Joel Klettke the Founder of Case Study Buddy, a specialized team completely focused on helping B2B companies capture, share, and cash in on customer success stories across multiple marketing channels and media. Clients like Docebo, Varonis, and agencies of all sizes trust Case Study Buddy to deliver a polished, professional experience and assets that drive real ROI.
Topics discussed in the episode:
- Tips for Creating an Effective Agency Case Study
- The Benefits of a Great Agency Case Study
- What is an Ideal Agency Case Study
- Tips for Conversion Copywriting
- What Makes A Great Case Study
Presenting Sponsor: ZenPilot
ZenPilot helps agencies build more productive, profitable, and healthy teams by streamlining their operations in ClickUp.
As ClickUp’s largest implementation partner, we’ve served over 2,300 agencies and would love to help you scale operations.
Learn more about our agency solutions.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Joel Klettke on LinkedIn
- Joel Klettke on Twitter
- Case Study Buddy Website
- Joanna Wiebe on LinkedIn
- Jonathan Dane’s Agency Journey Episode
- Joel Klettke’s Newsletter
- KlientBoost Website
- Gray MacKenzie on LinkedIn
- Andrew Dymski on LinkedIn
- ZenPilot
Episode Transcript:
Gray MacKenzie
Welcome into another week’s episode of Agency Journey. This is Gray Mackenzie from ZenPilot. This week, I’ve got the pleasure of bringing on Joel Klettke, who is a conversion copywriter. He’s also the founder at Case Study Buddy. We’ll dig into what that is? Joel, welcome to the podcast. Yeah.
Joel Klettke
Thank you so much for having me.
Gray MacKenzie
I’m excited to dig in to the story. I don’t know if people catch it right away. You’re located up in Calgary. Is that right?
Joel Klettke
Calgary. Yes.
Gray MacKenzie
I was listening to a podcast or an interview on YouTube. Rather that you were on. And the moment you said process, I was like, yes, I know where Joel is located. That was a giveaway for me right away. I’m excited to dig into your background. So you started out, I think, way back in the day. Were you an SEO first?
Joel Klettke
Yeah.
Gray MacKenzie
Copywriting.
Joel Klettke
Yeah. Every job I’ve had other than my first accounting Gopher type of job is a field I didn’t even know existed until I kind of worked in it. So I fell kind of backwards into SEO as my first job. Agency side. I spent almost five years there kind of working on all kinds of different accounts, and it was in my work at the agency I had always loved, never saw a career in it. I never wanted to be a journalist. Fiction was not predictable, viable career path in my mind.
Joel Klettke
So I did a business degree just mostly as like, well, use it for something, I’m sure. But through the agency of my eyes, we’re kind of open to the whole world of digital marketing. And the big thing that stood out, though, for me, was the whole as the entire industry started to turn its head towards content and started to pay attention to content actually mattering. And being an integral part of that, we’ve worked with some freelancers who wrote site, copy and blog and that sort of thing.
Joel Klettke
And I thought, ultimately, why not me like, this is what I’m good at, what I love to do. So in 2013, I went out of my own and originally was doing most of the content side of things promptly crashed right into the world of conversion copywriting, which scared the hell out of me, didn’t really know it was a thing. Know more about the direct response side of things, which I always thought was a little bit greasy because my exposure to it was like alternative cancer cures and the ugly stuff.
Joel Klettke
But when I came across fellow Canadian and Queen Bee of the conversion world, Joanna Weave, that’s where I really saw the potential to do good with this stuff and that it wasn’t that intimidating, that it was something that I could do and could do. Well, so kind of about a year and a half, two years in sort of really focusing on the conversion side, I was able to get a lot of good traction with that. It was on the back of a project on the conversion side with WP engine, where someone who sat on their board said, hey, I’ve got a little company I advise who just needs a case study.
Joel Klettke
Is that something you do and have a guy you just don’t say no to? Yeah, sure. I’ll figure that out. And that’s where kind of if you trace the origin story of case study, especially all the way back, that’s where the kernel of the idea started.
Gray MacKenzie
So you launched Case 2016?
Joel Klettke
Yes. That always gets up in my mind. We’ve been around over five years at this point. So one of the two, let’s say 2016 to be seen.
Gray MacKenzie
So building that out, what was the initial offer? Build you one case study, I assume one time project. And how different is that process at that point? Because you’ve been copywriting. You already have a good sense for what makes great content. But what’s been the evolution, I guess, from that initial offering to what the service looks like today?
Joel Klettke
Yeah. Initially, the idea was very productised. It was okay. I’ll have a particular format because I didn’t really know any better at the time. I thought I’ll have a particular format and I already knew having done the conversion work, a lot of the questions and insights that we look for are customer story driven anyways. Like what was going on in the business, what made the experience so positive and valuable for them? What kind of ROI are they seeing and how they talk about it. So it was really for me, the reason it made sense beyond the business case for it, which I can also talk about.
Joel Klettke
But these are assets that were hard to do but could be productize. There’s no ownership internally for a lot of companies. And so I thought, Well, originally the idea was I will do kind of a productised service. I will have a sort of set case study, and it will be one at a time. I wasn’t thinking down the road of how did they get buy in for these? And so the complexity of it occurred to me as I started doing it more and more. But originally, the idea was just a product service around a pretty well defined content asset project to project.
Gray MacKenzie
What did that first one look like when you I mean, I’m assuming you structured like, hey, I’m going to go interview your customer. I’m going to have one conversation with them. I’m going to write the draft, send it to you for review, send it to the client or your client for review, Polish it up and publish it. Was that the first iteration or was it simpler or more complex than that?
Joel Klettke
It was more or less like that, right? I did do my homework. I looked at a bunch of case study. I identified what I liked and disliked. Like, I really didn’t like the super high level, just a bullet point list of, like, here’s what we did. But from the beginning, I really did see the potential for telling the story better. I wanted them to be more human assets, which meant an interview was non negotiable. There was no reality in which I was going to go, no, I’ll just interview you and you tell me because number one, I didn’t want to get suited to oblivion.
Joel Klettke
Number two, I want them to be better human. More interesting stories. So the original offer, I first shopped it to my friends and network quietly. I didn’t go, like, here’s, new business. I just kind of said I’m working on this. I’ll give you a really good deal, but I want to kind of fine tune the process. It was through doing that. This came together as well. And my idea, I knew enough to know I didn’t know enough. So originally, the offer was I’ll do an interview with your customer, I’ll write the draft, I’ll get your approval, I’ll get their sign off, I’ll deliver the draft, and off you go within very short order within the process of doing the first few, some things became abundantly clear.
Joel Klettke
Number one, the huge opportunity for the final designed asset, because literally everyone was like, Can you put this in? So that right away I was like, yeah, definitely got to get a design sort of portion of this. But what became readily apparent is that with case study, the hardest part of doing them. I mean, there are lots of hard parts of doing them, but it’s the administrative side in a lot of cases, being on top of persistently following up and checking in and getting that approval.
Joel Klettke
And so again, the pieces started to come together where it’s like, Well, we really need if this thing is going to fly, we’re really going to need to be on top of that sort of project management piece as well. And then before that, too, you kind of realize again, going in. I had kind of just a pretty simplistic brief, but with each successive story, new questions got added to that brief. In terms of what do we really need to know what’s going to make for the best possible story?
Joel Klettke
How do I make sure, for example, that the next call I get on the response when I ask about metrics isn’t going to be you know what? I don’t have any of those. Let me go get them for you. And then I never hear from a person again. So by doing it myself, hands on in the weeds from start to finish, you start to see for yourself why these are so difficult and why the problem that you want to solve exists. And I got to start to engineer the process and the offer more toward the nuances of doing these really well.
Gray MacKenzie
Right. Well, you made two points there that are helpful. And then I’ve got a follow up question of it. But one of the last points that you’re making there is that there’s a big chunk of a lot of the stuff that looks really cool on the outside. That is the workhorse type stuff. It’s like, no, it’s the admin, the project management type stuff. That’s actually a huge pain and huge piece of the problem. And I think oftentimes if you actually get into the details on what makes anything tick, a lot of it is the fundamental stuff.
Gray MacKenzie
It really is a lot of the basic building blocks. It’s not more complex than that in all cases. But the other piece that you mentioned, I love that you came in with a point of view. You had an opinion on how case study should go, and I’d assume that’s a piece of what’s made case study successful has been we’ve got a perspective on what we want case study to look like as a client you don’t design. We’ve got a format that we want to follow and a method that works in our opinion, from what we’ve seen.
Gray MacKenzie
And now we want to go apply that to the businesses who are willing to get in line with the type of case study that you produce. I know there’s more flexibility than that, but coming into a marketplace with a point of view is powerful, too. Yeah. And maybe talk a little bit more about that point of view, too. I’ll let you jump in with whatever thoughts you had there. But also, I’d love to hear kind of what is a great case study looks like in Joel’s opinion.
Joel Klettke
Yeah. That’s where I was going. I think again in the early days, a lot occurred to me, and that was part of what excited me about the opportunity. And what made this business sexy to me is not just these are hard to do assets, and every B to B company on the planet needs them. And there’s not a lot of ownership internally and so on and so forth. But when I looked at a couple of things, how they’re coming together, right? Most case study are boring. They’re narcissistic they’re tough to believe because the people putting them together either never involve the client, or they only cherry pick their very best cases.
Joel Klettke
And don’t give a lot of depth or clarity on how that win was made possible. And so when I was kind of surveying landscape, the stories that I liked best were the stories where the customer was truly at the heart of the customer success story. It was never look at us raw, raw, bullet point list of what we’ve done. It was all about here’s what the customer was going through, what drew them to us here. Our values played out in real life in a story. And so in my mind, what makes a great customer success story if we’re breaking it down kind of section by section, we all know the challenge solution results formula for a lot of people.
Joel Klettke
That’s where it starts and finishes. But the mistake that gets made and the opportunity that’s there is in the challenge section, you don’t just want to talk about what was broken. You want to talk about mistakes. What would happen if this hadn’t gotten solved? Why was this personally frustrating or painful for the individual? We forget that people in B to B are under pressures of their own. A marketing manager has KPIs they need to hit, they have goals they need to reach, and so on. And that’s what people ultimately relate to.
Joel Klettke
In the solution section, everybody talks about the what, but to me, a great story. The solution section is about the why not just what you did? Why did you take that approach? Especially for agencies. Everybody wants to know we did this. We did this. We ran this as a campaign. That’s wonderful. But why did you push the client towards those services and not others? What did you do within that campaign that made it a success? Why did you choose that particular angle and not another? That’s what elite is really interested in.
Joel Klettke
It’s not just what when did you get for someone else, but how does your thinking work? So that when you bring that to me, when you bring that to bear for my account, I’ll see a great result. And then in the results section, everyone loves this sexy metric. Some of my favorite stories we’ve ever done, though, have no metric at all. And that’s because it’s about pains alleviated outcomes achieved. That’s not always numerical, but in the results section. A great story, in my opinion, doesn’t just talk about the result.
Joel Klettke
It talks about the impact, and especially for agencies. The worst results section you can have is like an analytics graph where it’s like, look up to the right. Nobody cares, nobody cares or understands what you’re showing them. The big thing is okay. Let’s say you got a 20% lift in traffic where you got a 100% increase in conversions. What did that make possible for the business? How did it change their day to day? What can they do now that they couldn’t do before? So a real string goes that one layer more to really get into the human side of it and beyond, just kind of the surface level wind, which most companies never do.
Gray MacKenzie
So I’ve been on the other side of case study. I’ve been on both sides looking at we’ve done historically a terrible job with telling the story of client engagement and client wins. That has gotten a lot better in the past year, but a lot of that is used as sales assets. We do very little. We’re starting to push out more stuff, but there’s still a big gap. So looking at hiring case study buddy to come and help us, but also being on the flip side where HubSpot is one of your clients right now.
Gray MacKenzie
And I was just on the other side of a case study for the HubSpot’s Payments product. And that interview conversation very tightly run 30 minutes conversation from case study buddy. I smiled when I saw after HubSpot reached out ask about the case study and then introduced us. Yeah, this is going to be fun to see what the service is like on the other side, but 30 minutes, it was not scripted and robotic, but there’s clearly a script. You guys have a process for what questions are going to get asked and what the follow up questions look like?
Gray MacKenzie
Which someone in my line of work appreciates a lot being the process there. But a lot of questions around, obviously, what was the situation? What were you feeling during that situation? The emotion tied to the situation outcome as well. And then from a results perspective, what does that mean in terms of cost savings? What does that mean in terms of time savings? Was that mean in terms of your ability to go focus elsewhere? And what’s the impact of the time? It’s not just how much time did you save, but what did you actually do with that time?
Gray MacKenzie
It’s like the second order, third order questions that are impactful. So that is a huge tip and takeaway. I think we talked about this when I originally had a conversation with your team from the hiring side, but living through it on the other side, being asked, that question is like, oh, this is cool to see happen on the back end of it. So that piece of kind of how do we get those questions and pull it together? Obviously, you’ve got a script and some training there.
Gray MacKenzie
How do you train or how do you convey that back to, like, what are the practical ways that you give your copywriters and you give your account management team and you give the interview like, each person project management, each person on the case study body team get them looped in so that they are building high converting or high, very effective case study.
Joel Klettke
Yeah, I think importantly, I wouldn’t necessarily call this script. We have a formula. Our formula is BDA before during after, and we have kind of questions that we go to. But one of the things that I hated about most case study and listening to other interviewers because we would have clients over time, parachute interviews that they’ve done, and they’re very wouldn’t. And it’s obvious that it’s like, these are the questions that I planned, and I shall not deviate. We made a decision very early to separate interviewing and writing on the team.
Joel Klettke
We have interviewers who just interview. We have writers who just write it’s not because both sides can’t do it with some bandwidth wins and things like that. But when we look for interviewers, one of the things that we want is that ability to get into the muck of an industry and understand what makes the question meaningful, where to push in, where to pull back within that BDA sort of framework for the whole team. And this is one of the things honestly that we’re continuing to work on, because as we grow, it gets harder and harder to make sure it proliferates through everybody.
Joel Klettke
But one of the things that we look for and try to communicate from the beginning is, hey, as a North Star, we’re trying to tell a human focused impactful story. The customer is always at the center of their experience, is always at the center. Focus means we’re not asking about everything that happened. We’re trying to zero in on a particular aspect, which makes for a much better story. And then empathy means that we’re trying to get captured the full 360 view of that. What did it look like?
Joel Klettke
What did it feel like? What did it make possible? Part of the challenge that we have with so many different roles, taking part, the account manager, the project manager, the interviewer before an interviewer even gets on a call. The Am, the PM have touched that project. We are hiring towards AMS who understand the world of storytelling and can look at a brief, identify a gap, push in and make sure that we’re asking the right questions. One of the things that we’re working on between the M and PM team, and it’s a constant working process is how do we make that interviewee feel as prepared as possible to tell a really great story?
Joel Klettke
So, for example, we were trying to make a really concerted effort to get our clients when they’re making the ask and then our PM team when they’re making the introductions, saying we would really love it if you could speak to these elements of your store. So that interview me comes in confident knowing this is the type of thing I might be asking. These are metrics that I might reference when it gets down to the creation team. There it’s about again, we set a vision, we set a North Star.
Joel Klettke
This is what a great piece looks like. This is what the right level of detail looks like. Everything up till then, from the brief to the way that the PMS and Ms engage has been oriented around, how do we make sure we get not only the detail but the context? So that when we pass this off the interviewer, who can do what they do best and the writer can take that great interview and all of the rich detail pulled out of it and turn it into a story that’s worth telling and worth reading.
Joel Klettke
So it is a concerted effort. It gets harder to do as we grow, but we have a lot of checks and balances throughout each stage to make sure that we’re not dropping context off a cliff. And to close this thought out, that can be challenging because the reality is, in the case study side of things, most of our customers, even the big ones, are relatively unaware. They think case study are case study, a case study? Why don’t you just ask the same stock question? But then when they see the potential for something focused and strategic aligned with the business goal, rich in context, then they start to get it.
Joel Klettke
And then we start to get better briefs and have better outcomes and so on.
Gray MacKenzie
I have a couple of very practical questions to ask. One is around the medium you guys do. Obviously the text, you can put it on your blog, you can have a PDF, you can have a short snippet, you get short video or long video. What is most popular right now? Obviously, video is expensive to do, but are more expensive to do. But has there been a big rise in the number of companies who want to go video or is Tech still the winner?
Joel Klettke
So we launched as a written only service. I think that’s really important to say we’re late comers to video, we’ve got a video team. Now we’re continuing to grow and deepen our offering there. So for us, the bulk of the work we do is still on the written end. I think there is a misconception. I love video, and I think it’s amazing, but there are times when a written asset is simply better. If you want to get into the guts of a story, the guts of execution.
Joel Klettke
A video testimonial is wonderful when you want just the customer’s perspective. Here the accolades hear their experience. When you want to communicate what you did as an agency as part of that story or what you did as a software company as part of that story, a written asset allows for a depth that you would need a five minute video for. And in that case, I can promise you nobody’s watching a video longer than two and a half minutes in most cases. So we have seen, especially through the pandemic and explosion in demand for the remote video side of things.
Joel Klettke
I think people are realizing, depending on your brand, remote video can still be pretty polished, but the raw aesthetic as well, even if it’s not for some brands, it makes a ton of sense when you think of the coaching space. When you think of markets where you serve freelancers or different industries where you don’t need that high production on location shoot video doesn’t have to be that expensive, and it can be a wonderful medium. So we’ve seen a big increase in video. But what I would say and what’s encouraging to me, because this is how the company has changed and kind of what we’re hanging our hat on.
Joel Klettke
So whether it’s the tail wagging the dog or not, I don’t know, but we are seeing an enormous increase in people kind of recognizing that. Hey, these aren’t just bottom of funnel sales assets. They’re not just give the PDF to the sales team or throw it on the blog. People are starting to recognize these can be full funnel assets. We can use an audiogram for lead acquisition. We can use a video in our cold outreach. We can use a one sheet on social media, or we can use a narrative version of the study on our site.
Joel Klettke
And so if there’s anything that we’re seeing, it’s definitely an uptrend in the video side of things. The written is not going away. It’s growing as well. But we are seeing more companies look at doing more formats because these are hard won assets. There’s a lot of moving parts. If you’re going to do them anyways, make it an investment and get as much collateral from it as you possibly can to use everywhere. So we’re seeing a lot more companies kind of choosing multiple formats as well.
Gray MacKenzie
That makes sense. This is not related to I mean, this is related to your experience in copywriting. This is probably more for the copywriting clients that you got. Is there a hierarchy of copywriting? We’ll take an agency as an example. Like, the first thing you nail is your home page, then your services page, then your welcome email, then you’re about then your case study. Like where do case study fit in the hierarchy? And what are the things? If you go to ZenPilot 90% of the stuff on the main core pages I wrote, I enjoy writing.
Gray MacKenzie
I’m not a conversion copywriter. If you were to come in and say, hey, we should fix this up. Do you have a standard order that you look at solving those issues in?
Joel Klettke
I think it’s less a hierarchy and more a conveyor belt because you can have, for example, a wonderful homepage get leads in the door. But let’s say you’re a software company and you have no nurture at all. Well, that’s wonderful. One part’s working. The next part is completely broken. So when I think through it, when I’m working with clients, I try to diagnose where the conveyor belt is broken and focused there. But specific to agencies. The front end site is a huge deal. I mean, there are companies you reach a certain point where your brand name carries you forward.
Joel Klettke
And at some point people want to work with you because of who you are and what you’ve done and what you work on. And that’s great. I’ve worked on a lot of agency sites. I’ve consulted to a lot of agencies, and I would say the three most critical pages without fail every single time. The home page is obviously important because it’s where you point your flag. I promise you agencies who are listening to this. If you go to your analytics and you bring it up and you look at what’s the second most visited page on the whole site, the vast majority is going to be our about US page vast majority.
Joel Klettke
And people go there. And why do people go there? And why do we spend so much time working on those pages that’s where your client figures out, not just okay. You’re an agent. They figure out they like you. And if they see you mirroring the values they have, and if they see you having the proof that it takes to get them over the lines. For example, when I worked on Era, we spent a lot of time on nailing that about US page because that was the place.
Joel Klettke
Yeah, the homepage is where you make it obvious who you are, what you do, what you’re about. But the About US page is really more an about you page for the client. It’s why we are the best fit to serve you. So the home page, the About US page. And then when you get into your services pages, I mean, the contact page. There’s a lot of, like, shoelace tripping that happens there, making things like either needlessly complicated or not. Vetting leads well enough. So I’ll spend a fair amount of time on that front when you get into the services pages, though being aware of how aware your customer is makes a huge difference, because let’s say you’re an SEO agency.
Joel Klettke
Odds are, unless you’re serving small businesses, you don’t need a section saying, what is SEO they know, right? It’s more about how do you execute that? How do you take care of the client through that what makes the way that you approach that unique or best for the audience that you serve. What I will say now, and this is I’m wearing my bias on my sleeve, but because I get to live in both worlds, on the conversion side and on the case study side of things, social proof is the ultimate differentiator in that regard.
Joel Klettke
Like other agencies can steal your headlines, they can steal your design, they can steal your service in a world that’s saturated. And everyone’s saying we’re an extension of your team, a story that shows that is going to beat the pants off an agency that says that every single time. And so a really critical area of an agency site is the results page. There’s a company called Client Boost. Go look at how they let people filter their case study because I’m not just saying it because I recommend it to them.
Joel Klettke
It’s really smart. They don’t just have bins or whatever. It’s like. Show me companies who were really small or had a small budget or are unicorns now or whatever. So I would say start on the front end because that’s your identity. But I honestly believe right after that point. If you’ve got leads coming in the social proof side of things, especially for an agency, that’s where the rubber hits the road in terms of differentiation and really getting people lined up to contact you.
Gray MacKenzie
Client Boost is we make sure we like those in the show notes, too. That’s an awesome example. We’ve had Jonathan on the podcast before, but yeah, they collect so many reviews. It’s absurd. The ability to filter it down and find a bookable. Stuff is really helpful. One of the things that is undervalued about that approach, too, is that takes a lot of the heavy lifting off of your sales team. This agency came from there an ecommerce that is 40 people, and they came from Asana to look up.
Gray MacKenzie
This agency had a process problem and we fixed their process as part of that clickable. There’s pains. There’s agency size, there’s agency industry, there’s a new geography, and a lot of that right now is on the shoulders of our sales team to know what pieces to prescribe at which stage in the process. Oh, here’s the agency. That’s like that versus having all of that public and all developed. It becomes a lot easier for clients just to go find that stuff on their own, which is a better prospects to go find it on their own, which is a better experience.
Gray MacKenzie
You’re stress on the about page. Here’s the next business for you. About page, buddy. We need to work on the name a little bit, but that would kill everyone stress. Is there a more stressful page to write than your about page? We did web design at our agency for a number of years and everyone stressed about the about page.
Joel Klettke
Oh, yeah, because you stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back. You’re like, what do I say about myself? They’re hard to do because you almost need to be an arm’s length from yourself. And that’s why my conversion work. For example, yes, I talk to the boardroom, I get in with the market. I do internal interviews. That’s still very important to me. I want to understand the perspective of the company, but you are who your customers say you are, and it’s good that you have goals and you want to evolve that and we incorporate that.
Joel Klettke
But if you’re stuck on your about page, the place to start is not the blinking cursor. It’s close words or close WordPress or close whatever. Go talk to customers and ask them what made you choose us. What did you find exceptional about working with us? If you were telling other people about us? The great thing is, if I was to ask someone to recommend their agency, why did you choose the agency? They’re not going to rattle off a list of 20 reasons they’re going to have to.
Joel Klettke
They’re going to say they communicate really well, and we just love the experience they had in Fintech, for example. Great. Your customers distill down your value offering automatically on their own. Naturally, go cherry pick that. How do they talk about it? And that’s a good way to get started about us. Page side of things and further to your point as well in terms of enabling sales. The thing is, stories are ammunition. When we’re in a position to say someone comes in, a lead, comes in and says, I’m really interested in moving to click.
Joel Klettke
But I’m worried about the migration times. You know what? Actually, we just dealt with a customer very similar to you. Similar situation. We were able to migrate them in six months. A story is going to again beat the pants off. In that case, a metric area or migration is, on average, faster. That’s fine. But to be honest, I know Tom at X Company, and we just did a very simple migration. Here’s the story that is ammunition for the sales team and further, too, right in the agency world, especially the thing that people are always critical of communication reporting was I kept in the loop.
Joel Klettke
Did I feel like they had my back? Do I feel like they went to bat for me? Stories are always going to be better at proving that to be true than anything you can say as a founder or an owner or a sales rep or a customer success team.
Gray MacKenzie
I’ve got two last questions for you here. First one is around tooling, any tools that stand out for you guys that are not somewhat lesser known tools? Not that we use Google for email or whatever, but are there any tools that according to your process in terms of it, could be how you’re recording interviews? It could be what you’re using for transcriptions project manager, any of those platforms?
Joel Klettke
Yeah. Ironically, we’re in the process of overhauling a lot of our delivery stacks. So we’re automating and changing some things. I’d say there’s some tools that are especially for the interview side of things facilitating the transcription side. I mean, we’re in love with the script. Fantastic tool. The ability for our writers to be able to select parts of text and drag it, and you’ll be able to listen back and for our transcription is to go in and be able to make text changes and all that. And even as we progress into video, to have the ability for someone who is not necessarily tech savvy to go in and make cuts and say these are the best responses.
Joel Klettke
The best takes and then pass to the video team or whatever. The script is so incredibly versatile. So we do a lot of work in there. Beyond that, the stack, it’s nothing super proprietary or special. We’re certainly working. I think on our end, like I say, to automate and do some more kind of tech enablement for the team because we’ve just grown to the point that that’s necessary. But I’d say Descript, especially is one that we really like.
Gray MacKenzie
That’s helpful. I know the script is not super old, but for as long as it’s been around, I think you’re the first person who’s brought it up on the podcast, so that’s a great recommendation.
Joel Klettke
The team there knows what they’re doing. And like I said, for me, the ability to visually edit audio and video is magic.
Gray MacKenzie
Yeah. Second one is around. Where do people go? What do they do? So first piece is for someone who wants to learn about case study buddy, case study, buddy. Com obviously. Is there any specific page you point people towards or anything that they should specifically check out on the site?
Joel Klettke
Yeah, I would say again, the sites in the process of being overhauled as we grow. I would say the whys page gives a good kind of sense of why we are passionate about this and why we’re specialized and why that makes sense for a lot of companies not having to wrangle multiple freelancers or deal with that unpredictability and that sort of thing. But two, I would say probably the best place to see how our brains work is in the blog. We write a lot about issues you don’t even know.
Joel Klettke
You have yet with customer success stories that I can guarantee or crash into if you decide to make them a priority. So those would be places that I’d look. We have our process on the written studies and video studies pages, so that’ll give you a good sense from a high level of how we work. But I would say the blog is if you really want to be good at this stuff or you want to see, well, how complex can it be like, how much really is there to know?
Joel Klettke
I promise you, you’ll find some insight that surprises you on the blog, so I biased. But I would say check that out.
Gray MacKenzie
You’ll learn something for sure on point people one in their place, which is Twitter at Joel Klettke on Twitter. Congratulations on your first name, last name, but you’ve got in your bio, pray for competitors after you hire me. They’ll need it, which I know has been taken and repurposed by many people many times over. I’m sure at this point, but you’re pretty active on Twitter and a good follow there as well.
Joel Klettke
Is there anywhere else you’d point people every so often when I’m not currently drowning and growing the business as it is. I do try to share on LinkedIn and I have a newsletter as well. It’s Linked from Twitter. I haven’t been as active on the newsletter, but my philosophy towards all of those channels has always been just give it away. Share as much as I can. I rarely try to sell anything. My mentality has always been if I can show people how I think either they’ll go do something better on their own or they’ll think I might be a good person to help them do it.
Joel Klettke
So I’d say probably LinkedIn or the newsletter also pretty decent places where I try to share useful things and be a useful human.
Gray MacKenzie
First, I’ve talked around renaming this podcast from Agency Journey to Agency Operators and intentionally kind of shifting this to very much what’s the operations component of the business. But your newsletter name is one of my favorite newsletter names. Isn’t it legitimately useful? The newsletter is called at some point in time.
Joel Klettke
Yes, I don’t know I think I’ve called it.
Gray MacKenzie
I don’t think it’s the formal name of the newsletter, but I think the call to action, maybe from your site was like, Join Joel’s legitimately useful newsletter or something.
Joel Klettke
It’s likely I have neglected, neglected that stuff. I hate newsletters where it’s like, every single thing is like, buy my course, find my thing. I’ve always been of the mentality. For me, it’s like kind of the pen pal inbox where it’s like, I go there when I’m like, I have something I want to teach people or share or an idea. And I genuinely want people to write back to it. And when people actually do, I’m like, this is the best. It’s great. So, yeah, it’s not that I never saw anything.
Joel Klettke
I do believe in what I know and whatever. But most of the time, I’m just trying to help people do this stuff better because I think the world benefits when communication gets better all around.
Gray MacKenzie
For sure, that’s a great way to wrap it up. Cool. Thanks. Coming on. I appreciate your time today. Be willing to share with us as well.
Joel Klettke
Yes, yours. Thank you. Bye.
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