Molly Ruland:

Welcome back to Can’t Content, your essential podcast for all things content marketing in 2024. That is quite a claim. Let me tell you. Today, we are thrilled to host Ryan. He’s a seasoned b to b SaaS marketing executive with a decade of experience spanning industries like cybersecurity, DevOps, data observable and data observability. Whoo. I need more coffee this morning. Currently, he’s the CMO of Databand dotai, which recently celebrated a noteworthy acquisition by IBM.

Molly Ruland:

Cheers to that. Good for you, man. Beyond his professional success, Ryan is also the creative mind behind pancakes with mister Bear, a children’s book that explores themes far deeper than its delightful breakfast setting. Today, we’re diving into start up marketing best practices, product marketing, and the pivotal role content plays in these areas. Ryan, welcome to Cam Content.

Ryan Yackel:

Hey, Molly. Appreciate that. That was a very nice introduction. I think it’s, like, the best introduction I’ve gotten. I’ve got, like, like, 10 or so podcasts. Like, that was the nicest one. Thank you. It’s great.

Molly Ruland:

Hey, man. I’m available. You can hire me to open for you anywhere you go. You know what I mean? Well, I think it matters. Right? A lot of times people just read whatever you send, and I’m like, no. I wanna learn more about you. I want to go to your LinkedIn profile. I was having a good time with that.

Molly Ruland:

I went and looked at the book, got a little teary eyed this morning. I’m like, okay. This guy this guy’s got some depth to him. I I I appreciate that. So I’m excited to chat with you this morning. Let’s jump right in. Tell me a little bit about, I like to do a little Shark Tank esque section where I just ask you details about the business. So how how long has DataBank been around? How many employees you got? What’s what’s the company snapshot?

Ryan Yackel:

Yeah. So DataBank’s been around since 2018, and it was founded by 3, 3, 3 gentlemen, Victor Evgeni and Josh. And it all started from a problem that they saw in the data space, which was you have data engineering teams that are basically like the software developer, software engineers, you know, back in the DevOps craze and the continuous delivery phase where the developers had all the power. Right? It was you gotta hire as many software engineers as we can. Well, kinda what happened in the past, especially with AI now, what’s happened in the last, you know, 5, 6 years is data has become the new oil, so to say, for the world. And so you need data to do everything, and data engineers are the ones that are taking the data, changing it, manipulating it, pushing the data to get it to the actual business to consume in either data products or reports or AI strategy they have today, LM models, all that stuff. And they saw a need to help data engineers, and data platform teams basically be more productive. And so what we came up with was a data observability platform that functions very similar to other solutions out there in the applications or building space like Datadog, New Relic, Instana, Dynatrace, all these companies that have been very successful.

Ryan Yackel:

We just take that same concept about detecting issues earlier so a data problem could happen in a data pipeline. Something could change. You don’t even expect that to happen. There could be some downtime in a system that’s consuming data you had no idea about. All that revolves around observing and monitoring and alerting when in the lack of air terms when crap hits the fan right when things break so they don’t run around trying to figure out where the issues are. So, that was what came out in 2018. Since then, data observability has become a huge topic in the data quality and data governance space. So it was on things like the Gartner hype cycle for data management innovation. It’s gotten a lot of fanfare recently.

Ryan Yackel:

It’s probably one of the hottest topics in the data space today. And so, you know, since 2018 to about now, there’s probably been about probably 10 to 15 new companies that have emerged in that space. So really on the edge of kind of like a category creation at the time. And then in the last few years, as we built the go to market machine, gaining more market share, we had an opportunity to get acquired by IBM. And so that happened about a year ago. And, now we’re part of IBM’s IBM state of fabric. And so we’re actually the first company in the start-up space in that data observability category to have an exit and to be acquired. And, obviously, it was acquired by one of the most recognizable brands in the world.

Ryan Yackel:

So kind of a cool kind of a cool story, from 2018 all the way up until today.

Molly Ruland:

So where do these well, congratulations on that. That’s amazing. That was probably a hefty experience, getting bought by such a big company. I can’t imagine that was just, like, smooth sailing the whole time. So congratulations on many levels there. So, you know, how does all this data merge with being a CMO? Like, where do those two worlds combine?

Ryan Yackel:

Yeah. Yeah. So you’re talking about, like, the space in general or just, how do I use data as a CMO?

Molly Ruland:

Yeah. In your personal journey, because, you know, you know, you’re a CMO at data data brand data band. Right? So how is your intersection between looking at all this data and the marketing? Where does that intersect for you?

Ryan Yackel:

Yeah. So, I mean, we have a lot of different go to market motions. Right? So part of our go to market motion in DataBend, when we were first getting going was we wanted to build a product led growth model. So a part of that product led growth model, you know, I I there’s people out there that say, like, hey. You have to be all in on product led growth. I’m not one of those people that say that, because of a lot of different reasons, which we can get into. But product load growth in my space, I’ve done this at multiple other companies, is that you’ve gotta have an offering that can easily be onboarded and you can easily be tried and easily be purchased. The last part that I think a lot of people get too hung up on is the purchasing part, for it to be successful.

Ryan Yackel:

And so in all the companies that I’ve been a part of, the data that we look at is the and from a PLG space is how many inbounds are we getting? How many inbounds are converted to a trial or interactive demo or POC? And then from there, how many of those are gonna convert? Very simple. Right? It’s very MQL to sales accepted, to sales qualified, to, opportunity rejected or open, and so on. Right? All those things kinda play into what I’m looking at on a daily basis. Right? Our team is constantly looking at that as well for all these different, and performance marketing, ways to get more inbounds, ways to get more people to come to us and actually try out the software. Right? The second part of the data we’re looking at is how can we then take not only just this PLG model, which is you get the product, try the product, and then decide to purchase the product. Because at the end of the day, when it comes to purchasing, if you’re dealing in a highly complex space, the purchasing is going to be something that’s gonna go through, let’s say, a procurement arm on the other side of the business. Right? We’re not selling a project management tool like Asana or Basecamp or Canva. Right? It’s a very technical product.

Ryan Yackel:

And so when it comes to the purchasing part of it, the people that are actually using the product may not be able to just swipe their credit card and start using a data data tool that connects them with sensitive data or connects them with, you know, has to go through a firewall to connect them with things. There’s a lot more complexities, right, in a b to b enterprise sale. And so what we look at after that experience is done is, okay, how can we get our customers to then lead a purchasing decision to them, upwards into their executive ranks? Right? So what we do is we start with that PLG motion. We make sure the trial, the moments are there. And when we get to procurement, a lot of that when we get to procurement is a lot of making sure the sales team has the right capabilities in place to make the ROI case, to make the return on investment, case, the total cost of ownership, all these things so that then they can present a case to then the upper management for them to actually purchase the tool. Because you can’t just go directly from, hey. I wanna take this. I wanna buy this tool, and start running right away.

Ryan Yackel:

We’re getting to other models in the future where we’ll be able to do that. But a lot of times, the most of the use cases that we have are enterprise. They’re complex. So you can’t just spin something up, connect it, and then purchase it, and continue going.

Molly Ruland:

That, you know, that that reminds me. I saw an article or something on LinkedIn that said the average sales cycle on an enterprise account is, like, 11 months or something like that, which sounds about right, especially in a space like yours because of all that sensitive data. Like you said, you can’t just connect it right away. So who are your ideal clients? Probably very large companies than I would imagine.

Ryan Yackel:

Yeah. So the majority of our customers, from a company standpoint, large customers, yes, because obviously we’re now providing a VM. We have access to a lot of customers in the enterprise space. But besides that, what we look for is we don’t just look for, hey, Are they a big company, and can they buy the product? Like, okay. Like, if everyone did that, then, you know, I think that there would be no no need for an ideal customer profile. Our ideal customer profile are modern data engineering teams or platform teams. They’re using a lot of different technologies, not just IBM technologies, not just Microsoft technologies, not Google, not, wherever the latest and greatest tool that’s out there today in the data space, which seems like there’s one that pops up every hour, it seems like, with a new solution. We look for people that are using a multitude of modern technologies.

Ryan Yackel:

Could be, more of a, heterogeneous mixture of different technologies they have. A lot of open source, so a lot of them are part of the Apache Foundation? Are they using things like Python for coding their pipelines? And then they producing, products that are more product, data products oriented. Right? So we have one of our customers, is a company that’s in the sports betting Right? So at the end of the day, all their data feeds into a consumer app that is gonna be used for sports betting. And so in that particular customer’s case, they have 100 of, you know, thousands and thousands of different pipelines that are pushing this data. So in that complex environment, at the end of the day, their goal is to serve the customer, to make sure that the end user like me I’m in Atlanta, so I can’t I can’t bet in Georgia, so we can’t bet on a sports app. But if I did have a sports setting app, right, and I was able to bet on that, I’m their ultimate customer. Right? So they don’t want to make sure that there’s no data downtime as it relates to the customer, and that the customer is getting the most accurate data so they can actually make the most logical bets that they want on their device.

Molly Ruland:

Man, that’s a you know, this is a pretty complicated topic. There’s a lot of information. How did you end up in this space? Is this something you’ve been doing for a long time? I mean, where how did, you know

Ryan Yackel:

Yeah. I mean, I am specific. Yeah. So I’ve always been in the b to b like, I would call it, like, the business to business SaaS technical technical sale, environment. Right? So I’ve never worked at a b to c company. I’ve always worked in companies that are trying to sell to the enterprise. I got started at a company called CGI when I was back in 2012, I guess, 11. And I was working as a tester on software.

Ryan Yackel:

So I was a consultant where I was just testing software that was being released by development. And then I took that knowledge and actually moved to actually be a part of a company that was selling testing software, and that was a company called QASymphony that that, later became, merged with a company called Tricentis, which is a $330,000,000 company now. And the reason why I got into that space was because they’re looking for somebody that had technical expertise in the space. And from there, I also, you know, found out that I was a subject matter expert on all things related to testing, in that company. So I was doing webinars and writing data sheets and helping the marketing team with messaging and positioning and all these all the things that you would need to lean on for a marketing person to understand the space. And so that’s how I got into product marketing. And then from product marketing, I moved into content and product marketing, then moved into, running all of marketing over at Databend. So that’s my quick overview of, like, how I got into the tech space.

Molly Ruland:

Well, you know, that reminds me. I noticed on your LinkedIn, you wrote an article recently about why you should hire a product marketer as your next CMO. And I just read it, and I thought that’s really interesting, because product marketers are a little scrappier, right, and probably taking in a lot of that data and information because it’s just a whole different world. So, I thought that was really interesting. Is that what you recommend? Like, I also noticed you wrote about starting on a small budget, like marketing SaaS companies. If you had to give one piece of advice to a SaaS company with a small budget, would it be to hire a product marketer as a CMO, or what would you advise people?

Ryan Yackel:

Well, I I always tell people whenever they they come to me and ask ask me for if they’re looking for their 1st marketing hire, that’s not just like a pure digital marketer is to go after somebody who’s in product marketing, specifically somebody who’s in product marketing that wants to then take over all of the, all the function of marketing. And the reason why I say that is because, in the article I talk about this. But if you go to the market machine, if you go to the market, the machine includes, obviously, it’s gonna include marketing and sales and partners and all these people. Right? Product marketing is basically the glue that makes everything work. And so when people talk about, like, hiring a full stack software engineer, right, they want an engineer that can do all these different things. Right? I would say product marketing is like a full stack marketer. And being a full stack marketer means that you understand all the different assets that are facets of the business that are in marketing, but also sales because you work directly with them. And so in that article, I make the case that if the go to market machine is a car and it’s driving on the road, and, you know, it’s driving on a highway in the desert, it’s pretty smooth.

Ryan Yackel:

Right? There are no changes that probably need to be made. You’re doing things in paid media and you’re writing content and you’re doing emails and, like, okay, everything’s great. Right? But think about, like, if that car has to go down a mountainside and it’s raining outside and it’s dark and you don’t know where to go. The market’s changing. New competitor enters the space. Pricing is now an issue. Well, product marketing is basically the lights that are on the car that guide the market team, to get out of the store. Right? So every single company that I’ve been at, in product marketing, when I’ve worked with DemandGen, DemandGen is heavily reliant on product marketing because and and this is not a knock on demand gen.

Ryan Yackel:

I’ve worked with amazing demand gen teams. And I think the best functioning demand gen team is somebody who’s led by a really good product marketer because they do all the tactics. Like, they’re the ones that are setting up the ABM programs. They’re the ones that are setting up the events or someone’s setting up the emails or someone’s setting up the nurtures or setting up the website and the web copy. Right? But if they don’t know the product or understand the industry, they have to always go to a subject matter expert to understand, like, hey. What’s our messaging for this booth? What are we gonna show at the booth? What are the demos we’re gonna show? Hey. We’re talking about this particular capability of the product. Like, I don’t understand the product.

Ryan Yackel:

Can you explain how this works? You know, going out for ABM, there’s all these accounts that we have. Do these fit our ICP? Do they fit our ideal customer profile? Are these keywords that we want to trigger a buying intent? Do they match what, what, what, our customers are looking for? All those things, they usually go to a product marketer for those questions. And so if the product marketer isn’t good at being that subject matter expert in the product, in the field, and also understanding what sales is doing, then the demand gen team isn’t gonna be set for success. Does that make sense?

Molly Ruland:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I think and you see it a lot. You see it a lot in, like, disjointed activities or marketing or, you know, the larger the company. Like, one hand has no idea what the other hand is doing, and it’s, like, you know, completely different messaging. And, you know, the designer has one idea, and the data has another idea. And, you know, it’s probably a little more cohesive in some of these bigger companies, but maybe also even worse. Right? Because you get to these huge sizes, it’s really hard to keep that together.

Molly Ruland:

So that seems really smart to me is to find somebody who has all the information. I feel like this whole space is changing so much and not just from the data and the tech and the AI, but just how people are marketing, what people are getting sick of. I mean Yep. It’s really fascinating to see, like, AI on LinkedIn with all the spam comments and now all those AI prompts and then people responding with AI written content, and it’s like I we’re all adjusting so rapidly at this point. You know, 6 months ago, we were identifying bad AI pictures by, like, multiple fingers, by too many fingers. And now look at us. We can, like, we can spot fake pictures. We can spot fake content almost immediately.

Molly Ruland:

And I think our whole marketing and data world is changing because people are changing. Yeah. You know, the world has changed. You know? The things that worked before don’t work anymore, and I think that’s gonna change by the hour at this point. So I think taking a different kind of approach to who you’re hiring makes a lot of sense. What is something that a company can do to kinda implement some of these tactics, you know, in their business this year, you know, to boost that acquisition and retention? What are some things a company could do?

Ryan Yackel:

Well, so from aN LG motion, I mean, the most of the stuff that you want to focus on is the experience that’s in the application. Right? So, I mean, in our application, we have things like, hey. How can you showcase certain products that are in the in the actual, system that you may have access to and don’t have access to to intrigue the brain that, oh, maybe I need to upgrade or maybe I want to look into a cross sell for this other product that I know it was a part of my my, my, the what I or what I currently have. There’s things like adding it, for attention, adding in things like banners and CTAs that talk about, like, what’s new in the product, tours, and videos that showcase, like, here’s some new latest thing that we have. Here’s some thought leadership that we have as well, like, to keep to make sure that this company or that that that that that your customer is actually a part of a company that’s pushing things forward and is not just rolling out small features here and there. They’re actually leading in the space. Things like that, I think, are are really good to make sure that the customer, when they’re in the product, actually understands different paths they can take to either upsell or get in different tiers or be more sticky to the actual product. From a from a, like, a more sales led motion that we’ve seen and how marketing works there is that we’ve been doing a lot of things as it relates to third party validation of what we’re speaking about.

Ryan Yackel:

So in the past, it was, hey. Let’s get a bunch of analyst reports, which we still do. And a lot of enterprises are always gonna look at analyst reports to see how well you’re doing in those, like Gartner and Forrester and Everest and all these other ones that are out there. But we what we’ve been doing though is we’ve been partnering with a lot of third party content creators that are on LinkedIn, on YouTube, on Substack, on Medium, on these other areas that when they write pieces of content, they the their their audience looks at them as being unbiased, which they which they are, and they give their fair assessment on what they’re experiencing. So getting back to, like, how things have changed. Right? People want to look at other people for that validation versus going to a quote, unquote expert in the space like an analyst to get that information. Right? They want the bottoms up, not the top down. The top down could be, you know, a huge company, a Fortune 500 company that wants to look at, you know, the latest and greatest report that’s from Gartner, which is obviously very important that we make sure that we’re hitting all the capabilities for the enterprise.

Ryan Yackel:

Right? But from a bottoms up approach and more of a PLG motion where you start with more of the users and grow those users, they’re not gonna look at a usually, they’re not gonna look at an analyst report. They’re gonna look at what review sites say, what does which, again, that can get a little spammy as well. But what are their peers saying? Like, what are the people they actually trust? Oh, they mentioned DataBank. They mentioned data observability. They mentioned the fact that this is a good topic to pay attention to. They’re gonna validate that more through them than an analyst report they may not even have access to.

Molly Ruland:

Yeah. I mean, you know, the customer is not reading analyst reports. That’s for sure. Right? They’re you know? Which sometimes I mean, that’s a valid point. I think when you have all this data and all these smart people working, you’re like, this is what it is. But then sometimes the customer is like, actually, what I really love is this, or I don’t understand this. But if you’re not talking, you know, if you’re not getting that information, if you’re not talking to people using it, then how could you possibly know? So I think that’s an important step to not miss. Alright.

Molly Ruland:

Let’s do a couple speed round questions. What’s one marketing tool that you can’t live without?

Ryan Yackel:

This isn’t really a marketing tool, but it’s a tool I’ve used since 2014. So maybe it is a marketing tool. It’s a very simple tool. It’s called Snagit, from TechSmith.

Molly Ruland:

I’m writing this down.

Ryan Yackel:

And also their Camtasia, which is videos, creates videos, things like that. The reason why I say these things is because, like, there are things that are outside of the oh, yeah. We have HubSpot and Marketo and SalesLoft and Salesforce and all the other things, like, yeah. Yes. You need all those things. I’m talking about personally for me, when I’ve been able to create short form content and quick content for people or call out something or highlight something or making a presentation, Snagit and Camtasia have been the the two two things that I’ve used that supercharged quick content creation, that I don’t need to go to my designer for.

Molly Ruland:

And

Ryan Yackel:

I can just do it really quickly. And I’ve used them. I’ve had those solutions since, yeah, like, 2014. So I’ve gone on 10 years now.

Molly Ruland:

Shout out to snag it and can’t I’ve heard of Camtasia, but I’ve never heard of snagging it. So I’m definitely checking.

Ryan Yackel:

I guess it’s just like a snipping snipping tool. You can do quick videos on it. You can quickly call out things. It’s just great for everyday use, quickly grabbing things and showing people kinda what’s going on.

Molly Ruland:

And sometimes you really gotta be in the moment. Like, I have a full team and full, you know, video editing, but sometimes I just do stuff myself because I’m like, I’m in the moment. Yeah. I wanna grab it. It matters right now. It’ll be relevant right now. It’ll take me 20 minutes, and then I can get it out on the platform I want, not bog down my Yep. You know, my high end video editor with something I could do on an app or Right.

Molly Ruland:

You know, something like that. You know? Okay. LinkedIn or Twitter?

Ryan Yackel:

LinkedIn.

Molly Ruland:

Have you ever been on Facebook? Have you ever had a presence on Twitter? Did or did that it just weren’t there, or did you leave when you

Ryan Yackel:

I I I was on Twitter, and then the reason why I left Twitter was because I felt like I was, like, I was just, like, doom scrolling on Twitter. And I was, like, okay. I can’t have Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Like, one of them, I gotta get rid of one of them.

Molly Ruland:

One of them’s gotta go.

Ryan Yackel:

Yeah. I went through a purge in my life where I was, like, unfollowed every buddy I’m still friends with on Facebook, but I unfollowed everybody except for, like, my neighborhood. So I can know if something’s going wrong in my neighborhood. I just, like, got tired of constant feeds and

Molly Ruland:

The noise. Stuff.

Ryan Yackel:

And I was like, okay. I’m just gonna stay on. I have obviously, LinkedIn is the best one for professionals, and staying connected with people. I can’t really give that one up.

Molly Ruland:

Yeah. I’m a LinkedIn girl too over Twitter. I used to have a huge following. We have, like, 10,000 followers on Twitter, but we just sort of abandoned it like a beached ship. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Ryan Yackel:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Molly Ruland:

Hey. I see. You know, it’s kinda whatever. What is your favorite book if you were gonna recommend it other than pancakes with mister Bear, of course?

Ryan Yackel:

My favorite fictional book is the series called Red Rising. That’s by Pierce Brown. It’s basically a mixture of, like, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Hunger Games, like, all that kinda mixed together. And there’s, like, 6 books now, I think.

Molly Ruland:

Nice.

Ryan Yackel:

I just finished the last one. That’s probably my favorite, favorite fictional book.

Molly Ruland:

That’s super cool. I like that. And then what about, like, a business book?

Ryan Yackel:

Business book, I think it’s called making a manager or making a manager. I think her name is Kate. I think I can’t remember her last name. Really good book. It’s all about, like, first time managers. So I gave that book to a lot of my employees, or my sorry, my teammates. And one of my guys, Ryan Sanders, who was my last company. Keyfactor, he says he’s read it, like, twice, because now he’s managing more people, and he just wants to keep as a refresher.

Ryan Yackel:

It’s a really easy book to read, but it’s about her journey at Facebook as, like, a brand new manager and the things she’s kinda learned along the way. That’s a really good book. And then rework by Jason Fried and David Hanson, I think his last name is. That’s a really quick snippet book of just, like, how to rethink work. And I think those are the guys that founded Basecamp, I’m pretty sure.

Molly Ruland:

Oh, nice.

Ryan Yackel:

But, that

Molly Ruland:

They were ahead of their time when they came out with that bad boy. Yeah.

Ryan Yackel:

Oh, yeah. There’s a book called neuroselling, which I liked. That was a pretty good book. And then I’m reading a book right now called Build, which is by the guy. I can’t remember his name. I shouldn’t know his name, but he was the guy that basically created the iPod. And he created Nest. He is a very successful guy.

Ryan Yackel:

It’s a really good book too.

Molly Ruland:

Eric, I love that you gave, like, 4 or 5 books because I’m about that life too. I am a big, big reader. Although my brother’s an author and he says that I don’t read books because I listen to them on Audible, but I’m like, whatever. Take your classes someplace else.

Ryan Yackel:

Yeah. I can’t retain stuff more when I hear it anyway. So

Molly Ruland:

Same. Same. And I’m an active listener. Like, if I’ve weighed off, I rewind it and listen to it again because what’s the point? I’m not just playing books in my ear to somehow absorb it. Right? You know, I gotta pay attention. I think one of my favorites is the one page marketing plan. Have you ever read that? By Alan Dibb. It’s like another one that I’ll it’s, like, super old, but it’s so relevant.

Molly Ruland:

It’s like just the core principles, like customer service

Ryan Yackel:

Oh, nice.

Molly Ruland:

Follow-up and all that. And then the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John c Maxwell, that’s one that I read. I went on this mission and I read, like, 150 books in 3 years about business development, leadership, and, well, I recognize there were some serious gaps in my education. I had run a company that was, like, successful from the outside, but it was just behind the curtain. It was me pushing this boulder uphill that was gonna roll back on me and kill me the second I stopped.

Ryan Yackel:

Yeah.

Molly Ruland:

And so everybody thought I was super smart, but I was not. You know? And so I was like, well, I better fix this. And I felt that was the best method. But I’ve gotten to the point now where I’m rereading books and studying books that were really impactful instead of looking for more because at some point, you just sort of tap out. But I’m excited to get some new recommendations because I haven’t read any of these books.

Ryan Yackel:

So thanks for your help. Good. Yeah. Let me know if you like any of them.

Molly Ruland:

I definitely will. Alright. And then, let’s do this segment real quick, and then we’ll go. I’m gonna read a couple podcast names, and you tell me if they’re real or fake.

Ryan Yackel:

So are

Molly Ruland:

Are you ready?

Ryan Yackel:

Okay.

Molly Ruland:

Alright. The slogan slammers.

Ryan Yackel:

Real?

Molly Ruland:

Fake. Alright.

Ryan Yackel:

We can do this.

Molly Ruland:

The beam I know. The beam cast.

Ryan Yackel:

Real?

Molly Ruland:

It is. I can’t even say half of these with a straight face.

Ryan Yackel:

Are these all marketing podcasts? Or

Molly Ruland:

These are all marketing podcasts. Yes. Bounce Rate Ballads.

Ryan Yackel:

Fake.

Molly Ruland:

That’s a good name, though. I kinda like it. Alright. And then one more, marketing over coffee.

Ryan Yackel:

That’s real.

Molly Ruland:

That’s a real one. Yeah. As you know that one, sometimes I’m like, people are gonna know these, and then it

Ryan Yackel:

Oh, anytime there’s, like, coffee in this the tagline, I feel like that’s an easy go for a podcast. And I did a video on, data driven decisions and coffee that I I did a whole video on, data observability and how it relates to making a cup of coffee in the morning. They showed me making coffee and things like that. So, anything with coffee and I feel like is has some marketing spin on

Molly Ruland:

1. It’s a win. It’s a win. Yeah. I couldn’t believe that the bean cast was real. I’m curious. I have to Google that and find out. It must be coffee.

Ryan Yackel:

That could be I bet I bet that’s a coffee thing too. Right? It’s, like, get your get your like, let’s cast over a coffee bean or something.

Molly Ruland:

Oh my god. Interesting. No. It’s just a marketing podcast. It’s not from a company. I I thought for sure it would be, like, a coffee or a black bean, like, t o t o paulone or something. I live in Costa Rica, so we have a lot of Yeah. Bean companies here.

Molly Ruland:

That would make sense. Tell me about, where the inspiration to write that because it’s I’m trying to see where this data guy and mister mister Bear intersect. You know?

Ryan Yackel:

Yeah. The inspiration was so I have 3 girls, and the inspiration came from the fact that I was reading them the same stories over and over again at that time, and so I was kinda tired of doing that. And so let me just start making up stuff. And so I started to just make up the story about this bear that lived behind this family, and he smelled pancakes every day, and he starts to get angry, and he goes and confronts them. It’s basically what the story is about. This and the story is about loneliness and making time for people that are lonely into your family time. Spoiler alert, everything ends up being okay and they all become friends. But Yeah.

Ryan Yackel:

Yeah. Surprise, surprise. The bear doesn’t eat the kids or anything. Surprise, surprise. But, the story is basically about that. But what I would do is I would tell parts of the story to Rosalie or Winnie, and I would gauge their interactions, like how they respond to certain things. And so I would retell it, maybe change out certain things. And then when I got down I felt like it was a whole story.

Ryan Yackel:

I was like, oh, it seems like I feel like I could make a book out of this. And so I wrote it on the way to a happy hour at one of my companies in the back of an Uber. And I wrote it on Google Doc, just just wrote it all out, and Hey. Reached out to a graphic design guy. Name’s Jordy, Tonali. Shout out to him. Really good graphic designer in the space. Reached out to him, and I was like, hey, man.

Ryan Yackel:

Do you do children’s books? He’s like, yeah. I can do anything. I’m a graphic designer. I’m like, alright. Cool. So Yeah. So we put together a contract, and we wrote it to get I wrote it, and he did illustrations. And we went back and forth on, like, how to do it.

Ryan Yackel:

And I and and on my LinkedIn, I have in my articles, I have 3 posts that talk about, like, how I did it, the process that I went through, and there’s some YouTube videos as well on us, like, just talking about it. So it was a labor of love. I didn’t do it to make any money. Like, I haven’t made any money. Right. Obviously, unless we blow it up or anything like that. But, no, it’s just a fun, fun project to do, and it was cool to include my girls in it, and they’re really excited about it.

Molly Ruland:

I love it. That’s super how old are your girls?

Ryan Yackel:

Now they’re 8, almost 7, and I have a 1 year old. So

Molly Ruland:

Oh my goodness. Yeah. Oh, the 7 there are 2 that are a year apart. That’s the whole thing. I’m the youngest of 4, so there’s a lot of dynamics happening in the age difference. You know? That 1 year

Ryan Yackel:

Well, yeah.

Molly Ruland:

They’re, like, partners in crime.

Ryan Yackel:

Yeah. The 2, Winnie and Rosalie, they are, like, a year and, like, no. Wait. They’re 5th and they’re 15 months apart. So that’s, like, a year and 3 months. Right? So they’re almost like twins. I feel like they’re very close in age. They’re best friends, and then they’re enemies, you know

Molly Ruland:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 5050 for sure.

Ryan Yackel:

So they kind of, you know, it is the way it works. But, no. I mean, they’re going up too fast, honestly. Like, they’re a lot of fun and really enjoy hanging out with them. And Juliet’s the 1 year old. She’s a lot of fun too. Good sleeper. So I was getting up with her.

Molly Ruland:

Yeah. Well, for sure. Well, Garren, our engineer who’s behind the scenes right now, he has 2 boys that are also, like, 15 months apart. And, I mean, they even look like twins. You know? My brothers are the same, age difference, and, definitely, they had some friction growing up. But even now, as full grown adults, I mean, they’re each other’s best friend. They talk all the time. You know? My sister and I, not so much because there’s three and a half years between us and that.

Molly Ruland:

But, you know, in high school and grades you know, that was enough of a difference. It felt like another planet, but my brothers are still very close. So I would imagine your girls will do the same. Yep. That’s super cool. Well, thanks for sharing all that with me. I love that, and I hope people buy the book. And I love that you’re just creating different stories because a lot of it is so bad, and I’m sure you recognize that.

Molly Ruland:

These stories are for girls. They’re like, wait for a man to save you. It’s like, oh, awesome. It’s great. Excellent story line. You know?

Ryan Yackel:

Well, it’s like we talked about earlier. It’s a story that’s been done over and over again. Right? So, I mean, like, it can be hard to write another princess story if, like, there’s a 1,000 of those? So they got enough of those stories.

Molly Ruland:

Yeah. Enough of that because I’ve been waiting my whole life still not a princess. You know what I mean? Like, I was sold a lie. I should sue Disney. Yeah. I never watched that stuff. I was a tomboy growing up. But still, where’s my prince? You know, where’s my savior? But, well, listen, Ryan.

Molly Ruland:

I don’t wanna take any more of your time, but this was super interesting, like I said. And, you know, for any larger companies who were listening to this, what’s the best place for them to reach you?

Ryan Yackel:

Yeah. Reach me. I mean, go on LinkedIn. It’s just my name, Ryan Yackel slash Ryan Yackel. So happy to talk to anybody. I’m happy to talk to anybody about anything we do in marketing, anything that I’ve seen successful here or even at previous startups as well. Love connecting with people. So I had a mentor or somebody I’m mentoring reach out to me recently.

Ryan Yackel:

We’re gonna meet up again, talk about, you know, new things we’re working on in marketing. And then, recently, somebody reached out to me, and I just had a Zoom call with them just to talk about my journey. So happy to do any of those things with anybody, to encourage people.

Molly Ruland:

That’s awesome. That’s really nice of you. And I would encourage people to follow Ryan on LinkedIn because his content is funny and interesting and helpful and relevant, and it’s a nice break from some of the other accounts out there. So on that note, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for tuning in to Camp Content. If you found this content valuable, please comment, like, share, make fun of us, do whatever it takes, but leave us a message on LinkedIn. And, of course, hit up Ryan. He’s got lots of great information, and that was a really generous offer from him.

Molly Ruland:

So until next time, thank you guys for tuning in, and I will see you on the next one.

Ryan Yackel:

Thanks,

Molly Ruland:

Alright. Alright. Thank you so much for tuning in to the episode of Camp Content. This is Molly.

Ryan Yackel:

And this is Matt.

Molly Ruland:

And we are Heartcast Media, AKA Camp Content, and we appreciate all of your support. If you found this content valuable, please comment on social media, LinkedIn, wherever you find us and we will make sure to comment back.

Ryan Yackel:

And be sure to go on and subscribe and like on your favorite platforms, Spotify, Itunes, YouTube, you name it. Leave us that subscription. Leave us that good review.

Molly Ruland:

We’ll love you forever. So until next time, be to each other, and we’ll see you next week.

Ryan Yackel:

Produced by HeartCast Media.

Molly Ruland:

Thank you for tuning in to Camp Content hosted by Heartcast Media. We are a digital content agency focused on content marketing for businesses and brands. If you’re looking to save time and be more consistent with your marketing and need a little guidance on what to say and how to say it and where to say it, we got your back. Book a discovery call today, and let’s talk.