Amar Ghose on Building ZenMaid: Messaging for Niche SaaS, Simplifying B2B, and Cultivating Passion in Business
Amar Ghose, founder of ZenMaid, joins us to share his journey from starting a maid service to creating a niche B2B software in an industry not typically associated with high-tech solutions. His philosophy of targeting specific, 'boring' niches with sophisticated software solutions has driven the success of ZenMaid since its inception in 2013.
A Silicon Valley native, Amar discusses his transition from sales to entrepreneurship, the nuances of building a business in a specialized niche, and the importance of focusing on solving problems rather than being driven solely by passion for the industry. His approach of "cultivating passion" over time is a fresh perspective on how to find fulfillment in business.
Please enjoy this insightful conversation with Amar Ghose!
CONNECT WITH AMAR
They're running a maid service because they want freedom just the same way that I do, but their freedom may look different than my freedom. We all just wanna get through our day with loved ones and run into a little bit less frustration, have a little bit more. Fun for me to do the best job that I can for the company.
I think that it's always important that I'm plugged into the customers, but I don't think that I need to be the one dictating the messaging or the copy or anything like that. It brings me so much joy when we're able to remove friction from maids service owners' lives, and you get a very stark reminder of just how much time and frustration that you're saving people by adding in another SMS template or stuff like that.
That's like. Thank God that this was driving me up a wall that I had to deal with this like every single day in the software. You get like those sort of reminders that really make it like, make it worth it. I, I love our customers.
Hey, welcome to the Message Market Fit podcast. I'm your host, Chris Silvestri and if you're new here, this is a show where I chat with B2B SaaS, folks in marketing, product growth, and founders.
About how they join the conversation already happening in their customer's minds. We dive deep into their thinking, their systems and their playbooks to see how they empathize with their audience and speak to them in a way that resonates. So they're compelled to take action. Join us and learn how you two can shape your messaging strategy and write copy that truly resonates and differentiates you.
I am super excited about my guest today, Amar Goes. Amar is the co-founder of ZendMaid, a maid and cleaning service scheduling platform. In this episode, we chat about Amar's unique journey from starting a maid service to creating ZendMaid, his philosophy of targeting specific boring niches with sophisticated software.
And the art of cultivating passion in business. We dive into the challenges and rewards of simplifying BW b messaging and into Amar's strategies for learning from customer feedback. Let's dive right in. Amar, thank you and welcome to the PostCast. How are you
doing? Pretty well, thanks for, uh, thanks for having me.
Awesome, awesome. So, I dunno, it's from TwentyThirtyOne, a tweet that you wrote. It says build sexy software for boring niches. It's the best of both worlds. I know that you started ZenMaid 2013, am I right? Uh, yes. So how did you get into B2B and how did you get into such a specific niche?
So I grew up in Silicon Valley, in Palo, Alto, right near, uh, like Google and Facebook, apple, all of like those.
So I feel like just from like a relatively like young age, I was kinda surrounded by like tech and everything. It's kind of logical to like, to go into, like, into software, but uh, I actually had a background in sales previously, but it always been a little bit entrepreneurial. So after graduating college, I spent.
About three years working in sales for a couple like different companies and you know, throughout high school and college. And then after college I was always working on these little side projects. And so at some point I actually started a maid service with a friend and we ran that for about 14 months.
Then after that, one of my friends approached me and essentially said like, Hey, we should start a software company together. I can do the coding, you can do like the sales and marketing. It's like the classic Silicon Valley, like combination. And, um, yeah, we tried, tried a couple different industries. We essentially wanted to talk to people and see if we could identify a problem that we could solve for them, like with software.
And then very quickly, uh, moved over to focus on like on made services.
Nice. And uh, so was it kind of a scratch-your-own-itch kind of a business that you started?
Yes and no. I mean, like, I. In hindsight, it kind of looks that way, but like the truth is not, not really. I had a maid service. I'd already shut the maid service down.
It was more just that my co-founder was like, well, you already had like, like created some technology on the back end, like with your website. Not all maid services have, so we can like start there. And then because I was focused on sales and was doing all cold email and cold calling, it was just much easier for me to get my foot in the door with maid service owners when I could call them and be like, Hey, like I ran my own maid service for 14 months.
I don't anymore. But I wanted to talk to you about like some, like some scheduling stuff or whatever. People were much more willing to talk to me. And so in, in some ways my background in the main service like industry just removed some of that early friction for us. But was it scratching our own itch? No, not, not, not really.
Not like the classical way. Yeah. Got it.
So would you say that you are passionate about the niche or is it purely a business deal?
Um, it's purely a business deal, but I think it's more about like what you choose to be passionate about. Right? And so, like for me. I've always been passionate. About kind of like the, the building of like the business, right?
Or like, I, I think it's really kind of magical when you get the systems in place so things happen without you having to do anything anymore. So I absolutely love what I do day to day and I do love that I'm essentially compensated for just thinking about problems that like, that help maid service owners.
But that's more like cultivated over time that I love it because it's working. And now like, I love it because it like makes me, like, makes me a living. But you know, if we had gone. Dentists interested in our software 10 or 11 years ago, I'd be just as passionate about about that. Right. So I'm passionate about like serving and helping people, but I'm not gonna lie, like the specific niche is, is less meaningful.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I find that a lot of founder that I speak to, they. They are mostly problem solvers, so they're not necessarily super passionate, as you said about, about whatever they're working on, but they're passionate about building a system with the processes, helping people fixing problems,
and I, I definitely see a lot of like removing friction of, I think that's one thing that now, like it brings me so much joy when we're able to remove friction from made service owners' lives and.
That's something that really does mean a lot to me that like, I feel really good about that. And, um, every now and again, you, again, you get a very stark reminder of just how much time and frustration that you're saving people by adding in, you know, another SMS template or stuff like that. And it sounds like very like small, but then you get these times where you make a small improvement and you have a main service owner that's.
Thank God, like, you know, that this was driving me up a wall that I had to deal with this like every single day in the software. And like, you know, every now and again you get like those sort of reminders that really make it, like, make it worth it. So like, you know, I, I love our customers.
Yeah. And for the uninitiated, uh, could you tell us, and this is actually a question that I ask all of my clients, whenever we start talking, discussing projects, who does your company help And how I find that like phrasing in this way.
It's a pretty clear indicator that tells me, okay, this person has done the research. They know their thing, they know their industry, and, and they know how to speak to them. So who, who would you say does ZenMade speak to, um, help and how
Zenmade is to help main services be more successful? That's like it in a nutshell.
So we're very focused on. Made services, which would be residential, like true home cleaners. We have some folks that use us for commercial cleaning. We have some folks that use us for Airbnb cleaning, but it's not what we were designed for. That's not who, like who we cater to. We may do some more stuff on the Airbnb side.
Commercial is something that we're not planning on, like on moving into, and then also some housekeeping businesses. But in terms of like who we speak to from a copywriting perspective. It's only Maidservice owners. Those other three groups have kind of like found us, but we're very specifically not trying to like to pick them up.
I mean, in a nutshell, it's simple scheduling software. So simple scheduling software for Maidservices. It's essentially like the tagline. That's what we get paid for. When I say that like our, our, like. Company's slogan or like why we exist is to make made services accessible is because we also put out a bunch of educational content we call like a popular YouTube channel.
Blog, resources, we put on events. We do all of these things, but all, all of that is to help the entire industry and then we make our money, all the software back
end. You used to have a podcast, right? I found a couple of episodes. Did you, why did you stop if you did? We
didn't, so the, the podcast was, we had a personality behind the podcast for a little bit, but, well, yeah, she essentially got busy and wasn't able to stay.
It was to stay like on top of it. It wasn't like what we hired her to do, but it was nice, like while it lasted. And then most of our podcast content is actually just audio versions of talks that were given at summits. That, that we've like hosted. So we're in the process right now of trying to restart our podcast.
Ah, but we, we really just need a face for, we need a personality or someone that's going to lead it because it's not me anymore. I was the face of the business for, for, for quite a while and it doesn't really serve us anymore for me to be the face of the business. Right. That I do podcast interviews like this.
Kind of around how I'm building ZendMaid and stuff like that. You won't find me on really any podcasts anymore that are actually for made service owners, and it's just, you know, I'm not the target demographic. You know, like I'm much more a software CEO than like a made service owner, right? Which is what I used to be back in the day.
I'm curious, we talk about these made businesses, right? Did you also narrow down to the amount of maids that they they have in their business or any other like sub-specifics?
Uh, it depends on kind of like what you're sort of looking at or like how you're kind of looking at that. Like internally, we have definitions of like who our best clients are.
We can't really speak to them, right? There's no way to target made service owners based on how many clears they have because you just don't know that information. I mean, most of the time that information isn't even accurate in their actual scheduling software, right? So like it's not the kind of thing that that we can go and like look for.
So it's like we have a better idea of like who we specifically like serve and like who we're best for. You know, if they're below a certain size, then we know kind of what the pin points are in comparison to like the medium size and the large size and stuff like that. So we have that sort of differentiation.
But again, like it's not really anything that we can, uh, vary in terms of like targeting or um, messaging really.
So, so let's jump into that. How will. I'm curious, especially the early stages, how did you go about researching your customers starting to collect this data and Yeah, and starting to form the message that you used on the website initially?
So I think in the beginning it was just copying other websites and adapting like what they had like to us that like, I'd be lying if I said that we went down and were really thoughtful about it. It's like, no, like we just. Knew that we needed like an explainer video, we needed a headline, we needed a subheadline, we needed like a description, right?
And we probably just went on to Intercom or whatever the hot new thing was, like at the time. Took one of their designs and then like wrote our own lines. I mean, I remember very distinctly actually. The first like, uh, landing page that I sent over to my co-founder, the implement back in the day. He like spent two hours rewriting the entire thing because he was so unhappy with like, how it, like, how it had like come out, right?
So that was very early on where I only had the sales background. I hadn't, I hadn't learned copywriting, I didn't know that much about like, you know, the industry and like that stuff beyond my own personal experience there. And so, um, you know, I remember it being a big, like, miss in the beginning. Now another thing is I never consciously went out to get better at this for like copywriting purposes.
This was all just kind of the role of the founder. So, to date, I've spoken on the phone with. I think 7,000 maids service owners. So like, you know, in the first like year that we were in business, I probably spoke to 500 maids service owners, maybe more than that, that I talked to, like on the phone. So that was where I began to sort of like, pull some of the language and everything and, and like kind of figure out like what the wording was.
And I began to realize, okay, when I say these things on the phone, which was much more natural for me, like being, being in sales that like people are responding, well, maybe that should go on the website. And stuff, stuff like that. So that, that was, that was how I, how I started. Yeah.
Very organic and kind of intuitive approach.
After, it's kind of the same thing after a while that I'm immersed in the research for clients. I realized that there's a point I, I realize, okay, now if I keep reading reviews and I keep interviewing customers, I'm not gonna learn more than I already know. I kind of have that intuitive feeling, right? So I kinda the
same, or it's like right the.
Write like kind of what you have like in your head, take what you have and do like a version of the copywritings, then go talk to more people so you can get feedback on that copywriting, right? Yeah. Like there's always value in talking to more people, but sometimes you need to stop talking to more people and just do the work and then restart the conversations.
Yeah, either
anything. Yeah, for sure. So when it comes to your ICP's, who would you say your top, I dunno, two or three personas are for Zen made.
The, the, the main one that, that, that, that we're focused on is who we call, like mid-sized Mary, which is going to be a maid service that's in the United States.
Usually is gonna be run by a husband and wife couple, or like a middle-aged woman, you know, likely in like, in, in, um, the center of, um, of like, uh, of America. They'll, yeah, be essentially mid-sized in terms of like revenue and how many cleaners, um, they have. So let's say, you know, three-hundred-and-fifty to seven-hundred-and-fifty thousand dollars in like annual, um, annual revenue.
Usually our mothers, sometimes grandmothers care a lot about like, time with family and stuff like that. Uh, the most common story for these people is. They started cleaning their own home after like, you know, having a kid and stopping working or something like that. Before they were just cleaning, kind of like locally as like a solo cleaner.
A couple friends noticed that they were good at cleaning, asked them to clean their homes, and now you fast forward a couple of years 'cause they usually find us four or five years, like into their, like, into their journey. That they find all of a sudden, you know, quote-unquote overnight, but four or five years later now, instead of like just cleaning homes, they're now sending cleaners to different homes and they're now running, like running a business.
Mm. And oftentimes it's Unintentional. And so that, that's like the most, like the most common story that that's the one that I know. Like that's because it's like our primary focus. We, we have other ones, but like, you know, that, that, that describes our like ideal cus like client so like, so accurately that the rest are kind of like afterthoughts super
interest.
Interesting. So you mentioned that it was kind of like unintentional how they got into the business. How did you Yes. How did you realize that? Was it kind of like an aha moment when you, when you found out about that or? Um, I.
Don't really remember, but I mean you would just hear about it like a lot that you would hear that it was a common story.
But then the main thing is just that like a lot of our customers, it sometimes feels like it's a B-to-B company 'cause we're selling to other businesses made services. But it sometimes feels B-to-C because of the way that they think about investment and costs and stuff like that. That like, if we're being honest, just.
A lot of, a lot of our folks, because of like sort of how they ended up in the business, they don't think like business owners. So we would definitely get the objection of, oh, like, you know, it's, you know, forty-eight, or, you know, fifty-eight dollars a month, or sixty-seven dollars a month, or whatever.
Clearly this is gonna save me five to 10 hours a week. But it's just too expensive. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just like, no, no, it's not like no business owner would ever do that math and tell you that it's expensive when it's like the core like backbone of your business. Right. It's not like a supplementary tool or like or, or whatever.
Yeah. That's just something that we've seen that has changed over the years, that now a lot, there's a lot more like savvy business owners that are running like running made services, but funnily enough, they tend to go with some of our competitors. Because of the way that our competitors are built out.
So we're actually really good for these folks that maybe weren't thinking about it that way. And then we come in and help them to really streamline their business and go from being like maybe accidental business owners to being like real professionals. I
had a similar experience in. So in B2B, I work for this company Superniche as well.
They sold software for portable toilets and roll-off container companies. So you can imagine these companies are very kind of old school, right? So they, the only thing that they use to track like their routes or where the toilets are, is basically spreadsheets or paper. And, and the, one of the main obstacles that we had was trying to convince them.
To use software, right? Because they were kind of averse to software. How were you able, or how did, how are you doing it in your co-op messaging or positioning? Um, how are you overcoming that, uh, investment barrier? Because
in the beginning I was just trying to do anything I could to get people onto, like, onto our software that's very much reflected in the way the business is currently set up.
So in the beginning, it's like we didn't have an export or an import tool. So like the first couple customers when they wanted to like, to get to get started, you know, at some point someone was like, this is taking me a while. Can I send you like a spreadsheet and can you guys upload it? And my response to that was, yeah, but we didn't have.
An actual uploader. So then we went through it, just manually added it for them, right? Mm-Hmm. And so we essentially have that same thing is, you know, at some point I realized, oh, actually, like that sounds like a weakness, but instead like it's concierge onboarding, right? So you send me like this file, I will format it and like upload it for you.
Now we have an uploader, but we still do it internally. So everyone goes through like concierge onboarding. And so what we have is we have a variety of things like that. Like we offer them unlimited calls while like while they're getting started, we'll move over their customer information and their employee information.
If they can send us their appointment information, if they're in like Google Calendar or something, we'll actually move over their appointment information, right? That's something that none of our competitors. Offered to do, and we just have a team that's trained up on it. So we've automated some of that, but a lot of it you can't automate, which is why our competitors don't offer it.
And so like those would be examples, but. To to, to add to that, it's the, all of the, everything that I just said is heavily emphasized in the actual like Copywriting and messaging of like, Hey, like, we make it easier than any other platform. Like, you're already like nervous about this because you wasted, you know, six months trying to get onto our competitor and it completely shut the bed, right?
Like was then made. It's different, right? You'll know in like seven to 10 days whether it's the right system for you and if it's not. Arm, no fowl.
Right. Do you find, you mentioned competitors, do you find that a lot of your customers already are coming from other solutions, similar solutions, or
are they aware of them?
Well, I, it's. Close to fifty-fifty, I would say they're, they're definitely aware of them, right? Like if twenty-twenty-three or twenty-twenty-four actually, like, jeez, in twenty-twenty-four, like, people are aware of competitors, right? No one finds then-made and goes, oh, like this is the only software there is.
I mean, they have at least 30 other software options. Most of them are not specific to like two-made services. But yeah, they're, they're, they're always gonna be like aware of other, um, of other like software and everything. So, yeah. But I would say at least 40% of people, I would say, are probably moving over from other software and are moving to us because like we're easier to use or we offer more functionality.
Yeah. Or whatever it might be. Did you
see, did you see the percentage of people moving over from something similar already increasing over the years?
I don't know that that, well, I'm not, I'm not good with these, these sorts of, like, these, these sorts of numbers I'm sure we've looked about at some point.
Yeah. But I, I have no idea. Yeah, I mean, I would imagine so. I, I would imagine so because 10, 10 years ago, it's like we were still having to convince people like they should use a software at all. Whereas now it's much more of, of like, no, of course you're gonna use a software, right? Like, you'd be insane to stay on paper.
It's twenty-twenty-four. It's why
us? I'm always kind of, uh, interested in these trends, uh, because a lot of, a lot of companies don't. Regularly update their copy, their messaging to kind of mirror these trends. Right. So how, how often do you think working on copy messaging is
good? Well, I think it depends on where, right?
Like I think, I think like our email marketing for example, we're always working on the copy there and improving the messaging because those are going out live right. Our website, we don't update very often. Usually it's when there's a design, because our website is meant to be like classic marketing, right?
We don't have any things on there that are gonna like only be relevant for like the next couple of weeks or whatever. It would just be too much to manage. So it's almost like we experiment a lot more with the copy of like our social media, right? And our email and all of those things. But then we have set things in the funnel that, you know.
Unless we're running AB tests, which like we're starting to do, like to do more. We're not, we're not like really updating it. Right. Uh, I mean, although AB tests is something that I think we're going to make a habit of going forward, and so in that sense, we will be updating it. But it's not as much like updating the messaging, like thinking about like, what's changing.
It's more just going, oh, maybe this headline will be more effective, or whatever. Yeah. The
probably the only. Recommendation that I always have for big changes on the website is whenever you're reconsidering your positioning. Right? So it might be, I don't know, every six months maybe 'cause you saw a new competitor popped up, or that substantial changes in your products that required you to.
Change the angle they used to speak to customers. How do you see, uh, how, how did you see your positioning change, if at all? Did did it change over the years since 2013? Or is the angle that you're using pretty much the same?
Uh, the angle's pretty, pretty much the same to be honest, because again, we pick like a classic like of just like.
We've always been focused on simple scheduling for made services. Mm. And as we add more features, that doesn't change, right. The point is, is that it's still simple scheduling. So yeah, I don't think that we've really like changed it, changed it too much. I mean, our brand has definitely like changed just because we went from being like the little startup to now most people assume.
We're like the defacto, you know, software, which isn't entirely true. That's more like reflective of our marketing than, than anything. But like the product's beginning to catch up as in like the product usage is beginning to catch up to that perception, which is nice.
Awesome. I have something else that you wrote.
Uh, yeah. Again, back in 2021. So, and, and it says, um, add massive value, capture, some of it handmade customers. Run over $20 million a month, and this is back in 2021 through our system each month. They deserve all the credit for that. They will absolutely find a way without us, but we help in our own small way and keep a hundred K to keep doing it.
So this struck, struck me because speaks a lot I think, to kind of. Always trying to be humble and trying to put yourself in the customer's shoes. So how do you keep doing it? Like what type of research do you run for customers? Do you do interviews, surveys, polls? What do you do to keep in touch with your customers?
So I feel like for, for me, this is something like I, I can go through all the things that I do, but it's less strategic and more just because like I'm very social and like I grew up kind of like online, you know, and everything. So we have two, um, two Facebook groups. One is just for Zen made customers. The other is for all made service owners regardless of what software like they use.
So that keeps they plugged into the industry like nicely, right? So, so that already is quite helpful. We have a private channel in our Slack where we've added, I think, five customers now that are main service owners. Uh, and multiple of our team members are in there from, from Jim, our designer, to um, our marketing person who writes the emails and we just are able to ask them questions.
They're able to report bugs when they happen, so they get a little bit of like VIP treatment and stuff like that. Um, you know, I'm still in support every day despite the fact that we have, you know, 2000 customers and like a three or four person support team. I'm still in there most days like looking at stuff.
Uh, I'll occasionally jump on calls and do like a sales call every now and again 'cause like no one's available or provide support like over the phone. And so like, I'm just quite active, like in, in those things. You know, I used to go a lot, go, go to a lot of the maid service events in the United States.
I haven't really, since the, um, since the pandemic hit, but I may, may get back to that like at some point. But I feel like I'm pretty deep into, like, into these things. You know? I follow all of like the major influencers. I'm friends with all of them, like on Facebook, you know, like I'm friends with, with lots of like our customers either on Facebook or follow them on Instagram and like quite a few of them follow me.
Like, I feel like one thing is I'm plugged into their lives more than just like, professionally, like on social media. It's like, you know, I'm seeing photos of like their kids and stuff like that. And I think that's something that, I dunno if it gets like lost, but I feel like it's not talked about all that often.
Right. It's like we're all, we're all human, right? Like they're running a maid service because. They want freedom just the same way that I do, but their freedom may look different than my freedom. Right? But it's like, at the end of the day, like, you know, we all just wanna get through our day with loved ones and run into a little bit less frustration and have a little bit more fun and like, you know, all that stuff.
So, yeah, I don't know. I, I just, I keep customers close, I feel like is the biggest
thing. Yeah. I love it. Especially because a lot of companies. They tend to see their customers, their ICPs as these kind of buckets of demographics, you know, like age, gender, you know, like maybe interests, but I love how you phrased it and how you, how much attention you pay to, yeah, the, the emotions that they feel, the, their kind of psychology, how they think, uh, how they think about life, how they think about business.
So all these different areas. Contribute in, I think giving you a better idea of who your customers are and keeping in touch with them. Yeah, and I, I was also curious about, as, as the founder, co-founder, do you think that you would ever distance yourself at all from like, keep in touch with customers or will you always try to be in as in touch as possible?
Like, would you ever delegate everything to your team and just trust them or
no? Yes and no. Yes and no. I think that for me to do the best job that I can for the company, I think that it's always important that I'm plugged into the customers, but I don't think that I need to be the one dictating the messaging or the copy or anything like that.
Right. So, so Jim, who we've mentioned on this, on this pod a couple of times already. He'd been jumping on calls with folks that are, that are in like our private Slack channel for, for customers, right? Mm-Hmm. I know I've been on multiple of those calls, but a couple of those have happened, like without me.
So like, I want to see this seep through the entire organization, so everyone is thinking more, you know, like me, what I'm talking about here, being plugged into the actual lives of meat service owners. Yeah. I mean, I can't, I can't imagine remaining in charge. Of Zen Maid and not, and not be doing at least some, as I could see, cutting it down.
Yeah. I mean, I could, I could see like not doing this as much and there are times where I'll go two months without ever looking at support and then there's times where I'll be in there four times a day and it'll be like helping people out and doing like all that stuff. Like the goal with the company is always that the company can, should be able to run entirely without me, but should also be set up so that I can come in.
Anywhere that I want to, whether that's the place that like I want to develop and grow as a person or as an entrepreneur, or it's where like I just have, you know, quote unquote like superpowers, right? Mm. And so like, you know, I wanna be able to come in and add extreme value in various places, but also have nothing miss a beat if I'm like not around.
Uh,
speaking of team members, how do you keep everyone aligned on. Your value proposition, but also your messaging throughout your channels. Not
even really sure how to answer that. Like I don't really like I, I think it happens organically. Yeah, it happens. It happens organically. I mean, we have some things that are like, you know, written down of like, you know, style guides and like, and stuff, stuff like that.
But I mean, if we're being honest, they're never referred to. I mean, who's gonna go and look at those every time? Like you write something, right? Generally, people know. Kind of the tone that we want to go with. Or like our writer Erica for example, like I, you know, jump on calls with her like weekly and we had a transition period where she was trying to like write more like me and all of like all of that stuff.
So like right now I think it's more just that we've got a very close-knit team where everyone kind of knows how we're gonna do go about things. We do encourage everyone to share, right? So like in the Slack channel of just like, Hey, this is the message that's like, that's going up so other people can, like, can make suggestions and stuff.
And, and like one thing that we like doing is having multiple people write the same message. So then there's like a little bit of like, to like comparison, right? Yeah. It's not a silly one is better, but like sometimes it's a very different town. So like recently we had to ask people for reviews and one person said like, you know, something about like getting swept away or getting swept off their feet.
And that's. Nice puns in there and someone else was just like, Hey, you said you loved us. Leave us a review. Yeah. And so we talked through both like those options and just stuff like that. You know, I feel like there's healthy discussion around our messaging that keeps us
all honest. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of times those, I.
Like feeling forced to, I dunno, build a, like a voice style guide. Uh, sometimes it's just fluff doesn't really get used If you don't have a plan in place or the need, maybe your team is not as big. So I, I think that you're, you're totally right. Like if you, if your team is close enough to customers, to the product, and you always are in touch with the team, I don't think that's necessary at all.
I, I even think that's probably best. Because you tend to, as you mentioned, know your customers intuitively. And it all comes
out natural. Well, for me, I think it's also just for my, uh, for like the way specifically like kind of my brain works is like, I love systems, but I'm not good at like and systems at all.
Yeah. And so for me it's, I was never gonna take the time to document that. And so the reason we have documentation now is because our writer, Erica has sat down with me going through these things and just as she's taking notes for herself. We turned that and she, she took the time to turn that into a proper guide.
So now the next person that comes on, it's not necessarily they're gonna read that and know how to write. They're still gonna have to have those calls with me, but now they'll have a written guide alongside it as we're talking through everything. And so, so yeah, it's something that that's, that's come up organically within, within the company.
Yeah. And
when did you realize that you needed. To put in place these systems or someone to start tracking these systems
when the team came and offered to do it. If we're being completely honest, you know, like I didn't like, I, at no point did I go, we need a style guide, right? Mm-Hmm. Like literally, Erika was just like, Hey, I took the notes from like from our calls.
Like put together a rough draft like of like a style guide. Can you let me know if this is like helpful and if I should like go forward with it and then put that in the marketing channel. And so I looked at, at a couple other people were like, oh yeah, this is really helpful. And then that's how it came up.
Right? So that's kind of what, what I mean is a lot of stuff that like. Looks genius inside and made more, has to come more, more has come from me, sort of empowering the team. Mm. And like letting them kind of do those things. I mean, hell, like, I just had a call with, with Jim like a couple of hours ago and he was telling me about this new design system that he's implementing in Zen made.
I didn't know that, I didn't ask him ask him to do that, but it was something of value that he saw that could like accelerate thing and he just, you know, went ahead and did that. And I feel very, very blessed to have a team. That, that behaves that way.
Yeah. It's nice to have a great team proactive and also the founder needs to be able to listen and, and be open to that.
Right. Another thing that I really liked about your approach that I saw was, uh, this distinction that you made, uh, about your company, the way that you see it, uh, divided in media company and marketing company.
Oh yes. So it was more media and product, uh, that, that is more like media as marketing is, is what I was thinking.
So this is something that you hear talked about on some podcasts and like, and all that, but I definitely realized that, so I, I'd mentioned earlier in the interview. That we essentially do all these things to make made services successful, but that we're paid on the back end to provide, like to provide software.
So like a lot of people would think about us as a software company because that's how we make our money. I think that's useful, especially if you're a product person. But because I'm a marketing person and I had someone focused on product where regardless of what I was working on, like early on, like in the, um, in the company, I wasn't doing much product design or anything like that.
I elected to think about the company on the marketing side as a media company. So. Essentially like the same way that the media that's out there, you can pay for ad space. So like there's a cleaning magazine, there's like a publication for cleaning companies that I could go and I could pay $500 a month to put an ad in there.
It was looking in every single place that we could put an ad and can we create and own that asset and essentially become the media company on there. So what's interesting is that we also do paid advertising. And we're also paying to kind of drive people directly to the software, but then we spend a bunch of time creating essentially media assets.
But to me, the way that I think of that is like content or like education slash entertainment, which I think is a much healthier way to think about it. It's not like creating media for the sake of creating media. It's no, no. Like there's six. The Civic, you know, sections that most people think about their maid service in.
Can we create content around hiring, around training, around sales, around customer support, around all these things that can help people to run a better business. And if we can do that and attract the eyeballs, that is just a matter of time or it's just figuring out how do we funnel that attention down.
Into the, uh, in, into the software. So at a very high level, I think about the company as a media company that just happens to monetize with software. The other really empowering thing about thinking about it that way is if our software disappears overnight, if you've always identified as a software company, that's an identity crisis because now you don't have your product.
If ZenMade were to lose its product overnight. I still have this massive media empire that we could immediately turn on ads aggressively and replace $50,000 a month in like Indian income. Right. Or there's a couple of things that we could do that keeps it as like an asset regardless of the
software.
Yeah, it's, it's thought leadership, like establishing yourself as the authority kind of in the space. Last couple of questions. What's your strategy for learning? Where do you go about learning and what do you like to learn
about? So Twitter is a, is a big one. Um, I'm reading that, um, that hey Mr. Whipple book or something like that.
Yeah. Um, what do you think that, um, yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty good. I started over the, um, over the weekend. Um. And, uh, yeah, I mean, it, it's pretty, it's pretty solid. It's, um, what I like is that it's called like that classic kind of like hide, if you like, classic marketing that really goes down to like first principles and what drives human behavior.
It's not talking about like Twitter tactics or whatever. No. So like, you know, that was a recommendation that I just got like, got from you. There's a lot of people on Twitter whose like, opinions I respect, and just when they recommend things, I'll like, I'll give them a look. Uh, I listen to a bunch of things, so I listen to, uh, it's, it's really a lot of like, biographies.
If there's anything business related these days, it tends to be biographies. I don't listen to too many like actual business books anymore. Occasionally. Mm-Hmm. Uh, quite a few podcasts. You know, my First Million and, uh, the Acquisitions Podcast. Founders podcast. A couple of those. More, more of my podcasts listening get like directly.
Business-related. And then, um, a couple communities. The, uh, the Dynamite circle, the, uh, let's see, the SaaS Academy that I'm in for, like, for, for SaaS companies. Uh, I think, I'm not sure if I'm in the exit five community yet for, uh, for B2B marketers, but like our, our, our new marketer that we just hired. Like two or three weeks ago.
He's in that community now and I'm supposed to be supposed to be joining and everything. So yeah, just a couple, couple places. Places like that.
What do you think about Slack channels? I mean, I mean a couple of Slack channels, but I don't know. I'm still of the opinion that I. Messages get lost in there.
It's kind of a jungle. What do you think?
Uh, yeah, I can't stand that, but I literally won't join. Community is like, there's like the Hampton community by uh, by, by Sam Par. Oh yeah. And that was like really, really good. And it's got some really, really high-level launcher printers. For me, it was like, I looked at it and like the call for me was gonna be in the middle of the night, and then it was a Slack channel community.
And I was like, okay, well, in that case I know that I'm not gonna engage in the community 'cause I've, I don't have the patience for it, like adding ADHD and like wanting to have all the messages read. Like I've literally never been at a Slack channel that was like not directly, directly work related.
That's ever worked for me. Yeah. So like, you know, there's a free SaaS one. Called Sass friends that's on like circle. And so I like that community like a lot. And it's literally just because it's on a different, like a different platform like telegram groups, discord, slack, none of those work work for me, but work for me personally.
Awesome.
Uh, last question, and this is a kind of a personal one. You said that your goal is to buy Arsenal football. Why is it still your goal?
I see you've been, I see you've been reading, reading my, uh, my, my blog. Um. Yeah. Uh, I don't know. It's one, one of those, one of those things that, you know, in, in a perfect world, you know, I feel like, I feel like once you get beyond a certain point, like of money, there's not really much more that money can buy that's gonna like, like significantly kind of like change, change your life.
And I feel like you hit that point of like, you can pretty much buy whatever you want and travel like the way that you kind of want to, maybe not like private gen status, but like. You know, business class or like we're first class or whatever. And to me, the only real reason to work for more wealth beyond there is so that I can buy a football club and like, you know, I put it on my blog, I'm putting it out there into the world, like, you know, if I'm gonna buy a football club, it may as well be my favorite club.
So exactly. Arsenal on there. But you know, if I can play in anywhere on the English football pyramid, I'll be, I'll be pretty happy.
Awesome. Awesome. Alright. Thank you very much, Amar. It's been great. Uh, people can find you on Twitter. Uh, it is just Amar or your blog, the American Dream with an A. Anywhere else you would like to point people to.
No, I think that's pretty, pretty much it. You can find like how their socials and stuff on my, uh, my personal website or whatever. But yeah, Twitter is the, uh, Twitter, Twitter is the main, main place. So, um, I mean that, that's where you and I know each other from. So, uh, yeah, that, that's definitely the spot to, uh, to reach out.
If you're not on there and you're watching this, you should get on there 'cause it's awesome.
So thank you Omar. And guys, everyone check out Zen Maid. It's got great messaging. I think they've done some serious work there, so I recommend you check out their homepage. Thank you, Omar. Thanks for having me.
Cheers.
Thank you so much for listening to the pod. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you did, the best thing you could do to support the show and help me as a small business owner would be to leave our view. Head over to Apple, Podcasts or Spotify and let me know what you think. If you don't wanna miss future episodes, subscribe and if you have any feedback, questions, or suggestions for future episodes, just hit me up on LinkedIn at Christopher Silvestri or Twitter at Silvestri.
Chris, speak to you next time.