Why Stunts, Story and Effort Beat AI Slop with Caitlin Bigelow of Blazel

Caitlin Bigelow 0:00
I think a lot of people say that LinkedIn isn't working and they assume that it's their content, but actually often there's a lot of like upstream reasons why their content isn't working very well. Some of the biggest reasons that I see people making mistakes around is their positioning and the audience that they're trying to talk to. So if I talk to a CEO and say, okay, you want to activate your profile because you think this is going to be an important like pipeline builder for your company, who is like who is the most important persona that you want to reach for the growth of the company? And then they list out six different ICPs. That doesn't work.

Kevin Kerner 0:35
Hello there. This is Tech Marketing Rewired, and I'm your host, Kevin Kerner. My guest today is Caitlin Bigelow, CMO at Blazel. I'll start this podcast by saying when Caitlin joined Blazel, her CEO had fired every marketing leader he had ever worked with. Eleven months in, she stole his car and she wrapped it in flames. An amazing story of storytelling as a CMO and how to really get noticed as a challenger brand. And a lot of these stunts that she's she's doing, as we'll talk about here, are very creative, meant to drive engagement, and cost very little. Her first stunt, she was saying, cost about $700. It was a billboard in Wichita, Kansas. I'll let her tell the story. But sales tripled after it. So what I find amazing is how courageous a lot of this stuff is. How she talks about how she was supported by the rest of her company, but even had to face some uh people that that um didn't like what she was doing too much in her LinkedIn feed. Um, those were obviously the the not the majority. The stuff she's doing is really great. So I really am excited to get this out there because I think it shows a CMO that is just not using the same old playbook and really leaning into something that we all know to be a challenger brand, you have to get noticed. You have to do things that are different. You can't do things the same, or you get kind of the same that everyone else gets, and people listen to the big brands. Um, so before we get started, I wanted to mention that tech marketing rewired is brought to you by Mighty and True. Mighty and True is a growth advisory for tech brands, and they do a thing called a blueprint session, which will both autonomously and through their growth advisors, look at how your growth systems are working and get you an output that will um tell you where you should be placing more resources and improving your efforts. So you can book a free blueprint session at www.mightyandru.com/slash blueprint. Okay, this will be a fun one. Let's get to it. This is Tech Marketing Rewired. All right, Caitlin, welcome to the podcast.

Caitlin Bigelow 2:39
Yeah, Kevin, thanks so much for having me.

Kevin Kerner 2:42
It's great to have you on. But for context, it for the people that don't know Blazel, you know, I would love for you to just do a like a quick overview of your role and then what Blazel does for people.

Caitlin Bigelow 2:53
Sure. So I'm the CMO at Blazel. I've been a marketing leader for the past 15 years. I've worked in early stage startups all the way through to, you know, the last company I oversaw marketing was doing $130 million in revenue. Um, Blazel is an early stage startup and it's focused on how do companies grow using LinkedIn as a channel. So we help remove the cognitive load around being consistent, like what am I supposed to post every week? To how do I write it in the way that takes kind of the least amount of time and effort? And AI is obviously a huge supporting factor in there. We use things like, you know, interview agents and trending news that we highlight for you and kind of do all these things to make that whole process easy.

Kevin Kerner 3:39
Yeah, super cool. Um, and I know the stuff that you're doing on LinkedIn personally is really uh well done and and uh it definitely creates a lot of the what you'd want in LinkedIn, just a lot of people following, a lot of people engaging. Yeah. And you do it in a very interesting way. So I'll I won't really set this up too much, but I wanted to show one of your posts and how traditional it is for most LinkedIn posts.

Caitlin Bigelow 4:04
Today's the day. I've stolen my CEO's $95,000 sports car. I'm wrapping it in flames, and he has no idea.

Speaker 4:12
Bring them out, bring them out, hey, bring them out.

Speaker 1 4:15
Anything we should know? Be very careful with them. That car is definitely his baby. No food, no drink.

Caitlin Bigelow 4:27
Okay, we're almost there. Oh my gosh.

Speaker 4:31
They see me rolling, they hating, patrolling and tryna kiss me right and dirty. Tryna kiss me right and dirty, tryna kiss me, right and dirty, tryna.

Caitlin Bigelow 4:43
I can't believe you didn't notice this when you walked around the corner. Is this my car? What do you think? What the hell? Wait, what the fuck is this? Go check out the hood. You just feel my car? Do you realize like I have streetcar? Yeah. What do you think the neighbors will think? What part of I Wanna Build a Subtle Brand? Did you not understand? No, and you never said subtle.

Kevin Kerner 5:06
Whose idea was that to wrap the CEO's car in a wrap?

Caitlin Bigelow 5:13
Guilty. Guilty as children.

Kevin Kerner 5:17
I I just I have to ask you, did he he just seriously didn't know about that before? 100%.

Caitlin Bigelow 5:21
He had no idea. Like literally no idea. And the funny thing that didn't make it into the video was that uh we thought he had figured it out because the day before I was filming, like there it seems like a really funny thing, right? Like, oh, you're gonna steal your CEO's car, you're gonna do this outrageous thing. Like, it was so much work to do this. It was actually really stressful because I was like, I'm putting so much money and time into this. I really hope it works. So we were filming a bunch of the before scenes of the car the day before we stole it. And so we had moved the car to a different portion of the garage and backed the car in so that the hood was spacing out so we could get all of the beginning shots. And we're up there filming, and I film lots of stuff. So I'm always have cameras around the office and things. So that part isn't so unusual, but we're kind of near his car and we're in a parking garage. And Zayn comes up out of the office on his phone. Like he, I think he was like interviewing someone, and he's kind of like come meandering over. And I'm like, he's coming to the car, he's coming to the car, like, oh my God, what do we do? And we just like like we just kind of he we kind of made eye contact. He goes to the car, he gets something out of the car, and he goes back down into the office. And we're like, surely he registered that one, his car was in a different location than he parked it, and that two, the orientation of the car was all so different. And literally he had no idea. I thought, okay, he'll mention something later. He'll be like, what was that all about, Caitlin? Or like, how did you do it? Like, why was my car in a different place? He like literally didn't notice. I maybe it was because he was on the phone, but he did not notice. So we were just like sweating, freaking out that like the cat was out of the bag.

Kevin Kerner 7:02
It has so many good good beats in it. My favorite beat of the whole thing is where the wife tells you not to um to really take care of the car, and then you and you could say you take a bite of the hamburger, and the hamburger like something comes out of it. It's just it's so classic. Uh you how did you do you have an improv background or any comedy background that you come up with this stuff? Or is this just come out of your brain? Has always come out of your brain.

Caitlin Bigelow 7:26
You know, I just I don't even know where the idea was incepted. I just thought for a while, gosh, it would be really funny to steal his car and like do this hilarious, like make it just as cringy as I possibly could design it and just so ostentatious because that's not really how his personality is at all. You wouldn't really know this from following our CEO on LinkedIn, but he's extremely introverted. We had a we had our company launch party. It was all just kind of friends and family and things. And he was stressed about having to stand up and just say, you know, one minute of like greetings and thank yous and things like like this. That's not his personality at all. And so the idea that I would do this to his car just made it even funnier to me. Um so great. Yeah. So, and I think the the thing though is that I'm really lucky that I work in an environment, you know, I can do these kind of things. Right. It's like in some ways encouraged. I mean, he didn't know that that was gonna happen, but and and I didn't actually know how he would react to it. I didn't think I would get in trouble for it. Um, I think he understands kind of the price we all have to pay for like attention and that that's part of like the growth plan and whatnot. But I didn't actually know how he would really respond to seeing the car.

Kevin Kerner 8:42
Well, it's really smart as a challenger brand to do things that because you're not gonna get noticed by doing blazal, a better way to do social media, LinkedIn. It's just not gonna, no one's gonna see that. No. So I I love I love the idea. Um, I had Udi Lettergore from Gong on the podcast about a year ago or so, but he his courageous marketing, I think it's courageous marketing.

Caitlin Bigelow 9:03
Yeah.

Kevin Kerner 9:03
Um, it is really good. And it's that same concept that you have to do things to punch above your weight. And you're definitely doing that. Did the thing what do you because I want to I wanna um talk through some of the thinking you have behind doing some of this more disruptive stuff, but has it shown that it's worked? Like can you see in the numbers this stuff's working?

Caitlin Bigelow 9:24
So I'm lucky that the stage and size of the company and just kind of the culture of the company is not so obsessed with attribution that I have to tie an exact number to an outcome every time I do something, which I'm grateful for that flexibility. What I can say is that LinkedIn was our only channel for until just recently. Like we just started investing in YouTube, and I think we like recorded our first video like last week, right? It's like a brand new channel. We're we brought on webinars now, we're starting to do some other things. But for a while, it was just literally LinkedIn. And so all the growth that we had, I could pretty much attribute to the act the activities we were doing on LinkedIn. And so if you look at kind of cumulatively all of the ARR that we have generated over kind of the first offering we did as a company, then we kind of pivoted and now we're rebuilding as a second offering. You know, that's over two million of ARR that we've generated purely off of LinkedIn content.

Kevin Kerner 10:22
Wow. It's incredible. Yeah. And I would guess that YouTube and there are probably other formats here that make this stuff really work, yeah, bigger. You could do all kinds of a video for sure. Um, have you so on the YouTube channel, is it is it open? Is it launched now, or have you launched it? And how is it doing well?

Caitlin Bigelow 10:40
So we've had a YouTube channel live for a while, but it was like kind of one of those things I think probably most marketers could relate to this. It's like, you know, we didn't have this like grandiose strategic vision for the channel. We were kind of putting things up randomly. And so now we're like, okay, we have a real strategy for the channel. We're leaning it heavily into educational content. We're looking at as a way to build another organic channel outside of LinkedIn. Uh, and so the channel's been live for a while, but it just hasn't really performed. It's just been kind of limping along. And so we're hoping that we can like start to hit an inflection point with what that looks like.

Kevin Kerner 11:15
Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. Um, and I because I think I had a question about like down funnel. This certainly gets eyeballs to the brand. You know, people know the brand. They might go to the site to check it out. And of course, this is just your your personal stuff here, and that the the brand has its own um, oh, I guess it's being posted as the brand, but um, you'll have to have some conversion from getting some engagement with the LinkedIn post all the way down funnel. And so you must be thinking through that other content that needs to be created, right? You can't do that. 100%.

Caitlin Bigelow 11:47
You can't, if everything you were doing was just crazy brand spooky. Spooky, yeah, yeah, then that wouldn't you'd grow a big audience and your audience would have no idea.

Kevin Kerner 11:56
Yeah, comedy channel. You need to start a comedy channel.

Caitlin Bigelow 11:58
Exactly. And so the I think all the time about funnel. And I think about these kind of plays as um like audience building kind of awareness uh type play. And then once I have an audience, how do I build trust with that audience? How do I how do I make sure that they understand that I see their problems and that I have solutions and frameworks and things that can help them and I build trust with that audience? And then the kind of bottom funnel content, which is like, how do I convert that audience into taking some kind of action? That's where we layer on a lot of like our webinar style programs or like, you know, one of like, or our product launches, we'll do like big launches on LinkedIn through our organic content, or we'll solicit design partners for things through our content. And we don't do that all that often. And I think that because most of the content we're producing kind of falls into this uh kind of awareness building and trust building, that by the time we have something interesting to say, we have a new product, we have, you know, we have design partnership opportunities, we have a webinar where we're teaching people something they've been following along for a while and they're going, oh, awesome! Like I'm really interested in that thing now. And we're able to kind of push them off of LinkedIn into our own own audience.

Kevin Kerner 13:11
Yeah, trust is really good. And there's a little bit of an emotional connection you get with a brand that does stuff like this. I mean, you're you're your users are like, oh, this is such a fun brand to be around and they want to be part of it.

Caitlin Bigelow 13:23
It's hard to compete with companies that are having fun. And I think that is, you know, and at the end of the day, like the way that I kind of talked with our CEO, Zayn, about this is I said, look, we're at the end of the day, we're marketing to marketers. They are gonna appreciate really thoughtful, well done marketing. Like you can't cut corners. You have to really push the envelope, you have to do something to stand out in the noise. And I think if we make the effort and really put our, you know, think about it from that from that lens that we'll have the most success.

Kevin Kerner 13:59
Yeah. Um, you you you, as you go down funnel, you've got a lot of good data, I'm sure, on what works and doesn't work in LinkedIn. And I really love your model of amplifying across a company. Can you, can you, from the data that you see, can you tell me what works and what doesn't work on LinkedIn for a company?

Caitlin Bigelow 14:18
I'll tell you a few mistakes that I think people make.

Kevin Kerner 14:21
Yeah, that's good.

Caitlin Bigelow 14:22
Um, I think a lot of people say that LinkedIn isn't working and they assume that it's their content, but actually often there's a lot of like upstream reasons why their content isn't working very well. So some of the biggest reasons that I see people making mistakes around is their positioning and the audience that they're trying to talk to. So if I talk to, you know, a CEO and say, okay, you want to activate your profile because you think this is going to be an important like pipeline builder for your company, who is like who is the most important persona that you want to reach for the growth of the company? And then they list out six different ICPs. That doesn't work. You can't be talking to six different audiences through one singular profile. So this is where the idea of like activating many profiles within your organization can really be beneficial because each person can talk to a different persona. So like within Blazel's strategy, I talk to marketers. That is my audience. Those are the people that I relate to, like those are the people I love. Zane talks to founders, like that's his audience that he talks to. We do not cross-pollinate that. He does not try to then talk to marketers. I do not try to talk to CEOs. Like we have very different audiences. I think there's some certainly overlap of we do all these shenanigans and things and like it cross-pollinates. And so people want to like go and follow me just be to see some of the antics and things that are happening. But my content is targeted very specifically to the group that I'm trying to reach. And I think a lot of people struggle with that. They don't want to niche down. They feel like if I'm only talking to one person, am I leaving so much more on the table? And I'm saying if you don't talk to one person, then you literally don't have a table.

Kevin Kerner 16:04
Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of business, it's business 101. I mean, you got to pick a niche and go for it. That's really, really good. Um, okay, so I wanted to talk through your um your you have some tactics that you listed out there here that I think are really awesome. There are eight of them. Uh, from perform a very expensive prank to create a parody of what people hate to uh do something real where most use AI. Um, just really good stuff. And it for the people watching this, if you haven't gone to Caitlin's channel, you should definitely go to see this. But what are some of your greatest hits of that, of those um different types of tactics?

Caitlin Bigelow 16:43
Gosh. I think that there's a few things that I think about in terms of doing marketing that I really want to go viral in some way or have people emotionally connect to. So one, I think people have to see that you've put an effort into the thing. So, like when I stole my CEO's car, that takes a lot of effort. And I could have just done an AI prompt and fake AI done the car, but it doesn't show effort. And so people will not appreciate that thing.

Kevin Kerner 17:15
Great advice.

Caitlin Bigelow 17:16
The other thing I think you need to think about is how will the story be told visually? So I think about things when I'm thinking about marketing ideas and a campaign, I always think about how would this visually show up on LinkedIn? Would this what is the what is the hero image for this thing? So, like again, kind of going back to the car, there was a clear hero image of my mind of what that's gonna look like. The car will look outrageous, right? And so we could have this like really awesome, like it's this sexy luxury car and then has all this crazy meme stuff on it, right? Same with um, we hosted a hot sauce competition for SF Tech Week where we had all these people up on stage, uh including Zayn again, our CEO. And there was this montage cut together of him, and maybe we can play it um here.

Kevin Kerner 18:06
It's horrible.

Caitlin Bigelow 18:06
It's it's it is so painful to watch. It is so, so painful.

Kevin Kerner 18:11
Uh let's take let's take a look at it.

Caitlin Bigelow 18:13
Tucker butt. Oh, it's time for Zane to tap off. That sounds great. Anything where I have to the driver's seat and a little QR.

Speaker 6 18:26
Okay, this poor man needs milk.

Kevin Kerner 18:30
So painful.

Caitlin Bigelow 18:31
It's painful. And he was really and he actually trained for this. Like he was eating hot sauce every day and like working on the case. What was the pepper?

Kevin Kerner 18:38
Was it like one of is it like the debom from like was it some crazy ghost pepper from some?

Caitlin Bigelow 18:43
Yeah, we had like the Carolina Reapers. I mean, it was like spicy, spicy stuff. But it became clear to me like very early on that he was in pain and struggling. And I thought he would for sure tap out. And I was encouraging dad tap out, and he didn't. But again, what does the visual moment look like that's really gonna pull people in? Well, he's like crying on stage. He pours, I mean, they see him, you have milk on his head. He pours milk on his head, and he said it really helped. It's like that is such a strong visual moment that people are gonna have some kind of emotional reaction to. So I think that for me, like the worst thing that could ever happen as a marketer is you do something and just no one pays attention to it. So I don't care if I create polarizing content, which I do. I I had a woman just this week. I mean, I've had a handful of people publicly say, like, you should be fired. You have, you know, you're terrible at your job, you're chaotic, you're disorganized, like, you know, you're immature, whatever. Um, that's fine. I'm actually thrilled when I get like a new hater because it means that I elicited such a passionate response out of someone. Like my content made people feel something so strongly that they were willing to like publicly comment that I should be fired and they have no idea who I am. Like, whoa, that's crazy. It's good for us. Yeah. But on the other side of that, like most people don't feel that way. Like, you know, I'd say like 90, I don't know what the percentage is. Maybe 95% of people think what I'm doing is really fun and awesome and like exciting, and they want to follow me.

Kevin Kerner 20:13
It really is.

Caitlin Bigelow 20:14
And the 5% are like there's the haters out there that there's always gonna be haters no matter what you do.

Kevin Kerner 20:19
It is um, I'm wondering how much content comes out of the like the hot sauce thing. I only watched the hot sauce clip, but it seems like there would be so many other things that could shoot off that. Do you ever do extensions of the crazy idea, or is it usually the crazy idea and then so get the engagement and walk on?

Caitlin Bigelow 20:37
Here's something that I don't see very many companies do that I think is a real missed opportunity is that there is an opportunity. Like my my favorite thing to do is storytelling. I love telling stories. And people always think of the moment as the post, right? The hot sauce competition is the post. But you should tell the story all the way leading up to the hot sauce competition and tell the story after the hot sauce competition, right? And same with product launches. Like we we deploy the same strategy with product launches. If we're about to do a big product launch, we will talk about the product launch leading up to the big launch video five, six, seven times before we get to the launch. And then we'll talk about the launch after the launch as well. What were the numbers, metrics? What happened? Here was the launch party, here's all the excitement. We want to create this feeling of like inevitability and momentum behind what it is that we're doing. And I just don't see very many companies do that. I think they think of it as just we're working for this one post. And if you do it in that manner, you're putting a lot of effort and time and pressure on one singular post to really perform well. So the car post, you know, the car stunt resulted in many posts, right? It was like I had a teaser post, I had a picture post, I had the video post, then we did a behind the scenes video post. Then, you know, Zayn is posting. Uh, you know, I have a marketing lead. She also posted, right? Like we had a lot of content and conversation around that.

Kevin Kerner 22:08
Yeah, it all could, I mean, it really just all goes back to effort and care. I mean, you it just takes a lot of effort to do this the right way. And it's everyone's looking for the simple way to just launch the thing now. There's so much AI slob. And you do have one really good video about your AI slob stuff that where you covered your office in slime, which is this is just perfect. How do you build like I can't remember if you knew Zayn before you went to work there? Um, but how does someone build a relationship? How do you sell this to the executive team in a way that they don't think you're crazy?

Caitlin Bigelow 22:42
Yeah. I saw a fantastic interview with Don Jeter, the CMO at Torque. And for those of you who don't know Torque, it's a large cybersecurity company. And they basically have the version of branding for of liquid death, but for cybersecurity. So they have, you know, pterodactyls with skeletons riding on their backs and monster trucks and crate, like it's so off-brand. And he basically said, This was the brand I knew I wanted to build. And I went around when I was interviewing, I went in with like, this is the vision, and I want you to get on board with the vision if you want to hire me. And I was like, wow, Don is so much more intelligent than I am. I kind of lucked into it a bit and like stumbled into it. Um, I did know Zayn just through, I had been following him on LinkedIn for a while. And I actually pitched, I was going to pitch to him when he was a VC and I was a founder. And uh he had ended up competing or investing in a competitor company and we never connected. But I followed him along online. And what I didn't know was when I joined, he had fired every marketing leader he had ever worked with. And generally, I think, kind of had a had a skeptical relationship with marketing.

Kevin Kerner 24:00
Interesting.

Caitlin Bigelow 24:01
And and just kind of felt like it was a bit of a cost center, which I think is frankly an opinion that a lot of CEOs feel. And there is this like friction between the CEO and the CMO of like are what's the RRI we're getting out of this? And you know, is this really is it worth it? Are you spending responsibly? Kind of all these things. And so, you know, I think though that one of the things that convinced me to join was that I was really excited about the space and I felt like Zayn understood what it took to gain attention and to grow an audience, and that he was very willing to be he was very willing to be unabashedly who he is online, unfiltered and and not worried about what other people would think of him.

Kevin Kerner 24:52
How much fun has that created for the internal brand, like your employees, the people at the company? I I see a lot of companies trying to do this type of type of stuff once. And then it's great and it's fun, it's like the event, and then it ends. But I'm wondering, is this carried into the culture of the company in any way?

Caitlin Bigelow 25:10
Yeah, it has to, right? It's just, I think it just comes out naturally as part of our relationship now, right? Is and and I think the thing that's kind of cool about this is that it only works because the trust is there. Zayn knows that I'm actually really good at my job. And that's why he can fake threaten to fire me all the time, because he knows that I'm not actually worried about losing my job, right? Um, and so I think I know we kind of did a long windup to this, but to go back to kind of like, how do you build this right? And, you know, what does that look like at the beginning stages? You know, we didn't come in with some big master plan about how the two of us were going to interact online and that, you know, we were gonna take this friction that exists and a lot of people recognize and like blow it to a point of absurdity and like make it kind of a parody thing. It just kind of started to happen naturally and we like recognized the signal and thought it was funny and just started leaning more and more into it. And I think that, you know, the the very early stuff that I was doing uh cost no money, right? Like it cost no money or almost no money. And when I could prove that that was working, it was like I had more and more of his buy-in. So, like the the original first stunt I did was I did this kind of parody launch of coming out of stealth. And so I bought a billboard in Wichita, Kansas for $700. And I like bought, you know, a thousand branded pens for Blazel that was like a joke. And I like pretended that we bought a really expensive domain name. Like I did these like kind of um, I was like almost poking fun at marketers. Like, here's all these silly marketing things that people do that actually don't move the needle at all. And so I'm gonna stack all these together in a funny way. And that cost me almost nothing, like under a thousand dollars, all in for like a huge, like we ended up getting hundreds of thousands of impressions for the launch. And it was like a massive success. You know, sales like tripled, everyone was over quota, like it was awesome. And Zayn was like, whoa, that worked really well. Like, what how do we do more of that? You know? And so then I, you know, and then we did um, we did another parody video with our investors. We took all the VCs that had invested in Blazel and we said, okay, instead of doing the traditional launch video where you say, like, you know, it's like the founder on the on the beige couch saying, like, we just raised $70 million and blah, blah, blah. I said, what if we get all of what if we do that parody video, but we get all of our investors to say why they invested, but for crazy reasons. Like I was tricked into it. They told me the round was oversubscribed, it wasn't. I didn't look at the deck. I only liked the logo, kind of all these funny things. That cost us no money to do, right? That was a zero dollar thing to do. Um, and so I didn't start with, you know, and I've never really spent that much money. The car was like the most expensive thing I've done, but I've worked up to it. That's 11 months in. I'm now spending like $3,000 on a stunt, right?

Kevin Kerner 28:14
It's like gorilla. Yeah.

Caitlin Bigelow 28:15
Yeah, I started spending like $0.00 or $50 on something or whatever. And so, you know, budget is uh you don't need budget to do this kind of stuff.

Kevin Kerner 28:25
I don't know if you can do this or not, but you have your eight things here that are really kind of a system that you could build. But I wanted to give you a a pressure or one of the things, attention maybe that a CMO feels. And I wonder if you could riff on something. Here's one CMOs have the shortest tenure in the C-suite.

Caitlin Bigelow 28:41
This this is one that we riff on all the time. Um so you know, this idea that marketing is undervalued, that marketing, you know, uh it gets fired more frequently. That's actually the parody that we're kind of riffing off of is um is that exact tension. So yeah, that's right.

Kevin Kerner 29:01
That is the whole story, right? Yeah, that's part of it.

Caitlin Bigelow 29:03
That's the story. Yeah. So like we did um, we did a fake 90-day performance review for me, where Zayn basically says, like, you're doing a terrible job. All these people publicly online think you should be fired. He read real quotes from real things online. We had been evicted from our co-working space for guerrilla marketing tactics, like all of this was real. And so we did this fake performance review, and he said, You're being put on a pip. And that was the that was the joke. Um, so yeah, I think doing a fake pip on, you know, with your CMO and your CEO and recording it as like a Zoom call and saying, like, you know, that's the joke.

Kevin Kerner 29:41
So good. So good. Uh, what about sales and what about the tension between sales and marketing? Sales, sales says marketing leads are bad.

Caitlin Bigelow 29:48
Well, yeah, okay. So I would do some kind of video where sales is like complaining about marketing. Like marketing's not giving us leads. You would take like the things that are most recognizable, right? Like marketing isn't giving me leads, or the leads they're giving us are not good enough, or like not the right ICP or whatever it is. And so you'd have like the sales team like complaining about marketing. And then you would have marketing be like its own persona where uh like we have these flame suits in the office that I make people wear periodically. And so maybe as like to get back at them, I would like make them wear the flame suit and do some outrageous like stunt out on the street to try to get them to bring traffic in or something. You know, it's like almost like a revenge play kind of deal.

Kevin Kerner 30:37
Yeah, I love it. Or I have one.

Caitlin Bigelow 30:39
I yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you got?

Kevin Kerner 30:41
I just thought of one as you were as you were going through that. I was like, um, I don't know if you've seen watch Better Call Saul.

Caitlin Bigelow 30:47
Okay, yeah, I've seen some of it.

Kevin Kerner 30:48
Like comedy, but he's he's um scamming a bunch of these old, old, like these elderly people, and they're playing bingo, and he's reading the bingo stuff out, and he has the mic on while he's reading the bingo cards, and then someone comes in and he goes out of the of the place, but he's still got the mic on. And so this person's talking to him about the scam, and everything's being heard in the room that the bingo players are in. And then he walks back in and he notices he has the mic on. Turns out it was all it was all part of his ploy. That was part of the the ploy. He wanted to get him mad at him, but oh my gosh, can you imagine like a sales presentation where they're just sick and tired of presenting your marketing plan and you have your you have your thing on and then you walk outside and oh sh, oh shoot, my mic's still on.

Caitlin Bigelow 31:32
That's totally it. That's I could also see like um like a like a like a schoolyard kind of like bullet like rivalry kind of thing almost where like the bail team, yeah, the sales team like won't sit with you at lunch anymore because you're like, you know, you're like not cool right now for them, or they're like mad at you, or I don't know. I'm sure you could riff on it in a bunch of ways.

Kevin Kerner 31:53
So good. Yeah. And you I think if you just took your eight things and just thought about it for a while, you come up with all kinds of stuff. So it's a really good system. I'll make sure I link to this post, your your post here, because it's really good. Okay, I wanted to, I could talk to you all day about this stuff, but I wanted to um ask you three questions we're asking all the CMOs that have been on this. They're kind of they need to be better now. They're kind of not as good at questions now. Like we gotta make this a lot more fun. But anyway, I want to, we're doing a benchmark here um across these two questions. So the first one is what is one AI workflow that worked for you, that's working for you? And I and it's really interesting for you because you're doing a lot of live things. Um, but what's what's working from an AI perspective?

Caitlin Bigelow 32:36
The thing that I'm most excited about from an, I mean, it everything runs on AI now. Like we're doing stunts in real life, which is part of the shtick, but AI helps plan things and organize and everything. But the thing that is working the best for me right now is I have always been a big fan of organic channels. So using LinkedIn, using YouTube, SEO, kind of whatnot. And so lead magnets have always been a big part of my kind of marketing tool, you know, toolkit, so to speak. And I think using AI to make really customizable, very cool lead magnets where kind of the leading principles are you absolutely could not get this on your own and you can create this magic moment for someone using AI is really cool. So, like I'll give you an example. One of the things we do is we have this LinkedIn report card that we build for people. And so they put in their email address and we look at their full 12 months of posting history, and we analyze how they stack up and rank against other marketers in their industry or whatever industry they're in. And we show how their data compares to the averages, how often they're posting to the average, um, like how they rank against the 33,000 other marketers in our system. Kind of there's all this interesting stuff. And it's creates this like really like, whoa, this is so cool. And I never would have been able to do something like that before, yeah.

Kevin Kerner 34:00
Yeah, it's incredible. It writes the HTML, the JavaScript, everything. It's just, and you just think of the thing and it happens. And then not enough marketers use that. It's just like right there. Either stuff you think of that that you can just build that's a calculator or something, but things like you say, where you're you're using the exhaust of your own data to do some benchmark or something else. Really, really smart. That's the first time that's been said on the question number one. Yeah, right. Um question two is what's still stuck in pilot, something that you expected to be running but isn't by now.

Caitlin Bigelow 34:33
Oh man. You know, I think that my Achilles heel is that this maybe this is a superpower and a weakness, is that I have a lot of ideas all the time. No, and I tend and I tend, I know, I know it's shocking to me.

Kevin Kerner 34:50
Surprising.

Caitlin Bigelow 34:51
And I tend to jump into stuff without always thinking it through all the all the way. And so I feel like I have a lot of like partially started campaigns or projects or things that I'm like, you know, I never really got that to the finish line, right? I wish I had either not started that at all or, you know, um been a little more intentional about it. But then at the same time, when you're a scrappy little startup, it's like sometimes you've got to throw spaghetti at the wall and then just see what's sticking and then say, okay, I'm willing to say that there's like a little graveyard of projects that aren't gonna make it to fruit.

Kevin Kerner 35:24
Totally agree. Totally agree. Uh, especially when you're scrappy and just start like we're a small company, but you gotta try stuff. You get in some stuff isn't gonna work. I totally agree. And then finally, what's the one thing that you won't hand to AI?

Caitlin Bigelow 35:36
This is gonna sound really silly coming from a company that literally generates AI content for people, but I love actually writing the stories myself. I think um the like the Blazel platform is so helpful to me for so many reasons. Um, but I really get a lot of joy and satisfaction out of writing. Both my parents were journalists, and I it's just something that I really like to do and enjoy. And so I've, you know, there have been times when I've used the content that Blazel has produced for me, but it's I I like writing it myself personally.

Kevin Kerner 36:14
Yeah. Do you think you have to be a creative to do the stuff that you're doing, or is it just some blinder you have to take off to think this way?

Caitlin Bigelow 36:24
You know, it's a good question. Uh I think that there's a lot farther people could push. You I think you have to be a little bit less worried about what people are gonna think of you. And I think you have to feel kind of supported in the role that you are like there's like the right mix of things that must be true, I think. And uh, but I think a lot of us could push it further than where we push it. You know, if you think about like, okay, that's an interesting idea, but like, how do you really make people care? How do you make that a little more intense? Like, I'll give you one quick example. You know, when I was thinking about doing this billboard in Wichita, Kansas, I went to Zayn and said, Hey, I think we could, you know, as part of the parody of this launch, we could do this, we'll just Photoshop a billboard in Wichita, Kansas. And he's like, Well, how much does a billboard cost in Wichita? Like, why don't you just go do the thing? Right. Like, that's so much cooler. And I was like, Oh, I I can do that. You're gonna let me like go do that. He's like, duh, go. It's like 700 bucks, like be free. And I was it was like, Oh, yeah, of course, you should push it more, right? And so, like having someone there in the room with you to just encourage you in that way is so helpful.

Kevin Kerner 37:39
Yeah. What is uh I wanted to ask you the AL AI roulette question here, but what's on the cutting room floor for you? What's the what's it what are the things that you you wished you would have done that you haven't you didn't do? What's the best? Yeah, what what like that you're like, is there anything where you've gone, man, I really want to get this done, but you just haven't done it yet? What can you tell me?

Caitlin Bigelow 38:01
Everything?

Kevin Kerner 38:02
No, yeah. Um that's the answer. There's too much. There's too much on the cutting room floor.

Caitlin Bigelow 38:08
I think the thing that is high on my to-do list that I somehow have not made time to do yet is I have been building a skill library for our agent around LinkedIn best practices that are in my head. And I really want our agent to be able to encourage and coach people through this because there's not just learning how to use our app, but there's also like what are the LinkedIn best practices? And it's so in my bloodstream that I just take it for granted and I just assume that everyone knows that you should do all these different best practices and people actually don't know that stuff. And so I have been building a skill library where as I'm using LinkedIn and I think of something that's like a piece of a playbook or something people can use, I build the skill file around around it. And I'm trying to architect that into uh GitHub so that our our engineers can like pull those files easily. And uh anyway, I'm like partially through the project and I keep kind of getting these starts and stops with it.

Kevin Kerner 39:06
Yeah, that would be great. I'm sure a lot of people would use it. Um, okay. Let me ask you, let me press send on this AI relap question. I put your your uh profile in Whisperflow, and then it's also kept up with what we're talking about here, and then I have our pre-call and a bunch of stuff. So I'm gonna hit send on this and see what happens. A stranger called your team chaotic, disorganized, and unfocused. You called that proof it's working. What would someone have to say? What would someone have to say to actually worry you?

Caitlin Bigelow 39:38
I don't think that a public comment would worry me. No, I mean, if someone like threatened me or my family, then I would be very worried, right? Like if I if I got like a real stalker or something, then yes, I would be seriously concerned about something like that.

Kevin Kerner 39:50
Yeah, maybe it was someone liking the the content too much might be like, okay, let's not.

Caitlin Bigelow 39:55
No, but I think in terms of I I don't think you could say much worse about that about me than things that have already been said of like me just think people think just not liking it or thinking I don't deserve the role that I have, or that um uh the one that really got me was um I had posted something that was like very personal to me. And I had said, like, I have no reason to believe that this is possible, but I really just want to build the largest marketing tech brand in the world, like the most recognizable marketing tech brand. And at the time we were five people. I've never worked for a unicorn company, I've never worked in SaaS before, I've never managed a huge team. Like there was a thousand, I had like 4,000 followers on LinkedIn. Like there was absolutely nothing that could point to this being possible or that I should publicly be saying that this is like the North Star for me. And people were in general very supportive of the post. And then this the next day, this guy wrote this like scathing thing about me about how I would never achieve this goal and how it was like, you know, disorganized and blah, blah, blah. And uh, and I was just like, again, I just totally took it in stride and was like, this is great. Like, I I you cannot fluster me by saying these things to me.

Kevin Kerner 41:11
Um, you gotta ignore the haters. Yeah.

Caitlin Bigelow 41:13
But the haters also made for amazing content because I literally just took a shot of what he said, posted it and said, like, so-and-so disagrees. Has you know, have you ever felt like who is this person in your life that is out there telling you no when you feel like in your heart you should be saying yes and leaning into it? That's a that's a moment that we have all had someone be that naysayer to us, right? And so it actually made for really amazing content because it makes us relatable and likable and human, you know?

Kevin Kerner 41:44
Yeah. Yeah. And you surround yourself there too. You've got some really supportive people at the company and it's uh it makes it makes it all makes it all work. But Caitlin, this has been great. I knew this would be a lot of fun with you, but it's been really awesome. Um, I I'm I'm really interested in the platform too and your and your work. Um, where is there anything that you guys are offering to be able to get into the platform easily? And how do people follow you and get a hold of you for?

Caitlin Bigelow 42:08
Yeah, so you can you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm I you know I'm very available. So shoot me a message if you have questions about LinkedIn content and want to kind of get something going. Blazel.com. We, you know, if you want to book a demo and check it out, we've got a bunch of information and stuff there on the site. And uh yeah, this was a pleasure. I'm so I'm so glad you invited me on.

Kevin Kerner 42:30
Yeah, good stuff. Thanks, Caitlin.