Equation of Excellence

Rabah (00:01.228)
All right, folks, three, two, one. Welcome back to another episode. Your favorite DTC podcast, Equation of Excellence. I am joined with someone I've been lurking on for quite some time, has built a bunch of different empires and working on his biggest one, Motion, Reza Kajabi. Did I hit it? OK, amazing. Thank you for coming on the show. know.

Reza (00:21.359)
Yes, sir.

Rabah (00:26.664)
I had to grease some palms and was hawking down your partnerships person to get you on the calendar. And here we are. So I'm very excited about it. So thanks for joining the show.

Reza (00:35.961)
Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me.

Rabah (00:37.774)
What's new in your world? How are you? guess I'm kind of jumping the shark. For people that don't know you, kind of give us like the elevator pitch. when I was doing the research, didn't realize you had your hands in like a bunch of little different things. I didn't realize that. And then it's kind of culminating in motion right now. But yeah, give people some background and let them know who you are, what you build, what you're building, that kind of thing.

Reza (00:49.08)
Hahaha

Reza (00:59.663)
Sure. So I, I've been building around commerce enablement coming on, onto around 10 years now. I joined a startup. Yeah, it's wild. I joined a startup that was, if you're familiar with fair, what they do today. So this startup was like basically building a similar version of that very, very early on. And I met my two co -founders for a company that we started after that called shoelace.

Rabah (01:14.498)
Yeah? Yeah.

Rabah (01:26.38)
Yeah.

Reza (01:26.447)
And this was like, yes, that was 2015. We started working on that. Shopify had like 50 ,000 merchants at the time. The app store was like this new thing. And we were one of the first apps in the Shopify app store and just had been like, yeah, building around this space forever. At the time it was really interesting. Facebook was going more direct to advertiser. used to be that like, you you had to go through all these like third party platforms if you wanted to advertise.

Rabah (01:43.319)
What?

Reza (01:56.651)
on Facebook, but like they were prioritizing their pixel. And it was at this like perfect moment of Shopify would not be Shopify without like Facebook kind of just like showing up as this perfect distribution channel at exactly the right moment. And so it's like a fascinating time to be building around around around commerce. And so early on shoelace was an app that would help people basically integrate their Shopify and their Facebook store. So if you wanted to like sync your catalog, set up your pixel,

Rabah (02:09.902)
gonna integrate with you more.

Reza (02:26.819)
Before like people would have to go like go into their theme dot liquid files and like do all this like manual stuff. like, so that was that was shoelace. Eventually that became harder, like easier and easier to do. You didn't quite need a product for that anymore. And so like shoelace went through a bunch of twists and turns for many years. Eventually that business turned into a marketing agency. That was like, that was what for many years as we were pivoting that business, we just like did a bunch of work for people and like kind of accidentally built.

Rabah (02:31.768)
us.

Rabah (02:55.436)
Yeah.

Reza (02:56.815)
an agency and then several years after Corey Dobbin came and took over and now he's kind of running the show there. And right around the time that Shoelace kind of morphed into an agency, I know like my soul was always in software and it's always what I wanted to do. And then we went off and kind of built what eventually became Motion, which was also like a very interesting timing. Like this was right around iOS 14. It was right around the time where everyone was like, the industry shifted from

Rabah (03:21.421)
Yeah.

Reza (03:26.863)
audience targeting being like probably the biggest revenue lever everybody could pull. I remember all the videos around like how to run lookalike audiences and all these like different like hacks on basically audience targeting as a revenue lever. And then all of a sudden right around iOS 14, partly because of iOS 14, but actually think in a large part because of how good the algorithms got at audience targeting. It just meant that like people were not spending as much time and energy.

on that anymore and so then the whole thing became about creative and just opened up a can of worms and all kinds of different problems related to that workflow and then that kind of pulled us into building what became Motion and we can talk a lot about that but that's the short kind of history and I love this space and I'm kind of happy to have been introduced to this ecosystem and great to be building here.

Rabah (04:19.662)
That's the most fun people. I couldn't agree with you more, but B2B SaaS economics are definitely better than agency. It's just good, but. And also shout out to Corey. sent me, you guys did that really awesome custom pair of Air Force Ones. So the box is, I should have it up. man, now I'm embarrassed. But they're gorgeous. That burgundy red, yeah.

Reza (04:36.335)
I was impressed by that. I've not been involved in shoelace day to day for years. I saw Corey, he's doing a great job. And I saw that swag and I'm like, wow, that's good. It good work there.

Rabah (04:45.666)
He's wonderful guy.

Rabah (04:51.34)
Yeah, he's a wonderful guy. And I couldn't agree with you more because I've been in this. I'm an old fogey out here and I've been in this game for a minute too. And it was so interesting to see how quickly for me that shifted. It's almost like bankruptcy happens slower than you think and then faster than you think. I mean, deployment and targeting the shotgun method timber. I mean, just anything under the sun setting super high bid caps and then

putting a million dollar budget a day. I mean, the craziest, hackiest deployment stuff, targeting stuff, target people that use an Amex or are ready to shop. I mean, it just went on and on, right? And then that just essentially got, the juice just wasn't worth the squeeze where you're just doing all these little knobs where there's this big money lever over here of like, and it almost felt good because it was almost getting back to what

marketing is as its core of like giving a really awesome message of value and what's the job to be done, like kind of back to that through the creative versus just kind of hacking it through the deployment and targeting strategies.

Reza (06:05.337)
Yeah, exactly. It's kind of like if you if you were to buy a billboard somewhere where you have like high confidence that like your ICP is going to walk along here, don't worry about that. Like what do want to tell them? Like you have your ICP's attention. Like what do you want to say? And I think algorithms now just like and especially if you work in like talking to your ICP into your creative, it will find a way to get in front of the right person. It's just like what do you what do you want to what do want them to know? What do you want them? What do you want them to hear?

Rabah (06:28.277)
Exactly right.

Reza (06:33.015)
I think the other I heard someone say something I quite liked, is this idea that because now the ecosystem has gotten so mature, there's so many merchants, there's so much like attack on the consumers attention, not just from other ads, which is like this is what the person said that not your ads are not competing with other ads, they're competing with every other piece of content, which I thought is like a perfect way to describe it. like,

Rabah (06:56.622)
Exactly right.

Reza (06:59.375)
You you need your ads to be engaging and it's to stop the scroll. It needs to like get people to convert and buy, but like it's doing that in this like sea of crowdedness amongst everybody else. And so there's a lot of time and energy that goes into that as well as the fact that the average shelf life for an, for an, like visual asset is not very long. Like you need to constantly push out new stuff. And, and so, yeah, I agree. It's like right around 2020, I think like

Rabah (07:19.597)
Yes.

Reza (07:26.681)
COVID times, everything just suddenly became like all about creative. It was really interesting to see how that happened.

Rabah (07:33.186)
Yeah, it is interesting. What do you miss about agency life, and what do you not miss? Because that used to be my old life, too. And it's such an interesting quagmire of incentives and headwinds and life and.

Reza (07:37.967)
Well, you know, it.

The thing that's funny is that I never actually fully got into agency life. It's like the moment we, the moment we fully embrace SheLace as an agency, I kind of just like went back to back to building. But I think the things that are, that are really interesting about running an agency and obviously now like we have a lot of agency clients. Like the thing that I think is really cool is that you could spend a lot of time on strategy and like constantly thinking about like new things and new new strategy to execute.

Rabah (07:52.046)
You did it right then.

Rabah (08:06.424)
Right.

Reza (08:15.821)
Whereas in software, it's kind of like things take a lot longer and you're like building things that take that take a much longer time. And so I think for people who like this really rapid cycle of you have an idea, you strategize it and like you bring it out into the world. Like it's a lot more fast pace. Whereas things you almost have to like push against gravity to make software move fast, especially as a company starts to scale. But, but each, each have their own like challenges and, and benefits for sure.

Rabah (08:37.752)
so well said.

Rabah (08:45.27)
Yeah, that's so well said. Honestly, I think you did it right because they joke the don't buy the boat, but just make buddies with the friends that has the boat. And that's kind of what you did. You got all the positive and externalities from the agency, but you didn't really have to dive deep into the negative ones because you nailed it. I think everything's it's just a more volatile industry. It just is what it is. You can do good and get fired. You can do bad and get fired. You can stay hired, but not do good. I mean,

Reza (08:53.315)
Hahaha!

Rabah (09:13.066)
It's just a wild world. But I will say for all the little young guns out there, I actually think agency before brand is a really good move because you get to see this really awesome constellation of problems, personality types, brands, different offer levers, et cetera. And then when you figure out what you really like, then you can niche down to a brand. that's a little tidbit for the young guns out there. What really excited you about Motion?

Like obviously you saw the market opportunity of like, okay, creative is going to be the next kind of, I liked how you put that revenue lever. And then you're just like, okay, cool. mean, because Facebook reporting, especially in this context is not super ideal. What made you be like, okay, let's bet the house on this. This seems like a really awesome opportunity because it's a fantastic product. We at Fermat recommend it to all our brands and we use it for all of our customers. And it is really.

It's really accelerated too, I have to say. I think you guys done a really good job in terms of innovating on the product. But any what really excited you about this intersection of tech and marketing?

Reza (10:17.923)
Yeah, the thing that I found really interesting and it continues to be what drives us today is this idea that as soon as creative became really important, the thing that became really critical for brands was like, even though creative became really important, you couldn't just be creative and solve these problems. Creativity alone was not going to drive high performing assets. It was really this combination between

having like the rigor of a data analyst, also the creativity and the imagination of a real creative person. And it really is like the harmony of those two things together that drives really big impact. And we saw that as like, this is a really fun problem because these two types of people could not be more different than one another. Like the left brain, right, right, right brain divide. Like it's extremely different skill sets and everybody.

Rabah (10:57.838)
It's beautiful.

Rabah (11:08.791)
Yes.

Reza (11:13.881)
has always heard this idea of this like unicorn profile, this person who is like equally creative, equally data driven and like, you know, those people are so rare. And our view is that like the market is now in an environment where it needs to like mass produce this persona, right? And like, that's the way that we thought about it. You think about like a country that's at war or something, and then they have to like go and build all these like manufacturing plants. Like we need to

Rabah (11:33.036)
Yes, it's really well said.

Rabah (11:38.509)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Reza (11:42.145)
increase our supply of like X or Y because of some like crisis. And I think, I think that's what's happening now where this like, this persona call it like the Dara Denny, the Jess Bachman, like these people like really able to manage both of those things. I think that's gone from this like rare mythical person to actually now critical for every brand to have one. And every individual who's either coming on from the data side or coming from the creative side to like develop themselves.

Rabah (11:51.906)
Yeah.

Get it.

Reza (12:11.907)
just enough to be dangerous on that other skill set. And then they become like, true weapons at their, at their companies. And so we thought that as like, you know, there's product to build here to help facilitate the people who are more data -driven to be more creative or the creative people to be more data -driven. Like we've been referring to that role as like creative strategist is like this person who is the equal balance of both of those. And what got us really excited is that besides all of the product to build around here, like there's just a lot of.

Rabah (12:17.612)
Real weapons.

Reza (12:42.123)
Education is a lot to talk about related to this problem. It's like motions been really committed to like creating a ton of really valuable content around this problem space. And so it just felt like there is a lot here. Like we could spend over a decade just like working on this problem. And so it felt like felt worth it to go to go all in.

Rabah (12:43.256)
Yes.

Rabah (13:00.61)
That's beautifully put, man. I think that's exactly right. And what I really love about what you guys are doing, especially on the content side with you guys just ripped that big content series with Dara, Jess, Bear, everybody. I thought that was brilliantly executed. But more so in the B2B SaaS, I kind of oversimplified utilities and accelerants. And so a utility is, I do the thing?

If I can't do the thing without the thing, then you're a utility. So Shopify, e -commerce, ESPs, SMS, social snowball, or super affiliate for affiliate. You need those things. Whereas Canva is like an accelerant, right? But Canva has done such a good job of integrating so much where I think you can convert yourself from an accelerant into a utility by penetrating workflows.

And all the top tier creative people I know rely on motion. And so I just see that as such a cool and really positive signal from the market that you're shifting into that utility where you're going to rip motion out of my dead cold hands kind of thing. And I think that it really aligns just from the Peanut Gallery with your internal thesis of how can we generate this on -ramp, kind of like that Super Mario Turbo strip of being able to take somebody that's either analytical and give them the creative juices.

or bring over that art director style person and attach metrics to what they're doing to get them more interested in actual business impact and not just creating these unique incredible angles that are great. And like you said, you need both, right? You can't just have pie in the sky art director, but you also can't just have this stodgy person that's living in the spreadsheet all day. That melding of both is really where all the value is generated.

Reza (14:40.653)
Yeah. And it's almost like the, the, the accelerant and, and utility example, like it applies to motion, but I think it's also applying to this role itself, like this creative strategist who is art and science. It's not like it used to be this like rare accelerant. And now it's like, you actually can't live without this. And so it's becoming critical. The number of people that I've seen in the last couple of years who have gone from like, wait,

Rabah (14:50.904)
Guess. So well said.

Reza (15:06.595)
What's a creative strategist? So like, my God, we absolutely need to hire a creative strategist because it's such a force multiplier on everything that we do. So like no brainer once you have certain spend level.

Rabah (15:18.89)
I couldn't agree with you more. And not only that, as the capitalists I am, they command a premium. Like before they're like, dude, I can't afford them. They're so rare and unique. Even if I knew one, like I just don't have the money to pay for them. Where now you're almost in a weird way democratizing creative strategists where it's like, OK, guys, I'm making them in an era where you can buy them for a market rate that isn't

absolutely detrimental to your economics and almost like a win -win for everybody where these people are commanding premiums but also having the impact on the business that they wouldn't be able to get elsewhere.

Reza (15:55.939)
Yeah. Yeah. We like, we view our mission as like, how do we accelerate this job of the creative strategist in every single way? Like, how do we create more creative strategists? How do we help the creative strategists become more successful in their jobs? And like, you know, we've been focused on this for the last almost four years now. And in the early earliest time of that, was like, wait, creative strategists, like there's barely anybody with that job title. And like most people, the way we, we, we released this like,

Rabah (16:03.086)
That's such a cool idea.

Reza (16:26.005)
ebook was maybe like two, two and a half years ago called Becoming a Creative Strategist. And we had this hat on it and the hat had creative strategists. And the reason we put the hat was that the job was so rare that it was like someone just needs to wear the hat at the company. Like your job is probably growth market or a media buyer. But like once you put the creative strategist hat on now, like this is, these are like the four or five parts of your workflow that are really serious. And

You know, so we were, we were always okay with like, doesn't matter if it's not a full -time job or not. But if it, even if it's somebody doing the role kind of like side of desk, at least take it very seriously as a discipline and say like, here are the parameters of creative strategy. It's almost similar. If you're familiar in, in the SaaS world, like the rev ops role, I think it's quite, it's quite comparable, like kind of means a little bit of different things to different people. Everyone kind of has one. Sometimes people have it, but not in.

Rabah (17:13.39)
moves.

Reza (17:21.931)
in title, but they're kind of doing it and everyone knows it's important. And so that's the one that we point to that are like, there's some comparables there in, in, in the SaaS world.

Rabah (17:31.598)
For people that, because most of our listeners are DTC focused, the B2B SaaS motion, especially when it's sales led, it's a business of its own. I mean, it is so, especially too, because most marketers live in HubSpot, most salespeople live in Salesforce, so there's this kind of like total alignment there. then it would, again, no judgment on DTC, I did it my whole life.

Reza (17:42.723)
Mm

Rabah (17:58.9)
It's awesome, but it is sales on easy mode. When you get to a B2B SaaS motion, even if it's self -serve, like you guys have a self -serve slash sales led model, we're only sales led here at Fermat. It is so sophisticated and it is incredible how many knock on effects changing one thing does. you're absolutely right. And the thing is, you can't let it stew for too long.

because people like me, have to go and defend my budget to the CFO or VP of Finance to say, hey, I need $2 million this quarter to spend. This is why I need it. If you don't have any semblance of where the lead's coming from, who are the leads, where it is, that's such a per, it's, yeah, I'm getting just goosebumps thinking about it. I hate it. Because the other thing is it's that weird shared, it's a quasi -company resource, but there's a marketing ops person, but they're usually the same as the rev ops person. They're just.

kind of switching the hat like, I'm wearing the marketing ops today, but I'm doing it. It's a fucking quagmire, man. It is. It's so well said because like you said, it's a force multiplier. Like if I, if you get your rebops in order, man, you can really scream.

Reza (18:55.886)
Yeah.

Reza (19:05.411)
And so for creative strategists, the way we think about it is like, you know, if you, a creative strategist does their job well, they're like paying for themselves many times over, And so if it is a revenue or creative role, then there's not this question of like, can I afford to hire one? It's really like, there's maybe a question of scale, but like, if you hire a salesperson at a SaaS company, like they should pay for themselves and like drive you revenue. so like,

If you think about a brand that let's say even spends a million dollars a year in media spend, even like say less than that, like half a million dollars a year or more in media spend, then like, if you have one person or like half of someone's like full -time energy going towards the best creative process that's going to drive the most revenue impact on that spend, like it doesn't take a lot of impact for that to like pay for itself.

from a job standpoint, especially when revenue is the biggest lever. And what I find interesting in all the debates, like you have the attribution wars, you have the cost cap wars, like you have so many of these like battlegrounds in DTC, but every one of these camps notice that like no one disputes that creative is the most important. Like in the most recent like cost cap versus like no cost cap, both sides are like, yeah, creative is number one, creative is the most important thing, but like here's our differences and like, you

Rabah (20:12.096)
Attribution.

Reza (20:33.565)
strategy, but the commonality is that creative is absolutely the most important thing in any way that you look at it. And so it's so important to like put the time and I think people don't ever an appreciation for just how hard it can be to get it right because you need to balance the art and the science. And the first thing that I find happens to people is that like, wait, once they actually figure out creative is really important is that, wait, I need to produce a ton of volume here.

Rabah (20:50.264)
Very hard.

It's very hard.

Reza (21:01.643)
And so then you work backwards from that of like, need to produce all this volume, like every week or every other week. And I can't just throw stuff at the wall. Like I need a process for this. And then you kind of very quickly stumble into this idea that you have to find a way to balance the creativity and the kind of rigor and the data side. And only through being able to put those things together, then you have a process that like constantly ships winning creative.

Rabah (21:20.248)
Yes.

Rabah (21:27.756)
so spot on and what I think too is what Motion allows you to do is build the stories around the data, which is I think people experience the world in stories and not in data. And so without that ability, you can just get into just saying numbers, which just doesn't land or it's very lazy work. No, totally, totally tracking.

Who are your kind of like either B2B SaaS or just in general, any kind of CEO muses or executive muses or companies that you really like what they do or aspire to or influence you in an inspirational way?

Reza (22:02.203)
I have always been the biggest fan of intercom and intercom is my favorite company. remember in like early, early days of shoelace, like this probably like six months into starting the company. We didn't know if it's going to work or not. I sent a cold email to Des Traynor, the co -founder, and I read all of his work. I was just like a huge fan. And I was like, Hey, listen, I love intercom. Can I put you on our investor update list? Because in case

Rabah (22:07.522)
Yeah!

Rabah (22:17.068)
Yeah.

Reza (22:31.415)
our company doesn't work and it fails and I have to get a job again. I only want to work at one place and it's intercom. And I just want you to have like context on me if I ever come knocking around for a job and like, that's the best. he, he, he replied and he's like, of course, like put me on your list. And then he ended up investing in shoelace. yeah, yeah, sometime after. And, and so that's, that's, that's, been great over the years. And so intercom, I'd say it's like, like,

Rabah (22:37.304)
That's exactly.

Rabah (22:50.282)
Really?

Reza (22:59.521)
number one company. love them. I was fascinated by the years of like the intercom versus drift for people like to pay attention to that. There was a time where like intercom felt like they kind of lost their way as they tried to do a little bit of everything like drift came around. started yelling and screaming about like sales and revenue. And like I was kind of intimidating to to the intercom team, I think. And like they spread out. I think for some years, like all the intercom fans like

Rabah (22:59.694)
strong.

Rabah (23:06.855)
Yep.

Rabah (23:11.149)
Yes.

everything.

Rabah (23:18.829)
Yes.

Reza (23:27.395)
What happened here? Like it just felt like, you know, things kind of went off the rails and then, and the CEO comes back and like in the last year or two, things just seemed to be on fire over there. They're looking at AI like exceptionally well. And so huge, huge intercom fan love, love those guys and how they build companies.

Rabah (23:28.525)
Yes.

Rabah (23:37.612)
Yes.

Rabah (23:45.346)
Yeah, I followed, my gosh, I'm losing his name now, Ryan. He did a lot with their product and stuff and they had some really awesome ways of looking at product. got to see him speak at a, them and Bob Mesto were really good friends and Bob is a super muse of mine. did jobs to be done with Clayton Christensen. He's just a brilliant guy, great books, but.

there there's some killers over there but I did get that vibe too it almost male chimp a little bit a little bit where you're like it felt like they were the leaders in X and then like you kind of come back and look at it again you're like wait I thought you got hold on and then but it does feel I will say their upsell motion is incredible it's like you want two more breasts or three more breasts okay here's some more money because it's like spirit airlines right I'm gonna get the get in at $50 and you're like dude I end up paying $300 for the ticket anyways but

Reza (24:17.132)
Mm

Reza (24:21.059)
Yes, right.

Reza (24:29.677)
Hahaha!

Reza (24:37.624)
Hahaha.

Rabah (24:38.74)
It's a really cool product. We built a lot of really cool stuff on top of it. it's such an interesting one. Really good pick, though. I didn't realize SF'd. What do you guys like? You guys sit across a lot of data and stuff like that. Are there any trends you're seeing? Is there anything that's of note? Do you think the presidential election is going to have any really deuterious effects to?

the market in terms of ad buying because CPMs are definitely going to go up, especially as things get closer and they have to dump those budgets in. Yeah, I guess what are you seeing? Where's your head out there?

Reza (25:16.867)
Yeah, that was interesting. I hadn't thought about that one, but I've seen it kind of come up a little bit. I suppose it could definitely have an impact. But, you know, for the most part, the thing about Metta is that like it's always been pretty wild and unpredictable and like people kind of find a way to, to, to ride the waves as they happen. I think the things are like, you know, what are the things that you can control? And from a trend standpoint, that's definitely the thing that I have found.

Rabah (25:36.717)
move the curve.

Reza (25:46.275)
to be the most interesting is that when an ecosystem matures like ours has, especially seeing it like I remember the days where people would put like white background, product shot, and then like make bank, right? Yeah.

Rabah (25:58.142)
send it. Yes! I put a dollar in, Facebook gives me four out, like the glory days.

Reza (26:04.343)
And like everybody understands that like it's harder now, right? Like, then the question is like, how much harder, what does it, what does it actually mean that it become harder? And I think sometimes it's not, it's not easy to like fully understand the amount of effort that goes into making something work in a mature environment versus like the early golden days. And so when you look at the companies like

Rabah (26:27.437)
Yes.

Reza (26:30.553)
hex clad and Ridge wallet and true classic and like these ones that everybody loves and respects. Like when you peek under the hood there to see like how they run their processes, it's like, it's phenomenal what they're doing. And it's, it's, it's very, very impressive. And I think that's where people get the most stuck is that like, you know, sometimes I remember this, I think it was Jeff Bezos wrote this letter talking about this very interesting example.

Rabah (26:31.864)
Yep. Yep.

Reza (26:58.291)
on if you want to teach somebody how to do a handstand and you want to like, you know, it's, it's a difficult process. hard to learn. And his point was that the first thing to do is you want to spend a lot of time upfront, helping them understand the scope that's required. So it's like, if you want to learn how to handstand, you're not going to get it in a day or two days or three days or in a week, like really drilling in this idea that it's going to be.

Rabah (27:19.948)
Right.

Reza (27:25.167)
pretty insane, you're probably gonna have to do like hours and hours and hours for this like very long period of time. It's gonna suck forever. And it's gonna feel like you can't get it going. And at some point, it'll work out like really communicating that if you want to achieve this ability to do a handstand, understand the effort that's going to go into it here. And I think that is what's missing often when people are like, want to watch a YouTube video or two and be like, take this tactic and like,

plug it in. It's like, sorry, like those, it's not the, it's not the growth hack days anymore. There's always like some cool thing, like some random thing, like, I don't know, Morella Crespi, who's a great creative strategist. She, she talked about this one thing, like, I don't know, the sound first approach to running ads and like, that was like a cool idea and a bunch of things like that, that are early new, cool things to do, but then like arbitrage windows, like pretty, pretty short.

Rabah (28:07.938)
She's amazing.

Rabah (28:21.697)
Exactly right.

Reza (28:23.691)
And so I think that is the trend is like the inputs and the amount of effort that goes into the inputs and like building a good process that constantly produces winning creative. I think that's the thing that people under appreciate when they see like a Jess Bachman, for example, and you're like, wow, this guy's really good. It's like, okay, well have a look at how he does his work. And then it's very, yeah.

Rabah (28:41.411)
Yes.

Rabah (28:45.58)
It's wild. I'm really close to Jess. He's a brilliant dude.

Reza (28:49.345)
It's very fascinating. And so like, just takes effort. And that's why it kind of comes back to the value of having like a full -time person do this kind of work is that it's almost like an acknowledgement of the scope of effort required to make it work. I think that's like a mental shift that brands who want to succeed in this kind of an environment, like that's really important to get right. And everything else is just an output. It's like the different

hacks and like things that work. so how do you build the machine, right? That like spits out all of the right things at the right time. And I think that's, that's the biggest, like highest leverage activity that brands can do that, like to not have one winner, but like consistently produce winners. And I think that's where, the Hexclad of the world, the Jess is like people like that really get it right.

Rabah (29:41.334)
Yeah, I couldn't be more aligned with you because I've been in this game, like I said, a long time and I've not once been able to spot the winner. And so once you realize like a thesis driven approach is so much better because one you don't get into right and wrong or winning and losing. It's did I get learnings or did I find something that I can then elevate into a higher spend campaign? And it almost becomes fun because there's this this kind of scientific method of like thesis test results was it

validated invalidated and then let's try it or do derivations of it. Yeah, I absolutely love that. I think it's spot on.

Reza (30:14.639)
as well as things like what are other people doing? What are trends that are happening on organic social? What are interesting cultural moments that are important that might have an impact for this very brief time period? And so that's where the art side, customer psychology and all of the non -quantifiable, extremely qualitative, creative things come in that

you actually can't discount that. this is I find really fascinating. And people try to build a process and they get too rigorous and too spreadsheet. Then they're like, wait, actually you need to be really creative. And so what are the inputs that go into fueling the creative side? Like, yes, data is important. Yes. Like the quantitative baseline is important, but what are the things that we're doing that is going to fuel our creativity? Like, I don't know, having a meeting, looking at three things that

we found on social and talking about why that was great. then like a abstract conversation with the team, for example. And I think you need to balance both of those.

Rabah (31:20.91)
Very demure, very mindful response, Reza. See what I did there, kids? See what I did there? No, there's a great quote. It's actually on my refrigerator of the top 10. And it's perfect results count, not a perfect process. Break the rules, fight the law. Let's go, Phil Knight. But I think that's such a perfect caveat, because I'm a big systems autonomy guy. I've found when you get too deep into the systems, people start to worship the systems, not the outcome.

Reza (31:23.605)
Hahaha!

Reza (31:50.626)
Mm

Rabah (31:50.734)
And I've been at places where they're incredible at measuring themselves about how much they suck versus actually doing good work, if that makes sense, because the system is just on this pedestal. And you need a system because you can't recreate the wheel. Like, again, I'm really good friends with Jess. And he has a very sophisticated system. But it's only there to free up the mental load, to relieve himself of the cognitive load of having to recreate the wheel. And so now he can go do the things that actually do add value.

I think that's so spot on. I'd be remiss not to ask you about AI. How are you guys going to integrate it? What are you thinking of it? And then at the macro level, because creative is one of the most interesting places, in my opinion, that AI actually can be applied, whether it's creating it, whether it's recommending it, whether it's analyzing it, giving you top hooks, giving you headlines that perform, creating headlines, et cetera. How are you guys approaching it? What's your kind of macro thesis on it? And then

How do you think it's actually gonna impact the role of the creative strategist?

Reza (32:51.681)
sure. Yeah, it's, we've taken an interesting approach with AI, we've still yet to release a, you know, kind of AI checkbox, we ship the thing. And, know, a year and a half ago, and when things start to get really interesting with AI, we looked at it, and we're like, things are really going to accelerate here. And if we keep if we start building, we're probably going to waste a lot of engineering cycles, because the models are moving so fast, that

Rabah (33:00.333)
Yeah.

Rabah (33:19.362)
Very well said.

Reza (33:20.239)
you know, it's just going to be like keeping up with them is going to be pretty crazy. It feels like now they're at a point where they're obviously still going to keep moving extremely fast, but like they've stabilized a little bit in their maturity. And so now we've been spending a lot of time internally playing around and trying to build things because the thing that's always been obvious is that AI is going to play a critical role in every piece of software for sure. Particularly when it comes to creative, like

Rabah (33:46.157)
Yes.

Reza (33:49.377)
It's such an interesting application. so like, I think of our world as three buckets, there's distribution. So everything that platforms do to like run the ads and like get them in front of the right people. We've seen AI do phenomenal work there already, right? And it's, it's largely why targeting is now a solved problem because algorithms are just really good at, at distribution and figuring out who to get it in front of, which by the way, side note for all the B2B folks, Meta

Rabah (33:51.362)
Yes.

Reza (34:16.995)
And we don't, there's not a ton here, but just a fun fact, beta B2B was always very tough on meta because you'd go to LinkedIn and you target people based on their like job title. And you can never really do that in meta, but now, and we've seen a lot of this internally. you just put your kind of ICP inside of your creative, you can kind of get in front of the right people for B2B on meta. And I think that's actually a secret that most B2B advertisers don't quite understand yet, but like an example of just how good audience targeting.

seems to have gotten. like AI kind of solved the distribution side. On the production side, which is the other part of the equation, like incredible stuff happening there with generative AI companies like captions and like others who doing really good work at being able to produce new creative. And then there's everything in the middle. And the part around like producing creative and distributing creative, those are areas that like

our views are like we play in that environment, but not particularly interested in creation, not interested in distribution, but everything that happens in between around coming up with the right ideas, figuring out what works, what didn't work and where to go next. That's the, that's the part where just like as a product we're very interested in and our application of AI is particularly around that. And so one way to think about it is, you know, you can, as all these like generative AI products become really good at

figuring out like what being able to create interesting things. think we're probably years away from anyone is able to create anything at the cost of zero. Like I'm kind of taking that for granted and like just a matter of time that that's happening. Then the question is like, how do you decide what to create? Right? Because you still have to do that. Like you still have to figure out what it is we create. And that's the part that we're most interested in and thinking about a lot of work. We obviously have like huge data set on, you know, how we can help people get to

Rabah (35:55.032)
Correct.

Reza (36:14.945)
an answer on figuring out like what to do next basically and what's worked. And so our focus is very much around everything creative strategy. not particularly interested in creation and distribution either. so within creative strategy, there's just like, we're having a lot of fun with it internally now. think we'll have some announcements in the coming months for people around, you know, what we're releasing with AI, but

It's just a no brainer that it's going to, it's going to play a really, really big part in the motion product, as well as frankly, every software product that like doesn't die basically in the next, in the next few years. And like, and that's kind of been our approach with it is that it has quickly gone from this like novel thing that you could probably take advantage of to now like it's pretty equally accessible to everyone. And so it's like a pretty even playing field. So it's almost like saying, you know, AWS is available.

to everyone. It's you know, I mean, it's like, it's, it's, it's, it's really fascinating that it's there. And I think every software company has to find a way to incorporate it. And for us, the use cases are very simple. Like, for example, motion solved a really interesting problem for people where if you were doing analysis on a spreadsheet before, it was hard to consume the content, play the video, actually visualize it. And like we solved that and made it a lot easier to like

Rabah (37:11.608)
Yes.

Reza (37:38.627)
go through the data and like figure things out. But largely you still have to use motion to figure out what am I looking for? Like what is actually the answer? What is the right comparison? How do I set up my report? And that's been like the number one thing that customers had always asked us for is like, can you tell me what's next? Can you tell me, know, give me insight into things that I shouldn't have to go and like look for myself. And those are all the things that we're working on.

Rabah (37:45.571)
Yes.

Reza (38:05.423)
to share with with customers once they're already

Rabah (38:09.522)
That's super exciting. Okay, two more questions. One more about AI and then two, how you structure and manage your team. What do think of AI influencers? Do you think that's going to be big or do you think it's going to flop? Because I can't, the videos are getting so good now that I'm like, man.

Reza (38:21.775)
I

I think it, I think it's going to work. The like one obvious application is like, think about it as, real celebrities. So take like, let's take Hexclad and Gordon Ramsey, right? That's like a great partnership and Gordon's probably very busy and he probably needs to like time it so that they can like film new stuff. I think of like the one really good application is like the likeness of Gordon for Hexclad to be able to use that more efficiently.

Rabah (38:36.354)
Yes. Yes.

Rabah (38:40.898)
Yes.

Interesting. OK, I see where this is headed.

Rabah (38:52.193)
Interesting.

Reza (38:53.409)
Right? Like, cause that takes the personality of a real person and it just makes it a lot more efficient to create cycles of new content from that. That is for sure going to work. And then there's like, there individuals who are AI first personalities who will become popular? I don't know. That's interesting. It's like a cultural question that maybe yes, but the first one feels obvious.

Rabah (39:01.985)
hats.

Rabah (39:15.65)
That's super interesting. mean, that's RIP, but that's what Cameo could have actually been. That's the move there, because that was always the problem, is like, you need the synchronous time. But if I sign off on that, that's actually low -key brilliant. I didn't think of that. That's really smart. I really love that. OK, how do you structure your team? What do you think of remote, hybrid, in -office? Like, what are your thoughts there?

Reza (39:22.041)
Should have

Reza (39:27.661)
Yes, right.

Reza (39:45.481)
I would love to do five days a week in office. That would be the dream. But I think it's just not practical. I think it's just not practical. And therefore, just...

Rabah (39:55.094)
In terms of cost structure or ask on employees or like where does it impracticality stem from?

Reza (39:59.887)
I think people are way too, so right now we have employees in like six different countries, even within like, yeah, different time zones. Time zone is not the worst. our furthest time zone east is like Western Europe. I don't think we have anybody past Western Europe. It's not so bad.

Rabah (40:06.34)
six timezoned?

Rabah (40:16.644)
that's not bad. Yeah, those are great hours actually. prefer, I'm gonna start doing three months in Europe. I prefer those like Spanish hours. You get your morning, nobody knows you, and then you have your evenings for the busy work, if you will.

Reza (40:27.523)
I like that,

Reza (40:31.459)
Yeah, yeah, that's cool. And so I, the only reason I like in person is that the amount of things that happen, like after work conversations, like collaboration, like it's very, very difficult to produce that.

Rabah (40:41.324)
degree. Meetings, I hate meetings but they're so much more efficient in person.

Reza (40:47.279)
Yeah. And so I think dream scenario, you can have like 50, 100, 200 people all living in like a commutable distance from an office. But I just don't think that's, that's like possible. Anyway, like have a bunch of people we probably have. We probably have like 10 people around Toronto and even to get those people to come to a central office is going to be hard because like it's a long commute time for people in just one city. And so I think.

Rabah (40:56.077)
Yes.

Rabah (41:11.316)
The traffic is brutal there.

Reza (41:15.439)
from a practicality standpoint, at least for us, that's never happening. But I do love it. And so then we try to create as many in -person opportunities as possible. So once a year, we have an entire company retreat. We just had ours. And then what we're trying to do now is every quarter do a leadership offsite in person. Yeah, so I think that's really valuable and important. And then every team try to meet up.

Rabah (41:26.219)
I love that.

Rabah (41:36.725)
I love that.

Reza (41:45.099)
once or twice a year. you know, things like maybe if you have a new like cohort of employees, try to do something in person for that cohort or something, like just find as many excuses as possible to get people in person as frequently as possible, accepting the fact that like remote first is, is not going away, but maximize as much in person time as possible is the way we're trying to do it.

Rabah (41:46.646)
It's beautiful.

Rabah (42:09.772)
Yeah, I love that take. That's what so we're kind of like a hub model here at Fermat. We have HQ's SF New York office and Austin office for the marketing team and then a smattering of people across the globe. And then we have a big development team out in Bangalore and an office out there. And we basically do what you're suggesting where every team or has a quarterly meeting like a quarterly off site. And then there's two by annual.

or there's bi -annual company meetups that are more like rah rah rah kind of stuff. And then we run a leadership every quarter where we'll get all the kind of org leaders together. Because yeah, it's tough. It's tough. There's pros and cons to both. ultimately, for me, what I've realized is I think it's basically the boss is prerogative, and then you just need to hire on that culture, whatever the boss feels like they want. mean, at the end of the day, it's their boat to drive, your boat to drive. And you should build the company that you want to build.

and you shouldn't let anybody else, you know, because it's almost like all the advice on Twitter. It's like, it's all context, man. all, it could be right, not useful to me. And those two things can be simultaneously true, where it's like, that's really good advice. But in my context, it's actually not value additive to me. And I think that's lost on a lot of people because they just see the cool flashy things to try. And you're like, well, is that really super applicable to you?

Reza (43:32.909)
Yeah. Yeah. You want, you want to go like a few levels deeper and think about like what it is you want to try to solve and then how to, how to do that versus like what's working and what should I do? And the way we think about it is like there is high altitude work and alignment. And then there is like heads down executing, right. And actually I think remote is very good for like heads down. Don't bug me. Let me execute. But like resume is very difficult to like

Rabah (43:40.739)
Yes.

Rabah (43:52.803)
Yep.

or the

Reza (44:01.005)
go extremely high altitude, align at a strategic level. And so it's like, let's meet up in person, stay relatively high altitude, build alignment, everybody disperse heads down, execute. then like, you know, it's, it's like a strategic.

Rabah (44:04.328)
That's a beautiful metaphor.

Rabah (44:15.778)
That's beautiful. And just elevate and de -elevate whenever needed. That's beautiful. I love that. Because I'm of the same thesis that real work is done individually. But you do need to collaborate, synthesize things, get together. But then you go out and build your stuff, come back, show and tell, does this work? That's beautiful, Reza. I absolutely love that. OK, last question. What is your equation of excellence? What do you think excellence is a function of?

Reza (44:43.491)
Ooh. What do I think it's a function of? So how do you achieve excellence?

Rabah (44:48.204)
Yeah, like what are the, what's in Reza's excellence recipe?

Reza (44:53.455)
so I think the first thing is like curiosity and interest kind of to your earlier point about like agency versus software. To me, I've always just been like fascinated and interested and curious about software. And it's, it's motivated me a lot to like spend time and energy on it. And so I think if you're not interested in something, you're not genuinely curious about something, it's going to be very difficult to like achieve excellence from that.

Rabah (45:08.172)
Yeah.

Reza (45:22.263)
And so I think genuine, I don't like, passion is probably unnecessary. It's like, like it could be true intellectual curiosity about something. And I think that that's very important as like probably foundational ingredient and then probably just one, two more. So curiosity and extremely hard work. I don't think excellence is possible without like ridiculously hard work. Like there's just no way, no way around that.

Rabah (45:49.486)
couldn't agree anymore.

Reza (45:52.055)
gotta be mindful to like burnout, don't like drive yourself to the ground, et cetera, but like gotta work extremely hard. I think for excellence. And then the last one is just persistence and like, don't stop. Like just, you know, be curious, work very hard and find a way to do that for an extremely long period of time. think people who like have a lot of like start, stop, start, stop, try something, then try something new. You don't allow that to like compound over time. And then like.

Rabah (46:20.536)
Yes.

Reza (46:21.593)
build something that is, has a lot of like force behind it. And so I think persistence becomes really, really key.

Rabah (46:26.062)
So well said.

No, it's so well said. There's a great line. It's not how much the load weighs. It's how you carry it. And I think it's beautiful because hard work and persistence are absolutely necessary, almost at a delusional level. But there's also another one where it's no one to hold them, no one to fold them. But you really want to keep that as last resort.

Reza (46:45.144)
Mm

Rabah (46:49.964)
The people I read a ton of business memoirs and stuff like that. And the number one thing isn't talent, isn't timing maybe timing and luck are probably the two biggest factors of success. But the one that you can actually control is persistence. And there is so many big pivots, right? Like Figma was a drone company. Slack was an IRC actual gaming company. Like there's all these things. like there was just this unfaltering belief that we're going to make it to the other side where at the end of the rainbow with the pot of gold. And if you don't have that, it's

It's really challenging because there's just going to be hard times. Life is tough sometimes and without that kind of curiosity, persistence, and hard work. Good luck because it's probably not going to happen and you're going to be out of McKinsey again. But no judgment, McKinsey. Good consultants, I've heard. don't know. Reza, dude, this has been such a blast. I know you have some cool stuff coming up. How can people connect with you? How can they get more involved with Motion? This time, it's yours, my friend.

Reza (47:30.383)
Hahaha

Reza (47:49.199)
Yeah, thank you. So we have our annual Creative Strategy Summit. do this every year. It's the biggest event we do. It's running across two days this year, September 19th and 20th. It's all virtual, it's all online, it's all free. I think we're expecting over like 10 ,000 registrants to this event series. And so you don't wanna miss it. I'm sure we'll have like the links and such to subscribe to it. And yeah, highly recommend you join us for that.

Rabah (47:56.162)
Mm -hmm.

Rabah (48:02.264)
Love it.

Rabah (48:16.748)
Amazing. then Motion is just, yeah, motionapp .com. Go grab it. Go get it. Get started today. And then you're on the LinkedIns and Twitters. So go follow Reza. Get all the awesomeness. He puts out a lot of cool data and just cool timeline feeds. Reza, dude, thank you so much for taking the time. Actually, a couple of us are in Toronto right now at the Legal Legends thing. So yeah, go pop in and say hi.

Reza (48:21.261)
MotionUp .com

Reza (48:27.363)
Yes, sir.

Reza (48:42.083)
on this.

Rabah (48:44.386)
Thank you again, my friend. Sorry I was a little late to the call, but this has been just exquisite. I love the elevation thing. I'm going to have to go back and re -listen to this. You were dropping bars. I really appreciate that. All right, folks, if you want to go create funnels, like create ads, go over to firmatcommerce .com. You can sign up for a demo today. Go make my boss happy. And then we have a fantastic newsletter that goes out every Monday called The Geometry of Growth. It's curated and written by the wonderful Alexa Kilroy. So go check that out. You can sign up right on the website. And that's it.

Reza (48:51.897)
Ha ha ha ha.

Rabah (49:13.774)
That's another one of the books. Thanks so much, Reza. Give me a shout if you're ever in Austin. Don't come now. It's terrible. It's like 1 o' 5 right now. But we're doing a few events out here. See if you ever want to make it down from the Great White North. Just let me know. We'll put you up. It'll be fun. Thanks. Thanks again, everybody. We'll see you next week. Bye bye.

Reza (49:25.165)
Appreciate it. Thank you.