Pros and cons of building a remote-first company with Devin Bramhall of Animalz

Maren Kate
So welcome to From 5 to 50, the podcast dedicated to helping startups and founders survive and thrive through the early stages. I'm your host, Maren Kate, and I'm here with Devin from Animalz. Welcome to the show, Devin.

Devin Bramhall
Hey, Maren, it's great to be here.

Maren Kate
Awesome. Nice to have you too. I was gonna, is your last name Bramhall?

Devin Bramhall
Bramhall. You said it correctly. Most people, surprisingly, don't get it right. Bramble sometime I hear. But no its Bramhall. Very simple.

Maren Kate
Okay cool. So you're with Animalz and you guys pronounce it Animalz.co or just Animalz the name?

Devin Bramhall
Animalz. Just Animalz with a Z.

Maren Kate
With a Z, oh, yes, of course. And so you're not the founder. When did you join?

Devin Bramhall
I joined a year ago in March of 2018. Walter, the founder of the company had reached a point when he realized he needed a leadership team. He had been running the company himself since it was founded in 2015 and had reached a point where it was unmanageable on his own. So he was smart enough to call in help. So he hired me, and my colleague Haley, who was our Director of Customer Ops.

Maren Kate
Perfect. So in 90 seconds or less, just kind of tell our audience the founding story or the why behind Animalz.

Devin Bramhall
Yeah. So Walter founded Animalz based on a belief that content marketing works. He created a company called iDoneThis that was an email productivity software.

Maren Kate
I used to use that!

Devin Bramhall
No, that’s incredible!

Maren Kate
Yes, years ago at my last company Zirtual we used iDoneThis.

Devin Bramhall
Oh, wonderful, he's gonna be so happy to hear that. So yeah, he credits content marketing for how his company grew and was eventually sold. And he realized that the tactics that he used to grow his own company he could use to help other companies grow. And so he created an agency to do that and here we are almost five years later.

Maren Kate
Awesome. Are you guys bootstrapped, self funded, investors?

Devin Bramhall
Nope, self funded and we've largely grown via word of mouth. In fact, it wasn't until January of 2018, that Walter hired, or rehired actually, a former employee to run marketing and sales for the company but, prior to that, it was all word of mouth.

Maren Kate
Okay, and what's your current size? Tell me where you are now and then where you are when you joined?

Devin Bramhall
Oh, gosh, so right now we're about 27 people, and I believe will be 36 by the end of the year. And when I started there were, I’m to get this wrong but, about 15. We've almost doubled the size. As an agency, as you know, we're always hiring and so I feel like it's almost impossible to stay on top of how big we are.

Maren Kate
Absolutely. And Walter founded it when? 2014 - 2015?

Devin Bramhall
2015, yeah.

Maren Kate
So in four years, going from one person to almost 30. That's impressive. Now, are there any growth numbers that you can share? Revenue, clients, anything to give the audience a better understanding of where you're at as a company and also kind of benchmark themselves?

Devin Bramhall
Yeah, so I would say that the years leading up to 2018, the company fluctuated a little bit. So there was like incremental growth I think. You know, we went from like 800,000 to a little over a million in the first two years. Now we've been growing kind of like 1 million ARR for the following years. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that growing an agency is really difficult and trying to manage employee count with new customers can be difficult. You don't want to over hire too much but if you don't hire enough you can't service the customers that come in so it's difficult. And so again, I think being a singular person running the company the revenue growth was consistent, but incremental. And I have to say, even after Walter hired us, we've still taken growth very slowly intentionally. When I came in, one of the values that Animalz had was relentless growth and when I give the values presentation now to new employees I say thoughtful growth because we are a company that differentiates itself on quality. It's our promise. People come to us because they go to other content marketing agencies and they don't get the same quality they get with us and they pay a premium for it so we have to deliver it. So we have to be thoughtful about how we grow, be very careful about who we hire, be very careful about how we onboard new customers, etc. So we're sort of continuing to be incremental but we're choosing that and really working towards building a foundation where we can grow faster but still maintain the quality that we deliver on today.

Maren Kate
Makes sense. So 27 people you said, if I'm doing the math in my head, it's like three, four or five million a year by the end of this year, something around there.

Devin Bramhall
Yep

Maren Kate
Cool. Okay, so into the meaty part of the podcast growing from five or a few people to 50, you're right in the middle of that, I'd love to touch base on, first of all, is your team fully remote or is it located in New York?

Devin Bramhall
We are fully remote. When Walter founded the company, it was co-located in New York, but he quickly realized, like many people do if it's right for their business, which it was for this type of agency, that we needed more talent than New York could accommodate. So being remote was the best decision for us as a company.

Maren Kate
And you have some deep experience working remotely, building remote teams, isn't that right?

Devin Bramhall
Yes, I worked for HelpScout prior to Animalz and they are a fully remote company. They have, gosh, when I was there they were around 50 people and I think they've grown to like, I don't know, 60 or 70 at this point. It might even actually be more than that.

Maren Kate
That's awesome. Okay, so then walk me through the pros and cons of remote teams. What you've seen, if someone's at that five person stage right now, a few people even, you know, 10 or 20, and they're thinking about could I be remote or partially remote? What is the good part? And what are the bad parts?

Devin Bramhall
Sure. So I think actually, being remote is more difficult in the early stages. One of the things that made working at HelpScout so healthy, I guess, and pleasurable as a remote employee was that they’d ironed out a lot of kinks. They have a process for everything. They had a communication style guide, they had an onboarding playbook, like everything.

Maren Kate
Ooh a communication style guide. That's great.

Devin Bramhall
Yeah. Yeah. So this whole concept of like, you're communicating largely through comments, and docs, slack, email, perhaps, although not very much, and so they have something like assumed benevolence if you misinterpret the tone. Its really hard to interpret what people's tone is based on how they write. Someone writes differently and come off really aggressive when someone thought they were saying something plainly. So I think that when you get to a remote company that's been around for a while, they've likely ironed out a lot of those kinks, establish their processes so when you onboard as an employee you know what to do, right, you know, where that quote unquote water cooler is, you know how to communicate effectively so that you can build relationships right off the bat. Because I would say relationship building is definitely one of the, I wouldn't call it a con, I would call it a challenge for remote teams, and even if you're someone who is comfortable being remote, comfortable structuring your own time. We've lost some really awesome candidates, like people who started working. There was a person recently who I was really sad about who had such potential. He was such a great person and he didn't like it and he didn't realize he didn't like it until he tried it. So you don't want to lose people to that just because you're remote.

Maren Kate
But sometimes you have to.

Devin Bramhall
You do, yeah. Connectivity is difficult…

Maren Kate
I think that's a really good point, too, because sometimes people will ask me about cuz my company is fully remote, and my last company, which was almost 500 people at its peak was 99% remote, and a lot of the lessons I learned a lot of things I messed up that time I fixed this time. This is like my second child, the one that hasn't had to have a terrible mom. But people always say, I think we need to discuss that remote work and building remote companies is not the panacea. It works for some companies. It works for some people. But there's other people and other businesses that shouldn't be remote.

Devin Bramhall
No, absolutely. I 100% agree with that. You know, I think there was a time I remember speaking on a panel when I was in Boston, I think it was run by the city, I don't know it was something, and there were all these like legacy companies like Liberty Mutual and Harvard Pilgrim were there. Big insurance and financial firms. And they were struggling to attract top talent, they wanted to learn from remote culture and startup culture. And it's like, they think, “Oh, wow, you figured it out, you've got it”. And its like, not really. I don't think that this accommodates every person in the world. It attracts a certain kind of person who wants a lot of freedom. It attracts the type of person who cares as much about lifestyle as they do about work and that type of person tends to do better at work and be more dedicated to their work, if they have that freedom.

Maren Kate
What are some examples of, well, let's talk about the pros of building a remote company. And I do agree with you 100%. It is so much harder in the beginning. You have to put more intentional focus into everything from processes to culture to core values. Then if it's your first year or two and you're five people in a room being able to build those relationships that way. Once you put in that hard work what are the benefits? What would you say the top three benefits of building and running a remote company are?

Devin Bramhall
Oh, that's a great question. So okay, this is the obvious one, you get greater access to talent, right? When you have no boundaries on where you can look, you've got infinite possibilities. So that is number one absolutely. Particularly for an agency, which is always hiring, right? We always need that access and any limitation to the best people in the world holds us back. So you have number one. Number two, I do feel that remote work can offer greater productivity because when you're working across time zones people often think that can be a complication but, you know, my Head of People Ops, who I've worked very closely with on just about everything, but in particular hiring, when I wake up in the morning she's got a bunch of stuff ready to go for me and she's moved on to something else, right?

Maren Kate
I totally love that. That’s what I loved about working in Europe. It's just like, you get all this stuff, you send it off, then the next day you're just like boom, boom, boom, you get the answers back. It's like time travel.

Devin Bramhall
Yes. Right. And how cool is that? Also, you have more time, potentially, to yourself where your team isn't online. And everyone says the same, we all love slack but we also equally hate what it does to our productivity. So imagine a world where you don't have to be the one who's like, ‘I'm going off Slack’, it's just like, nobody's around to bug you. And I think you know, for the people who report to me, you know, my Strategist, right, he is in the UK. He gets a whole bunch of hours before I'm awake in the morning to really focus on big projects so that by the time I'm online, again, same thing, he's got a stack of things for me to review, there's some overlap time to talk about it, and then he goes to bed and recharges, and then can follow it up in the morning. You know, you get it, it goes on and on.

Maren Kate
A perfect example is my company, we do recruiting for, so we're an agency like yours, except we focus on recruiting mostly for companies that are Series A, Series B, they're mostly in San Francisco, LA or New York. And then we also have a handful of companies that are just fully remote and we crush fully remote hiring and we love it because we do it ourselves. But so when I am the least productive, I lived in LA for four months and I felt like I was perpetually playing catch up. I would wake up, I would start my day, you know, wake up at 7:30, 8, and I would immediately be on Slack because in New York there was issues blah, blah, blah. I moved back to New York, thankfully, and then the most productive I ever am is when I'm in Europe because I literally get four to five hours of my day to work on big projects before my team's even up and before clients are up. And then after there's a few hours of overlap, and then I'm done. So I think that is a really significant productivity boost that people don't always realize immediately.

Devin Bramhall
Yes, absolutely and I think that kind of speaks to or it relates to the third thing, which is I think that remote work can be really good for work life balance. So, because you're, and this is going to be counterintuitive and I think that it takes some time to get to the confidence of this place, because I think that, particularly for younger folks who are just starting out, there's that feeling that they have to be always on, even if the culture doesn't make them feel that way. Do you know what I mean?

Maren Kate
Yeah, you burn people out.

Devin Bramhall
Yeah. Because when you're young you measure yourself on volume of work completed whereas the older you get you realize it's the quality of output.

Maren Kate
Yeah, exactly. Totally. Results versus optics.

Devin Bramhall
Yes, Yes, precisely. So for me now I feel that remote work gives me the flexibility in my day. So for example, I just got a puppy, and I love him, I bring him everywhere with me but if I want to go to a yoga class tonight and I have a few more calls am I'm gonna have time to transport home, take my last call, go to yoga, right? Like, if I wanted to go for a run in the middle of the day, I can do that. I can just let my team know and I'll be gone for an hour, right? If I want to work from home because I hate going out in the rain and it's raining for the last few days I can work from home, no big deal. So I really appreciate that it builds that flexibility into your lifestyle, I guess.

Maren Kate
Into your day to day.

Devin Bramhall
Yeah and I look at the general channel, it's like, our team will be like, “hey, going for a walk see in a bit” like, “going to have a snack. I'm eating, I don't know, Fritos” or whatever like, they talk about what they do when they sign off to take a break and they're not afraid to take a break and that makes me so happy.

Maren Kate
And you have to build that into the culture, you're totally right, and really let people know it's okay and it's wanted. Okay, so switching gears a little bit because you and I could clearly talk about remote teams all day. So in terms of your experience growing a company in that 5 to 50 standpoint, I'd love to hear, regardless of the founder, the audience that's listening, whether they're remote, whether they're co-located, wherever they are in the world, what are your best tips for growing for not only customer growth with that content and marketing point of view, but also just the things that you've seen? You've experienced the slip ups and how you have or would fix that?

Devin Bramhall
Yeah, so one of the first things that I have experienced here is this need to be adaptable, right, and a willingness to look at things and the way they've been done up until this point and be okay with completely changing them. Systems, processes, even philosophies on various things, like how we hire, for example, or even role levels, for example. Your company will reach various inflection points and you know when those inflection points are, like, there's no question. Everything starts to go off the rails and break. The things that you fix before are suddenly broken again and actually working against you when they were the thing that solved a problem that existed before that. And you really have to be flexible enough to look at what you're doing and say, “Is this working?” and be okay with changing it.

Maren Kate
How many times do you think you change like between a few people to 50 plus people? How many iterations do you think a company can go through? Or breaking things and then fixing it?

Devin Bramhall
Well, right now, I look at it on an annual basis because I've been here now for a year and we've gone through a lot of change. But I would say, all, not all, but a lot of the systems that we put in place last year are now breaking already. And when I got here, again, there was like I think about 15 or 18 people. We've almost doubled that.

Maren Kate
What are some specific examples of systems that break from 10 to 20, 10 to 30?

Devin Bramhall
Hiring is one of them. So we've changed our hiring process twice. At first, it didn't properly evaluate. First it was targeting different things. First, we changed what candidates we were targeting, let me go back to the beginning, then we changed our hiring process to target that new type of hire. Then that took too long because we were getting a ton of new business and it was taking way too long to hire. So we had to change it to be shorter but still give us the information we needed to know that that candidate was qualified. Now we're starting to rethink, okay, this is the level we were hiring people at before, maybe we actually need to hire higher level people. How does that affect our revenue model, etc? So that's something that's gone through a lot of changes in the past year and I think will continue to change but my hope is that’s something that becomes more static and doesn't actually change. It reaches a point where for quite a while it stays the same because I think it kind of has to if you're going to scale, right?

Maren Kate
Yeah you get to a point where you're good and then you kind of grow it out from there.

Devin Bramhall
Yes, yes. The second thing is, the second sort of example is changing the company org structure. So when Haley I came in, it was Walter, it was basically the leadership team and all of our content managers. It's funny, I was talking to one of my mentors recently and he called the challenges that we're facing first class problems, which I was like, tell me more, sounds glorious. But he said that one of the challenges, things that we have to tackle, is adding layers, so like management layers. So earlier this year, even before we reach 30 people, we needed to hire sort of, we’re calling them Strategist, but they're really Strategist and Account Managers, because Haley and I were basically still managing customers and that's untenable, right, at a certain point. So we basically have to redo our org structure to say, all right, we're now functioning in pods, right. So there's a VP, which is Haley or I, and then there's a Strategist, and then there's a bunch of content managers. Whereas before that Strategist layer didn't exist, right. So that's another big one and I have to say that was a huge game changer for us. If look at what I was contributing to the company in January, sorry, in December of last year versus now my contribution is so much more powerful than it was in December because I was still so hands on and that helps a company maintain it does not help a company grow.

Maren Kate
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's the kind of keeping the wheels on versus actually starting to make progress.

Devin Bramhall
Absolutely and the last thing I would say, that's been just glaringly important, is incentivizing key players. So this is something that we're currently discussing right now. But there's two ways that you can incentivize people. There's one with opportunities for advancement and the other is with some kind of stake in the company, right? So you can move them up or you can incentivize them with a piece of the company and then there's bonuses and all of that. That's something that we're really trying to refine right now because currently, all we have are role opportunities, which is powerful and great, right, but that only goes so far. And I think about some of the people on my team right now and what it would mean to lose them and I don’t want that to happen, right? They've made themselves very important to us and I want to make sure that they stay because having to retrain someone at that is so costly.

Maren Kate
Yep. Oh, my gosh, yeah. And the other thing to think of too is in that growth stage and that 5 to 50 stage it is really important to, you have to do all these things, but you're also prioritizing. A lot of stuff is just not going to get done and what are the the vital few, what's the Pareto Principle, the 80/20 that matters the most? And I think incentivization that's an incredibly important one. So if someone’s in this growth trajectory, how would you suggest a smaller company, because I know you guys target big brands, what's the quick and dirty guide for them to use content marketing?

Devin Bramhall
Oh, that's a wonderful question. So our philosophy is that using organic search as a key part of your content marketing strategy is the most effective. It is the wheel that you don't have to crank out because if you can get content to rank and search for terms that are relevant to your product or your business then you're going to continue to get traffic. Traffic of the continuous people that actually could be interested in your product, right? At the very least helps build awareness for your brand. So all of our strategy begins with organic search. Now, it includes lots of other sort of content marketing tools, right, like we help people with social media and email and sales enablement content etc but at the core of our strategy and the core belief that we have as an agency is that organic search is really the most helpful tool especially, especially for companies that are just starting out, right? That's how Walter did it with iDoneThis, right? I know this was nothing to nobody, right, and they wrote content, they got to rank in search, they posted on places like Hacker News, and got tons of views and got great spikes in traffic, but it's that organic traffic from relevant search terms that really is the driver of the actual business, right? That's like the non vanity.

Maren Kate
How does it work now considering how much content is out there? How many people are writing and a lot of it's not great? I mean, I think about this, like, I started a blog over a decade ago, longer than that, and I started a podcast eight years ago that I only did for like three months back when no one was doing it. Now, there's so much out there. How do you, especially as a small team with limited resources, how are you able to create that content and actually get it noticed?

Devin Bramhall
Well, it has to be better, right? So you have to do a better job. Think of it this way because there's so much content out there, and a lot of it isn't great, it's that much easier to stand out. Like just be purposeful, right, be thoughtful. Put any time at all into something, right, and you're going to stand out from your competition. The other thing is, especially as it relates to keywords, it used to be that everyone was focusing on the top level keywords, right, the ones that got the most volume, you know, you've got 10s or hundreds of 1000s of searches per month, okay, but those are usually so broad that the majority of the traffic that comes from those keywords is not going to be anyone who cares about your product. So it's like managing traffic. So it's like if you can get comfy with targeting keywords that aren't, you know, you're not going to be, okay, million pageviews a month, right, but the pagesview you do get….

Maren Kate
Might be 100 very specific ones.

Devin Bramhall
Right. Yes.

Maren Kate
So niche. So it's niching down in a world where there's so much noise. It's being purposeful and niching down and and really knowing your audience.

Devin Bramhall
Be strategic. Really it's not about bringing all. It's almost like as you age, right? When you're young, your in high school, you want all the friends, you want to be so popular and known by everybody. The older you get, you're like, I want five really awesome friends. It's like, think about your five really awesome friends. That is an effective strategy now. That’s what works.

Maren Kate
Interesting. It's like a throwback to when I started with the 1000 True Fans, Kevin Kelly's blog on content or something. I forgot what it was. So, okay, with you guys, with Animalz what should a company's budget be for them to engage a firm like you? What are they going to look at a month, a quarter, a year?

Devin Bramhall
So we're a little bit more expensive. So our packages start at around $4,500 and go up from there.

Maren Kate
Monthly?
Devin Bramhall
Yes. So we do monthly engagements.

Maren Kate
Okay. Is it month to month or do you have to sign a contract? Three months, six months, 12?

Devin Bramhall
Currently month to month. We asked for 30 days notice to cancel.

Maren Kate
Okay, that's not that bad. That's what a really junior content person would be in say, Manhattan, if you multiply it by 12.

Devin Bramhall
Yes. Exactly. And the packages go up from there depending on volume of articles per month, any kind of additional content like social or email, and how deep we go with strategy. So all of our packages come with strategy, or sorry, all but one come with strategy to do a lead band for super early stage companies, but things like content audits, or rather site audits, those are a lot more in depth so that's where things get a little bit heftier. But the difference between us and say, like an SEO agency is our audits come with a lot more actionable recommendations that are easier for companies to execute on. Also we can do the work. But we kind of set you up to be able to do it yourself or have us do it.

Maren Kate
Okay, that makes total sense. And if you're a company, and you only have, let's say, 1000 bucks a month,budgeted, if you only had 1000 bucks, you were starting something from scratch, you've got your basic product market fit but you you need to grow, how would you use it? Would you hire one person part time, or would you take advantage of some of the various kind of microtask sites like Fiverr, or what would you do?

Devin Bramhall
God, girl, that’s a question. The simple answer is it depends, obviously, but I would hire a freelancer who was a really, really good writer, who knew enough about search to be able to write articles that can rank but that also has experience with like social and email because you're probably going to end up wanting them to do some additional extra tasks. Most freelancers worth their salt have enough expertise to be able to do basic social and email. So have someone who can cover the bases for you. I think a freelancer is probably best. I haven't had the best experience when I was a freelancer using sites like Fiverr. I didn't find the quality of work that came to me was very good. People thought I would write a blog post for 20 bucks.

Maren Kate
What about Scripted?

Devin Bramhall
I have not used Scripted?

Maren Kate
Yeah, I've been hearing back and forth mixed reviews. Fiverr. I mean, the name says it all. Like it used to be a site that everything was $5.

Devin Bramhall
Look, I'm not necessarily commenting on the quality of these sites. I think it really depends on what you're looking for whether or not you should use them. They just haven't benefit for me on either end. What we find as an agency is that clients don't always know how to work with agencies and so you need to kind of get somebody, whether it's a freelancer or an agency, who knows how to help you work with them better, knows how to get feedback from you, etc. So when I was on the client side, and actually worked with Animalz when I was at HelpScout, and I had to be taught to be a better partner to the agencies we worked with. Because it was not intuitive to me to invest in people we paid money, like outside people we paid money to, versus my employees I invested a lot in. So I feel like if you get like a seasoned freelancer, they'll be a better partner for you and they'll help lead you into a really productive, healthy working relationship.

Maren Kate
And then the great part is as your company grows, and you have more more bandwidth and more spend for marketing, you can up that engagement. Okay. And last but not least, how would you go about hiring someone? How do you know when someone is is good at content and understands SEO? Obviously, that's your guys's bread and butter so I'm sure you have a pretty robust hiring process in house. How could a smaller company replicate that if they needed to bring on some marketing help?

Devin Bramhall
I’m going to give you a secret. I’m going to tell you how we hire a little bit. We've actually thought about this a lot and we originally had candidates write an article for us. So we would give them a spec and that was interesting. We did learn a decent amount about their writing and on page SEO expertise so that was helpful, but we didn't really understand their sort of their more strategic capabilities, like how would you go about choosing a keyword, etc. So we changed it and we gave them a fake company. We actually modeled it off of one of our customers. So we told them okay, this is what funding stage their at, this is their annual revenue, this is type of, etc, personal audience and we ask them to propose three variations, like three titles for a single article and then choose one, explain why they chose it, right? So they have to include keyword research in there because you shouldn't be choosing a direction for an article without keyword research. And then we asked them to produce an outline so we can see both their keyword research capabilities, their on page SEO, a little bit of their writing, can they even structure a post. We ask them to fully write out the interim conclusion. And that's how we evaluate them beyond the interview questions beyond the cover letter, the resume, that by far tells us the most about that person. Then we go back to them with a round of edits. And that is crucial because you need to see how people take feedback. Are they able to synthesize?

Maren Kate
Yes, because if they don't take it…

Devin Bramhall
Mmm Hmmm, So that has been really effective so far and something that we're going to continue doing because it just works. And it's relatively easy, right, it's a little bit of upfront work, but…

Maren Kate
Now do you pay them for this? Is this like a paid Test Project or is it just part of the interviewing process?

Devin Bramhall
So we used to ask them to write full articles. We actually pulled from our own, like, we would pull from articles that we, like, from our own work that we're doing for clients, right? Because we're like, “Okay, this is like something a client would really want. Let's see how they do it” because we thought, “okay, this is in the wild”. So we did pay them for that just in case we ended up using any portion of their work.

Maren Kate
What was the pay?

Devin Bramhall
We paid I think it was either 250 or 300 an article. It wasn't much because we weren't necessarily going to use it. Obviously, we had a Content Manager that was writing for them but you know, just in case, again, just to be fair. In the world of content, just like in the world of design, you want to be fair to people.

Maren Kate
Exactly. You need to pay for the work.

Devin Bramhall
But it was taking so long. So the reason that we created a mock customer is so that, again, it's an outline, it's essentially useless. And we asked them to spend, like, we give them a time limit. We're like, “do this in two hours”, so that they know that we understand that, given this time period, you can only do so much so we're gonna evaluate you accordingly and don't worry about it. So we don’t pay anymore because there's no reason to at this point.

Maren Kate
I get it. So last question. This is so fascinating. I was just literally wildly taking notes while you were talking. That gave me an idea for the way we recruit people. It's like, oh my gosh. What do you think for, I don't know, a 500 to 1000 word post, that's normal, what can someone pay a good content writer, good freelance content writer, you know exactly what you're talking about, and know you're going to get something good? Because you don't want to under pay. You don't want to overpay. It's hard in the world of content. Everyone has their different thing. I like saying “this is what we pay, take it or leave it”, but I also want to be fair and I want to get good people. So like for Avra, what should we say we will pay for these kinds of posts? How much should we pay?

Devin Bramhall
It’s tough question because I don't think that money necessarily equates to quality. Like you could have someone that charges, you know, a $1000 or $1500 for a 1500 word post, $1 a word, basically, and they could be terrible. I also find that, like, I have a whole group of freelancers, not a group, I have a small handful of freelancers that I know and love working with and I've referred them to some people who didn't love their work because they didn't know how to give feedback or whatever it was, right? So I think finding what you would deem a quality writer is actually more personal than people realize. And so it's really less about what you pay, and more about finding someone that has the voice that you personally like and hiring those people. That said, I will answer your question with an actual answer. I think that for a 500 to 1000 word post anywhere from 500 to 1,000 dollars. I would say 75 cents to $1 a word is where I would put it. I, as a freelancer, was pretty expensive. I did a whole podcast on what my rates were way back when. But, you know, at that point, my background spoke for itself. I had lots of examples of my writing. I think I charged at least $1 a word and if I was doing strategy, it was by the hour and it was a lot. But I think, in my experience, you can get a quality freelancer for 75 cents to $1 a word, approximately.

Maren Kate
Okay, that's super helpful. Wow, it makes me feel like I'm under paying now and I need to pay more. That's really interesting. Well, you know, Devin, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been fascinating and I totally now want to drink with you in New York someplace. So, I have three super quick final questions and wrap up you can tell people where they can find you online and also where they can find Animalz. So my final three questions are what's your favorite book or podcasts from the last year?

Devin Bramhall
My favorite book that I read in the past year, it was not published in the past year, is The Secret History by Donna Tartt. She wrote The Goldfinch and I hated The Goldfinch and I thought The Secret History is one of the best books I've ever read.

Maren Kate
Really? Oh, my gosh. Amazing.

Devin Bramhall
I realize that was a very unpopular thing I just said but personal opinion.

Maren Kate
I didn't like The Goldfinch either, actually. I got about halfway through it.

Devin Bramhall
But what you recognize in The Goldfinch is that she's an incredible writer and she creates amazing stories, and detailed and interesting stories, I just wasn't interested in that story. The Secret History completely different, and had the same writing, and the same great storytelling, and I was like, “this is the best”. I didn't want to put it down and it actually might be the first book I read a second time.

Maren Kate
Oh, my gosh. I'm adding it to GoodReads as we speak. What are the top three tools you guys use to run your business at Animalz. What do you really rely on?

Devin Bramhall
Slack, Airtable, Front, and I have to add Quip as a fourth because all four of those are essential and Quip is like Google Docs. I don't personally love Quip as a tool. I prefer Google Docs but, for intents and purposes, it works for our business so I’m whatever. Tools are personal.

Maren Kate
Okay. And what's Front?

Devin Bramhall
Front is an email management software. So it's similar to HelpScout, actually, my former company. It has like shared inboxes, which is crucial for agencies, right, because you need to be able to collaborating across customer. So it's allows us to be able to collaborate on customer comms internally and help content managers with their comms with our customers and see it all in one place. Oh, Zoom. Because we're remote I get those extra two because those are essential.

Maren Kate
Yes, you literally need more tools. And then the last question, the most important question, most serious one, if you had to fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck, which would you pick and why?

Devin Bramhall
Oh my God, that is such a weird question.

Maren Kate
I know I love it. Its my favorite question.

Devin Bramhall
I feel like this is one of those questions where there's a lot of psychology behind it, which is making me nervous. I feel like I'm sitting in front of a shrink right now. Let's see, 100 duck-sized horses or a horse-sized duck?

Maren Kate
Yep, little mini horses.

Devin Bramhall
I would pick 100 duck-sized horses because horses aren't really fighters. They're generally afraid and so I actually feel like it wouldn't really be a fight. I could just like, you know, be gentle with them and communicate with them non-verbally. Let's go through this together. Like let's just walk around, you know, like, let's all get together and be friends. Because I feel like ducks can be a little more ornery.

Maren Kate
Oh yeah, ducks are terrifying at the size they are now so a horse-sized duck… But I love it because this question is a divining rod. People fall very much on one side or another. I've had arguments with people about the how you want one giant duck and I’m like “you're insane”.

Devin Bramhall
I was going to ask what you would pick so I assume you’re with me on the little horses.

Maren Kate
Definitely 100 little horses. Just boot them. So where can people find you and where can they find Animalz on the interwebs.

Devin Bramhall
@devinemily on Twitter, Devin Bramhall on LinkedIn, those are pretty much my only public social channels. Animalz is Animalz.co. We don't have a social media presence right now so just go on over to our website. But you can find us on our blog. We write a lot more detailed content about our content strategy, about content marketing, about SEO, about writing, and we also have a podcast.

Maren Kate
You have a podcast. I'm gonna link to that in the show notes too because you have some amazing guides on the blog. I was looking at it before the show and I was like, damn. I sent it to my content team.

Devin Bramhall
I’m glad it was helpful. That was the purpose, right? That's the purpose of content marketing and we wanted to live it breathe it so we decided…

Maren Kate
Actually helpful.

Devin Bramhall
Please use it.

Maren Kate
Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you Devin so much.