From professional poker player to inbound marketing at a crypto startup

Matthew Kay: All right, I have the pleasure of being joined today. by Bill King. Bill is the organic growth lead at one of the fastest growing crypto related consumer tech brands in the world, undisclosed. Bill started his career as a professional poker player but for the last few years, he’s worked at companies like Frase, Drift, AvidXchange, HubSpot. When he’s not dominating the SERPs, and running all sorts of fun growth experiments of Bill hosts a podcast of his own. Bill, it’s an honour to have you here.

Bill King: We were just saying before, it’s actually better if we set the expectations and the bar low. And then I try to deliver above that expectation. But thank you for the very warm welcome. Happy to be here.

Matthew Kay: Um, you are in Boston, Massachusetts, but you spent some time in my neck of the woods, North Carolina. That’s right. Um, what was your time like here in North Carolina?

Bill King: I love it, I actually miss it. Some really good friends down there. Beautiful place to live like it’s perfect place. If you’re if you’re starting a family, is just great work life balance, you know, people are generally outside more than we are here in Boston. So.

Matthew Kay: whether it helps.

Bill King: 100% It really does help. And, you know, I like as much as I love Boston, I think having exposure to moving somewhere outside of New England has really opened my eyes to like where I want to be long term. So anyways, yeah, it was a great experience living there.

Matthew Kay: It’s also nice. It’s always nice to leave home for a bit. Absolutely. Um, cool. So for for today, I’d love to maybe talk about, you know, how you got into growth? How you got to where you are? And then dive into some tactics, what you’re working on now. The problems that you’re trying to solve? And, you know, everything in that regard. How does that sound?

Bill King: Sounds good. Yeah. You know.

Matthew Kay: When you were in high school Bill, what did you want to be?

Bill King: I was really into music and still am. And I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. If I’m being honest, it wasn’t really something that I put a lot of thought into until I like, I found the thing for me. I know it sounds like horrible. And like, I wasn’t really thinking about it. But I really wasn’t because, you know, I don’t think the traditional like education system, like really connected with me. It wasn’t it so.

Matthew Kay: I though it meant to be a commonality of people that work in growth, or people that worked in SEO, whatever you want to call it. School was not their friend, usually.

Bill King: Yeah, I mean, it’s not saying that, like, you know, in order to work in this space, you have to be kind of a rebel. But I do see people like we know this, because we’re both kind of deep in the into the growth slash SEO world. I think it takes a certain level of kind of thinking outside the box sometimes and approaching products with, you know, different perspective. But yeah, I wasn’t, I wasn’t like, too into school. I went to college, trying music, failing, arrange, and then eventually, you know, found journalism, and I really enjoyed telling stories and following up with people and kind of going through that process, in the meantime, started a baseball blog. And that’s, you know, what, ultimately led me to the growth world. But But yeah, I think like, you know, it started with a lot of failed experiments, my career, especially when going from school, realising that maybe these things weren’t for me, and then trying out new things, and just ending up where I am here today, a little bit of an accident. But also, I think a lot of the things have been to kind of make sense now that I know myself a lot better and understood, like what I love and what so.

Matthew Kay: You mentioned the baseball blog, I have a little bit of a personal story of like building a brand or building a little media, company, blog, whatever you want to call it. I find that to be very amusing that there’s like always, it seems like a commonality. A lot of people just, you know, the best way to learn is to just go off and start a blog. So what prompted you to really end the baseball, let’s blog about it. Was that the the core of it?

Bill King: Yeah. So back. Back in my day, when I was in school, I graduated high school in 2003, which means I am an old man. But back then, there was a very interesting thing happening in baseball, where there was this really micro community of people who were thinking about analytics. It wasn’t quite like out there in the public. Like there is today.

Matthew Kay: You know, what comes to mind?

Bill King: Yeah, this is before like, all that was kind of like the movie hadn’t been created. This was like, true niche communities. It’s I compare this like to the SEO thing, right? So I’m getting into baseball. I’ve always been a baseball fan. Just I wasn’t very good myself. So I started a baseball scouting and statistics blog. And it was basically just taking a look at players like that I thought should be performing better or worse based on like, more things like biomechanics, or like, there are underlying statistical performances and maybe like, why was it the case that they were performing this way or that way? So I’d read sort of profiles, looking at some of those players and some of them I had like a couple that that kind of made some traction. Like, I think I had an article about like one of the Yankees pitchers and I thought he was gonna get injured based on the distance between his plant leg and his drive leg and I learned a bunch of stuff it. So be you Boston University used to have the Sabre seminar. And you would go to mind blowing, they’ll be general managers, their scouts, etc. It was like a dream for me. So I would take a lot of notes, I would listen to, you know, some of the early statistical analysis that we’re doing, and I would write player profiles. And I just couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get anybody to my website. And this is like, you’re talking about a journalism major, I have absolutely no idea how the internet works. My mom was kind of like a hippie, my dad was an engineer. But like, we didn’t really talk about this stuff at home, it was just like, I literally had no idea what I was doing. And then I’m ever making literally, like a search, like, how do you get traffic to your website, and I just went down this spiralling rabbit hole, insert 100%. And so I started running my own experiments, built up a blog, and then, you know, started writing for this website called FanSided. Juice, I don’t even know if it’s around anymore, but was doing some work on there. And then that led me to saying, Wow, this is really interesting. There is a system to this, which was the exact same thing that I learned about poker. And we didn’t even talk about that. But like, so started school, eventually ended up playing poker professionally, for a few years regulation, the US hit, same exact kind of thing happened with that, where I discovered something I was kind of interesting, didn’t really know what I was doing. Didn’t realise there was a system to it got into it got into game theory, and like all the math behind it, then regulation change, poof, all of a sudden, it went away. So now digital, know actually was very profitable, extremely profitable and 1000s. Like, there was just free money, if you are a smart, analytical person. This is why like, a lot of people don’t understand unless you were in that that kind of era that like, if you were, if you worked really hard, and you used data efficiently, there was a lot of money to be made back in the old days. So that was profitable. And then AI kind of came around, then the regulation change, and it just kind of died. Right? So structural changes. Yeah, markets come in and out. Like that was an opportunity that a lot of people in like the crypto world and stuff like that, like our previous poker players, but like, it was an amazing experience. It was profitable, I got to do things that I would never have been able to do. Until, you know, maybe later my 40s when you acquire enough means to do these things.

Matthew Kay: So I don’t have your resume in front of me. Obviously, I do have it tattooed on my back, actually. But does your resume say professional poker player? Is that a line item?

Bill King: Yeah, for six for it was about six years or so. Some really amazing opportunities, some stressful moments, because you’re talking about this is your own capital, you’re deploying it just like a business. You’re saying, If I invest this dollar here in this specific instance, and I do it a million times over and over again, I’m gonna profit, right. That’s basically the end. So think about that, right? We’re talking about poker is basically hypothesis validation, using data, like testing out new things, finding what works and just doubling down on that.

Matthew Kay: Try to separate ego from outcome and everything that work out.

Bill King: Trying to figure out why people can’t get to my blog. I’m like, well, there’s got to be a system to it. Well, I learned what the system was found out what the exploits were, started doing it on my own site, got some muscle memory, and then it ended up leading to my career that I’m at now. A lot of failed experiments and a lot of random stuff. But here we are.

Matthew Kay: So you come to organic growth, you come to growth in general, from from what angle? Would you say your sales background? What were your earliest roles before you got to HubSpot?

Bill King: So I’ve tried all the things I mean, like I tried like sales, account management, I mean, I was literally pressing buttons in life just trying to figure out what it was that motivated me and made me really excited. You were running your own personal growth experiment. 100% Yeah, like I had no idea and I think that it helped because I tried a lot of different things. Some of them I liked, I like aspects of other things. Like you know, I was doing door to door sales billboard sales.

Matthew Kay: Wow. And yeah, it’s it was that was that like, I have no reference point. And you might be the first person I’ve ever talked to that has done that. But what is the door to door billboard sales person’s life look like?

Bill King: Terrible. It’s terrible. Yeah. Like but actually the one of the things that I learned in there was this is like 2008, nineish or so when just right then PPC ads and Google Analytics and all this other stuff was becoming a big deal. I remember sitting down with one of my customers and you know, he, I’m like, hey, what do you spend your money on? And why? You know, because we became close on a lot of billboards and he’s like, I got this guy. You PPC ads. And then he does like web marketing. And I’m like, Well, why do you spend so much money doing that he’s like, because I know exactly the ROI. I know that I can spend this much and I can sell this many cars. And that was it. That was all I needed to hear. And then literally, I remember spending time at Panera Bread at night, studying after work, I would work all day, go next door until they threw me out. And I was studying like the HubSpot inbound methodology. I was all in, then ended up a few years later, I end up working there. And it was an amazing opportunity to springboard my whole career.

Matthew Kay: So that’s awesome. Now you are in Boston. And you know, you’re from Boston, I would describe Boston, my personal understandings of the area, a fantastic ecosystem, shall we say? Is that I mean HubSpot is part of that and a product of that and has helped that. What was it like coming into HubSpot, and like the era that you entered, you know, maybe paint a picture?

Bill King: Yeah, Actually, it was like, perfect timing. Right. Because before HubSpot, there was startups here, there was innovation, but it was like, a lot of the big tech companies were like Liberty Mutual, you know, I mean, like, there wasn’t like a ton of like, exciting tech. Yeah. HubSpot really started to be honest with you. And then that snowballed into many, many other startups in a huge amount of talent. Instead of coming to Boston for school, came state started families started new companies, it really blew up Boston, not to say that they like were solely responsible, but they were certainly a big part of it. And, you know, nowadays, you see so much stuff happening in the Cambridge area. There’s a lot of great like biotech and everything like that, which is it’s awesome. It’s really awesome to see.

Matthew Kay: Absolutely, absolutely. So um, you know, after time at HubSpot, I think your next step avid exchange, that’s what brought you down in North Carolina. That’s where we first met through North Carolina though. What was the How does one say You know what, let’s pack up. And let’s move let’s do it. What was the call the call the bird call that brought you down here.

Bill King: One of one of my one of my clients actually at HubSpot, she was a longtime client of mine the whole time I worked there. Essentially, my job at HubSpot was to help people be successful using the platform. And a lot of people just didn’t know how to do it. They just bought the platform. And were like, Oh, how do I actually use this thing? How do I how do I drive more growth for my business? So my job was to make sure that they retained right, my goal was to retain customers on the platform. How do you do that? Well, the way I learned how to do it was from writing really good content, getting people to come in on your front, like literally, I built the playbook on my own. So when I started there, I think I had a unique advantage in the sense that instead of learning it from more of an academic standpoint, I have literally just done it myself, and realised how difficult things were and kind of what things to avoid. And during the process, you know, became friendly with one of my clients, they come to inbound, etc. And she’s like, Hey, my husband started this, or it has this company, and they received a bunch of funding. Turns out always backed by Peter Thiel, and a lot of the mafia. Yeah, exactly. And so I went down there, and I was like, beautiful place, I would love to get out of Boston for a little bit and spent three years and basically started the first digital marketing slash, like growth, you know, thing on marketing there and was working on all sorts of stuff. And yeah, it was a fun time.

Matthew Kay: That’s awesome. Now, I when you were there, is that when you did you did this reforge growth series programme? Right?

Bill King: Yeah, this is one of the early ones. I think it was like 2017 or so.

Matthew Kay: Was that part of your time and Avenue stance or like just part of your growth or during?

Bill King: This is right when I think right after I left HubSpot after the IPO. I think you know, they had just started Reforge and I was like connected because of a HubSpot kind of tie ends, you know, and honestly, probably one of the most amazing investments that I’ve ever made in my life was just getting exposure to people who think like, four levels above where you are. My whole career has been like that, whether it’s SEO poker, it’s like who are the people who are really like in the weeds that are really building like amazing strategies and just get somehow get your yourself in front of those people. Learn from them, like extract as much as you possibly can from them.

Matthew Kay: 100% and combining that with the late night Panera sessions, brute forcing knowledge into your brain.

Bill King: No, I mean, like, you know, a good example of HubSpot was like you know, they had done inbound marketing, but like there was no full time SEO person there. Right. So I got super fortunate. They hired Matthew Barbi, who, you know, ended up building out like all this internal documentation on the wikis in there and like, just literally upped my game like 10 levels just by understanding how he thinks, you know, if there’s anybody listening, like surrounding yourself with the best in the world at something, whether it’s training, growth mentor or like working at companies that have Top tier talent because it will change your life.

Matthew Kay: Absolutely. What what like when you are looking for, like, quote unquote, where to go next? Or you know, when you’re thinking about like these these moves and everything in that room? What are you evaluating the company that you’re, you know, going to next? What are your key? What are your deal breakers? I’d be curious to know.

Bill King: Yeah, I mean, like, I’ve been really fortunate the past four companies have either gone public or like been acquired, and like, you know, gotten like funding and like been successful. So I think things I look for number one is just like, is this a viable opportunity? That could be huge if the company was to be really successful? Right? That’s the first thing number two, once that’s settled, because that’s kind of table stakes. It’s like, you know, you want to be at a place that’s growing, that’s profitable, or has the potential to be, then it’s like, how much am I going to learn by being there? Like, how much am I gonna level myself up by being there? Yeah, that’s, that’s always a great indicator, because number one, typically, the best companies hire the best talent. So usually, they’re, they’re connected in some ways. But also, like, when you meet some of these leaders at these teams, like, you get a pretty good sense for kind of like, who they are as a person. Are they like more of a teacher? Are they more somebody who’s going to be just executing and kind of expects you to kind of follow that, you know, extracting, like, as much as I possibly can from each amazing person that I work for has been a real big focus. And then also, like, what does this do for me, my career in the long term, like, let’s say, I’m successful here, and a couple years go by, and I learned a ton of stuff, and I grow my career here. What does that mean, for me? Like, is the story connected? What’s the next path? For me? I’m thinking three or four positions, and or companies or whatever things down the road? How does this help me get to my ultimate goals that I want to do in life? Yeah, those are basically the three things I think about.

Matthew Kay: I think, you know, one thing that you you might have shared this a while ago, but basically the notion of like a career acquisition loop, so you have like, you know, distribute unique knowledge. I’m looking at it craft, right, receiver, build credibility, open new doors, value generator, I have unique knowledge. So like, you know, insecurities of like not wanting to put out content about what your work but yeah, just just getting over separate ego or something. Maybe there’s something.

Bill King: Yeah, like First things first is you need to like find communities where people are excited and active. When I was in poker, the source of that was called Two plus two. It was basically a publisher, who, who wrote all the poker poker strategy books were published them had a forum on their website. And it turned out some of the best players in the world, were there talking about hands talking about their strategy, talking about their bankroll management, talking about motional, and sort of like, you know, control and things like that. And I, I found people, they’re engaged in the community, build connections, and then that’s when things really take off exact same thing. For growth. It’s like, step out of your comfort zone, go like to conferences, like that’s how we met, you know what I mean? Go on the internet, find the people who are doing the amazing work in somehow find a way to get involved, whether you donate your time, literally, like find a job work for them, that would be ideal. At a minimum, like you want to get into the circle of where people are doing the interesting work. And sometimes for you to find that you have to kind of take some ELLs go out there and meet some people, maybe sometimes you don’t find what you want. But like, you’ll find people if if you’re passionate enough.

Matthew Kay: 100% Yeah, it’s always humbling to get your ass handed to once once or twice and just kind of keep on chugging. Yeah,

Bill King: Yeah, I mean, like, you could do your own experiments and like, end up becoming really good at the end of your life. Or you could just find people who have already figured it out, learn how they figured out why they figured it out. That’s the thing you want to learn not the answer. It’s like, how did they get to that answer? You know?

Matthew Kay: Yeah, I think your comment about being bought into the opportunity, the market opportunity of who you’re working for working with helping, whatever you want to call it. That is a huge, huge thing. As a, you know, a person with your background and like sort of statistics in baseball and poker, I think that that that mindset of like looking at the hand that you have, or looking at, you know, where does this player stand amongst all the others?

Bill King: I mean, what do you want out of this? Are you there to make friends? Are you there to get some equity? Are you there to make money? Are you there just for a job? Or are you there to like to grow? And I want to make this very clear that sometimes working at the most fun companies means that you don’t grow the most, right? Like, you know, I think actually speaking of Reforge I think Brian Balfour was the one that tweeted something like this, he was like I’m not sure here to like, I don’t have fun at work, but I’m really, really challenged in that provides me value, I think the exact same way. Like, my work, I take it very, very seriously. And every single time I go somewhere, I want to make sure that I’m learning I’m productive that I’m like, leaving a good impression on people. And then I have my fun, like outside of work, as you and I both know, we like to drink tequila sometimes and have tacos. Yeah, that’s okay. But like, when I’m at work, it’s like, this is this touches other aspects of my like, overall happiness and like fulfilment with life, which is like being challenged by something in figuring out tough problems.

Matthew Kay: Yeah, that that is a very fortunate, like, I am always grateful when I sit back. And I think the same thoughts that I’m scratching some this is great. Like, I think there are a lot of people out there that never quite got there or don’t, don’t have that or don’t know that that’s possible. So yeah, incredible.

Bill King: Yeah, like, if you don’t want to, if you don’t want to be under that type of stress, don’t go work at the top companies, man, go do your own thing. There’s plenty of money to be made. If you want lifestyle over, like working hard, and kind of like taking some losses and figuring it out and going through the motions, then don’t do that. Just be honest with yourself, like, what is it that I want to do with myself? And how do I create a ecosystem around me that helps me get there?

Matthew Kay: 100% Um, you know, as someone that works in SEO and uses SEO tools, I was amused to see you take a role, I guess your most recent one previous occurrent a role at a company called phrase. And I got to get emails from a certain Bill King show up the mime of praise. User, what is phrase what brought you to phrase and what was that? Like?

Bill King: Yeah, actually, so kind of a funny story. So I’m working at Drift. And I’m I was working on acquisition. So SEO and paid ads. And I’m like, damn, one of the things that’s annoying to me is that we have this huge writing team. They’re all producing a ton of content, but we’re not getting any results out of it for organic search. So how do I do that? I’m like, alright, well, the system is broken here. Why are we not getting results from our reading? It turned out after thinking about it and asking a bunch of different people, that it was probably the content briefing process. So if you hand a writer, a keyword, and you don’t get the result you want, that isn’t the failure of the writer, it’s a failure of you for not clearly articulating what it is that you’re expecting out of the content, right. So so I’m like, Okay, well, I need to create content briefs, so I write content briefs, and then I realise, wow, I don’t have the time to do these at the level that that I want to. So of course, I go to Twitter. And I’m like, does anybody know any hacks to like, you know, automate this or like, you know, like, scrape data or whatever, like thinking I’ll build a tool or something, it turns out that it already exists. So that was called phrase right there. They do more than content briefs, but like, that’s what they kind of built their, their company on initially, was their content briefing product. And so what you can do is you can put in a keyword, and you can automatically extract all the relevant information from the search engine result pages that you’re trying to rank for. So that fuels insights for your content team. Okay, so if an article is going to rank number one for what is cryptocurrency? What’s the market talking about? Because that has already been validated by Google as something that they think is valuable to the ranking it? Yeah, there’s the reverse engineering, what’s the success criteria? So you take all that information, and it turned out that phrase actually automates a lot of those things. So I hit those guys up. And you know, they were in Boston, and we ended up you know, connecting. And I was like, these guys are great. I don’t I’m not sure where the company is gonna go. Like, at the time, it was just early. I use the product a little bit, but I knew that they were really intelligent and awesome people. And I wanted to be part of that team. So I did that for a little bit. And then, you know, ended up where I’m at now. But uh, but yeah, some pretty exciting stuff. They’re building over there. If you guys haven’t, if you’re in the SEO slash content space, and you really want to like up your game. Definitely check out phrases some really interesting stuff.

Matthew Kay: Awesome. What is it like being a marketing team have one quote unquote or being I don’t know if the word is resource constrained? But like, how does prioritisation change? Like, what are you doing? Is they’re less convincing others of strategy and more like, well, how are we actually going to get anything out the door? What does it boil down to?

Bill King: Yeah, well, let me start with what it’s like. It’s terrifying.

Matthew Kay: Good. That’s a good word. Yeah.

Bill King: Terrifying. I mean, fortunately, like I said earlier, by having a network of people that I trust in a manner admire and respect, I was able to reach out to people and say, Hey, I’m going to this tiny startup, you know, things are moving quickly. I’ve always worked at bigger companies like what is the right success criteria? So I started by talking to people who had been there, whether they had been, you know, directors of marketing at a start up or not And then also people who had invested in those companies and said, Hey, what are the types of things that make it really good, you know, startup marketer, etc? So, so yeah, so it’s really about like, Okay, so let’s just get this out of the way, like, you don’t have any resources and everything’s due yesterday, and every single day you come into work, there’s less cash in the bank than the day before. So like, there’s always this ebb and flow of like, is the company going to survive? How much cash do we have, and you are under the gun to produce results immediately. So I think the most important thing, like if you’re starting your you want to go to the startup thing, get crystal clear on what it is that the founder needs from you, it became super clear to me that what we needed was just to get net new signups in the door. So I, you know, there were plenty of other things I wanted to do. Redo the website, like, you know, change the the copy, like, do all the quote unquote, things you’re supposed to do. Yeah, but the reality is, like, I need to get this place to a state where, like, where I’m actually driving value for them. So we start doing that, and then went down from basically cascading from there, like once you start learning to know that your customers so that you can build the proper strategy to get people to use the product, you learn other things like, oh, maybe there’s actually some problems here with other parts of the funnel. Why can’t we retain people? Why don’t they get active probably.

Matthew Kay: Start thinking about the pirate metrics, and, you know, ARR, and that whole, yeah, not everything else kind of comes to play. Yeah.

Bill King: And then the advantage you have, as a startup marketer is if you know the domain, really well, that is such an advantage. So like, I started, I was like, damn, these content briefs are really cool. But you know, it’d be amazing. If you had a template where you could scrape out certain parts of the content brief that you want, and plug it into a specific template that you can automate and quickly build. And so like, if if anybody here is listening in they’re thinking, I’d love to do a start up, maybe be like the first marketer there. I think it’s a competitive advantage to be somewhat of an expert, not an expert, but like, be very familiar with the space. Because the learnings you’ll have to pick up at a record pace, it’s a lot easier when you can relate to the end user, and you know, the basic problems they have learning that from the ground up. Sure. Yeah. I mean, like, you could do that. But you’re just creating more friction for yourself.

Matthew Kay: Yeah. How do you shortcut your learning? Like, when you want to learn more about the product, or the offering? Or what? Like, so, you know, if I’m working with like, maybe, say, a home services business, I started asking questions like, you know, do you track leads? And then that answer, the answer’s no. And then start, how do you build them? How do you ask them for review when you’re done with a job? But if we’re talking about software, you want to ask questions, like, you know, do you have a sales team? What what what is your process there look like?

Bill King: It’s actually a little bit simpler than that. I don’t work at places that I don’t have a passion for. But I haven’t used the product and I don’t understand it. Like, I cannot state this enough, if you’re just applying to places and you don’t like know how the product works. Like what the experience is like, I think that’s a huge mistake. So every team that I’ve worked for, I’ve either been a user of the product, and then ended up to go working there, or I knew the team, or I knew it was crystal clear to me what the problem was in the business, and that I can make an impact upon immediate, immediately arriving there. So important, because.

Matthew Kay: I think that’s maybe more of a client services, agency side type product, maybe a lot of people in those roles, don’t even really care what the, what does that leave there? Well, we’re just gonna do the thing we do, so.

Bill King: Being successful is like, is not just being the best marketer in the world, or like being the best SEO, it’s about being picking the right place where you can provide a ton of value. And you can also grow yourself, right. So like, before we even think about what to do there, think about where you should go for the first part of it. And the number two is like, do I know for sure I can have an impact here? Is it not clear? You know, like, I think actually, Brian Todd, who’s the growth team at Coinbase. He was on my own podcast, and he’s sitting there and he’s talking about like, you know, I wouldn’t go work there. Like, you’re here is the reason why. You know, and I was like, sitting there listening to him. And I was like, Damn, that’s really smart. Because his way of thinking about it isn’t like, let me go prove that I’m good enough to go get a job there. He’s like, Can I have a reasonable impact in a short amount of time?

Matthew Kay: Yep. And if the answer’s no, then it’s no.

Bill King: That’s right. It doesn’t matter how good you are at SEO if they don’t believe in SEO, if you don’t have engineering resources. God bless you because.

Matthew Kay: The market is structurally not really aligned to whatever they’re trying to do.

Bill King:  And they bought in on this like, am I gonna have to go uphill to even make this a reality at this company? Do the homework before you go.

Matthew Kay: Absolutely. And so all of this, I guess, brings us to now you and without going into too much detail or as much detail as he like, you are no longer at a five person company. How big was Frase four or five?

Bill King: Six when I left? Yeah, I mean, those guys are great. Like we’re still friends, we still keep in touch.

Matthew Kay: But you’re a much larger company than six. Now if I’m not mistaken.

Bill King: Yeah, I mean, we’re pushing 3000 at this point. So quite the difference going from six people to 3000 and growing at 50 to 100% per year. Which is totally crazy, basically, I mean, like, I can’t say where just due to security reasons and stuff like that. But TLDR it’s one of the top crypto exchanges in the world and ended up there also by mistake, which is a common theme in my life. But I remember during the pandemic, I went to MIT Bitcoin Expo on a Saturday morning, there was like eight people there.

Matthew Kay: As one does.

Bill King: Yeah, just passionate. I was like, I got into crypto in 2015 made a decent chunk there, and then just forgot about it. And like, hadn’t really thought about it too much. And then the latest generation over the past like two, three years or so, which is like an eternity in crypto. I’m like, damn, what’s going on over here. There’s a lot of VC. There’s a lot of like engineers that are building projects on top of these new blockchains. And I’m like, wow, it might actually be coming. It might go from theory to application right now. And so if I missed this, I’m making a huge mistake. So you know, so I go to MIT Bitcoin Expo to learn more about what’s going on with the Bitcoin world like the crypto world. And that’s how I ended up meeting. You know, my current boss, we met as just two people talking about growth problems. Just in LinkedIn. Hey, man, that talk was I said to him mazing mind blowing, you know, talk you just did, like, he’s talking about price volatility and how it relates to growth rates. And I was like, Oh, my God, I need to reach out to this guy. And then it just happened organically. You know, he’s like, Hey, we have these problems with my funnel. I’m like, me, too. And that’s how’d it started.

Matthew Kay: It happened organically no fun intended. thing? You know, I love it. So as an organic growth lead, what is your what channels are you responsible for? What kind of team do you have? What is the painted picture?

Bill King: Yeah, it’s basically, I’m responsible for the Logout experience, anything that’s not a paid, paid, sign up for the platform. So my ultimate goal is to take all the different websites that we have all the different channels that we have that organic SEO, app store optimization, a B testing, conversion, optimization, organic, social, take all those channels, take all those different properties and come up with a way to most optimally drive people to experience the value of the product, aka signup, right? My job is technically done once somebody signs up for the platform, but like we work very closely with product. It’s a product culture to product driven company, its consumer, fast paced kind of place that I always wanted to be at. So it’s been quite the ride and I couldn’t be happier.

Matthew Kay: That’s awesome. I mean, the just you describing it before, you said product six times in one minute. It does sound very, very product focused. What is that? Like? What is it like? Being able to kind of talk into product so much.

Bill King: Like going from B2B to consumer is just a shock in general? Like, yeah, there’s no sales team? Like, it’s it’s a it’s a very clean funnel? So yeah, I mean, I think that let’s talk about crypto in general, because that actually drives the lot the culture there. The people that work, there are like a unique breed. We all came here from very random walks of life. And we all believe in the mission, that crypto is after, like, the goal here isn’t just build a proper company, you know, IPO make a bunch of money, the goal is to literally give economic opportunity to everybody in the world at a, like everybody has an even chance to me, like I could not be at a place that aligns to my values more than that, like I grew up with, you know, not too much. I had to learn all the stuff on my own, like nobody ever taught me like finance and like how to like actually create like wealth and stuff like that. And I’m like, I hope the next generation if this is successful, we’ll be able to be the beneficiary of all this stuff that we’re building today. So that’s number one. But number two, like the pace of innovation, in the blockchain slash crypto space is I’ve never seen anything like it. We’re talking innovation products, like revenue, like ebbs and flows of regulation. It’s totally insane. Amidst the chaos is just incredibly brilliant people that have come from like Facebook, like all like Google, like, it’s like all the big tech companies. People are starting to realise that this is going to change the world. So having access to those, you know, incredibly brilliant people having to work in a Work growth literally in product are like such a big deal to the success or failure of the company, for me is like a shorter feedback loop, right? I do an experiment. And it’s like to me to see the impact of the funnel. That’s intoxicating. And I’m sure everybody who’s worked in consumer can also relate. It’s pretty exciting. I mean, like we have, I have an amazingly talented team, you know, it’s seven people now, but we’re looking for another 20 people to join my team next year. So if you are pumped about crypto and or building amazing companies, with the smartest people ever, please reach out to me.

Matthew Kay: Very, you know, just the smartest people ever of all time in the entire universe, Bill King’s quarter. So, you know, I think this is it’s good to have an idea of you know, where you came from, what you’ve done. I am very curious now to sort of maybe get your thoughts on growth, how you approach growth problems, channels, and everything else in that realm? How does that sound?

Bill King: Yeah, sure. Let’s do it. Yeah, I’m excited about.

Matthew Kay: So you would say, are you an SEO? First? Are you a growth person? First? How do you identify what’s the what’s your first love? When it comes to? Channel?

Bill King: Yeah, that’s a good question. So I think the, the overall thing that motivates me the most is like, trying new things, learning failing, like, that’s the DNA of me, right? Same thing with music, I failed at that. tried a lot of experiments, poker, same exact thing was very profitable and successful. But obviously regulation, change, SEO, everything was all an experiment, trying new things, pressing buttons, etc. So like, that’s really my DNA right? Now, I think it’s important that you have deep expertise in a specific area, if you want to transition to like, more of a growth type of overall role, because it’s a, it’s a real competitive advantage. And the way I think about it is like, I can add value immediately on, like SEO and experimentation, right? If I hire the right people, that can, number one, help complement the skills that I or areas that I lacking, right. But also, like, if I find people who are super talented, that if given some guidance, in like, let’s say, an area of like SEO or experimentation, that they could go 100 miles an hour, and be really successful. So those are the two things I think about. And like SEO is kind of my forte, but again, like, I don’t think it’s really SEO, I think it just kind of happened that way. It’s more about like, how do I figure out how to solve a specific problem in SEO, just because of my writing background just became that.

Matthew Kay: And I think the writing background is a fascinating one. And that’s like a huge in because I think that the biggest muscle, and it’s a personal difficulty of my own, but like I’m not, I always I loved English class. I love writing reports. I love writing in general, but like the muscle of just right into to publish is one maybe I personally am not fantastic at but just to have that background is a huge leg up for just really being successful in the SEO space. Now you’re someone you’re you’re on the social medias, you’re out there on the internet. I’m sure people ask you SEO questions, or you get people coming to you with, with how to do this? Or how to do that. What are the common? You know, questions that you receive? Is it how to start? Is it how to scale? Is it specifics around certain portions of SEO? Yeah, what is building get asked?

Bill King: I think like, so most people will approach the approach SEO within optimizers mindset?

Matthew Kay: Yes, that’s a huge one. Yeah.

Bill King: Like, they think to themselves, I’m going to just go sit down, I’m going to write this blog post. And I’m going to optimise it for this keyword. And I’m going to keep doing that I’m going to repeat that process over and over again. So I think that makes sense. When you’re first starting out, you need to be able to get yourself to a position where you can prove that you can do this, and you can build skills and everything. But at some point, you have to start thinking bigger, right? So, you know, this company is, you know, talking in the billions and billions of millions of dollars, if I sat there and said, I just need to go repeat that process, just do it more, we will fail. So I would just encourage everybody to start thinking about in systems, right? What is the thing I’m trying to produce? I’m trying to produce revenue for my company, for my specific channel. Well, how do I do that? I would think to myself, we need to deliver content people are looking for, we need to make sure that our website is authoritative enough that we have a competitive advantage there. Right. So that word competitive advantage I think all the time about now in the enterprise like World War on that now, there’s less of a focus on like Link Building per se, because we’re talking about, you know, some of the elite tier domains.

Matthew Kay: Natural land alone is probably going to be enough to do everything you need.

Bill King: The precise opposite problem I was at previously, where we’re talking about a brand new website, nobody knows who the brand is. Our problem there was about removing doubt and building those initial systems to have success down the road here, the problem is exactly the opposite. The problem I’m dealing with right now is getting high quality content that is aligned to search intent out as fast as humanly possible, and making sure we get the maximum yield from those bets, right. So that like, that’s the 100 mile strategy. And so what we’re doing is we’re building basically products for search engines. And what we’re able to do is basically take a source of data in a product. Some of it proprietary, some of it is from external sources in Basecamp, saying, what’s the product I want to build? How quickly can we scale it? And like, basically, how does that create? Does that create new kind of competitive advantage? For us? That’s what I think about 24/7? How does this strategy I’m going to do and execute create a competitive advantage and or something that somebody else can’t replicate very easily? So important when you’re in like, a large, scalable organisation, because everybody’s got resources, everybody’s got engineers, etc. So that’s super ambiguous for reason. Because I think that a lot of people like think, Hey, Bill told me like, what the strategy is for, like this website? And I’m like, well, it’s different every time. But the frameworks that you apply to, like SEO and other channels are actually the same. You’re just looking for, like, where do I put the maximum amount of time and energy that I need to, if you’re a brand new site, you got to build a ton of authority, because it’s really difficult to rank for without that, right. Your focus should be 100% on that, right. And when you go up to the enterprise, maybe it’s less about like building authority. And it’s more about like optimising how you get out to market with content. You know, there’s a lot of bottlenecks, like editorial, legal review, etc., in enterprise you don’t deal with when you’re a startup. So those are basically the ways I think about it is like, how do I build an engine that gets to me where I want? And then what are the levers across that engine that I can pull?

Matthew Kay: And then where do I add more fuel? Or do I maybe get another engine? And put another one there?

Bill King: Sure, yeah, like, you know, nowadays, like, it’s so hard to, like, create a sustainable advantage in, in Google. So think really deeply about how you go about doing that before you press the buttons to go and actually go do it.

Matthew Kay: Your comment about optimization versus creation is a fascinating one. I’ve sometimes heard that boiled down into the the idea of offence versus defense, the offence is like you’re making offensive plays, you’re going out you’re you’re doing you’re breaking defenses, you know, us versus them, optimise this, you know, stack rank competitor, this. How do you delineate between the two prioritise between the two? Like, what does that process look like?

Bill King: It’s about like surveying the landscape and having.

Matthew Kay: game you’re playing sports analogies?

Bill King: Yeah, like, at first, you want to kind of spread your bets, like, where is the value, right? I think about this for experiments, think about this for SEO, you know, you could go tweak in tune, like an app store screenshot and, you know, get every little pixel just right, that makes sense. If you’ve already found the things that motivate someone to take action. If you’re not sure, then you should probably place bets all over the place. With reasonable hypotheses that you understand if this is successful, I know what will come out of it. So at first you want to find the the the thing, then double down on that thing. So spread your bets out, say, Hey, listen, I’m gonna try these 10 different experiments, they’re completely unique. Talk to your customers understand what those could be. When you find one that has a signal that you’re onto something, that’s when you go into optimization mode. And so for the the place that I’m at today, they built their brand and their products early, they’ve got a tremendous amount of like authority to their website, but a lot of people don’t kind of know them in the consumer realm. So my job right now is just how do I how do I get in front of as many consumers as humanly possible, thoughtfully. Then when I figure out where are the edges? Oh, my God, this topic works fantastically. It converts really well. Then we go, okay, let’s double triple down on that specific area, and then continue to pile on that until the edge is gone. Then you go through the process again. What other things can we go do? Where’s the advantage? You just repeat that engine over and over and over again?

Matthew Kay: Absolutely. Yeah. I think, you know, to to like to not invest resources into something that is unproven. Or to avoid, you know, misallocate. Yeah, that.

Bill King: You got under pressure, right. Yeah. You’re under pressure. You got numbers to hit. Yeah, yeah. And so you need to think about like, this goes back to that poker analogy, or like the brain that I have because of poker, is I’m like, I don’t think like everybody else. I’m not I don’t come into a situation. I’m like, okay, they did this before. Okay, let me let me do that. 10 times faster or harder? I’m like, Well, what if nothing existed? How would we approach this problem? If, if there was no playbook previously, what do we do? Right? Everybody who’s listening to this, like, you really need to put some time into thinking about how you could solve the problem before you even walk in the front door. So the place I’m at today, I was like, if I were leading that, what would I do in the first six months into I think that that’s reasonably going to be successful? Well, not sure. But this looks pretty promising. So that helps me already get halfway there. And then when you’re there, it’s about getting stakeholder relationships tight, selling the vision, getting people to buy in on this stuff, trying stuff, failing, learning, sharing, all the kinds of frameworks that like you learn from proper, kind of like growth orbs that are very, very mature, and you bring that framework out to the brand you work on, and just, you know, continue to do that.

Matthew Kay: Absolutely, yeah. And it all goes back to you couldn’t be doing any of this, if the structural market that you were in, it was not growing is not, the company’s not bought into what you’re Yeah. So.

Bill King: Another thing, don’t be afraid to say I can’t do it. If you’re not 100% sure how you can create value and or get there, then don’t do it. A lot of the times, like your success or failure is predicated on the decisions you make, right? I mean, that’s how life is. But if you’re not sure how you can add value, you just want to go somewhere, and just kind of like do that. I mean, you could but like, it’s gonna make things a lot harder for you. So if you’re in SEO, and you’re like, Wow, big website looks cool, but I’m not really sure how I can add value there. Like, that’s, you want to step back and say, How can I? How can I approach this problem in a unique way and help help grow it?

Matthew Kay: 100%? Um, let’s talk about competition here. So I think, you know, you could say that search and organic search, and I guess paid search as well, it is a, you know, it’s a game with winners and losers. And there’s only one position one in paid, and there’s only one position one and organic. And so in that sense, it’s a finite game. And so there is a tendency, I think, for for many to just sort of stack rank against competitors, what are they doing, we’ll do what they’re doing, and sort of follow them like little fish in a stream. But some of the stuff that you’re talking about when it comes to product, and, you know, the the framework to stop doing that and start thinking about what could we do that no one else is doing? Are you right now playing games with, you know, four or five neck and neck competitors? Or you? Maybe not doing that? And then the follow up to that would be? How do you sort of stop looking at competitors and start looking at maybe other industries, other verticals, or completely, you know, out of thin air? You know, just putting a king and a queen, and Asus pays whatever together? In new ways. What does it look like?

Bill King: With paid, I mean, I have an incredibly talented colleague who leads paid at my current place, and, you know, just huge, huge, huge shout out to them. They’re killing it, but it like an hour specific. In our specific situation. There is, I’ve never seen the amount of capital flowing into into the space, right. So I think a lot of people who are listening to this, we’re familiar with crypto, probably pretty aware. I mean, like, if you look on TV, and there’s all sorts of stuff going on, right? So like, with paid, you can deploy capital very quickly, right? So I think to myself, Okay, where’s going back to that kind of analogy of like competitive advantage, like, either you’ve got a brand that everybody’s familiar with. And then therefore, as a result, your paid ads performance will increase. Or you’ve got a data advantage, you’ve got a data advantage, and you can react to let’s say, auto bidding on market conditions, or you’ve got some sort of proprietary algorithm that helps you outbid the other. It’s like, kind of like day trading or something like that. That’s the way I would, I would I would, I would think about interest, you could have both that would be ideal. You know, there’s some major brands out there that do both of those things. And then there are some brands that are not as well known, but just are killers at like optimising and building infrastructure. If you don’t have one of those two things, or like, you’ve got a compelling product that is so much better than everybody else that by gravity, you end up winning the paid ads game. Those three things are like what I think about and then if you don’t have those, maybe think about other ways to grow. Because the hill is going to be extremely difficult to climb if you’re in a competitive environment. Like la you know, the more important thing is like are we sure that we’re going to get a return on our investment from doing this You know, I think the days of like spray and pray like paid ads are like, pretty much gone because the, the CAC implementation implications are just enormous and it’s so hard to grow nowadays. But there’s opportunities outside of paid ads to grow, you know, like, you could focus on like, virality. And like referrals and like all these other things that like, you know, if you’re early, and people don’t want to refer your product and stuff like that, I mean, like, maybe there’s a product problem, maybe you should focus on that.

Matthew Kay: This is where it goes back to the differences between growth and marketing. And, you know, I mean, that growth starts to be informed by product by, by revenue by all of these other factors other than just very top of funnel. You know, how many people saw the brand name on what platform? Okay, cool, thank you Nielsen.

Bill King: The solutions thinking like, you know, if you’re, if you’re listening to this, you’re like, that’s advice. Thanks. I work in paid paid ads, like, that doesn’t really help me. Well, there’s ways to apply that thinking in paid ads, right? How do I create an advantage I’m against by competition? Well, maybe I partner with a brand team. And we do some type of like campaign to get people more familiar with my, my brand. Or like, maybe I invest in infrastructure where I build out a data team. And where we’ve got some proprietary algorithms going, there’s actually a fantastic blog on lifts, engineer growth engineering team off to send it to you later. So you can put it in there. They literally built a completely automated all bidding system to like, exactly compete with Uber and spend less just fascinating.

Matthew Kay: Because it becomes such as that’s a zero sum game once it’s like that they have a direct competitor and he must.

Bill King: Retain the talent. Yeah, you know, maybe somebody else gets pried away when they learn you have an edge, like, the more important thing is like being hypercritical of like, is this working today or not. And if it’s not, then you need to adapt in not being married to the thing now you have to spend paid ads a lot of times to grow today, right? And like you hear a lot of like, you know, like insane stuff like oh, let’s turn our page ads off. And um, you know, a lot of companies can’t do that, because they can’t be discovered.

Matthew Kay: Unless your Airbnb, they turned all their paid ads off. And it’s been fun, but.

Bill King: They’re just great when everybody knows who Airbnb is. 20 years later, after they were doing what was they doing on Craigslist? Like, all those growth hacks where they like, traffic off Craigslist? Yeah, exactly. So if you haven’t heard that story, then please check that out. I think like, they’re in a different era of their company. So they can focus on brand, they can focus on partnerships. But if you’re like early starting out, like, don’t be married to a specific tactic be married to the result, right? I think like, you know, that keeps you curious. It keeps you less than, like, I know, SEO, I’m gonna do SEO. It’s like, well, what if like, you know, brand marketing is like the new cool thing, and you’re just married to a specific tactic. That’s not really thinking strategically that’s thinking about, I love this, I’m comfortable with this.

Matthew Kay: Yeah. I think, you know, sometimes tactics literally are inside of people’s job descriptions, or their titles. Have you been in situations where maybe something that was not performing or something that should have been stopped, like, whatever a company was doing was still going because they had the people to do the thing. And even though it was no longer working the, you know, human cost of jettisoning department, or it’s just, it’s it’s politics involved, all sorts of stuff.

Bill King: Here, all the kind of emotions that everybody goes through. I think also, like, day to day kind of operational, just make the next month number, like you get stuck in that. And then you never make those big bets that like, you know, if you’re not like thinking, How do I put 20% of my time and or budget into experimentation to find the next big bet? You’re going to someday wake up and go, Oh, shit, that thing I used to do doesn’t work anymore. Right, you now. Yeah. But the more important thing is that you should have a culture that that welcomes people taking kind of outside the box idea that as long as they have sound fundamentals, I’m doing this because of this on the successful when I you know, do XYZ, you should be thinking that way and you as like a leader. We’re all busy, like I’m tremendously busy, busier than I’ve ever been in my entire life. But I never forget to treat people kindly and to make sure that I build a culture that welcomes people to think differently. And if you do that, I think you’ll you’ll be in a good spot.

Matthew Kay: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Cool. Well, Bill, um, where can people find you? Where can people reach out if they want to talk about SEO roles, paid roles? private jet, pilot roles. Anything else in that realm? What’s a good place to reach you?

Bill King: Yeah, Twitter is BillKingTM my website billkingtm.com and LinkedIn/billkingtm it’s all the same place but I am. Yeah, like I said, I’m trying to build the people who are a team full of people who are like who are hungry, who are fired up and want to make a big difference in the world. And so if you want those people then please hit me up. We have a lot of roles in SEO, experimentation, social operations, the there’s no place that if you don’t hear that and you think you’d love to work in some type of job in like the crypto space or like work on something exciting, but it’s a different department. Hit me up and I’m sure I could I could make sure you’re taking care of.

Matthew Kay: Awesome thank you, Bill and I speak with no bias but there are there are few people in the world. I don’t know smarter and more humble than Bill and be an honour to work with someone like him. So Bill, thanks so much for coming on. It’s been an honour it’s always great to talk and really enjoyed it.

Bill King: Yeah, appreciate having me on. I appreciate the conversation.