Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast

Heidi: What we discovered was that when you searched for fashion design podcast inside of like Apple podcasts or anywhere, my show did not come up. That was a big problem. Like hindsight 2020, I realized that I had called my show successful fashion freelancer. And in my show, the blurb about the podcast itself, I said, I would always say fashion freelancer because I didn't want to exclude by saying fashion designer, I was.

Including a technical designer or a pattern maker or a textile designer. And so I thought if we zoom out and we just say fashion freelancer, that's like a big umbrella that encompasses everybody. Well, the problem was we weren't showing up because the word fashion design or fashion designer was not in the description nor in the title.

And so he goes immediately, what you're going to do is you're just going to change, like go into the show description and add fashion design, fashion designer. Like that's your quick. 80, 20 fix right now. I did that within three weeks inside Apple podcasts. We show up number two. If you search fashion design.

Louis: Bonjour,bonjour, and welcome to another episode of everyone hates marketers. com the no fluff actionable marketing podcast for people sick of marketing bullshit. I'm your host, louis Grenier! In today's episode, you will learn how to be crazy niche and be very successful with it. My guest today helps freelance fashion designers find clients and get money. She's a decade long freelance fashion designer, made a lot of money and obviously helping people to do the same. Now, she's also the host of a top rated podcast. We'll talk about that in a few minutes called finance fashion, not finance, fashion designers get paid. And she's been stalking me for a while.

So I had to invite her on the show. I'm just kidding. Heidi Weinberg, welcome aboard.

Heidi: Thank you so much for having me, Louis. I'm excited to nerd out with you.

Louis: So a lot of people, especially, you know, when I say people is like folks listening to my show, like freelancers, consultants, agency owners, entrepreneurs, whatever, if there's one thing that they challenge me on or they resist the most is this feeling of, you know, the more you narrow.

Your opportunities or your markets, the more it's a risk. So what do you say about that?

Heidi: Meaning they say it's risky to go too narrow?

Louis: Yes.

Heidi: I firmly believe that more narrow, the better. And I've, I've learned a hard lesson recently about that. And it's something that I work with my students very extensively on.

And we see direct correlative results with the more narrow they get, the better success they see.

Louis: So what do we mean by narrowing down, right? Maybe you can give a quick example of, you know, in your field, what we mean by like narrowing down, going to ultra-niche type level.

Heidi: Yeah. So I have a student, for example, she is a freelance fashion designer and she designs.

Cashmere sweaters. That is ultra-niche. I have a lot of people that come to me and I'm like, okay, what are you thinking about your services or whatever? Or they may be in my program and we're on coaching call and they're like, I'm going to do women's ready to wear. I'm going to do men's wear, kids wear like that is the broadest market in the world right?

I'm going to do knits or wovens. And so for people who are listening that might not know a ton about that, like knit is essentially something that's like a stretchy versus woven is like more like a button down shirt. And those categories still are massively, massively, massively broad. So you know, we have other students, one of our very successful students also, she does, I always have to think about her niche cause it's like all these little qualifiers she does.

Pattern making, that's her one service for women's small, slow fashion brands. That is it. She turns away all other work and she's booked out like three, four months in advance and she keeps raising her rates and it's like nobody turns away. So we, I see this happening over and over and over versus the freelancers who are like doing these big broad categories or just kind of taking any project that comes to them.

And people get so scared of like, well, I'm going to. I'm going to push projects away or, you know, what if, like, people just don't think I can work with them because I haven't said I can do all the things for all the people. I'm like, that's fine. You will push people away. But the people that really want to work with you are going to be so hyper excited to work with you.

They're not going to be able to find someone who is as niche as you. And as a result, they are willing to pay more premium, higher prices. because of your specialty.

Louis: So you mentioned that like very broad category, like quite naturally, because you know, the, you know, your market and all of that. So can you give me back an example of what you said would be like a very, very too big of a market?

Heidi: Yeah. Like I have, I hear people all the time say women's ready to wear. And I'm like, that's basically all women's clothes.

Louis: So what does, what the fuck does it mean? Women's ready to wear?

Heidi: Yeah. RTW is just like a term in the industry for, you know, it's not bridal, it's not couture. It's not the stuff you see on the runway, right?

It's just sort of, it's like ready to wear like everyday clothes for everyday people that you find in pretty much every store out there.

Louis: Okay. Yeah. Okay. And so how would you know apart from instinctively that it's too big, right? Let's say we're talking about a category that may be a fashion thing that you haven't heard before.

I don't know. How do you tell? I don't know. I don't know. This is too big.

Heidi: I think you kind of need to think about like, I mean, I always challenge people. I have a little bit of like a formula for niche, right? And so it's, it's, there's two different formulas you can use. One is like one service, multiple categories, or one category, multiple services.

So this might look like I do pattern making, like actually I'm drafting the physical patterns to cut and sew the garments. And I might do that for a variety of categories, categories, right? I do pattern making and I do women's men's and kids. I would argue that that's still quite broad. Um, but that's a way to get started.

You can also look at it as like, I do multiple services, but for one really niche category, right? So like the, the cashmere sweater designer that I mentioned earlier, she does, she does the design. She does the technical portion. She specs the garment. She does the sourcing. She helps them with all the fitting and everything.

And so she's doing like, This hyper niche category, but then she's offering a multitude of services. So that's like initially one qualifier that you can look at, but then I think you just have to sort of, it's a little bit of a gut check and this is something that people really struggle with is like figuring out their nation and thinking like, Oh, is it too big?

Is it too small? Da da da da. I tend to say, air on the side of too small. Like if you're almost like it's uncomfortably a little bit too small, I'm like, I think you're probably getting in the zone. You just need to think of like, if you, if you say this category, like women's ready to wear, I'm like, how often are you seeing that type of garment?

You're seeing it all day, every day in every single shop. Right. Versus, um, another example is a woman who does small back. Large cup lingerie. So we're talking like 30, 32, 34, like small around the rib cage area, but then like D D double D and up, that's her niche. And I'm like, you're not seeing that everywhere all the time in every single store.

Right. But the person that wants that and needs that is like, yes, you are my person. There's a lot of nuances to like making sure that fits right. And all that sort of thing. So just kind of using your gut a little bit of like, how often are you seeing this product out there? And it's, it's likely you're not seeing it everywhere all day in all the stores.

Louis: Gotcha. Okay.

Heidi: If that makes any sense.

Louis: It does. It does. I don't think I've ever met a freelancer, consultant, agency owner, whatever else, who told me, you know what? The niche I picked was too small. I should have went, I should have gone bigger, right? It's never, it never happens, right?

Heidi: Yeah.

Louis: Um, if you trust your guts, and, if you have some experience in the field, you know that, yes, it's uncomfortably small, but you know that there is more than enough.

people to serve. So have you met anyone like that before?

Heidi: No, I've never met anyone that said it was too small.

Louis: Yes, me neither. But in the context of, of niching, I mean, so.

Heidi: Right. Got the memo.

Louis: I was Googling ready to wear market size and. All I can find is blank reports for some reason. So let me try to find something because I'm going to share how I think about it in terms of the size.

Cause so there's two ways to think about it broadly. There is the top down approach and the bottom up approach, right? So top down would be what is the global size of that market in terms of number of people that you could serve or number of revenue being shared? What's the percentage you could get inside that realistically, right?

That's the capture. And then therefore how much you can make based on your. Target, right? Based on what you think you could be making now for the type of people you're serving. We're talking about freelancers. So we're talking about solopreneurs on, you know, they realistically don't need that much money.

Uh, per year relative to the market? No. So when you think about it this way,

just trying to think...

Heidi: And that data like that, if I, I would never send someone on a goose chase like that, be like, go figure out the market share. Like that would very much overwhelm them. That would just be something that like, it's gonna be hard to find if I'm like, okay, go try to figure out the market share for small back large cup lingerie.

I mean, it would just, it would be a goose chase, right? So like,

Louis: But, uh, it's a good, I use it to do the opposite, which is like, see how big it is and see how impossible of a task it is. Right.

Heidi: Gotcha.

Louis: So for example, the market size in 2021 of custom made clothes, just for the sake of the argument is 51 billion per year.

Right.

Heidi: Yeah. So that's big.

Louis: It's just way too fucking, yeah, it's way too fucking big. And you're talking about like Ralph Lauren and whatever, whatever. So that's the top down approach. And then the other one that is actually easier is the bottom up, which is you start with what you know, and the audience that you have, and you start, you know, if you have an email list, let's say of like, let's say 10, 000 people.

If you sell to 1 percent of them every year, how much, you know, do you need to sell? To get to get somewhere near where you want to be or LinkedIn following or whatever else, you know?

Heidi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that I would argue you could look at it that way for my audience. I think they also might like a lot of them don't have, they don't have email lists.

They don't, they might be a little bit on LinkedIn, but they're not necessarily building presences in the way that like you and I, and some of the people I think in our circles of like this online marketing sphere are. Some of them ultimately do grow to that. But most of them are the, they're these small solopreneurs.

They don't need or have a big following. And it's more of like just finding this unique niche customer based off of, yeah, what their experience is, what do they really love and how can they niche that down? I always talk, I talk a lot about like. putting qualifiers on it, right? I'm like, okay, you want to do women's ready to wear.

Okay, right. That's first. That's huge market. So what kind of qualifiers can we put on that? Can we stay petite, maybe inclusive sizing, maybe also sustainable, maybe also low, like small batch production, right? Then we can start to like, look at like, okay, now we can narrow this down. And so You know, I think there's all sorts of ways to take.

Okay, if you're really interested in women's ready to wear, how can we actually make that work right? And we can just put these little qualifiers on it based off of your experience and based off of what you're really interested in, passionate and excited about. Some people are like really into inclusive sizing.

Some people are very passionate about sustainability, et cetera. And so making sure that. They're really excited about it. And based on their experience in the industry, how can we make something like this work?

Louis: So let's imagine I'm one of your clients. So I'm into, I make shoes. Okay. I make shoes. I'm going to stop here because I know roughly where I want to go, but I want to see, so let's say, okay, I make shoes for like everyone, you know, custom made shoes.

And. That's it. I want to, I want to start out more. I want to make more money. What do you, what do you tell me?

Heidi: What kind of shoes are these? Like running shoes, tennis shoes, high heels, like what kind of shoes? Boots, winter shoes.

Louis: They are shoes that are like, look like everyday shoes, like sneakers and stuff like that.

But they are for people who want to increase their height a bit, you know, to have this extra padding.

Heidi: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So this is, you're a designer for, I guess, I don't know what exactly is called, but there's like lifts. Right. I think shoes with lifts or something. Go out and find brands that are targeting petite people, right?

Go out and find footwear brands that maybe are already doing this, but they want someone specialized in like a freelancer who's specialized in this. service, go out and find brands that are, you know, maybe some type of like specialty shoe. This could be a stretch, but like seeing like, is this a market that they want to break into?

It's a really unique example you gave me. And I'll parlay that into, we have another knitwear designer, sweater knits, not specifically cashmere, but just sweater knits. And she's had good success with going out to companies that have. Knit accessories. They have like gloves and scarves and hats, but they don't have sweaters yet.

And she's pitching to them. Hey, have you thought about introducing sweaters? And she's gotten clients that way because they're like, yes, we do want to do sweaters. We just didn't have anybody that knew actually how to do all the fitting and all the stuff like that. Right? So I think there's opportunity to look for brands that are doing things that are kind of adjacent to what your specialty and your niche is.

Like with the lingerie, right? You could go out to brands that are doing maybe inclusive sizing, but they don't, they haven't broken into that like small back, large cup category. Right? So things that, that are sort of adjacent or complimentary to what you're offering, but there might be a hole in their offering that you can go and say, Hey, I can fill that hole.

I can add those sweaters to your, to your line plan. I can add these. Shoes with lifts or what have you, right? So there's a lot of opportunities to do something like that.

Louis: So here we're talking more about the acquisition of the clients, but what I'm curious about is how do you, how do we decide whether the niche is worth pursuing?

Because let's say I'm thinking of doing this. I haven't done it. before. I just think it's a good idea. And I'm starting here, right? I used to design shoes, but for everyone, you know, whatever. And I'm starting to think this, right? So it looks like when I do a bit of research, the category seems to be called elevator shoes.

There's a company called Mario Bertulli, which is the way it's a good example, which, which gives you like invisibly taller, five to 10 centimeters longer without losing any comfort. And so they look like normal shoes, but they have this kind of hidden. Uh, thing. Uh, and I know for a fact that the governor of Florida right now, the time we're recording this use those.

Heidi: Yeah. There's a lot of speculation that he's got less...

Louis: it's not speculation. It's for sure. It's for sure. It's so easy to see anyway.

Heidi: I've watched some videos and yeah, I was like, I don't know, but anyway.

Louis: So what does it, how do we know if, how do we know if it's a valid kind of niche?

Heidi: Yeah. Okay. So you're talking more about validation, right?

I jumped to acquisition. You go out and you talk to people, you talk to brands. First of all, you see, like, are there any brands doing this or are there brands that are doing things adjacent to this? It's just general market research, right? You go out and you have real conversations with real people who are doing something along these lines.

And you try to understand, like, is there enough of a need in the market for someone like me to come in and help as a designer doing these elevator shoes, right? Which I guess that's where you thought of this is from the, I can't remember his name right now, but the Florida governor. So

Louis: Ron DeSantis,

Heidi: that's right.

I'm impressed with your us political savvy. I don't even follow this stuff very closely.

Louis: Yeah. That's a problem. I need to stop, but okay. So are there any brands doing this? Right. And something that people struggle with when I ask them to do this, which is like, is there any evidence in the market that there is like, there's an actual market for it?

Are people paying money for this thing already? Or are you completely hallucinating? And what people will tell me some at least would be. Yeah. But then I can't be, then it's, my idea is not original or like, then I'm not the only one. Therefore it's saturated. Therefore I shouldn't do it.

Heidi: I mean some competition is good, right?

It shows that there's already a need in the market. I am actually in this unique little niche of like freelancing just for fashion. And there's very, very, very, very little out there in terms of freelancing for fashion. There's a lot of freelancing advice in general, right? As far as it goes specific to the fashion industry, a few people have crept into the market, but I'm talking to like a handful of people and it's, they're not making a huge splash online in terms of like having a podcast or having a YouTube or having like any type of big presence.

And so, you know, it's funny, I've talked to my husband extensively of like, is my market too small? I'm making money. It's working. So like, you know, it's working on some level, but we have a question of like, how much can we scale this based on the market size, based on there's no competition, right? How valid is this?

And so yeah, some competition is good competition. You know, in this space, as far as we're talking about, like going after freelancing, it's not really looking at competition. Cause you're, if you're going out there doing market research, like are there brands doing these elevator shoes? Yes. Then there's, there's potentially clients out there for you.

If you didn't find anybody and maybe you wanted to start a brand, like that's a, but that's a whole different thing. Like starting your own brand of like, I want to make my own line of elevator shoes. And arguably there could be nobody out there doing it. You do first need to validate that. That idea, see if anybody's even interested in buying elevator shoes, but that's a whole different thing of like starting your own elevator shoe company versus like going out to freelance and going out to freelance.

Yeah, of course you need to find that there are companies out there doing that specific thing because those are ultimately going to be your clients, right?

Louis: Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. So there is a book called, I don't know if you read it by David C. Baker, who wrote the business of expertise alongside a few things.

And he has a couple of tests to see if your positioning is tight enough. So he said you need to have roughly between 10 and 200 direct competitors. In the world, or at least in the area that you are in, like if it's a geographical area, so direct competitors, like, you know, are there any other, like you, Heidi, that do exactly the same thing?

And then a market size of around 2000 to 10, 000 customers, again, quite difficult to know, but one of these, one of these trick to do this is, are you, can you buy a list of people who exactly fit that group, not actually going through and buying the email list because that's illegal and stupid, but is there a list available?

How? And then, and then the, the conference event test, which is like, are they, are there any events or conferences out there? I'll bait small that targets exactly that group as well. Right. So to see if there is any evidence.

Heidi: I've heard about that one before. Yeah.

Louis: Any evidence of any, any of this. So, so just to recap what you said, because there's a few interesting stuff you said already, which is like, you tend to look at it in two ways, one service, multiple categories or multiple services on one category.

So like you slice and slice it and dice it this way.

Heidi: Yeah.

Louis: And then you would use qualifiers. So you would use qualifiers for both the service and for the categories, right? So you'd go, let's say you do to go out of the fashion world. We'll talk about, you know, marketing advice, that's the service, which is extremely broad for butchers.

The qualifier would be like, instead of marketing advice, it would be go to market plans. I mean, although butchers would fucking wouldn't say that, but like, is it, is it, you just drill deep, deeper into the, into the specific category or services.

Heidi: Yeah, you can. I think there's a certain, I think you do reach a breaking point, right?

Especially when it comes to the service component for the fashion industry. So like big bucket, I'm going to say there's like, you got design. You've got technical as far as services go, and then you've got like production, like actually getting the garment made. And then within each of those, you can break down into like arguably three different services each.

So I'll give one example, which would be tech packs. That would be in the technical component and tech pack for a garment is basically like, you need a blueprint to build a house. You need a tech pack to create a garment.

Louis: Okay.

Heidi: So that's the parallel. So, and we have students that exclusively do tech packs.

That's all they do. They don't design, they don't source the factories and manage production. They just create the tech pack. They're essentially like an architect, right? Although architects do design. So they just do tech packs. It would be really hard to put a qualifier on that tech pack service. I'm trying to think what something, huh?

Louis: Why, why would it be very hard?

Heidi: I can't even think of one. I can't even think of like what it would be. So, so then you can look at the category, right? So the category would be like, for example, when our students does tech packs for sort of active lifestyle stuff. So she does a little bit of swim. She does a little bit of like yoga.

Lounge, athleisure wear like that. She doesn't also do like handbags and shoes and all the things, right? So her categories are, they're complimentary, but they're a little bit broader and so she could put a qualifier on that. Like maybe she's doing sustainable or inclusive sizing or small batch manufacturing or something.

But I, I literally can't even think of a qualifier that you could put on a tech pack. It's just, it's this sort of cut and dry document that you need to create. You know what I'm saying?

Louis: Yeah, yeah. So there's a point where you can't zoom in further.

Heidi: I, correct. I believe so. Yeah. Yeah.

Louis: So, so then when you're done on that side, then you can apply the category like, so flat pack only for, right. I don't fucking know.

Heidi: Only for small batch active and lounge wear. Like they maybe are so passionate about like the You know, the overproduction in the fashion industry, all the things that are getting created and not sold and getting marked down and all the waste and all that stuff that they're so passionate about that they're only, they only want to work with brands that are doing small batch production of like, you know, 50 or a hundred pieces or something.

So there's a lot more room for qualifiers on the category side than there are unlike the service side.

Louis: Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. That's interesting to hear from your specific industry, because I think that'll help people to kind of try to apply it to their own. I think that what, what I kind of extract from what you're saying is that either like both the service or services or category or categories that you're coming after need to be something that people understand already, or it's already something that is in demand, that is understood in some way, shape, or form.

If not, then this is when it becomes so. I want to, I want to kind of switch gear to something else, which is your podcast, um, the way you've changed things around. It's, it's still talking about niche, but now it's for your own podcast and what you've learned. So before the name of the podcast, which is now fashion designers get paid, what was the name of it?

The title of it?

Heidi: It was called successful fashion freelancer.

Louis: Okay. And you had, you have this podcast for the last, what, six years now?

Heidi: Six years. Yeah. And before Successful Fashion Freelancer, it was called Successful Fashion Designer.

Louis: Okay. So you've changed name.

Heidi: I can tell you the full circle.

Louis: Yeah. We changed it three times.

So why did you? Change it from successful fashion designer to successful fashion freelancer in the first place.

Heidi: Okay. Let me see if I can make this succinct. So my business used to be structured a little bit differently. And I used to have multiple courses on technical skills in the fashion industry, like how to create a tech pack and how to use Adobe illustrator for fashion.

And we had six courses at our peak of offerings and the podcast was a little bit more broad. I interviewed people that worked in fashion as employees. I interviewed people that had their own fashion brands and I also interviewed freelancers and it was just sort of about working in fashion in general.

And so successful fashion designer felt like a little bit of like a broad enough umbrella to encompass all of those things. Fast forward to 2021 and I decided to, in general, niche the business down more. I had originally started back in 2009. My YouTube was started solely off of how to use Adobe Illustrator for fashion.

And that's sort of how I got my break. And I was known a little bit as like the illustrator girl in the fashion industry. And we got a little bit bloated and like added all these things, da da da da da. And then I was like, it's. It's too much. And even though we're still like niche in the fashion industry, I go, it's just too much.

We're talking about 8 million different things. We're talking about tech packs and illustrator and freelancing and starting your own brand and finding a job. And I was like literally getting out of breath, overwhelmed of like, Oh, it's too much. So I go, I don't want to do all this other stuff anymore. I just want to do freelancing because that's where I'm most passionate.

That's where I had the most success in my career. I had a brand, I worked in house, neither of those worked out for me. And freelancing was where I found my success. That's where I am the most excited. That's where I think I can offer the most value. It was like, there's nobody else really talking about it.

There's other stuff on tech packs and illustrator and all that stuff. So, so I said, we're going to retire five of these programs and we're just going to keep our freelancing program. And as a result, the podcast is going to shift to be just talking to freelancers. And so I said, Oh, the simplest switch.

And it just made so much logical sense in my head was to say successful fashion freelancer. We just changed one word, right? And I was like, that makes a lot of sense. That encompasses everybody. The problem that I didn't realize or learn until here we are fall of 2023, two years later, I took a course called podcast marketing Academy with Jeremy ends.

I think, you know, you guys are buddies. He's phenomenally smart, especially in marketing and the podcast space. And he challenged me, what we discovered was that when you searched for fashion design podcasts inside of like Apple podcasts or anywhere, I, my show did not come up. That was a big problem. And what I realized like hindsight 2020, I realized that I had called my show successful fashion freelancer.

And in my show, in my, like the blurb about the podcast itself, I said, I would always say fashion freelancer because I didn't want to exclude. By saying fashion designer, I was excluding a technical designer or a pattern maker or a textile designer. And so I thought if we zoom out and we just say fashion freelancer, that's like a big umbrella that encompasses everybody.

Well, the problem was we weren't showing up because the word fashion design or fashion designer was not in the description nor in the title. And so he goes immediately, what you're going to do is you're just going to chain, like go into the show description. and add fashion design, fashion designer. Like that's your quick 80-20 fix right now.

I did that within three weeks inside Apple podcasts. We show up number two, if you search fashion design, brain explodes. And then we ultimately did wind up changing the show name. And that was more around less around to get the word fashion design, fashion designer into the show name, but more about, we did extensive sort of brainstorming on like meeting my customer where they're at, and I can go into detail on that if you care to, but it was calling the show successful fashion freelancer was not meeting them where they were at. We did. I did a little bit of market research and some quick tests on Facebook ads and we found that winning name.

Louis: Okay.

So let's stop here because there's a lot of, no, no, it's great.

A lot to unpack. So to go back to the beginning, you said you started on YouTube with Illustrator for fashion, right? Like Adobe Illustrator for fashion, and you started to become known this way. And then it became too much. Can you describe for folks who might not have experienced this feeling of this is too much, what it kind of feels like and when you knew, you know, your gut feeling that, that knew we need to fucking remove 80 percent of what we're doing.

Heidi: Yeah, there was, I would say there was two things that happened. First, we had six courses and you got to sell your courses and we were launching them. So in order to launch each of them like twice a year, we were literally launching every single month.

And I was like fucking exhausted of like launch, launch, launch, launch. And I felt that there was no space. And all of our launches are by 98 percent of our revenue and everything comes from the email list. Right? So we're launching, launching, launching. And I, I felt that. We were just on this launch hamster wheel, um, which was burning me out.

I also was like, this can't feel great for the people on the email list. Right. And so it just, it felt like there was not even room on the email list to like have some conversations and just talk and like nurture and just be casual. It was just always this strategic, like, okay, well now we have to build up and we have to build up the runway and the anticipation towards the launch.

So that was the thing. Number one. And then thing number two was I lost a lot of passion for some of those topics. I have grown in such a way in like the marketing and the business sense of things over the last five, 10 years. And I was like, this is the content. that I'm most passionate about. I'm kind of done talking about Illustrator.

I'm kind of done talking about tech packs. Like these topics, I used to be able to nerd out on Illustrator and get really excited about it. And I was like, I'm not excited about it anymore. I don't, I stopped freelancing in 2019. It was running the businesses in in parallel for a couple of years. And I, at some point, like reach the reach the breaking point, like time and financially wise, I was like, I don't have to do this free on thing thing.

And I'm just sort of done. Right. And so I wasn't using the software on a day-to-day basis. I wasn't creating tech packs on a day-to-day basis. And I'm still very qualified to teach and to talk about this stuff, but I just, I lost the drive for it. And I, I firmly, firmly, firmly believe I do this demo on whenever I do like live trainings, I talk about.

Your excitement for something or your meh sort of for something is like a drop of red dye in a glass of water. And if you hold up, I literally do this live. I'm like, hold up a glass of water. I'm like, this is your excitement or this is your, and you drop it in. Right. And it just, it bleeds into everything literally.

And I firmly believe that. When you write emails, when you write social media posts, when you show up on a podcast and you're talking about a topic that's sort of meh, it bleeds into it and people feel that on the other side as intentional as you might try to be to like fake that enthusiasm. I don't, I mean, you can be really good at short.

I'm sure some people do, but most people it's really, really hard. And I was like, this is bleeding into my content. I don't want to write emails about illustrator anymore. I don't want to create tutorials about illustrator. So it was just like a shift in my passion.

Louis: So you, you took a big swing and just selected the one course that you were genuinely excited about and that you wanted to dive into.

Okay. So, so then the podcast, you rename it from successful fashion designers to successful fashion freelancers with that in mind, right? Because you were talking about freelancing, which makes sense on the surface. But then you realized that you could grow more. You could grow the podcast more. You felt like it wasn't really necessarily hitting the right notes or that it wasn't found as well.

So you said. Before you moved on and decided on the new name, you said you did some market research. You asked some, you know, send some surveys. So tell me about that step.

Heidi: Yeah. So I wanted to learn, I mean, I understand my audience has pain points and I do a lot of market research and stuff, but I was like, I want to get a fresh take on this.

And so as I was going through Jeremy's course, I sent out a survey to my email list, which is about 20, 000 people. And I said, I just went really high level generic with it. I didn't say, well, we're gonna need reading the podcast. What are good names? I said, I think I just sent out two questions. One was, what are your biggest challenges and frustrations about working in the fashion industry?

And then I said, if you. We, I think we all know these questions, right? The other one was like, if you could have a magic wand and create a dream fashion industry for yourself to work in, like, what would that look like? Right. So we got hundreds of responses. So we did a bunch of analysis. I think I might've used your tool at this point.

What's it called? The buyer insights, the fucking buyer insights tool.

Louis: Fucking fast buyer insights.

Heidi: Yeah. Anyways. And two things floated to the top. They wanted, they were fucking sick of horrible bosses and they, they were fucking sick of not making any money. The industry is very competitive, right? And, and it's highly desirable creative industry to work in.

And so brands underpay because again, so I looked at like exact verbiage that they were using. Horrible bosses came up a lot, like literally that exact phrase. And so, and then the other phrase that came up was, I just want to get paid more, something like that. We had so many versions of that type of phrasing.

So we kind of worked those into some titles. I think one was fashion without horrible bosses. And then one of them was fashion designers get paid. I can't think of any others. And then we just turned those into basic graph, like literally just like a color and text fashion designers get paid fashion without horrible bosses.

And a couple others, and we ran them as click tests, click objectives on Facebook, just to say, what are people going to click more on? Everything else was the same, the headline, all the other things, the targeting, all this stuff. And by far way more people clicked on fashion designers get paid. So I was like, boom, there's a title.

Louis: Nice.

So thank you. That's, that's super interesting in the way you've done it. It reminds me of how Hotjar did it at the very start when they started the company, which is like a 80s company before I joined them. They were, they did a Facebook ad to test the tagline they would go after on the thing. So that's actually pretty clever to do.

Now what I want to zoom in on is something that I really love. You said that a few minutes ago, you said you need to meet people where they are. So you've realized, let me try to like analyze what you said and tell me if I'm saying anything stupid. So you realize that basically. When you were, the name of the show used to be about freelancers, that most people were actually not freelancers just yet, right?

That's the first thing. So when you're sick of an horrible boss, apart from, you know, if you're sick of yourself, which very much happens, but that means you're employed. You're not freelancing. Right? Yeah. So that's the first thing. The second one that is even more interesting because I was listening to your podcast about this, this episode where you are sharing the shift is how people perceive the world, Freelancer. Or the thing about freelancing in the fashion industry to be, you work with a company, but you're not fully employed. And so you're like double fucked.

Heidi: I call it temp job. A lot of people call it permalance is basically like, and jobs are advertised this way in the fashion industry.

And so when you say freelancing. And people will say, I'm a freelancer. I'm like, but are you? And they're like, yeah, I'm, I just got a gig working for Ralph Lauren for three months and it's onsite 40 hours a week. Like you look and act like an employee, but you're not getting all the benefits of being employee.

And yes, you're like doubly fucked. And the brand is reaping massive benefits. I have, I am extremely passionate about this topic. You is very advantageous to the brand, right? They're not paying employment taxes on you. They're not paying your taxes. Is at all, they're not paying your health insurance or paid vacation or da dah, dah, dah, dah.

And yet you're required to look and act and show up like an employee. Some people like this arrangement, so I don't mean to like totally poo poo it, but I think it's actually very, very destructive for our industry, and I know it exists in other industries as well. And so, calling the show successful fashion freelancers first, like a misperception and what exactly is a freelancer and what exactly are we talking about on the show?

And then also like, that's not really meeting them where they're at. They're not a successful fashion freelancer. And so I'm like more like painting this dream versus meeting them where they're at with either fashion without horrible bosses or fashion designers get paid. Like those are two pain points that they are currently feeling.

The ideal person is ICP is working in a job, burnt the fuck out. Sick of their bosses feeling like they're not getting paid enough that da da da da da right and so these these other titles that are show names that we played around with were much more meeting them where they were at versus this successful fashion friends or dream I was painting over here that They didn't even maybe quite understand what the dream I was actually painting.

And I talked about that a lot in the show, of course, about how, like, I don't talk about permalancing. I talk about true remote freelancing, but right. The first hurdle in the podcast is getting someone to actually click through the show to look at the list of episodes. So like I was likely maybe losing people on that first bear, that first, like very, very, very top of funnel.

Louis: Yeah. But that reminds me of a bigger problem, which is really this idea of like. Every single word you use for your positioning or any marketing material that is kind of important, like your podcast title or whatever, matters because the picture that people have in their head of it, you know, is something you need to play with and you can't like try to change people's mind.

You have to play with what people have in mind. So I found that very interesting that in the fashion industry, the word freelancing doesn't have the same meaning. our context than like in the marketing industry where we, we understand what freelancing typically means. Um, that reminds me of an, of a completely different example with a, someone I work with, who was specializing in the menopause, helping women going through menopause, basically just to summarize.

Uh, What she found was that women facing problems that are linked to menopause were not calling it menopause. So they didn't know it was menopause first, so they wouldn't search for it. They wouldn't like, they wouldn't seek advice on menopause. They had like, you know, the, the signs of menopause, but they didn't know that was it.

So that's the first thing.

Heidi: Totally.

Louis: And the second thing was the stigma. So meaning that. If they knew it was menopause, they never thought of themselves as like an old lady with menopause. And so that kind of the word was, you know, so by just shifting the category and the way she was talking about it, it really helped her to, to have her offers land way, way more.

Heidi: Yeah.

Louis: While the thing behind it were the same you know?

Heidi: Totally as a woman who went through early onset menopause at the ripe age of 30. Yeah, that cascaded into a whole other thing. It's in terms of creating a family. That's all in our story. That's okay. We got there. We have a child, but yeah, like I was having like excessive hot flashes, like waking up in the middle of the night, like sweating and went to a couple of doctors got no diagnosis.

Ultimately long run, we figured out what it was, but I was not searching for anything along those lines. I mean, I'm not sure if I was, I'm the exact persona for this woman you're talking about, but, but yeah, I get that fully. I mean, I get that firsthand.

Louis: Yeah, yeah. But exactly. So, so it's, it's so important to try to not reinvent the wheel and to invent new words and feeling like you're so smart.

You're like God, you can change the entire market and the way they think, right. You need to be there where they are, right. Like you've done it. We're changing the title. So in, in terms of the result that you got, like, if you talk about tangible results from that change, and maybe you can talk about a couple more changes that you've done, like, were you able to measure anything beyond the position?

You know, the, the search position?

Heidi: So here's where things get a little tricky and I feel like we don't totally have any tangible results to share yet is I took six months off the podcast, actually about seven for the first time in five years from about February this year to, I don't know, August, September, something like that.

And, so we were not publishing for six months, and then that was during the time that I went through Jeremy's course, and we came up with the show name change, et cetera. And so we just relaunched with the show name change. Let's see. It's November, middle November right now. When was it? I'd have to look on the calendar, but like, maybe two and a half months, two and a half, three months ago. And while we have not seen a direct correlative uptick in terms of downloads, I mean, you and I both know that the podcast game is a real long, slow game. And so I don't feel confident that it's been enough time to see those measurable results. And we can check back in on that in like a year.

Louis: No, I get it.

Heidi: Maybe six months even, but you know what I'm saying, right?

Louis: Oh, I do. Podcasting is a fucking piece of shit. Um, I wish, I wish I knew that before starting, but I did the same, you know, I stopped the podcast for a while, like more longer than you before having my like first child. And then, you know, during paternity leave and stuff, I needed a break from it to, to kind of find back the passion for it.

It's I've made this change recently, actually, when it, when we talk about SEO for, for podcasting, I've actually added to the title. It used to simply be everyone hates marketers, but now it's everyone hates marketer, a bar, a vertical bar, no BS marketing podcast. Oh, I didn't notice that. Okay. Yeah. It's just for SEO.

And actually that helped. The reason why I mentioned this is because that small change actually that lead to an increase in visibility in particular for in on Spotify, where now I think I'm number one. If you sell just marketing, it's the first one that comes up.

Heidi: Have you seen an, like a tangible increase in downloads?

Like you kind of saw immediately with that?

Louis: No, no. Okay. But I do, I have a tool that I use called voxelize. com. And it's to see, it's basically SEO for podcasts to see like where you rank and I can see an increase like I'm currently, for example, you can look UK Apple podcast, top 1 percent of podcasts for the current week, 2, 413.

In terms of ranking, but that's the biggest, that's for every podcast, but you can see whether you increase it or not, and that what type of keywords are you showing for, so it's, it's helpful that way. But as you said, it's, it's a long game. You know.

Heidi: I know I was like, Oh wow, we're now showing up to actually, I'm curious if you search in Spotify or Apple for fashion or fashion design, where do I land?

But I was like, boom, that alone is going to be like a massive dent or a massive bump. And I haven't directly seen it, but I know longterm that it was the right move to make.

Louis: So the first I just type fashion and I can see the business of fashion. You probably hate them. Ah, yeah. The run through with Vogue, in fashion with Glennis, Trail Nash, and then dressed media, whatever.

And if I do show

Heidi: These are all big shows. Oh. And I can't, I can't compete with them.

Louis: Ah, yeah. Ah, you're number eight. I mean, as soon as I put see, oh, you're there. Fashion designers get paid. Boom.

Heidi: Boom. Boom. Yeah. Boom. That's just for fashion. Okay, number eight. I'm going to take that. I'm going to take that and run.

Louis: But fashion design, you're first.

Heidi: I'm first. Okay, that's news. Okay, boom.

Louis: Spotify is quite big, getting bigger. So anyway, interesting.

Heidi: So yeah, I mean, even fashion design still feels like a really competitive term. Right. That's a huge market. So for me to have number one, I, and I did not, I didn't even Louie, I didn't even show up when it was called successful fashion freelancer.

I was not even on the map. Oh, it kills me a little bit.

Louis: Yeah. It's yeah. No one should ever start a podcast and think that it's going to work. It's the worst. It's just so difficult.

Heidi: It's difficult. Yeah. But, but I will say I do a buyer survey. So after everyone gets into my, any of my pay programs, I do a survey and I'm like, you know, why did you make the decision to join?

And are you, do you listen to the podcast? And they have a couple options of like, what podcast? Heck yeah. Or I listen sometimes. And the majority of my buyers at least listen sometimes. And many of them are heck yeah, I'm a loyal listener. And a lot of people in like the The qualitative field where they can like write about why they decided to join.

I hear a lot that people say, I heard a story on your podcast and the person sounded just like me. And I was like, Oh, maybe I can do this. Right. So it's like painting all these stories or telling all these stories. And, and people listening and finding it really relatable and then believing that it's actually possible for them.

And that can also just build, you know, like the no like and trust. So I think that hard numbers wise podcasts are hard as fuck, right? But I think that when you get those listeners, it doesn't need to be.

Louis: It's a deep relationship, right?

Heidi: It's a deep relationship that you do not get an email and you do not get on any social media.

Arguably, maybe with like some long form video content, you can get similar, but yeah, it's a tough game.

Louis: Yeah. Like podcasting is a nightmare for those marketers who think you can measure everything and everything must be measurable. And if it's not measurable, it shouldn't be done. It shouldn't be done.

Right. Like we're both examples of, of. In that world, this is impossible to achieve. You can't have a podcast and run a successful business on the back of it. If you're measuring everything and trying to, to make it fucking work anyway. Okay. Shit. We're already at the end of, of the time here. So clearly we could talk about that for ages when I started the podcast.

So the title has always been everyone hates marketers. But when I started a podcast, it was in my head anyway for tech marketers. So I made it for folks working in tech in marketing, and this is going to be the opposite of what you were saying earlier in terms of like niching down for the title and whatever.

And I realized quickly that most folks listening will not take marketers. Surely there were some, but there was a lot of copywriters and freelancers and all of that, which completely surprised me. I had no idea. And so what I've done is I expanded the positioning of the podcast to be really about anyone who hates marketing bullshit.

So like the qualifier was very much around the psychographic of people and all of that. But it turns out that most people listening are actually marketing professionals. Yes. Some are in house, but not all in tech. And a lot of them would be people like us, right? So consultants and stuff. So my point here is it doesn't.

The answer to niching down doesn't necessarily mean niching down in the way you've done it, which is like per like job title or something like a filmographic or demographic or whatever. It could be something else, but it needs to be really in line with what people are expecting and the signals that you get from your audience.

Heidi: Yeah.

I meant to mention earlier, but I will throw in one more thing that like, you know, I was doing this fashion freelancer terminology. Cause I was like, Oh, that encompasses everybody. And then one of the things that sort of also flipped my brain on that was I implemented a, uh, survey post. Sign up on my email list.

So as soon as you sign up on the website for lead minor or something, the immediate landing page after that is a quick survey. And so I started collecting data that way and we get quite a few email subscribers every month. So we got a lot of data pretty quickly. And I was like, what, what role do you most identify with or something like that?

Or like, what do you call yourself? Right. And it was like fashion designer, technical designer, pattern maker, a couple others. And it was like. Well, over 60 or 65%. And we're talking thousands of people taking the survey. We're like fashion designer. And then the other five were spread out amongst that other 40%.

So, you know, maybe less than 10 percent each. And so I was like, yeah, we can say fashion freelancer, and that does encompass 100%, but by far, our number one person is concentrated in this fashion design, fashion designer type of category. And those other 40 percent or 35, 40 percent of the people, they're not, and I know there's just I don't have hard data on this, but this is just more like hearsay and just from what I know in the industry, they're not looking for like a pattern making podcast, a technical designer podcast or something like that.

Like they know that they're so niche that they're looking in fashion design as general in general as like a big bucket. So logically I, once I started seeing that survey data, I was like, Oh, okay, we got to fix this.

Louis: Yeah.

That's interesting. I've done similar exercise two years ago. Need to redo it. Like a big survey.

And I found that out of the people who are business owners, 44 percent identify as freelancer, 37 percent as entrepreneur, meaning they have employees and the rest would be solopreneurs. So they sell products, not their services, but basically. A lot of solos, solo people. And that's why I'm slowly but surely updating my positioning and going even more now.

Anyway, before I started remembering something else, I want you to ask you one of the last question, which is what do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next 10, 20 or 50 years?

Heidi: You changed the question on me, or I don't know how recently you changed the question. You used to ask for three bits.

Louis: It's not done.

Heidi: Okay. Okay. What should marketers learn today that will help them in the next 10 to 20 years? I think it is, I, I recently learned a little bit of a lesson with the Google helpful content update, which I don't know how closely you or anyone listening follows SEO, but we, like I said, get most of our, I think I said to you, yeah, no, someone else was talking to you this morning.

We have grown organically. We, because we're so niche, we float to the top on Google and I got a little overly aggressive with some of the AI tools and started pumping out some content. You know where this is going. It was good enough, but then Google has implemented what they've called this helpful content update recently.

And I'm getting to the point of my piece of advice here. I promise this is coming full circle. And you're getting penalized unless if your content is not exceptionally helpful and from firsthand experience, or maybe you have surveyed your list from some type of experience, it's not just like, like all the affiliate sites are getting dinged massively.

Oh, here's why you should use ConvertKit. And here's why you should use ActiveCampaign. And like the people writing this, like have not actually used those softwares. Like all that type of stuff is getting deemed massively. Anything needs to be written from like a point of genuine expertise and genuine experience, or you've curated and gathered the experience from surveys or doing interviews or talking to people or something.

Right. But genuinely, genuinely, genuinely helpful content. I hired a writer and we're using CMI tools and she does work in the fashion industry. She has experience. She's not just. Just a writer that's fluffing up this AI content, but we did get deigned cause we were like pumping out all this content. And I had to take a step back and I was like, like I saw a drop in Google analytics.

I saw a drop in email subscribers and I was like, Whoa, gosh. And I took a step back and I looked at all this content and I was like, it's fine. It's not exceptional. So we're doing this massive content audit. I won't even tell you about the headache that it is causing, um, to like untangle all of this. But, but that would lead me to the answer to your question, which is.

At the end of the day, I think you have to do some serious self-assessment, accurate self-assessment and evaluation of like, are you leading with genuine helpful stuff that is really like user first? Not right. And that could be, it doesn't have to be SEO, right? It could be your podcast or your social media posts or your emails or something, right?

Like, are you engaging in a that is ultimately, genuinely in an exceptional way going to help the person on the other side. And I think that that is like, it's a core like human, moral, ethical thing, right? But we can very easily lose, easily lose sight of it, right? We get this AI tool, now we can create all this content and I slipped. I like went into that gray area for a hot minute and thank God Google punished me because then I, I went back and I looked at the content and I was like, you know what? It's actually not that great. I don't feel super proud of this. Yeah. We're like, we're writing for SEO. We're not writing for people.

And so I think it's just this constant reminder and, and maybe you're doing a great job at that and you don't slip, but I, I think it's. And doing it not just because Google's going to punish you or something, but doing it because that's like the right thing. And you're putting your user and your customer or whoever's on your client, whoever's on the other side of the line, you're putting them first.

And I believe if you learn and remember constantly to lead with that in 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 years. You're going to be doing fine because at the end of the day, you're doing the right thing. And yeah, there's strategy behind it, but really put the user and the customer first. I don't know if that totally answered the question, but that's where my head went.

Louis: You fucked yourself and you learned the lesson, but no, it's never a set in stone. It's a moving thing. And yes. So sometimes I do succumb to like, Oh, what if I do this? Like everyone is telling me to and whatever. But I think I got better and better and I never fail to that trap of the AI generated content and trying to do this.

I didn't even have time to think about it. So, but it's interesting. Thanks for sharing that as well. That's an interesting tidbit about your psyche. We're all humans and we're all struggling with the kind of tension between doing good work and making money. Um, what are the top three resources you'd recommend to listeners today?

Heidi: Yeah, there's a book called the psychology of money. I learned earlier this year after a friend of mine who's a therapist called me out on it. I got, I got money shit in my head. I got money issues. I think most of us do. And I started working with a therapist to really dig into it because I was like, this is hindering me in some big ways.

And I, I listened to that book. You can read it too. I listened to a lot of audiobooks. And it, I'm going to listen to it again. There's a lot of interesting takeaways and stuff. And then kind of leading off of that, the second thing would be investing in yourself. I have very much been a little bit raised and a little bit cemented in the mindset of like, you can figure it out on your own.

You can do it cheaper. You can, you know, and, and as going through some of this deep personal development stuff, learning that like. You need to invest in yourself. You need to spend money on yourself and the right things. And this year, 2023, wherever we are, I have taken some leaps to invest in myself and I have seen direct tangible results.

And I was like a year ago before I worked on some of my money mindset stuff, I would have been like, I can just figure that out. I will watch all the YouTube videos and listen to all the podcasts. And right. And so I think it's a constant reminder. Um, I think there's a balance, right. But investing in yourself and really taking that stuff seriously.

And then third is a book called how to write short. And I need to read a book called how to speak short, because I'm very verbose. As you can probably tell. Yeah. Oh yeah. I find myself very verbose.

Louis: I would have never, I would have never ever noticed that about you.

Heidi: I think you're being very sarcastic.

Louis: Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.

I mean, absolutely.

Heidi: So just learning to be more succinct in various formats.

Louis: Okay, you're dealing well with awkward silence. Okay, cool. Heidi, uh, you've been a pleasure. How can people learn more from you and get to know you more? Connect with you.

Heidi: Yeah. Yeah. You can pretty much find me anywhere online under. So Heidi, S E W H E I D I. If you just Google that, I come up everywhere, whether you want LinkedIn or the podcast or my website, that is the kitschy name I branded myself with a long, long time ago and it has kind of stuck.

So that will get you there.

Very nice. Once again, thank you so much.

Heidi: Thank you, Louis. It was a pleasure to be on.