook marketing, which is I think advice that lots of people can take to heart. And so my question of the week for you is, “Do you want to try Facebook ads? Have you tried Facebook ads? What worked and what didn’t work?” Let me know over at Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter @jcasabona. Thanks so much to our sponsors, Castos Plesk and Pantheon. If you want to find more information about them and all of the show notes you can head over to HowIBuilt.it/112. If you like this episode. Be sure to give it a rating and review on Apple podcast. It helps people discover us. Until next time, get out there and build something.