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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and I am so very excited about today's episode because this is a topic that for sure, in over 1,100 episodes, we've definitely not talked about enough, but I've noticed as a consumer that this is a rising trend.
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This is one way to really stand out with your marketing efforts, and that, of course, is influencer marketing.
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It's a scary world for so many of us who haven't gone there, but that's why we've brought in an incredible guest and a fellow entrepreneur to navigate those waters with us.
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So let me introduce you to today's guest.
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His name is Sandeep Azdir.
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Sandeep is the founder of Influenergy, which and a fun thing about him is I already know this guy has such great energy and he's an amazing entrepreneur, and that is epitomized in the fact that he's not afraid to roll up his sleeves and get things done, whether it's automating YouTube channels, designing clothes or analyzing multi-million dollar deals in the venture world.
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He's a passionate entrepreneur with a knack for content creation, a keen eye for trends and a sharp financial mind.
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This diverse experience fuels his fire to make his company a game changer, which, just to tell you a little bit about his marketing company.
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It's a social media marketing company specializing in influencer brand collaborations, particularly on social media.
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The company focuses on connecting AI, consumer apps and tech brands with micro creators.
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We're definitely going to talk about that micro part in today's conversation ensuring authentic engagement and maximizing ad performance.
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I'm super excited to learn from this guest here today, so I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Sandeep Azadir.
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All right, sandeep, I am so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show.
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Thank you for having me, Brian.
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Thank you for that warm introduction.
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I'm sort of blushing right now.
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Heck, yeah.
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Well, I'll tell you what.
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It's my job, because you are going to shine here today for our listeners, and so it's my job to bring that genius out of you, because there's so much in there.
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But we're going gonna kick things off.
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I will put the onus entirely on you to take us beyond the bio.
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Who's sandeep?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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thank you appreciate the question.
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Um, where can I start?
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So, just to start off, I guess I'll connect my personal story and get the genesis there and tied to how I got to this seat and speaking to you on this amazing podcast.
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I was born and raised in Toronto, canada, and pretty much my entire life I kind of spent working in the financial world, whether that was like portfolio management, venture debt, project management, risk enterprise.
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I worked for pretty big companies.
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I moved five years ago to Silicon Valley.
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I was pretty much in the heart and bowels of Silicon Valley and I pretty much worked as a portfolio manager for a hyperlocal bank called Fremont Bank and in Fremont Bank I analyzed over 2,600 loans.
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I managed a $2 billion commercial real estate portfolio.
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It was there where I sort of graduated and moved on towards Citigroup or Citibank, which is a pretty big multinational bank as we know.
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I was working for their enterprise risk team and sort of managing risk, you know, for all of the divisions, whether it was strategy, marketing, trading, and in doing so, you know I kind of tied these two aspects together.
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So that led me actually into venture debt.
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Where I was working for at the time probably now is number one, the second biggest or second largest venture debt company, and that was right before the crash of Silicon Valley Bank Signal Signature, first Republic and so forth.
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So I had, like this really good knack and experience to like analyze data, work in financial banks, analyze P&Ls of venture debt companies.
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But throughout my life living in Canada, then moving to the US, you get this entrepreneurial spirit that is undeniable almost in the US, and I tried different ventures on the side.
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I had tried things like YouTube automation, as you mentioned.
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I had tried clothing brands where I got in touch with, like, a very famous rapper that has over 15 million followers, so I got to collaborate with him.
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I got to work in real estate, but I always kept trying and trying things.
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But it wasn't until YouTube automation where I decided to take a step away from what I was doing as an employee and deep dive more into influencer marketing and UGC marketing, which is user-generated marketing, and it's that where I started connecting with people and started talking to creators from all over the world and currently, at this point, I'm talking to over 25, sorry, 400 creators in 25 different countries, 25 plus different countries.
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That goes from India, australia, nigeria, finland, italy, usa, mexico, canada and more and I really picked their mind, learned and it seemed to me that we were really at this fork in the road moment from traditional marketing to influencer marketing, where you could connect and speak to people and really get this true sense of authentic marketing.
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At the end of the day, like billions of people are using social media daily I think the active monthly active users for TikTok and Facebook exceed billions weekly so to me, it made a lot of sense that this sort of form of marketing was attracting so many people, getting to so many lives and just a matter of a few clicks you could just order something, subscribe to something, buy something.
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So, with that being said, it made a lot of sense for me to get into this.
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I think what I really enjoy about it the most is connecting with people, working with people in all different sorts of backgrounds, speaking to founders, bringing them together, bridging the gap, and it's super amazing to see the results they can achieve when they put this social media marketing, which is a true form of authentic reach and allows people to be enticed, into purchasing or viewing or, you know, bringing vanity metrics such as impressions, shares and likes, and it allows for them to really understand a product and trust what's out there and so far it's been so super good.
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Initially in my journey, I started working with CPG fashion, beauty, makeup hygiene, but most recently, in the last four to five months, I've switched to more of an AI consumer app and tech app approach and what I can tell you that what I've accomplished in almost a year in fashion, beauty, makeup hygiene I've done in one third of the time in the AI consumer world.
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So I've been working with plenty of creators.
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I'm an advocate for AI.
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I'm definitely excited to combine those two worlds and I think AI, as we know, is growing at a, you know, very hot rate, is growing in, maybe, you know, greater than 100% year over year, and you want that sort of growth rate in a business.
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You want to be.
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You want to be in the middle of the Venn diagram between influencer marketing, which has a category of 30% year over year over the next decade, and you want to be in the middle of that influencer marketing and AI marketing, which both have greater than double digit growth.
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So it's a great place to be.
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I'm learning a lot and the best part about it is, in addition to being like the latest buzz in the news.
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It feels like we're in the first minute of a soccer match.
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It's just starting, so that's the best part about it.
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You know you get latest breakthroughs, like DeepSea against Stargate, so it's day to day You're getting all this new information, so it's super exciting and that's where I'm at right now.
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Yeah, for sure I love that overview for so many reasons.
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You're taking us to different intersections that we're for sure going to explore in today's conversation.
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But I really want to start out with the fact that we've probably all seen influencer marketing in action without realizing it, and you actually made me realize, even in that overview that you gave, that maybe there's some interesting ways that we're all using terminology differently, because you made me you're the first one to ever make me realize is UGC the same as influencer marketing?
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Has it evolved?
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Is that the broader umbrella?
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Talk to listeners about what UGC is, how you view influencer marketing.
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Are they one in the same or are there different ways that we deliver that in the marketplace?
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Brian, that's a great question and I can get a lot of trouble if I answer this wrong.
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So I'm going to do my best, because UGC and influencer marketing are two separate things, but they sort of fall under the umbrella of digital or social media marketing.
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Let's start with influencer marketing, which is a simpler one to understand.
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Influencer marketing is when an individual on social media uses their audience to attract people to their platform to sell them a good service.
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At the same time, they don't even need to sell them a good service.
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It's something that can fit their image.
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So, for instance, if there's someone who has, you know, x demograph at Y age from this country, they don't really get to choose their audience, but they do get to choose what they present to their audience because they want to ensure the audience continues to follow them.
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So you can look at influencer marketing as sort of a celebrity in a movie.
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We're going to that movie for that celebrity, to see what they have and how they can skew our views.
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Ugc is an acronym for user-generated content.
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The analogy I like to make is influencer marketing is a person who's a star of the film, but UGC user-generated content.
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They don't necessarily need a following, but they'll create small individual films or reels as we call them in the social media world, which can be under a minute, and they will use or reels, as we call them in the social media world, which can be under a minute, and they will use those reels and produce them on behalf of a brand.
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So they're actually producing content for the brand, for the brand to reproduce and repost on their social media outlets to show that they have everyday people like you and I using their products.
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Influencers have a large following and they try to leverage their audience.
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So again, influencers are the stars.
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In the movie, ugc is the person sort of behind the camera.
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Think of it as someone who's an independent film.
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Yeah, that's a really good analogy and you got me thinking so.
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A few years ago I moved from Los Angeles to right here in beautiful and sunny Tampa.
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Florida ago, I moved from Los Angeles to right here in beautiful and sunny Tampa, florida, and so when I moved here I didn't know all of the local spots, like I had all my spots in LA, and so here in Tampa I could follow 500 different local Tampa coffee shops, restaurants, all these other things, but I'm just going to get their marketing from them, whereas what I found is that there are some Tampa micro influencers not huge follower accounts maybe 5,000, maybe up to 10,000, but those people essentially became my curators and my guide to the city where they would check out coffee shops, and that's so valuable to me as a consumer and in turn, when I hit those spots up, it's super valuable for those restaurants.
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So I've seen it in action, without understanding the mechanics of how it works behind the scenes.
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You're at that intersection.
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You're working with the creators, you're working with the brands.
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Walk us through.
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How's this stuff actually happen?
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How's this content get made and then get into the world and push to people?
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Yeah, it's a really good question.
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I would say a lot of the people who are working on this definitely follow a passion of several different niches.
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It could be acting, it could be editing, it could be something in the media world or it could just be someone who just enjoys exploration and creativity.
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There's no necessary formula to get from an influencer or UGC UGC generated content person to produce that content for you.
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Also, what's really interesting is a lot of these creators.
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They fall into different niches.
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So, for myself, I work with mostly AI and tech creators, and those people review AI and tech apps.
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So they're not necessarily all editors or people who are very good with software, but they might be people who are interested in technology or AI and in that passion.
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What they found is they like posting about it and then, furthermore, they start developing the following and then, sooner than later, they're an influencer because they're actually swaying people to use certain AI consumer apps or certain technology or certain hardware or phones or whatever it may be, whatever product or consumer product it may be on Amazon.
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So there's really no singular origin or genesis of these creators.
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It really comes down to just recording, editing and I think the best part about this.
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It's so democratized that anyone can do it.
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You don't necessarily need to be someone who could be perhaps in the modeling world and have a large following count.
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You could just be a person who just takes your phone, puts it on your face and speaks about a product and sooner or later, if you do it consistently enough, people will respect that and follow it, because they do value your opinion yeah, it's true, I'll tell you I'll pile, pile onto that point as a podcaster that anyone can start a podcast, but when you start doing it consistently, you know, I tangibly noticed something changed.
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When I hit episode 50, especially when I hit episode 100, 250, all of these milestones, people started realizing, oh, this is here to stay and he's continuing to give great value on the air.
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Let me subscribe, let me follow along, let him serve me along my own journey, and so it's incredibly valuable.
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Sandeep, and I love the fact that you recognize that opportunity from a business perspective, because I know that you love entrepreneurship and businesses just as much as I do.
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What I'm really fascinated by is businesses that have kind of two sides to the coin.
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You simultaneously need to grow your influencer network while also getting in touch with the brands that you aim to serve, and I'm fascinated by which one do you go after?
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First, the Uber case study of finding drivers and finding passengers.
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It's super important.
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How'd you navigate that with regards to launching your company?
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That's a fantastic question.
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I always call it a left side, right side equation, so I like the fact that you put both hands up there like that, because that's typically what I do.
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Initially, when I first started, I went after the creators, and the reason I went after the creators?
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Because they were the ones again which I was working with in the fashion, beauty, makeup, hygiene world world, who didn't necessarily have a lot of followers, but they had produced a lot of UGC videos.
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So it was more of a saturated feel and I felt like it would.
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They were more approachable to speak to, which was made it very interesting because I would talk to someone be totally intimidated by their follower count, but in the UGC world they don't typically have a lot of followers and that doesn't mean that they can't be intimidating or sharp, but they're actually quite on their game and very well versed in what to do in terms of marketing.
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So when I got to them, I actually really understood in deep dive and these are creators all over the world, as I had mentioned.
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I really understood in deep dive and started asking them questions that really picked their brains and I think when I found out what they do, what they price their work, at how they do it, why they do it, what makes them good.
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I started seeing and recognizing patterns between what is a good UGC creator and what's not and it's not a super deep formula in terms of what separates the good from the great, but in doing so, I was able to speak with enough of them to present it to the brands, and I initially presented myself as a bespoke agency.
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So I was like I'm a founder-led agency in marketing.
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I work with a bespoke set of creators that I have personally vetted, and the reason I personally vetted them initially was because I actually wanted to present myself as someone who is doing a more manual process.
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I wanted to stay away from AI chatbots.
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I wanted to stay away from a mapping algorithm, and the reason I wanted to stay with that sorry, stay away from that is because I wanted to really learn from them and truly pick the best creators for the best brands, and I think what kept me doing this sort of founder-led face-to-face approach on video and speaking to creators was the fact that it was so validating when you speak to them.
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It's very rare that a company founder or entrepreneur will pick up the phone and give up their most valuable thing, which is their time, and speak to someone and really pick their brain and talk to them.
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Obviously, the busier and busier I get, the more difficult that it's becoming, and now that I'm working more towards the AI world, I am sort of favoring those automation processes.
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But it was such a crucial part for me to start, and starting with the creators really helped me understand the business.
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Yeah, all right, sandeep, you took us there, so I'm just going to follow your lead.
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Once you introduce AI to the conversation, I always love hearing the different ways that people view it.
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So, of course, you not only work with AI brands, but I would imagine behind the scenes there's a lot of AI that powers the way that you operate.
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So what's your perspective on AI?
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Where we are, where we're going and how we can best use it?
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Right.
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I think initially my impression of AI was just.
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I was just like you and everyone else.
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My mind was completely blown.
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I couldn't believe I could generate, you know, a nursery rhyme or a story by just giving it a few prompts, Like, hey, create a story between Sandeep and Brian on a podcast on a nice LA Tuesday morning and it would just spit out this result that just blew my mind, that I had wished I had had during my earlier years of education, my formative years of life.
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So obviously initially I was very blown away.
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But it got to the point where I was thinking you know this sort of doomsday scenario where is this going to be a law of diminishing returns where it gets so good?
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It gets so good that it starts forcing people out of employment.
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I think we're still ways away from that.
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I still think we're in the seminal formative moments, like I mentioned, like the first minute of a soccer match.
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And I do think AI right now is at the point where it's limited by the physical power, but we can still use it to help and benefit us.
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And knowing that 300 million people are using ChatGPT Weekly shows me that you know the cat's out of the bag.
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We're using it.
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It's an assistant, it's helping us and you can use it in whatever way you'd like to.
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You can use it as a personal tutor, as a resource, as a guide.
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I think it's a very useful tool.
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I know for myself.
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I only have so much time on my hands, so automating those processes in terms of now matching creators to to brands becomes a much more easier thing and much more accurate thing, and also because it's so ubiquitous in the world.
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I do believe brands, creators and other people do appreciate when you use this technology, because they're probably thinking why are you, why would you not use it?
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So I do think it's like very important.
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I do think it's proliferated in the business world, but I do think we're still at that seminal moment.
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We're far away from these doomsday scenarios at this point.
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Yeah, Sandeep, I love the fact that you call that out.
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I'll transparently add on to that is when some vendors I get pitched a lot as a podcast owner, as the owner of a few different companies, and it's kind of become a bragging point.
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It seems to me a lot of companies that say we don't use AI and as an end consumer, I think to myself well, I wish that you would, because you could probably get so much more done at an even more affordable rate.
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And so I love the fact that you openly acknowledge no, we do bake this in and this is how we are able to more accurately line you up with the people who you want to get in touch with.
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So, thinking about those clients that you serve and the brands who obviously they're in it not for just vanity metrics, not for those likes and views, but of course they want that positive ROI.
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Talk to me about that side of the world of influencer marketing.
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How the heck are you doing attribution tracking?
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How are you paying attention to the metrics that drive the needle?
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I'm so interested in hearing more about that.
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Right.
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So it is a data driven approach.
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It's funny you do ask that because in influencer marketing you can get up to a certain point and do well, and those are with vanity metrics, those are with likes, shares, comments, clicks.
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Those things help and they definitely bring eyes to your brand and I do think a lot of brands appreciate that.
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As I mentioned, I'm working with AI consumer brands, so a lot of these brands are using chat, gpt integrations to build on their products and they need a little bit of marketing to differentiate themselves, because at some point there could be a lot of similarities between video editing company one video editing company, two video editing company number three with a little bit of variance between them.
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But they need to truly understand what's going on in real time, identifying patterns, looking at vast data sets, using data-driven predictions to better lead decision making in areas like business.
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So so I think the best metric and this was something that I had learned from an entrepreneur the best metric that someone can initially give is what is your ROI and simply just explain that just in a couple of lines, and I think what's how this is captured best in marketing is what is your click through rate?
00:20:41.742 --> 00:20:49.144
How many people are viewing this, clicking through and checking your website and then also doing that final step, which is the purchase.
00:20:49.144 --> 00:20:57.584
So you know creating that start, go to market and inception sorry and you know purchase.
00:20:57.584 --> 00:21:00.199
So getting from point A to point B, how do we get to that?
00:21:00.199 --> 00:21:18.787
Of course, the other metrics matter and I think that's important to get eyes on your product, but I think, at the end of the day, you do want to know how many people are buying, how many people are clicking through, how many people are subscribing to what you're saying, and I think those metrics matter just as much and is why people are attracted to the set of data.
00:21:21.769 --> 00:21:23.133
And, like they say, data is the oil right, so everyone wants to know.
00:21:23.133 --> 00:21:25.718
Yeah, with that in mind, I mean, you talk about clicks and obviously that's so important.
00:21:25.718 --> 00:21:29.792
I think, sandeep, truth be told, that's probably one of my beefs with social media.
00:21:29.792 --> 00:21:38.807
Everyone knows I'm not very active on social media and part of it is because social media companies, their incentives, are to keep people doom scrolling.
00:21:38.807 --> 00:21:51.690
They want us to scroll all day long, and so I have traditionally found and I'm not the most astute at this, but I've traditionally found that links aren't always the best call to action on social media platforms.
00:21:51.690 --> 00:21:56.240
Of course they do work and I, on the consumer side, I've clicked many links from social media.
00:21:56.240 --> 00:22:09.619
But talk to us about those call to actions, talk to us about that bridge that we can build from that social media content, especially with influencer marketing, to getting that traffic in those conversions right.
00:22:09.701 --> 00:22:12.048
I I think the call to action sort of the end point.
00:22:12.048 --> 00:22:23.151
I think that's super important, but I think what's equally as important is the start point, which I don't want to overlook, and sometimes to get people to the end, it's really just how many times you appear to them in the starting.
00:22:23.151 --> 00:22:37.286
So I've worked with people who, you know, own their own sunscreen brands or AI founders, and really the initial step to get to that call to action, in my opinion, is to try different forms of marketing.
00:22:37.286 --> 00:22:42.060
I think that's why the data is important, because you really get to capture in real time what's working and what's not.
00:22:42.060 --> 00:22:52.032
So you might have a certain hook that's working, a certain image is working, or look, this look working, or maybe something provocative or entertaining that really attracts a crowd.
00:22:52.032 --> 00:23:02.896
You don't really almost ever get to choose who your audience is, and that's why I think influencing is very interesting and influencers are very picky with what they advertise because they don't want to upset the people following them.
00:23:03.960 --> 00:23:07.810
But in terms of the call to action itself, there's different ways, like you know.
00:23:07.810 --> 00:23:13.659
There can be very blatant and forward ways of, you know, encouraging people watching the video to subscribe.
00:23:13.659 --> 00:23:16.816
There could be deal-based, there could be affiliate marketing.
00:23:16.816 --> 00:23:28.503
A lot of the times what they do try to get you to do is get to the website and take it from there, and usually they have offer promos and try to distinguish themselves in some sort of way.
00:23:28.503 --> 00:23:35.760
But I would say most of the time call to actions are super important and getting people from step one to step two is super important.
00:23:35.760 --> 00:23:41.816
But that step call to action to the final step, it could take many different attempts.
00:23:41.816 --> 00:23:46.853
On goal, it's really about how much face time you have initially in front of the consumer itself.
00:23:47.714 --> 00:23:49.558
Yeah, asandeep, I'm here today.
00:23:49.558 --> 00:23:53.053
For all the soccer analogies, I'm all about it, so keep them coming.
00:23:53.053 --> 00:24:05.700
And, with regards to that, when we talk about social media, any conversation about social media, even external, from marketing, just social media a word we hear a lot and I'll throw branding in here as well is authenticity.
00:24:05.700 --> 00:24:09.440
Obviously, that's a core part of why ugc works so well.
00:24:09.440 --> 00:24:11.888
It's a core part of why influencer marketing works well.
00:24:11.888 --> 00:24:13.375
It's worked for thousands of years.
00:24:13.375 --> 00:24:27.696
If our friends tell us hey, I went to this really amazing korean barbecue spot in la, well, now more likely to go there because I trust that person's opinion on korean barbecue and so that has been the way that we've made decisions for literally thousands of years.
00:24:27.696 --> 00:24:48.365
Talk to us about maintaining that authenticity, because some people have some crazy views on the way that capitalism and commerce and transactions and relationships work and they think that you lose that authenticity if there's some sort of agreement even if it's an affiliate marketing agreement, like you introduced us to Talk to us about that authenticity and how we maintain it.
00:24:49.650 --> 00:25:03.666
Right, there's a term I came across and forgive me because I don't remember where I saw it, but they said UGCs actually should be called true GC, which I really enjoyed because UGC produces that authenticity.
00:25:03.666 --> 00:25:15.041
And, truthfully, I didn't understand this step initially, because, when I was working with brands, I would try to find those creators that I felt were good matches, but those creators were educating me that their audience were telling them otherwise.
00:25:15.041 --> 00:25:30.715
So, for instance, I was working with a male skincare creator, which is, you know, not as common as maybe a female skincare creator, but I had found an AI app for this person to work with and I said, hey, can you advertise this one?
00:25:30.715 --> 00:25:33.730
And this skincare creator was very adamant.
00:25:33.730 --> 00:25:35.596
They didn't want to do it, and I truly didn't understand why.
00:25:35.596 --> 00:25:36.318
I said, hey, you advertise this one?
00:25:36.318 --> 00:25:37.301
And this skincare creator had was very adamant.
00:25:37.301 --> 00:25:38.605
They didn't want to do it, and I truly didn't understand why.
00:25:38.605 --> 00:25:43.319
I said, hey, you have like 71 000 plus followers, you have great views, like, people love you, they comment, they like they buy stuff.
00:25:43.319 --> 00:25:46.229
We tried it, we experimented.
00:25:46.229 --> 00:25:49.919
It did not work, and the reason it did not work is because, again, they didn't choose their audience.
00:25:49.919 --> 00:25:51.592
So now it's.
00:25:51.711 --> 00:26:03.217
It's very, very important to know who the audience is, what the demographic is, what the country is, what the age group is and more, because you don't want to bring that valuable piece of marketing to the wrong place.
00:26:03.217 --> 00:26:06.770
It's like going fishing in a pond with no fish.
00:26:06.770 --> 00:26:10.467
You're not going to catch anything, so you can throw the reel out all day.
00:26:10.467 --> 00:26:12.773
Nothing's going to get attached to that hook or bait.
00:26:12.773 --> 00:26:19.890
So, with that being said, um, I've had creators and influencers when I first started, and this is a great, valuable lesson.
00:26:19.890 --> 00:26:23.987
This is why it was important to work with them first, actually turn down gigs.
00:26:23.987 --> 00:26:27.944
They have told me like we don't want to work with this brand because it doesn't fit our image.
00:26:27.944 --> 00:26:28.748
It doesn't.
00:26:28.748 --> 00:26:30.712
It's not what our audience is following us for.
00:26:30.712 --> 00:26:38.919
So it's super important to get that true marketing, because those creators and influencers also value their audience as well.
00:26:38.939 --> 00:26:55.678
It's not just a simple transaction, and it took me like a few lessons to learn that you really have to deep dive and understand what the creator is vouching for, who they are and why they're advertising, who they're advertising to, and they don't want to give up their morals, and I really I'm an advocate for that too.
00:26:55.678 --> 00:27:02.999
I think that makes a lot of sense because the success hinges on them liking it and their audience responding to it.
00:27:02.999 --> 00:27:15.138
So it makes a lot of sense to really make the marketing authentic as possible and I always tell people if you don't like the product and the creators are very open with this they will be very candid.
00:27:15.138 --> 00:27:20.429
They'll like I, I don't like it, I can review it and say that, or we can just leave it and that's totally fine.
00:27:20.429 --> 00:27:21.695
That's that's acceptable.
00:27:21.695 --> 00:27:26.140
That's not everyone's gonna like everything and I think that's what makes this marketing so special.
00:27:26.762 --> 00:27:28.190
It's not just some smoke and mirrors.
00:27:28.190 --> 00:27:41.335
It's true people showing what they use in their daily life, and we never got that before because we never had access to, maybe, a celebrity like a Taylor Swift or a Steph Curry or Beyonce, who are just one click away.
