In this episode of the Professional Confessional podcast:
"Either start the business, or stop talking about it, because you're bothering me." [00:35]
Ashley Stryker [00:00:06] Welcome to the Professional Confessional: How the biggest mistakes we’ve ever made fundamentally changed our work, our careers, and our approach forever. Gain wisdom and perspective through these audio absolutions.
Ashley Stryker [00:00:20] Today’s guest is Joe Pullizi, the “godfather of content marketing” himself. Publisher, entrepreneur and author, Joe talks about how his biggest mistakes drove his very first business out of the market completely.
Joe Pulizzi [00:00:35] I gotta take it back to, you know, 2006, 2007. [I was] 33, 34 years old and I’m in content marketing, custom publishing, whatever you want to call it at the time. I was working for a large publishing company. I was vice president of content marketing and making lots of money and all that good stuff, traveling, but not so bad. It was a great job. It was a great first kind of career move for me.
Joe Pulizzi [00:01:01] And finally, after the persistence of my wife, which she said, “You’ve been talking about starting this business forever. Either start the business, or stop talking about it because you’re bothering me.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:01:12] So we set a date. It was the last day of March 2007, I ended up leaving that job and started on April 2nd, 2007, what was called Junta 42.
Joe Pulizzi [00:01:24] We were going to be like the eHarmony for content marketing. And that’s actually how I explained it to people. I said, “There’s lots of brands out there that need content marketing help and there are lots of writers and agencies out there that are willing to work with you, but they’re very hard to match up.” So, that’s what Junta 42 did; we actually matched that up. So that was the start of it.
"Bleeding cash. Losing money. Dumping everything into web development..." [01:46]
Joe Pulizzi [00:01:46] Fast forward to the summer 2009: Bleeding cash, losing money, dumping everything into web development, getting to the point where I’ve lost almost all confidence in my entrepreneurial abilities because I know that the jig is up.
Joe Pulizzi [00:02:03] I had to look at the numbers. I was running out of money. Credit cards are maxed out. All the savings are gone. I basically said, “I’ve got to stop fooling around and realize that I’m a complete failure because I couldn’t make this thing work.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:02:17] And it really came to a head… I think this was in September of 2009, agencies had to pay for Junta 42 to be part of the lead gen system. They paid $5,000 a year to be in that system. They would get unlimited leads, And we had a lot of those agencies that actually got million-dollar-plus deals out of it. We didn’t get any commission off of that. We just got the $5,000 annual fee.
"This must be some kind of a mistake." [02:42]
Joe Pulizzi [00:02:42] There was one — our best case study in the world and the agency they got… I don’t know how big the deal was. It was well over a million dollar deal we delivered them in the previous year, they were part of the Junta 42 system, but they didn’t renew their subscription. And I’m like, “This must be some kind of mistake.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:02:58] So, I call the agency president on the phone. And I said, “Hey, this is Joe. I see that you’re not in the system. Something must be wrong. Can I can I take your credit card now? We’ll get you re-upped now, everything’s great.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:03:11] And she said, “Joe, I’m sorry. I’m not we’re not going to be re-upped this year. I love everything, but we’re just not going to do it and spend the money.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:03:19] And I’m like, “Really? Why is that? What’s the issue?”
Joe Pulizzi [00:03:22] And she said, “We’re looking for a better return on investment in other places.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:03:26] And I said, “If you can get a better return on investment than a million dollars in revenue for five thousand dollars spent, let me know and I’m going to go do it!”
"I can't even close the deal on the greatest case study we've ever had." [03:36]
Joe Pulizzi [00:03:36] Anyway. Small talk. I hung up the phone and I remember… This is probably one of those, if it was a movie, it’s the low moment where you’ve got the music playing in the background and the and the lead character feels really sorry for himself, goes into the backyard and says, “I’m an utter failure. I can’t even close the deal on the greatest case study we’ve ever had.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:03:59] And that was it. So in the next two weeks, I start getting my LinkedIn profile together and started sniffing around. “OK, I’ve got to find a job somewhere.” And my wife knew where I was, and I’m just in a real dark place because I had this dream of being the successful entrepreneur and it’s not going to happen. The idea doesn’t work. Maybe the idea was sound, but I couldn’t make it financially work for us.
"I started to go through some of my emails from our blog subscribers..." [04:25]
Joe Pulizzi [00:04:25] Probably two weeks later, for some reason, I started to go through some of my emails and the emails were from our blog subscribers. So luckily at the time, the same time, this is all going around the Content Marketing Revolution blog, which was my personal blog, but it was on Junta 42.
Joe Pulizzi [00:04:42] It was doing fairly well. We were getting lots of blog subscribers. It was starting to get found in search. All the good stuff. I would get emails from subscribers just, “Hey Joe, I’ve had this question, that question” — whatever the case is.
Joe Pulizzi [00:04:54] And I started to really look at some of the feedback we were getting. It was like, “Joe, do you have an online training programs available for my team? Joe, are there any large in-person events around content marketing that I could send my team to?” These things kept going coming up over and over again.
Joe Pulizzi [00:05:12] And that’s when it hit me. It’s like, “Oh, my gosh, we’ve developed this audience around content marketing through the blog and we’ve done a pretty good job of it. And I’m trying to force feed this stupid Junta 42 product down their throat when nobody wants to buy it.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:05:27] Only maybe a half a percent of those people were even looking to outsource their project at some time. So I’m trying to sell a product that’s not even near the life cycle, what was going on in content marketing was a new thing. Everyone wanted training and education, so it just finally hit me.
Joe Pulizzi [00:05:42] I’m like, “Oh, my God, I am selling the wrong thing. Why don’t I just listen to the blog? Subscribers are telling me exactly what they want to buy, but we don’t have those products and services available.”
"I'm going to give this one more shot." [05:52]
Joe Pulizzi [00:05:52] So I talk to my wife and I said, “Look, I’m going to give this one more shot.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:05:56] We scrape together some more money. I wrote down the visual plan for what became Content Marketing Institute. It was on a cocktail napkin, because I was probably heavily drinking at the time.
Joe Pulizzi [00:06:08] And, it basically said we would have the leading online destination for content marketing; We would have the leading in-person event for content marketing; and, we would have the leading trade publication magazine for content marketing.
Joe Pulizzi [00:06:21] That became ContentMarketingInstitute.com; It became Content Marketing World event; and it became Chief Content Officer magazine.
Joe Pulizzi [00:06:27] So basically everything Junta 42 switched over to Content Marketing Institute in May of 2010. We came up with the new banner. In September, we said, “We’re launching this event a year from 2011 we were going to launch Content Marketing World; January, we were gonna launch Chief Content Officer magazine.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:06:45] It took off right away, and the little event that we were hoping for 100, 150 people to come to in Cleveland, Ohio, in September of 2011, we ended up getting 660 that year; 1,000 the next year. Three years later, we had 4,000.
Joe Pulizzi [00:07:00] So that was it. It was almost nothing. And the persistence and stubbornness and that … I just did not want to work another go back and work a corporate gig again. We had to find a way. And that’s a long, short story.
"I'm still salty over it." [07:16]
Ashley Stryker [00:07:16] Did you ever find out why they never bothered to re-up?
Joe Pulizzi [00:07:18] I haven’t talked to her since and that’s my fault because I’m still salty over it. It’s 12 years and I’m still upset. But if you… Be very careful who your buyer group is, where the money is coming from. Here’s one of the key things to launching a product. So this is key.
Joe Pulizzi [00:07:39] In Junta 42’s case, all the money came from agencies. I know agencies now and anyone listening to this who knows agencies, knows that agencies don’t spend money on marketing hardly ever. So I’m trying to target a group of marketers that hate spending money on marketing, for marketing!
Joe Pulizzi [00:07:59] So it’s truly… It’s shoemaker shoes! They never spend money on their own marketing. They generally don’t have their own marketing initiatives. It’s generally word of mouth only. Maybe now you could do, like, SEO. It’s not a lot that’s put into marketing. So $5,000, even though they got the million dollar deal, $5,000 to them for marketing is a huge amount of money.
Joe Pulizzi [00:08:21] OK, so now fast forward. So that was a great learning, as one of the best failures you could have, because after getting through that, I said “Never make that mistake again.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:08:31] And when we moved to the whole model of Content Marketing Institute, I said, “Oh, all of our money will come from enterprise marketers that have a ton of money, that spend a ton of money on training. They spent a ton of money on education, and they really need to get this content marketing thing.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:08:47] And I said, “Oh, that’s just a lot better than trying to get 100% of somebody’s marketing budget at $5,000” — $5,000 for a company, let’s say, a Fortune 500 company, which is who we targeted the $5,000 from. That marketing group is throwing away money! It’s taking out a client for dinner. It’s nothing.
Joe Pulizzi [00:09:07] So that was the big change we made, so that when you go and I start to started to ask, “Hey, can you and your team go to Content Marketing World and we can give you 20 passes and it’ll cost $25,000?”
Joe Pulizzi [00:09:21] [It was] like, “Where should we send the check?”
Joe Pulizzi [00:09:22] And I’m like, “Oh my goodness, what was I doing all this time?”
"Agencies didn't -- and still don't today -- spend a lot on marketing." [09:25]
Joe Pulizzi [00:09:25] I don’t know personally why, but I think in general why we couldn’t get agencies to sign up was simply because of that reason, like they didn’t — and still today don’t — spend a lot on marketing. If you look at a lot of the marketing initiatives for specifically content marketing agencies that have started since then, none of them have worked very well. The association doesn’t work very well, because people don’t want to pay the dues for it. It’s crazy. They just don’t spend money on anything!
Ashley Stryker [00:09:52] So I think part of it… I will say there’s a sort of, “I know how to do this. I’m paid to do this for other people so I don’t need to pay someone else to do something I already know how to do.” And they forget there’s a bandwidth issue, whether it’s time, whether it’s other resources.
Joe Pulizzi [00:10:06] And that’s the rule. Yeah, that’s the rule, not the exception. And I do the same thing, so I’ll get it. Colleagues of mine, friends, they’ll say, “Oh, we’re down to our final selection of, let’s say, these three content marketing agencies. Which one should we choose?”
Joe Pulizzi [00:10:21] And I know them all. And I’ll say, “Which one does the best job on their own content? Choose that one, because they’re the ones that really care about this, because they’re doing it themselves. They’re eating their own dog food, whatever, whatever you want to say.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:10:34] So I think that. Really important, so it’s the same thing with somebody saying, “Oh, I need a new website, I’m going to hire this company, that their website is horrible.” Why would you do that?
"Why do you think Junta 42 ultimately failed?" [10:43]
Ashley Stryker [00:10:43] Why do you think Junta 42 ultimately failed?
Joe Pulizzi [00:10:47] First of all, Junta 42 failed for me because I launched a product that I fell in love with and had no input from my future customers — which, of course, that’s the whole idea of everything that I do now is around, “Don’t launch with the product.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:11:05] Most businesses that launch product first fail. Why would you launch a business that way? Why wouldn’t you build the audience first? They come to know, trust you, and they will tell you exactly what they want to buy. Of course, that’s the beauty of the business model today. That’s what we call the Content Inc. model. That’s what I would move forward.
Joe Pulizzi [00:11:24] We were just way too early, because I was launching a product that you had to know exactly what you were looking for. You had to have people in the department that were strategizing over this.
Joe Pulizzi [00:11:38] We launched Junta 42 at a time when nobody even had any content marketing people on the team. If you had a content marketing person or a custom publishing person on your team, they were probably working on an internal publication or a corporate magazine. They were not at all associated with marketing. They were probably… Had offices down by the boiler in the basement. Nobody knew where they were. They probably never came out.
Joe Pulizzi [00:12:03] So those are the types of people that we were targeting. Now, slowly over the last 13 years, those people are now an integral part of marketing. So I’m trying to launch a product for a industry is not even a thing yet, which is so silly.
Joe Pulizzi [00:12:20] So [what] we tried to do was launch education, training and the product at the same time. Totally silly. Hindsight’s twenty-twenty, right?
Joe Pulizzi [00:12:28] I just I want to go back to that Joe and say, “What are you thinking? You go ahead and go march forward with this.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:12:36] The blog was called the Content Marketing Revolution. I really believed it was a revolution. I believe it is — I still do! — it is the absolute best way to market your products and services today. But at that time, nobody was doing it yet. So there you go.
"Do you regret anything? Do you wish you had started differently?" [12:50]
Joe Pulizzi [00:12:50] People ask me to — and I’m sure you think about this with your other guests or you talk about this — is, do you regret anything? Do you wish you would have started differently?
Joe Pulizzi [00:12:59] And I think it’s so funny. Sometimes, you have to go through that pain to… I don’t think I ever would have got — I learned that lesson so well because I was, it was down to desperation and I learned it; I got it; went forward. So I would almost have to say I would have to go through that again, in order to really understand.
Joe Pulizzi [00:13:18] It’s almost like with stock investing right now. I’ve been investing in the stock market for a long time. When I first started investing in the late ’90s, I made huge mistakes. And I’m so happy I made those mistakes with a smaller amount of money, so that today, I can make smarter decisions. That’s what we talk about.
Joe Pulizzi [00:13:37] Even with our community at the Tilt or reading the book, we try to tell people, “Look, learn from everyone else, learn from my mistakes first.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:13:44] But sometimes, you just have to go through these things and realize, “OK, that didn’t work.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:13:48] The more people make mistakes, the ones that make the most mistakes are probably the most successful people in the world because they went out there and tried things, and we’re crazy. That’s my favorite quote: “If you tried something and failed, you’re vastly better off than if you had tried nothing.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:14:05] That’s my number one [quote], since I found it on the back of a sugar packet when I was six years old at my parents’ restaurant, that’s what I look at all the time. And I took that home, and I put it on my wall, and then I made it into a — printed it out with my dot matrix printer and put it on the wall and looked at it all the time and said, “Whenever you get into a situation, take the leap, give it a try, even if you might fail and then see what you learn from.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:14:29] That’s all — that’s the number one thing I’ve tried to teach my kids. It’s don’t be scared to take the risk. Now, obviously, I said, “Don’t try to get you don’t get yourself killed. If you are physically going to be injured doing something, I don’t want you trying that. But if it’s not going to kill you, and if the worst thing is, you’re going to have a couple of bruises, or your ego is going to be bruised or you’re going to be scared to go into a situation — go for it, give it a shot.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:14:52] And I do that all the time. Like, I spent five years of my life going to events and by myself just meeting with people. You probably would not see this, because I’m fairly outgoing, but I do not like to go up to people and introduce myself. Most of the time, I feel like I’m an introvert. I would like to go back to the room and order room service.
Joe Pulizzi [00:15:13] But what I do is, I’m like, “OK, how do I make the most of the situation?” And I’m like, “There is a table, and I’m going to go sit down and introduce myself to everyone at that table.”
Joe Pulizzi [00:15:22] And I go do it. And then I’m like, “Oh, I did that. That was exhausting. I met some really cool people. Now what?”
Joe Pulizzi [00:15:29] I was like, “OK, there’s a group over there. They’re just… They’re talking. I’m going to go over and introduce myself” — and I, like, will myself over there to do it.
Ashley Stryker [00:15:37] It’s amazing, how that just spirals into real opportunities.
Joe Pulizzi [00:15:40] The last thing I’ll say, at the time between the lowest of the lows to thinking that this thing was going to work was then less than two years later. It was like, “Oh, my God, I’m a complete failure,” to, “Oh, my God, this thing is going to be a multimillion dollar enterprise!” — That seemed to happen really quick, once you get on the right path.
"So, Joe's biggest mistake was..." [16:00]
Ashley Stryker [00:16:00] So Joe’s biggest mistake was actually twofold. First, he fell in love with his product before his customers validated the approach. And second, he sold to the wrong audience altogether! His original target market of agencies generally never spent on their own marketing, even as they sold it to others.
Ashley Stryker [00:16:18] Joe brought his business back from the brink by switching gears to sell what his audience was actually asking for — education and events — instead of matchmaking; and, by pitching the new approach to prospects that actually had money: In-house marketing teams.
Ashley Stryker [00:16:32] Today, Joe’s Content Marketing Institute and Content Marketing World conference remain cornerstones of the profession. (I’ll actually be attending CMWorld this week. I’m so excited!)
Ashley Stryker [00:16:42] Joe himself has since moved on to other projects, most recently the creation of the Tilt: A newsletter and community designed for content creators who seek to build their audiences first and monetize second… just as he should have done.
Ashley Stryker [00:16:53] You can subscribe to the Tilt using my affiliate link at PC-Podcast.com/JoeP. That’s PC-Podcast.com/JoeP. Hope to see you there!
Ashley Stryker [00:17:07] And you can find this and other episodes of the Professional Confessional podcast at PC-Podcast.com or on your podcasting platform of choice.
Ashley Stryker [00:17:17] Would you like to listen to the whole conversation and not just this story edit? Go to PC-Podcast.com/Support and subscribe for full recordings and early episodes. That’s PC-Podcast.com/Support.
Ashley Stryker [00:17:34] In the meantime, please share this episode with someone who you think needs to hear it today. That’s all for this Professional Confessional. I’m Ashley Stryker. Thanks again for tuning in, and I hope you’ll join us next Sunday at 7 PM eastern. Talk soon!