Love At First Try

Jim Zarkadas (00:00)
cool, let's see so it's recording from what I see mmm mmm actually recording this actually recording is higher quality yes and for me the voice is it's like the volume is fine right because I'm using the mic but I'm not sure if it's a like you

Chris Silvestri (00:09)
Can you hear me test?

Yeah, yeah, it's good. Yeah, no, it's good. Is mine good?

Jim Zarkadas (00:22)
Yeah, yeah, it's very clear. For me it's like I can control the volume of the input, so sometimes if it's too high then like you have a normal volume and then suddenly Jim is like too loud, so I have it in the middle. Yeah, if you can hear me well then it's ⁓ Cool. So yeah, thanks a lot for coming to the podcast as well. Let's start with that.

Chris Silvestri (00:30)
Yeah.

Yes, yes, thank you so much.

Jim Zarkadas (00:45)
Yeah, I was thinking it would be cool to start with an intro. I know you for a long time. We had the mentoring, like you've been mentoring ⁓ me, yeah, mainly me, like in the team on the co-production stuff. And I've seen many interesting, cool things when we did the mentorship back then. I was like, I would really love to dive deeper and kind of share this with more people as well. So I would say let's start with a quick intro of what you're doing and what you're building. And then I can jump into the first one, the first question.

Chris Silvestri (01:11)
Yes. Yeah, sure.

So I'm Chris originally from Italy, I moved to the UK in 2018. But my background so now I'm a messaging strategist and conversion copywriter for b2b software companies, which means I do everything from the strategy, the research before the strategy and the copy for website emails, sales, collaterals mostly. But before moving into copywriting, was a software engineer in industrial automation. So

imagine it was very much a logical type of programming, so nothing to do with web or apps. It was very much into like, building a logical sequential programming that commanded these like automated assembly machines that put together plastic components for hospitals mostly. And so was a lot of logic, but it was also designing the human machine interfaces. So the touchscreen displays that

Jim Zarkadas (01:58)
Mm-hmm.

Wow, okay.

Chris Silvestri (02:09)
basically operated these machines. And there was, it was very much at stake as well, because these machines then were operated by humans in factories. And so if I messed up some of the logic that there were basically the risk of someone losing a limb or something, right. So I also needed to put in place ⁓ security systems, all of that double checks everything and so

Jim Zarkadas (02:10)
Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

Chris Silvestri (02:36)
I learned a lot about putting myself in other people's shoes from that field, which in retrospect, I think it was very useful. Like back then I kind of hated it and I wanted to change jobs, but now I kind of appreciate it. And I'm also a drummer. So at the time I wanted to tour more with my band. So what do I do? I started searching for how to make money online. And after trying different things, blogging,

Jim Zarkadas (02:40)
Mmm. Mmm.

Chris Silvestri (03:03)
some Amazon FBA business, different courses. I stumbled on copywriting. And yeah, I was kind of fascinated by the psychology behind it, understanding how people think, kind of being able with words to move people to take some kind of action. And yeah, I stuck with that, did that on the side weekends, evenings for two, three years. And then in 2018, I went full time at the same time moving to the UK.

Jim Zarkadas (03:07)
Okay.

Hmm

Okay.

Chris Silvestri (03:32)
And I've been doing that basically

since then, with a couple of intermissions, two years, I worked at an agency more on the UX side, because then we transition into usability testing startup. And so watching lots of usability tests and understanding again more how much research impacts the decisions that you make both on the usability, but on the conversion side as well. And with design.

Jim Zarkadas (03:43)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Chris Silvestri (03:58)
And then in 2021, I think went back on my own and that's when I found the conversion alchemy, which is my current messaging and copywriting business.

Jim Zarkadas (04:07)
Pretty cool. It's funny that I know you for like, think it's been, we met in Sustock in Dublin. When was that? threes, threes, sounds like that, yeah. But I didn't know, like, I know that you're a co-writer. I know that you were working, for example, with Powered by Search, B2B, SAS, SEO, HSC, but I didn't know about these cool things about your past, man. So yeah, happy that you were having this conversation. We've been always talking about copywriting.

Chris Silvestri (04:13)
Yeah, 2022 or 2023.

Mm.

⁓ cool. Nice.

Jim Zarkadas (04:33)
And now it makes sense because I've been following your content for a while and you're more technical. I'm like, Chris feels like he has an engineer kind of inside him. Like I can see it on the way that you write, the methodologies, how technical and systematic you are on the copywriting. So now it makes your background justifies pretty much pretty much everything. Yeah, that's that's pretty cool. OK, thanks for the yeah. Thanks for sharing all these. ⁓ And yeah, the first topic that I wanted to discuss and have in mind is

Chris Silvestri (04:38)
Hmm.

Hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's interesting.

Jim Zarkadas (05:03)
Taste in copywriting. So on this podcast, like on the conversations I'm having with people, for me, it's really about how to combine taste and growth. Because for me as a designer, ⁓ from my story, I started as an engineer back in the days and I worked with many designers and I saw like two types of designers in general. You have like the very UX driven people that are all about.

making it easy to use, making it convert and so on. But then on the visual side, it's always like very boring and very basic with just the basic design system. And then you have the UI designers that just make it beautiful and fancy. And you have like the people that are into the UX and growth and the people that are into the taste and the visual beauty, the delight. And it's hard to really kind of combine those. And I feel that's where all the magic is, is in combining these two. And one thing that I learned along the way is that copy...

Chris Silvestri (05:46)
Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (05:53)
is design. That's something that I've been always saying that people think that copy is just you design the screen and then copies for somebody else but you actually copy leads the content leads the design and the design also leads the content. It's kind of a unique ⁓ thing. yeah, I was thinking to start by discussing taste into copywriting. How do you perceive taste and how do you define taste as a copywriter?

Chris Silvestri (06:05)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's very interesting and I love how kind of both like you and I kind of intersect because you say ⁓ copy is design and I say copy is UX or I see the UX in copy or the UX of copy as well. And I think and I agree with you, a lot of designers are too much into taste probably and not enough about like usability, the conversion side of design. And I saw it a lot working with agencies, bigger agencies where

I came in and their designer basically prepared their design without any context whatsoever on what I was doing. And so then you kind of needed to like fit pieces together like Lego blocks that don't work. yeah, taste is very interesting. I see it as it's kind of like pattern recognition. But it's shaped I think by exposure and all the amount of reps.

Jim Zarkadas (06:57)
Hmm.

Chris Silvestri (07:10)
that you do. And I think exposure to what? In copywriting especially, there's the concept of general, generic knowledge and specialized knowledge, which is all the kind of knowledge that you need to acquire when you work on a copywriting project. general, generalized knowledge is ⁓ your experience as a human, Empathizing with people or anything, all the other experience that...

Jim Zarkadas (07:23)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Silvestri (07:38)
to cue to where you are right now, that kind of influence how you think and how you see things. And the specialized knowledge is the specific knowledge on the industry, the market, the product, the audience, the ICP. So the way that you combine those two, it's kind of your exposure and then there's reps. So immersing yourself in the research, looking at a lot of voice of customer data, interviewing customers and doing that a lot over different projects and different...

types of industries or with different audiences. I think all of that builds that taste and that pattern recognition that tells you, okay, this is copy that sounds good.

which is very useful, especially now with AI in TadGPT, you can easily recognize when something is written like blank TadGPT, or you can actually build an argument shaped by good exposure and the reps. And yeah, I think taste for me, it kind of feels right. It's something that is not like following like a formula or like a structure. When I see something, like it literally feels right. It's kind of, I don't know, it's more like an intuition.

Jim Zarkadas (08:42)
Hmm

Yeah, it's like food in a way. It's like that you tried it out and it just kind of feels right. And it can be also different from one person to the other as well. Yeah, yeah. That's okay. That's very interesting. Yeah, exposure is a big thing indeed. Like it's similar like on the product and visual design as well. It's like you really need to expose yourself. Like I really like on the taste since you mentioned, I really... That was a realization that I had the last years that if I want to create better outputs,

Chris Silvestri (08:56)
Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (09:18)
I don't need to try to create better output. What I need to do is to create better input for my brain. So I see my brain as like input and output, right? Like the output, say, the design. The input is the exposure that you are saying. So this is something I had since early days that I would pay for.

Chris Silvestri (09:23)
Mmm, yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (09:34)
like digital products that I would use. Let's say if I had GitHub or GitLab, I would always go for GitHub, even if I had to pay, because for me it was always important to have an amazing quality. The chair that I'm gonna buy, like I will try to buy a better one and aim for higher quality. And if I'm on the lower budget, still like go for the better kind of a quality and well crafted chair. And what I'm sharing this is that...

is because I've been a big believer that if you consume good taste, you will also have good taste, which sounds obvious, but I've seen like with many designers that they're not really exposing themselves to something specific. For example, for me, I come from an engineering background and a more strategic and UX background. Visual design has been my weak spot like the last year since I worked on a lot to improve and build a team around it as well. And one thing that I started for example experimenting is painting lessons, is consume more arts.

to expose myself into like the world of painting, colors, because for visual design, these are the things that you need to see. And this way you just kind of develop your intuition and your taste to see what feels, to understand what feels and what doesn't feel right. And also to draw ideas from different...

Like to not look into other websites and just bring some patterns, but actually look into paintings, into arts, into places that people don't really ⁓ look at. So yeah, the exposure, it really resonated with me. That's why I wanted to share this one. I fully, fully believe this part and like developing the taste. And on the taste part, so we've been discussing more about how to develop taste, right? Like how to make sure you have a better taste.

Chris Silvestri (10:47)
Yeah, different fields.

Yeah.

haha

Jim Zarkadas (11:10)
My question is, how do you define taste as a concept? There is no right answer in my head for this and it's a question that I always love asking people just to see how they perceive it because I feel like everybody has a bit of a different ⁓ perspective on this. In the case of copywriting, if you had to describe what taste really means to somebody, what would you say in that?

Chris Silvestri (11:28)
Hmm, I would say like if you want like a crisp definition, I would say, yeah, yeah, I would say I don't know, it gives me for me, maybe because I'm kind of like systems approach, it's very much like inform the judgment. So being able to intuitively, instinctively tell if something works or doesn't.

Jim Zarkadas (11:33)
No, just freestyle. Just kind of...

Hmm.

Chris Silvestri (11:59)
because

you've done the work beforehand. That's why they informed.

Jim Zarkadas (12:01)
Hmm.

That's a good one. That's a good one. ⁓ Another topic, mean, I'm not sure it could feel like related to me. In my head, it's related to taste. again, like it's it depends on how everybody perceives taste as well as the the authenticity and uniqueness of the copy. ⁓ So especially in the world of AI, where everybody can write copy.

Chris Silvestri (12:21)
Mm-hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (12:27)
how can you make something more ⁓ authentic? I can tell my definition of that like on the visual design side, say when we design a website or like the product interface, but I'm curious like on the copywriting, how do you, what do you say that makes copy more authentic in a way?

Chris Silvestri (12:44)
Yeah, so first, I would say, like, let's define authentic in copy. I think authentic in copy is when you can actually speak the same language of your target audience, or and at the same level, which means same awareness or know knowing what they know, and same sophistication, knowing how much they know, and being able to express it on the page.

But also at the same time, it's kind of like an intersection of how your customers or like your audience speak along with your unique point of view and standing on whatever is that you do, your product, service, or the problems that you solve. I think if you have a strong point of view and can speak your target audience language, then that's why you're able to be authentic. Because if you...

are good at speaking our customers language, but you don't really have a strong point of view, we're just basically conforming to what everyone else is doing. If you have a strong point of view, but you're not expressing it in your customers language, then you're basically just throwing out what you do, like features, like what like your story, but there's no value in it for for your customers that they don't see the resonance.

Jim Zarkadas (13:46)
Hmm

Mmm.

Hmm.

Love it.

It's like a unique perspective on the... That sounds like also big thing on positioning, right? Like that you need a unique perspective or like a unique approach you're building the product and that's one of the reasons people would buy your thing.

Chris Silvestri (14:12)
Yeah.

Yeah, and typically that that insight, unique perspective

when I work with clients, that's typically the way that we start the sales pitch or it's the strategic narrative, the unique perspective is the first is kind of the hook. You hook prospects with, okay, we saw this in the industry. And so we wanted to change it. And that's why we build a product and then you can introduce the product. But that insight point of view, it's the yeah, it's the hook and the way that you start your sales pitch.

Jim Zarkadas (14:30)
Hmm.

love it.

There is a guy to slightly of topic, but I'm kind of excited about him as well. Alex James. I'm not sure if you've seen him on LinkedIn. That is he's a copywriter and messaging strategist, but for B2B services. So he would work for us, not for the clients that we're serving, the B2B SaaS. And like his motto, like his tagline is your perspective is your product. And I'm like, yes, that's it. It's like, and he, the positioning framework that he has is what's

Chris Silvestri (14:51)
No.

Hmm. Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (15:11)
what everybody's doing, what's wrong with that, what is the unique observation you have and what's the new thing that you're ⁓ giving to the world, which is pretty much what you described as well. So yeah, I really love your take on this. Like, authenticity is really about having a unique perspective. So to be authentic, you really need to have something unique. You really need to bring something different. Otherwise, you're just repeating what is already there probably. And also the empathy part. Yeah, go for it.

Chris Silvestri (15:18)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, and I would also

add that a lot of times, maybe your product is not that unique, but the way that you see things makes you unique. It's kind of like the unique frame that you have can actually make you...

Jim Zarkadas (15:48)
Hmm

Chris Silvestri (15:53)
make you stand out in a way because that like you help people see things in a different way. And especially for like service providers and consultants like us with ⁓ all about content. The way that we frame our content is what makes us stand out because services you can't really reinvent the wheel infinitely, right?

Jim Zarkadas (16:04)
exactly.

That's very, very true. Very true. It's like, yeah, I'm thinking about the clients that we're working with, for example, SendMade and KnowledgeAll. And with both of them, there is a unique mindset on how they build the product, which is...

Chris Silvestri (16:26)
Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (16:28)
what you're saying. If we take the example of Knowledgeall, let's say, it's a help center. It's a software to create knowledge base, a help center ⁓ for your internal team or external team. And of course there are other tools as well, but Knowledgeall has this unique approach and like the folks, for example, on amazing customer support that they're like, I think, yeah, I want to say the top, but let's say the top three in the customer support quality. And then on how they build the products and the features, we will be discussing about incorporating AI

for example, and the unique mindset that Knowledgeable has on this is that we want AI to help authors and not replace them. So it's like the unique mindset that you have on how you're going to incorporate this technology into the product and how you're going to come up with features. in the end, your software is just a knowledge-based software. It's not that it's something groundbreaking or something really new. It's a product in existing category, but it's the details on how you build it that actually ⁓ are this unique ⁓ perspective that you have.

⁓ like a really cool stuff, fully, yeah, fully on same page on this. And it's interesting to see that product strategy, copywriting design, pretty much same mindset, right? It's like the same principles and same things apply. The output is just different in one thing. It's like product ideas on the other one is, is words and the other one is pixels. say,

Chris Silvestri (17:28)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, it should be way

more seamless than it actually is when all these departments work together.

Jim Zarkadas (17:53)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So on the authenticity part, you mentioned one thing, right? And it's knowing your customer and speaking their language. So what does this really mean? I would love to, like, we... ⁓

because I'm into design and copywriting, I know this, we call it the voice of customer. It's something I learned from you actually as a concept that there is a term for that. And from you, the other thing that I saw was like, that's really cool. It fully makes sense. And it's just like one of the things that you see that just makes sense. And you wonder why didn't I think about it before is actually systems to incorporate voice of customer into your copy that you don't have suddenly to guess what these people say. There are just ways to

Chris Silvestri (18:26)
Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (18:36)
ask them and then you can use their words for example. So I would love to dive into the VOC, the voice of customer and how like to embrace this authenticity like you need to know your customers. So what are some practical ways to understand your customer better? That's one.

Chris Silvestri (18:39)
Mm-mm.

Jim Zarkadas (18:56)
and then to make it super practical to actually use copy into your process, things that ⁓ they actually say. So it's a bit of the research part that I'm asking about, but also the how do you end up incorporating actual copy, because you can have a conversation with somebody, but you just get ideas and insights and mindsets, but you don't really get specific words necessarily. yeah, I'm curious to deeper into the VOC.

Chris Silvestri (19:06)
Yeah.

Mm-mm.

Yeah.

Yeah. So VOC. So first, I want to give credit where credit's due. So I've learned that concept from Joanna Wiebe at Copyhackers. I think she's probably the most like the biggest proponent and the original conversion copywriter. And so she talks a lot about voice, voice of customer. Yeah, Joanna Wiebe. And

Jim Zarkadas (19:35)
Really?

What is the

website? Sorry for interrupting, just want to take quick notes.

Chris Silvestri (19:42)
Yeah, it's called

copy hackers, which is like the biggest educational copywriting conversion copywriting website blog online. I wrote a couple of articles as well for them. Yeah, yeah. And so yeah, voice of customers obviously starts with research, the way that I see research, I try to first give it a structure, and also kind of optimize the way that my clients

Jim Zarkadas (19:45)
⁓ copyhackers. Yeah.

Super. I'm gonna add it in the notes. Okay, super.

Chris Silvestri (20:09)
I mean, that I conduct research for my clients so that they can also continue doing it after I finish my work. Which is I see research as an iceberg. So imagine an iceberg, you you have the surface outside of the water. That's kind of what you see, like the most immediate things. And when it comes to research, especially voice of customer, the first thing, it's all voice of customer. So...

Jim Zarkadas (20:16)
Mmm.

Chris Silvestri (20:35)
anything that's readily available for companies, which is typically online reviews, or maybe they already recording sales conversations, sales calls, or maybe the support is having chats. So all of that is potentially good voice of customer that you can collect. And I always recommend and I always do when I work with clients, the first thing that I do is, okay, let's gather all the voice of customer, which is super fast to collect if you're

if you already have some of those calls and also for us to go online and collect those reviews and those that language. And so that's the first layer. That layer typically typically tells you what your customers or prospects say. First layer, second layer, which is the right below the water with a lot of companies don't really do. And you know, probably well, it's the to me, it's the structural layer, which is the UX user experience layer of the copy specifically.

And for me, that comes down to looking at user interaction data, heat maps, analytics, product analytics, or website analytics, user recordings. So it's basically understanding how what users do on your website. And the kind of matching okay, is what they say kind of does it match what they actually do on the website? And where do they scroll past or how far down the page do they scroll? Where do they click? What

kind of copy draws attention to them and what kind of copy seems like it's not working. And it's also super helpful for me to understand what kind of decision makers people are, or like specific ICPs, because when you watch user recordings, or when you run usability testing with your target audience, hopefully, for messaging specifically, you can kind of see whether or not they...

Jim Zarkadas (22:13)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Silvestri (22:27)
move fast to the section, they click right away. So are they faster decision makers, more emotional, more logical, more methodical, do they need more information. And so all of that is super useful information that you can use later to help you shape your arguments, the copy, how long the page comes out, and all that. The final layer

which again, very few companies do, which is a lot of my work is the qualitative side. So running those job to be done interviews, or conducting qualitative surveys, or maybe even just installing quick polls on website. So those pop-ups that appear on website, if you have the traffic, obviously, that ask people to qualify themselves or to give you some more information on maybe some friction points that they have on website. So

Jim Zarkadas (22:56)
Hmm

Mm-hmm.

Chris Silvestri (23:19)
All of that and all those three layers gave me a really good foundation to kind of understand how users, what users say, what they do on the website and kind of why they act, why they make decisions and the way that they do it. And I try to always do as much as possible of those activities in each of those three layers. But obviously sometimes you can't so you need to optimize again and so.

We jump in, we diagnose, okay, what can we do? We do all that too. And it's basically the sole purpose is to understand the before, during and after the decision is made. So we can map the entire journey and then write copy.

Jim Zarkadas (23:58)
So yeah, the life

before the product, like what happened in their life, why are they looking for a new solution? Like what do they need to decide about the new solution? then, how, yeah, life is be after they pick the new solution, like the new product. Yeah, yeah, I see your point.

Chris Silvestri (24:03)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

which is then basically the next step is most of like the work that you do, right? Which is the like onboarding. So a lot of our work sets like matches expectations first, then sets expectations for the next stage, which is like the in product experience, right?

Jim Zarkadas (24:28)
Hmm

Exactly.

Yeah, you sell the dream, we need to make it happen. That's the idea.

Chris Silvestri (24:35)
Exactly. Yes. Yes. You need to make it happen

and also make them believe that it can happen because a lot of it is actually using the product, but a of it is perception that you can influence a lot with the design and the experience.

Jim Zarkadas (24:43)
So...

Exactly.

And that's something I've been discussing also with other people like in the industry like co-protters and so on that you need to align the promise on the website with what's going on in the product. Like they see something specific on the website that they're buying and you want to make sure that the product is ⁓ kind of a, not that it works this way, but let's say on the onboarding.

If you care about, let's say, getting more leads for your website, I'm just coming up with something classic, then the onboarding setup, like the account setup, shouldn't be about setting up your account. It should be about getting you ready to get more leads for your website. it's like on the cob, it's like small things you can do that you can actually make sure that it's aligned with the reason they decided to sign up, to make sure that you always present things with this perspective, like under this topic.

Chris Silvestri (25:35)
Mm-mm.

Yeah, and then also with the microcopy that you have inside the product as well.

Jim Zarkadas (25:43)
So yeah, I...

Yeah, true, Okay, so, yeah, you mentioned user interviews, website polls, watching sales calls as well, understanding the user deeper and so on.

So here's the thing that I've encountered and what I guess like people that are not co-protters because the cool thing about the cool thing I see it as cool about this podcast that I want to be arrogant is that ⁓ it's a design podcast for non-designers, right? So I'm always like in my head when we discuss things, I'm always asking the question, how can I make this simpler for somebody that has no idea about co-proting? What is qualitative, quantitative, like about all these more technical terms? How can we make it more?

kind of a practical for them like to take three actions, let's say after the episode. And for the VOC, like it's, I think like it's pretty clear what it is. It's actually words, it's voice of customer. It's words that customers have used, testimonials, things that they've said on the sales calls and so on. So you search some ways where you can collect this one. The demo calls, the sales calls, I think it's one of the easiest ones because from what I've seen, almost every SaaS company offers some kind of a booking, book a demo call.

as an option and they talk with the customers on support and so on. My question is how do you go from this ocean of content into copy for the homepage? Because you have all this voice, but how can you incorporate it in some practical ways? I'm curious about your process.

Chris Silvestri (27:16)
Yeah, yeah, that is

Yeah, it's a very good point,

very good point and...

Now with AI, I think it's easier than ever if you know what you're doing, obviously. And I think it goes first, it goes still back to taste, right? Because when you're looking at what your customers say, like a transcript or even reviews, on competitor reviews, which are really good, especially if you don't have a lot of customers, you're just starting out early stage, you can look at competitor reviews. And there's a lot of good voice of customer typically on G2, Captera, Trustpilot, sometimes even on Amazon.

Jim Zarkadas (27:52)
Hmm

Chris Silvestri (27:55)
Amazon,

if you look for books in your industry, you can kind of gather some good language that they use. But yeah, the first thing I would say is create, I don't know, a swipe file, whether it's a spreadsheet or some other system that you use. Collect the voice of customers so that the language that...

Jim Zarkadas (28:02)
Hmm.

Chris Silvestri (28:18)
to you sounds interesting, especially if it's very vivid. It goes into their motivations, their struggles, their desired outcomes, anything that kind of covers those three. I would write it down in your swipe file and...

and give it like a theme or a category, right? Is it a motivation? So is it something that explains what brought them to this decision or to the product? Is it a struggle? Is it like a pain or problem they're having? Or is it a desired outcome? Is it a goal that they want to achieve? Which is also good because a cool thing to understand, especially when you write value propositions in a homepage,

is to understand the I call it the emotional direction. it's is it ⁓ for the majority of people in your audience, are they trying to move away from pain or towards a goal? Is it more like a negative frame or more of like a positive frame? And that's super important to match their the motivations to bring them to the page, right, especially on homepage. So you can add that category as well. But yeah, anything that's super vivid, very detailed, very emotional.

Jim Zarkadas (29:14)
Hmm

Hmm.

Chris Silvestri (29:30)
a very evocative, that's all good voice of customer, I think. And obviously you develop it by speaking with your audience, immersing yourself in this research, listening to them. And the second step is probably try to take some of those that you collected and try to write them in different forms, whether it's writing a couple of headlines, using some of those words.

writing a couple of call to actions, writing a couple of paragraphs or a couple of bullet points and save all of these kind of banks of example copy somewhere that you can kind of refer back to. And you're doing two things, you're doing practice first to try and turn all of that into copy. And you're also creating material that you can use, whether it's in your website copy, emails or sales deck anywhere, right? So collect those kind of little banks of copy.

Jim Zarkadas (30:10)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Silvestri (30:26)
And then the other step that I typically normally do first, because it gives me a lot more ideas. And it's also great just because our memory is kind of limited in the context is I use AI. And I basically inject voice of customer in the copy. So once I wrote copy, I don't know first draft, especially if I see that the copy is not super vivid, it doesn't really go a lot into detail or doesn't feel emotional enough.

Jim Zarkadas (30:46)
Mmm.

Chris Silvestri (30:55)
I literally copy paste a lot of voice of customer that I selected and pre filtered and categorized. And I basically with a simple prompt, ask the AI in a chat that has all the context, right? So it's not a blank new chat. So it needs to have the context on the work that we've done previously on the audience on the product. I basically literally ask it for a specific sentence or piece of copy. ⁓ Upload the document with VOC and basically ask it something like

See if there's any voice of customer that we can use to inject or weave into this copy here. And a lot of times it's surprising how good the actual result is because AI can take a lot of context and see whatever makes sense and mix it and blend it with a copy. And if you ask it about 10 to 20 variants, then you can select the one that looks pretty good. So yeah, I think this is pretty much a good process.

Jim Zarkadas (31:41)
Hmm.

Love it. That's the level of

practicality that I love. This is like a bit that I can just go and like, I'm a SaaS founder, can do this. I can go like grab 10 reviews from T2 Latte.

look at my headline on the homepage, ask the GPT to do this and see if anything cool comes up. And that's a very cool use case of AEIs. Like it's another confirmation and also a reminder that AEI is about like strategic thinking that you need to know what you're doing and you just incorporate it to save time because you could do this on your own, but you would literally have to look at 10 different reviews, the headline, play around with copy. Yeah, it can really save you time, but it's super intentional. I love the use case. And that's something I haven't done before.

Chris Silvestri (32:04)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (32:30)
Okay, that's cool. That's a really nice insight for me as well because on what you're, I can share a bit of my experience as well on what you said about creating banks of copy, like a swipe file and so on. For the ones that don't know, like swipe file is kind of a personal gallery slash database of content, could be screenshots, could be pieces of copy, and that form could be like a spreadsheet or a Figma file, whatever kind of swipe file you, depends on what kind of swipe file you're creating. So for this,

Our swipe file, example, for ZenMate Knowledge All, what I do is I create an Airtable base called social, ⁓ no, I call it VOC. And what we do there with Anna, Anna is my executive assistant. Every month she goes into the D2 profile, let's say of Knowledge All or and ZenMate, and she literally copies and pastes every review inside that Airtable. And one thing for me was that

I know this voice of customer is in different places, but I need to centralize this information somewhere where I can hit command F and search and write, for example, scheduling and see what people have said about scheduling is animate or like automations. And ⁓ that's a thing that I did. And it was inspired a hundred percent by your process when you have the mentoring calls that the first step is collected somewhere. It may sound obvious, but it's very important just bringing a specific place because then you can just hit copy.

Chris Silvestri (33:26)
Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (33:50)
paste into ggpt. And if you have somebody in the team that is on operations like Anna in my team, for example, it can really help to actually keep this up to date and make sure you can kind of come up with more and more ideas because many times it just happens once and then this database is like 10 years ends up being like five years old or something. So yeah, that's a small thing.

Chris Silvestri (34:08)
Yeah.

There's

also, speaking of building this knowledge base, there's another thing that I started doing recently as well, mostly for internal use, but it's something that any founder, I think, could do. If you go on a podcast, like myself, I'm going maybe one, two podcasts a week lately, I'm basically collecting Google documents of all the transcripts. Sometimes I literally copy paste them from YouTube. All the transcripts of the podcast, I think I have like...

Jim Zarkadas (34:28)
Yeah, wow.

Mm-hmm.

Chris Silvestri (34:39)
for now, like it's like three or four documents with four or five podcast transcripts in each document. And then I upload that all in my like project knowledge, whether it's Chagypti or some other model. And that's basically taking my voice of customers or my voice and using it for anything that I need to like produce writing or even even the thinking that you do with AI.

Once it knows how you think the topics that you talk about how you explain them, it's basically becomes like a second brain.

Jim Zarkadas (35:12)
Mm. Yeah, I love it. That's something that I've been digging as well more and more. with an A, a ten mate, Amar brought Banti, a friend of him, that is an AI consultant and something that we've been looking into like creating custom GPTs and like how you can actually not create like virtual employees, all these things that we were talking about, but more like how to create second brains for specific topics, like a second copywriting brain, a second...

Chris Silvestri (35:27)
Mm.

Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (35:38)
⁓ UX writing brain. Like I do a lot of for me when I design, I always drop screenshots into TazzyBT and ask it to review all the copy that I have. Because on the visual design, I haven't seen like any interesting feedback, but on the copywriting is really cool. And it's really this thing. It's not, I'm not asking to write, but I'm actually using it as a teammate that, hey, you're my second brain. Take a look and let me know what you think. Sometimes I get really beautiful ideas. Sometimes I don't really get anything.

But it's, yeah, I really like how you phrase it. It's like, it's a second brain. I think that's the, in my opinion as well, like the right way to treat and think about AI as well. Cool. So we discussed, yeah, sorry, go for it.

Chris Silvestri (36:14)
Yeah, a lot of people considering

as their main brain, like their top key brain, but that's the problem. Like if you offload everything, then you basically stop thinking and that's not good.

Jim Zarkadas (36:19)
Hmm

Exactly.

Exactly. And these people eventually they realize, oops, what I'm doing is not working anymore. Like I need to change my process. That's always with new tools. Like people need to understand how to use them properly. And yeah, it's also a thing I feel like in humanities that we humans tend to like look for the easiest solution, like the least amount of pain and that's kind of exactly. And usually it's like these kinds of examples that prove it. It's like, yeah, I just don't want to do the work anymore. And I asked a deputy to do it.

Chris Silvestri (36:31)
Yeah

shortcuts.

Yeah. ⁓

Jim Zarkadas (36:58)
On the, okay, so we discussed what is VOC, what are some practical ways to collect ⁓ VOC. I wanted to share on this one, you mentioned the usability testing, the customer experience and so on. I want to mention something that I learned from you and I feel like could be an interesting point to mention the podcast as well. And it's the new customer survey. That's something that emerged through our sessions and incorporated into the process with every client we're working with. ⁓ And it's pretty much the following.

Chris Silvestri (37:17)
Hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (37:27)
Maybe it's also from you send me some documents or resources, maybe from copyhackers. I don't remember exactly where I found like the actual survey, but it's about understanding why people buy your products and being able to use their words. Because if you ask me why the sassims are working with us, like why they decided to work with us, I'm going to give you an explanation. But if you ask them, they may say the same thing, but using different words, like a different kind of messaging.

Chris Silvestri (37:32)
Mm-hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (37:55)
And that survey was pretty much three simple questions. What is the number one reason you decided to buy, let's say ZenMate? What were you using before? What happened in your life? And you decided to look for a new solution. ⁓ I think it was pretty much these three questions. We've added a few more in our post as well, but ⁓ it was really cool that it's just that simple. Just find people that signed up for your SaaS and became a customer the last month and send them these three questions. And in our case, we've actually made it part of the

Chris Silvestri (38:06)
Hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (38:25)
⁓ of the product that actually we automated it so that we can collect every month new feedback. And this really helps with positioning. So in the case of ZenMate, we decided to not do it with Amar because he was like, yeah, Jim, like, I don't think we're going to get any interesting insights from there. We know why people are buying. We have enough voice of customer. And the thing with ZenMate, the interesting finding, because I used to feel that these surveys should be used from every SaaS company out there. With ZenMate, they know who they're selling and it's super specialized as a product. They know that

Chris Silvestri (38:29)
Alright, nice.

No. ⁓

Jim Zarkadas (38:55)
Like we know what's ZenMade that people buy the automations mainly like they come for scheduling. want to, ZenMade is a scheduling software for cleaning businesses. So, you know, you're saying to cleaners and you know, what is the top two reasons that they're buying and you have already enough voice of customer. So it doesn't make sense to do it on monthly basis, but on the Knowledgile where it's a product that can be used from different industries like Knowledgile, it's a knowledge based software and it's used from insurance companies, energy companies, tech companies, government organizations.

Chris Silvestri (39:21)
Mm.

Jim Zarkadas (39:24)
So the ICPs can be different and the value can be different as well. And positioning is way more complex for Knowlethal compared to ZenMate, where it's a specialized software for cleaning business in the US. Like sales are much easier over there. And what I'm trying to say is that for Knowlethal, this survey has been a beautiful tool for us to understand what landing pages to make. People mentioned a lot the glossary feature.

It wasn't very clear for us because we're offering like 20 features that Glossary is something that stands out and we see almost every month a customer mentioning the Glossary. So we added in the onboarding flow, ⁓ in the onboarding email sequence, we made sure that we're going to prioritize the improvements on the UX on the Glossary feature. We built a landing page for that. We highlighted in the homepage. So it's really beautiful how a survey can really influence not just the copy because we know also how they describe the value of Glossary.

but also the strategies, like how you're gonna prioritize things. So surveys is something that I knew about, but you were the one that showed me practical ways to actually add it in the process. Because yeah, survey, everybody knows that a survey would be cool, but finding the right questions to ask in a survey, man, that's a totally different story, it's not easy.

Chris Silvestri (40:23)
Yeah, yeah.

Especially, especially because you if you want to kind of understand how they say things, you have to be good at not leading them to how you say it, right. So if you use, for example, lot of multiple choice questions, you'll be you're basically telling them how you say it and just basically having them pick one of the choices. But if you are able to ask like an open ended question, that's still enough focused for them to understand what you're talking about, but

Jim Zarkadas (40:44)
Hmm.

Exactly.

Chris Silvestri (41:06)
enables them to express themselves and tell you how they frame things, then that's super, super useful. And I don't know if it was in one of the questions, but one question that I started a bit more recently asking as well, that's super helpful with positioning and value proposition as well for the copy. It's like super simple. What's the biggest problem that this product or service solves for you?

And that's, again, super useful because then they literally, first, they have to pick one thing and also they choose, they literally decide how to frame it and how to explain it. So you basically get lots of voice of customers on value propositions that you can actually use.

Jim Zarkadas (41:38)
Mmm. Mmm.

I love it. I took some notes. I'm going to add it in the survey because we've been asking what is the number one reason you decided to buy Knowledgable because this survey is something that we've added and we do every month with Knowledgable. People say sometimes you have amazing customer support. Sometimes they're going to mention a feature, but the way you frame the questions, it's a great question to understand what is the thing that truly sold them because sometimes is that some of the people said pricing.

Chris Silvestri (41:57)
I'm

Hmm.

Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (42:22)
But this is what really solved them. What is the number one problem that it's solving is a different question. It's not why they bought it, it's actually what is the biggest pain point we're taking away from them. And the reason they bought probably is because we're solving this pain because that's an expectation that they have. And then we hit some other check marks where the most important could be the price. ⁓ So these two questions I feel will be really a great combo.

Chris Silvestri (42:27)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, you...

Yeah, you literally have them think about on the spot about that transition from before to after and they have to explain it.

Jim Zarkadas (42:53)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, I love it. That's really cool. Okay, yeah, we're gonna add it on the survey for sure. That's a really cool takeaway. Thank you. Let me think. Yeah, for the VOC, what else? What would be another interesting? Yeah, the synthetic research actually is a topic we wanted to dive into. So...

Chris Silvestri (43:01)
Yes.

Jim Zarkadas (43:15)
Talking about how to talk with the customers, we talk about the new customer service you can send every month, demo calls that you do every month and sales calls, ⁓ website pop-ups you could eventually create. ⁓ And of course there are more approaches ⁓ that you could follow on that. But one that I would love to dive into that you've been writing a lot ⁓ is how to leverage AI. So I've been...

following your content and your podcast as well. And you've been talking about like role playing with AI and how you can actually use AI to be your user. And I won't lie at first, I was like, it sounds interesting, but I'm not sure. Like with AI, I'm always like, because there's so much fluff online and so many influencers trying to sell you a bullshit. I'm always skeptical, but yeah, of course you're not an influencer trying to sell things. And like I've been seeing how you use it more and more. So that's a topic that I would love.

Chris Silvestri (43:50)
you

Yeah, yeah.

you

Jim Zarkadas (44:08)
to dive deeper into Oxidly and learn more because it looks like really, really interesting as AI evolves actually at getting smarter and smarter. So yeah, feel free to explain what it is, how you use it and so on.

Chris Silvestri (44:18)
Yeah, so

this whole synthetic research thing for me started when I, like after working with B2B for so long, I kind of got tired because sometimes it's hard to participants, like research participants or like in interviews or surveys, especially when a lot of times the client, the product is not.

super loved by customers. So it's even harder to get one survey done. Or maybe don't there's no traffic so you can't run really like go out website polls and all that. And so what I what I kind of decided to do on my own just because it was interesting, like an interesting experiment, the way that it started is basically, okay, I'm already doing the research, I have all the transcripts, the interviews, all the data, right? What if I because I saw actually that ⁓ one of the

Jim Zarkadas (44:51)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Silvestri (45:14)
initial like original techniques of prompt engineering was okay, you give a role to the AI that's one of the biggest thing one most popular thing like I don't know, tell the AI to be your assistant or a copywriter. So why instead of giving them a role of someone that needs to help me, why don't I give them a role of my ICP, my customer persona, and see what they do like how they how they chat with me if I if I don't know.

paste pieces of copy what they think. I literally I saw the potential in being able to kind of ask any sort of question just because maybe I'm interested in and curious about like learning how people think. And I saw how valuable interviews are. And so like if I could replicate those with my b2b buyer and is basically like having a truth machine. can basically ask them anything and they can tell me what they think. And so yeah, I started experimenting with different like

Jim Zarkadas (45:45)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Chris Silvestri (46:11)
providing different data, different knowledge bases, testing different LLMs, how they behave, like the differences between one to the next. And initially I was using ⁓ Gemini, back then it was the 1.5 Pro, which is, had the biggest context window. I think it was 1 million tokens now, and now there's the 2.5 with 2 million, even bigger. And yeah, basically it's shared.

lots of information, all the resources that I had. And then with a simple prompt, what I was doing was basically telling them, okay, you are this customer persona, ⁓ where the shoes never get out of character unless I tell you so. And also I've added this kind of functionality in the prompt using simple brackets, I basically said, and ⁓ before you reply to my questions or to my prompt,

also add your thought process in ⁓ thought bracket, right? So because I wanted to kind of see if what they thought was different or similar to what they actually said. So I simulated kind of the reasoning process as well. And now you even have reasoning models, which is even better because they actually simulate the thinking process. And yeah, so I did a couple of tests, even like a simple

Jim Zarkadas (47:25)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Silvestri (47:34)
fun test that I did one time was basically simulating not my the ICP of my clients company, but simulating the persona of my client. So I was speaking with them. I think it was a private equity operating partner back then. I basically simulated them the person, because I know I knew that they were kind of opinionated. And even though I always want the research to dictate a copy and what we do, I also wanted to align it with their

Jim Zarkadas (47:49)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Silvestri (48:03)
product knowledge because they had a lot of knowledge about the technical product that it was. And so before sending the copy to the client, I actually tested the copy with this AI persona of the client. And then it was super interesting to see like the similarities in the AI's feedback versus then the actual client feedback. And I was able to make some adjustment before sending it out. They basically reduced.

Jim Zarkadas (48:23)
Really? Mmm.

Chris Silvestri (48:31)
the revisions maybe that I had to do or yeah, they were much more aligned compared to what I've originally done. And so it was good process to basically have the copy come out, right? And so those were the initial tests. And I realized that when I was doing them that they would never be 100 % accurate just because a lot of those commercial models have their own...

Jim Zarkadas (48:45)
Hmm.

Chris Silvestri (49:00)
like training, original training. And so they're always kind of influenced that there's never is never going to be like a blank slate that you operate with. But then some actual synthetic research platforms starting popping out, right? So and for different specific user uses use cases. So now, I even wrote a report on my website on this.

Jim Zarkadas (49:03)
Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Hmm

Chris Silvestri (49:27)
you basically see two different fields. There's the ⁓ product development, usability testing side of synthetic research, and then there's the marketing, messaging ⁓ side of things. So two different ways of testing two different things. In the product usability side of things, you basically have agents that go through your website, go through your products, and automatically analyze it or like collect help you collect data on

Jim Zarkadas (49:39)
Hmm.

Chris Silvestri (49:57)
how your website performs or how your app is doing or where users, these agents stumble on some friction points. So that's one. And then the other one is instead more of like the marketing, which is you simulate these personas but inside these platforms that are way better at taking your persona information, replicating it. So for example, if I have the ICP of a CMO,

Jim Zarkadas (50:06)
Okay.

Chris Silvestri (50:26)
These platforms can take my profile and create 100 or 200 different individual AI personas with different variants that still fit the description of my persona. And then you can test your copy. You can ask questions to all of these 200 personas, for example, and scale your research much more cheaply, faster than you could do with real humans. But the caveat here,

which I always take into consideration, is that ⁓ some of these platforms basically could help you run this research without any context. So basically just describing your persona and then you could do the research. But the way that I do it is first I do as much of the real human research as possible. And then I feed that more accurate information to these platforms. And then I run synthetic research. So it's... ⁓

It's different ⁓ areas of synthetic research. Again, you have the full synthetic research, which is completely taken from just the knowledge of the internet, right? Especially for B2B, it's not great because B2B is very niche. It's very hard to get information from B2B leaders as well. Then there's partially synthetic research, which is a lot about taking real data, but anonymized, basically just...

Jim Zarkadas (51:36)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Chris Silvestri (51:54)
replicating the details that are not sensitive. And there's the augmented research, which is what I do as well, which is basically taking real human research and kind of expanding it with AI. So you're basically already have solid foundations that are way more accurate than just taking the whole knowledge of the internet, and then you are able to scale it and expand it. And yeah, it's been it's been very fun so far testing, there's lots of platforms that are

Jim Zarkadas (52:00)
Hmm, it's like a combo.

Hmm.

Chris Silvestri (52:21)
Coming up, I'm having chats with some of these founders and it's very interesting to see how each one is trying to use a slightly different approach. There are some platforms that are more, there's one called Synthetic User, which is a bit more structured in the sense that it allows you to conduct more structured research studies with lots of questions, takeaways. Then there's this other one, it's called Rally. Website is askrally.com.

And they literally create, you can create your personas and you can literally have a chat with these personas. And it gives you like a ⁓ condensed reply and then you can go and look at the individual replies as well. So two different approaches and one I think is more for enterprise, the other one is more for small businesses. But yeah, I see a lot of potential, especially if you already have a solid process. I think synthetic research can really help you.

Jim Zarkadas (52:52)
Okay.

I had no idea.

Chris Silvestri (53:20)
scale your research and do it faster and do more of it consistently.

Jim Zarkadas (53:26)
Okay, yeah, I'm looking at the time and I could easily use another hour on this topic. Okay, let me think, like what would be some to the point questions first. What are some, so you described really in a very nice way, like what is synthetic research, the different approaches that exist, like the whole kind of ⁓ think of synthetic research. And what I would like to do now is go a bit deeper.

Chris Silvestri (53:31)
hahaha

Jim Zarkadas (53:51)
discuss about more practical, ⁓ actually practical use case. So you mentioned this example with the private equity firm that you were talking about with, for example. If let's take a B2B SaaS product because people that are going to watch this episode are probably, not probably, like they're going to be into B2B SaaS, probably founders. And if we take the example of ZenMate, which is an example we've mentioned in the episode, how would you use synthetic research?

Chris Silvestri (54:05)
Mm.

Jim Zarkadas (54:20)
⁓ in ZenMate? Like, would it be to improve, let's say, the hero section? What are some use cases that come to your mind? And for one of the use cases, I would love to ⁓ dive another level deeper and discuss about some questions that you could actually ask and what kind of content you would feed the AI.

Chris Silvestri (54:25)
Hmm?

Yeah.

Yeah. So let's start. Let's do like a real example. If you can share what are you currently working on? Is like, is there an initiative or activity as far as like the UX or copy?

Jim Zarkadas (54:43)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's a beautiful one. Because I

was thinking about it. So right now at ZenMate, we're designing a new version of the mobile apps. And the mobile apps are the app is mainly used from the cleaners. So you're a cleaning business, you're using ZenMate to automate and...

⁓ simplify your operations, it's a ZMedia scheduling software and the app is so that cleaners can see the details very quickly, they have all the information at their hand when they're doing the appointment, they have their to-dos, important notes, access information to the property and so on. And we've been trying to decide what are the top problems to solve, for example, and also the onboarding flow for the cleaners, the first three slides. How do you really...

Chris Silvestri (55:19)
Mm.

Jim Zarkadas (55:31)
sell the app to a cleaner, let's say. So these are some questions that I have to answer in this design project.

Chris Silvestri (55:36)
Yeah.

Okay, so first I would think, do you have like ⁓ some information on the profile of these personas? Like, do you have like an ICP, whether it's a slide or a document with information on this person or your customer personas?

Jim Zarkadas (55:57)
something specific, it's all in our heads, so there is no kind of a document that describes...

Chris Silvestri (55:59)
Okay, so that's, that's

probably the first thing that I would do. So I collect, I don't know, one pager on your customer persona, like me for clients, I typically have like a 14 point document that goes like super deep into like demographics, psychographics, decision making, questions that they have all of that. And so the most specific obviously the better. But since you I think you have a lot of data on your personas, you should be able to gather

yeah, using AI or LGBT or whatever, from your knowledge base, gather all the data and create, I don't know, one two page document that says, okay, this is our persona, maybe like a range, maybe it's like, I don't know what the age range of demographics, because that's kind of the foundation that you need to tell to these platforms, to the AI, okay, this is my persona. And this is what you need to take and kind of replicate, right? The next step is,

I don't know going some some of these platforms like ask rally is one that's probably the easiest one to use. Sign up. And then the first thing that they have you do is like create your YCP your customer profile. The the best thing that you can do is having this IPCP profile ready that you can just literally copy paste into their chats. And then they ask you how many personas based on this profile do you need. And typically I try to do at least 50 or 100 you

click generate, it generates these personas, and you can actually see the individual profiles. And then once you have these personas, you can basically literally ask them anything. And the way that I would ⁓ test for I don't know your app, your flow, first is to give them kind of the context, right? So you need to give them cost, okay, you have this specific problem, then you jump on the app.

and you see these screens and in the in some of these platforms, you can test either images or you can write or I think you can also test videos. So if you take a a ⁓ screenshot of your iPhone or, or a mock up, whatever, and just literally upload the video with the right context, obviously, like tell them kind of give them a scenario like you would do when you should be testing, right?

Jim Zarkadas (58:03)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Silvestri (58:18)
and then ask them anything that you need to know, like what's the first thing that you would do here or what would you expect to see when you click this button before you click, right? Or after you clicked, now you see this. Does it match what you expected? Like anything that you can literally think about, you can ask it and see the responses. Obviously everything again, depends on how accurate your ICP information is to start with.

Jim Zarkadas (58:39)
Thanks.

Hmm.

Okay. So yeah, you could test like if it comes from, if it's about marketing copy, like does like for the hero section, you could say, yeah, I'm like, it's really like you wouldn't ask like, is this hook strong? Like asking as a marketeer is like, yeah, is this going to hook you? Like, are you going to scroll? ⁓ This I feel like it's

Chris Silvestri (59:03)
Yeah, you

could ask to a person that. But or probably the better alternative is first you come up with two or three variants of a hook, and then have like a multiple choice question in some of these platforms, you can do it. So you can ask them out of these three hook that you see on LinkedIn, on a LinkedIn post, which one would make you click or which one would stop you from scrolling.

Jim Zarkadas (59:10)
Hmm.

Chris Silvestri (59:33)
Right?

Jim Zarkadas (59:33)
Yeah,

and also ask them why, like which one and why, like to understand the reasoning a bit and yeah, that's something Banti, the AI, our AI consultant has been saying is try to make also Tadgbt to educate you by asking them to explain why they gave an answer, which has been an interesting thing. ⁓

Chris Silvestri (59:36)
Yeah,

yeah

Jim Zarkadas (59:50)
Hmm, okay, that's, yeah, I need to, I have the website open in new tab, I really need to give it a try. Because one thing that I've been, one of the upcoming episodes is gonna be with Stephanie, and Stephanie is a customer of ZenMate that is doing every design call we do. And that's a thing that we started doing, is it last year? I think it's one, one and a half year. It's from the, ⁓ one of the retreats actually.

Stephanie was invited there, we gathered all together in the Netherlands and after that we had the idea that hey it was really useful to have a customer around why not just invite them to Design Call and man it's been really like a transformative experience it's like day and night how design was before and after Stephanie joined.

Chris Silvestri (1:00:27)
Yeah, yeah. I had a...

totally. I had

a similar experience when I was working with a company where their audience was super niche. So it was a software, but for portable septic toilets. ⁓ So basically the software was basically helping these portable septic like toilets companies track their...

Jim Zarkadas (1:00:45)
Wow, yeah.

Chris Silvestri (1:00:54)
the the trucks, the routes that the trucks were taking to carry these, all of these containers and all the stuff. so optimizing all the routes, optimizing fuel, managing clients, invoicing clients, all of that stuff. And the one clever, super clever thing that they did at the company, my client company, they hired ex, like former operators at these portable septic toilet companies to work with them.

for a software company, right? So they were basically having the sales calls, they knew exactly how these operators spoke, and so they were able to empathize with them. So, yeah, secret move.

Jim Zarkadas (1:01:26)
Beautiful.

100%. Yeah, that's not that's that's been doing is like now the new member of customer success team is a previous cleaning business owner. So it's like it's a hidden super part to actually have your customers in your team. And even like in the design calls that were they can, like we've been designing a feature called checklist, for example, Stephanie and she's explained us why many things were fully off. Like for me, it's a beautiful thing because every Tuesday I can do usability test with zero effort. It just

Chris Silvestri (1:01:41)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (1:01:58)
Stefan is there, I can ask whatever I want. And why I'm sharing all this is because synthetic research could be really cool for early stage companies that don't have access to customers trying to figure things out. think like with some teams that I'm working with that are on the early stage, that would be a cool one. And also teams that just cannot invite somebody yet or they don't feel comfortable could be all kinds of reasons. So I feel it could produce similar value. Yeah, also this one.

Chris Silvestri (1:02:21)
Yeah, or if your audience is super niche. Yeah, and I would say

especially like, for example, ZenMaid, you have this person who's basically the target ICP, right? What you can do is test those synthetic research platforms, have that person look at the responses and tell you, this is actually accurate. Like, this is actually how I would think or what I would say. So you can basically validate the responses of synthetic research from that.

Jim Zarkadas (1:02:45)
True, true. Yeah, it's in my to-dos for this or next week to experiment actually. It's really, really cool. Yeah, and thanks a lot for serving with the world, the knowledge on this topic. It's your research that actually is helping us out here. You're the one that brought the concept. ⁓ Really cool. So I see we're already, yeah, one hour. So I try to wrap it up and ask the...

Chris Silvestri (1:02:54)
That was...

Cool. ⁓

Jim Zarkadas (1:03:14)
Yeah, it's two questions that I have in my list. The one is top three mistakes you see in SaaS companies when it comes to copriding. And we can take the example of websites, because from what I understand, that's the main thing you're focused on. So to SaaS founders out there, what are the three top mistakes that you see that they're doing and they really need to stop doing if they want to grow further?

Chris Silvestri (1:03:37)
So the first one is probably especially when comes to homepages value propositions, a lot of companies basically just tell people what they do right away, which can be useful. Because a lot of people say, oh, like benefits over features, sometimes actually, like stating features is helpful when you know that your customers are specifically looking for technical specific things, right?

Jim Zarkadas (1:04:02)
Yeah, exactly.

Chris Silvestri (1:04:04)
But I think the overarching principle when it comes to value proposition is you need to match the conversation that people are having when they land on the website. What are they thinking? What are they expecting? What do they want? What brings them there? And you get all of that from those interviews. And I think I've heard from ⁓ Matt Lerner, I think, is a growth advisor consultant.

Jim Zarkadas (1:04:20)
Hmm. ⁓

Mm-mm.

Mm-hmm.

Chris Silvestri (1:04:31)
he had this kind of very useful framework to think about it, which is basically your, in a lot of cases, your value propositions should complete the sentence, I want to. So if you say, I want to optimize my conversions, blah, blah, or I want to get faster project management or whatever. Like if you're uncertain sometimes, that's really like a helpful shortcut to kind of come up with something better than what you already have.

Jim Zarkadas (1:04:43)
Mmm, nice one.

Chris Silvestri (1:05:02)
And second mistake, we'll probably be copying competitors, just because a lot of companies, again, they might not do the research. And so they think, they feel the pressure. And they think that competitors know what they're doing, but all the times they don't. And so you all end up speaking the same, like saying the same things, using the jargon or using ChalGPT now.

Jim Zarkadas (1:05:21)
That's a good point.

Chris Silvestri (1:05:30)
Yeah, I think that's probably, I think there's like, there's a point in looking at competitors, but only if you use it to kind of deconstruct their strategy, what they're doing. So if you if you see, if you look at the copy, you kind of you can understand whether or not they're targeting an ICP that's maybe higher awareness or lower awareness, or, and also how you position yourself, that's super helpful, like understanding, okay, these are the claims that they make, because they are positioning themselves.

Jim Zarkadas (1:05:41)
Hmm

Yeah.

Chris Silvestri (1:05:59)
this way, and we can do it this other way. And probably the third one is, I would say like the misalignment. a lot of times they, a lot of companies keep moving forward without bringing together different teams like marketing product and sales especially. And everyone kind of says different things. The work that one team does.

Jim Zarkadas (1:06:02)
Yes.

The narrative, yeah.

Chris Silvestri (1:06:27)
doesn't really help the other team. And so it's like living in these different silos. And that's actually a lot of my work. When I do the case study interviews with my clients, when I kind of ask them for feedback, probably the biggest thing that they appreciate is how my work helps them communicate the same way and help everyone in the teams speak the same language and write the copy, of speak to the same positioning, the same value.

Jim Zarkadas (1:06:34)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Chris Silvestri (1:06:56)
And so yeah, I say those three.

Jim Zarkadas (1:06:58)
So the sales narrative, yeah, to make sure that everybody even kind of sells the product in the same way, that there is like a source of truth that this is who we're selling to and this is how we sell it to that person. Like the one-sentence pitch, the three-minute pitch, and so on. Yeah, that's cool. Okay, very interesting stuff. And...

Chris Silvestri (1:07:09)
Exactly.

Jim Zarkadas (1:07:21)
Yeah, the last one that I have is, what's your favorite SaaS product at this moment and why? It's all about SaaS, this podcast, so I'm really curious about the tools.

Chris Silvestri (1:07:27)
So, yes, one

is actually a suite of tools. I don't know if you know them. It's, they call it, they have a very unique category. They say it's a multimodal company or something. It's called Every, and it's basically an online publication. It started out as a newsletter. I wrote a couple of articles for them. I'm kind of writing one as well now.

Jim Zarkadas (1:07:36)
Okay.

wow.

⁓

Every dot too,

yeah.

Chris Silvestri (1:07:57)
Yeah, exactly. And so if you look at their product suite, if you sign up for their newsletter, which I'm not sponsored or anything, you basically also get all their products, right? And they have a very cool ecosystem. And I use all of their products because they're super useful. And I like how each product solves a very specific problem. So they have one

Jim Zarkadas (1:08:06)
Yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Chris Silvestri (1:08:19)
that basically

helps you automatically clean up your MacBook folders with AI. anything, anytime that you add something, it basically, yeah, yeah. Exactly. That's one. The other one is called Spiral, which is basically like a repurposing tool. You basically, and it works with input outputs. You basically paste, I don't know, from a podcast transcript, I want to write a LinkedIn post. You...

Jim Zarkadas (1:08:28)
Sparkle, yeah, I'm looking into the product right now. Yeah, Sparkle's the name, yeah.

Yeah.

that's

cool.

Chris Silvestri (1:08:48)
you basically copy paste as many inputs, output examples as you can. And then what spiral does is it extracts the patterns, the templates, and then you basically have one click generation of that specific format. So yeah, and you can do it and you can create your own and all that. So another specific example. And the third one that I'm using is the is an email product, which is kind of acts like a like an executive assistant for email.

Jim Zarkadas (1:09:05)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Silvestri (1:09:18)
It's called Cora and automatically categorize emails generates response drafts for you. But also the nice thing compared to even other AI email tools that I tried is that it basically collects email in two briefs. One, and you can select the hours when it sends you these briefs. And I have one at 7am in the morning and one at 5am. And now I basically only look at email at those two times rather than constantly going

Jim Zarkadas (1:09:18)
Yeah. Yeah.

Hmm.

Chris Silvestri (1:09:48)
inside and being able to them because the smart thing that it does is that you don't see the emails that you get, they are all getting labeled and categorized and they are moved out of your inbox. So anytime you open your email client or whatever, you don't see anything. And you only see those briefs or email that are important that you need to act on when you're going through the email. So

helps me a lot like with focus and also like with distractions and ⁓ yeah so those three I like them because they're super useful I use them every day and they're also kind of included with newsletter which is nice so and if you also look at their their landing pages for these products they're very well done

Jim Zarkadas (1:10:27)
That's cool.

Yeah, I was looking into Spiral and like the headlines are really in point. Funny thing with Quora, one of the teams we're working with is called Get Inbox Zero, which is a competitor of Quora. So I've been digging deep into Quora actually as a tool. And they have also really interesting UX. I mean, on the light side, it's really beautiful design. And the product approach is also pretty cool. It's like pretty opinionated and you don't really have much optionality. So Get Inbox Zero is like different approach where you can fully customize your rules and everything. Where Quora is more kind of a...

Chris Silvestri (1:10:44)
Alright.

Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (1:11:01)
Like it takes over and has an opinionated approach on this. Yeah, that's also popular. Yeah.

Chris Silvestri (1:11:03)
Yeah, because another one that I tried for email was called Fixer with a Y. Yeah,

and that's more like a standard, like fully customizable option, but I liked Core because of the simplicity and also kind of the, in general, the philosophy behind it, like creating a narrative around your emails that you can look at whenever or if you want to.

Jim Zarkadas (1:11:14)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah, yeah. See, like another example, like going back to the beginning of the podcast episodes, like the unique approach. Exactly. A beautiful example that kind of emerged here. Okay. Yeah. Every really cool. And I've seen that you actually publish some posts. That's where I, they go into my radar actually through your content. So yeah, it's really cool. And I think maybe that's not true what I'm saying, but I think I read somewhere that they're building older products with AI coding. So they don't really write the codes.

Chris Silvestri (1:11:29)
the point of view, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. That matters.

yeah, actually, I actually forgot

but I'm using another one of the product which is still in beta I think but I've been using for a month or so which is an AI dictation product. So you basically hold a shortcut, you dictate and now like even when I work for like on clients copy and with AI in AI chats, like I literally speak to the AI and I don't even write anymore.

Jim Zarkadas (1:12:01)
the monologue ⁓

That's something that there is an app called Super Whisper I think that people told me about but I haven't tried because I don't know it just it's like with Siri for example I had like a friend of mine he bought the HomePod and he was like hey Siri do this and that I'm like man it sounds a bit weird like one month later I have HomePod in my at my place and now every morning I say hey Siri play some music for example and yeah yeah go for it

Chris Silvestri (1:12:15)
Yeah, it works the same way.

⁓ Yeah. I mean, like these tools work work work

work like 20 times better than Siri. Like it's not even comparison like the way they understand what you say and also how they if you mess up things while you speak, they also fix it for you.

Jim Zarkadas (1:12:42)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and for this, my, the thing, like what I was trying to say as well is that at first it felt really awkward to talk to a speaker and then it's just like routine. And I feel like it's gonna be the same because now it feels weird to stop typing and start talking suddenly to the computer because I like, yeah, I don't really have a conversation, but it's something that I really need to try out because many people have been mentioning that efficiency and productivity really goes up. So yeah, it's more kind of a mindset shift that I personally need there.

Chris Silvestri (1:12:59)
Yeah.

and

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, let me check quickly. If I look at my dictation, it says that I saved two hours with a total worth of 15,000. So yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (1:13:26)
Mmm.

wow,

okay. And monologue, yeah, monologue is actually from what you're saying is actually not just about transforming voice to text, but actually editing a bit so that it sounds right, it corrects things. That's cool.

Chris Silvestri (1:13:41)
Yeah. Yeah, like I think you can

also, like in the settings, you can prompt it how much you want it to modify your dictation or if you like leave it completely as it is.

Jim Zarkadas (1:13:53)
Hmm?

That's cool, I'm gonna take a look. Nice man, thanks for sharing. ⁓ Yeah, I think that's pretty much all for this. These are all the questions. It was a solid episode, one hour and 15 minutes. So yeah, we discussed many interesting stuff. ⁓ Yeah, thanks a lot for making the time for this and sharing everything. Actually, last question that I almost forgot.

Chris Silvestri (1:14:00)
welcome.

Also.

Nice.

Jim Zarkadas (1:14:20)
who should talk to you, like what are the pain points they have and what are the problems you can solve for them. So if anybody like really liked what you what they heard and so on, who are you helping out, like what kind of companies and what are the problems that you can solve for them.

Chris Silvestri (1:14:36)
Yeah, so if you are a CMO, VP of marketing head of growth, or a private equity operating partner working with a lot of tech companies, B2B SaaS, typically between 20 to 200 people, sometimes I work with bigger companies, but series A to C is typically the range that I work with and you're kind of in growth mode and feel like you're reaching a plateau or you don't understand your customers as much as you should and can't express

what you do, who you do it for and how you do it. We basically help you map all of that out with research, positioning, messaging strategy and the actual copy for your top conversion points, which is mostly website, email and sales tax. So you can find me on conversionalchemy.net, it's my website. I have a newsletter if you want to sign up and I'm typically just on LinkedIn mostly posting about this stuff.

Jim Zarkadas (1:15:24)
Yep.

Yeah, posting many cool insights. Nice. Thank you. Thanks a lot. And yeah, I'll include everything on the episode notes so that people can find the website and everything. So yeah, that's pretty much it. Yeah, no problem, man. Yeah, what do you think? I feel like it was pretty, yeah, kind of I really like the flow that it's more of like a conversation and less of a podcast.

Chris Silvestri (1:15:41)
Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, I love it. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

Yeah, very nice. And also, like you can see...

Jim Zarkadas (1:16:04)
The proposal is for such founders and the ability to care and want to learn more about designs but are not designers themselves. Never yourself do dive into the topics of UX growth.

Every episode we discuss how to design products that become sticky and unforgettable and dive into the topics of taste, growth, UX, and life, instruction, etc.

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We serve practical frameworks and tips on how to incorporate ⁓ all these into your process. Come on. Frameworks you cannot. Hey, I'm Jim, and this is the Lobo for Stripe podcast. A podcast for SaaS CEOs and developers that truly care about design and want to learn more about it, but they're not designers and they find it too complex. In every episode, we discuss how to design products that become unforgettable and sticky. In every episode also, we serve topics and

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