Chris DuBois - F2F
Chris DuBois: Can you hear me now? I can.
Chris LaFay: There we go.
Chris DuBois: Hey!
Chris LaFay: We did it.
Chris DuBois: Sorry.
Chris LaFay: What's up, mate? I'm teaching Dawn how to take my style guide, like my core website theme and all the Claude scripts that I have, and getting a demo site spun up. And I'm realizing how little of AI she has actually used, but she has the brain to do it.
Chris DuBois: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: And how little she knows about what a GitHub repository is, which is also fine. But it was very much a 101 class. Also, you shaved a lot, I feel like.
Chris DuBois: You look like five years younger right now.
Chris LaFay: I don't know why. Maybe it's the combination of the shave and the haircut.
Chris DuBois: I haven't cut my hair for a while, and over a week, I was like, okay, you looked, and you literally looked like yesterday, though, so thank you for noticing.
Chris LaFay: I got a haircut last week, and this is a running joke with my wife now. My wife is very, she notices things. I don't get angry, I don't get upset, but she knows, like, if she asked me a question, and my eyes go, she knows that I'm bothered by it. She notices such small details. Three years ago, I got my haircut, and she didn't notice, and we went — I play music at church every Sunday — and we got there for practice, and I texted the worship leader, who's a good friend of ours, and I was like, when I walk in, I need you to make a big deal about my haircut. And it's a place that resounds, it's very echoey, and I walk in. And from like a hundred feet away, Jay's like, Chris, your haircut looks so good. And my wife melts. She feels so bad about not noticing. She is embarrassed in the most wonderful way possible. And then this past week, I got a haircut on Tuesday and she did not notice until Sunday and she felt like crap. So I find it funny.
Chris DuBois: I notice things now because of her freaking retentiveness on noticing stupid things.
Chris LaFay: It's rubbed off on me. Cheers. How's your week been?
Chris DuBois: Good. I mean, besides shaving. Yeah, I've done some stuff. Welcome to the chaos brain.
Chris LaFay: Sorry, that was —
Chris DuBois: Yeah, no, that was a tangent. Things here are nice. Weather's starting to get good. And speaking of weather, have you put more thought behind doing that event in January, February, November, December, whenever it was going to be?
Chris LaFay: No, okay, I need to.
Chris DuBois: For something like that, gotta start marketing it like July, August. So no, I have not thought about it at all. Right now, I'm purely thinking — I happily admit this to you — I'm in like a new deal rut, where it's like, I only get a new client if I lose a client. And so it doesn't — I don't understand. If someone just, it's time for that client to be done, like we finished our work together, it's all good. Like nobody is left because they're dissatisfied.
Chris LaFay: So that's a win.
Chris DuBois: But when they leave, I get a new client, but I'm not getting any new clients separate from having a hole in my schedule now. And so I don't know. Just pure happenstance of, like, it's just like, bloop, bloop. I don't know. I have a sales call today, and so I'm now wondering, is a different client leaving me, and I'm going to close this deal? I don't understand. But I did realize, it's fun to just look at your own marketing and what you're doing. Last year, I was doing tons of content. This year, I took a gamble and said, what if I just go really deep on content?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, totally.
Chris DuBois: And I haven't got any business from that. So I'm like, well, let me flip it back and see if that changes. And so I'm cranking up the content. I wrote 21 blogs this weekend. And now it's just like, all right, let's go. But also, I haven't been on podcasts for a while. Stuff like that.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, that surface area.
Chris DuBois: Yeah, surface area. But are the leads that you're getting when people are coming — are they coming from referrals?
Chris LaFay: No, they're all from my marketing inbound people finding me.
Chris DuBois: Oh, really? That's great.
Chris LaFay: I get very few referrals. Actually, my LinkedIn post tomorrow is going to be one of the deals for me. It's interesting because I tried a referral campaign, just going to the people I know to see if I could drum up any referrals, and I got like none. So it's very interesting. The guy who says don't rely on referrals can't actually get referrals anyways. Though Tony Wilson has sent me multiple clients, but now he's moved to Turkey. He's like not necessarily on Earth anymore. I barely talk to him. Time zone doesn't help with that either.
Chris LaFay: The dude's like 12 hours, it's basically India in terms of time zone overlap.
Chris DuBois: But the best I did get — I don't know how to log this one. I closed the client, and on my discovery call with him, he said, so how do you know this guy? And I'm like, I don't know who that is. And he's like, well, he referred you. I look this guy up. I've got to talk to him. But I think he just saw my content and was following. My client now said, yeah, he just really likes your content and stuff. But I still want to talk to this guy. It was just interesting. I got a referral from someone I don't even know because they liked my content.
Chris LaFay: Remember when — this is probably about three months ago — I hit you up about a random dude in Exit Five. So I still have no idea who. I still have no idea who it was in Exit 5 that referred me. I almost considered joining Exit 5 just to go into a channel and search for classiccity, like, across the board.
Chris DuBois: I tried and couldn't find it. You did that, I forgot about that. And I really should get in there. I've closed one client from it, who was a client for like a year before, I guess, I fired her.
Chris LaFay: Oh, you had to, oh, that sucks.
Chris DuBois: Well, there's only so much roller coaster stuff you can do.
Chris LaFay: You realize you're talking to a person that is the epitome of a roller coaster.
Chris DuBois: Yeah, but I've never come into a call with you where it's like, I have to guess at like, are you the alcoholic dad today or the sober dad? Some days I was coming in and she was just like, everything's failing. The sky's falling. This is bad.
Chris LaFay: I just closed three deals last week.
Chris DuBois: And it was great last week, but nothing's happening this week. As soon as she was like, hey, so I had this financial issue come up, and I'm like, hey, maybe I can just save you some money, and you just don't work with me.
Chris LaFay: No, I would not be able to handle that. I realize that I'm very much an open book with a lot of my business owner friends in general. And I've realized that some people can take my oversharing as like, I'm complaining about things, which I'm not actually. I very rarely am actually complaining about them. I realize by talking about things and getting people's thoughts and ideas, it helps me flesh out what it's like in my head, not like, woe is me.
Chris DuBois: Yeah, I use AI for that now.
Chris LaFay: I value human connection, Chris.
Chris DuBois: I wish I had that, too. Actually, my last agency, when I was running an agency, the founder was very much a talker-outer. I just caught a fly on my finger.
Chris LaFay: Dude! Yeah, just grabbed and gone.
Chris DuBois: Anyways, he was a talker-outer, but I would just listen for sometimes an hour. And the only thing keeping me on that phone — because sometimes it was just him griping, he needs someone to gripe to — was knowing that he was paying me a lot of money to be on that phone call for that hour. And I would be just walking around my lawn, getting my steps in, which is the best. I might actually set up coaching sessions for those. Like, this is a walk-in coaching session. We're just talking, we're walking, let's go.
Chris LaFay: One of my mentors who I was pretty consistent with for about six months a couple years back, I think I did one video call with him. That was it. Walking the rest of the time. He's like, I know what you look like. I know that you're paying attention.
Chris DuBois: If you don't need a computer, phone calls are great.
Chris LaFay: That's why I do a lot of drive phone calls. I get bored and it's a way to keep my mind active. But in general, it's this unboxed time. Whereas when you have meetings on the schedule, you do coffee, it's like you're in this boxed time. When it's a random phone call, it doesn't feel as boxed. So you don't worry about the tangents as much. You can kind of go off in whatever direction. And that's very enjoyable.
Chris DuBois: And I'm also the type of person where it's like, oh, we're on this random tangent, but you have to go right now. I'm like, okay, bye. See you. And I basically hang up on you, because I would rather talk until the time limit and then go.
Chris LaFay: I'm weird.
Chris DuBois: Anyways, for today. So how's the business going? What's new?
Chris LaFay: So, one of my buddies closed a deal. Mickey Mellen, actually. That's the conference person, closed a deal for me yesterday. I'm getting a kickoff call scheduled soon. Teaching Dawn how to do the quick build site so that I don't have to be the only one that does them. Basically bump a junior developer and have just a person who can be client facing and knows how to get information out of clients. Let that be the person. So my thinking is for these 15-to... I was about the first call and kind of set the tone and set the direction and then let somebody else handle the other 90%. Now she might have to call me in for a couple technical nuances, but that's okay.
Chris DuBois: Yep. I'm bad at finishing things.
Chris LaFay: So let's get me out of that. So we started that process today with her. And she seemed to grasp it. So that's good. Delivered a lot of stuff yesterday. So my mental load is a little bit lighter today than it was yesterday. They're not done, but they're getting closer to being done. I have now sent out two weekly newsletters. There was a divide between the two, but I went ahead and scheduled number three and number four. So the next two Tuesdays will be the remainder of what you sent over.
Chris DuBois: Okay.
Chris LaFay: I do need to give you the edits because I copied your stuff into Claude and then manhandled it in Claude, and I need to go back and send you the edits to those so that yours can learn to be better. So that's in a good place. I have an event pop in next week that's basically the event that we were/are going to do — just an in-person one here in Atlanta with a different branding messaging partner. That's next Tuesday, feel pretty decent about that. What else is happening? I don't have a ton of leads. I have a potential lead on the table from another agency partner. This was probably my list from two weeks. Hoping that gets closed. That'd be about a $20,000 site. We're looking pretty decent at the moment. I'm feeling pretty good. And sorry, that was very scattered.
Chris DuBois: No, no. So good. So everything is still kind of referral driven right now.
Chris LaFay: Oh, yeah. When your agency partner closes the deal for you.
Chris DuBois: Yeah, but that's like a best case scenario.
Chris LaFay: Oh, it's wonderful. Unless they're a miserable client.
Chris DuBois: If they're miserable, then you're going to regret that.
Chris LaFay: But no, Mickey doesn't sound really overly optimistic. Mickey works with good people. I know that every business has bad clients. Don't get me wrong. The reason why they're gray labeling this is, this is one of their few remaining marketing-only retainers because he converted his business to be all website maintenance, but they have about five or six clients that they have active $2,000, $3,000 a month marketing things with. And so they wanted to keep it on their paper, but they introduced us. Obviously they played with our website. So I also built a tool that's not on the live site yet where I can actually manage my events on my website. When you play with the website and you click the buttons, all that jazz, I push you to actually save your progress. Nobody does that logically. I understand why it's not important, but now when you sign up for an event, you actually sign up for it on the website and it saves your information there. So as you play with the site, it saves into that account. So now I have a legit reason for people to give me their email address on the website. And now their stuff they do will be tracked, not in a weird, creepy way, but now I know what all you're doing, your progress is saved, et cetera. So I'm very happy with that. That was what I was working on this morning, getting that moved over. But that needs to be an evening project, not a workday project. So priorities.
Chris DuBois: Okay. That's good. Could also be cool to add people who show up to events. Like you have your list, but then you can add them to a list in your platform and give them like a badge for attending a live event.
Chris LaFay: That's exactly what I was thinking. 100%. Because I now have the ability to — sorry, I have two computers running.
Chris DuBois: I feel you. I just came inside, left the laptop. But it's so nice outside. I don't want to be stuck right here the whole day.
Chris LaFay: But today's one of your meetings days, though, right?
Chris DuBois: Yeah, but I got hour breaks kind of in between today.
Chris LaFay: Oh, that's nice. Get stuff done.
> **SCREEN SHARING:** Chris LaFay demos the events tool. https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=1051.044282
Chris LaFay: I'll show you this. Because if it generates ideas, all the better. So I have an event section. This is the events page. And at the bottom — ignore the HubSpot thing — this is the signup form. And you can push the button. If I am actually not signed in to the system, your saved stuff isn't there. So if I go and do Chris — one of the things I'm thinking about doing is connecting in my Dex, my CRM, to this as well, so that I can actually show people's faces, like these are the people that are coming, because a lot of the events I do are based on meeting new people. So if you see the faces, you're going to see — there, you can cancel. So if I go back over here now to this event, down here in the settings, I can see the list of all the people that are there. Mine is not valid yet, because my email address hasn't been confirmed. So when I go to my inbox next time, it'll be — well, that's sad. Anyway, I had to test that out. But it adds me to the list. But now am I actually signed in? Yeah, I'm signed in now. So Chris LaFay. Now all the stuff that I do — April 2026. Now I'm in there. I can go to the list, see the subscribers. Oh, it actually doesn't subscribe you to the list. Interesting. Good to know. But I can then send out emails to people. Based on the list that they signed up for, I have multiple lists if I want to. This is an email management tool, like it's a freaking MailChimp, just from my website. So if I check the agency leaders workshop, and I click generate body, boink, it has the sign up, the whole thing, it will add my email signature in there. Send to subscribers. I forgot to put a subject line. So sign up button that goes there. And down here at the bottom, they've already signed up. So it checks it all off already because they're still saved. I can go back, I can still add to this and be like, hey — if I go to this event, I could change the status here to attended. And then I could attach to an event, have a badge, so that if you attended, it pulls up in your items, basically give people a reason to go back to the site, even though it's small. So hopefully maybe that gives you ideas later on the road. That's my thinking for forcing people to the website. And then when you sign up for the first time, once you've signed up and you click on the link to confirm your email address, when this page comes back up, a modal box pops up and says, hey, you're confirmed, we got you, go back to the homepage and punch the boxes and don't pet the bees — to hopefully get people to go back to the homepage and poke around on it some.
Chris DuBois: So what happens if you pet a bee now?
Chris LaFay: Ooh, you get stung. You're supposed to pet a bee. And then you can do it as many times as you want. It's not one of those one-and-dones. And there's a little noise that happens that sounds like a buzzing bee getting closer to you. I also have night mode as well, too — there are edits on staging right now. There's text that still needs to happen. But I'm going to have a switch based on the time of day. I probably actually turned this toggle off.
Chris DuBois: I like how you did that with the picture.
Chris LaFay: This right here? Yeah, and just highlighted the — I didn't have a group photo. I like doing selfie photos and fun casual photos with event stuff that I host. And I was like, I don't have one. But we went to golf together! So I dimmed everybody else out. I should have highlighted this dude because this dude was the videographer, but such is life. So that's not a today thing. That's a fun weekend project thing. But the more reasons I can give you to go back to the website, the better. And the quicker I can get your freaking email address, the better too.
Chris DuBois: Right. Chris, we got to get your leads separate from — I did get more people signing up for the newsletter stuff. There are legitimately new people there that I've been connected with for a long time that are at the top of my newsletter list.
Chris LaFay: So that's good. So that's working, even though the content on it is very straightforward and basic — not in a bad way, just basic — people are seeing it.
Chris DuBois: So yippee-ki-yay. We got to be able to have a path to address all of the people we need to. Nothing stops you from doing a newsletter edition that's just like a pitch. Same way. Just make it valuable for them.
Chris LaFay: One of the things I'm thinking about doing — I'm a big fan of Basecamp in general. And they just launched a new version of Basecamp and they redid their homepage.
> **SCREEN SHARING:** Chris LaFay shares the new Basecamp homepage. https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=1454.457061
Chris LaFay: And it's very much my personal style, which is, here's everything you need: pricing, features, paths, testimonials. They don't have as many videos. They had a lot of videos before of all these tutorials that you could watch immediately. But it's very simple and straightforward. Actual screenshots of the app, not these designed-up versions that look nothing like it. So I'm actually thinking about doing an issue in the newsletter about a Basecamp teardown. Of what they do right on it. It sounds like a human wrote this to another human.
Chris DuBois: Which is still a thing.
Chris LaFay: Weird that — what's still a thing? Oh, that a human, yeah. Humans writing to humans. The dude actually has a letter — the owner has a letter in there, which is where I got my idea for putting my signature and stuff. So the newsletter's rolling.
Chris DuBois: Yep. Actually, let's jump into Atlas and just go through where we're at with stuff.
> **SCREEN SHARING:** Chris DuBois shares the task board (Atlas). https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=1537.784754
Chris DuBois: So, all right. LinkedIn newsletter.
> **ACTION ITEM:** Add top-of-newsletter CTA to Chris LaFay's LinkedIn newsletter. https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=1547.9999
Chris LaFay: I think I moved on the tasks to completed. How is this per newsletter? Do you have a CTA at the top of your LinkedIn newsletter? Nope. Don't have that yet.
Chris DuBois: Let's just look at it.
Chris LaFay: I have the design for it. Just need to. Actually, do I have the design for it done? Dang, dude, that's a lot of freaking LinkedIn DMs!
Chris DuBois: Yeah, they're all people trying to sell me.
Chris LaFay: I just haven't opened it on this computer for a bit. I open the ones that I need to, and then I don't touch — I don't want them to see that I know they're there. I will let my inbox be cluttered with unread messages so that I don't give them any of the time of day.
> **ACTION ITEM:** Delete Sightlines newsletter on LinkedIn. https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=1602.9999
Chris DuBois: I don't blame you. All right. What was the name of the newsletter?
Chris LaFay: Sandbox. What is Sightlines? That's dated. I'm honestly probably going to — for the time being, I'm going to just delete Sightlines and then move. It's basically just my HubSpot form to get people on my HubSpot email list.
Chris DuBois: Got you. So we can do a swap on that. I like all your content. I noticed, because I ring the bell.
Chris LaFay: And it actually gives you notifications? Yeah. I get notifications from people that I don't think I have the bell, and I do get notifications from people that I don't think I pushed the bell. I don't get notifications when people comment on my own stuff or tag me in their own posts.
Chris DuBois: That one's annoying.
Chris LaFay: Like, I promise I'm not ignoring you. I literally don't know. Even right here — how many do I? Oh, hey, look at that, some random stranger commented. I'll look at that later. But Jared is a client, and so I get his notifications. I go through my notifications and none of it's of interest, and I try to call them and it just doesn't work.
Chris DuBois: Okay, so that's something I've been seeing you getting after. I think you're probably doing fine on that.
Chris LaFay: Yes, every post that I've written has had the newsletter CTA at the bottom of it. I actually taught my Claude code that that's the CTA for right now. Dang it. Freaking Chrome crashed on me again. I need to restart on my computers.
Chris DuBois: Don't use Chrome anymore. Chrome's old.
Chris LaFay: Oh, you're using Comet, I see.
Chris DuBois: So much better. Although, I don't like that they changed the assistant, so you can't do shortcuts here now. You have to go into their computer to do it, which is fine. If I open a tab, I can just hit computer and run whatever. But I loved that right here, I could do a shortcut that would engage with the page I'm on. I had Critique as one, and so I could just show up on your website, hit Critique, and it was already trained in this massive prompt for how I look at a web page and then would just tear it up and give me all the information.
Chris LaFay: Interesting. Why would you get rid of that? That seems dumb.
Chris DuBois: It still has it. It's just built into the computer portion. So I'm guessing it was something to do with how people were using up credits or something.
Chris LaFay: Y'all are using this up too much. Please stop. Thank you.
Chris DuBois: Do you want me to still do this one of sending connection invites for your newsletter?
Chris LaFay: Are you continuing to — sorry, I was saving my newsletter thing.
> **ACTION ITEM:** Set up Link MCP; connect to LinkedIn; set cron for 5/day; add ICP; export subscribers; connect non-subs. https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=1820.9999
Chris LaFay: Do you have the automation running where you're giving recommendations for people to connect with?
Chris DuBois: Yeah, it is.
Chris LaFay: Okay. I need to make that a part of my — is that a part of the MCP actually?
Chris DuBois: Yeah. It'll find people. So I just use the Link MCP to be able to access all the data in LinkedIn. And I just serve it my ICP for whatever I'm trying to do and say, hey, here's the — like for my business, like for your business, I have all of the workbook docs. And so if I say, hey, give me contacts for Chris, it'll search that first and then add all those contacts.
Chris LaFay: Interesting. So I went through and connected with most of the 10 that were in there when you were messaging me about it last week.
Chris DuBois: Yeah. I got more for you.
Chris LaFay: Okay. I, for whatever reason, thought that was like a trial. It was like a one-and-done sort of thing.
Chris DuBois: And now I'm just going to keep adding some. If I see it's empty, I'll just add some. And I can put it on a cron job for like every Monday or whatever. Or it could be daily to give you five new contacts.
Chris LaFay: Okay. I need to put that on my list.
Chris DuBois: One of my goals with the client facing MCP is that you can — and I'm still troubleshooting a couple of things with that one, thank you for the assistance there — but with this, you can update all of this down here using that. So if you message someone on LinkedIn, it has access to your DMs as well as your connections, your everything. So you can just say, hey, look through my list, my active pipeline, and in the outreach, update contacts based off what my engagement has been. And then I'll go through all those and just do it for you.
Chris LaFay: That's cool. So do I need a linky link account?
Chris DuBois: You need a Link MCP.
Chris LaFay: Okay. To be able to do it. But yeah, it's nine bucks a month.
Chris DuBois: Yeah, use my code. If you buy for three months, you get 50 percent off. Fifty bucks.
Chris LaFay: So when I'm viewing — to give you, when I'm looking at this, I have my task list pulled up and I have it in the Kanban board style and I see two that I have that are not done. What is the create 20 sides? Your site is drifting checklist and PDF, and then build a tiered email follow up by score. So I see here, there's a lot more that are marked off as not started, and I think you're in a different view.
Chris DuBois: Yeah, I was on the task here and planning.
Chris LaFay: Okay, this is the part — because I noticed when I was looking at your screen just now that there were more things from the task view.
Chris DuBois: Yeah, so some of them might be assigned to me.
Chris LaFay: Oh, okay. These all say with Chris DuBois. There's actually a couple in here that say with Chris LaFay.
Chris DuBois: Okay. Yeah. Currently with.
Chris LaFay: Oh, like this one should not be with me, although I can get you a list if you want.
Chris DuBois: Yeah. So there's the task owner, which the "with" will default to the task owner, unless it's otherwise defined.
Chris LaFay: That's dumb. Okay, some UI tweaks that you should make, my opinion. If it's in the complete column, the color should not color. Like you have a lot of stuff here that's red and yellow. And tasks, if it's in the complete column — that's just less, because when a lot of things are yellow and red, complete doesn't matter at that point.
Chris DuBois: Yep. There's another thing I had to add, I think in planning. Oh, yeah. This was also done as well — build/apply for the test notes. And then I have to update again, the breadcrumbs. All right, this LinkedIn carousel series, this is with me, to just give you the content.
> **ACTION ITEM:** Convert newsletters to LinkedIn posts; publish. https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=2119.9999
Chris DuBois: I have some drafted. I just wasn't liking what I was getting from AI. So I was going back and forth with it a lot. And then I ran out of time. So this one's still on my plate.
Chris LaFay: I also need to get the — one of the things I was going to do, I have some time tomorrow, I'm going to go to a coffee shop. I'm going to take the newsletters that I wrote and convert them to LinkedIn posts as well. Basically subdivide them effectively. So let me actually show you, I need to put these in the document below. This will actually be a good jump point for this. Let me pull over your Google Drive doc and show you what I've written, how I've edited your newsletters, to get your opinion on it. Where was the plan for the newsletters? Because that's where the Google doc was — LinkedIn newsletter launch.
Chris DuBois: Documents, not in the plan, but it's in the task. Here we go.
Chris LaFay: "Built to touch" is a little provocative. Now that you say it like that. I can make anything sound like that. It's my problem. No, this is the one with the posts three and four. Issue two, issue three. Okay. So the format that I'm thinking — paste, edited here, I'm going to send you a link to this Slack. It's in your Slack. So this is the general format that I'm thinking for these quick-hit articles: what are the problems, what are a couple of the problems in bullet points? The second piece is, is there a little mini story that I could tell based on something — maybe it's a caveat, maybe it's when this rule does not apply, maybe it's a story — and then the actual fixes. So based on the problems from one, two and three above, these are the things, actually go back and do them this afternoon. And the CTA at the bottom is kind of the same thing: you don't need to redesign, you don't need a developer, you don't need these things. Open it up. Go do it. Save it. Done. This is the consistent close. And then whatever the actual CTA is. So this is the format the numbers three and four took and they feel very natural to me. Do you like this? Do you see any issues with this?
Chris DuBois: Okay, cool. Yeah, roll with it and see what the market decides.
Chris LaFay: Dope. Where's the other one? Number four. Dope. That is now done. And you have your edits in these as well.
Chris DuBois: So did you cross-promo with peer creators? Any friends who also do this stuff?
Chris LaFay: I don't actually, but we can just kill this one too.
Chris DuBois: Just for now, let it grow and then we can hit it harder later.
Chris LaFay: I can find some people. So my next thing in terms of cross-promotion is going to be that video game thing that you found. I'm actually going to take it probably in the route of a D&D game, rather than a video game, where we actually have a story, a mini story to tell. This will still be within a 90 second window, so this is not something long, where every agency owner at the table has their own character that they're playing. I'll be the guy behind the screen running the story. And then each of those, I'm thinking we could actually do them a lot faster as well. I have a script for it that I wrote up that I sent to my video guy, and he was like, yes, please, let's do this.
> **ACTION ITEM:** Email 8–9 Atlanta agency owners re: D&D video series; schedule shoot. https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=2450.9999
Chris LaFay: Now I just have to get — I need to send emails out to people, I need to see who would actually legitimately be interested in this, joining up for this and actually doing it. I had Claude write me up an email last night to send out to a couple of agency owners because we actually do a little mini series with it where we have four challenges and each person is kind of the main character, so they get their time to shine.
Chris DuBois: Yep.
Chris LaFay: And it would just be funny. I just realized I don't write humorously. Humor is not my forte. That's the problem. But I think it would be highly shareable and people will get a kick out of it. And maybe that's just me. So that's also on my docket to send out this week — emails to about eight or nine different people that I know here in Atlanta to see if they wouldn't mind looking like a fool on camera.
Chris DuBois: I think that might be the challenging part. But if everybody has fun with it, it's like, yes, awesome. Run that as a test to build it and then let's track it.
Chris LaFay: The D&D emails I got done because if I can just get — the goal is engagement, the goal with that is surface area at the end of the day. Just be out there, create more surface area, create something that's shareable that I think people would like, so free value add to my agency partners. It'll cost me like 500 bucks probably. The video game style would have probably taken the better part of four or five hours from a shoot perspective, plus I would have to create assets and find sounds. Whereas the D&D style, we could actually probably do four little mini stories, which will each be a minute to a minute and a half a piece. We do all that recording in probably two or three hours at most. And then editing is cakewalk at that point — you're just slicing up and putting the story pieces together.
Chris DuBois: Yeah, I like it. The fact that all these things can just fit so well into your positioning. Obviously, we need to see it pay off in people booking, but everyone that I have sent to your site, for various reasons, just as an example of a good website, has been like, this is awesome. But "this is awesome" does not directly translate to revenue. So we have to figure out — what are the numbers? Are you getting more people on the site just in general now?
Chris LaFay: Let me pull up Google Analytics. Now, I don't know if I have my own IP addresses blocked, but I also don't go to the live site very often. Oh, when did I launch this thing?
Chris DuBois: When did I go to the cabin with my wife? I don't keep tabs on you in that way.
Chris LaFay: You feel like it's important. Human intelligence.
Chris DuBois: I know how to collect it.
Chris LaFay: We just — here's access to all my calendars. Cabin weekend, April 30th. Okay, so I launched it on Cinco de Mayo, which is what those spikes are for.
> **SCREEN SHARING:** Chris LaFay shares Google Analytics. https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=2758.754214
Chris LaFay: So I launched it here and got almost 400 people to the site. And then something else happened there, I have no idea. But we're on average getting — I don't care about this estimated benchmarking data, that's stupid. So I'm getting about 50. I'm definitely not going to the site 50 times in a day. But also, Singapore, China. So most people, last 30 days — last three days I've been going to the agency leaders workshop, which makes sense, because that's what I've been pushing. Not many people going to the quiz. These are all blogs. The CTAs to go to the actual quiz thing in the newsletter may not have even gotten clicked. Do they do view stats here? They do clicks. I know you can see clicks on LinkedIn posts now.
Chris DuBois: Oh, really?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, but this doesn't have it. This is overall analytics. So I don't know if anybody has clicked over. This one had a CTA. Oh, it's just the newsletter. But do they track the click links? Well, they did for a little while, then they don't want people to get too excited about posting on their platform. Anyway, newsletter's rolling. So I have basically the next couple of weeks lined up for the newsletter. What do we want to do next after those are done?
Chris LaFay: Do you think the idea of pulling a list of interesting websites would be worthwhile? And doing some teardowns within that — it's less actionable.
Chris DuBois: Yeah, what if you kept the same theming of picking one section, but then showed sections from your favorite sites that do — so like a testimonial section, being able to show what great testimonial sections look like on different sites.
Chris LaFay: Okay. That's not a bad idea. That'd be interesting.
Chris DuBois: And then you could tag those companies to get more visibility.
Chris LaFay: Hmm. It's not a bad idea. Do you think I should be putting these LinkedIn newsletters as a blog post on my website as well?
Chris DuBois: I don't know how Google feels about that for duplicate content.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, that's true. I think LinkedIn newsletters are gated. I don't know.
Chris DuBois: Hang on. I don't think — or I do think they are indexed because AI uses that as one of the ways it can cite you and see if you're useful.
Chris LaFay: Okay.
Chris DuBois: But yeah, I would probably do something like that. And then you can include other companies inside it. And it still fits everything you're currently doing, but it also shows — you get to call out things that you think are great. On one front, it lets you build up your own swipe file, which could be an asset at some point. If you keep enough, you have a doc where you keep putting all the testimonials sections that you like, and then at some point that becomes a massive swipe file.
Chris LaFay: What do you think I should search? Basecamp is obviously one of the things I personally look at for a lot of things, because I like their general ethos. I tend to keep going back to the same types of big company websites.
Chris DuBois: Just use an AI browser to just find it for you. So I did a post this week of just agency headlines, and I didn't go find all of those. I just used the computer and said, hey, I'm looking for marketing agency sites. I have a very generic headline because I'm calling it grandma copy.
Chris LaFay: I saw it. Yeah.
Chris DuBois: So I explained the concept and then let it go find those for me. We could probably just do that and have it find examples for you.
Chris LaFay: Yes. Okay. That makes sense.
Chris DuBois: I like that idea. Let's cruise through some of these other planning ones, because we might actually want to kill some of these tests, because I probably went overboard on how many we were going to run at once, so we can push things to next quarter.
> **SCREEN SHARING:** Chris DuBois reviews the planning column. https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=3153.100763
Chris DuBois: Like, even this, is your site drifting scorecard? That's done.
Chris LaFay: That was the quiz. That's the actual quiz that we put in. Yeah, that's done.
Chris DuBois: Then we got the marketing for it. So you got everything you need here. I got the follow-up sequence.
Chris LaFay: I don't have the tool for that, the tool to do the follow up sequence with it. Also, I don't think anybody has actually submitted their email address through it either.
Chris DuBois: I would say let's punt on that until we actually get people to come to these things.
Chris LaFay: The quiz is there and is being promoted in the newsletter because the LinkedIn post that I posted had the newsletter as the CTA. So looking at task five within that list.
Chris DuBois: I'm sorry.
Chris LaFay: Task. So 305. I have put the newsletter in there, not the quiz.
Chris DuBois: Yeah. So eating priorities. If this is live, let's let it ride right now the way it is.
Chris LaFay: And then we'll just —
Chris DuBois: So the goal right now is just to get newsletter subscribers on LinkedIn. That's the primary.
Chris LaFay: Okay, cool. Because then you'll get a bigger audience to be able to market whatever you need, which, by the way, I have 880 people on that newsletter.
Chris DuBois: Yeah, because it's been dead for a while. But whenever you connect with somebody new, it just pushes it out. Do you know there's a way to get a list of your newsletter subscribers? You actually messaged me about this. I can't remember.
Chris LaFay: I think it'll be a Link MCP thing. While you're doing that, I'm going to fill my water bottle up because I'm thirsty.
Chris DuBois: Sure. I did not drink water well yesterday. Yeah, it says it's not — not surprised, there's gotta be some sort of way to pull them.
Chris LaFay: Because I am curious as to how many people are legit, because when you're looking at your list, it only loads in like 10 at a time when it's lazy loading. And so I was wondering if I could just lazy load all of these suckers and then copy the HTML code, keep on scrolling, and then inspect this window once I've scrolled all the way and copy that HTML and be like, here's my list. I'm actually testing it out right now. Ooh, it does. It has all the list items. And it has the LinkedIn URLs too. You have to scroll for long.
Chris DuBois: Just connecting to everybody who I'm not connected to who was following this.
Chris LaFay: But you also want to do some sort of leveling. There's some crap in here as well. There's so many people from other countries that just randomly subscribe.
Chris DuBois: Right.
Chris LaFay: But you could do this. Because I'm looking at the HTML of it. And it has a list item for every single one of these people. And it has their LinkedIn URL. Not some sophisticated stuff.
Chris DuBois: Yeah, a lot of the ones on my list I just saw were like army buddies and stuff like that, and I probably just wanted the support. But you also can't kick people off of it.
Chris LaFay: I kind of wish I could kick some people off so that my stats are better, but.
Chris DuBois: Yeah, just cleaner.
Chris DuBois: Okay, so we're pushing this one to the next quarter.
Chris LaFay: I technically have — it's that I haven't pushed it as a CTA, but I have that link in my LinkedIn profile, the one that I didn't get rid of, not Sightlines, but the other one, like the 10 minute audit thing. It's not positioned correctly.
Chris DuBois: Could you also do the push from your newsletter to this?
Chris LaFay: Yes. 100%. I could actually make the watch — you can't edit. Once you schedule a newsletter, you can't edit it anymore.
> **ACTION ITEM:** Plan Q3 LinkedIn newsletters: site-section teardowns; tag companies; CTA to 10-min audit. https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=3619.9999
Chris DuBois: You can only edit the post, which is stupid.
Chris LaFay: After the next four, which means this will be a Q3 push as well. So let's just look at doing that. So maybe what the newsletter turns into after these are done — let's pinpoint some websites that have different sections, either different content sections, different design sections, that are either good or bad. That's what the content turns into of like, this is what this company is doing, here's why it's good, here's why it's bad, this is what you should look at with your own website for this. And then the CTA is — let me take a look at your website for you and do the same thing. That actually is much more natural. If we're looking at an existing site, here's what's good, here's what's bad, the CTA is let me do this for you.
Chris DuBois: Right.
Chris LaFay: That's so much cleaner.
Chris DuBois: Yeah, I'm pushing the rest of these. And let's just focus on that for now. Something separate from this I want to talk about is your potential recurring offer. What are — are almost all the sites that you work on on WordPress?
Chris LaFay: WordPress, Shopify. So revenue, 30% Shopify, 70% WordPress; quantity of work, 92% WordPress, 8% Shopify. If that's a spitball.
Chris DuBois: Okay. So if I gave you — could you create a template library that people could just access and put modules on their own site from, for both Shopify and WordPress? Or you might have to make a completely different version for Shopify, or would it just be WordPress only?
Chris LaFay: So I'm not as familiar with Shopify, so I don't really know the answer to that question. Speaking to WordPress, can I basically plug in and make a plugin out of the building blocks that I have? The answer is yes. The caveat is they require advanced custom fields because they're custom built blocks. So if you don't have ACF, then you can't do it. But you also have to be using WordPress's page builder Gutenberg and not things like Elementor and Divi. This isn't necessarily — I'm not listing these out as problems, I'm listing these out mostly as, yes, it does sound like problems, but it's also just more niched at the same time.
Chris DuBois: Yeah. Well, I'm just trying to find a way to see if there was something — if I had access to a template library and could use all of the templates you have, I might pay 500 bucks a month to just know that I have access to all of these website things with more being added. That's a pretty big win.
Chris LaFay: That's one of the people I was talking to about this a couple months ago. He actually just converted his agency to a software company, but he's very different from me. And that's what he was — charge a thousand bucks a month to this always-improving library of structures that get added to on a regular basis, because that's kind of what he's done with his company. He's more restaurant niched, and he has software behind it as well. He has web, mobile, and something else where you can subscribe to all three of them. And he basically just skins the app and the website for your company, and they're always building new modules for restaurants to be able to do first-party online ordering and stuff. So he's hellbent on me doing something similar in a good way, not in a pushy way.
Chris DuBois: Well, if it's working for him, then he's got to.
Chris LaFay: So the answer is yes, I have that structure, that parent theme that I'm teaching Dawn how to use, has those 15 building blocks that all look fine in a perfect world scenario. In the next probably month or two, once I hone down a couple other things, if you told me, Chris, rebuild me my website, I could probably do it in about eight to 12 hours without your input, and you would have a WordPress site, no longer a HubSpot site, with probably about 80 to 85% content/image accuracy, because there's nothing crazy that you're doing. But it also takes a little bit of aesthetic tweaking — the blocks are very basic. They're white or colored, and just laid out. They're not designed.
Chris DuBois: Anyway, I digress.
Chris LaFay: It's a possibility. It's something I'm not opposed to. The problem then becomes if you want to leave and not pay me $500 a month anymore, do I cut your access off? My whole messaging structure is, you own your stuff, you shouldn't be locked in. And they should own their stuff.
Chris DuBois: This additional library to go in and look at stuff — they would lose that.
Chris LaFay: I think it almost would be one of those, you pay for updates. And when you stop, you no longer get updates anymore.
Chris DuBois: Could be. You pay for the initial access, and then updates are what we charge you for.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. And I basically check by domain name — this plugin of blocks goes to my server once a day, and it's like, does this person's subscription still active? Yes or no? Great. Green checkbox. You're good. If it's not, it doesn't push any updates.
Chris DuBois: Right. So like Sprocket Rocket that we built — I could not get our founder to want to do a recurring model with it. He just wanted a one-time 3K license for it.
Chris LaFay: What is Sprocket Rocket? What is that?
Chris DuBois: If you go to sprocketrocket.co, it's a website builder, it's an application, but it's also like a full template library in HubSpot. So you can — we built an app on the back end. So you can just drag and drop the pieces you want to your site. And then it pushes it into your HubSpot portal. And once it's in HubSpot, then it pulls all of your branding, your typography. And then you just have to update the copy and update the imagery. And you can have any site you want, or you can hand it to a developer to then customize whatever pieces. But it is pretty customizable, even from a marketer standpoint, because you have all these dropdowns. I think my site is currently in Sprocket Rocket, and this could give you some ideas. I don't use our app anymore, because I just don't need to, but with the application — website pages.
> **SCREEN SHARING:** Chris DuBois shares Sprocket Rocket. https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=4116.119882
Chris DuBois: So for any page on my site — mine, obviously, the devs did a lot more custom stuff to get it looking that way — but I can open this, and just say I want to change a button. So I got my two CTAs, I can open one, I can change what style do I want it to have?
Chris LaFay: You have basically what I have. This is all very similar, actually. To WordPress.
Chris DuBois: To what I — yeah.
Chris LaFay: When I say I have custom built blocks, like within that CTA, that banner section, you can't move things around. You just fill out the form and it outputs HTML code for you.
Chris DuBois: Gotcha. You don't have customization.
Chris LaFay: So to give you a frame of reference, when I say a lot of my blocks are built using advanced custom fields, this is actually what they are. It is a block where all the HTML code is generated and you just fill the form out. Which is why in order to customize the look of it, you need a developer to do it. But by default, it's a white screen with white boxes. Some of the boxes are colored with your colors as necessary.
Chris DuBois: Right.
Chris LaFay: So what I'm hearing you say, looking at Sprocket Rocket — they have a $200 plan, a $1,000, a $3,000 plan, and you basically just get access to —
Chris DuBois: So they added a subscription since I left?
Chris LaFay: No, these are all one-time payments.
Chris DuBois: Oh, never mind.
Chris LaFay: So the Pro at $3,000 has 150 plus custom modules and future module releases as one of the checkboxes.
Chris DuBois: Gotcha. I'm also surprised they haven't ramped that up with the ability — now, because you can use AI to just create more modules, you'd think they would have just had 20 different versions of every section.
Chris LaFay: Yes. But anyways.
Chris DuBois: So what you're saying is the model works.
Chris LaFay: It does.
Chris DuBois: Yeah. I mean, right now, Sprocket Rocket is a majority of Lean Labs' revenue. When I left.
Chris LaFay: Wait, $3,000 — a multi-million dollar?
Chris DuBois: Not just your prescriptions, they do white label sites from that. So when someone downloads any templates, tools, the application itself, a salesperson will reach out and say, hey, saw you downloaded this, looks like you're going to build a website, did you want help with this? And then a majority of sales come from that.
Chris LaFay: Interesting. And on the Sprocket Rocket site —
Chris DuBois: They don't mention the white label sales at all. The team that built my website, took your design and built it into HubSpot, is the team that does all the white label stuff.
Chris LaFay: Okay, that makes sense.
Chris DuBois: So it's like we're hiring a team from India to build it out, but there's usually the salesperson stays on as the account manager to get the project done. They did probably a million in sales last year, just through that. And that became a bigger percentage of Lean Labs' revenue. The agency is not doing as well as this path. So that could also be a thing. What if you just launched a bunch of templates into a marketplace where you get their email and then you reach out to them and say, hey, thanks for downloading this template — you could have free ones, you could have paid ones — but then going back to them and saying, hey, we can help you with a website build. We're actually pretty good. And we would build it in this way, so you control the site, even after we're done.
Chris LaFay: Interesting.
Chris DuBois: I know that model works, because I've literally seen it work. And now it keeps getting better. Your newsletter, when you start showing off other modules — say we take that approach where you're going to be like, testimonial sections, and you show a bunch of awesome testimonial sections, you can also put some from your library and say, if you're on WordPress and you just want to download some of these, you can go get them for free. And now people can just go into whatever marketplace, access those templates, and now you have their email, and you can market to them. They're following your newsletter, so they already care about this. They got access to one of your modules. They're probably going to be doing a website build. And then once you have a bunch of modules, you throw together packages, which is what we did. So we'd have a landing page package and it was all the modules. Just prebuilt landing pages that you could go with a couple extra modules so you can swap some stuff out. But if someone's doing a landing page, say they're selling something, they have some asset they're trying to put out there, you can then market.
Chris LaFay: And also people could go out and build out their website. And then when they reach a blocking point, we could just come in and write CSS code and call it a day.
Chris DuBois: Yeah. And that's part of the pitch too — if you're already using these modules that I gave you, we don't need to do the full build. You save money by working with us because you're already using the stuff that we would be using. We're not starting from scratch.
Chris LaFay: Dude, think about workshops. So the workshop idea that we had, the messaging that I had — a little wireframe building tool. They actually had a platform within — doesn't have to be within WordPress. But now you actually go and the blocks are already on the page where you just write the words. Don't worry about the style. Now they're already in their own subdomain website.
Chris DuBois: They like the editing experience.
Chris LaFay: It's a permissionless — hey, this is it. If you want us to take it to the next level here, or you could just launch this. Now you can go back and play with the colors and the fonts, but everything is laid out nicely. Then it goes into — why constrict it to WordPress? Why not just build your own custom CMS that just works the way that you want it to, and not have to jump through the WordPress-y hoops?
Chris DuBois: I feel like it would be a lot more to maintain.
Chris LaFay: That would be. Yeah, exactly.
Chris DuBois: Yeah. I'm liking this. Because actually I kind of did a little test with this.
Chris LaFay: I had a client that came in before I built my pipeline for website building, and I had a simple little logo, rows of logos, and they just had a basic Gutenberg block that did rows of logos and they weren't happy with how it looked. I had built in my custom setup a logo bar that has a couple different settings — you can scroll them, you can change them all to grayscale, you can adjust the height so they're all matchy matchy. And as they're doing QA, like two weeks ago, they're like, you can't figure this out — so I went and just dropped that one block from my core theme into their custom thing, and was like, hey, upgrade, here's how it works, and they were like, oh my gosh, this is so much better. Think about that feeling, zoop, at scale.
Chris DuBois: Right. Chris likes the idea. How can I associate here?
Chris LaFay: I need more hours in the day. No, I don't need more hours in the day. It's fine. I'm thinking a lot of it's built out already. I don't have the landing page for this. Is this a Classic City product? So looking at what Lean Labs did, they have sprocketrocket.com — the very bottom of the footer says "made with love by Lean Labs," there's not even a link to Lean Labs, just text. Do we brand this as its own thing and go the Lean Labs route, or do we create a name around this and have it live under Classic City? No matter what, the name of this has to be video game oriented so that it matches the field. So whether it's its own thing or whether it's "power-ups powered by Classic City" — that's a terrible name, I think it's bad — but which of those two routes do we go?
Chris DuBois: I would use Classic City. You just say whatever we name the product, powered by Classic City. Well, it depends where you're putting this up. With Lean Labs, a majority of our leads didn't come from people going to Sprocket Rocket's website to buy. They came from people buying off the HubSpot marketplace.
Chris LaFay: Oh, I understand now what you're saying. So zoom backwards like 20 minutes when you're like, find a place to put this up on a marketplace. WordPress doesn't really have that. They have a plugin library that's free.
Chris DuBois: Do page builders, though, have it? So I've used the thing with a leaf. Elementor.
Chris LaFay: Divi.
Chris DuBois: Yeah, what's the one with a leaf in the logo? I feel like it was a leaf.
Chris LaFay: I don't know. Envato. Envato Marketplace.
Chris DuBois: Oh! I think that was it. But a marketplace like that, where they just have templates, and you could just create it for that. Do they make their own or do they have creators that make them?
Chris LaFay: Yes and no. The path probably was, hey, I had this thing called Elementor, let's put Elementor as a theme building thing on the Envato marketplace, then it got big and big and big, and then now people can build extensions for Elementor. Some of those extensions for Elementor live in Envato, some of them maybe Elementor has its own, like, these are ours that we have rubber stamped approved for Elementor.
Chris DuBois: But like, if you made a theme for Elementor, is there a marketplace you could sell that — you could sell in multiple marketplaces?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, there's nothing holding you back from putting it on multiple locations. You can put it in the core WordPress repository if you want it to be free. You could put it up on Envato for payment. And then if Elementor has its own rubber-stamp approved stuff, I'm sure there's a process to go through that. But nothing that we have is for Elementor. It's all for WordPress's core Gutenberg, which is not as popular as all the other ones, just because it hasn't been around for as long. These other ones have had momentum for years and years. But Gutenberg is a lot thinner. It's a lot faster. My opinion is better, but everybody's biased toward whatever they like. So the market is smaller with Gutenberg, but they're also probably better-perspective people in there. People that are using Divi and Elementor typically are DIYing stuff. That's not 100% true. So we name it, we decide whether we want to put it under Classic City or as its own unique thing, licensing is the next challenge because a lot of these blocks are built using advanced custom fields to power that form architecture.
> **ACTION ITEM:** Research ACF agency licensing; define distribution/licensing for Gutenberg blocks. https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=4991.9999
Chris LaFay: And I don't know how they feel about packaging advanced custom fields with a predefined access key in with the selling of other products.
Chris DuBois: They have an agency licensing model.
Chris LaFay: I think it's possible, but I haven't looked into how that would be done because that is a very big piece as to how all this works. So that's another thing that has to be thought about. But then also, what would be interesting — and this is where Chris's little plus-one plus-one plus-one brain is firing on all cylinders — it would be really cool to be able to, from the Classic City site, be like, start building today, and a staging site on WP Engine is spun up, they get access to it, it adds the plugin, it creates them credentials, they have all their color theme pickers and all that jazz, so that when they view a homepage, it's kind of built out.
Chris DuBois: That would be really nifty. Take it for a test run.
Chris LaFay: Maybe we just have a sandbox that refreshes every day. I don't know.
Chris DuBois: All right. So we got some details to work out for it.
> **ACTION ITEM:** Draft landing page messaging/naming for Gutenberg blocks; derive LinkedIn hooks/CTAs. https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=5110.9999
Chris LaFay: What is the way I can be of the most assistance to you? That was the original question. Landing, naming, landing page content. In general, what is the package of content — the pros and the cons list, the why to do this, the whole thing? I'm thinking through taking the content of this conversation, shoving it into AI: what is the messaging architecture when you take Classic City into the mix? What is that landing page content? What's some naming ideas? And then derive from that, what are some potential LinkedIn hooks to talk about this idea? I wouldn't necessarily want to package all this together in one large deliverable. Let's make sure the foundation is good. What are the LinkedIn hooks that could derive from that, then some LinkedIn content, CTAs, et cetera. And then I have to figure out how is this going to be deployed? That might be the most important piece, because most people don't have Gutenberg-powered WordPress sites that they're just like, I'm gonna add this plugin. I can give it to you as a zip file, you can install it, but that initial user experience of starting is key. That's not done, but I also realized there's probably going to be an over-engineering part. So I don't know where to start. Once you said, I want this — what does that next step look like?
Chris DuBois: There's a lot of technicalities within that. Because with Sprocket Rocket, you just go to the HubSpot library and push add and you're done.
Chris LaFay: But current WordPress sites are complex, and nobody is going to be like, I think this sounds like a good idea, let me go spin up a WordPress site. Nobody's doing that. So onboarding is going to be the challenge. Maybe we add friction. Maybe part of this is, by doing this, you will be handheld through the first couple of steps of the process. Maybe there's a power to that. There's a power to slow. Maybe I'm wrong.
Chris DuBois: Yeah, friction at the right spots is a good thing.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, agreed. Might not be the spot, though. I'm going to spend some thought cycles on this. And try to figure out — I think if you can figure out where we can sell that, just the path for how to even get it in people's hands that works.
> **ACTION ITEM:** Consult agency partner re: selling Gutenberg blocks; report back. https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=5299.9999
Chris DuBois: I'll spend time thinking about the rest, like the marketing of it.
Chris LaFay: I can actually talk with my other agency guy that I was talking about before about this because he knows a lot. How to sell it. Does the Fathom transcript automatically get added anywhere when these meetings are over? I know summaries — where does it get added to?
Chris DuBois: Inside that summary doc, there's a link.
Chris LaFay: Oh, it's in the summary doc.
Chris DuBois: So when the summary gets populated.
> **ACTION ITEM:** Confirm availability for Jun 10 call; notify Chris LaFay if phone-only. https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=5348.9999
Chris LaFay: Didn't realize that. Didn't see it there before. Okay, cool. All right. It's 12:30. All right, man.
Chris DuBois: Oh, a quick thing — wait, do you have to rush? I don't think I'm out with the army next on the 10th, which is our next meeting. If you're okay with it, let's keep it on the schedule for now. If I can do a phone call meeting during that time, I will. I just don't know what my schedule looks like by then. I will know what my schedule looks like with the army. And so I can probably still run the meeting, period. It's just I don't know what they're doing with me yet once I get there.
Chris LaFay: So the other event idea that I had — let me give you the 30-second version, or do you need to hop?
Chris DuBois: No, hit me.
Chris LaFay: So I have an idea — again, I'm always thinking about how do you provide value to people as a first step. So my thinking is, in Atlanta, think of this kind of like a trade show where there's a lot of different booths all around. It's not a trade show by any stretch of the imagination. We have a venue that can possibly have about 100 people. So we have enough space to do something similar to this. I get a video crew, a design crew, an ads person, an SEO person, a messaging and positioning person. And we all have our little sections within this room. And other agencies, other businesses, can basically, if they want to sign up for this workshop day, every person's booth has a signup form.
> **ACTION ITEM:** Pitch Atlanta Growth Day to video/ads/SEO/design/messaging partners; secure venue; set date; start marketing. https://fathom.video/calls/686673818?timestamp=5455.9999
Chris LaFay: Maybe they're 45 minute sessions. They're on the hour, but they're only 45 minute sessions. And by applying to go to this thing, you can sign up for three different time slots. I'm going to go talk to Chris about this, I'm going to go talk to the video people about this and the ads person about this. There's something tangible that happens here. All the agencies that are involved obviously get access to everybody that signs up. And this is basically — I'm thinking about pitching this like an Atlanta Growth Day. You don't spend time on your own stuff. Come and spend time with it. I'm organizing this group of five to 10 experts in their own domains. Come and get your stuff done with these really smart people. And then you get a chance to meet all the other agencies that are actually there in attendance. I'm thinking the video guys could have a video booth where you do the content day video, the talking headshots. Maybe bring a photographer in to take photos of this thing. Maybe even like a roaming reporter the day of — maybe one of the video people just walked around with a microphone and ask people how they're enjoying themselves. So it'd be a way that probably — I'm hoping 50 to 75 people come and attend and get value. There would be the list ahead of time. And then you would have a lineup of people that would come and you would know who they are ahead of time. So you would know what their problems are. That's what I'm thinking.
Chris DuBois: I like it. Do you like this idea?
Chris LaFay: Is that something that you're interested in possibly being a part of?
Chris DuBois: Yes. I think if the timing worked out and everything. Yes. I'm happy to promote it regardless because I think it would be an actual valuable event.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. I'm trying to think about ways to make some of the tertiary things fun. So the idea of having a roaming reporter where when people are walking from place to place, go and do on-the-spot interviews and try to add fun elements inside of it.
Chris DuBois: People won't stay all day.
Chris LaFay: They'll come for their sessions and then head out. So I don't think it's going to be this large bustling thing. But I think if it's pitched as an Atlanta business growth day, we're getting Atlanta together to level themselves up. I think that kind of messaging around it would drive a lot of people. So anyhow, that's the idea that I had. I had a space that's free that can fit 100 people. I was like, what can we do with the space? So that was the idea that I randomly talked to you about.
Chris DuBois: All right, man.
Chris LaFay: Have a good rest of the day. Enjoy.
Chris DuBois: I'll catch you later.
Chris LaFay: See you, man.
Chris DuBois: Bye.