Stop Using Someone Else’s Playbook
Learn from Tom Wentworth, CMO at Recorded Future, about building one of the largest cyber intelligence new sites.
(upbeat music)
Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Fazon, CEO of Casping Studios.
And today I am joined by a special guest.
Tom, how are you?
- Good evening, how are you?
- Super pumped to have you on the show today.
Court of Future is a really, really cool company.
The type of marketing that you're doing
in the way that you think about investing
in both content and technology and all that stuff
is best in class.
And recently recognized as a webbeonnery
for your podcast.
So anyways, we're gonna get into all that stuff,
but I'm just pumped to chat with you.
- Yeah, I know.
And we should have hit the record button
about 30 minutes ago.
We could, at the episode would have been already recorded
at this point.
- That's exactly right.
All of the dirty details of making a hit.
Today's show is always brought to you by our friends
at Qualified, you can go to Qualified.com
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Head over to Qualified.com to learn more.
First question, Tom, was your first job marketing?
- So I came in a marketing in a very bizarre way.
I was a developer in high school and college.
So I thought I was gonna be a programmer.
I wasn't very good at it.
I found this amazing job called Sales Engineer
where I got to go around and talk about technology
but not have to rate code.
And then essentially I came into product marketing
and then one day was just kind of given the whole marketing
role and told to go figure it out.
I never thought I wanted to be in marketing.
I always looked at myself a bit like Happy Gilmore,
which apparently they're making a new Happy Gilmore,
I think, maybe it wasn't Happy Gilmore.
But I always, like Happy Gilmore is a hockey player.
I want to be a golfer.
Like I'm a developer who, a marketer who wanted to be a developer.
That's kind of how I look at it.
But yeah, I've been running marketing teams
for about 12 years now.
- And flash forward to today,
tell us what it means to be CMO for a quarter future.
- Yeah, so a quarter future is a large private
cybersecurity company.
We're in the threat intelligence space.
So we help company find and mitigate threats across.
There are cyber domains, supply chain domains,
which is hot right now, physical, geopolitical
with the current world war situation happening.
We're giving our clients insights that are happening
in the world.
Most security, legacy security investments
are about protecting networks and devices.
We're trying to surface what's happening in the world
so that you can get ahead of these threats before they happen.
It's super interesting.
The comp that I would use is what Bloomberg does for traders.
Bloomberg provides all this bespoke intelligence
through their portal so that you can be a more effective
commodity trader, hedge fund trader.
We do that for cybersecurity companies.
We surface all of this intelligence,
eight billion different entity types
or pieces of intelligence to help you make better decisions.
- We're gonna dig all into the marketing strategy
for that here in our next segment.
The trust tree where you go,
if you want us to trust and share those deepest
darkest pipeline secrets.
Tell us a little bit more about recorded future.
Who are your customers?
- Yeah, so we sell to large enterprises.
Everybody has security challenges these days,
ranging from very small businesses
all to the largest companies in the world.
We focus our efforts on organizations
with more robust, more mature security organizations.
And these are organizations that are probably using
a portfolio of other security products.
They probably have an endpoint solution.
They probably have a SIM, the store,
all of the data they're collecting.
They probably have a firewall.
They're probably doing something in cloud security.
So we go into large enterprises,
kind of classic enterprise SaaS.
We sell into the CIO's organization,
generally speaking, the sponsor for a recorded future project
is the chief information security officer.
So we're in that organization somewhere.
And then our job is to educate the users,
the people that would be in our product every single day,
and then help the managers and directors
and DPs and CISO understand the business outcomes
that we can deliver through threat intelligence.
- And tell me a little bit more about that buying committee
who else shapes that decision.
- Yeah, I mean, so it depends on where we land.
So we have five different solutions
that we bring to market,
depending upon what's most important to you.
So for some companies, their supply chain
is what keeps them up at night.
For a lot of companies, it's ransomware
that keeps them up at night.
For some companies, it's just making their
security operations team more productive.
So depending upon where we land,
the committee will be generally composed of the people
who day to day do the work.
So one of our most typical use cases
is selling into a security operation center.
The people on the front lines of cybersecurity threats.
They are overwhelmed with the amount of work
they have to do.
So we will help them understand
how they can be more productive with intelligence.
You know, we'll sell to the person who runs that team
because that person's looking out for,
how do I make that team more productive?
How do I get more from them without hiring
a bunch more people because cybersecurity resources
are scarce.
So there's a big productivity play.
And then what the CISO cares about these days
is how do I keep the board happy?
Securities become a board level issue.
So, you know, we wanna make sure the CISO
can articulate that the organization
is prepared against these types of risks
that can be frankly existential at this point.
You get it by ransomware.
Incredibly bad things can happen.
- And what's your marketing strategy holistically?
- I initially didn't buy this at all,
but I am a big believer in account-based marketing.
I don't like the name account-based marketing,
but the sort of sense that we know
who the best prospects for recorded future are.
We know how many of them there are.
And the more that we can allocate marketing reasoning
are messaging, positioning, marketing resources,
dollars, people at these accounts,
the better off we're gonna be.
So that's a pretty aggressive shift we made this year.
We are exclusively running an account-based marketing
motion at recorded future.
And it's my team's job to essentially educate
the accounts that we target.
And then when an account shows intent,
when they're showing that they want
they're looking for something that we can do
to make sure that they're reaching out to us
and grabbing time to talk to us.
- Yeah, that's fascinating.
I think you probably have to have one of the coolest
content initiatives for an ABM focus company.
And it's so cool, I love to.
And we're gonna obviously dig into this a bunch,
but it's cool to hear you say that it's a peer play
sort of ABM approach and you invest so much in content.
- Yeah, I used to hate the, I used to hate,
I think ABM vendors for a long time
like tried to sort of take over the idea
of the concept of doing account-based marketing.
So I didn't like it.
But once I started really committing to it
doing it and seeing the results,
like it just makes sense that the more you can focus
your dollars and people and resources on the best accounts,
the better results you're gonna get.
- Yeah, I mean, I think, you know,
I've heard people that are sort of like,
okay, this is kind of like, you know, how we used to do this,
but it wasn't called that sort of thing.
And I think there's always some amount of things
that are like that.
I think ABM is one of them.
But I think the difference is that there weren't
as many people doing it and there was a lot more people
that were unaware that they should be doing it.
'Cause that's the way that I feel,
that it's like by creating the category of ABM,
now more people just understand that you should be
prioritizing key accounts.
Whereas back then it was like,
equal dollars spent on TAM accounts.
It's like, no, that's not, like we need ICT accounts.
- Or even worse, just on names and a database.
But like if you were a marketer at SAP in 1989,
you were doing a company's market and you just didn't call it that.
- Yeah, totally.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's like, you know, like ABM, you know,
or somebody like that, where, you know,
back in the day where it's like, you know,
there's only 360 accounts that matter to ABM, you know,
or whatever it is.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- We just didn't think about it when you're like,
oh, I'm a horizontal SaaS play, like anyone could buy us.
So you didn't think about it like that.
But you're like, no, actually,
still 386 accounts that you care most about.
- And that's, I think that's the change
and shift at least for me is even in those sort of,
we're a horizontal, we can sell to anybody.
No, actually even in those environments,
there's still going to be best fit accounts
that you're going to get the best results from.
So I can't imagine at this point
me ever stepping back and saying, nah,
a warhorse on till we sell to the world,
I'm an account based guy.
I've been converted.
- That's cool.
I like that, that's a great story.
What about your marketing team and your structure,
anything unique about it?
- Yeah, I mean, the only thing that's unique is,
is I, so it's pretty classic.
You know, we've got a product marketing organization
responsible for carving out our market opportunity,
understanding the competition, understanding the outcomes
we deliver for clients and, you know,
we've got a team that obviously focuses on that.
Our complexity there is we've got these five solutions
that we sell and we've got a pretty complex product portfolio.
So we've got a great product marketing team
who's out there trying to make sure that we're telling
a strong story in the market.
We've got a growth team, a demand gen team,
their job is obviously to create pipeline.
So we look at something essentially every minute
or every hour we're looking at,
making sure that we're creating a fops to the sales team.
And then I've got a brand organization who owns
comms, who owns our visual identity,
who run some of our big events like our customer conferences.
The thing I think that's unique and you hinted at it earlier,
is I also run a media organization
that we call Recorded Future News.
We don't think of it as a marketing function per se,
but the news organization lives under me
and our editor-in-chief works for me.
And that's definitely something that most companies don't have.
- When you say it, you don't think of it even as marketing.
That seems like an extremely strategic decision.
Can you swine that?
- Yeah, so Recorded Future News is the largest
cybersecurity news property or among the largest
cyber intelligence news sites.
We made the decision back to the Bloomberg example.
We love Bloomberg and we've been sort of inspired
by not just what their product does,
but how Bloomberg built itself as a brand
and Bloomberg sells terminal.
So traders, like we mentioned, but Bloomberg news
is what most of us know Bloomberg best for
and then all the different flavors of media
that Bloomberg produces, Bloomberg TV, events, et cetera.
So we said we wanna be the Bloomberg cyber.
And we wanna go out there and build a relationship
with the world, with our audiences,
and maybe the world's too broad,
but with our audiences, people that care about cyber.
And we think the best way to build that relationship
is in the best way to build trust.
And trust is probably the most important word for us
is to be their definitive news source.
So we went out and hired an editor in chief,
Stole him away from a site called Protocol.
He had worked at Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal
named Adam Zinowski and we said Adam,
let's start a new site.
And we're called the record.
And you're gonna go out there and just tell
the most interesting stories.
These are not gonna be edited by a reported future.
No one is gonna tell you what you can and can't write about.
There's gonna be this journalistic wall
between recorded future and recorded future news.
Just go out there and tell great stories.
And we started with one reporter and then two,
and then three, and now we're at eight.
And it's a global reporting function.
We've got a reporter on the ground in Ukraine.
We've got reporters in London and lots of places
across the states.
And we put out 10 to 12 stories a day
that are super important to our audience.
And we even break news.
We will break news with our sources.
And we've got some pretty great sources
and we'll break news and people like CNN
will cover our reporting.
It's incredible how this has actually come together.
- Yeah, that's absolutely amazing.
And absolutely best in class.
You know, there's all sorts of different types of companies
that have built out sort of media properties.
We've worked on a bunch of those here at Caspian.
And in each one sort of serves different functions
for the company, some live closer to marketing,
closer to product, some live, you know,
with sort of a, on a separate property,
but still sort of like a pretty, you know,
close connective tissue.
And it's fascinating that y'all said,
we're gonna put a big wall in between us
and the media property and let them do their thing.
- Yeah, it's like Bloomberg.
There's only one topic that Bloomberg news can't cover.
Do you know what that topic is?
- No.
- Mike Bloomberg.
So Bloomberg, Bloomberg reporters will not write stories
about Mike Bloomberg or Bloomberg the company,
but anything else is on limits.
And that's sort of our approach, right?
We'll write, our reporters can write stories about
whatever they think is relevant to their audience.
And that's exactly what they do.
And they all consider, they all think of themselves
as true reporters.
And what we're trying to do is not generate leads from this.
We're trying to build a relationship.
We're trying to be the trusted source of their cyber news.
Do you think about brand-building?
What most people do in cybersecurity
when they get to be recorded feature size?
We're about over 300 million in ARR,
which makes us a pretty good size company.
What most companies are size do is they go buy
enough one sponsorship or they go put their logo
on some sports team jersey.
And that's cool.
That's a cool way to get in front of people,
but I don't think it builds trust.
Like why would I trust this vendor
just because there are logos on a jersey
or there are logos on a car?
That just tells me they got a lot of money to spend.
So we said, instead of going to do that,
the way that we're going to build awareness
for a reported future and build a relationship
with our audiences through news
and then through a podcast,
which I'll talk about a little bit too.
So that's our brand awareness investment.
We feel very confident that people who fall in love
with our news are also going to like our product.
I don't have to prove it.
Like in the sense that I don't have to have
this super complicated attribution scheme.
Like we just ask our clients and our prospects,
like, hey, do you like recorded feature news
and they love it?
And that's just about enough for us.
- That's really, really awesome.
And I think about that stuff all the time,
I wrote this book called "Serialized Content Framework."
And one of the big things that people found interesting
was this I called the "Egotainment Graph."
And basically if you were to like plot all your content,
the stuff you're creating,
and it's like an x, y axis, educational one side
and entertainment on the other.
Like just plot your content, like scale one to 10,
how entertaining is it, how educational is it?
And like most of our stuff is bottom left quadrant.
It's bad, right?
It's not in any of the top quadrants.
And I think it's just as simple as the same thing.
It's like in your gut, do you believe that this stuff
needs to exist, yes or no?
And then that's how you should make it.
And the justification of it, does your audience love it?
And it's like they will love it if it's entertaining
or if it's educational or potentially both.
I obviously like that drives brand awareness for y'all
and that's why you invest in it.
- And the other thing that's really cool,
so you mentioned about the connection between product,
the best place to read, record, if you're new,
is inside of our product.
And the reason is because as you're going through a story
about a piece of ransom, some ransomware happening
or a vulnerability, if you read it inside of our product,
you can pivot into our product to see
if that thing is actually meaningful to you or not,
which is very similar to Bloomberg.
When you read a Bloomberg story inside of the terminal,
you can click through and get all of their financial
information that powered the article.
That's sort of, again, what we're trying to do as well.
So we promote the value of our news,
not just as a brand awareness investment,
but if you're a client or a reporting future,
this news can help you make better decisions faster.
So there's some value for our clients there as well.
- Yeah, and your show, click here,
just got, it got a 2023 National Edward R. Murrow Award.
It got a 2023 Webbe on Re for Best Tech podcast,
which is incredibly competitive that category.
It's commercially viable because people like it
and they listen to it and they love it.
And those folks are your customers and prospects,
but also it's critically awarded as well too,
meaning it is doing something that the critics like.
And I think that that's no small feat.
And it's not all about awards, but that's pretty darn cool.
- Yeah, podcasts is interesting.
So I joined a report of future about four and a half years ago.
When I had joined, we had already published 150 or so
podcast episodes.
We worked with a partner called CyberWire
and they once a week for 52 weeks a year,
they went out and produced a podcast episode for us.
And it did well.
It did well enough for we said,
what if we actually really doubled down on this idea
of having a podcast now that we have a news brand
and recorded future news,
now that we've built this identity,
why don't we build a great podcast,
and not just a great podcast for a tech company,
but like a great podcast that could hold its own
against Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, et cetera.
So our belief was we had to do it internally.
We had to bring the people on full time.
And we went out and we had known for a while
this podcast, our name, Deena Temple Raston,
who was a well known podcaster at NPR.
And we talked to Deena about starting a podcast here.
And her big breakthrough for us,
her big, her big, not news for you,
but we need to tell stories.
We want to go build this narrative driven podcast.
And that's not easy, by the way,
because these stories don't write themselves.
So you're not just going to give me a microphone
and put me in front of a podcast tool and go.
We're going to put some real investment behind this.
So to get to a podcast that's actually meaningful
in a broader way is really hard and takes resources.
And I didn't know that.
We have a showrunner.
We have a producer.
It's a lot like building a TV series I've learned.
And they've done a great job to your point.
It's a great podcast.
It focuses on cyber, but the stories are told
in a way that's more interesting to broader audiences.
Like they go spend time in Ukraine.
They talk to criminals in different countries.
It's really cool work they're doing.
- Yeah, I mean, I think as someone who is a professional
in this space, and can tell you, it is a ton of work,
what's crazy is you get in what you put in.
Or you get out what you put in.
Like that's the thing that I think people don't realize
when they make investments like this is that if you,
and I'm not saying this selfishly,
like I truly believe that if you put in the right amount
of work, then you're going to get really big results.
And it doesn't need to be a podcast.
It could be whatever thing is your thing to sure.
You know, if it's that F1 sponsorship,
but that's how you want to go the extra mile.
- Yeah.
- Like do that to the end degree,
but like I think that where you sort of sit in mediocrity
is when you don't do that.
And you all went the extra mile with both
recorded future news and the Click Here Podcasts.
Like these are best in class assets,
not just for a tech company, but for a media company.
- Yeah, and I think so two examples.
Like what Mr. Beast does on YouTube.
First of all, blows me away that there's no Mr. Beast of BDB.
YouTube is wide open as a platform.
What's great about YouTube is the discoverability.
Like I'll go home in an hour or so
and I'll watch YouTube tonight.
I won't watch Netflix or Apple TV Plus.
I'm going to watch YouTube.
And you know, like what Mr. Beast has done on that channel
and the amount of money that guy prints every single video.
It's wild to me that no one in BDB,
including my company, have figured out how to own BDB.
But it's the same sort of thing, right?
Mr. Beast didn't fake it.
Those videos are as impressive production as a Hollywood blockbuster, right?
The channel doesn't matter.
Pick one channel.
It could be a podcast.
It could be a TikTok.
It could be whatever.
But if you commit to it and stand out
and I'd rather be great at one channel, then average at 10.
- Oh yeah, I couldn't agree more.
And I think the thing for Mr. Beast is why there isn't a Mr. Beast for BDB in
my opinion
because I've looked at this a ton too and said to this a ton.
And I hear people all the time like,
just do what Mr. Beast does.
And you're like, the problem is, same thing with like,
do what Rogan does or do it whatever.
It's like, yeah, well, if you pick the best creators of all times,
like do what Walt Disney did or what Keraswischer did or whatever, or Oprah.
But I think the part of the thing is that they didn't wake up with all the
right ideas.
It's like they tinkered their way to get there.
And part of the process of what people like is that they came from a place, got
to a place.
They learned that they did it their way.
So if you were to create Mr. Beast videos the exact same way he does it.
Yeah, fast cuts and the really cool cinematography and the zoom in, zoom out,
and the interstitials and all the other cool stuff that he's doing in those
videos.
That's in best in class with like video creation techniques,
but that's not what makes him him.
Right.
It's that he has this unique view of the world and that his show brings that to
life.
And I think that that's like what a lot of tech companies don't get is,
you have a unique view of the world.
You see the world differently than other people make a show that only you could
make.
And like only Mr. Beast could make his show.
And that's why that we can replicate it.
And I think only recorded future can tell the kinds of cyber stories that we
tell.
I'm a student of Mr. Beast, which is a weird thing to say, but my daughter
loves Mr. Beast
between I have to love Mr. Beast.
What that dude did early in his career was he was an expert at thumbnails.
He was the guy who figured out that you, you know, if you're spending, you know
, two hours filming the video,
you should be spending four hours figuring out the right thumbnail that's going
to get people to click on your video.
Because that's how YouTube's algorithm works.
So that dude became an expert at the sort of, you know, now we look at them as
click baity thumbnails.
But I mean, that's what he figured out in his early innovation was just that
thumbnails matter the most.
Great thumbnail can cover up from moderate content.
Yeah, he found out that there's like, you know, a slight percentage increase
that when he has his mouth open in a video thumbnail.
Yeah, like this.
Yeah.
And now all of his videos are all have thumbnails.
Every video, like every video in NewTairv has that they all have that same like
shocked look in their face when they, uh, anyway.
Yeah.
I spent too much time on YouTube as the clear takeaway here.
Indeed.
Well, you know, that's, that's what, uh, but that's what CMO should be doing,
right?
Is seeing what's out there and trying to fit into their company. There's a
great story of the former C CEO of, of ESPN and someone asked him, um, what was
your biggest mistake as CEO and he said.
He's like ESPN ran 24 hours of sports coverage.
And every single second that I had those, those that spared I was watching our
content because I want to see my team.
I want to see my, my people out there.
And he said that it actually was really bad for me because I wasn't looking at
all the other stuff that was out there.
And I feel like being a CMO is much the same way, right?
It's like you actually have to be consuming other stuff out there so that you
could say, hey, I just saw this.
Can I throw it to my team?
Like, what do you all think of it?
You know, and sometimes that's the good, but.
So you're saying that when I go home tonight and spend three hours on YouTube,
I'm actually still working.
It's, yeah, I'm doing research.
All right.
So that's, it gets a good spin.
I love that.
Right off the YouTube premium subscription YouTube premium.
Oh, I pay for YouTube premium for sure.
So done.
All right.
Let's get to our next segment, the playbook, where you open up the playbook to
talk about the tactics that help you win.
What are your three channels or tactics that are your uncutable budget items?
Yeah.
So.
They change pretty frequently.
One thing that we do, we have, so our, our gateway between the recorded future
news media brand and recorded future of the company that sells products and is
a SaaS company is a newsletter called cyber daily.
So cyber daily is a essentially is a daily newsletter that.
Gives you yesterday's news from the records.
That's what we sort of package up the news from the record.
We send it out every single day. There are about 35,000 daily active users.
And we promote, we promote the heck.
Yeah, it's a daily newsletter because that's six days a week.
It is wild to me that we can send a news that are 35,000 people almost every
single day and get, you know, 40% open rates.
It's pretty cool.
So we spend a bunch of money promoting that channel and it sources for us way
into the double digits of our pipeline starts with cyber daily.
And these are not, it's not a direct response channel like you'll send it for
cyber daily and you might not become a client for five years happens all the
time.
But you know, we've got a way to reach your inbox six days a week.
That's pretty good.
We feel good about that.
So cyber daily for for sure is one that we are, are not going to cut.
Second one is we like LinkedIn a lot.
LinkedIn is one of those places where you can get exactly the right message in
front of exactly the right person and exactly the right company.
There's almost no other channel that you can do that.
But most people look at LinkedIn again as a direct response channel and it is
awful as a direct response channel.
If you measure the efficacy of LinkedIn by how many people sign up for your
webinar, you're going to cut it in a immediately.
So the way that we look at it is as purely as an awareness channel, it's our
digital billboard, just like every tech company puts up a billboard in the 101
in San Francisco.
It's our equivalent.
But we can, but we can be smart about it and put the right messages up
depending upon like four in a late stage off with a client.
We're going to show them something different than if there's a one of our
prospects who doesn't know anything about recorded future.
So we're, I get back to the account face marketing world, you know, we use a
product called six cents which helps us figure out which accounts are in market
, which ones aren't.
So all of those get different types of messages and we get really great results
from just putting messages in front of people on LinkedIn.
The third one, which is going to be controversial, but I'm going to go for it
anyway, is direct mail.
And yes, I set it out loud.
I said direct mail.
I said it.
Direct mail is cool because figure out marketing is an arbitrage like when
everyone else is going here, you want to go over here like you want to go in
the different direction.
So everyone has saturated digital and social and all the cool channels turns
out direct mail is great because people don't get that much direct mail.
You know, people open direct mail sound to heck it is.
You can target exactly who you send direct mail to.
It's a channel that's very highly targetable.
So we love direct mail is a way to reach people with something again, very
specific, very bespoke.
And it's a, it's that arbitrage story where it's a channel where there's not
much competition.
I know about you, but I don't open very many emails.
I don't answer my phone ever, but I open every single piece of direct mail I
get.
And that's been our experience here as well.
So I'm not going to cut direct mail.
I love it.
Those are three great channels.
I notice that all of those are basically brand plays.
So direct mail is a brand play, but of course, you know, our our BDR team is
going to follow up with you.
Essentially, we use it in a bunch of different ways, but one is just a sort of
a way for us to get better conversion on BDR cold outreach.
You know, there are some accounts who just won't respond to emails, won't
respond to LinkedIn emails, won't answer the phone, won't answer a text.
If we send them something to be a direct mail, we're going to get better BDR
connects.
It is in some ways a meeting booking tool for us.
That's one of the kind of units of measure we look at it recorded future is how
many meetings are rebooking for our sales team.
So it is, it is both an awareness play for us, but in some cases, it is
actually a, how do we get more meetings this month?
We can use direct mail for that.
The other thing, other than it's really cool about is it can scale.
Like a lot of channels, it's hard to scale this thing. Just as easy to send 10
pieces as it is a thousand pieces.
So, you know, we can go big when we need to as well.
Quick question on the on on recorded future news.
So obviously, by the way, 30,000 people 40% of the rate is crazy for cyber
daily.
And, you know, the daily newsletter and for click here podcast, you know, these
all live in recorded future news.
Does this come out of marketing budget or is this something like entirely
different?
Good question.
So we, we actually look at it.
I manage the budget.
So, but it's a separate P and L. So marketing has a P and L recorded future
news has a P and L.
I, I technically sit over both of them, but we break those out separate.
So if you were to look at the cost of sales and marketing, if you were, if you
were an investor looking at us, you, you know,
the recorded future news costs wouldn't sit inside of sales and marketing.
Very interesting.
Do you think that that's something that people should be doing more of?
Because that's that's pretty, pretty darn unique.
Yeah, I think it's, it depends for us.
It makes sense given that this is an editorial independent.
We actually have a separate entity.
Like there's a separate business for recorded future news because of that.
So I think if you're, if your investment in media is, is really a marketing
investment, then maybe not.
And, but ours isn't to my point earlier.
It is a, it is, it has a positive impact on marketing, but it is not a
marketing investment.
So running it separate for us makes sense.
I think for most people, can't relate probably is at the end of the day of
marketing expense.
But let's just keep it pure.
Like for us, it is, it just shows to the world.
Okay, this we are really serious about being, we couldn't get reporters to come
work here.
Like no reporter on the planet wants to work for marketing.
No offense to me.
Speed up, but like, we, you know, we tell them, hey, you're coming to work for
recorded future news.
Yeah, they're, their email addresses are reported future news, not reported
future.
Do you monetize it in other ways?
Like do you let other people sponsor or do ads sponsor?
We could, I've done the math on it.
Like we're, there's a seventh and easy, seven figure plus revenue op that could
come from monetizing these news properties.
Selling advertising, selling sponsorships, we do not do that at all.
And we have at this point zero desire to monetize the only way that we monetize
at all is through cyber daily.
So on the record, even on our podcast, you'll hear Dina talk about cyber daily.
So if you do send a for cyber daily, you do become a reported future quote
unquote lead.
But that's the only way that we monetize is through cyber daily.
And that's, that's very indirect monetization.
What do you think would happen if you turned it off?
Yeah, I think it, I think we would, we would lose the goodwill that we've built
in the cyber community.
We've become a pretty serious source, meaning you know, if somebody has a list
of the five sites that they look at every single day is to figure out what's
going on in cyber security.
There's a few, there's bleeping computer, there's dark reading, there's a
record of futures in that mix, right?
So I think we would, we would lose, we would certainly lose the ability to get
our name out in front of, you know, millions of people a month.
And I think we would lose trust.
I think we would lose the trust in the community and that's, that's really
important to us.
It wouldn't be devastating immediately.
But my big belief and my like the reason I did this or the reason I pushed so
hard, I didn't know initially what we were going to do.
But the reason we pushed so hard to do something here is because I don't think
you can do demand gen effectively if you don't have some sort of sustainable
brand awareness investment.
Like I don't think it works. I think if you do that, if you don't do it, you
end up just, you can't spend your way into growth.
Effectively, you need some asset like this, whether it's news, F1 sponsorship,
whatever it is.
So I, I think there would be not as much of a short-term impact, long-term, the
company would be, would struggle.
I, you know, I think marketing sometimes is just as simple as no like and trust
And, you know, you would erode the trust.
You would eventually erode the like and, you know, maybe, maybe that people
would still know who you are.
But I totally agree. I could not agree more that I mean, there'd be a few, a
few million people less a month, who would see the recorded
future logo in front of their face. There has to be some impact to that.
Seriously. And you can't really replace it with paid.
Like it just doesn't work like that, right?
It's like people seeing billboard ads is not the same as, hey, the we create,
because we put money into this, we created something
that is wholly new, right? There's, it's just a different thing.
It's like our money created something. Just a side note, I just love that's why
I love sponsoring like independent creators.
Is because we're a sponsor and independent creator.
You're literally saying to their audience, hey, I believe that this person's
work should exist.
Not just that, yeah, I want to monetize like I sponsor the marketing examples
newsletter by Harry dry.
Because Harry's awesome. And I love his work. Yeah.
But like, yeah, like am I going to get a huge ROI from that?
I don't know, but I'm just like he's doing amazing work.
And I want my brand associated with that.
Same thing with like MKT one, their newsletter, where like,
Caspian's going to sponsor that. We're a little tiny company.
We don't have money to spend on like tons of sponsorships, but I just believe
that their work is really important to our ecosystem.
And it's work that I couldn't do, you know, myself and I'm just really glad
that they do it.
And that it's cultural for us. Like again, it comes back to, you know, we want
to be the Bloomberg of cyber.
And there's very, there's, there, you trust someone for news, especially today,
given how news, how controversial news can be.
You would think that news is pretty, pretty factual, but, you know, if we can
become the trusted news source for cyber professionals,
that's going to pay off and it has and we will keep doing it.
So yeah, final piece there too is like there's only, you know, as they say, the
obstacle is the way.
The thing you hear all the time is, well, cyber, cyber security people don't
trust vendors because, you know,
there's a, they're always selling something or developers don't trust vendors.
And it's really hard to get them to trust you.
Well, the obstacle is the way, right?
Make the thing that, that, that sort of forces you into a position where they
could trust you.
And that's what y'all did.
No, initially that was the concern we had to overcome.
And inside of the community, we had to prove that this wasn't going to be a
site that was just going to be
veiled content for reported future products.
And, you know, we get feedback now like, hey, even from other cyber security,
you know, competitors and
ecosystem partners like, hey, you guys are, you actually kind of just did what
you said you're going to do.
You just report the news like we are our reporters.
Well, we'll talk about our competitors.
If our competitors report something, they'll cover it.
Um, like again, it's, we've been pretty true to our promise since we started.
And we've never violated the editorial independence thing that we put in.
That is, that's sacred to us.
I love it.
Thanks so much for spending so much time on all those different pieces.
Um, what about your most cutable budget item?
What's something that maybe you're not investing in?
So a recorded future doesn't have a booth at black hat.
There are two big conferences in cyber security, RSA, which happened in a
couple of weeks and black hat, which happens over the summer.
And, you know, we found from doing these things that there was huge audience
overlap at both of those events.
We'd see the same people.
Um, that it was, you know, maybe an audience that wasn't the best fit for us at
this, at this black hat conference.
And, you know, there were certainly people who go to Vegas that we want to talk
to, but maybe we didn't need to have an actual booth there in order to meet
those people.
Maybe we could do other types of experiences, hold other types of events to get
there.
So we're, we're one of a handful of cyber companies that aren't going to have
an official booth presence at black hat this year.
We didn't last year either.
And we didn't really notice any significant consequences as a result.
We saved some money for sure.
And those are big, big checks you write to go sponsor, you know, a 30 by 30
booth at one of these big conferences.
You know, we met a bunch of our clients and prospects in Vegas.
We did some, a bunch of events with our partners there, but we didn't have a
big sponsorship.
So in general, I think a lot of cyber companies pay the black hat and our say
tax.
They just assumed that every single year, they're going to have to write the
big check in because everyone else does.
I'm not sure that's necessarily true always.
But, uh, you know, that was a big decision we made and we'll do it again this
year.
And, uh, I think that was so bad.
I was a, it was a big cut and, uh, and I think an effective one.
What about experiments that little extra budget you set aside for experiments?
What's an experiment that you're, that you're thinking about?
Direct mail was been the most recent experiment that we've scaled up.
So my, my newfound love for direct mail came from my, uh, my head of demand,
saying that direct mail is an underutilized channel.
It's our virtual opportunity.
That's probably the most recent one.
We love books at recorded future.
So the other thing that I'll add to our media empire is literally physical
books.
And we create some of those books internally.
We've got a few experts at recorded future.
We've got a guy named Alan Liska, who is a ransomware expert.
Every time there's a big ransomware attack, CNN will call up Allen and say,
Hey, we're going to do a drop at 730 tonight.
We need John go, uh, go take a shower and get on TV.
Alan also writes a book on ransomware.
So we, uh, we sponsor Alan's book.
There's about four different books that we've printed books that we've,
we've either have sponsored license or produced ourselves.
So we go crazy.
The combo of books and direct mail is very interesting for us.
Like we will send people books.
That's been a cool experiment for us that's, that's worked out pretty
effectively too.
What about AI anything that you're exploring with AI?
I know, obviously there's AI in the products here, but anything AI related.
Yeah, and the product is really incredible.
But what we do this cyber daily, cyber daily is 100% automated.
I'm incredibly, as a former developer, remember back my happy Gilmore story.
One of the things I've got to work on personally is automating cyber daily.
So what we do every single day with cyber daily is we've got a zappier process
that runs.
So every time there's a new article that gets published to the record,
chat GPT summarizes it, pulls out three key learnings and writes it to a text
file.
So that we're building this file every single day of today of that day stories
that all have been summarized by chat GPT.
Then before the email gets sent, we have chat GPT read the entire email and say
given these 10 stories today,
build me a super compelling headline at the top of cyber daily that's going to
summarize today's news,
build me a really great subject line that's going to cause people to open that
email up.
We then use a HubSpot API to like actually build the email itself in HubSpot.
So all the, all the marketer has to do is literally push the send button on
cyber daily and it goes out.
So it is entirely generated.
So the content is written by the recorded future news team, but the emails
assembled through chat GPT and zappier automation.
It's super cool.
So we love AI.
Yeah, we love AI.
We've had good results.
And the cool thing about it is, and we also, you know, all of our social posts
are essentially being done by chat GPT.
Our reporters were super skeptical of this.
They're like, I'm not letting this hallucinating monstrosity chat GPT like
butcher my article.
So we spent the first month or so having them read every single summary and it
did a great job.
It turns out it's really good at summarizing.
It's awful at creating.
But you can give it one of our stories and, you know, we sort of told it like,
Hey, pretend your reporter at Axios or Bloomberg and summarize it as if it
works fantastically well and is almost never hallucinated.
It did one time.
It did one time.
It invented like some threat actor that didn't exist and I got yelled at for it
But it's been like one time in nine months.
That's awesome.
Just to be clear, AI is going to change the world.
I'm, I'm like insanely bullish on it.
We're experimenting with an sort of an AI tool that complements what BDRs do
that helps sort of automate what a BDR does so they can focus on higher value
accounts.
And maybe we can use AI to automate some of the outreach to, to encounter less
intent.
So we're super bullish on AI is a productivity tool across the go to market.
Love that.
I can agree more.
Yeah.
It's going to change the world.
I think that it's just, you know, it's, it's a slurling process, right?
It's a, you know, it comes from all with what it is and what it isn't.
No, true.
And what and what and what it's going to become and how fast it's going to
become.
That to me is the is the debate of a part.
Are we looking at AGI next week or in 10 years?
That's the stuff that, you know, it keeps me up at night.
Yeah.
And especially like, hey, if it's helping cure cancer, you know,
then people need to see those, those type of case studies a little.
Yeah.
I haven't seen those yet, but I can tell you it's pretty good at writing emails
and it's pretty good at,
you know, it's starting to get pretty good at doing some of the stuff that,
that, you know,
people like BDRs can do and other people on marketing, it's become a
productivity tool for us.
I don't think it's going to replace anybody, but it's certainly a productivity
tool.
Like qualified's piper, which you can go to qualify.com and check out the AISDR
that everybody needs.
Okay, let's get to our final segment quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers, just like how qualified helps
companies generate pipeline quickly.
Go to qualify.com to learn more quick hits.
Tell me you ready.
Let's go for it.
Do you have a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
I was born a leap year, which is maybe the craziest story about me.
I don't know if that's a hidden talent or not.
I play guitar pretty, pretty terribly for someone who's been doing it for 30
years.
It's probably my one hidden talent.
I'm fantastic to karaoke.
I'm world class.
If you want to Justin Timberlake song belted out, I'm the guy to go to.
Do you have a favorite book, podcast or TV show lead, recommend?
I just finished reading the qualified sales leader, an OG book by John McMahon,
the X Blade Logic PTC sort of the like originator, all the stuff that people do
today,
value selling medic, med, med pick.
I'm not a sales leader, but it's one of those books everyone should read.
It sort of walks through like if you're in marketing and you know what sales
leaders are expecting, it makes my job easier, fantastic book, highly
recommended.
What's your best advice for a first time CMO?
Don't run someone else's playbook.
The fastest way to get fired is a CMO, which by the way, happens all time.
I've had my job for four and a half years, which is wild in this world,
where you know, advocacy,
most just go job to job every nine to 12 months. Like if you like just don't go
in,
they're expecting you already know the answers.
When you started a company, don't rush into a solution, try to understand the
problem.
And like even if you're experienced, if you try to run a playbook,
your playbook's most likely in a fail, you're going to get fired in nine months
and go try to do it again, it's a losing proposition.
I don't have a playbook.
So it's easy for me.
I don't have to have it.
It sounds like yeah, a pretty good one.
But no, I wouldn't.
But like if I were to go to our company, I wouldn't necessarily, I wouldn't
immediately say,
oh, we should build a news organization.
Like that's probably only going to work at record.
If I try to do that, if I went to work at qualified and try to do that,
probably wouldn't work as well.
Like, but I think people in my spot do that.
They go say, oh, work my last company.
It's going to guarantee work on my next one.
I don't think that's how the world works.
Couldn't agree more. Tom, awesome chatting with you today for listeners.
You can go to recordedfuture.com, check them out.
Obviously, you should go check out the podcast and the whole media empire that
they're
building as well.
And you can go to the record.media to learn about that.
Tom, any final thoughts?
Anything to plug?
No, this is fun.
I apologize for talking fast to all the listeners.
Hopefully you had to put the slow down button on your podcast player.
It was about 70, good about 75% and all sound normal.
But it's been a lot of fun.
Awesome.
Thanks, Tom.
We'll talk soon.
Cheers.
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