Today we’re talking with Yam Regev, the founder of Zest.is, a content distillery focused on providing actionable content to its users. Yam shares how combining a human touch with automation became essential to Zest’s rapid growth.
Zest has gone from 0 to almost 18,000 weekly active users in just a year, and a lot of that growth is thanks to the fact that Yam personally responded to every single content submission when Zest first started.
That human touch created a powerful WOW moment for Zest’s users, which created a positive feedback cycle that brought them back over and over.
So listen to how Yam was able to achieve this super-human feat by being smart about when to automate & when to be human, and how his commitment to the unscalable led to Zest’s success.
(And make sure to tune in next week, where Louis and I are going share what the next phase of this show is going to look like.)
Enjoy!
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Today we’re talking with Josh Braaten, a marketing consultant and founder of Brandish Insights, about the lessons he learned when he formed his own Super PAC to take on the US government and fight for net neutrality.
He shares the backstory of what led him to create a Super PAC in the first place, and then deep-dives into the practical insights he gained while crafting a message to resonate with his target audience, such as:
Josh was a pleasure to speak with and someone I look forward to staying in touch with outside of the podcast, so I hope you find some value here as well.
Enjoy!
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Today we’re talking with Jane Garza & Kim Perkins from NOBL.io, an organization founded to help teams change the way they work for the better.
Jane & Kim share how they’ve helped teams successfully reach higher levels of motivation & collaboration.
And it’s a far cry from the rewards and punishment systems that researchers have learned from rats in mazes 60+ years ago.
Instead, they highlight the importance of:
In today’s episode, we talk to Focusmate founder Taylor Jacobson about human-to-human accountability and how it can help us beat procrastination and achieve our professional and personal goals.
If you’ve ever sat down to work on a task and then suddenly minutes—our hours—have passed without you accomplishing much, you’re not alone. Taylor experienced that situation enough times to know something had to change: so he created Focusmate, an app that pairs people with an accountability partner for live, virtual co-working sessions.
Focusmate’s vision is to improve the way millions of people work by helping them keep on task and get their jobs done. As you’ll hear in this episode, I tried it myself, and I can personally vouch for it!
In addition to hearing the story of how the app came about, we cover powerful ideas such as:
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Today we’re talking with Erica Peterson, the founder of Moms Can: Code.
When she became pregnant during her studies at West Virginia University, Erica was told that this ‘life choice’ did not fit with her career progression as a graduate student.
Instead of accepting that pregnancy and parenthood can hold someone back from professional achievement, Erica eventually created Moms Can: Code, a global community of moms who are learning to code and a training program to teach moms to code both online and in their local communities.
This is an important conversation about the role of women and parents in the (tech) workplace, and one that shows why it shouldn’t be a black or white decision between choosing to work or being there for your family. Enjoy!
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Today we’re speaking with George Mumford, the mindfulness coach to some of the world’s top performing athletes.
Over his 20+ year career, George has helped teams such as the LA Lakers, The Chicago Bulls, and the New York Knicks reach new levels of focus, flow and presence.
Both Michael Jordan & Kobe Bryant directly credit George with helping them level up their game, and Phil Jackson, the coach of the Laker’s and Bull’s during their winning streaks, calls George his secret weapon that allowed him to win 8 NBA championships.
So why are we featuring him on this podcast?
Because the state of presence and flow that he helps athletes, Olympians, and global executives to achieve is a state that allows us all to focus our full potential to the moment at hand, free of the stress of what’s coming and free of the baggage of what may or may not have just happened.
In other words, a state that enables you to reach your peak creativity, inspiration, motivation, and drive.
Enjoy!
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Today we’re talking with Peter Docker, co-author of the book, ‘Find Your Why.’
Peter is an Igniter and Implementation Specialist on Simon Sinek’s Start With Why team, where he’s helped companies in 88 countries around the world achieve the extraordinary by uncovering their higher purpose.
Peter shares several incredible stories about the power of finding your why, including:
Peter is an incredibly engaging speaker, and this conversation left me feeling charged and inspired, and I hope you end up feeling the same way.
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Today you’ll be hearing from Alice Karolina Smith, the founder of TheEthicalMove.org.
Alice shares a very unique story of how she went from dropping out of design school in Switzerland to being exposed to massive levels of income inequality in Bolivia – and how that led her to create an organization dedicated to breaking the cycle of consumerism.
It’s a story of how she reached a breaking point with traditional marketing methods that lead us to compromise our integrity, honesty, and transparency for a sale, and instead decided to focus her energy on encouraging companies to work towards serving the world around us.
In other words, to help companies succeed by putting people first.
Enjoy.
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Today we’re talking with André Morys, the CEO and founder of konversionsKRAFT, one of Europe’s most successful (and award-winning) Conversion Rate Optimization agencies.
André is a great embodiment of what a people-first leader looks like, not only when it comes to his clients but also his team.
As we’ll hear from André, putting his team first has led to greater productivity, better customer service, and more revenue in the long run.
And he really walks the talk. In fact, in this conversation, André shares with us about the time he fired his single biggest client that was bringing in over €750,000 a year because they were becoming too much of a headache for his on his team.
And it paid off. Not only did they make that money back, André’s team ended up surpassing their revenue expectations for that year and continued to do so.
We also get practical and talk about how he merges big data with personal, qualitative insights to deliver results for his clients.
So get ready for a great episode on the importance of focusing on employee happiness and the impact it can have.
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Today I’m happy to introduce Lori Schwanbeck, a lovely human being who’s been working as a mindfulness consultant with dozens of companies and organizations like Google, the U.N., and even the ministry of Bhutan.
In fact, she was still recovering from her jet lag from coming back from Bhutan when we had this conversation.
Lori shares with us how practicing mindfulness at work can help us to enhance our decision-making, think more creatively, and build stronger teams.
Lori also shares why it’s so important to be vulnerable, human, and be yourself at work in order to create connections with others, how that actually leads to incredibly powerful teams, and why mindfulness is such a powerful tool to enable all of that.
What I loved so much about this conversation was how Lori was so willing to get personal, and how she invited me to do the same. I opened up a lot during this interview and shared a few things myself about what it is about working at Hotjar that has enabled me to do the best, most effective work of my life.
She also walked me through two incredibly quick but effective mindfulness exercises that take less than a minute each but lead to some pretty meaningful insights, so I hope you follow along and do them as well when you come to them.
I’m so glad I had the chance to talk with Lori, and I hope you feel just as at home with her as I did.
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“You are who you are and that’s why we love you. That’s why we hired you. So don’t try to be someone else because we wanted you.” – Omer Molad
Today we’re talking with Omer Molad, the founder and CEO of the recruiting software startup, Vervoe, on how to bring a more human element into the hiring process.
Omer shares an incredibly personal story about how he learned to earn the trust of his team members’ while he was a platoon commander in the Israeli army in his early 20s.
That story alone is enough of a reason to listen to this episode, but Omer also talks about how he overcame the challenges & prejudices that he faced as an outsider to the tech industry in Melbourne, Australia while looking for work, and how that led him to develop a new way to hire that eventually became the heart of Vervoe.
What I loved about speaking with Omer was his complete openness and transparency, his willingness to admit that even as the CEO, he doesn’t have all the answers but is 100% willing to make the effort and find his way.
He’s definitely an inspirational figure, and I hope you get as much value out of listening to him share his stories as I did.
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I’m very excited to introduce today’s guests:
Nilima Bhat & Raj Sisodia, co-authors of Shakti Leadership and pioneers of the Conscious Capitalism Movement.
They join me to talk about how qualities traditionally considered to be more ‘feminine’ – such as empathy, compassion, vulnerability and even love – are helping businesses increase revenue and create higher levels of employee engagement and customer satisfaction.
And this isn’t just their opinion. They came to this interview packed with research and studies showing that companies that embody these qualities significantly outperform businesses that prize domination, competition, aggression, and winning at any and all costs.
These two make such a powerful case for the need to bring a people-first mindset into every aspect of business that if I could make this episode required listening for business leaders, I would.
So have a listen and learn more about what traditional, profit-oriented businesses are getting wrong, and how a new generation of companies is setting itself up for long-term success.
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How do you cultivate a healthy, open culture that empowers employees to thrive?
In today’s episode, we’re talking with Diana Chapman, the co-founder of The Conscious Leadership Group, about how to create a more authentic, people-focused culture at work.
Diana and her team have helped dozens of organizations, including Ebay, Asana, Whole Foods and more, to increase employee engagement and performance by eliminating drama, building trust, and cultivating a culture where authenticity, vulnerability, and transparency can take root.
And they’re getting results. In fact, Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, the co-founders of Asana, actually give every single one of their employee the chance to go through CLG’s leadership training, and credit that with helping them to more effectively achieve their company goals.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Diana is an incredibly open and inspiring person and was more than willing to share the exact exercises she guides companies through to help their employees to thrive.
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“I realized that I’m doing the same stuff as I was doing at the first launch, this is like launch number four, and I’m not growing like I should be. What’s the missing piece here?”
“What I discovered? There’s a big difference between your audience and your customers.”
- Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko.com
Today, we’re speaking with Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko.com, about the importance of talking to people in order to make sure your messaging is on point. I’ve been a fan of Brian’s for years now, and his site is one of my favorite sources for everything related to SEO and building backlinks.
Today, Brian is going to walk us through how sales of his flagship course, SEO That Works, started to stall by the 3rd or 4th launch, even though his email list was growing like crazy.
And no matter how much he looked at his analytics, he couldn’t figure out what was going wrong. UNTIL, that is, he started talking directly with his customers.
So listen closely and find out how Brian dramatically increased his launch numbers with a simple human-first approach.
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What does meditation and mindfulness have to do with success?
In today’s episode, you’ll hear from Sharon Salzberg, one of the first people to bring insight & mindfulness meditation to the US back in the 70s and 80s. She has taught meditation to thousands of people, including at retreats alongside the Dalai Lama.
So why meditation?
Because I’ve experienced & seen first-hand how meditation has helped me and others to develop the traits that are essential to succeeding by putting people first:
Empathy, compassion, presence, peace, decreased stress & anxiety, increased self-control, focus, and discipline, increased levels of energy, a heightened sense of well-being.
And the list goes on and on.
In fact, if there was only ONE thing that I would recommend others do if they want to succeed by putting people first, it would be making some kind of mindfulness or meditation practice a regular part of your life.
But don’t just take my word for it. Let’s listen to Sharon talk about her own experiences in bringing mindfulness meditation to a skeptical audience, what got her hooked to meditation, the scientific evidence behind the benefits of meditation, and how to easily get started without a lot of fuss.
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What happens when you go from being customer-centric to customer-obsessed?
In today’s episode, you’ll hear from David Cancel, the CEO of Drift, the company behind conversational marketing, which emphasizes 1-to-1 conversations with your potential customers over a more traditional sign up-to-drip email series.
So why are we featuring a company that starts these conversations with a chatbot, instead of humans?
Because David, a 5-time startup founder and former Chief Product Officer at HubSpot, has without a doubt one of the most human approaches to understanding his customers that I’ve ever come across.
But he wasn’t always this customer-focused. In fact, he stumbled onto this approach almost by accident 10 years into his now 20 year stretch in SaaS, and it’s what has helped set Drift apart in the already crowded messaging market.
In this episode, David and I discuss:
He also shares the biggest insights that he himself has gotten from his personal interactions with customers.
Honestly, David was a GOLDMINE of information on how to run a customer-focused company. So have your favorite pen and notebook handy, and get ready to take a ton of notes.
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Just how much of an impact can being transparent and vulnerable have on your business?
In today’s episode, we’re talking with Alaura Weaver, a copywriter who specializes in helping people speak ‘human,’ about the effect that storytelling can have on your business and how being transparent and vulnerable in your communication can create meaningful relationships with your customers.
She also shares a powerful story about the human cost of putting profit before people that’s definitely worth listening to.
Alaura is a contributing writer to CopyHackers, one of the my favorite Copywriting resources online, and is the story editor and content manager for the PRX podcast, “Inflection Point.”
In today’s episode, you’ll learn:
So if you want to discover how to communicate your story in a way that can help you grow your business, then this is definitely the right episode for you.
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What do you do when you take a massive gamble on an initiative you think is a sure bet, and then it almost tanks your company?
In today’s episode, Peep, the founder of CXL, one of the most popular conversion optimization blogs on the internet, shares:
How the launch of the CXL Institute training program completely bombed, left the company with only 30 days worth of cash, and got Peep to the point where he was almost ready to pull the plug and let his whole team go.
BUT, he also shares how thanks to his people-first approach, Peep and his team were able to turn things around and start generating a profit.
We talk about the exact steps Peep and his team took to understand the needs of their customers as the ship was going down, including:
So if you’re interested in hearing how one of the top minds in CRO managed to rescue a sinking ship, you’ll definitely want to listen to this episode.
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Are you able to ship fast and get your ideas out there? Or do you get stuck in the ‘perfectionism’ trap?
In today’s episode, Sarah is going to share how she launched a brand-new User Experience course and watched it take off, before she even prepared a single lesson.
It’s a great story of how to validate a concept before even putting pen to paper by listening to your potential customers, and how to enlist your early users into creating an even more successful final product.
You’ll get to hear from Sarah about:
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