How To Grow Your Business and Generate Leads On Instagram - Vive Kananthan

This is the Beyond the Story podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. And now, Sebastian Rusk Vive welcome to the show, dude. Absolutely, man. I'm pumped to be here. It's great to have you here. You and I connected through a mutual connection of ours, the one and only Mr. Dan Martell. He was singing your praises on your software and the great work that you do. And one thing that stuck out, he followed it up by saying Veve is one of my favorite humans. And I thought, you know what, when people say that, especially guys like Dan, He says it was say that they really mean it. So I was I was curious. We're always curious on how we can grow and expand our online presence here. Instagram is a hot spot to be right now, specifically for business and content and connections, et cetera. So I said, I need to reach out to this guy. And of course, I always lead with, well, let's get you on the podcast because what a great way to learn about somebody and what they do then through a conversation here. So thanks for taking some time out of your day to hang out with me for a few minutes. So for some context, let's help our listeners better understand a little bit more about you and your backstory. And then let's dig into what you're actually doing and how the software works and how you help people grow on Instagram.

Sebastian Rusk

For sure. First of all, I'm so grateful to be in this podcast. And I'm so grateful for Dan because he have changed my life that you would never understand it. But I'll share that story a little later. But that's it. So a little bit background about me. I ran a web development agency back in India. This was back in 2015. um from there i had dan as a coach because every time i scaled my company i have to work like 80 hours a week like there is no way that i can figure out a way to work less but get more dan so I need more revenue, right? So every time you have to scale your company, you still have employees, but I couldn't figure out a way to scale it without me being working like 80 hours a week. So that's the moment I thought like, okay, who in the world has done that without working like 100 hours a week or something like that? Then Dan popped up in my feed. I had him as a coach in 2015. That's where he taught me how to run a business. I was so good at tech, I was so good at marketing, I'm so good at delivery, but I couldn't figure out that scale part. It looks so obvious now, but I didn't even have a scorecard for my business. All I checked through is the Stripe account or my bank account, and that's how I measure the progress or the performance of the company. So fast forward from there, from 2015 to 2017, we shut down the company because it is pretty hard to change the culture of the team when they are so built up with a different culture. So I find it very hard to have people owning the accountables, like owning the outcomes of any project. It didn't happen. So I shut down the company, gave the severance package for six months, and then went for freelancing. It's easy to make money. So went there. That's when Dan wants to help with a developer. I am a developer to the core. Applied for the job, got the job. Dan hired me for a development role, and then He taught me marketing and he wanted me to run Facebook ads. That's how I learned Facebook ads. So I ran Facebook ads, Google ads, LinkedIn ads for him, and we scaled a SaaS Academy to like from a five member team to a 40 member team now. So yeah, that's how it all started for me. Like that's how I learned copywriting, marketing, stuff like that.

Vivekananthan Sivashanmugam

Amazing. So what, so talk to me about the software that you've created here that helps people grow on Instagram.

Yeah, for sure. Um, so there is only two things that is really required for your business to grow. One is the number of people who want your service, the leads, right? And then you need to figure out a way or emotion or some way to have a conversation with those people who want your service and then see if you can help them out. If so, here's my payment link, here's what I can do, and you take their payment, and you do help them and get what they want, right? So it's just that simple. So on Instagram, you do it, you post content to attract your ideal audiences. For example, what do you do, Sebastian? Maybe it'll be much easier if we use an example.

So I help people launch a podcast in 90 days or less.

Perfect. So if you can post content about like podcasts, how to create podcasts, like entrepreneurs, like coaches, like everyone wants to start a podcast. So if you can post content that is relevant to podcasts, then people would like to know about it. The other step is, I also need to know about the tools, the stuff like that. You give those out in the content, right? That gives away, people feel like, oh, this is so much valuable for me. Or you can also give, okay, here's the intro that you can use to get Things or you can use the script to reach out to people to book a call with them to have a podcast with them, right? So those are the things that you give value on the podcast or on your content. So you put all you post the content out there. on Instagram, you attract your followers, your ideal audiences. And then once they become a follower, you send an outbound message to your followers saying, Hey, Sebastian, thanks for the follow. Are you here for the inspiration or looking to create a podcast or start a podcast? Right. So they, then you have a meaningful conversation with them. And if they would say, yeah, I'm here for the inspiration, or I definitely need help in creating a podcast, then starts the sales conversation. So the eyeballs and the dollars, so your content generates eyeballs, and then you have a sales motion that converts those eyeballs to dollars.

Okay.

this is this is the process so we call this the sell by chat so we sell them through chat and that's that's that's the main process now where does the software comes in is we do send automated messages to your followers based on the qualification criteria like say uh your followers should be an entrepreneur, your followers should be a coach or a personal brand owner. We don't want to send the initial messages to people who don't have a business at all, right? So that's when our software comes into play. We send the initial opens, initial messages to your followers. And then if they respond back, It all shows up in a software and then you can have a sales conversation and a software designed in a way to manage your sales pipeline very efficiently and all the fun stuff. But it all starts with the sending out the initial out one message to your followers.

Got it. So it goes from, it starts out manually to, to, to develop the process, which I'm actually experiencing right now, which I learned from Dan. It's like creating a reel a day, an Instagram post a day, three stories a day and continuing.

Reels is the only thing that can bring you new followers because the stories engage with your existing followers. But Reels is the one that brings in new followers because that gets posted in the discovery section and If you don't do any reels, then you don't get new followers.

Right. Because you and I had a conversation about a week ago and you said that, you know, once you're starting to get to around 50 new followers a day, that's when the software is relevant. Because if you're getting one or two followers a day, you can usually manage that manually.

Exactly. Like there is no need to have a software to do that one message for you, right? You can do it manually. But if you have like 50 followers, then it becomes so trickier and hard to send 50 messages every single day. And even much more harder is managing those 50 conversations inside Instagram app. Like you won't be able to manage 50 new messages on any given day inside the app because it's just like not built to do that.

Right? Yeah. It's very hard to organize them.

Yeah. And then that's, that's the reason why our software comes into the play. Like you can assign a tag, like lead, qualified, offer presented, like all the fun stuff. And yeah, you can manage the pipeline efficiently.

So let me, so let me ask you, so When it comes to your existing followers, like, so I had one, my, my main account got deleted just one night to the next, just gone. And it was allegedly over a, over a meme about a juice box and the way the straw went in the juice box. Allegedly one of the robots caught it and said, this is false info. I mean, it was a total joke meme and my account got deleted. So I had, I don't know, 14, 15,000 followers on there that I had been building for quite some time, gone, no getting it back, no recovering it. So I took over an old business account that I had had that had about 1,000 followers on it, where I just did food content, normal content, social media content, et cetera, and just made it my own. And I've since built it up. I'm at about roughly around 2,200 followers right now. Now, of the people, I don't know who all of those 2,200 people are. So when you don't know who your followers are, how does this start to come into play? Do you evaluate who they are and go through them and parse them, or do you just continue to add new people?

That is the two things, right? So, number one, yes, you need to post more content, and that way you would generate new followers. That's fine. But what can we do with your current 2,000 followers? Like we can extract all your followers and we can scrape their information and then give it in a Google Sheet where you can see, oh, do I have my ideal audiences in my, as followers so far, right? So you filter them based on your bio. Does their bio contains coaches or it contains entrepreneur or a personal brand? So you filter them and then you can start reaching out only to those people who qualify for your audience, right? The coaches, stuff like that.

Yeah. Now, so is there a way to do that without their software? Like if someone's just getting started and just has like three or four opens a day, cause I'm very curious in finding out who these 2000 mystery people are. I mean, I got a good idea of the 15 or 1200 of them, but the thousand that were already there, were those people just interested in foodie content or whatever the case is my mom following me, you know, these whole, like the whole idea of like, Because when I got to my follower list and I was like, oh, let me reach out to that person. Let me reach out to this person. No, I haven't talked to that person in years. Like, so I'm trying to be intelligent and structured on and productive, more importantly, on who I'm actually reaching out on.

Sure. Without the software, you can still scrap their information. There are tools like apify.com, which would charge you like $3 per thousand followers, and you can still scrap that. You said it's edify.com? No, it's apify.com. Okay. Yeah. They charge you like $3 per thousand followers. And for you, it's just like five bucks, less than five bucks, you can get those information. And I would strongly recommend doing that, get that information, because you need to know who your followers are, right? There could be an opportunity sitting right there.

Right. Yeah, no, I definitely want, I mean, I, as you know, what Dan teaches, it's like five opens a day and I'm like, cool, how do we get to five opens a day? You know what I mean? Um, outside of the new content and the new content and being in community and connecting with new people that's helped out tremendously. And I have been able to get in there and Hey, be great to connect with you. Are you here for the content or learn how to grow your business with a podcast? I mean, that's become the norm of what I'm doing and talking about.

Yeah, for sure. And the most important thing is when you start doing the five opens every single day, the compound effect is much more higher, right? So on the first week, you might get like 10 responses back. But over the period of time, when you do it for a month long, then you would have like a huge snowball effect that creates the momentum for you to have more sales conversation, in turn more sales. So that's, that's the beginning of having the daily five opens.

So, you know, a lot changes with. social media and platforms and what platforms allow what they don't allow, what works, what doesn't work. Like I found like cold, this strategy for Facebook is not nearly as effective as it is on Instagram, LinkedIn, a little bit. I'd say LinkedIn is probably the second runner up to Instagram at Facebook. Absolutely not. Tick tock. I couldn't even tell you how to check a DM on tick tock. Cause I can't even find them. I mean, I can find them when they send me a notification and that's about it.

Yeah. When someone sends me, Hey, I have sent a message on TikTok. Oh, do we have a message on TikTok? That's how I know.

The only thing I like about this is it sends you an email and tells you a person sent you a message and you're like, cool. Now let me go find where that DM actually is in the app because you have to have a PhD to figure that out.

Yeah. Yeah.

But as these platforms continue to evolve and the way we utilize them changes and evolves as well. What's the shelf life for a sell by chat strategy, in your opinion? We'll just use Instagram for example purposes.

The platforms, obviously, yeah, they would change in a way that how the content has been distributed across to new people, right? The consumption model could change. In the sense, you create a content, and then there are people who consume your content, right? So the platform changes would only affect how the content has been distributed to new consumers, or new people who consume your content. But the selling in itself, the sell by chat in itself is just an age-old sales process. The psychology of selling has never changed. It's the same process that even a decade before, the same process. Even now, it's the same process. There could be a few nuances and tweaks in there. Maybe there is a few nuances in selling through chat, but the principles, the pillars behind selling is always the same. It always stayed the same. For example, let's just go through a real quick sales process. Tell me about your business. And then the next thing is where you currently are. What's your goal? So what is the difference between your current reality to your goal? Am I the right person to get you to reach the goal? If so, here is how I can help you get to reach your goal, and this is all it's going to cost you. This psychology is the same. This process is the same. For example, you go to the gym membership, the same process. If you buy anything that involves selling, the process stays the same. It has never changed. So what I believe is the sell by chart won't change. Because even the platforms can evolve, but unless the Instagram shuts down the DM functionality, the Cell by Chat will still be there.

Yeah. I just said, well, people will just be more in tune and, and, and used to hearing it, you know, or, or familiar with the process of where it's like, what I teach is like start a podcast so you can interview people you want to do business with. Eventually people are going to know, okay, you invited me on my podcast because you want to sell me something. People are already starting to learn about that, but that doesn't mean it's going to go away necessarily.

Yeah, exactly. Right. Because, The reason why you invite them, the podcast is like to experience how this is done. Are you, you tell me, why do you invite them to the podcast before they became a client?

Yeah, well, exactly. Because I mean, we're getting them on a podcast, trying to sell them a podcast. It's like, yeah, it's close to the same sandbox as you can get. Right. Yeah, exactly. I love that. Well, um, it's been great to connect with you. I was, I was so curious to learn what you're doing now, and I'm starting to connect all the dots here with what Dan teaches specifically and why he's, you know, sings your praises on, on what you've been working on and what you've done and developed here with the software and what you guys have, have done together on here. So, uh, I'm, I'm excited to continue this journey of, uh, of unpacking what's possible with, with Instagram and new business development. This is the new networking meeting and event on there, you know, content, content, content, and the relationships that we can build.

Yeah. Instagram is a goldmine right now. Like that's the best like messaging software out there. Like Instagram is the messaging platform. Like if you can get on with Instagram with your content and get followers, then yeah, you did great for your sales.

Yeah, that's fantastic. Veev, I appreciate your time, man. Really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to hang out with me for a few minutes and explain what you got going on. Listeners, I'll drop a link to Veev's Instagram. Make sure you connect with him, follow him. He is a wealth of information and knowledge, both from the software standpoint, but also on the market sales and marketing standpoint as well, too. So great guy to connect with. And if you're getting 50 new followers a day and you need a solution to help manage all that, reach out to him. Tell him you heard this episode. saw him on the show and you want to learn more, he's very thorough with explaining and qualifying whether or not he's a fit for you and what he can do to help you. So, Vivek, thanks again for your time, my brother. Thanks. Thanks a lot, Sebastian. I really appreciate that. Thank you. You got it. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story podcast. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. We sure do appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, Launchlab.com Studios. We'll talk to you next time.