Product Genius, the Podcast for Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and Startups

Steven Julian

Do you like books? Perhaps you prefer self-guided formative experiences. Well, today you'll get both. Plus, we celebrate our first ever guest from outside our borders. He'll talk about bacon and we don't mean the Canadian kind. Next on Product Genius.

Laurier Mandin

Do you want to be a successful inventor entrepreneur? Struggling to get your product from idea to market? Well, you've come to the right place. Welcome to Product Genius. The down-to-earth podcast that explores important topics about inventing and launching new products. Noah McNeely is your trusted guide. With more than 20 years of product launch experience, he's here to help you on your journey to become a product genius. Let's get started. Here's your slightly annoying co-host, Steven Julian.

Steven Julian

Greetings and salutations, loyal listeners, of the great podcast known as Product Genius. Coming to you almost live from deep inside the layer of Product Quick Start, it is me. I already said that. And it is the intrepid producer, Jody Smith, and seated across the table, feeling very comfortable in his own place. It is Noah McNeely, the host. Hey, Noah.

Noah McNeely

Well, I'm as comfortable as I get anywhere. I never really feel fully comfortable.

Steven Julian

In front of. a microphone? Or in life?

Noah McNeely

Anywhere in life.

Steven Julian

Sounds like another show.

Noah McNeely

Recovering engineer. I'm still trying to get my feet under that. But yeah, I'm doing good.

Steven Julian

As long as I don't bring any more discomfort or uncomfortableness than you already have in your life, I think I'll take that as a satisfactory answer.

Noah McNeely

It's a fun sort of discomfort with you.

Steven Julian

Well, thanks. I'm not sure there's another show.

Noah McNeely

Not that kind of fun discomfort, but okay, we should stop talking about that.

Steven Julian

Speaking of which, we're proud to have Tiffany and Opu Probiotics as our sponsor again. I couldn't resist. You put it on a tee and I knocked it out of the park. Love you, Tiffany. We miss you. I hope you're doing great. And yes, sorry.

Noah McNeely

We're going to get another letter.

Steven Julian

We're going to get another email. Oh, man. Before that happens, let's welcome in our guests. We are thrilled, man. We've got a great guest. Noah, you keep lining up these fantastic guests who have all kinds of interesting things to say. So let's go ahead and bring them in. We have Laurier Manden. He is the author of a book called I. Need That, and he's the head of a company called Graphios.

Noah McNeely

Graphos. Graphos.

Steven Julian

Sorry. Dang it. I spelled it wrong on my notes, and I messed it up. Let me fix that.

Noah McNeely

The year is young.

Steven Julian

You've already made their strike one.

Noah McNeely

You get three strikes this year.

Steven Julian

I know. Speaking of which, as of this recording, there are about 25 days till pitchers and catchers report. One of those teams will be from Toronto and Laurier is from Canada. Laurier, welcome to the studio.

Laurier Mandin

Hey, it's great to be here. And I like that name. I'm thinking there could be a cereal brand in Grafios.

Steven Julian

Oh, oh, I like that. Oh, you're so kind. You're so kind. But for those people who are now Googling you and finding out about the book and looking for the company, let's tell them about the company and what you guys do.

Laurier Mandin

Sure. Graphos or Graphos Product, what we do is help innovators, and that includes inventor entrepreneurs like the kind that listen to this show, develop products and take products to market. The most important part of the work we do is in helping them. Position their product and come up with. a really solid go-to-market roadmap. So we've been doing that for over 30 years, if you can believe it. And I believe it now because I was just out shoveling snow for about two hours. We had a huge blizzard and all my neighbors are somehow older than me.

So I'm feeling every year of my age right now. So we're pretty deep in. In marketing products, and that's what we do best.

Steven Julian

Now, speak also, so out of that, and since you've been doing that for 30 years, you definitely have the gravitas and the history, and not just from snuffling show, a shoveling snuffling.

Noah McNeely

That's two sharks.

Steven Julian

All right, make a note. We're going to edit that. All right, shoveling snow. I need to slow down, Laurier. All right. Out of the gravitas of the experience, you were able to also write a book called I Need That. Talk about the book and what readers can expect.

Laurier Mandin

I Need That is a book that I worked on for over five years. I started before COVID and just launched it recently. And it's something that I really wanted to get right because it answered a problem or its goal. is to answer a problem that everybody who's developing a product has. They're automatically, just by the fact that they're doing it, they're heading into this default trajectory to failure, sadly, where 70 to 95% of new products fail. And that's just so not necessary. And there are some persistent, repetitive reasons that I saw as to why this continues to happen.

And I recognize that if I were to just show people, okay, these are the things that everybody tends to do wrong. These are the things you need to know about your product. Here's what you need to know about your customer and your customer's brain. And if you understand all of these things and you take the right steps, then you've got no excuse to go into that 70 to 95% batch failure rate. And I joke that, you know, if you, in Vegas, the odds of winning in blackjack or roulette are close to 50-50.

You get kicked out of Vegas. Coming in with odds of 70% to 95% for being too risky. And yet people take huge sums of money and years of their lives and throw them at launching products with these terrible odds. And they're not fixed odds. You can do things to change them. So that's the short summary of why I wrote I Need That and why I put five years of my life into doing that. And I'm really happy with the outcome. I think that I managed to not make it a... It's a thousand-page book.

I mean, it's about 300 pages, and it gets you through the things you need to know in order to be successful.

Steven Julian

Absolutely. Noah, I've got a question for you before you even ask Laurier your first question that you want to ask him. So as he described his company and kind of what they do, I'm like, I've heard some of those things before because you talk about positioning. And we've talked many times on this show about coopetition and about how you are trying to help people build a team and you find others who are doing the exact same thing. So talk about why you specifically wanted to have Laurier on the show.

Noah McNeely

Yeah. So I think if you are a listener, have listened to a few of these episodes, you'll notice there's a trend. I tend to bring people. on that are a lot like me in some way or another. He has this marketing book, which is he's an expert on marketing, which is something I can advise people about just a little bit, but he can give much better, deeper advice than I can. And his book, unlike a lot of the marketing books out there, it recognizes that product entrepreneurs have needs too. It's not just talking to the bigger companies, not just talking to product managers at established companies.

Acknowledge and address the needs of the typical people that I work with and that would be listening to this show.

Steven Julian

So you help people develop the product. They definitely need help marketing. Right.

Noah McNeely

As Laurier talks about in the book, you have to have a good product. That helps with the marketing. But as I tell people often, I can make the best product in the world for you. But if you don't know how to sell and market it, you're still going to fail.

Steven Julian

So, Laurier, let me kind of get out of your way by asking a question that I'm sure you would love to be asked in every single interview and every. single networking group you go to and probably even at a cocktail party or two. Give us one or two things that an entrepreneur who's just developed a new product, what are the most important things for their marketing to be successful?

Laurier Mandin

One of the most important things is for them to understand that, yes, someone will buy their product. To achieve a specific outcome. But that's not necessarily what is going to be the strongest motivation of that buyer to buy the product. What really motivates people is something much bigger. It's that desired long-term future state of what they want to be, where they want to be. And I call that the coveted condition. So in order to get an idea to understand what a coveted condition could be for your product, take the product name and say, I need name of product here.

To become blank, so to become fitter, more efficient, more popular, get promoted, whatever. that long-term outcome is that if I were to take away that product after a year of using it repeatedly, what would you miss the most and what change in your life would be in jeopardy from not having it?

Noah McNeely

So this is a question you're asking. You're asking the product developer to ask hypothetically as if one of their customers was asking that question. After using the product, am I understanding that correctly?

Laurier Mandin

Yes, and it's much more of a marketing question. It's kind of a brain science question, too, because it's really trying to understand the emotional part of what the reasoning is for someone to buy the product. And I know that that's a challenge. when you're working on and developing and engineering a product, is you're thinking about... Functionally how it's going to work. Will it achieve the outcome that it needs to functionally achieve and not going beyond that in terms of how is that person going to feel after that? But we recognize in marketing and the work that I do is that people don't just buy on solving a functional problem because most of us have solutions to whatever problems we have.

We have our status quo way of solving those problems. It's very, very painful to us emotionally and to our mind, to the neocortex, the big rational part of our brain, to accept that we're going to have to learn a. new way. So to the emotional part of our brain, new is good, new is exciting, a new way of doing something and something we can dream about is motivating. But to the rational mind, new is scary, dangerous, new has always gotten us killed. Harmed in some way, so we avoid it. So really, one of the biggest things that innovators, that inventor entrepreneurs need to learn to do is to market their products effectively, to get their head out of just that obvious outcome that you're going to get someone to.

It's obvious that if I buy myself a Ford F-150 that I can throw stuff in and get it from point A to point B and run my construction business. The reason why on the commercials I'm seeing this truck bouncing over boulders and on the top of beautiful mountains and places I'll never go is because that's the emotional stuff that gets me to think, wow, yeah, I want a better life. I want to be in command of this powerful machine. It's not just about that basic functional need of having a truck.

Noah McNeely

Yeah, so I think the emotional aspect of marketing is certainly something. that... I, as a recovering engineer, often struggles with because, you know, we as engineers, product developers, we're often taught to kind of put emotion aside. And which, yeah, if you're an engineer with a company that's got a marketing department and so forth and so on, that's fine. But a lot of us who are entrepreneurs, we're kind of one-man shops or one-woman shops or whatever. We can't do that. Or if we do that, there's a big danger. So I love the way you approach that.

You know, one of the things I like to do with my clients, at least in my sphere, is help them avoid mistakes by talking about mistakes I've seen other people make. You know, I always change the names in the scenario to keep the guilty, you know, to protect the guilty and the innocent. Do you have anything like that? What are some, do you have any mistakes you could talk to kind of in a real world way? Again, protect the innocent and the guilty that might.

Laurier Mandin

This is an interesting crossover question between what you do and what you understand as an engineer and what marketers do. And I. talk a lot about validation methodologies in the book. And one of the biggest mistakes that anybody developing a product is, is not necessarily not doing the prototype testing and making sure that it functionally does its job properly, but understanding. Do people want it? What people want it? So doing the validation testing that I find is kind of the crux. It's the tipping point into failure that so many products go into.

And there are all kinds of reasons why innovators fear doing proper validation.

Noah McNeely

Assume our listeners and assume this particular host doesn't really understand all the terminology that well. What do you, in sort of like... As if you were explaining to someone who'd never heard the term, what is validation testing? What's an example of that?

Laurier Mandin

Great. And thank you for taking me back a couple of steps. So validation testing is taking the product, and often this is best done in its roughest, barest prototype form, and having people utilize it and finding out if they feel that they really would, they want this. A combination of finding out if users want to use the product, if they will be able to use the. product, and the most important thing when it comes to deciding that you're going to build something is will they pay what it's going to cost you to create that product, to manufacture it to a high level of quality, to get that product in their hands, and to make them successful with it.

Because that's often... All of that bundled together, the answer is often no. They will not pay for you to make this thing, to make it amazing and get it to the point of shipping it to them with all your costs. that are going to include processing returns and customer service and all those other things. Because there's usually a business also around this product. So all those things together, part of what we're validating or we're testing for is do customers, do the people who you're expecting are going to buy this thing, Actually see as much value in it as you believe is there.

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Steven Julian

We're speaking with Laurie A. Mandon. He is the President and Principal Consultant with Graphos. I did correct my mistake. And also the author of.

Laurier Mandin

I Need That.

Steven Julian

And Laurier, I wanted to ask this particular question. One of the things you are called to do or one of the things you see probably as your role is wherever someone is in their journey of getting that product to market and marketed correctly and connect with customers and clients, you've got 30 years of experience. Are there a couple of similar bottlenecks that the inventor entrepreneur finds themselves in where they get stuck or they are about to give up or they just can't get over the hump? What are some of the similar?

And that's a very loaded question because you've done technology products, you've done. Simple, you know, probably very basic products with, you know, so that's like, there's a wide spectrum. So what are some of the bottlenecks you? see people come across? So it's not mistakes and it's not advice for success. It's be ready for these obstacles or be ready for these hard points or pain points.

Laurier Mandin

The biggest challenge has been, and this is something you probably encounter with your work, is manufacturing, getting the right manufacturer. Getting the parts right, the components, all depending on what kind of product you're putting together. But I've had more products that get to the point where now they're coming up with manufacturers and part specs and all that stuff ends up taking way more time than they thought it would. And I guess for one thing, it's really important to recognize that everything is going to take, you know, I've heard 30%. I think that's low a lot of the time, longer to do and 30%.

More to produce than you think it will. So it's on actually producing the item that most of that logjam happens. I find that when we get to the stage of creating the marketing, doing the positioning, we talked a little bit about that, writing the content, creating an online store, doing all of that stuff. That's kind of the fun part. And we don't end up with huge delays. Very often what we end up waiting for is actual product. And the inventor entrepreneur is always so excited and so, you know, everything in their life revolves around getting that product to market and getting it selling that that's really arduous and painful.

So I find that the bottlenecks aren't typically so much on the marketing side, as long as we create the proper expectations of how long it's going to take to build things and design things and write. The content and put it all together in a really nice package. And then once that happens, it's a flywheel and you're working on continuous improvement and trying to figure out what may not be working, optimizing things like that. But most of it is probably the stuff you guys tend to encounter on the product development side and when you start getting into the real nuts and bolts of manufacturing.

Noah McNeely

Yeah, I mean, Steven, I know you got something, but that 30% longer than you expected to take, that's... For people that have some experience with product development, for the people that are brand new, you know, that have been. an entrepreneur that's never done a product before, that's a much bigger number often. They have very unrealistic expectations. You know, they see movies and they see, you know, Tony Stark make something in a half hour. It's like this high-tech thing. It's like, oh, that can't be that different from the real world.

Laurier Mandin

Six months must be plenty.

Noah McNeely

Yeah, so a lot of education can go into helping to guide an entrepreneur on the product development side. But I think also, as you're alluding to on the marketing side as well. But, Stephen, you had a question, so I interjected, so go ahead.

Steven Julian

So, by the way, you brought to the table the – I think we need to – I think we need to create – Jody, make a note. We need to create a manufacturing montage. Of what it really is like in the lair of Product Quick Start. It's not two minutes long. It's Noah in a dark, cold corner of the lair, like going through his bit drawers.

Noah McNeely

You just made me sound like Dr. Frankenstein.

Steven Julian

Yeah, and? What's your point? So, Laurier. I also wanted to ask this question, you know, and kind of? talking about the bottlenecks, you mentioned the word process in the last answer you gave. And I think you guys will kind of stand behind, in fact, I found on your website, kind of the words proprietary and kind of a couple of trademarked processes that you guys do. So if someone works with you. How is their experience going to be more unique than working with someone they find just searching the internet and looking for the first marketing company that doesn't necessarily specialize with entrepreneurs and inventors?

Laurier Mandin

That uniqueness, I guess, comes from doing it in a way that we're always optimizing and putting our learnings into and creating systems and platforms and frameworks so that we can be more efficient for our clients. The processes that probably set us aside from more generalist marketing companies and that are built around us marketing products very specifically. So when we take on a new client, we understand the world that they're going to be going into with this product and the kinds of marketing tools that they're most likely to be using. Everything that we do and those processes that you mentioned.

Are geared around the specific needs that. they're going to have as a product-making client and also around the gaps that are probably existing in their knowledge. I thought it was interesting that you asked the question about validation and recognizing that for a lot of inventor entrepreneurs, that might not be in their vernacular, in their vocabulary. And to me, that's true. And the other side of it is it's shocking. Because you really got to know some of this stuff. I mean, really, read. I Need That before you call me. Because once you've done that, some clients I almost feel like, did you read this book when I meet them now?

Because they have this advanced level of knowledge. But most really are starting at a point where they should be armed with more knowledge before they're... Before they go in and start talking to marketing companies.

Noah McNeely

Yeah, and I think a lot of times, you know, the inventor, entrepreneur, especially someone new to it, they just can't imagine why someone wouldn't want to buy their product. And in your space and in my space, they can't imagine why it wouldn't work or why it can't be made for whatever it's going to be. made. And I think you and I probably both fight similar battles there, at least to get people to wrap their head around that. I did want to jump over. Or jump back to the book a little bit because there were a couple things in there that piqued my interest.

One in particular, because I'm a big fan of bacon, you have a chapter which I thought would be both insightful and entertaining about how all of a sudden bacon became a thing and marketing was a big driver of that. Is there something? Is there a lesson there that we could apply to entrepreneurs?

Laurier Mandin

There's definitely kind of a psychological, and when we talk about positioning, how bacon came to be is really a wide positioning and influencer marketing 100 years ago story. Because, yeah, bacon wasn't originally a breakfast food. It was something that a food... Producing company wanted to come up with a way to sell more of, but it didn't have a place in people's world. So what they did was they got a well-known and one of the first of his kind in his day, TR man, to write letters to doctors. And I. think he wrote letters to 5,000 doctors and had them endorse bacon as a breakfast food. that would give people.

You know, better start to their day. It would give them something more substantial and, you know, accompanied with other things that would make it a more reasonable breakfast food like eggs. And he actually had, I think it was 95% of the doctors responded endorsing this idea. And then they took it to the media and the power of newspapers in the day was such that putting this on the front pages of all the newspapers in America made people feel that they needed bacon in their lives, that that's where bacon. It went from this kind of obscure thing that not too many people were eating to that breakfast food that everybody craves.

You want the sizzle of that bacon because a PR guy 100 years ago decided or was hired to make you want it.

Noah McNeely

That were, you know, my taste buds would certainly agree that bacon is….

Steven Julian

The PR guy was right.

Noah McNeely

Yeah, well, bacon is something we need in our box.

Laurier Mandin

You have something to work with there.

Steven Julian

In fact, asking that question, I'm now. going to cut this interview short because, or you keep going, I'm going to go get some bacon.

Noah McNeely

I was just going to say that reminds me, that story reminds me a little bit of the Nathan's Hot Dog story where on Coney Island, Nathan's opened this restaurant and they would give doctors… Free hot dogs if they would simply come and eat out front wearing their doctor's outfit.

Steven Julian

It always goes back to the doctors.

Noah McNeely

Yeah, so it's an interesting thing. Another chapter that jumped out at me and made what I thought was a really interesting point. It's got food in the title, but I don't know why I was attracted to it.

Steven Julian

You were hungry when you were reading it.

Noah McNeely

Maybe I was, but the one about how we don't need another Apple, and I thought one of the insightful things there is. there's so many people that try to copy Apple, but they're trying to copy, especially early stage companies are trying to copy a very mature and established Apple rather than really trying to copy what Apple was when it was at their stage. I think I interpreted your point in that chapter correctly, but maybe help the audience understand that a little bit.

Laurier Mandin

You're so correct on a few different levels, right? We don't think about being Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak starting a business out of their garage with this terrible logo. You know, it was this tree, woodcut of a tree or something like that that most people wouldn't recognize. We imagine, you know, Apple, the biggest company in the history of the world. And being so innovative and yeah, but one of the reasons that that's in the book is whenever I ask somebody and we need to know kind of what kind of marketing they like, what their brand image would be like in their mind.

And Apple's always at the top of the list when they say, you know, I want it to be like this and I want my website to be like Apple's. And one of the key things I talk about with that is that Apple is what it is because... It's an innovator is because it did things no one else had ever done. And if you copy an innovator, then you're a follower. So yes, be that. Innovate. Create new things. Create excitement. Do. things in a user-friendly, intuitive way that people learn without a manual.

Do those things. But please don't try to be another Apple. Don't try to be another anybody. That's kind of the most important part of that chapter to me.

Steven Julian

So you said earlier that, you know, this was a labor of labor that took five years out of labor of 30 years. And you kind of said it wasn't a thousand pages. It's also not a picture book of 25 pages with pop ups. There's definitely some depth to it. Without giving away all the secrets, although I really would, I almost want to quiz you on the most powerful word in marketing. So I'll let you decide whether you want to tell us that and tease it or tell people. they got to read the book to find it.

But as people, if people do take the time to invest in this book.

Noah McNeely

And they should.

Steven Julian

And they should. And by the way, speaking of the 95% of doctors who said yes to bacon, I was thinking of the four out of five. Dentists who recommended Trident. I think two out of two podcast hosts on this. show will heartily recommend that people should read this book. What will they get? What kind of journey are they going to go on? What are they going to be able to, where are they going to go? Man, that was highly profitable because I read that book.

Laurier Mandin

I hope it's not just from the content of the chapters themselves. At the end of every chapter, I have a series of action items that I do these now for quick wins, I call them, and there's 104 of them, or no, I think it's 114 in the book altogether. But to me, those are the steps that I think are the most useful, the parts of the books that I think are the most useful, because they don't just apply, they're not theory. They're, okay, what did you read in this chapter? And how does this apply to what you're doing, what you're building right now?

Because I've read so many books myself, and I've often found that, you know, I read that whole thing, and I struggle to find what is actually applicable to my world. So what I didn't want to have with this book is for people. to read it and to say, no, great, there's a lot of good theory in there, but nothing is really relevant to me. In every chapter, There should be like five things that are relevant to the product that you're creating. And here is how you can apply specifically those learnings to what you're working on.

Noah McNeely

That was one of the things I really enjoyed about your writing too, is that, yeah, there's some philosophical stuff in there, but you... You always seem to tie it back into something practical and real world. And a lot of books don't do that. A lot of books, you know, they want you to go off and think about it, which there's a lot in your book to think about. But you're also kind of give us the answers to the quiz, too, which I think is very useful, especially for entrepreneurs who don't, you know, we don't always have all the time we'd like to have.

So I think that's a very good approach.

Steven Julian

I hate to do this. I'm the slightly annoying co-host. And as slightly annoying co-host, my job has to be that Laurier, I think, is correct when he. says at the end there are five or six action items. And for him to call them quick wins, I think that's fantastic. It also has to be said that this book has homework. So I just have to say it that way to be slightly annoying. I apologize. But I was thinking to put a positive spin on my slightly annoying way of saying it. Even if you got a failing grade of 50.

And you only did 50 of the things you would, or 50%, you would have over 50 quick wins in your product development and getting product to market. That's a huge investment. That's a huge return on investment. So well done. So I apologize for calling it homework.

Laurier Mandin

Yeah, well, nobody's going to grade you on it. I think that's the most important thing. So you're going to hold yourself to doing this homework because you want to succeed, right? Self-study course.

Noah McNeely

I would call it self-guided formative experiences.

Steven Julian

That's the recovering engineer speaking.

Laurier Mandin

Exactly. And as your teacher will tell you, you can cheat all you want, but you're only cheating yourself, right?

Steven Julian

In this case, they're not cheating at all. They're self-guided doing. it. I like it. So, Laurier, let me ask this question. Obviously, I guess the – let me just say. As other than going to Amazon or your other favorite book website and searching, I need that. And it's Laurier Manden, L-A-U-R-I-E-R-M-A-N-D-I-N. If you want to search the author, is there any other, is there a particular way that would, that people can look for the book? or is it like, no, it's out there, find it. however you can and get it. So let me ask that first.

Laurier Mandin

Easy to find on Amazon and Audible, but go to lmanden.com. L-M-A-N-D-I-N.com. And I've got links directly from there. I don't get commission on the links because it's my book in the first place. But that'll get you to the best place to buy it where you live. And at the same time, you can sign up for my daily emails because one of the things that I did as a follow-up to this book is I've been writing every single day. I work on putting out an email that helps people to learn, to move forward, to keep on advancing in their...

Product making, product marketing journey. So that's kind. of the added bonus is go to almanda.com and get my daily emails. And I promise you'll learn stuff every day.

Noah McNeely

Well, yeah, so I really appreciate that. And I think I do encourage everyone to take a look at it. But before we move. Kind of on to the end of the interview, which I think is why Steven's waving at me. I had one question. I'm not waving. Yeah, I'm creating this mythos that Steven's always.

Steven Julian

Goodness, great. What is going on with it? Man.

Noah McNeely

But I have a question.

Laurier Mandin

He's dancing.

Noah McNeely

It's one of the very first questions I wrote down in my notes, but I wanted to kind of.

Steven Julian

But you didn't get to it, did you? No, I wanted to. Now you're circling back.

Noah McNeely

Hey, I wanted to send it to the end.

Steven Julian

Don't yell at me.

Noah McNeely

Okay, so your book, obviously it's a new book. You've been working on the last five years. It's up to date. Now, there are a lot of well-known marketing books that have been out for a long time. So it seems to me, and again, especially through the lens of entrepreneurs, which is our audience mostly, but it. seems to me that marketing has probably evolved and changed in the last five, 10 years in ways that Readers may not get from older books. Is there anything there you'd want to kind of highlight or draw attention to?

Laurier Mandin

I wrote the book to be as evergreen as it could be. But the other side of that is I do recognize the tools. Like I talk about AI and I talk about the... The things that you could do to future-proof your product, recognizing the stuff that has happened over the past several years. So it is a post-pandemic book. It is a book about launching a product right now with some of the challenges that people encounter, especially, you know, I'm very realistic about how tough digital marketing has become, how hard it is to actually sell things and be profitable.

How the world has changed in the last several years and kind of where we are right now. And I deliberately wrote it though with in mind that I want to have just a couple of chapters that will really be dated in another five years and I'll need to go back to and revise. And the. majority of it will be, you know, the case studies will get updated, that type of thing. But the majority of it is really based on fundamentals, things that have existed for years now. Where they're at now and where they're likely to go next.

Noah McNeely

So bottom line there is, even if you've read all the marketing books you're aware of, there's still going to be something new in here most likely. And I think you mentioned your daily email as well. I'm assuming that's probably a way you can address new trends, new things, because none of us know what's going to happen tomorrow. Lots of things in the economy, lots of things in the world at large can evolve and all that could impact.

Laurier Mandin

That's true. I was going to add the audiobook that I've got. I also have a printable version of the Quick Wins for people who are listening to the audiobook. Since this is a podcast, I'm guessing I've got a lot of audio people here. So send me an email and I'll give you a secret link to get those printable Quick Wins.

Steven Julian

Oh, secret links. We like that. And Noah, by the way, saying hey to me was definitely worth it because that was a great question. I'm glad you did it. And I was going to say, Laurier, the other thing I was going to suggest, and Noah kind of mentioned it, you talked about a daily email. I would also want to give you an opportunity to talk about, just tell people where to go to find out more about Graphos because on your company website, you have a podcast, there's a blog there, there's all kinds of extra content, not secret links maybe, but good content.

Updated content like blogs. So for those people who want to possibly go beyond just reading the book and want to interact with Graphos and what you guys do, tell everybody where to go and what to do.

Laurier Mandin

Beautiful, yes. Go to graphosproduct.com. And yeah, I don't have any secret links there, but we do have blog posts that are usually more in-depth. One of the more recent ones that I've posted is about how to create a go-to-market roadmap. Using AI. So we talk about things like that, but I think I was terrified of a year ago and now I'm recognizing people. are going to do this stuff anyway. They need to know how to do it right and also where they're going to go wrong if they just let AI do it.

So you really do need people with experience and expertise to guide the process or else you're going to be creating a hallucination-based roadmap and you won't know where the hallucinations are until they go wrong for you.

Noah McNeely

Yeah, I kind of look at AI as the way I look at a lot of new technologies is. it's a very powerful tool, but it helps you get a lot done. But it can also help you get a lot done in the wrong way and badly and hurt yourself. So I think that's I want to check out your roadmap, too. So that that's interesting.

Steven Julian

I like that. To quote Dwight Schrute, you know, once this. Internet fad thing goes away, then we'll really get back to. So, and by the way, graphos, G-R-A-P-H-O-S product.com, all one word. Don't do what I did at the beginning of the show and put in graphios, although apparently. That's a new cereal line that will be coming to you soon.

Laurier Mandin

Yeah, I'm. working on that. Yeah. Give me a year for that one. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe I said 30%, a year in three or four months.

Steven Julian

I just, all I want, all I want is my picture on the front of the box. That's all I asked for since I came up, since I screwed up the name. That would be all I ask. And yeah, anyway, you need a clown on the front of your cereal box.

Noah McNeely

And that could be me. I don't think he meant cereal like he eats. I think he meant cereal more like a cereal series. Ooh. Like a, you know.

Laurier Mandin

I meant the kind you eat. Oh, okay.

Noah McNeely

Well, fine.

Laurier Mandin

There's always a spin-off TV series, right?

Steven Julian

Sorry. That's right. The Saturday morning TV cartoon show.

Laurier Mandin

The clown can be there, too. I like it.

Noah McNeely

I like it. The engineer interpreted something incorrectly once again.

Steven Julian

It's okay. And the slightly annoying co-host was there to bring you back down to earth. Laurier Manden of Graphos and also of the book, I Need That. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for being our guest on the show today.

Laurier Mandin

Well, I figured this would be. the most fun podcast I've ever done. And you guys exceeded that expectation. So thank you so much.

Noah McNeely

Oh, we're putting that on the website.

Steven Julian

I'm so kind. We got ourselves a review. I like it.

Laurier Mandin

It was good. Yeah, absolutely. Come and hang out with these guys. And you might actually listen to the podcast after too, but come for the fun.

Steven Julian

Absolutely. Absolutely. So best of luck to you in the new year and look forward to checking out more of the book and learning more about your company and come back soon. And thanks again for being on the show.

Laurier Mandin

You bet. Absolutely.

Steven Julian

Noah, again, just, you know, just set them up, knock them down. Great, great guest. Great guest.

Noah McNeely

Well, you know, that's why I get paid the big bucks to do this podcast.

Steven Julian

No, what you get paid the big bucks to do is to help people bring their products to market. So people, after they go to graphosproduct.com, they can go to productquickstart.com.

Noah McNeely

But don't let that big bucks comment scare you off. I'm the most reasonably priced person you're ever going to meet in this industry.

Steven Julian

And again, what you know you do. well, you do very well. What you maybe know a little bit about, like marketing, you get connected to other people, bring them to the table, help people get their product to market.

Noah McNeely

Well, I look at it as an inventor ecosystem because there's so much stuff I don't do, I don't want to do, I can't do. So I have reached out to find people like Laurier and actually Laurier reached out to me. I've tried to build a network of startup-friendly people that I can just refer you to. And I'm not going to get in the middle of it. I don't want to be in the middle of it. So you call me, you tell me you need something, and it's not something I do.

I'm just going to say, hey, call this person.

Steven Julian

Well, and the longer we do this show, the longer the list of people who we bring around this table who are geniuses, and I think sometimes people might listen or check out our shows and they go, holy cow, if I have to use every single one of these, I mean, it's going to be ridiculous. It's going to cost millions of. dollars. So many of the people you bring around the table and you yourself, you're trying to keep people from spending unnecessary tens of thousands of dollars. We've had those conversations many times.

Those date back to when Tiffany was doing the show. And we would sit in here and talk about how, we sat in a different layer, but we would talk about how, you know, just trying to help people avoid the pitfalls, mainly of money, also of time, also of discouragement. And so I just want to thank you for letting me be a part of this ride. I want to thank you for, I made it through the show with only two strikes.

Noah McNeely

All right. We'll reset for next month. Absolutely.

Steven Julian

So I choked up on the bat and I went the other way and I hit a nice single to right field. So excited about the upcoming spring training and baseball season. I'm also excited to be on this show. So thank you for doing that. Go to productquickstart.com. Let Noah help you get your product to market. Check out that book, I Need That. And find yourself a producer. If you want a podcast, go to JodySmith.com. And if you're looking for an independent financial advisor, my compliance department only allows me to say that you can search my name, but I can't give anything else other than that.

So for Noah and for Jody, this is your slightly annoying co-host, Steven Julian. The music is telling us that it's time to go and we will catch you next time on Product Genius.