Ep 190: Avery Schrader
Podcaster-Turned-Founder Who Just Raised $12 Million Series A Explains Dos and Don’ts of Influencer Marketing, Why It Might Not Work for B2B, & How to Create a Culture That Makes Employees Tattoo Your Logo
Avery Schrader is the founder and CEO of Modash, a leading influencer marketing platform that helps brands scale partnerships with content creators. With a background in building relationships and driving results for companies like Bolt and Verif, Avery’s journey to creating Modash stems from firsthand experience in the creator economy. Modash now serves over 1,500 customers globally, including brands like Victoria’s Secret and Birkenstock, enabling them to discover and manage influencer campaigns effectively. The company recently raised an impressive 11mEUR Series A round.
On this episode we talk about:
Why influencer partnerships outperform traditional ads and how brands can leverage authentic storytelling.
Avery’s entrepreneurial journey, including product validation and pivoting to focus on search functionality.
Practical advice on selecting creators, setting expectations, and adopting a portfolio-based approach.
How startups can use influencers creatively for brand awareness and niche audience engagement.
Key metrics to track, attribution challenges, and strategies for ensuring ROI.
The importance of hiring top talent, structuring company values, and fostering a high-performance culture.
We are on YouTube and Linkedin as well
Watch select full-length episodes on our YouTube channel > https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP6ueaLnjS-CQfrMCm2EoTA
Connect with us on Linkedin > https://www.linkedin.com/company/pursuit-of-scrappiness/
Read the full episode transcript below
Uldis (00:03.063)
Hello, hello, hello, dear listeners. Welcome to another episode of the Pursuit of Scrappiness podcast. Whether you're building a business, running a team, or just starting out in your career, we are here to bring you scrappy and actionable insights to help you become more productive. My name is Uldis Tēraudkalns and my co-host is Jānis Zeps
Janis Zeps (00:25.144)
Hey.
Uldis (00:26.699)
Before we start,
Avery (Modash.io) (00:27.253)
Great intro. Well done.
Uldis (00:29.963)
Before we start, a quick reminder to follow us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, helps more than you know. In exchange that you will find 190 episodes already, goddamn, covering all topics you need to become a scrappier and better version of yourself in life and in business. And if you subscribe, you can also join us in preparation for the 200th episode, which is coming soon.
Avery (Modash.io) (00:42.549)
Thank
Janis Zeps (00:43.343)
I
Uldis (00:56.351)
Anyways, open Spotify, Apple Podcast, click that follow button and be the first to know when we come out every Tuesday. About today's topic. So the world of influencer marketing is fascinating, growing, but can also be somewhat intimidating, especially for P2B marketers who are, I would say understandably skeptical about this marketing channel due to its questionable fit, trackability, brand impact that you have to be careful about.
and yeah, a whole world to unpack and to bust some myths regarding influencer marketing and to discuss how to make it work for you. We have invited today Avery Schrader. Hey, Avery.
Avery (Modash.io) (01:42.389)
What's up? Pleasure to be here.
Uldis (01:45.239)
So Avery is the founder and CEO of Modash a company that is helping already more than 1,500 customer scale partnerships with creators. Having worked with influencer marketing at such companies as Bolt and Verif, Avery brings the know-how on maximizing influencer marketing success. Recently, Modash raised a sizable 11 million euro Series A round.
and is working with such global brands as Victoria Secret, Birkenstock and many others. So today we want to talk about the basics of influencer marketing, how to make it work for B2B companies and also at the end talk a bit about company culture building. So let's dive in. Avery, talk about the shift from doing this influencer marketing management for Bolt and Verif to starting your own
business. Maybe you can tell us what stages of validation, prototyping, traction did you go through to take the plunge.
Avery (Modash.io) (02:51.581)
Yeah, I mean I think it's...
So the story basically goes that I had moved to Estonia and I had no employable skills, but I wanted to learn how to build companies. And so my strategy was to start a podcast, not super unlike you guys, I think. And so what I did was I just started, I went to the local accelerators with a crappy 20 euro lapel mic, because that was all I could afford, not these fancy sure things you guys have or whatever's going on over here. But yeah, I this crappy microphone. I went to the accelerators and I just started knocking on doors and then a couple of the founders agreed.
to let me talk to them about their company. So that was how I learned to build businesses. And then that show got a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger. And so we did live events at pretty well.
Janis Zeps (03:26.722)
Mm-hmm.
Avery (Modash.io) (03:34.771)
established ecosystem pillar here in Estonia at Lift 99. It's like a co-working space and we would do live events there and lots of people from the startup community would come out and I would interview founders like Karl Kotkas and the Villig brothers and all of these people would build these amazing businesses and for some reason I was able to convince a couple of them also to sponsor the show.
And so I built these relationships, they sponsored the show, and I got to feel what it was like to be a creator who was able to like barely pay his rent making a mediocre podcast. it was so much fun and I learned so much. And so what happened was I had seen the creator side, I'd always been really obsessed with it, this idea that anybody with a microphone can kind of do the thing they love for a living and kind of access opportunity that maybe they otherwise shouldn't be able to.
And so I knew I wanted to play more in that space. I needed to do more than pay my rent. I needed to buy groceries too. So I started asking these folks if they wanted to like freelancing basically. So when Bolt launched in Portugal, then I pretty much marked marched into the office on an intro probably from Martin, Martin Willig and asked Pavel and Carol at the time the head of growth still was Pavel and
asked like, give me a budget. want to do this. I'm super smart. I'm going to do this influencer stuff. And I think I asked for like, whatever, 20,000 euros or something. And he was like, I give you like a fraction of that. So he gave me a couple thousand bucks to go play in Portugal and launch influencer partnerships with them.
learned a lot from that and and yet did something similar at Verev. So when Verev was hiring like hundreds and hundreds of people all of a sudden they came out a white combinator like super rocket ship they needed to hire tons of people they needed unique way to get in front of all of these local talents because they were hiring hundreds of university students. Creators were an interesting way to do that but they had no idea how to approach it so the CMO asked me if if I would do it and so we did and it was super super effective.
Avery (Modash.io) (05:38.719)
We drove hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of applicants that were in Tallinn to that recruitment page and got lots of people hired. So yeah, so that was my start in the creator world, running partnerships for those folks, doing the show myself. And yeah.
Janis Zeps (05:55.779)
What time frame are we talking about? All these things you discuss sounds like it's a long timeline, but what years are these?
Avery (Modash.io) (06:04.437)
Yeah, they're kind of overlapping a little bit. sort of there was basically like 2018-2019 I was doing the show, the podcast and I was freelancing and I was also like just tinkering on random stuff. And so
Janis Zeps (06:15.809)
Okay.
Janis Zeps (06:20.098)
Super OG stuff doing podcasts at that time, really.
Avery (Modash.io) (06:23.477)
Even then, to be honest, was like, it wasn't, you know, there was already a few really, really big shows, but a part of me does wonder how big that could have gotten. It was pretty cool.
Uldis (06:35.895)
And why did you go to Estonia in the first place?
Avery (Modash.io) (06:39.669)
Well, I grew up in Eastern Canada in Nova Scotia, which is like the first part that you fly over and then you never think about it again. So if you've ever been to Canada, you've flown over where I'm from, but you never noticed. And yeah, like we don't really have, we don't even have sidewalks, let alone these like self-driving delivery robots or whatever. So there's not a lot happening. And...
I needed to get out to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. And so as soon as I was old enough to buy a plane ticket, I left. then I heard about Estonia or they're building these companies, which is the first thing in my life that ever really spoke to me other than creating content was like, maybe I could learn how to build a company. That would be really amazing. And so I just got on a plane from Germany. didn't know anything about Estonia, but I came here and fell in love with the city, fell in love with startups, fell in love with a girl. And that's all it took to keep me.
Janis Zeps (07:33.742)
Well, at least you're one of those guys that,
Uldis (07:34.094)
They're always that girl. The anchor. Business is all nice and well, but the girl.
Avery (Modash.io) (07:37.045)
Yeah
Janis Zeps (07:42.159)
Well, you didn't have to suffer massive downgrading climate like most people who moved to our part of the world. I think that's pretty much the same, right, where you're from.
Avery (Modash.io) (07:51.303)
Yeah, it's a little bit darker here. That's the one that gets me. But yeah, there's a great quote from a good friend of mine, Quan, who is from Hong Kong and built a little company here, now works at Modash. And he once said to Startup Estonia when they asked about the weather, what's it like switching the weather, he said, well, it's great. It's so dark outside that you just stay inside and code all day. So it's perfect.
Janis Zeps (07:55.783)
Aha, true true.
Uldis (07:57.303)
That's the character builder, the darkness.
Uldis (08:17.384)
Exactly.
Janis Zeps (08:18.543)
It's a joke, but I've heard it in different variations from so many people that there must be something about productivity because if you're like in Bali or southern Spain, like there's probably a part of you that's really struggling. let's go outside. Let's do something. And I guess Baltics are like safe in that regard that there's a lot, not much to do for most of the year.
Avery (Modash.io) (08:42.653)
Yeah, I don't know a lot of people doing siesta in Estonia, so yeah, it's...
Uldis (08:47.939)
invest in a headlamp.
Janis Zeps (08:47.97)
gap here.
Avery (Modash.io) (08:50.965)
Yeah, exactly.
Uldis (08:51.341)
So talking about working with content creators, so how does this...
Avery (Modash.io) (08:57.897)
You know, I can tell you an interesting story about validation if you like, because you asked me about validation in beginning. So the way that it's segwayed, basically I leveraged those freelance relationships to get feedback on the product. So Henry, my co-founder, who's much smarter than me and builds everything from scratch from the beginning.
Uldis (09:00.813)
Right, I did, I did.
Avery (Modash.io) (09:18.517)
We tinkered on all kinds of little things. So we built attribution tools. When I did the VEDA activations, then he built an attribution tool that did some fancy, like was able to detect applicants based on email addresses from social and that kind of thing. So there was really interesting little tools that we did on the back of my freelancing. So I would run the campaigns, complain about my problems. Henry would build stuff. And then we would try to demo things to customers and stuff along the way.
way and that process meant that we way overbuilt we built way too much stuff but we weren't romantic about it at all and so
take this collection of like trinkets that I built and from the bolt relationship became really really important. There was a guy at still at Bolt, I think the head of global partnerships now, Mikhailo, who I would take my little collection of trinkets on influencer marketing stuff to and show it to him and he would say Avery this sucks, why are you here? And I would leave and I would come back and he would say this sucks and then eventually, I don't know why that guy kept having lunch with me but eventually he looked at he looked at all the stuff and he said you know this all sucks,
for this little thing right here. And that became search, which was the core of our product. Even now, it's what most of our customers really know us for, is for the search engine. But there was a moment in that, which I think is a moment that most companies, or many of the early stage companies, think, everybody goes through the process of building and iterating and stuff, but there's a moment where you have to kill everything else. You have to have that come to Jesus moment and say, we put two years
Janis Zeps (10:37.294)
Hmm.
Avery (Modash.io) (10:54.705)
years of building stuff and customer conversations and whatever and either we're gonna carry that baggage forever or we're gonna let it go and you have to let it go and the sooner you do it and the more aggressively you do it and you get rid of all that nonsense the faster you'll get on with building something that actually matters and so that was really critical we deleted like 80 % of the code base and went went forward just with search
Uldis (11:19.241)
And how does it work? Like what do you search for?
Avery (Modash.io) (11:24.031)
So basically, well now it's a database essentially of every content creator on earth. So across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and you can input the criteria that you care about in order to surface results that matter to you. So maybe you wanna find the yoga creators in Argentina who speak to men and have like...
some other specific criteria, just plug those into Modash and we'll instantly show you the relevant results and let you audit them and get their contact info and that sort of thing.
Uldis (11:55.829)
Okay. And if we talk about influencer marketing in general, content marketing, what's the biggest difference between working with creators and other forms of digital?
Avery (Modash.io) (11:57.706)
Yeah.
Avery (Modash.io) (12:14.101)
I think like it's there's lots of things that are... Do you guys hear that little background buzzer? No? You're good?
Uldis (12:23.477)
There was a little something, not anymore.
Janis Zeps (12:24.494)
No good.
Avery (Modash.io) (12:27.133)
it disappears. Let's see if I talk loud enough no one will hear me. yeah so the difference between influencer partnerships and like other digital channels in general are like a gift and a curse generally. Like usually you're trading something that's harder for something that's better in some way. So for example
paid digital is fantastic because it's scalable, you can just plow money into it, you don't have to talk to anybody, just throw money into Google Ads and you'll be right there at the top of search, no problemo. Creator partnerships, we know that the consequence of that is that lots of consumers have ad blindness, they don't see your product or they see so many of them that they don't really care about your ads or they...
You know, their journey is much longer than that one Google search. It's a set. They see a whole series of things about you. They hear about you from friends, and they read articles on your site, and they see that ad, and they see so much. And so there's trade-offs to just putting that Google ad there, at least for companies that are a little bit a couple steps ahead in maturity. Whereas on the creator side, the beauty of it and the complexity of it is that you really have this human relationship with somebody that you can tell great stories with. And so you have to go through the pain and suffering of really
managing a human relationship, at least if you want to do a good job, but then you have all of this flexibility in what stories you tell, how you structure compensation, like you don't get to call Mark Zuckerberg and argue about how to pay for the ads, but with a creator you can really collaborate on all of these aspects, which can be really useful. So if you want to tell specific stories from a trusted source, then a creator is a great way to do that.
even more importantly, maybe hundreds of creators can be a really powerful way to do that. Yeah, so you trade basically like, it's a little bit harder, it's a little more work, you have to build strong, like real relationships for access to a trusted source who can make a real recommendation to an audience that cares about them in a format that resonates with them. Nobody resonates with Google Ads, it just doesn't happen.
Janis Zeps (14:41.072)
How much like, mean, is there a difference between industries and products? Because there is this thing that's changing. And if you look at, if you would browse through a catalog of ads or anything over the last, don't know, 30, 40 years, one thing you could notice like some really 40 or 50 years ago, ads could be very simple. this is the best toothpaste, buy it. And somehow it did resonate and it did work. And over time, our messaging is getting more complex. There's more information around.
And there's a lot of people saying that nowadays you really need some kind of human connection to sell things because somebody with a self-recorded video, like a micro influencer, can be way more convincing than like a sports star celebrity, right? In some, I guess, industries, like how much to the statement you think is true and based on industries, like also for startups and B2B SaaS, how much of that is true in that field particularly?
Avery (Modash.io) (15:39.711)
Yeah, I mean, think maybe part of the reason that creators are great is because they can tell a story from a very human perspective. So you can take like a jewelry. So we have a, a company called Idol that uses Modash. They're a sustainable jewelry brand. They print diamonds and then make this really great jewelry with it. And you can tell a story about a mom who's like,
trying to be more considerate about the products that they buy but has always been in love with like sparkly jewels and how she was always felt a little bit of guilt buying like buying a new piece because she knows that the diamonds come from places and businesses that she doesn't want to support and so now thanks to idol she can buy products that she really loves feel beautiful and she doesn't have to she doesn't
Janis Zeps (16:21.359)
Mm-hmm.
Avery (Modash.io) (16:35.917)
have to support those unsustainable kind of practices. And it's the fact that a creator can tell that story really authentically that makes it make sense to the consumer. Like, actually, I'm a mom. Okay, maybe not me, but you know, I can relate to that. I actually do sometimes think, damn, I wish I bought more sustainable stuff. Like, I wish I could practice what I preach a little bit better. I'm like trying to recycle my trash. I wish I could buy something I believe in too. And so maybe this brand is for me. And that's
Janis Zeps (16:50.351)
Mm.
Avery (Modash.io) (17:05.703)
kind of the beautiful thing I think about introducing creators and small creators can do that maybe even better than really big ones because small creators are normal people. Like I think that there is so many more people with a camera out there trying to tell stories about the things they care about than any almost anybody realizes. People think like yeah there's millions of creators or there's tens of millions or there's like a hundred million. No there's like 400 million people trying to who really
Janis Zeps (17:27.087)
Hmm.
Avery (Modash.io) (17:35.589)
enjoy making stuff online, just like you guys do in this format.
And so small creators can do that in really, really effective way because I relate to those small creators. They're normal people like me. I can't really relate to Cristiano Ronaldo. Like his private jet is too small. I don't know. guess that's a problem. yeah, so I think small creators can have the same kind of emotional resonance as a big one. They obviously reach a smaller audience, but that also means they have a lower price point. They're more flexible. You have more creative leverage.
Janis Zeps (17:52.58)
Yeah.
Avery (Modash.io) (18:10.059)
faster to recruit them. There's so many benefits working with small creators over celebs and celebrities have a place too but it's a little bit different than what we tend to support.
Uldis (18:20.769)
But how do you know, like, what, I mean, you never know if it's going to work, but I mean, how to maximize the success because it's just finding somebody that is, you know, with a certain geography, certain audience, doesn't really mean that it's the, that they're the right person for your product, that they're actually authentic and they're just not taking your money to make a post and you know,
collect a bill without the actual value. So what are the basic do's or don'ts when deciding to start a campaign?
Avery (Modash.io) (18:52.597)
Yeah.
Avery (Modash.io) (19:03.005)
Yeah, so I think generally like if you're so small of a brand that like you need every single creator to deliver super high return, then just don't do it. Just don't. It just doesn't make any sense. You should be spending like you need your first couple channels in place. Every company should have probably paid working a little bit on the margins, maybe some organic content, and you should have a dedicated person. You should have one human whose only job is to manage these creators. So you need to get to that
place don't feel like this is a shiny object thing you have don't don't yeah don't fall for shiny object syndrome don't think that influencers exist I have to work with influencers we should do that don't do that like you only need one or two channels to make a business really really great so use the first find one that's like relatively easy to to move forward with once you have that one then and you're getting ready to choose like who are the people that I want to work with first think of your creators as a portfolio
Like lots of people who listen to the show will be familiar with venture investing. And so the analogy works really well with content creators. don't need, when you invest in startups, you don't need every single startup to become a unicorn. You need like two or three of them to pay for everything else. You'd use this portfolio model. And it's the same when you partner with creators. You want to have 10 or 20 or 30 content creators, maybe with slightly different patterns across them. Maybe some talk about yoga and some talk about weightlifting and some talk about like running. And you're going to partner with
those cohorts of creators and you're going to test and learn and see what works really well for your audience and you're going to learn over time what are the metrics that really matter, what's the kind of feeling that really matters when you view that person, like is it that the content is really high quality and it's always sharp and pristine or is it that the person is really authentic and just like running around with their phone like pointing at stuff. Any of these things can work depending on the type of brand that you are and so you have to have a little bit of taste and thoughtfulness in the beginning.
But mostly you need to be willing to experiment and not bet the horse on one content creator. I think those are some of the things I would consider if I was just getting started. And when you do, you can get to insane levels of complexity in how you pick creators. But I think it's really like, do you think the stories that this person tells will resonate with your audience in general?
Avery (Modash.io) (21:26.579)
Do they reach an audience that is kind of relevant to your company? If you sell mostly to men, then they should probably speak mostly to men. Are they in the right location? Does the cost basis sort of make sense for you?
that set of things, do you want to build a relationship with this person? And it can get as complicated as we have one company that's been really successful called Tourlane. They do this white glove travel packages. So if you want to spend 10 grand but have really a trip of your life for your family, then they'll put it all together for you in a nice neat little package and you do it all online. It's really cool. And...
What they found was correlated super highly with high performing content was how enthusiastic the creator was when they called them the first time. If the content creator is excited on the phone call, then the ad does better.
Janis Zeps (22:21.711)
Hmm.
Avery (Modash.io) (22:27.669)
So you can like suspend all the time in the world in your spreadsheet, like trying to figure out if that like, okay, the comments only have 86 characters on average and not 84. And the truth is that a lot of it will come down to like the human elements that you can only judge kind of into it, like intuitively. so yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a mixture of art and science, I think. But generally, if you think of it as a portfolio and you, and you make reasonable judgments, then you'll learn over time and you'll get really good at it.
Janis Zeps (22:55.223)
I think it's first time I hear about this, like very much makes sense, like this portfolio approach, because I've heard like, if you look at some negative feedback, you hear about people, you know, failed partnerships with influencers almost always I think comes down to, know, okay, we thought of sort of, we're gonna try this out, we're gonna, you know, it's gonna blow up and this one thing gonna work, this one influencer and now we're gonna double the business and it doesn't happen, right? Yeah, makes sense.
Avery (Modash.io) (23:23.463)
Another way that you can kind of dip your toe if you just know, you know what, you really just shouldn't do it. you're not, if you don't, aren't already convinced that it can work because you're, like the truth is that if you're out there in a space where this channel can work, then your competitors are probably already beating you to death with that information. They're hitting you over the head with it every day. They're partnering with people who are really like...
causing a ruckus amongst your audience base and you're looking at that and you're going, wah wah wah, this is silly, channel, this will never work for me. you just like, if that's where you're at, like, that's okay, just accept that you don't have to do the channel. It's just that other people are gonna do it they're gonna be better at it than you and that's gonna cost you money over time. so I think, but yeah, so don't do it if you're too early. Don't do it if you hate the idea of doing it.
Yeah, because if you hate the idea of doing it and you're not really convinced when you go in, then you'll do that thing that you mentioned. You're like, okay, I'm gonna get the most famous person in Lithuania to post a selfie and then I'm gonna be rich and famous. It's like not really how...
You have to, it's usually like strike up a few meaningful relationships, build a cadence where you can learn, know, add two relationships a week maybe for a year and then at the end of the year you've done a hundred partnerships with like all kinds of different creators and you can really understand what's happening and some of them are gonna go super crazy and work super super well and pay for everything else.
Uldis (24:48.703)
I guess it's a good sign if the partner is enthusiastic or energetic on the first interaction. What about some red flags besides low energy and ignorance? What other red flags we should watch out for?
Avery (Modash.io) (25:06.367)
Yeah.
Avery (Modash.io) (25:10.387)
Yeah, I mean so much of it has to do with who the company is, right? Like the people that the pursuit of scrappiness wants to partner with need to show different characteristics than who Modash might partner with. And so I think that it probably comes down to that, like an understanding of what are the stories that you really want to tell and then making like a reasonable decision about whether that person can authentically tell those stories. Yeah, in fact, I think like...
Sometimes that's the way I think sometimes customers will ask me who should we work with and that's often how I think about it is I try to put myself in their shoes and say okay, so You're a cryptocurrency exchange. You're like one of the bigger ones in the world's people really trust you They already kind of know you most of the audience So you could partner with a lot of crypto people, but they've already made all their decisions So that's not really a great idea and those people are really expensive So which audiences might be willing to like try crypto if only somebody they try
trusted sort of nudged them and might make good customers for you, that your competitors are probably like too afraid to try to tackle, like maybe female entrepreneurs.
And then female entrepreneurs is Bitpanda's most successful niche, which nobody would have thought to come. And then you can tell a clear story there. You can say, okay, so this is kind of who we want to target, and then what story could we tell? Well, female entrepreneurs are business savvy, financially successful. They're like, people look to them for this kind of trust. But lots of them probably haven't dabbled in crypto because it's kind of like a bro-y, weird, sometimes even sketchy industry.
of this weird connotation so if somebody they trust comes and says like hey you know I've always felt like crypto is a little bit scary we talk a lot about like personal finance on this channel but I've always been afraid of crypto I never wanted to touch it because I'm just scared to say anything to you guys that that I don't fully believe in but now I just got off the phone with these Bitpanda guys and they've been telling me about all this stuff they do in security and how the whole thing works and it's absolutely incredible so I'm doing this thing with Bitpanda and it's gonna be this really really exciting cool thing like if you can come up with the creative first and you know the
Avery (Modash.io) (27:18.541)
audience you kind of have an angle and creative then it will tell you who to work with to some degree and you can do it the other way you can go like look for people and then try to figure out what stories they might tell but I think that that's a little harder at least for me
Uldis (27:30.495)
It makes me almost want to go and sign up at Bitpandas.
Avery (Modash.io) (27:34.727)
Yeah.
Uldis (27:37.461)
if I haven't already need to check. mean, we have spoken about generally applicable and easier to apply for B2C products, but obviously a lot of our audience and lot of companies, especially in our region are B2B companies and it doesn't immediately come.
as a as a you know top three channels for for most people in b2b to to do influencer marketing what do you answer to that
Avery (Modash.io) (28:10.057)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I think that B2B companies probably shouldn't do influencer marketing until they have figured other things out. Similar to consumer, but maybe even more so. The challenge with B2B is that you have a very... Basically, marketing budgets, think the way I think about them is there's these marketing budgets that live inside of companies and they're living organisms. They have to fight for survival and expansion or they get killed by other budgets and eaten. So your Facebook ads budget has to outperform your group.
Google ads budget, otherwise you'll just move your Google ads budget into Facebook. Why would you keep spending on this thing that isn't as effective? And so these channels need to fight for survival. And when you're in B2B, then you're fighting against, here's a list of a hundred people I need to talk to. I'm going to call them all on the phone because your TAM is generally smaller to some degree. And there's much like, there's very targeted ways to get to people. Of course, there's like prosumer stuff like Notion or something that has really, really big total addressable markets.
And so they can go super broad and so creators can reach lots of people in that way. But I think B2B, you just have to, you have more things to tap out before creators become your best option in many cases. That said, so we do some B2B partnerships and I think it depends a lot, like really you should be starting from like, okay, what are the big problems my company has or like what are the opportunities we have and then could creators be a useful...
Avery (Modash.io) (29:42.579)
way to solve that problem. So I can tell you about Modash's one. We're really good at content marketing. We drive like hundreds of thousands of web visitors to our website every month, essentially for free, because we produce lots of content. But all of that is SEO stuff. It's like very much in market, in market buyer stuff. It's like Influenza Marketing Platform, whatever like.
for that people search for it they click it and they come to the site it's awesome it works really well as a growth channel but we realize we wanted to build brand too we want to become the most beloved company in this category
And that requires us to make content that we can't like immediately drive SEO clicks to because it's not super high volume. It's not super transactional. It's more maybe informational like how like the three biggest consumer companies in Europe do gifting collaborations like very informative kind of stuff. And the question we asked ourselves was, okay, we want to do all this brand stuff and we want to be trusted and we want to be part of the community. How can we still get distribution to that content?
Like how do we get people to read that gifting thing? And so we said, okay, we'll embed create, we'll embed these B2B influencers, if you want to call them that.
into the content. They'll write the content. So they write their insights. We produce these blog articles that are super insightful because it's not a B2B SaaS company that came up with them. It's actual practitioners in the space, real community leaders. And then those community leaders have an incentive to share them because they were a part of it. It's like part of their career. And so we're able to leverage their networks in that way. And so we had the problem of how to distribute brand content. And we solved it by involving these kind of B2B community pillars, people who are
Avery (Modash.io) (31:25.029)
like head of influencer marketing at XYZ thing into the content and then they share with their audience. So it works really, really well for that. Of course you can take other approaches like maybe all of your customers go to trade shows. You're like more old school business for some reason, people still go to trade shows. And you realize that like,
Okay, so we could have a booth at a trade show, but that's what everybody does. That's pretty lame. What if we get like the guy who talks about our space on TikTok, but doesn't go to any of the trade shows because he's like a new age cool dude. We all follow him, but he doesn't come to the trade shows. What if we pay him and pay the conference to put that guy on stage and tell a story about us?
And then we can send a filmographer there, we can film the thing, and we can produce content out of it, and we can do a thing. then we become the strongest voice at the trade show, the one that really wins people's attention, because we bring this creator to act as gravitational force for us. And this is just another random hypothetical example, but the point is start from the problems your business actually has, and then reverse engineer the creative and how you can leverage creators to do that. Instead of thinking like,
Okay, I must do this influencer marketing thing because it's a thing I should do and look at it. It'll be much easier to approach it if you really start from a real problem, I guess is my point. Does that make any sense?
Uldis (32:55.477)
It sure does. sure does. But the biggest question for anybody doing this is how to make sure that you don't waste your budget. So to make sure that it doesn't lose in the fight for survival. So what kind of metrics can we track? How do we make sure that actually these campaigns are working?
Avery (Modash.io) (33:07.349)
Mm.
Avery (Modash.io) (33:21.993)
Yeah, mean, again, I'm so annoying because everything depends all the time, it's like, essentially you want, attribution is a pain across all channels actually, especially today because we all use 30 different marketing channels and our customer sees like nine of them and then talks to their friends about us and goes to an event where they like bump into the CEO and the CEO cracks a funny joke and then the guy decides to buy. Like who do you attribute the ad dollars to, right? It's like the CEO's joke closed the
but the guy looked at 10 ads and so, like attribution is always really hard. In the creator space, the most common ways to do it, depending on first you need to decide what level of attribution do I want to do. Like am I, am I,
Confident like can I just send free gifts to like 10,000 people and then not really care about the cost on the other side? And sort of measure it really broadly like how many how much like share a voice do I get how many how much content gets published how many impressions do I garner maybe I could estimate those sort of things or you can get really really specific so you know like Generally, it's a combination of promo codes. So you provide the creator code We've all seen this like 20 % off thing you give a some kind of
promo code, you give a link, like a UTM link or some kind of trackable link, you can generate and manage your promo codes and trackable links inside of Modash by the way, just saying. And then you can do all kinds of crazy stuff with advanced attribution tools or whatever.
Uldis (34:46.999)
Shocker.
Avery (Modash.io) (34:57.077)
Generally, think like what the what cool brands like the the successful brands I'm seeing what they're doing is like some combination of those things like tracking links and then tracking how that traffic performs over time Which is different for different types of companies if you're a fintech company then who cares if anyone downloaded the app you need them to Depart like do the KYC and deposit a dollar If you're an e-commerce store, you need them to buy whatever and so you track your whole funnel as you would with any other channel but so then getting that first like
touch of attribution is something like, you how much web traffic kind of influxes when we publish that content, how many promo codes get used, how many people visit that dedicated landing page, and then you just track it as a normal channel. Yeah.
I think though generally, at some point you kind of realize that it's working and then the... Yeah, like...
It depends so much on what kind of company you are. know, if we're talking to L'Oreal and we want them to move like $20 million out of TV or something, or okay, maybe 20 million is like pocket change to L'Oreal. If we want them to move $100 million out of television into influencers, then we probably need some sort of really fancy, Nielsen needs to like call people in Australia and ask them how they feel about L'Oreal before and after and get really complicated. Your B2B software company with like seven employees doesn't need to do that.
Like you should see either it worked or it didn't and you know if it worked or it didn't. We just had the Series A, we put a little bit of effort into this TechCrunch headline. It took a little bit of time. It took like some money, whatever. And we had to decide whether or not it worked afterwards. And the PR agency we worked with is like sending me these Excel docs and all this stuff. And I was like, you don't need to send me this stuff because I'm talking to customers every day. And I've had like five or 10 people in the last week congratulate me on the Series A.
Avery (Modash.io) (37:00.791)
and so I'm convinced that it worked. It's fine. It did its job. And because that's the level of like pragmatism I think you need in the early stage. So I wouldn't get obsessed about tracking. The basics are link clicks, promo codes, that kind of thing. Get your normal attribution stuff in order and it will be simple. And then don't fool yourself into thinking that attributing one more sale will change your business because it won't.
Janis Zeps (37:21.872)
Especially if it goes together with what said about portfolio approach. So you take it, you need some time investment in that. So it's not like a two week project. So you need to work with a bunch of influencers and it sounds like, yeah, together with that, you would probably should be able to see before and after, you know, if there's a change or not, right?
Avery (Modash.io) (37:42.163)
Yeah, and you'll see really quickly like some content won't perform and then one or two things are gonna go crazy. Like we had this random Irish guy publish TikTok about our platform once and it got like two million views or something. And it was like, we didn't attribute every dollar that it drove, we are pretty sure it was really important actually at that moment. yeah.
Uldis (38:07.593)
I guess the most important is not do the typical, you know, get, get, okay, we should do influencer marketing, find one influencer, do a deal, spend money, no results. I'm never doing influencer marketing again.
Avery (Modash.io) (38:16.458)
Yeah.
Avery (Modash.io) (38:23.375)
Yeah, I think it's the same with a lot of things. I think at least a lot of your audience is kind of in the startup universe, like this early stage universe. And I think it's the same with a lot of things. You don't actually have to do very much stuff. You just have to be really good at the things that you decide to do.
And so unless there's like some physical limitation about the universe, like you can't, it's like physically impossible for you to partner with content creators and be successful with it, then it's really just a matter of how good you are at executing. Like yes, it can work. You just need to go make it work. Don't like half ass that and half ass doing SEO and hire a PR firm to do your tech crunch article and like do 1000 different things at the same time. Just do one thing really, really well and your company will change forever. It's what happened with us and SEO. I would sit down at Christmas time and look at the blog via
Hot jar I would watch people read the blog and like I would actually watch our random anonymous visitors read the articles and I would see like kind of where they dropped off and then I would move like a link and I would go back to hot sure and I'd watch people read and then it was only once I saw them clicking deeper into the website that I was satisfied and that's how SEO took off for us I obsessed over the channel and really getting it to work and and then it did and then everything changed afterwards and so you only need one thing to work and whether it's creators or SEO or Google Ads or whatever just obsess over that until it
until it works or you decide you don't do it.
Janis Zeps (39:40.454)
Yeah, exactly. So many things depend on that. I think the superficial approach is what kills off a lot of potential ideas and not just influencer marketing, but something where you go and in influencers' case, it would be like, post this on Instagram, post this link once, please, and then I will decide.
like you said, engineer it based on the problem trying to solve, put some effort into it. I think also sometimes people partner with the wrong agencies or wrong consults. Not wrong, but you know, not everyone is really, I wouldn't say good, but also putting in effort as well. So yeah, kind of resonate.
Avery (Modash.io) (40:20.539)
Yeah, think agencies and stuff in general are... I personally don't like them for the early stage, even freelancers and stuff I was really hesitant about. And the reason is because you lose...
the ability to get really good at something if you let somebody else do it for you and you'll never really understand what's happening. So with creators, it's like, it's even more so because part of the asset that you're aggregating over time when you do influencer partnerships is the relationship with that person. So if you're really good to them and they want to work with you again in the future and they publish about you when you're not looking and you didn't ask them to, that's when you see like crazy returns. You get better prices, you get better content, you get more
Janis Zeps (40:41.105)
Yeah.
Avery (Modash.io) (41:07.201)
content, everything does better when you invest a little personal touch and then you have that relationship. But if you outsource it to an agency, you don't know what the real attribution is. You don't even know what the real price is because the agencies are generally taking a cut on both sides and not telling you. And you lose all of that real relationship building. so I think agencies are not
always super great, especially in the early stage. I kind of like them for one-off projects. I don't need to be great at PR right now. I just had that one thing that I needed to get done. And so I used people that were really great and helpful to do that. But I wouldn't hire an agency to run my go-to-market for me. mean, that's insane.
Janis Zeps (41:49.722)
Or ads, like if your business depends on like Google ads, Facebook ads, would you rather have... I mean, how do you even build this if that's just outsourced?
Avery (Modash.io) (41:58.983)
Exactly, yeah, because I need us to be better than anybody else in our space at Google Ads if we're gonna if we're gonna really do Google Ads. It's like Why would I do it so that we can be like a little bit worse than our top competitor? Like I need to kill them. That's my job. And so Yeah, that's really hard and you have to get really really good at lots of stuff
Uldis (42:20.353)
We got really carried away talking about all this interesting stuff. So I guess we don't really have that much time to dive into the culture building, but maybe we can talk about one culture building moment that I noticed that you did. So you tattooed your company logo, right?
Avery (Modash.io) (42:42.335)
So I saw your follow-up question was like, I get one? Did other people get one too? And the crazy thing about the tattoo is that it's not my tattoo.
It's so somebody in the team, an engineer who's been with us for a while, showed up to the office one day and like I was in a call and she stuck her arm out and there was this modash tattoo on her arm. I was like struggling to keep talking in the call I was in. And it was a really, really amazing moment. So it wasn't, it wasn't me. I haven't gotten mine yet, but I think maybe it, maybe it should come soon. It's a, it's a, it's a good idea. And I think like culture building is, is really difficult. I think it, you learn.
you learn a lot about it. think like probably recruiting is the most important thing. I heard a really great quote the other day about recruiting that maybe tells the whole story which was like you basically hire two types of people you hire children and you hire adults. Children you have to watch over all the time and make sure they don't like throw themselves down the stairs or like eat Lego blocks or whatever and adults know
to do. They don't do those things. You give them a little bit of instruction and they go get shit done. And if you really surround yourself with kind people who can do that, that are really smart, then a lot of culture will kind of take care of itself. It'll become more like what are the natural strategic kind of angles that you find and those become like embedded in your culture. So for us, for example,
we have a kind of mantra internally. It's called to be well-reasoned. To be well-reasoned is not to be data-driven. It's to look at the limited information you have about the world and to be confident enough to make a judgment call. And that becomes like part of our culture, but it's not so much about like, know, writing down values or that sort of thing. It's about hiring really great people and then identifying those things that uniquely connect those people and like being willing to commit to them. so...
Avery (Modash.io) (44:46.495)
Yeah.
Uldis (44:48.311)
But have you like... How many people do you have now, by the way?
Avery (Modash.io) (44:53.365)
We're like 60, 60 something.
Uldis (44:55.989)
Okay, that's plenty of nodes in the network.
Avery (Modash.io) (45:00.085)
Yeah, getting there.
Uldis (45:01.005)
But is that something that you have invested a lot of time structuring, defining, educating teams of the culture at Modash or the values or the typical mission vision, whatever? Or do you have some kind of different approach to that?
Avery (Modash.io) (45:23.987)
Yeah, I think you have to be really careful once you're not onboarding everybody yourself and they don't get to, like, I didn't, I didn't really, I heard it a lot, but I didn't really realize what happens once people don't just get to watch the founders kind of do what they do. Because people way more than I think I understood sort of just replicate.
like the acceptable behaviors and like the way of doing things and they say the same things to each other that we say to them and so on. And so that's how information and behavior gets sort of transferred. so, so yeah, once I did so in the last year, one thing I did that has been really, really successful is I wrote what we call internally the manifesto and it was basically like.
It started basically from a list of like 150 pieces of advice that I've given the team internally. I just sat down and was like, okay, what's everything I've said to different people inside the company over the last like six or eight months about how to work, how to behave, how to talk to one another, things we do, things we don't do. And it started with just that bulleted list. And then I went in and I kind of merged stuff together and fleshed it all out as like a really comprehensive document. And...
And it's, some of it's really, some of it's more complicated and ephemeral maybe, like that well-reasoned idea and how not to get, how not to be afraid to make a decision without perfect data. And some of it is more specific. Like if you have feedback for somebody, call them and tell them now.
Which is like very instructional and very clear but very different than how some companies operate like I've had people Show up to work and say hey actually I prefer to relay all my feedback to my manager and we just let that person go like this We just don't operate that way and if you don't want to operate the way we operate then that's okay And you're awesome, but weird weird and we do things differently so Yeah, so so the manifesto has been a really interesting and important It's like it's been a cool project because that now I can point to it all the time
Avery (Modash.io) (47:21.529)
And when I send a Slack message, I can be like, hey, yeah, let's not spend too much time on this C like 0.373B of manifesto if you want to understand more, which is really kind of, it's kind of fun. And it means that the team can also contribute and like chime in with comments and the doc and, and add information and so on. It's like a living culture doc, which is, yeah.
Janis Zeps (47:40.966)
Well, that's like what Ray Daly did as well, With principles.
Avery (Modash.io) (47:44.349)
I guess his book is kind of like that, right? Yeah.
Uldis (47:46.49)
principles, kind of. It's just thousands of them.
Avery (Modash.io) (47:51.807)
Hit it.
Janis Zeps (47:51.89)
Yeah, it's too long. I honestly haven't read it fully. I think I 85 % and then it just got too long.
Avery (Modash.io) (48:02.045)
Another thing that was really effective, like super practical for people, if you're just like thinking about culture in the early days, the, well, it could be unique to me, but I didn't understand how good people can be, like how talented the truly great talents are. And I kind of thought about it over the years. was like, okay, like Elon is out there somewhere building rockets, which means there's humans like Elon who operate.
He's not like, he's a weird dude, but he's not like the only person who's super productive. then like everybody you've ever heard of that does these amazing things, they are people whom you could hire people that are similar.
And so one thing that we did was really try hard to understand where the bar of greatness was in hiring and make sure that we're always looking to raise that bar. Like who's our best person? And the next person we hire should be in some way better than them until we can't find people that are better anymore. And it's physically impossible.
And that's really, I think it's a useful exercise because it forces you to really be honest with yourself about who's great and who's not. Even when you're suffering, you need to get that project done. You need that person hired, you need that software engineer. If you're always forcing yourself to look for something that's truly great and really to understand the boundary of greatness, then you'll make better hiring decisions over time and you'll also embarrass yourself because some of your past decisions really suck and you're hanging on to people who aren't gonna really drive.
Uldis (49:37.332)
man, you're just dropping these dimes. We just cannot take it anymore. Thanks, Eri. It's been truly, truly informative and also fun. So I hope you enjoyed it as well. And listeners, yeah, I think it was worth the listen, for sure.
Avery (Modash.io) (49:56.531)
Yeah, super fun.
Avery (Modash.io) (50:04.327)
Nice. I'm glad, yeah, I...
habit of talking a lot, I just kind of want to like cram as much like there's a there's one of the things that's interesting about modash culture is like There's a rule that you don't take anything I say at face value So you listen to all the stuff that I say and then you assume that it's 99 % bullshit and your job and I encourage you dear listener to do the same is most of what I just said is total trash so your job is to think of the one little tiny golden nugget that's in there and try to extract it and do something valuable with it, but
Thank you so much, and I hope it's not too hard to find the golden nuggets.
Uldis (50:40.363)
I'm sure, I'm sure it's easy.
Janis Zeps (50:40.847)
Not at all. No, mean, like super exciting. Yeah, thanks.
Uldis (50:46.605)
Alright guys, listeners, see you soon. yeah, this is the last episode of the season. So Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and see you already in, or hear you in 2025. Thanks guys.
Janis Zeps (51:07.164)
Thanks, bye.
Please note that the transcript text is AI-generated. We apologize for any potential errors or inaccuracies. Thank you for your understanding.
