Julie Wieler on Business Validation, Market Testing & Scaling Without Guesswork

This is the Beyond the Story podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. And now, Sebastian Rusk I'm excited to have you here. Thanks for taking some time out of your busy day to hang out with me for a few minutes. I love telling people stories on this show, hence the name Beyond the Story. And for context purposes for our listeners, I always like to go back to the beginning of the story. The beginning is different for everyone. Before we get into that, though, I know you and I connected through the great Dan Martell's coaching program. Shout out to Dan Martell, the human hug with a slap in the back of the head guy. It really, really is. And our friends Kyle and Carl at OnSpark that we met through Dan's program, that we both engaged to do business with, are doing great work with us. They brought us together here. Even though we were already part of the same group, we just never know Big shout out to OnSpark and Kyle and Carl for the work that they do here. So bring us back to the beginning of the story. Where did it all begin and what brought you to present day with what you do? You and I were chatting before the interview. I was really encouraged to hear about the work you guys do. So I'm excited to tell our listeners about it, but bring us back for a minute and walk us through what really brought you to present day. Sure. So for me, it all kind of started about 11, almost 12 years ago now, because we were kind of handed a, life-changing diagnosis for my husband. And, you know, we had kind of built life around a, a plan of him being our, our breadwinner and me being the, the child raiser. And so, which was great, but unfortunately life had other plans. And so that, um, was kind of the entry into my first business. And so in starting my first business, I was actually working to, um, Generate just some income for a family while i was going back to school and what i realized was actually really love serving people and i love the idea of. Building a business around that and i got really curious into why people make buying decisions and why. some businesses are really successful and some brands are really successful and why others are not, even though they have a really great product or a really great service. So it kind of opened this curiosity loop inside of me that just has never closed, full disclosure to this day. I love to make it better and keep learning. But then we started building um, marketing around our first initial business. And that really took off because it was all about how do we serve people and how do we actually help them solve a problem? And so very early on into my marketing journey, I was introduced to a framework called story branding, and I fell in love with this. It was all about where are we entering into somebody's journey and positioning ourselves as the guide in their marketing. And I knew that that made sense. And that, you know, just having utilized it for some of our clients, because by that time the business had taken off and other people were asking if we could do that for them. So, um, our marketing company was kind of born naturally and just for a few really close people. And so we started story branding, everything we got, I got certified as a story brand guide inside their community. And one of the things that I, was challenged with was I knew how powerful it was, but I couldn't show the numbers, um, to clients in a way that made sense to their brains. And so I kind of went digging for, okay, how do we actually prove how strong this marketing framework is? And that's when I found, um, a testing methodology in a data analytics system that I always say my left brain married my right brain in that I could, I could have all of like the cool pieces of how do we enter into somebody's story, but then also, How do we back it up with data? And how do we test these things? Because the one thing that I will say is there is a lot of great marketing agencies in the world. There's a lot of super intelligent people who know how to do this well. And sometimes we still all make mistakes thinking, oh, this is the right audience. This is who we should go after. And so when we found the testing process, what that allowed us to do was to actually go, okay, is audience A stronger than audience B? Because right now, both of these could go either way. And that was really what helped us curate our place in the market is we come with really intelligent recommendations, but we can also back them up with data. So it makes a big difference to a company's bottom line when you can say, hey, right now your company is built off of audience A. But audience B over here actually has a higher lifetime order value, a lower cost per acquisition. This is actually a higher leverage audience. So let's put a little bit of resources over here, and that Yeah. I find that fascinating that you guys were able to conceptualize a testing method without, you know, obviously sharing the secret sauce and letting the cat out of the bag. How is something like that established or like figured out to go, you know what, if we test this out, it's going to let us know which one works better. Well, you know, it kind of goes back to the, one of the teams that I learned it from had a background in working for Microsoft. And so big companies like Microsoft, they have testing engineers all the time. You know, one of the things that most people don't realize is that for one product in Microsoft, they probably have 3000 engineers testing, like sprint testing to make that product better. And so the, the ideology is not new. it was just new to marketing of how do we take these quick iterative tests and build that into something that actually moves the needle for companies. And so that was who taught me to understand this kind of idea of like, we're looking for indication and we're looking for indication that somebody is putting their hand up and going, yeah, that's me. And so the formula has evolved over time to understand, you know, what do we need to know? What are the indicators that we need to know to make sure that we're serving an audience at a deep level. And so we look for, you know, when most business agencies say that they test, it's kind of industry standard where they'll make five pieces of creative, five pieces of copy to go with those creatives. And they'll test it with a hundred dollars a day for 30 days. And then they'll say, okay, which one's our winner. But the problem with that is that's only 25 pieces of data. And so for us, when we go in, we actually test 10 different variants every 24 hours and we do it at a much smaller budget so that we can do it fast and we can do it, um, really quite quickly, which allows us to gain so much more So I love that. I love that. Well, that obviously, I mean, if, if, if companies are looking to go with marketer a, This is how the campaign is going to go market or be you guys. Here's how the campaign is going to go. And here's why, because we've, we have a tested method to figure out what's going to work, what's going to work best and who the cool kid really is. Uh, you're obviously going to be the choice every single time. So I love that. Well, I also know that you guys, you mentioned, that you guys wear a few different hats. So you've got this product and solution. Uh, you've also got a new venture. Let's talk about that a little bit here, working with, um, founders and VC firms. Um, let's chat about that for Yeah. So this one's actually really exciting for us because what we realize is there's so many founders out there with fantastic ideas and they really the world actually does lead what they're bringing to the market and the challenges is that they're very good at what they do but understanding product market fit or go to market strategy is a little bit different right unless you've done it or you know have a really great mentor and there is a whole slew of really great mentors out there. I'm not cutting that. But one of the things that allows investors to look at and evaluate an opportunity really quickly is to go, oh, OK, they've tested this. They have three audiences in mind. They know the leverage point of audience A, B and C. They know that this to start with this one. And it just what it does is it actually instills a level of trust in the founder that the founder cares enough about the market and the data behind that market. and can create a very smart scaling plan. So investors really like that. So we're actually having really incredible conversations and the founders product, what we wanted to do is we actually want to partner with founders for a little bit longer than we normally do so that we can be guides in their story as well to go, okay, this is how you're going to utilize this data. This is how you're going to implement it here. Okay, great. We can have stability on this part of that ad structure. Now we're going to add this in. And so it just gives them, a piece of the puzzle. And what we'd love to do is work with founders who are open to us making case studies out of them, because we really want to show the power of this to other founders and get more products into the world that the Which is obviously the best way to market a product to is, you know, proven You guys are also doing some incredible things with, um, go high level and that community and a white labeled solution. I've been a go high level user now for probably the past three or four years, thoroughly impressed with the platform. How does all that work? And let's chat about this whole go high level air quotes secret. Cause it's, it's, it is a secret to most people that don't even know that it exists. It literally does everything for you. For those of you listening, by the way, before we start talking about this, um, Um, I have a 14 day free trial to go high level. So I'm going to include it in the show notes on here, but Julie's going to, she knows way more about this than I do. I just have an affiliate link, full disclosure. That's all I got there, but you can check it out for 14 days and prepare to have your mind blown. So when you think CRM, when you think marketing websites, funnels, collecting things, all the things that you're probably not doing for your business, go high level does, but let's talk about go high level for a second. Now that I fully pitched I love it. OK, go. I totally agree with you in that go high level is a one stop shop. One of the things that when we were building our business a couple of years ago, we realized there was this gap between what people knew they needed and how to actually implement it. And so there was one of the things we always go into is like, what problem is our market actually? asking to be solved and the technology was one of them. So our first venture into the market was for coaches because coaches kind of have, you know, we adopted this mindset of like the first people who hit success in the gold rush were not the miners. They were the people selling the shovels. And so how do we build a shovel to equip people who are doing good in the world? And so go high level was our shovel that we ended up building. And so where people were, you know, spending money over on MailChimp and then money over on, um, Oh, Kajabi for their courses. And then constant contact. Yeah, I'm bringing it way back. Daddy, all of those things like they were trying to duct tape, you know, multiple systems together when the reality is, is for as low as ninety seven dollars, you can have it all in one place. That made sense to us. There's two different options in GoHighLevel. You can have an affiliate code like Sebastian shared here, or you can actually go to a white-label provider like we've built where we have templates and everything inside because we wanted to take the guesswork out so they could go do the work that they wanted to do and the systems would work in the background with a little bit of support and guidance so they had that as they built. I Yeah. So I guess the biggest hurdle that people experience is, okay, this sounds fantastic, but I'm using MailChimp right now. It's what I've been familiar with. Our front desk clerk handles it for us. How in the world do we migrate everything over Yeah. Yeah. So we actually are just launching a new offer called our key person method, which is actually all about this. It's all about, You know what are you doing that's inefficient and how do we move you into efficiency and part of that is understanding how to move your systems over how to get everything working in alignment and because that's so many business owners will waste so much time energy and money. trying to figure out how to duct tape all these things together so they all work or, you know, like you just said, your office admin has this task, but then somebody else has the invoicing task. And, you know, it can't all live in one place or it doesn't all live in one place, but it can. And so that's where we we actually built our product to have the things like we have our office hours where people can come and ask us any question. And so they can be like, OK, this isn't working over here on the tech side or Okay, I'm about to launch this email campaign. Can you have eyes on my copy? This is make sure that I'm touching the right pain points or things like that. And so it really did become this thought process of like, when you're starting a business, there's so many things that of all that. So if you're listening to this and you're like, holy cow, I didn't even know something like this existed. A, you can check it out for 14 days. After 14 days, you're still going to have no idea what to do. So you're going to want to connect with Julie and her team. So you'll be able to hit me up, send me a DM and go, I just listened to this episode, Sebastian. I want to connect with Julie and her team. And I'll make a personal introduction for those of I love it. I love it. Julie, I've really enjoyed our conversation. I'm so encouraged by what you guys have built here, continue to build. I know that we're working on some things behind the scenes with the great guys over at OnSpark. I'm really excited about that. And I really enjoyed You know, I just think that where I would want to leave people is that right now there's so many shiny objects there's you know go try this do this and it can feel overwhelming and the one thing that i always say i'll say it across all my content is go back to your foundations who do you serve what problem do you help them solve and how do you get that solution to them is really where it will always begin and then choose the tools that amplify that, not that distract from that. And so that's kind of what we've built on all facets of what we do. And I think that that's really what it will Love it. Great final thoughts. Thanks again for your time, Julie. I really enjoyed our conversation. We got a special visitor joining us there too. That's amazing. What a great way to end a podcast episode. Hey, thanks again for your time, Julie. I know you and I'll be in touch real soon. I'm looking forward to 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.