John SmallMtn (01:35)

Welcome to another episode of Founders Growth. My name is John Hill, AKA Small Mountain. I’m the founder of Adapted Growth. Today we have a very cool friend of mine, Braden Wallake, who is the CEO and founder of HyperSocial. Known him for years. We’ve been just friends. We’ve got some cool stuff to dive into, but Braden, can you take a second and kind of talk for anyone who doesn’t know who you are, what you guys do, and how you help?

Braden Wallake (01:58)

Sure. Yeah. So been doing this now—wow, I guess in 2019, HyperSocial has been—we do everything LinkedIn for people. So on the B2B side, work with small, mostly small businesses, B2B owners, helping them get leads, conversations, relationships, more importantly, on the LinkedIn platform. So it’s a great place for B2B and we just help them take it off their plate all day, every day. So simplest, shortest, sweetest thing I can do. Now outside of work, there’s way more important stuff like soccer and pickleball now I guess, and traveling and hanging out with my dog and stuff. But yeah, on the business side, that’s what we do.

John SmallMtn (02:33)

That’s honestly kind of like how we connected, right? Because I think we got connected on Facebook, just like being entrepreneurs and in the space and everything. And you were showing up as a real human. And that’s one of the things that I appreciate with digital networking—people who can kind of flesh themselves out a little bit and not just be the business that they’re trying to grow.

Braden Wallake (02:36)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think that was always the work to live, not live to work connection that we had. Sure, let’s dive into it.

John SmallMtn (02:56)

Okay. So let’s just dive into that, right? Because when we met, you were actually doing van life, which is a very cool thing, right? Living on the road 24/7. And there is also this whole other thing of hustle mode and 80-hour work weeks and sleep when you’re dead and everything else like that. How did you navigate those two ideas? Because in our conversations, I know you to be very driven and very focused on the things that you want. So was that difficult for you?

Braden Wallake (03:27)

In the van it was actually not. I mean, we were in the most beautiful places, like we did 29 national parks in the van, and we went to Mexico in the van, and we did so many states and all these places, and we did it for three years. But when you’re parked at a beautiful spot like Yosemite or on the beach of Mexico or things like that, it makes you like, “I want to keep living this life, but I also want to enjoy it while I’m here,” right? Because we have to move. We can only stay in the spot for so many days in a lot of places and have to move and things like that.

So it was actually maybe more productive during the eight hours, knowing that I needed to keep doing the stuff that was making us—and keep working so I could keep going to the beach afterwards and hanging out with my dog Roscoe, and Em and I could go on a date night or whatever. Like I think I was actually way better at work to live versus now. Now I bought a house—well, now we’re renting a house or selling our house, but that’s why my hand’s all dirty, by the way. Sorry, we’re finalizing the renovations. They’re like, “What the heck’s on his hand?” It’s like goop. I don’t even know what it is. Black paint. But yeah, so now it’s like, especially now that it’s getting cold outside where we live, it’s like I could just work an extra couple of hours. But I don’t get as much out of my each hour.

John SmallMtn (04:29)

Everyone was super concerned about that. Yeah, super easy.

Braden Wallake (04:48)

If I don’t give myself that hard stop, right? I used to just have a hard stop because we were going to go play on the beach, or we were going to go run around and get our paddleboards or whatever. I had something to look forward to at the end of the day, how to get my stuff done. Now I’m like, I could delay my time a little bit and sure, I can work an hour after five o’clock and I can work an hour after six o’clock. And then you kind of just let it stretch out. We’ve been pushing a lot harder to get ourselves back to what we had before and pushing things to be excited about, even here in the same kind of routine. But it was definitely easier back then for sure, I think.

John SmallMtn (05:20)

A lot of my work is getting people to understand that that is the better way to work. Don’t talk yourself, especially as a founder, don’t talk yourself into the idea that you must do this thing, right? Because the diminishing returns thing is such an important thing to just be aware of. And I was super lucky because I learned about it whenever I was a poker player and I was trying to play 12 tables and my coach was like, “Maybe eight,” because maybe you can’t play. And he was showing it to me there.

And so then whenever I hit this lane of trying to take sales actually seriously, I’m like, same thing. I need to be on, I need to be ready, I need to be prepared, you know? But it comes down to having it locked and having it loaded, but also having something else compelling and important, right? Like I see a lot of people, especially in the early days, they’re almost telling themselves that they can’t put anything else into their lives, right? And it’s like, there is room to do both. You need to be hyper-focused and disciplined and really driven to go do this thing and be consistent about how you’re spending your time. But you don’t have to become chained to it, you know? And I think a lot of people overthink that part because—and here’s the really weird part—if they’re that excited about it and it still fails, it’s not really their fault, right? There’s some interesting stuff about that whole thing.

Braden Wallake (06:15)

Right, right. It’s interesting, but then I see a lot of founders—same thing, right? But then they stop doing—you can be more productive in eight hours than you can be in 10 hours. Basically, if you were to look at it, we track our employees’, and the employees that we see work eight hours a day, or Emily and I are tracking our time, we’re seeing we’re getting way more out of the output of eight hours versus trying to work 10 or 11 hours.

There are so many aspects that make you successful, right? And if you get out of that and you stop building relationships with your friends, and you stop going to the gym, and you stop playing sports, and you stop having hobbies, and you’re not taking care of all of your wellbeing—your spiritual and your physical stuff that leads to a better mind to do better work here—it’s tough. It’s a tough thing to think of because, especially early on when you’re not making money and you don’t have a lot coming in and you’re trying to make sure that it’s proven, it’s hard to step away from the computer. But it’s crazy what happens. Like, so many problems get solved when you step away from the problem and just let your subconscious go to work.

John SmallMtn (07:28)

100%.

Braden Wallake (07:38)

Yeah.

John SmallMtn (07:44)

Yeah, and honestly, force yourself to do it, right? Go to the soccer game, go to the gym, go do something. But it’s also—like, I was on a call last week and I was talking with one of my clients and I was like, “Okay, so next week…” They’re like, “Well, kind of busy right now.” I was like, “Okay, do we sit down and build a plan?” “I’m too busy to even build a plan.” Okay. You know, like there’s always room to want to think that you must thrive in the scramble. But most people aren’t actually super productive in the scramble, you know?

So, okay. I have a question for you that I’ve been curious about the whole time, right? The entire time I’ve known you and geeking out on your van life trek and everything. And then, from my perspective, I kind of look up and you’re done with van life. You’re home, you’re buying a house, and everything else like that. Were you excited to be done with van life? Was it just kind of like a season of change? Was it like, “Hey, we’re going to go do this full-time,” but it didn’t live up? I’m curious, how did you feel when you were coming back out of it?

Braden Wallake (08:53)

So when we were starting HyperSocial and we did van life, the greatest part of van life is that it’s so cheap. By the time we finished, we had money saved. Even in the early days of HyperSocial, when we weren’t making a lot, we had a few clients and we were growing it and we still had the van, and we put debt on the van—because it was all built out and it was a $90,000 whatever van—by the end of it, we had no debt besides just our monthly van payment. All the debt was gone because it was so cheap that we allowed ourselves…

So the reason that we stopped doing the van: one, was because it was too small for two of us plus a dog. We were working, doing calls, and it was just a small space. So one of us always had to go outside—usually me had to go outside to do my calls and stuff, which is fine, I enjoyed it. But then we were like, “Well, we need to start actually building wealth too along the way.” My parents have always been in real estate. They just bought a 113-unit apartment complex. They’ve always been in real estate, so that’s always one of the things that I’ve wanted to pursue too.

So we bought the house thinking that we’re going to live in it for the year and renovate. But the other piece is we just wanted to stop going so much, especially in the small van. So we’re going to probably try to do it again, but maybe an RV this time, like an actual full camper, fifth wheel with the toy hauler. The toy hauler in the back will be my office and I’m going to have her office somewhere so we can actually have space. People need space away from each other. Being in an 80-square-foot van with one person all the time puts a lot of challenges up there, right?

So there’s a lot of benefits that have come from it. Our relationship, I think, has improved a lot. We probably spent more time together in the van—like hours together because we work together and we were living together in the tiny van—we probably spent more hours together in the three years we were in that than most couples spend together in 10 years, right? Because they go to their jobs and things like that. But then our relationship improved a lot because we had our own space once we had a house where she could go if we had an argument about work, or whatever comes up, or she wants to just be alone because she’s more of an introvert than I am. Then cool, she can go do that and not have me there being the annoying person that I am all the time. She can get away from that, you know? So we’re excited. We’re both kind of ready to go on the road again.

John SmallMtn (11:01)

I love the idea of like, “Okay, this isn’t it,” but then still being open to what needs to change so it can be the thing. The idea of going bigger—I don’t think a whole lot of people would think about it that way. It’s just like, “Well, the van was kind of confining. We were all over each other, it’s just not for us.” That’s really interesting.

Braden Wallake (11:29)

Yeah, and the other thing that happened at the end of our van travel was Starlink just came about. We did not have Starlink in the van, so we had to find hotspots. I was using a bunch of apps that you can get, like iOverlander and things like that, where people would say, “Hey, here’s a free spot to stay and here’s the service level.” I would actually cross-reference that with cell phone towers and that kind of stuff. We had a hotspot and it was great and it worked well, but that was actually one of our biggest stressors. We would try to get to a new spot and if there wasn’t service, we had to try and go find another new spot, and another new spot.

But with Starlink, there’s so many places we could have just stayed and had internet. Like, we went to the middle of Oregon, Starlink was working, and I had 150 megabits per second download speed—plenty. Not as much as I have at my house, but plenty that you need to do work. So yeah, those are two big things that we would have for next time, and Starlink is so cool.

John SmallMtn (12:16)

So going back a little bit, right? Because whenever we got connected, you were already running this thing, you were already in the van. I’m curious as to the timeline. Was it HyperSocial-Emily-van? Was it Emily-HyperSocial-van? How did that come together?

Braden Wallake (12:43)

Yeah, good question. So I had the old HyperSocial. We did Instagram marketing before we did the new one. And while I was doing that one—that was 2016, 2017, 2018—is when I met Emily. I was still doing the old HyperSocial. Then Emily graduated from Ohio State in 2019 with her master’s. And I said, “Hey, instead of doing that, I want to change HyperSocial anyways because I want to get out of Instagram and go back into B2B and LinkedIn where we’ve had a ton of success for ourselves. I want to go do that there.” And so the new HyperSocial and the van were around a similar time, about two years into dating Emily.

John SmallMtn (13:29)

Okay. Where did you spring it on her of, “Hey, come work with me”? I did a similar thing with my wife, right? So, okay. I would love to talk a little bit about the shift back. I didn’t know about the Instagram focus and everything. What made you want to shift back to B2B in this direction? Was it just something in the air? Were you seeing signals? What made you want to pivot?

Braden Wallake (14:01)

Yeah, so I mean, I come from a B2B sales background and that’s the world that I know. Instagram was a lot more fashion blogger clients and things like that—worlds that I just do not really know or like. I’m in a t-shirt and shorts every day. Like, this jacket is the nicest, fanciest thing I got. So, yeah, I wanted to get out of that world, but we had such good success with LinkedIn for myself. I could see a much clearer return on the investment for people, too.

Instagram was helping them get followers and things like that, and it was hard to correlate how that turned into—it was vanity metrics. And I don’t care about vanity metrics. I don’t care how many likes my crap gets, I care about what I’m doing. Is it somehow contributing to a bottom line along the way? That’s what most businesses care about. They don’t want to pay for it.

And then the agency world has changed period because so many agencies are just out there for vanity metrics. Especially when COVID hit, people were like, “I need marketing agencies or agencies like mine who can really clearly say, ‘Hey, here’s what your spend was, here’s what your return was.'” It becomes very obvious there. I think that was the big thing.

And then Instagram was also making a lot of platform changes, too. They shut down a whole bunch of meme accounts that people were paying for ads. You could pay for a shout-out from a 100,000-follower meme account, and they shut down a bunch of those because they were trying to monetize their ad network—their ads, their ads, their ads. Anything else that was monetizing on Instagram, they wanted out. So automation, they basically got rid of completely. Those kinds of pages that were getting paid for shout-outs and that kind of stuff, they got rid of too, because they just wanted you to pay the five bucks to boost your posts instead. So yeah, there were a lot of things at once.

John SmallMtn (15:34)

So, okay, this is an interesting question because recently what I’ve been seeing is that there’s been companies getting yanked off of LinkedIn, right? I think Apollo was one. And so there were concerns that companies that were scraping data, grabbing data, different things like that… When you see stuff like that and you’re working in the LinkedIn space, does it make you nervous? Or is it just, “This is just how it works, keep going”?

Braden Wallake (16:21)

That’s such an interesting question that I’ve never even thought of an answer to, so I have to think of an answer right now. This is live in the flesh, we have to think about this.

John SmallMtn (16:32)

Well, because I don’t think it’s—I mean, I think it’s stupid, the whole terms of service about limiting access to the accounts and everything, because no one follows it anyway, you know? But there is some danger, right? If you have a profile that’s got some longevity on it, you’ve got some connections and everything, and you might be using technology that gets you blacklisted or something else like that. I’m not saying that you are doing it unscrupulously or anything, but when that stuff happens, do you get nervous when it hits a critical mass of people talking about it? Or do you even see these conversations? Do they show up in your feed and algorithm when you’re talking to people?

Braden Wallake (17:11)

The Apollo one plus other XYZ ones was interesting because LinkedIn sued these companies that were scraping personal emails for people—the emails that you signed up for your account with. That’s what they were scraping out, and that’s what LinkedIn wanted to stop. And actually, LinkedIn lost the lawsuit. They didn’t win.

John SmallMtn (17:20)

Did they really? That’s fascinating. I didn’t realize it got that deep in the weeds.

Braden Wallake (17:41)

I was just talking with somebody about this the other day—that LinkedIn didn’t win those lawsuits. I don’t know if LinkedIn blocked Apollo—I never really followed it that hard—or if Apollo just took themselves off of LinkedIn and said, “Okay, if you’re going to sue us and get mad at us for this, we’re not going to use your freaking platform,” right? So I’m not sure exactly what happened where on that side, but I know LinkedIn sued a bunch of companies that were doing scraping of personal profiles. Because really, what do you need people’s Gmails and Yahoos and Hotmails for? In the B2B world, you don’t really need them, right? You just need to figure out how they set up their emails at their company. Is it first.lastname? Is it firstname? Is it first.lastinitial? And you just plug that in for everybody else that you need. That’s how it’s all built now. You don’t need those scrapes.

John SmallMtn (18:35)

I loathe the cell phone text message when we don’t have any relationship. Honestly, I’ve got my system set up to where my LinkedIn email is not my main actual work email. That way if I am getting scraped, I know who’s doing it.

Braden Wallake (18:50)

Yeah. A couple of years ago when COVID hit, it was awesome. We were able to send 100 connection requests a day on LinkedIn back then. The glory days! And then it was really scary for a while. LinkedIn made a lot of changes because so many people came to LinkedIn and there was so much… They brought it down to 100 a week, and then they brought it down a little bit more, and then they were trying to figure out the balance of that.

But it was because so many people came to the platform and were just doing the worst outreach, the laziest outreach. I had somebody who said, “I work with B2B owners, agencies, founders…” It was the most generic message I could have ever gotten. I think I screenshot it somewhere, but there were so many people going on and putting the laziest amount of effort into their outreach that everybody was complaining about how much spam there was on the platform. So LinkedIn was like, “We need to do something because people are wanting to stop being on here.”

It was scary then because we were selling people on packages that were, “Hey, we’re going to send 2,100 connection requests a month on your behalf guaranteed,” which is less than 100 a day, but still way more. LinkedIn has finally found the perfect balance. Because I think when they went to 100 a week, a lot of people canceled Sales Navigator, right?

That’s the one thing that LinkedIn has done. When it was Instagram and we were doing automation, Instagram only monetized their platform through paid ads. With Facebook and Instagram, that’s their main way of making money. So they don’t want you to automate things because they want you to pay for their ad platform. Well, LinkedIn was smart enough to figure out premium accounts that say, “Hey, we don’t care what you do as much because we’re still making money off of your account existing, right? Because you’re paying us for sales.”

So I think when they went to 100 connection requests a week as the limit, so many people canceled Sales Navigator off the cuff, and they were like, “Oh, crap.” That’s a big thing there. So we’re at a great balance now with LinkedIn where they have hard limits in place. Before, it used to be soft limits where you used to just get a warning from LinkedIn if you didn’t have premium or things like that. Now, I guarantee LinkedIn knows that we operate. They know that automation happens, but it’s hard capped anyway, so we can’t use it to spam people. We can’t use it to do all the things that were making LinkedIn not a great place. We were always trying to make it a better place anyways with the messaging that we put forward, but now there’s a hard cap.

Anybody who’s doing outreach needs to be more targeted in who they’re reaching out to on LinkedIn. They need to write better messaging, they need to make things better, because you can’t just play the numbers game like you did previously.

John SmallMtn (21:29)

And that’s a perfect segue into the next thing I would love to talk about with you, because we were kind of talking about this before we hit record: the difference between marketing and sales. They’re very connected, but they’re different in mindset, right? How do you talk about it with people? Because since there are limitations on it, you can’t just run it at full tilt. We need to be clean, clear, and relevant, right? It kind of sounds like what you’re pushing there. How have you gotten better at getting your clients to focus on clarity and messaging and not just try to do as much volume as possible?

Braden Wallake (22:04)

Yeah, there’s a few ways that we’ve gone about it. Number one: the easiest thing when you’re doing outreach is if you take your same exact Sales Navigator filters that you normally do, and then just add the filter of only going after your 2nd-degree connections that match that to get connected, and not your 3rd-degrees. That’s a huge step up in the connection rate that you’ll get.

The other piece is checking if they are active on the platform. There’s an option in Sales Navigator: “Posted something in the last 30 days.” Those are two really easy things that say we can’t do as many, but we’re going to get a better connection rate and a better response rate just targeting these smaller amounts of this overall target audience that are your 2nd-degrees and posted. Then that grows more and more because you’re building up your connections, so you have more people who become your 2nd-degrees that you can then reach out to. By actually doing less and targeting those focuses, you’ll get better results.

What we’ve recently started doing is—I don’t know exactly how we’re phrasing it—I was calling it like a niche in a niche. One of our clients has an insurance agency and he’s trying to recruit insurance agents who are working at XYZ companies who have changed their compensation plan. He’s only targeting the agents of those two companies. That’s a niche set—he could target all insurance agents to become an agent at his company, but he’s niching inside of that niche. There’s an industry event or something, and he’s getting a great reply rate.

Another client of ours is African American. She wasn’t getting great results before. We targeted people who matched all those filters, but then were also in Black business owner groups on LinkedIn. So it’s a niche inside of a niche that reaches people who are more like you along the way, and we’re seeing that we don’t need to reach out to as many people if we can get better results from the people that we’re reaching out to.

John SmallMtn (24:01)

Whenever I talk with founders or salespeople, a lot of them get stuck in, “I just need more, I just need more, I just need more.” Do you run into that a lot with people thinking, “I just need endless amounts of volume”? Or is it pretty easy to get people to realize, “Okay, I don’t need to do as much. I need to be better, tighter, more focused”?

Braden Wallake (24:23)

The goal is to still get more, right? But it’s not more of what they think. It’s not more input. The more input that you do, the lower your percentages are, and the more people that you’re wasting by trying to go out to those people if you’re not doing a good job. The goal is that you want more people who are raising their hands and wanting to have a conversation. It’s kind of an easy conversation to have: “Yeah, if you want to do more, first let’s make sure that the ‘more’ is on the back end.” Then if you want to add a partner’s LinkedIn account or things like that, now your “more” is still getting more output. You’re doing more input to get double the output essentially.

If people were just focused on looking at the steps along the way—the metrics, the connection rate, your response rate—those are the things that you need to fix in order to get the “more” on the back end. No cold email will ever get me a 10% or 15% response rate that we get through LinkedIn. On average, our clients get 30% to 35% of 2nd-degrees to connect, and then 30% to 35% of those will reply. That means we’re getting like 100 replies each month for our clients and a lot of hand-raisers from those. It’s hard to beat that unless you’re doing massive amounts of cold email, in my experience. A lot of people are better at cold email than I am, but…

John SmallMtn (02:53:36)

So, changing gears just a little bit: when you think about your path as a founder, what do you think you’ve struggled with the most? You’re pretty aware of who you are. We’ve talked about ADHD and things like this. Where has that shown up for you in the biggest way that you’ve been able to work on?

Braden Wallake (02:55:50)

Well, this is an interesting… The biggest thing I struggle with now? The biggest thing I struggled with five years ago? Because there have been different struggles along the way.

John SmallMtn (02:56:20)

Great question. Let’s go earlier, right? Because there are seasons to this. Right now, I would love to talk about your salesperson on the team now and getting out of there, because you come from sales. It’s interesting whenever people hand off sales to someone else, right? Everyone does it a little bit differently. But going back to the early days of this, where did you struggle the most? How did it show up?

Braden Wallake (02:56:49)

Everything that I struggled with super early on was finance-related. It was growth for the sake of growth. We grew a lot there, but I wasn’t tracking—actually, it was probably just metrics, internal team metrics as a whole. I think our profit margins I wasn’t really keeping track of back then. I could go figure out what they were if I wanted to, and things like that, but we had some good stuff. We were being able to pay our employees, like things were going fine, right?

But if I had really been more in tune with what my numbers were… It’s so easy to just—people get this advice all the time. Profit First is a book, and you need to get Profit First. So many people take that early on and they’re like, “Yeah, but I still need to grow, and then I’ll figure out the profit side.” But if you profitably grow, you can invest so much more and grow even faster along the way. We had several salespeople back then and we grew great. It was great fun and I enjoyed it.

Then there were the KPIs of our internal metrics, right? I didn’t really track that from our team. Like, what do your hours look like, what is your output, what are we getting done, and how many—any KPIs were just not being tracked across the board. I think those were two of the hardest things for me. Because I loved math in school, but just going and looking at numbers—I’m not trying to solve problems or doing anything there, just looking at some effing numbers—and I’m like, “This is so freaking boring, it doesn’t matter. We’ll just figure it out as we go.”

John SmallMtn (02:58:18)

A lot of people will push off metrics, KPIs, and documentation, right? They’ll thrive in the scramble, or they’ll try to. What led you to, “Okay, we’ve got to figure this thing out”? Was it a moment? Was it frustration? Because with your personality—we’ve hung out a couple of times, always over Zoom and calls and stuff like that—you are that person who likes to move, right? That’s the gist that I get from you. So I could see Braden being very prone to being like, “We’ll get to it tomorrow. We’ll get to it when we’re ready. We’ll get to it when we’re big enough.” Was it a tipping point? How did you get to the clarity?

Braden Wallake (02:59:11)

Yeah, so—and I think we’re going to dive into this at some point during today’s call anyways—was when we’d grown so much and then LinkedIn made a whole bunch of those changes. We lost a ton of our revenue because of the changes that they made, plus we couldn’t send as many numbers as we had promised clients on that. We’re like, “We’re trying our best here to do what we can for you.” We even tried to offer them more value, and a lot of those clients did stick around because they trust us, but we did lose a lot. We tried to change the way we were making some offerings out there, too.

Where was this going? So, I made a post when I had to let a couple of employees go. That was the breaking point there. I don’t want to grow like this again where it can all go so quickly, right? I want to grow more stably so I have cash reserves in case shit hits the fan, right? In case this happens, or in case algorithm changes, or in case whatever happens in business—because every business has external factors that affect it, right? It doesn’t matter what business you’re in, there are external factors. If you’re in clothing goods, you’ve got your tariffs now that may be affecting you. There are always external factors.

So being able to put money into the bank, more than just making it, means I could have kept employees around and we maybe could have figured out what ways to go. And we did for a little bit, right? But it was that moment… So I made this post, right? We’ll talk about that. But where I really started sobbing was… So we let go of two employees, and I let go of one and then Emily let go of the other. I went up to her after she let him go and she was crying harder than I’ve ever seen her cry, absolutely sobbing at having to let somebody go for this. That was the turning point right there.

I don’t want us to have to do it this way. If I’m letting somebody go now—like many people since then—letting them go because of lack of performance from them, or lack of fit together, or things like that, that’s not so emotional as, “Hey, we fucked up as a business and now we’re screwing over your livelihood,” for the people that we’ve liked and we trust and respect. Watching Emily have to go through that, that was probably the single moment where I was like, “Nah, no, this shit is getting fixed.”

John SmallMtn (03:31:19)

Man, that’s wild. I didn’t realize that that was the moment. Hearing in how you talk about it, it makes a ton of sense. I don’t want to make this whole interview just about that thing, though.

Braden Wallake (03:31:50)

Sure. I mean, we can just touch back to it, but that was the moment. It wasn’t me making that post that was the moment. It was me going upstairs because—we still had the van, but we were living at her parents’ house while we were getting ready to buy our house. I was working downstairs and she was working upstairs. I walked in there and she was sobbing so hard, and I was like, “Yeah, I don’t want to put that on her ever again like this.”

John SmallMtn (03:32:15)

What actions did you take? Because I think a lot of people have those moments, right? You hit rock bottom, adversity, challenges, and stuff like this. I think a lot of people mean well—great intentions, but kind of bad follow-through and everything. What actions did you take? How did you get there?

Braden Wallake (03:32:45)

Yeah. Some of the first actions that I took… I did a whole bunch of moving things in our project management tools. Eventually, we moved to ClickUp. Now we can really start to see where a lot of our stuff is done-for-you, right? And done-for-you gets so complex with people going out of scope and things like that. So we started tracking all of our time a lot better.

Not because I wanted to see, “Hey, are you being productive? Are you being a crappy employee? What are you doing?” I just wanted to know, “Holy crap, this person’s paying us the same as this person. This one’s two hours a month, so we have profit there; but this one’s 14 hours a month, right?” All of a sudden, that’s negative profit. That’s taking away from the other people who are paying us and not being so difficult. That was actually step number one.

And then we also started setting KPIs in place of, in each role, what are three metrics that you should be achieving and sharing with me each month? That way I could more easily get that quick view of things. I think that was another big piece of it. Most people just say, “I’ll start doing a P&L report.” A P&L report is very high level. It doesn’t tell you how to improve your profit margins. It’s like, “Okay, I need to stop paying for somebody’s software.” That’s cool, but that’s one piece. How is your product being serviced? How is your team putting in their hours? How is your team doing this? Are there better ways that we could optimize that process, too? Especially now with AI, we can automate a lot more. So, can I take some hours off their plate that they’re spending on creating Zaps or whatever it is that they’re spending their time on? Can we make that easier somehow to save ourselves time?

John SmallMtn (03:34:32)

In the done-for-you space… I love that you brought this up because I just don’t understand why people don’t do this more: go back and look at the client logs. See how much time they are a struggle bus. Especially in agency stuff, like the account management, right? If they’re never showing up to that call, that’s a signal there’s something going on in there. If you’re not doing account management, you don’t know where your people… It’s crazy, but I love that idea.

These two clients are paying the same amount. One we’re making really great margin on; the other ones are struggle buses. Inside of there, how much support do they need? How much do our people like working with them? There’s a lot to clean up inside of that stuff, but you have to decide that it’s worth doing as opposed to, “Well, everyone should just be better.”

Braden Wallake (03:35:19)

Right, exactly. You don’t know what’s going on where. You just assume that your employees—and I try to never make that assumption, but you can easily make the assumption that your employees aren’t working that hard, or they’re not being that productive, or how do you motivate them better, or things like that. They just don’t need motivation, they just need you to automate one of their stupid tasks that takes them three hours a week per client to do.

Now all of our leads push to Zapier. All the replies for clients push to Zapier. AI now marks it a one, two, three, four, or five on the lead warmness scale. If it’s a four or five, the client automatically gets an email about that thing, right? We used to go through and check our leads manually. It was one person’s basically entire job to do that. I’m like, “Okay, well I can free you up to do so much other stuff by automating this process.” Cool. Now they’re also not just doing the same thing all day, every day. They can get into some other stuff, too. We’re now making their jobs better or easier.

John SmallMtn (03:36:06)

Yeah, I love that, man. It’s interesting because I tend to find people kind of fall into one of two lanes, right? I saw a video about this and the guy talked about it: you’re either the showman or you’re the practitioner, you know? I find that people kind of stay in one lane. I’m much more of a practitioner than I am a showman. I’m not a super strong marketer, and that’s okay. But I love that you’re talking about both, because a lot of people who come from sales are more of the showman. They’re not trying to create a better product or a better mousetrap and stuff like that. So I think it’s really cool that you have room for both.

Braden Wallake (03:36:54)

I think it felt like the only option at that point. We already did the showman side. I could keep on going that route and just keep putting my… If I want to actually have a business that is potentially sellable or really scalable, I can’t do that by just growing just to grow. You just can’t. And you’re not going to be as good of a showman feeling that financial pressure that I felt early on.

Even though we were making a lot more, there were a lot more employees and a lot more paydays that were going out. Paydays were way more stressful back then than they are now. You spend a lot of your time thinking, “I hope I have enough payments that come in in time for payday to make payday for people.” That’s taking you away from being a showman. I don’t want to go post on LinkedIn nearly as much when I’m so stressed about the finances. Like, “Hey, here’s how to grow your business,” but my business freaking sucks. It’s hard to be that showman if you don’t fix that side.

John SmallMtn (03:37:37)

Yeah. That kind of leads to this other thing, right? Social does give this distorted view. I have lots of connections I’ve never met, like you and I have never met in person. I have a lot of people that are in that tier, and I see stuff like, “Be authentic, bring your whole self,” and everything. I try to do that because I don’t want to portray that it’s all highlights and unicorn horns, that this is hard and there’s a lot to figure out. I try to bring a very authentic perspective in my content.

So you made this post, and it got really, really big. I’m curious: how much time was it between you going upstairs, sitting with Emily, and seeing her going through this thing, to hitting post on this thing that got really big?

Braden Wallake (03:38:49)

Yeah, it was probably about 30 to 45 minutes. I was up there with her and spent some time. I wanted to give her some space, too, because people are all different. I like to talk my things out, and she likes to internalize it a bit before she talks to anyone else. So I wanted to give her some space.

I went back down. Watching her cry made me cry, right? So I was sitting down there, in and out of crying. Maybe it kind of just ended and I was just still crying, and I was just thinking. I just wanted to be helpful to other people, right? Because being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart, and it can be a very lonely journey. You are always in charge of asking how other people are; you don’t have people asking how you’re doing and what’s going on there.

I had friends that we traveled with in the van to Mexico. They came to us one day—we did an online game night or something before we headed to Mexico—and they said, “Braden, your posts around your ADHD are so helpful. We realized that Derek has ADHD, and that’s helped our relationship so much because of your posts about it.”

And so that’s what I was thinking: if I can do something on the entrepreneur side to just… That’s always been the goal. If you can put yourself out there more, like I talk about ADHD struggles that I have, and the benefits of it, and the funness and the anti-funness that comes with ADHD… Without that post, maybe they don’t realize it. Maybe their relationship doesn’t get to be improved. Maybe they realize it much later, but where’s their relationship at then, right?

So I said, “Okay, what if people are going through something similar?” Because it was 2022 when the economy was going backwards, all those big companies were letting go of people, and there was the one CEO who called his employees dolphins or whatever he called them. The big companies were being very ass-holy about it. I was like, yeah, maybe not all the founders and owners of companies are bad. Also, to other businesses: if you are going through this, you’re not alone. It’s okay to feel awful about letting people go. It’s okay to be crying.

It wasn’t to take away from what my employees were feeling. It was just like… I’m connected to a whole bunch of business owners. I’ve got 25,000 connections and they’re all business owners who may be facing something like this. What the post never saw was all the people who said thank you in my DMs. That’s what you just couldn’t see in public. Everybody said, “Dude, supporting you, but also thank you. I have to let somebody go tomorrow. This makes me feel like I feel okay that I have to do this—not okay that I have to do this, but I feel okay to know that I can feel the emotions on my side, too.”

Because it is harder to be the one fired than the one firing, but there are still emotions on the side firing, too. Especially if it’s employees that you care about. We’re a small team. These are employees that I’ve gone and stayed at one of their houses for a couple of days on our van travel. You get close to these people and you feel fucking awful about it, right? I was just like, “To other business owners: it’s okay to feel awful about this. You don’t have to be some person that has it all figured out.”

That’s where the post came from during that 30 to 45 minutes of time. I’m always trying to use my stuff to help other people. That’s kind of who I am. I just want to take my experiences and say, “Hey, can I help somebody else with the experience that I’m feeling?”

John SmallMtn (03:42:15)

So I saw the post, right? I think I saw it maybe the next day, and I knew you. So I saw it for an authentic moment of being vulnerable and trying to share. And then I started to read the comments under that thing, and I was floored, honestly. If you don’t really know someone, you’re not giving the benefit of the doubt.

You don’t strike me as someone who’s terribly concerned about being polarizing or pushing some buttons. Did you have a moment of, “This has blown up. Do I want to walk it back?” Or was it just like, “It’s out here. This is how I feel, and screw you if you don’t like it”?

Braden Wallake (03:43:15)

No, I made a post the next day. I forget what the second post was. It was like, “Hey, I’m Braden, I’m the crying CEO. Here’s what the intentions of my post were.” It didn’t matter. They didn’t care what I had to say. They assumed that was a PR statement at that point. I’m like, “If you think I can afford a PR person, you’re crazy. Fucking hell.” My left brain is my PR person, my right brain is the CEO. That’s what we got here!

John SmallMtn (03:43:30)

“Guys, I was just letting people off!” So, in that 24-hour period, how quickly did it blow up? Because it was everywhere. I would have conversations and other people would bring it up. In my chat community, people were like, “Have you seen this guy?” I’m like, “I know that guy.” I was in Albuquerque and someone was talking about it, and I was like, “I know that guy, he’s a solid guy.” They were so floored. They were like, “What?” And I was like, “He was going through it.”

If you’ve never had to go through it, you don’t know what it feels like. So you think you’re going to be tough and it’s not going to phase you, and then when it does, it’s wild. How long until you realized, “This is bigger. This isn’t just a post that’s going to get some engagement. There’s something going on with this thing”? How long did that take to register?

Braden Wallake (03:44:25)

It was interesting because it was rainy that day, so we had nothing going on that evening. Emily’s parents live out in the country, so we had nothing going on. I was basically hanging out, watching sports, and on my phone because I just kept getting buzz after buzz after buzz as people would comment. So I was basically commenting back and forth with people until 1:00 a.m.

I sent one of my team members a message on Slack and I said, “Hey, I think I just went viral on LinkedIn,” at like 2:00 a.m. I knew she wouldn’t read it until the morning. But before I went to bed that night, eventually I was like, “I have to turn this off. I’ll just be going back and forth with people all day on this.” It was all the HR people. That’s who came for it the most—was HR, HR, HR, HR. People I’m not connected with, but are in the HR world.

John SmallMtn (00:45:23)

Interesting. Did you get outreach from HR? “Hey Braden, if you don’t want to have to do this again, you should hire me.” Did you get outreach?

Braden Wallake (00:45:36)

Yeah, exactly. No, I didn’t get very many of those, but just a lot of HR people telling me I didn’t handle it the right way or things like that. There were some valid points. There were some valid points of, when you made this post, did you consider your employees’ feelings? Did you consider this, and did you consider that? All the other employees I had, they just know that I was upset about it. They knew that I was letting people go. They knew—just Braden being Braden. People who I let go, they went back and defended me.

John SmallMtn (00:45:56)

They came in and commented and defended you, which was…

Braden Wallake (00:46:05)

“Yes, I’m upset I got let go, but I’m not offended by Braden’s post.” So then what I did is I got permission from one to put his details up there, and he ended up with a much higher-paying job that he enjoyed more than the one he was doing at HyperSocial. He’s still at that job today. I made a post like, “Here’s one of the people I let go, here’s what he’s great at.” And he got hired. I don’t know if it’s from that post or whatever. I’m not saying it’s from that post, but I learned along the way that maybe I should have done some things for the employees first.

I was just trying to be real. That’s all it was. There’s that BeReal app, which I don’t ever use, but it’s all about posting. You have a time of day where it hits you, you get a notification, and you’re supposed to post within a minute of that and just take a picture and post. Yeah, I don’t like it at all because it’s always when I’m doing nothing.

John SmallMtn (00:47:03)

That is so funny.

Braden Wallake (00:47:03)

I’m just sitting here every single time. Like, no, goddamn it! Get it when I’m paddleboarding or get it when I’m doing something. Once, I’ll post the picture of my TV and whatever that I’m doing that day. But please, just once, let me just be doing something decent. But yeah, I was trying to be real in the moment. I hope for the employees it ended up better, but I think there were some things that I learned from it. There was plenty that was maybe not so truthful about it, or brought out of proportion, or things…

John SmallMtn (00:47:33)

When you think about trying to be real, authentic, vulnerable, is it harder after that?

Braden Wallake (00:47:43)

It’s so much harder.

John SmallMtn (00:47:46)

How do you deal with that? How do you weigh it out?

Braden Wallake (00:47:51)

To be honest, I don’t think I’ve found the answer yet. I think more than ever—and you may have seen my post on Facebook about it—just about the imposter syndrome that I now feel. I feel that more. Our business is growing consistently again, and we’re in a much healthier place than we were then. I’m glad we went through that to make ourselves better. We’ve improved a lot of the stuff that we’ve done, and everything is so much easier now than it was.

My posting has just gone down completely because I’m still not certain, if I do post real shit, what’s going to happen. I don’t want death threats in my email inbox again. I don’t want people going to Emily’s Instagram and telling her that her boyfriend’s a piece of shit. And I don’t want them to… I got a few death threats. Yeah, a couple to cut my throat, or that I should kill myself.

John SmallMtn (00:48:40)

You were getting death threats? My god. Wow.

Braden Wallake (00:48:49)

Quite a few of those. They would find my email. Yeah, there were a couple of those. But yeah, definitely, since 2022, I do not put myself out there the same way that I did. I’ve been trying to put myself out there a little more, like, “Hey, here’s something that I learned,” because I’m not a marketer, I don’t do marketing emails. So I’ve been sharing just some things that I try, and hopefully it can help somebody. But the emotional side of the business, I have not shared nearly as much.

John SmallMtn (00:48:55)

Interesting. Do you—this is a potentially weird question—do you think it’s important that you get back to that place where you can be that authentic, open person? Or is it like, “Hey, I’m never going back to an 11; we’re not going over a seven”?

Braden Wallake (00:49:33)

No, I think it’s one of the things that I’ve missed the most: just being my authentic self with people. I don’t care whether it’s social or in person or not—not that I try to not be myself, but a more reserved version where you get a piece of me, not the whole me. I would love to get back. That’s what Emily’s always… when we were doing our dating, she said that I’m a massive oversharer. That’s who I am. I like to share, I like to talk, and it’s enjoyable to me.

I miss some of the real conversations that happened on LinkedIn because I was just putting up what came to mind. So I think it’s been tough, and I don’t know how to necessarily get myself back to it. Because I tell myself it’s okay to post whatever, but I just don’t have the same thought process when something hits. I’m not like, “Let’s go make a post about that kind of thing.” It just doesn’t hit the same way.

John SmallMtn (00:50:36)

So with all that momentum of this post… I love that you talked about the positive DMs that you were getting, because when you’re scrolling through this stuff, it’s just negative, negative, negative. There was some positive stuff, but you’re just washed over with all the negative. I love that you were getting positive responses in the DMs. I think that’s really cool. We’re never going to make everybody happy anyway. What was the… obviously you made it through, but did anything cool come from all of that stuff? Any cool new connections, business opportunities?

Whenever I think about it, my wife and I had talked about it because we get to work together. It makes me not want to put myself out there, and my stuff always does better whenever I’m my authentic self—when I talk about my stutter, and I talk about being an introvert and stuff like that. But I didn’t even have to go through it, and I’m like, “I don’t know.” I don’t know how many death threats I would want to be able to choose to ignore, you know what I’m saying?

Braden Wallake (00:51:42)

It’s less than one is what you would like. I’m just telling you from somebody who was like, “Yeah, okay, whatever,” it’s still like somebody really threatened my life from a LinkedIn post. The answer is zero, right? Especially having family that you care about, friends that you care about, because the other socials are out there. People can go find out more about you, and it could get scary quick. The answer is zero death threats. That is how many any person should have, or want, or be able to handle. Nobody should be able to handle death threats. It’s not a thing that we handle in life. “Yeah, you know what? I’m really good at handling death threats. Look at my one skillset.” Stupid.

John SmallMtn (00:52:29)

Fair, fair. It shouldn’t be a thing you want to be good at. So, okay, I’m going to change my question a little bit, because I’ve never been through an experience like this where something I’ve said has blown up into this thing with positive and negative and everything. What’s the half-life of something like that? Is it months and you’re getting all of it? Is it 30 minutes? Is it three days?

Braden Wallake (00:53:15)

Of the benefits, or of the downside?

John SmallMtn (00:53:18)

That’s a good question. Just both, honestly, because I’m sure that it probably put you on the map for some people, right? It probably led to some stuff. But both sides of it: how long were you like, “Man, we’re still dealing with this, we’re still dealing with this”?

Braden Wallake (00:53:41)

It’s still my most-viewed post every month on LinkedIn. Now, I don’t post as much as I used to, so there’s that factor. But if I go look at my LinkedIn statistics, it’ll be one of my top five viewed posts this month. It’ll be one of my top five viewed posts next month. I don’t know when it’ll eventually stop, but yeah, it’s still a pretty commonly viewed post.

John SmallMtn (00:53:46)

I have a question for you, then: do you deal with the weight of, “Do I pull this down? Do I leave it here?”

Braden Wallake (00:54:09)

I’ve thought about it, yeah, because, even though it’s three years old, especially in the world that I’m in, you don’t want people to trust me less because I had to let go of employees when I’m helping businesses grow. There are plenty of things… I don’t try to advise people on everything on how to grow their business, right? It’s a very set few things that I’m really good at, and that’s what I advise them on. That’s what I want them to stick with me on, right? I don’t want them to trust me on whatever this is and whatever that is.

If I have thoughts about those things and I get better at those things, sure, I will share them with you. But I’m not telling you to trust me on how to manage your books and how to do your finances. Don’t fucking listen to me on that side of things, right? It’s important to do those things, but don’t listen to me on actually how to go about doing them, because I can’t help you there. But I can help you on this side. So I always wonder, should I take it down? Does it hurt potential clients who are like, “Hey, this is the owner of this company and this is what all the people are saying about him,” or those kinds of things? So I’ve had that thought many times. Still there, though. Laziness, probably—just having to go find it, click it, and delete it.

And I’ve never been a person to regret things that I’ve done. That post was me at a point in my life that I wanted to make that post. I made that post. It went whatever way that it went—up, down, sideways, backwards—it went that way. But to delete that is to just be like… I don’t know. You can’t delete conversations in real life. You can’t back up the things that you said to people one-on-one. You can’t remove those things. Why should I be able to go remove a post I made on social media? I said it. Whether it was right or wrong, it was there, and now it’s still there. I think that’s the bigger factor: it was me, and it’s me. And if that’s not what you want, if that’s not what you like, I don’t think I would do it again by any means, but I don’t think it would ever get deleted.

John SmallMtn (00:55:37)

I respect that. So if you’re talking to a brand new founder today, and they’re new, and they want to be viral, and they want to be big, and they want to do these things, and they come to you and say, “Braden, do I put myself out there? Do I go the authentic route? Do I go the copywriter route? What do I do?” What would be your advice to someone who is struggling with this very wide lane and huge range of different opinions? What would you tell them to do?

Braden Wallake (00:56:26)

I think if I had made that same post and didn’t include the picture of myself crying, it would have had such a different impact. People assume the picture that I took was because I was trying to add the personality and the emotion. I was trying to add more emotion to the post, like, “This is what business owners are feeling. It’s okay to be feeling like this if anybody’s letting people go.”

It’s the picture that I think made the bigger difference than the words that were in the post, right? Because it does come off as a vanity thing. I’ve laughed at people who take videos of themselves crying and posting on TikTok and things like that. You look ridiculous. I would post the real stuff, but I would really just take away the picture of yourself crying. That’s the one thing I would say: do everything else authentically. I still think post pictures of yourself, but I wouldn’t make it like that, because I think that was the thing that caused it so much, because it just felt like a vanity thing. Like, “Look at me, look at me crying, feel bad for me, feel sorry for me.” And that’s not what I was trying to do.

John SmallMtn (00:57:23)

So without the photo, you think it’s like five comments and a handful of likes?

Braden Wallake (00:57:35)

No big deal. I think it would have a more positiveness on it from just business. I don’t think the HR people would have seen it. I don’t think the algorithm would have pushed it as hard. Also, the conversation I had later is LinkedIn did a lot of letting people go at that same day. They let go of a lot of employees that day. It’s almost like it could have been pushed in the algorithm so that way when you searched “LinkedIn layoffs,” what did you get instead of learning about LinkedIn layoffs? You got a picture of the crying CEO laying off people instead, because he made that post on LinkedIn. Well, that’s the thought somebody else had, which is it got forcefully upped in the algorithm to prevent…

John SmallMtn (00:58:10)

I never even thought that. It never even came to mind that the photo is the thing that made it such a big thing. That is so wild.

Braden Wallake (00:58:25)

It was the photo, I guarantee, way more than… just with what I know, and how I post, and the way I see things. Most of the hate was, “You’re self-absorbed. This is about you. Crocodile tears,” whatever. I don’t even remember what they all were, right? But the post itself doesn’t come off as very self-serving, right? “I let go of somebody today. I’m very sad about it. Not all CEOs are assholes; they actually do care about their employees.” That’s what the post itself said. None of that was really self-serving. But the crying made it seem as if it was trying to be self-serving: “Pity me, woe is me, look at my face, it’s all about me,” kind of thing.

John SmallMtn (00:58:59)

This is a fascinating tangent, and we don’t have to go super deep down this thing. Do you think that the cultural leaning led to them thinking it was easier for them to think that you’re faking it—like crocodile tears?

Braden Wallake (00:59:26)

Probably, for sure. That makes sense. I think it’s part of it.

John SmallMtn (00:59:34)

Yeah, if the photo is there… because I’ve seen other photos of people who were upset or going through it and stuff like that. Sometimes it’s fine, sometimes it’s not. I was just curious to see your thinking on that. I’m going to think about that the rest of the day. Thank you, man. I appreciate that.

Braden Wallake (00:59:48)

Yeah. It’s also like, why would you take a selfie while crying? But it’s like, I had been crying for so long at that point. I’d gotten a clearer head. I had the initial emotional reaction, but I was still upset and tears were still going down my face. I was like, “I could take a picture of this now that I have clear thoughts around it.” I wasn’t wiping my face, it was just there. I was writing the post, actually, and then I took the picture to add it to the post. It wasn’t like, “Let me take a picture of myself while I’m crying,” right when I’m really upset. No, I’d been crying for a while now. I’d been upset for a while. Now I’m thinking about how I can use this as a time to help other people.

John SmallMtn (01:00:14)

I really want to show the struggle of this, right? That it does have weight to it. That’s fascinating.

Braden, I want to be super respectful of your time. I’ve got a couple of rapid-fire questions—questions that I’m asking everybody who’s coming through. Thank you so much for coming and doing this, man. We’ve been friends for a while and I just really appreciate it. When you think about your path, there are all these roles, all these mantras, all these dogmas, all the tweets and everything. What is the lesson that you couldn’t hear, you couldn’t see, you couldn’t learn it from anyone else—you had to go learn it the hard way, you had to run into the wall?

Braden Wallake (01:01:00)

That you would get as early-on business advice, but you just wouldn’t listen to? Pretty standard advice that you’re like, “Yeah, yeah, whatever, that’s just a cliche”?

John SmallMtn (01:01:04)

Yeah, all the standard boilerplate—niche down, and just don’t give up, and everyone knows that—yes, all of that stuff. Is there one that comes to mind that when you see it now, you’re like, “Yep, should wish I learned it as opposed to having to live it”?

Braden Wallake (01:01:12)

I do think it’s Profit First. I do think that’s one of the hardest lessons. Especially early on, you’re just so excited about the project that you’re building, you let that excitement take you away from making sure that you’re building your business smartly, right? I think that’s one of the biggest lessons that I would take: you need to know your numbers.

I think Shark Tank talks about it a lot. They’re always like, “You need to know your profit. You need to know what your cost per item is and what your sale price and margins are,” those kinds of things. Now I could probably rattle those off; back then I couldn’t. But then I knew every time I was selling something that was 500 bucks, I knew what my profit margin was. I knew, “Okay, that’s 300 bucks profit into the business,” or “Is it 50 bucks profit?”

John SmallMtn (01:02:12)

Yeah, you know it in one direction, but not the other direction.

Braden Wallake (01:02:16)

And you know what your customer acquisition cost should be at that point, because you need to keep it below this, you need to keep it below that. It just makes growing so much simpler. Because if you know that your lifetime value of profit of a client is worth $10,000, cool, you can spend $5,000 to get that client and you know that you’re good to go, right?

So just knowing those numbers a bit better, and building out the margins, right? You need to have margins. Your employees should want you to have margins. They should want you to be profitable. Working at a profitable company is way better than working at a company where they just spend all the money on employee payroll because it’s stressful. It’s just a better business overall. So I think that is the number one. “Yeah, yeah, it’s fine. It’s fine. We’re growing. I’m paying my employees, we’re paying our bills, we’re fine, we’re fine. OK, things are going downhill. We’re not fine anymore.”

John SmallMtn (01:03:07)

Yeah, it’s so similar to the resolution crowd: “I’m going to start in January. I’m going to start when I’m big enough. I’m going to start…” and we just kick the can because we don’t define what that place is, so it just morphs as we change.

Working in the space that you do—top of funnel, business development, outbound messaging, and everything—what is the advice you would give a brand new founder about putting themselves out there? What is something that a founder today needs to know about top-of-funnel messaging and business development?

Braden Wallake (01:03:45)

I think early on, too many founders want to go into marketing. They want to have inbound leads. They want to have people come into their website wanting to buy their stuff. The number one thing that I see is to just go build relationships with the people that you want to be selling this to. It’s not as scalable of a thing. Yes, you should eventually get into marketing and get into paid ads, you should get into sales funnels and things like that, but that costs a lot early on. You don’t have the runway.

The easiest: go to networking events, right? Go get on LinkedIn and start connecting with those people. Just go start doing that, building that out, prove it, and then you can have some cash flow and some extra profit in there. Then you can start to say, “Okay, now I can invest some of that.” But people want to go into marketing too fast, and they sit around and end up with no clients because they don’t want to put themselves out there. They don’t want to go outwards; they want to bring it all inwards.

Then they spend all their time, “Well, what should this web page say? What should this…” because they don’t have the funds to hire a copywriter, they don’t have the funds to hire an ad person, they don’t have the funds to have a runway on getting your ads to be profitable or that kind of stuff. Just go start conversations. You can send 200 requests on LinkedIn. Go start a conversation, call people up, give them a call, go to networking events with the people that are going to be there.

Go do the stuff that puts you out there, because you’re going to build referral partners. You’re going to build clients who trust you and like you even more. They want to know your journey of how you’re building the app because they like the software or whatever that you’re doing. They like what you’ve built, but they also like to know the journey of how you built it, why you’re building it, and what other things you are doing and thinking about. People just connect with you more that way.

John SmallMtn (01:05:23)

Why do you think they do that?

Braden Wallake (01:05:30)

I think there’s a few things. There are a lot of gurus who will tell you that you need to stop doing outbound and just get inbound, right? Inbound leads are so much easier to close when you actually do get them inbound, and referrals are way easier to close than cold. You’ve got to work harder with cold leads.

I think there’s also just a lack of confidence in what they’re doing. Going and having a conversation with somebody shouldn’t be a scary thing, but it is, because you’re not hiding behind a brand logo anymore. It’s you, right? They go have a conversation with you on Zoom, and whatever you are, you think they’re going to judge you for it. Or you don’t have all your business figured out, and you think they’re going to judge you for it. Or you don’t have this piece of your software, if you’re building software. Whatever it is, it’s your face now connected with people. It’s your name on the line, not a logo that you’re standing behind. So I think there’s a lack of confidence that can be behind it, too, but I do think there are a lot of outside factors on that, as well.

John SmallMtn (01:06:32)

I had to go through that shift because I worked in corporate and then moved into small business, and the weight was, “Okay, who am I? How do I fit into this whole thing?” That is a really big shift. I just always kind of label it as: it sounds sexier and it sounds easier, and the rejection is way off.

Braden Wallake (01:06:45)

Absolutely. Somebody could click your ad and not buy your thing, and you don’t even know that happened, right? You get a click, and you’re like, “Okay, that doesn’t affect me.” You’re calling somebody and they don’t want to buy your stuff, and you’re like, “What did I do wrong? Am I not building a good software product?” People cancel. It’s way worse.

John SmallMtn (01:07:03)

Or you don’t know how to run a sales call, so you just throw up because you don’t know any better. You’re going to treat it like a networking call versus a direct sales call. There’s a way of doing it, but if you’re not trained or taught, you’re probably not going to do it very well, which then makes it easy to want to avoid it. I don’t blame all the funnel builders and all the people who are building in their white towers, but it’s just not going to work unless you have mountains of spend. You’ve got to go talk to the people. You’ve got to go have a real perspective of what they’re dealing with, or else you’re just going to miss more than you hit.

Braden Wallake (01:07:44)

Yeah, it’s always capital equity or sweat equity, right? In the B2B or founder-led worlds, unfortunately, there’s not just time equity, but the emotional equity that you’re putting into being on sales calls. Getting those saves you a lot of money, though.

John SmallMtn (01:08:03)

I have to talk about this with people all the time. Stop—and here’s a tip: if you’re a brand new founder, stop saying, “I would love to meet you,” because then when they’re like, “Well, I don’t want to meet you,” you choose to get offended. It shouldn’t have been about that anyway, right? Lots of people will do little bitty things because they think it ups their percentages, but really it’s just putting their identity and value into their outreach and making it hard to be consistent because they’re putting too much of themselves out there.

“I am this person, here’s the thing that I do, I need this thing.” Don’t make it about you, right? It does make it a little bit easier. But once again, if you don’t know to do that: “I hope the CMO finds you well. I can’t wait to meet with you. I would love to spend five hours with you and not get anything done.” It just becomes too easy. I love that idea, because I try to teach people the same thing: it’s just a conversation.

A very old line that my old business partner used to say: “If you show up and you ask for money, you get advice. If you show up and you ask for advice, you’ll get money.” Working in public, self-startup—all of these things are versions of that, just slightly different. Go start with a real connection. Don’t try to market all the way to conversion from your tower if you don’t have the skillset, because it’s probably just not going to go very well.

Right now, Braden, all these really cool things are happening. AI is a major topic. I think a lot of people are going into gig work and consulting and starting off on their own. What is the one piece of advice or word of warning you would give to someone who’s starting now?

Braden Wallake (01:09:45)

Related to AI, or just anybody who’s starting now, period, whether it’s AI-related or not?

John SmallMtn (01:09:49)

Great question, thank you for that. I’m trying to bring up how big of a thing AI is.

Braden Wallake (01:09:53)

You mean more people are starting businesses because AI is now around?

John SmallMtn (01:09:57)

Silver bullets are everywhere, and people have no end of trying to sell us these silver bullets. So there are a lot of pitfalls: “I’m going to go hire an agency to do these things, I’m going to do it all through GPT.” There’s a lot of ways to do it wrong. What’s one piece of advice you would give to a founder to help them stay on the right path?

Braden Wallake (01:10:21)

I got this from a book called Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell.

John SmallMtn (01:10:29)

You’re the second person to mention that book on this show in the past few weeks.

Braden Wallake (01:10:33)

No way, that’s interesting! People will often make a matrix. He made it really simple when figuring out what I’m doing each day, whether to figure out whether it should go to an agency or whatever—because you do need to start delegating things, you need to start outsourcing things, and you want to do it the right way.

Every day, I would write down everything that I did across the board. Then I would highlight it green if it gave me energy. I’d mark it red if it took away my energy. Then I would mark it with a dollar sign if it was a money-making thing. The things that were green and money-making, nobody was taking those from me. The things that were red and not money-making, those are the things I need to delegate: replying to emails, replying to this. Is it revenue-generating?

After you do the red tasks that aren’t revenue-generating, then you do the red tasks that are revenue-generating, and try to get those off your plate. You can still do the stuff that you enjoy—green—but really you just need to be spending your time on green, revenue-generating tasks. It’s just a way to figure out where to start helping other people. If Emily and I were to delegate different things, what she would want to keep on her plate is way different than what I would want to keep on my plate. Every founder is different.

Have you heard of the Wealth Dynamics personality test?

John SmallMtn (01:12:04)

I have not heard of Wealth Dynamics.

Braden Wallake (01:12:04)

It’s $99, but it’s all about your path to wealth. It takes in your—it’s probably similar to your DISC profiles, but it takes into account, “Okay, what does that mean towards becoming wealthy?” I think every person should take that, because it tells you the first people that you should be working with on your team, the people that you should have around you.

I’m a Supporter, so I just help people be successful. That’s what I am. But I need a Creator to create the things, and I need a Deal Maker who’s good at buying low and selling high. It’s really interesting on your path to wealth. Some people are Stars, like Taylor Swift is a Star kind of thing. It was one of the most interesting personality tests that I’ve taken.

It would be interesting to know yourself, because when you hire people… Earlier, I hired people that were just like me, because I got along with them. They were great, they were fun, we got along so well. And then we go on, and I’m like, “Wait, what the fuck? We’re all doing the same shit.” You need the people who you maybe don’t get along with as well personality-wise—you like to still get along with them, but they’re better at building out the processes or whatever it is that you’re really bad at. Then you can start to really build something better. So hire not just based on their skillset, too.

John SmallMtn (01:13:02)

I love that, because my business partner was coming out of that mode. He’d only ever hired people just like him, and he was a really high I-type—very creative, innovative, loves the chaos and everything. The way that he explained it one time, he goes, “Man, when things were going great, it was a party. But with a little bit of struggle, it was like 2:00 a.m. and the lights are coming on and everyone has to leave, and everyone’s in a hurry to leave.”

Whenever we did DISC and I came back as a C, he was still excited, because he thought I was a D-type because we just knew each other in Kung Fu. So he was like, “You’re C. Okay, that offsets my struggles, so let me try it anyway.” I got to come in learning all this stuff about differentiation and all this stuff around the idea that we’re allowed to be very different, we’re allowed to need different things and be really good at them.

It was very, very helpful, because I’d never seen any of that stuff before that, and I’d been in sales for over 10 years at that point. So I can’t wait to go take this, and I’ll probably make everybody on my team take it as well. So thank you for that, man. I really appreciate it.

Braden Wallake (01:14:26)

Yeah, if you buy… I’ll give you the link where if you buy five, you can get it for half price. I found it afterwards, or I would have bought all five myself instead of the one first. So there’s a link where you can get five for $250 instead of $99 a piece, so I’ll send you that link.

John SmallMtn (01:14:39)

Epic. Awesome, man. Yeah, please send me the link. I’m happy to do that. I take every one of these assessments that I possibly can. So if anyone who’s watching this has a favorite assessment, send it to me, right? Drop it in the Slack community, send it as an email, put it in the comments. I’ve taken a lot of these things. Every one of them makes me a little bit clearer on who I am and how I want to work, so drop them in the comments.

Braden, if people want to come hang out with you and figure out what HyperSocial is working on, where should they go? Where would you like to send them?

Braden Wallake (01:15:00)

LinkedIn would be the number one spot: go find me on LinkedIn. I think I’m maxed on connection requests, so you’d have to give me a follow. I think I’m at 29,700 connections, so it’s basically maxed out. If you can get a connection request in, do it; otherwise, just give me a follow there. That’s where we’ll be posting more stuff. Or go to gohypersocial.com and see what we have going on. You can meet with our team and chat with us about what we have going on there. We’re trying to get more blog posts out on that side, too. So those are the two best spots, for sure.

John SmallMtn (01:15:51)

Braden, really appreciate you doing this, my friend. I do think it’s going to help some founders, and I also think it’ll help some people who have been on the founding path for a while and might be having some struggles that they’ve not been able to put their finger on or label appropriately. So I really appreciate it.

Braden Wallake (01:15:55)

I hope so. Yeah, absolutely. No problem, thanks for having me. It was fun.

John SmallMtn (01:16:06)

Absolutely. We’ll talk soon.