Content without distribution goes nowhere. Aditya Vempaty, VP of Marketing at MoEngage, puts it simply: “If you can’t tell me how you’re going to distribute it, you’re not doing it.” He also believes marketers who don’t spend time with customers are “lazy.” This episode is a wake-up call for content marketers who want their work to matter.
Aditya Vempaty starts with the customer and works backward. At MoEngage, every content program begins with weekly customer research. His team interviews users, reviews recorded calls each Friday, and logs insights in a shared document. Those insights shape messaging, steer the roadmap, and power “borrowed-authority” pieces like coffee-table books co-written with trusted brands.
Distribution is a must. “Channels are oversaturated… Changing the game comes from thinking about content as a distribution engine.” Every asset needs an external voice, a customer, partner, or influencer, who will help share it at launch. Aditya explains how he scales this model, from paying interview stipends and personally reaching out to prospects, to cutting 90% of blog content and rebuilding authority around focused topic clusters.
About Our Guest: Aditya Vempaty
Aditya Vempaty is the VP of Marketing at MoEngage, where he leads North American marketing for a $100M ARR customer engagement platform. Few marketers have built as many enterprise content engines from scratch as Aditya. He drove content-led demand generation at Amplitude, fueling 400% revenue growth. He created category-defining resources like Unit21’s Fraud Fighters Manual. Now at MoEngage, he oversees a data-rich, multi-channel content machine, including original research, webinars, and flagship books with top brands.
What sets Aditya apart is his focus on content as a real business lever. He’s known for “problem marketing” — building content engines that start with customer pain points and drive measurable impact, even in large organizations. For content leaders under pressure to show ROI, Aditya’s practical, metrics-driven approach offers a clear path to making enterprise content drive growth.
Insights and Quotes From This Episode
Aditya’s method for building an enterprise content engine is all about discipline, customer focus, and a distribution-first mindset. Here are the most actionable insights and moments from the episode.
“If you can’t tell me how you’re going to distribute it, you’re not doing it.” (00:05)
Distribution is a requirement. Aditya won’t approve content projects unless there’s a clear plan for reaching the right audience. This forces teams to think past production and ensures every asset is built for impact, not just completion.
“Marketers are lazy and don’t talk to customers… We need to spend the time and talk to customers. This is lazy bullshit.” (10:25)
Customer calls aren’t optional. Aditya’s teams review customer conversations every week, searching for insights that guide positioning, messaging, and content ideas. This habit turns raw customer feedback into a competitive edge.
“It’s like taking the SATs. When you know the answers to the test, why would you not go do this?” (11:27)
Talking to customers gives you the answer key for content strategy. Instead of guessing at pain points or topics, Aditya’s team uses direct input to create more relevant and effective content. This makes the process faster and more predictable.
“AI cannot do nuance… If you haven’t talked to the customer, you won’t understand what good and bad is.” (13:08)
AI can speed up production, but Aditya warns it can’t replace human insight. Nuance and real understanding come from talking to customers, not from generic AI prompts. Use AI as a tool, not a substitute for real conversations.
“Content, to me, is our super-power in North America: Why should the customer care? How does it solve their problems? How do we build trust?” (07:58)
Content should build relationships, not just drive traffic. As MoEngage grows in the U.S., Aditya stresses that content must answer why the customer should care, how it helps them, and how it builds trust. These are key to winning in a new market.
“Every asset needs to have authority that extends beyond you because that drives distribution.” (27:31)
Aditya uses a “borrowed authority” model: co-create content with customers, partners, or influencers so they’re invested in its success. This multiplies reach, since collaborators are more likely to share and promote content they helped create.
“Partnership webinars with Movable Ink and Inbox Monster pulled 500-600 registrants and the highest demo requests we’ve ever seen.” (30:55)
This is a clear example of borrowed authority in action. By teaming up with industry peers, Aditya’s team expanded their audience and generated record demo requests, showing the business value of collaborative distribution.
“We found that out of a thousand blogs, only fifty were driving meaningful organic traffic.” (36:37)
Aditya’s team learned the hard way that most content doesn’t move the needle. This led to a tough pruning process and a new SEO governance model, making sure future work is closely tied to measurable results.
About This Season of the Animalz Podcast: Breaking Down the Walls of Enterprise Content Marketing
This season on the Animalz Podcast, we’re pulling back the corporate curtain to show you how the largest, most complex B2B SaaS teams actually get content out the door. Our mission: demystify these hidden machines and reveal what it really takes to run content at scale.
Hear from content leaders of some of the biggest names in SaaS sharing the systems they’ve built, the battles they’ve fought, and the lessons they’ve learned along the way.
Check out other episodes in the season here
Links and Resources From the Episode
How to Take Over the World (podcast by Ben Wilson) (02:06): Aditya’s favorite history and leadership podcast, which inspires his approach to marketing.
MoEngage (06:26): B2C customer engagement platform where Aditya is VP Marketing; the company has about 600 employees and is nearing $100M ARR.
Amplitude (06:06): Product analytics company where Aditya previously led marketing; the origin of his first flagship book project with Animalz.
Unit21 (22:28): Fraud-fighting SaaS company where Aditya produced the ‘Manual of Fraud’ coffee-table book, featuring contributions from Mercury and Brex.
Nutanix & Synthego (06:06): Earlier companies where Aditya ran marketing organizations.
Mercury, Brex, Pinwheel, Lithic (24:50): Brands that co-authored Unit 21’s flagship fraud manual, lending borrowed authority to the project.
Inbox Monster & Movable Ink (30:59): Email tool partners in MoEngage’s ‘Email Benchmark’ webinar, which drew 500+ registrants.
Zuddl (41:41): New platform that auto-generates clips and transcripts, enabling same-day follow-up after webinars.
Customer Engagement Book (MoEngage) (45:50): Upcoming coffee-table flagship asset built on the borrowed-authority model.
Follow Matt Hummel on LinkedIn.
Full Episode Transcript
Aditya Vempaty [00:00:00]:
This is something I don’t see content people doing enough. And on my teams I like have said, I don’t care what you do. If you can’t tell me how you’re going to distribute it, you’re not doing it, don’t care. And it’s like, wait, what do you mean? I’m like, well, channels are oversaturated. It cost me a crap ton to get leads. Everyone says the same damn thing and everyone’s putting ebooks out there. We need to change the game. Changing the game comes from thinking about content as a distribution engine.
Ty Magnin [00:00:22]:
Hello and welcome to the Animals podcast. I’m Ty Magnon, the CEO at Animals.
Tim Metz [00:00:27]:
And I’m Tim Metz, the director of marketing and innovation.
Ty Magnin [00:00:30]:
This season on the Animals podcast, we’re pulling back the corporate curtain to show you how the largest, most complex B2B SaaS teams actually get content out the door. Hear from content leaders at some of the biggest names in SaaS, sharing the systems they built, the battles they
fought and the lessons they learned along the way. Today we’re thrilled to be joined by Aditya Vempati. He is the VP of Marketing at Moengage and before Moengage, Aditya also led marketing at amplitude at unit 21 and is really well versed in helping scale technical software companies through some periods of rapid growth. If you’re like most B2B content marketers, you want to lead the conversation in your industry. At Animals, we help B2B software companies do exactly that by creating standout, survey driven, state of the industry type reports that help you grow your brand authority, backlinks and pipeline in just 12 weeks. We run a process that helps uncover narratives from a unique data set packaged into a beautifully designed flagship content asset that your whole team is going to be profitable it. Book a consult now at Animals Co Whitepapers and find out how to set the new benchmark for your industry.
Ty Magnin [00:01:43]:
Well, Aditya, thanks so much for joining us today on the Animals podcast. One question we always start with for our guests is what content have you been consuming lately?
Aditya Vempaty [00:01:53]:
I think the content that comes to top of my mind. Podcasts count as content, right?
Ty Magnin [00:01:58]:
Obviously, yeah, yeah.
Aditya Vempaty [00:02:00]:
A podcast that is on my mind that I constantly consume has helped with scaling how to take over the world. It is a beautiful podcast by Ben Wilson and I’m a huge history buff. I love history and what it does is goes into all the prominent figures in history, good or bad, and really digs into what made them, who they are, how they were able to influence at the scale that they influenced while at the same time having trust amongst the people that they had. And then the quirks of them, what made them who they are and how they merged interdisciplinaries together. And that really, like, gets me thinking about crossover creativity and how marketing is a very multidisciplinary field compared to most other fields. Great example of this is Leonardo da Vinci created the first map in the world. Before that, maps weren’t drawn to scale. Meaning, like someone would say there was a church on a map and a train station, they’d be right next to each other.
Aditya Vempaty [00:02:55]:
But he was the first person who took art, which was drawing maps, and took math and started putting things to scale. So the church is here and the train station’s here. And then you’d actually say, hey, the ratio is, you know, 1 to 50 yards or whatever, and you can measure it out. That’d be the distance. In real life, that’s a predominant example where it’s like, wow. Multidisciplinary stuff really is key to being successful in your field. In math making. If you didn’t think about it, you never realized it was math, really.
Aditya Vempaty [00:03:20]:
I think it shaped a lot of my marketing, I would say, and also just my ambition and what I think about and how I want to do it.
Ty Magnin [00:03:25]:
It’s really interesting. I could see that shaping like, you know, how you think about leadership, like power. I. I guess also how to help your company win. As someone that is somewhat interested in taking over the world as well, how. What are the common patterns that you see in these generational leaders?
Aditya Vempaty [00:03:43]:
Yeah, it’s crazy. Like, the more you dig into it, there’s a pattern. They don’t eat very much. Like, eating is like, they knew it, but they do it as part of just like, I have to do it, but not like that is all I care about next is they compartmentalize really well. Napoleon said it best. He said, I have compartments. I open a compartment, I look at it and I’m done. I close it.
Aditya Vempaty [00:04:06]:
I go to the next compartment and I close it. And when I’m done with something, that compartment is closed and I don’t open it. And it’s not something I care about until I’m done. And that’s just how they think, how he thinks about it. And then the other thing is also they double down. They all have a superpower that they just double, triple, quadruple down like Napoleon’s was. He was the first, fastest marcher. He could march anywhere, everywhere, and just did it so fast compared to everybody else.
Aditya Vempaty [00:04:34]:
And that was the superpower. Right. And Leonardo da Vinci’s was that he just constantly thought and could just constantly put things together, tie different fields together. And that’s where his superpower was. And you saw all the stuff that he did was so ahead of his time. Like his flying machine was because he was so interdisciplinarian that he could just merge things together. And that’s like been the theme. Like compartmentalized food is like fuel, but not the core focus.
Aditya Vempaty [00:04:56]:
And whatever their superpower is, they double, triple down to the detriment of it. And that gives a vast amount of returns. And so really like, hey, it’s almost like they ignore the weakness. They’re like, I don’t care. That’s my weakness. Don’t care. Moving on. Right.
Aditya Vempaty [00:05:10]:
And so Napoleon was an example and then Jonah Arc is another example. They talk about how she’s had this like deep belief that she was going to win and always going to win and conquer and do whatever she needed. And that took her so far until it didn’t. And then that, you know, caused her death and demise. But that was just the crux and the core of it and that just how they operate. So those are like the three key themes that come across all the leaders across all the centuries. So that was really interesting.
Ty Magnin [00:05:35]:
That’s fascinating.
Tim Metz [00:05:36]:
I’m very intrigued by the eating.
Ty Magnin [00:05:38]:
I know I immediately was like, I don’t have what it takes.
Aditya Vempaty [00:05:41]:
Oh no. They eat patterns about eating.
Ty Magnin [00:05:44]:
Yeah. It’s like fuel. It’s not about the pleasure of it all.
Aditya Vempaty [00:05:46]:
Yeah.
Ty Magnin [00:05:47]:
Thank you for letting us indulge in that for a moment. Can you share your intro with our audience? You know, how’d you get here? What are you up to these days?
Aditya Vempaty [00:05:56]:
So the of empathy. I’ve been privileged, lucky to be running marketing organizations for almost better part of a decade. Had some great wins across nutanix, Amplitude, Synthego in various different fields. One of the things that I really truly love doing is going to different fields and learning the problems that end users have and really building trust and credibility with them. And you guys at Animals have been part of the journey I think for over better part of 10 years now. We’ve done some pretty awesome things starting at Amplitude and obviously now at Moengage and previously at unit 21. But yeah, he has been part of the journey for a pretty long time. But yeah, a lot of the success comes from putting the customer at the center, doing things that are scalable, repeatable, and utilizing other brands, other practitioners, influence and thought leadership to really bolster your own brand’s credibility and being a thought leader.
Aditya Vempaty [00:06:50]:
More than just a thought leader, but also someone you can go to to trust and educate on the problems you’re trying to solve.
Ty Magnin [00:06:56]:
And also using food only as fuel and you know, all those things we’re.
Aditya Vempaty [00:07:01]:
Learning from the food only as fuel and putting everything into cupboards and closing.
Ty Magnin [00:07:06]:
Nice. Okay, well, let’s start by talking about Moengage a little bit. A lot of people, I mean, people are still discovering the brand, if it’s fair to say this. So maybe like, you know, you can give a little shout out to Moengage and what you all do. But I’m really curious about the role of content at Moengage. And and then also if you can give a little color on like, you know, you have the North America team that you’re focused on, but there’s also this like global hub and the dynamics there I want to get into a little bit later.
Aditya Vempaty [00:07:34]:
Yeah. So Moon gauge is about 600 people. Organization can’t give the exact revenue, but let’s just say we’re well on the way to a hundred million ar if not even more. We’re across the globe and US represents a decent amount of revenue, but we’re growing the fastest in North America. Nice. Compared to other regions in terms of just pure ar. The way that we really think about one content in North America is that it is our superpower. Everything we do, content perspective, we think about, hey, why should the customer care? How’s it going to address their problems and how do we build trust? And those are like the three key things we care deeply about in North America and content.
Aditya Vempaty [00:08:15]:
And so for us, an ideal customer, Moon Gauge. Right. We build B2C customer engagement platform. And our ideal customer is like a B2C marketer, someone who’s a lifecycle marketer or CRM or martech manager at companies like Turo, Poshmark, Chick Fil, a kayak, or something like a Chuck E. Cheese. To give you an idea, those are all brands we can service. And it’s very much B2C marketing. And so we enable B2C marketers to take their first party third party data to communicate with us as their audience.
Aditya Vempaty [00:08:48]:
And communication across various channels of SMS, email, website, WhatsApp, text also and using these in conjunction to be able to talk to you in a way that you expect a brand to talk to you versus random emails, random SMS is random website nudges and so forth.
Ty Magnin [00:09:06]:
Yeah, you want to be like cohesive and personalized and all that.
Aditya Vempaty [00:09:10]:
Exactly. And so that’s where, as I said earlier, content is a superpower for us in North America. When we look at content, not about chest beating, Mel engage, or even talking about our product, we try to work a lot on how do we put the customer in the middle and what does the customer care about? What do they want to hear? Is it that they would dig in and give their time to, which in result would build as an association of positivity with Moengage and the brand and have them look into the solutions that we could potentially offer them. And that’s how we think about content as a superpower here.
Ty Magnin [00:09:50]:
Yeah, definitely. And I feel like you did more than other content marketers have championed this, like, I don’t know, customer first or like audience first approach to content creation. And so let’s, let’s get into that, maybe paint the picture of, like, what bad looks like and then also like, how do you guys actually do that? How do you actually put that philosophy or that perspective into practice? Because it’s so much easier said than done.
Aditya Vempaty [00:10:13]:
Yeah, it’s definitely so much easier said than done. And what drives me nuts, insane is I’m gonna say this and I might get kicked in the ass for this. What pisses me off, drives me nuts, which I just won’t tolerate on my teams, is how marketers are lazy and don’t talk to customers. They are, for some reason, so scared to have a conversation with the customer. I don’t know why. I don’t know why this generation of marketers, like, it’s just like giving the Heisman right there, was like, nope, don’t need to talk to the customer. And you’re like, what are you doing? And Shane on my team, right, says it best. Like when she sees that VR, she’s like, we’re just being lazy.
Aditya Vempaty [00:10:48]:
We need to spend the time and talk to customers. This is lazy bullshit. And she’s right. And that’s what we do. We actually spend time every week as a team listening to customer calls and talking about what we learned in the call, what was new, what we could have done better, and what we think we can integrate into our workflows. And then outside of that, by putting the customer front center, I actually spend time LinkedIn, messaging people saying, hey, can I get 30 minutes of your time just to just doing market research. I have no means, I’m not selling you anything. And just digging into what their pain points are, what they’re trying to solve, why it matters, and just embodying that ethos because it’s like taking the SATs, when you know the answers to the test, why would you not go do this?
Ty Magnin [00:11:33]:
Right.
Aditya Vempaty [00:11:33]:
Why am I wasting time, like saying, oh, my product does this and this, and ignoring someone who’s like, I have the answers. No one talks to me. Can you just take the answers and tell me? I’ll listen to you.
Ty Magnin [00:11:42]:
It’s like a shortcut.
Aditya Vempaty [00:11:43]:
Yeah, a shortcut. I find it easier way to market and then build credibility and trust and put it at the center. Because if. If you’re so busy talking about your products and what your company can do for somebody, instead of actually talking to the person and listening to what they want to do and what they’re not getting, it’s a world of a difference.
Ty Magnin [00:12:00]:
Yeah, they say like, you know, two ears, one mouth, like listen twice as much as you talk. Sort of like this, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Aditya Vempaty [00:12:08]:
Okay.
Ty Magnin [00:12:08]:
I want to get into the tactics of this. So you mentioned that weekly you watch some calls with customers with a team. Are those sales calls? Are those calls that you’ve had? Are they call someone else has had? And then what are some other tactics you might prescribe to help create this more customer centric content approach?
Aditya Vempaty [00:12:25]:
Yeah, so I mean, it’s all the above, right? It’s sales calls, it’s calls I’ve gone and done on my own. It’s calls I asked my team to go talk to people and try to get them on and. But to foster that environment of doing that, the tactics is literally like, I’m like, hey guys, we have a thousand bucks every month to go to give to people to do market research. And you know, before it’d be like, hey, why don’t you use LGP or something? The market research firms, right? And I’m like, no, we’re not doing that. And it’s like, why? Well, I want you to ask the questions. I want you to hear what they’re saying and want you to double click into is something really a problem or is this surface level? And start understanding the nuance. So you can make that core to our strategy. Because this goes back to another theme which we’ll touch on.
Aditya Vempaty [00:13:08]:
AI cannot do nuance. You can as a marketer, you have two ears, as you said, and you can decipher where the infliction point is of something that’s really painful and not. And you as a marketer, your job is to be able to do that. And no matter how good AI gets, right, it will never get there. And here’s the thing. If you can’t teach AI that these things matter, it Won’t help you anyway, so you won’t even know. So it’s like they always say this, right? Bad, bad data in, bad data out or shitty product out. That’s just going to be the case with AI too.
Aditya Vempaty [00:13:39]:
And if you as a marketer haven’t talked to the customer, haven’t built that tactic, haven’t done these tactics of spending time, you’re not gonna understand what good and bad is. And as you said, what is bad? Like bad is when you talk to a customer, I just focus completely. One talking to customer helps, you’re ahead of the curve. But the bad part is like I tell people, don’t just sit there and be like, what do you think about moengage? What do you think about this? What do you think about that? How would you use this? No, sit there and, and ask them, hey, what does your day look like? Where do you spend most of your time? How much time is spent launching campaigns? How much time is spent actually getting emails done or SMS or orchestrating your customer journey? And if they’re like, hey, I spent more time here, I spend more time double click, right? The entire thing I think probably also comes in is like from tactical perspective, like be curious, double click on things and listen to what they’re saying. Like if you hear inflection points or sense of hesitation, double click onto that and understand, right? A fun fact is most of our customers actually feature wise. Like most of the products are very similar, but the biggest problem they have when you talk to them is like I spend 80% of my time, 80% trying to reconcile my data and make sure I actually have the actual data in the right locations, right? And this is a big problem to me. And it’s like, why? Well, the data is unstructured in one system, it’s structured a different way in another system. I have to merge these two.
Aditya Vempaty [00:14:59]:
My user data, my user behaviors, and one system versus my email sends or another. How do I tie these together? I got to go get, extract, transform and load into this system to make it work. That takes me four days to do because my data teams have to go do this. And you’re like, wait, how long did it take you to write the email? That takes me like an hour. And then testing it takes another day. But then now I have to reconstole this data. Next thing I know I’ve lost five days because now I have to test and make sure what’s what percentage of Gmail, msn, how’s it showing on mobile? And you’re like, holy Crap. So your problem really is in the email, it’s how do you integrate? So it’s like, okay, so integration is something we should really like double down on this part of the market and talk about it as such and ask them how they deal with it so.
Ty Magnin [00:15:40]:
It can inform a product roadmap in addition to what kind of content you’re writing about.
Aditya Vempaty [00:15:44]:
Yeah, so it’s like we inform the product roadmap, we talk about it, but then we also, like you said, from a good aspect, we double click, dig in, ask what’s happening. Someone who isn’t great at content will listen to that and just hear what they want to hear and just regurgitate, oh, the customer really wanted this. Versus like double clicking. Maybe my assumptions might be wrong when I went in here. Could be the wrong thing. And that’s like between good and great. That’s where I think the gap is.
Ty Magnin [00:16:10]:
It’s interesting. So there’s also like an art to doing the interview, right? An art to like really listening hard and knowing what, what, what to double click on. As you’re putting out there. Do you train the team on that or you just kind of like hire folks that have that eq?
Aditya Vempaty [00:16:24]:
I think like you can hire folks that have that eq. The biggest thing is I think EQ and all these things come to one fundamental thing that like we as humans, I think the ones I have at least in my life and my teams that I’ve come across have is just curiosity. And that curiosity wheel will allow you to like learn on things. So like if someone hears something like wait, that was off and it’s like, sure, you can say it’s eq, but if they’re curious, they’re going to be like, that didn’t sound like the rest of them. I’m going to go double click and find out what is and go to the next level. That’s where you get better as a marketer, I would say, or not even a marketer in any field, but especially in marketing is by double clicking when you hear things that are not normal and being curious constantly.
Ty Magnin [00:17:03]:
I think what’s interesting about marketing is there’s so many different ways to get like a pulse on your audience. And I know like firsthand, like I viscerally feel if I’m trying to produce a piece of content, I feel if I don’t have that pulse, there’s like a disconnect when I’m writing or producing that piece, when I’m like on it and having a good healthy set of rituals where I’m talking to customers or people in the ICP often enough. It’s so much easier to produce that thing, you know, like, it just flows out of me versus, like, I kind of making this thing up, you know, and like, I know it kind of sucks. And, you know, I need someone internally to give feedback, but, like, I don’t know. By then it’s kind of gone. And I think what’s interesting about marketing is like, different roles have different natural touch points to customers. If you’re in events, right, you’re going to be face to face with your audience, you know, maybe every month. If you’re doing 12 events in a year, if you’re in product marketing, you probably get to do case studies, right? And that’s a great place for you to get that pulse.
Ty Magnin [00:18:04]:
And so I’ve tried in structuring my teams to like, make sure each person has some kind of touch point for them to keep that pulse. So when they’re producing some kind of content, it comes naturally out of them versus, like, you know, it’s their own kind of voice in their head.
Aditya Vempaty [00:18:20]:
You hit the nail on the head, right? That flow state, and you get to that flow state when you combine, I would say, your experience with your curiosity. And when you meet that and you talk to customers on a regular basis, your experience gets better, your curiosity gets better, and you’re able to hone in on what really matters, right? For a product marketer, as you said, they have to listen to customers. And one of the things that people were doing before on many of my teams, and I just was like, no, you’re not doing this anymore. Would be, oh, yes, CSMs. I’ll give them the questions, they’ll give me the recording. I’m like, hell no. They’re like, wait, why though? They have the relationship. I’m like, no, you are talking to them.
Aditya Vempaty [00:18:58]:
CSMs can be on the call, but you’re going to talk to them. And the question would be like, why? I’m like, because then you’ll understand what really matters to them and what doesn’t and how they answer questions. So next time you’re writing a product launch, you’ll be like, what are the things I really should emphasize and I shouldn’t for this audience that I’m writing for. And oftentimes the feedback would be, well, but that doesn’t, like, you know, talk about the product? I’m like, well, let me ask you this. Do you know what the customers care about in the product? It’s like, well, our product manager said this is what matters. Like, okay, have you talked to the customer? And I asked them, no. Okay, then how can you be sure? Well, they told me and it’s like not dismissing them, but you’re doing yourself a disservice and the company by not verifying and going deeper into what that really is.
Tim Metz [00:19:39]:
I’m curious how you synthesize the learnings like across the team. Because if everybody’s talking to customers, like, how do you get that for everybody? Top of mind. Do you centralize it somewhere? How do you do that as a group?
Aditya Vempaty [00:19:50]:
This is great. This is part of exactly scaling. So what I typically do is we have gone through so many interviews now, right. And got a treasure trove of things. So there’s like about five to six questions that are baseline. Like your problems would you look at, what are you trying to solve? How’d you go about it? How was your life before? How would you want to change it? Typical questions. But the things where we add more is like, hey, synthesize it into like a set of questions, one that everyone takes to every interview. But then the other side of that is like, what are the self motivating questions? Those are where we get the real meat.
Aditya Vempaty [00:20:23]:
Which is like, hey, how did this help you accelerate your job? How did this help you get ahead in your career? Did it help you? Did it not? How did this matter to the rest of the organization? And why were you so like focused on solving this problem that why did it matter to you that self like propelling and career like arc? That’s where the real meat comes from. The other questions are like standard. But this is where you’re like, oh, I see this. Okay. I see how people think in the area. This is what matters to him. In a company of this scale and this industry and at this revenue versus this company at this scale and this industry in this revenue. And those like, those questions of where, like, how can this person become a Luke? Right.
Aditya Vempaty [00:21:11]:
And how you become a Yoda? And you’re just like, hey, I’m Yoda. I just want to know how can I give you the skillset to be successful? You’re Luke. I’m not. I’m just Yoda.
Ty Magnin [00:21:19]:
Totally.
Aditya Vempaty [00:21:20]:
And those, Tim, as you said, like, that’s where we get the meat of it. Like most of us standardize. But those personalized, tailored career questions is where we really psychologically understand them. That the nuances come in and then.
Tim Metz [00:21:32]:
Where does that go? Like, where does the output go? How do you spread that across the team?
Aditya Vempaty [00:21:37]:
Yeah, we actually have a Document, we collect it. We review this document every Friday morning with like different interview questions. So we do two meetings. One is like the Monday morning meeting and then Friday morning close, and our Friday morning close. We spent about 10 minutes going through a customer case study. Someone’s done and reviewed. And so I have the notes, I share them and I’m like, hey, guys, take a look. What do you think? What did you discover? This is what I discovered.
Aditya Vempaty [00:22:02]:
And I actually synthesize the notes, put them together for myself if I’ve done it. If others have done it, they synthesize and put it together based on the format that we’ve already defined, which is like the five, six questions that are, you know, toss me ups and then the three or four, which is like very self motivation, career arcs questions where we get the, I would say the nuances of what they want to accomplish in there, how they’re not able to.
Ty Magnin [00:22:24]:
We’ve had the privilege in Animals, in supporting you at unit 21 and then you at Moengage to produce these pretty flagship, substantial coffee table books. Yeah, Moengage 1 isn’t out yet. But I’m curious, how does this customer centric philosophy tie into the assets, those coffee table books that you’ve produced? And again, I guess for the audience, maybe like give a little context for the audience that.
Aditya Vempaty [00:22:51]:
Yeah, yeah. So this actually goes back to a few things I may have said earlier. Right. This actually goes back to even, I would say, how to take over the world too, a little bit. It’s because all these leaders, how they. Their current trajectories and how they climbed up, they did some awesome, as you said, flagship stuff, but they did these flagship stuff by using the brands of people who are already in power.
Ty Magnin [00:23:16]:
Nice.
Aditya Vempaty [00:23:17]:
It wasn’t. They did it on their own. They didn’t come out of the blue and be like, oh, look at me. No, they. They found how do I utilize other brands and solve for problems that they have and in return get their brand trust and loyalty and then amplify myself.
Ty Magnin [00:23:33]:
It’s like borrowed authority.
Aditya Vempaty [00:23:36]:
It has not shifted over 2,3000 years. That is still happening.
Ty Magnin [00:23:41]:
Wow.
Aditya Vempaty [00:23:41]:
And that is like at Moengage, unit 21, like, you know, these flagship books or whatever, if you look at it, they’re all on borrowed authority to build a brand.
Ty Magnin [00:23:51]:
Right.
Aditya Vempaty [00:23:52]:
We think about it that way, as in, hey, ultimately the Barred authority is coming from people who potentially be our customers and they want to be the hero. We are not the hero. The biggest thing, like in all this learning, even all these people who have tried to take over the world. They don’t come off as the hero until they know they are the heroes. But they utilize others and make them the hero and they climb up the ranks as a result.
Ty Magnin [00:24:14]:
That’s like from like I don’t know the author but the story, brand framework, you know what I’m talking about.
Aditya Vempaty [00:24:19]:
Yeah, yep, exactly.
Ty Magnin [00:24:21]:
And for the audience. So you don’t like, you probably haven’t read the Unit 21 case study of the animal site. You should, it’s a good one. But what, what Aditya is talking about is like okay, so we’ve produced this coffee table book that included chapters from influential folk working at influential brands in the industry. Right.
Aditya Vempaty [00:24:40]:
That’s exactly, exactly it. And we wanted to establish Unit 21 as the brand for fighting fraud with the manual which wasn’t done before. Right. And we use brands like Mercury, Brex, Pinwheel, which you guys helped Lithic, which guys working with you guys helped make that happen. But the entire premise there was hey, we don’t have a brand that stands out but we have some cool concept and so how can we use the credibility of these other people and bring them together? And this hasn’t been done before where brands, literally professionals from brands who compete with each other wrote a book on fighting fraud and that was like the big deal of it. And the entire thinking there again comes back when you’re a content team, you’re like what’s the strategy? How are you thinking about this? How do you scale this? Well the scaling part comes from one, thinking about the customer first. Two comes from how do I borrow another brand’s trust? Right. Borrow their brand authority.
Aditya Vempaty [00:25:34]:
And three, how do you not make it look like self beating? Right. But you are the Yoda and this is the Luke. And so that, that’s what I definitely tried to do and tried to make sure happened.
Ty Magnin [00:25:45]:
Yeah. And you saw some big results for those. I mean I don’t need to recount the whole thing but check out the case study if you want to see the details of that.
Aditya Vempaty [00:25:52]:
We, we did see some good results and hopefully the one we’re working on with you guys, we see some big results too. Yes.
Ty Magnin [00:25:59]:
What else does it take to scale a content operation from those early days? Right. So maybe borrowing authority as a playbook within there like what are some other things you’ve had to do to scale up a content operation specifically. But if you want to just take it like marketing at large.
Aditya Vempaty [00:26:15]:
Yeah. One of the things is, and this is, this is I think going to happen more and More. And it’s. It’s been what I’ve been doing for a while and, and maybe I was crazy, but I don’t think so. It’s been working great, but it’s very much having distribution baked into content. This is something I don’t see content people doing enough. And on my teams, I like, have said, I don’t care what you do. If you can’t tell me how you’re going to distribute it, you’re not doing it.
Aditya Vempaty [00:26:41]:
Don’t care.
Ty Magnin [00:26:41]:
Nice.
Aditya Vempaty [00:26:42]:
And it’s like, wait, what do you mean? I’m like, well, channels are oversaturated. It cost me a crap ton to get leads. Everyone says the same damn thing and everyone’s putting ebooks out there. We need to change the game. Changing the game comes from thinking about content as a distribution engine. What does that mean? Well, it doesn’t mean you put an ebook out there and then you send it to everybody and they download it and your job’s done. No, that’s not the way it works. You need to start thinking about what content and the content you’re writing.
Aditya Vempaty [00:27:06]:
Why does it matter? For the author. Sorry, the audience. But then why would the audience share this? How can you make them share this? Meaning you don’t say share it, but they’re like, wait, I gotta share this. And this goes back into the fundamental principle of the borrowed authority. And that’s why it doesn’t matter if you’re borrowing authority from a practitioner, if you’re borrowing authority from your partner in the ecosystem, or if you’re borrowing authority from a customer. Every asset needs to have authority that extends beyond you because that drives distribution. Yeah, that’s like how we scale it. And that’s the only way I believe we can scale it to get to the revenue numbers we want to get to.
Aditya Vempaty [00:27:42]:
And it’s just. Without breaking the bank.
Ty Magnin [00:27:46]:
Yeah, it’s so interesting. So I often prescribe this kind of strategy to startups that are like, they don’t have an audience yet. Right. They don’t have domain authority. So, like, SEO isn’t going to work for them. Well, and so it’s like, yeah, who can you go borrow audiences from? I fundamentally believe you don’t have to be a startup to leverage that. But it feels like at a certain point you do have an email list in some domain authority. And so, like, do you.
Ty Magnin [00:28:15]:
You don’t have to rely as much on that. Is that true? Does this, like, strategy shift over time or do you believe, like, you just always run that playbook?
Aditya Vempaty [00:28:25]:
So it’s a playbook, but I think it does. It used to shift and now I don’t think it does. And the reason being is because it’s harder to get audiences attention, channels are saturated. Email Wallet works. It is more spam bots and more issues that we have into getting into people’s inboxes. And so now you have to find ways for them to give a shit and penetrate in multiple ways through distribution. It used to be that, yes, you have an email list, you’re good to go, but now with the advent of outreach and sales loft, everyone’s just spam emailing everyone, your domain has gone to crap. Yeah, right.
Aditya Vempaty [00:29:04]:
And that’s the problem. And so now if your domain authority is gone, even if you built a brand authority, so now your brand authority is like, I come to the website, I look at you. Why? I’ve heard of Amplitude or I’ve heard of Moengage, or I’ve heard of unit 21 or right, or Synthego. Like, you built that brand presence. So that’s going to always happen. But the thing that is really going to shift is now when we’re emailing people in their inboxes, our open rates are down substantially because the domains that we’re using have hurt the entire authority. Sorry, the outbound content, SDR engines and sales engines of Outreach and SalesLoft have hurt the authority of the domain as a whole. So your delivery is garbage.
Aditya Vempaty [00:29:47]:
And I mean, we’re fixing that. And we all. A lot of people have these problems. They won’t say it overtly, but it’s another issue.
Ty Magnin [00:29:53]:
So you’re thinking like, basically, yeah, the whole channels are saturated and hard in like this whole borrowed, borrowed audience thing. It’s like, still a pretty good clean bet.
Aditya Vempaty [00:30:04]:
Yeah, I mean, that’s going to shift. But ChatGPT still borrows authority to show your results on who you want. And authority comes from X competitor versus Y. And they’ll show competitor results if you’re writing content that really answers the question that the audience cares about. I mean, ChatGPT is completely barring everyone’s authority. They’re doing it legally, illegally, whichever way they’re doing it. Right. So then it’s like, how do I show up there? Well, this is one way to do it.
Ty Magnin [00:30:32]:
Yeah, nice.
Tim Metz [00:30:33]:
And I’m thinking, if I’m on your team, is there anything else you would accept besides Bird authority as a distribution play? Like, what other things can people put up there?
Aditya Vempaty [00:30:42]:
Oh, man, I’m open to anything. I’m like, you tell me how you get Distribution, I don’t care. I am behind you. Like, if you’re like, I’ll give you an example. We did this webinar and we had like two, three partners on the webinar. It was called Email Benchmark Reports. And we did with Mobile Inc. And also Inbox Monster.
Aditya Vempaty [00:31:02]:
And the webinar did phenomenally well. Like, for a webinar, you’re like, what the hell just happened here? I would not expect this. Right? Like, we, we had 5, 600 people register. You’re like, what? And then we had half of those show up and you’re like, what just happened here? How did this happen?
Ty Magnin [00:31:16]:
And they weren’t just zoom bots. They weren’t just like call recorders.
Aditya Vempaty [00:31:19]:
No, they were interested. They downloaded the report. And so what that told me, like, in our team was, hey, bar to authority doesn’t necessarily mean just like, hey, I need like a person on here. If you could work with your partners in the ecosystem, that benefits you as well.
Ty Magnin [00:31:35]:
Right.
Aditya Vempaty [00:31:36]:
And that’s another form of borrowed authority. But then also what taught us too was we need to talk about a topic that we can borrow authority from the subject matter experts also as well. And these people like Inbox Monster and Movable were great for email, for the audience that we cared about. So we got a lot of people coming in. And so, yeah, I think ecosystem and partnerships is more important in a market where we are, which is Brownfield, which is a lot of rip and replace, than like a green field like unit 21, where partnership, ecosystem isn’t as big. So you have to like, I think borrowing authority, it has many ways of borrowing, but you have to look at the ecosystem and see what you can use partners for or where you use customers or influencers. And I think you have to trade off accordingly for what you need at Moen Gage. Right.
Aditya Vempaty [00:32:24]:
We have to borrow Authority, the book that’s coming out. I’m not going too many details, but we borrowed it from established B2C brands through them being authors in it versus unit 21. Emojis that we also use partners. But unit 20, we now partners in the book because we’re like, there’s no real partner ecosystem in this space.
Ty Magnin [00:32:41]:
You have to find like, yeah, sort of like friendlies, you know, people that you’re not competing directly with, but like, you know, would have something to say about your subject matter.
Aditya Vempaty [00:32:49]:
Yeah, we did stuff, Ty, when you’re at appcues, we did stuff together at Apple.
Ty Magnin [00:32:53]:
Yeah, Amplitude and app cues. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Co marketing blogs and things like that. I Still want to get into the whole like North America global hub dynamic? Because when I was at UiPath, you know, we had this concept of like I led the global content team and that was like you had the like federated versus like centralized kind of approach. Like what gets done over here and over there, you’ll have kind of a unique setup. Right. Because if I understand it correctly, Mulengage was started in India. The North America investment is sort of this new growth opportunity, a huge and significant one.
Ty Magnin [00:33:27]:
But that means there’s like different things going on. Can you just describe what that dynamic is like for marketing and then maybe specifically content? Although I think it’s probably pretty. Yeah, so.
Aditya Vempaty [00:33:38]:
So the thing is, I think this is where human psychology is really key and I think when you’ve led global content teams. Right. And so for Moengage, when you come in and looked at it and they started in America, then they went to India, grew in India and grew in Southeast Asia and now starting to grow in Europe and North America and businesses healthy and flourishing. The thinking is very much like in these other regions. The, the marketing aspect of it is very different than Europe and America.
Ty Magnin [00:34:13]:
Sure.
Aditya Vempaty [00:34:14]:
And the nuances, the details do lie in the nuances. Right. North America and Europe have more sophisticated marketing engines, they have a more sophisticated buyer versus India and Southeast Asia or even the Middle East. And the markets are not as crowded as they are in America. But then the market size is much bigger in America than it is in those markets. And so you start putting those into play. And part of it is my job like as coming in being like, hey guys, you’re approaching certain things like marketing differently than you should. Because it comes down to human psychology and cultural aspects.
Aditya Vempaty [00:34:48]:
Where in those regions of Southeast Asia, Dubai, India, there’s no relationship concept. It’s much more coin operated. It’s like you’re in a position of power. You’re going to help me, I’ll help you. Whereas in the US and EU it’s very much like, let’s build a relationship first before you start trying to get things from me and I start trying to get things from you. And so that was like the first big thing. Like I spent a lot of time internally being like, guys, no one knows Mongage. They kind of know who we are.
Aditya Vempaty [00:35:12]:
We don’t talk to people they talk to. We don’t aren’t in the circles that they’re in. We need to spend time cultivating relationships and having people like before you say, are they buying first, like understand our existence and that we’re not vaporware. And so that from a marketing aspect was like, the big part is like, hey, we need to spend time with the thought leaders. We need to spend time with the quote, unquote influencers. Why? I don’t know if we’ll get pipelined. Like, well, because how people buy here shifted. Right.
Aditya Vempaty [00:35:41]:
And we do spend a lot of time with Gartner enforcers. And they’re great for some of our audience. For other audiences, they’re like poison. They’re like, this is a virus. It’s going to kill me. I’m not touching this. And others are like, I need this to even open a conversation.
Ty Magnin [00:35:52]:
Yeah.
Aditya Vempaty [00:35:53]:
And so from marketing aspect, I was like, fine, we’ll do this. But you have to realize, like, we also need this and we have to take a different approach. So that’s from marketing side, but the content side, the big, big issue that we really had to unlearn and relearn, where globally we would just churn out blog posts. And the way we were approaching it was just destroying our SEO because there was no cohesive strategy. Everyone was writing about everything and putting in terms. And so we started cannibalizing ourselves.
Ty Magnin [00:36:22]:
Yeah, sure.
Aditya Vempaty [00:36:24]:
And you’re like, what the hell just happened? And so, like, we had to step by, be like, hey, guys. And introduce an entire writing format and entire way of writing. We were like, you can’t write like this. We need. We need to kill these blogs. Like, we found out that out of like a thousand of our blogs, only 50 were driving, organic, meaningful traffic.
Ty Magnin [00:36:44]:
Oh, no.
Aditya Vempaty [00:36:45]:
Okay, so that you want to zoom into the content level of things. Yeah, that’s where we stood. Because, man, content, like, S. Content, the way it’s written in other countries compared to North America is just not the same. Understand in North America, like, or eu, you have to write content, be good at SEO and design assets that fit into the content. Whereas in other countries, like, I wrote words. Here you go. This is not my problem anymore.
Aditya Vempaty [00:37:11]:
Us, you optimize it. You put stuff in it.
Ty Magnin [00:37:14]:
Yeah.
Aditya Vempaty [00:37:14]:
And that’s a big difference. And that’s because the markets are not as mature as the US Markets, and they’re not as nuanced in their buyers. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s just America’s always been a very consumer country compared to the rest of the world.
Ty Magnin [00:37:26]:
Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting. I also think spray and pray SEO approaches, like, you know, just, like, crank out 100 posts a day or a month and, like, just publish it. It’s going to create A similar mess to untangle. So are you guys, are you still untangling that sort of SEO mess or is it a pretty easy, like, hey, let’s just prune.
Aditya Vempaty [00:37:44]:
It’s not easy, man. It’s not easy, right? It’s not easy. It’s. It’s one of those things where you had to do when you had to do at the time that you had to do it because you didn’t know any better. Now you know better and you’re like, oh, God, I. It’s like you can’t unsee what you see. Yeah. So I think about, like, if I.
Ty Magnin [00:38:01]:
Was walking into, like, you know, VP Marketing position or something, and I inherited like a library of a thousand SEO pieces written by AI, like, would I be excited or would I be kind of pissed? And I think it’s the latter, you know, because, like, it’s just going to be a big cleanup exercise for a long period to come.
Aditya Vempaty [00:38:18]:
Yeah, it’s. Someone fed you that something would work in a certain way before it was proven. And it’s good. First adopters are good, you should adopt. But I think you can’t go whole hog into it also as well. Right. I mean, you have to be like, look, I’m going to do this, I’m going to put a certain amount of money, but I have to de risk this. So I still got to do this stuff too.
Ty Magnin [00:38:37]:
Right. Right. Well, how are you guys using AI for content production or for marketing as a whole?
Aditya Vempaty [00:38:42]:
The one of the biggest things for us at least thinking through AI and how to use it. Right. Like for me, I and my team, I really push them to use it on doing whatever tasks they have. Like, hey, can I get this done like 50, 60%, 100% faster? But the thing I tell them is AI is not going to be creative for you. You still gotta be creative. You still gotta understand the customer. AI will help you do it faster, give you more options, but you still gotta, like, build that taste. You have to have good taste about what resonates with the customer and doesn’t.
Aditya Vempaty [00:39:11]:
Right. The books that we worked on, like, people write ebooks, they write physical books all the time. But like, why did, like, the ones we did flagship wise work? And I hope the one coming out works because we’re thinking about what’s the taste of the customer, what will they care about? What will they say, this is ick versus like, I’m in. This is cool. Right? And that’s where, like, AI can help you accelerate what’s cool. But also it can help you accelerate downwards. What’s ick. And that’s not a good thing either.
Ty Magnin [00:39:41]:
No, that’s great.
Aditya Vempaty [00:39:42]:
And this falls back into the problem. Like, you should use AI everywhere. But the thing is that you need to be really clear on what you’re using AI for. I’m never going to use AI for creativity. That’s just stupid. Why? Because AI is not going to be as creative as me and my team. What’s going to be good at is if I say I need these things. This is the tone, this is what I care about.
Aditya Vempaty [00:40:02]:
These are what my customers care about because I’ve talked to them so much. This is the tone they like, these are the problems they have. Then it’s going to do a great way of taking that information making into digestible chunks that I can scale rapidly. As we talked about scaling organizations allow me to execute multiple campaigns that have a high hit rate. That’s really where I see AI as like, hey, it’s not a machine gun, because machines just spray and pray. And you hope what it is, but it’s like having a battalion of snipers that you can just set off at once. They’re not spraying and praying. They know what to hit, where to hit, regardless how far away is.
Aditya Vempaty [00:40:39]:
Because you told them the wind, you told them the elevation, you told them what the target looks like, and they’re like, cool. Got it. But they wouldn’t be able to do it if you didn’t tell them all that information.
Ty Magnin [00:40:49]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Metz [00:40:50]:
It also sounds like. It’s almost like you use it to double down on what’s working, but not. Not just throw it at anything. Because if it’s. I like what you said. It’s like, if you put it on something that’s actually not working or it’s not proven or it’s bad, then you’re just going to scale something that’s. That’s bad and make things a lot worse.
Aditya Vempaty [00:41:07]:
Yeah. An example I’ll give you guys is like, we were looking for a new webinar tool. We had Zoom. We were going to do webinars every month with partners. And I was like, wait, like, we need to have a brand where. If someone does a webinar with us, I can show you. I can give you metrics on this, that if we send them within two hours, the webinar recording and the clips, they will like, be like, whoa, this is insane. So we did that.
Aditya Vempaty [00:41:27]:
We got a new webinar Wender. And the reason we did was we’re like, zoom doesn’t give me my Clips as fast as I want it, I have to wait like two, three hours. And then slicing smaller clips takes me two weeks because I have to give it to somebody else to process. So we got a new vendor, Zuddl. We tried it out, we did with our BFSI webinar. And it was the most number of demo requests that we’ve ever gotten from a webinar. Because within an hour we emailed them right away. We’re like, here’s your webinar on demand.
Aditya Vempaty [00:41:54]:
And then within literally an hour of that, we also gave all the reps the clips to use the, the video clips to use with actual transcripts to use and who they should email this to. Yeah. And then within 24 hours, the webinar being done, we’re like, hey, we actually want to give you a say across channel marketing kit and download the webinar because we all had it ready to go. That started giving us demo requests because we were so quick and we’re at top of mind and AI will help you scale that. Right. We wouldn’t have been able to make those clips, have the transcripts ready, give this to the sales reps if we didn’t think, hey, we should do this. This matters.
Ty Magnin [00:42:30]:
Yeah. So I think I’ve talked about this in this podcast before, but The CMO at UiPath, Bob Patrick, always talks about momentum, momentum, momentum as like really his, like, big thing with marketing. And what you’re saying makes me think about like, because AI or these tools with AI built in can help you turn things around faster. Even a customer conversation to, you know, some sort of like, oh, I uncovered a pain point, let’s write a piece on it. Because you can turn that around faster. I feel like you can turn the flywheel faster, you can build momentum faster. And that is a quite an advantage if you have the right, like, you know, creativity in place.
Aditya Vempaty [00:43:06]:
You said it. It’s quite an advantage if you have the right creativity in place. If you don’t, it definitely goes the other way really fast. And then you’re like, oh, shit, I need to dig myself out of this one.
Ty Magnin [00:43:16]:
Maybe that’s a good thing too, you know, fail fast. Isn’t that, you know, what we say? Is it positive?
Aditya Vempaty [00:43:21]:
I think it’s a great thing to fail fast. But the problem is, what’s that Japanese proverb? If you’re on the wrong train and you know you’re going the wrong direction, get off as soon as you can.
Ty Magnin [00:43:30]:
Yeah, true.
Aditya Vempaty [00:43:32]:
So you don’t have to work as hard to get back the problem. I Think with a lot of people is once they double down, like, no, gotta go, gotta go. Gotta.
Ty Magnin [00:43:38]:
Yeah, yeah.
Aditya Vempaty [00:43:38]:
Like, they will just push and push and. And look, that. That happens with anything you experiment with. Right? You have to give enough shots that you have enough data points to validate if you’re right or wrong. But you also need to constantly be like that.
Ty Magnin [00:43:49]:
Work.
Aditya Vempaty [00:43:49]:
Did that not work? How’s it going right now?
Tim Metz [00:43:51]:
So I feel a theme that I hear through the conversation is like, there’s a lot about relationship, like, talk to the customer, find partners. There’s a lot of, like, going out to the humans. It sounds like what you said. A lot of marketers are afraid to maybe ask a partner to join them, or they’re afraid to go and talk to the customer. So I wonder is, where does that come from in you? Is there. Is there. Is there a special reason why that’s. Is that you or is there.
Tim Metz [00:44:14]:
Is there a story there?
Aditya Vempaty [00:44:16]:
I don’t know if it’s a special reason or anything. Right. For me, I just found the most amount of success, fun and joy I have is when I engage with people and make them feel good and special about themselves. Then I feel like it comes back, they want to engage with you, they want to help you. And it just. Like, I just want everything in life to. As much as I can be a positive energy exchange. And to me, like, if I can go four out of five days where everything is a positive energy exchange, there’s gonna be a negative energy exchange.
Aditya Vempaty [00:44:49]:
Like, it’s. It’s gonna happen. But that’s what I try to aim to do. Like, if I can make everyone not happy but feel like, okay, yeah, it’s tough, but I’m doing the tough work. Hey, this sucks. But there’s someone to help me get through it. Hey, I can figure it out, even if I haven’t yet, because someone’s telling me, like, hey, I’m on the right path. Like, those are moments I love.
Aditya Vempaty [00:45:08]:
Because you’re uplifting everybody, right? We’re all here. Why be mediocre?
Ty Magnin [00:45:13]:
Nice. Well, did you. You’re doing it. You know all my interactions. 5 out of 5 or 10 out of 10, however many times. So did you. Where can people find you? Follow you? Interact with you?
Aditya Vempaty [00:45:23]:
Yeah, I mean, LinkedIn. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. You can follow me there. Send me a DM. I’m pretty responsive. Twitter, I use it. Twitter will probably have a lot of warrior stuff on there or random musings about life and marketing, too. But if you’re Curious more about the marketing stuff.
Aditya Vempaty [00:45:40]:
LinkedIn is definitely where you can find me and reach out and yeah, we have a new book coming up from Moengage. By the time this is out, it should be out. It’s called the Customer Engagement Book. So if you guys hear this, take a look at it. It’s our next flagship book. As Ty, you said coffee tables style.
Ty Magnin [00:45:56]:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining.
Aditya Vempaty [00:45:59]:
Yeah, thank you, Ty. Thank you, Tim. Appreciate it.
Ty Magnin [00:46:02]:
That was a hell of an episode.
Tim Metz [00:46:03]:
Yeah. Nice. That’s great. You know, a lot of people say that of like, oh, you need to know your audience or audience first or things like that. I mean, he really lives it and it was nice to hear, like, how he does that and like, everything from kind of his philosophy to like, practical tips of, like, sit with team every week, listen to, you know, listen to customer calls. It’s like, oh, yeah, yeah, I got to do that.
Ty Magnin [00:46:22]:
Yeah. I think a lot of people pay lip service to, like, distribution first or to like, audience first content. Right. Like, we talk about these sometimes in animals too.
Tim Metz [00:46:32]:
Yeah.
Ty Magnin [00:46:32]:
And I think we really do, like, live them and, you know, and really deliver with certain client engagements. He, like, really lives and breathes by these things, you know, really believes in them deeply. And so you can see he’s like built systems around it. The people that he hires are in line with that approach and strategy. That’s kind of rare, you know, I admire that. I admire that, like being all in on. On some core beliefs about marketing.
Tim Metz [00:46:57]:
He has these kind of. It’s almost like classic B2B tech. Right. Like selling, for example, like a customer engagement platform to big enterprises. Right. But he seems to be able to bring a kind of creative or like, non traditional format to that. So I was. So I would have loved to explore a bit more.
Tim Metz [00:47:14]:
But, like, how is he thinking around that and how does he get that sold internally? But I think, anyway, that’s really cool. Like, and I would really urge people to go check out the case study and read about it because I also feel that, like, these kind of plays like a printed book. I think it actually is making more and more sense. Like, as he’s also saying, right. Like, the channels are getting more saturated. So, like, you need to go back to other things that will make it stand out. Because indeed, people, you know, obviously, like, SEO is getting more difficult. LinkedIn is getting clogged, Email boxes are getting clogged.
Tim Metz [00:47:44]:
So, like, yeah, you need to start finding different ways to get attention and to get your brand out there and to get people to notice you. And I think what he’s been doing at unit 21 and with the upcoming book, it’s. It’s a really great playbook, not just for printed books, but just for finding different formats and different channels. And also his point about distribution is also baked into that case study. You can see that there. Like, it was not like, oh, we have a book. How are we going to distribute it? Like, from the beginning.
Ty Magnin [00:48:07]:
Right.
Tim Metz [00:48:07]:
He was thinking about, like, how are we going to distribute the book? And interviewing these people who are themselves going to become, like, distribution. Yeah. So.
Ty Magnin [00:48:17]:
Well, you know who it makes me think about that we also interviewed in this season, Matt Hamill over at Pipeline360.
Tim Metz [00:48:24]:
Oh, yeah, of course.
Ty Magnin [00:48:25]:
He’s the flying distribution machine. Right. So, Matt, if you haven’t heard the episode, go back and check it out.
Tim Metz [00:48:30]:
We should. We should build like, a kind of collection or showcase of, like, very original distribution methods and formats because it’s like, I think it’s going to be more and more important. And that’s indeed another cool, very cool one.
Ty Magnin [00:48:41]:
I dig it. And hey, if you’re listening and you have one, find us on Luke and shoot us an email, you know, tiedanimals co or timidanimals.com or both open to hearing from you as well. Hope you enjoyed the episode. Stay tuned for the next one. We’ll keep learning about the enterprise with you.
Tim Metz [00:48:57]:
Yeah, thanks for listening. See you in the next one.