Jeremy Weisz 14:09
I’m curious, Dennis for you when you were younger, what did you want to be when you grow up? I know you work for American Airlines you work for Yahoo you know London School. Business what did you want to do?
Dennis Yu 15:02
I wanted to be a professional distance athlete, I want us to run marathons. Yeah, I wanted to run for Nike. And I cut out the swooshes off of the shoes of my teammates and put them on the outside of a shoe box, I flew to the Louvre in Paris, where the actual Nike winged goddess of victory is two pictures of myself in front of it. I read the annual reports of Nike, everything about Nike, I knew. And my dream was I would run for Nike. And I sent my shoe box and I sent my fastest times and as a 14-year-old, I had run 16 and changed for the 5k, which is pretty fast. And I got this kind letter back from Shelly Bridges, the intern coordinator, and sorry, Dennis, we can’t sponsor you as an athlete, you need to make these world-class qualifying times you got to run 12 minutes with 5k, like 12 minutes, that’s faster than four minutes. Well, I can’t do that for three miles at less than four minutes per mile. No one in the world has run those times, Shelly this year. And as of this year, the world record, of course, is faster than that. But no one in the world this year has run those types. And so I became very disillusioned. And then, long story short, eventually got Nike as a client, they paid me millions of dollars for analytics. And it was way better than if I was an athlete running for Nike, because a bunch of my friends were running for Nike, and they would get injured and they would constantly be on the road, and you win a race, you make a couple thousand, it’s not a glamorous thing. It is not what the 14-year-old dentists thought it was. And when I visited Nike for the first time, at their headquarters, I expected all these athletes to be running around and doing athlete sorts of things. But it was a big corporate office thing with meeting rooms and shareholders like all the kinds of corporate apparatus you’d expect, and it was just like, oh, that’s not what I want it to actually. Thank you. I’m glad I didn’t do that.
Jeremy Weisz 16:56
What did you think of Sherdog?
Dennis Yu 17:00
I think that Phil Knight’s an enigmatic character. And anyone who wants to write a biography, we’ll find different angles. You could have a Walter Isaacson, just like for Steve Jobs, write compelling books and tell the stories and they’re great. And there’s so many stories that have been written about the founding of Nike and about Phil Knight, but nothing is as powerful as the actual autobiography, the words coming from the founder himself. So no slam against Shoe Dog or other books that are of that genre of founder biographies. But I like watching Phil, on these YouTube videos where he’s giving lectures at Stanford. I like reading like Marriott by J. Willard Marriott who founded The Marriott Chain, or Grinding It Out by the founder of McDonald’s. Ray, who actually didn’t found McDonald’s, he popularized it. Or Lee Lacocca wrote, wrote his autobiography and Lacocca. You can still look at the biographies. But I think autobiographies are just way more powerful.
Jeremy Weisz 18:10
Any recent favorites books?
Dennis Yu 18:17
I would still go back to Steve Jobs. And well, that was actually written by Isaacson. It wasn’t Steve. I just love reading people’s stories like this one. This is Josh Nelson. And he’s telling his story, and how he built a seven-figure plumbing business. And it’s not because he’s trying to sell services. It’s because he’s speaking from his own experience. I just love people who talk about their own experience. It’s authentic. It’s theirs. Dan Ulin, built a almost seven-figure coaching business single-handedly as a solopreneur. I think that’s absolutely fantastic. I want to know how he did that is one person. I’ve got a ton of people on my team. And I feel like I can’t get enough done. How can one person do all that? So I want to know what he does. What’s his magic, right? And that only comes through when it’s the founder himself. Not ChatGPT, not someone interviewing them on Zoom, which can help. You know, folks like you, Jeremy can guide them but your job is to pull the secret sauce, you said green elves, whatever out of them and structure it.
Jeremy Weisz 19:28
I know you’ve done a lot of co-creation of content. And so I’d love to hear some of your favorites that you’ve worked with in co-creating content.
Dennis Yu 19:36
I was just talking about Dan Ulin. So Dan Ulin in LA and this guy’s an enigmatic character speaks multiple languages is just a savant magician, professional, musician, coaches super high net worth people which can imagine dealing with people in that world. And he flew out here to see me in Vegas a couple months ago, and we were up till 4 a.m., that first night, he was up to five and he saw the sun come up. And the thing that impressed me so much was we were here in this podcast studio, just talking about the behind-the-scenes of what it’s like working with super high net worth parents and the fears and dreams and pressure that comes with that. And what’s it like having the staff, if you will do these people, they build bubbles around themselves to protect their time, because a lot of them are celebrities. And so very private in a certain way, but seeing how they operate, see how they organize was killer, because technically, we were there to film videos, to help tell his story, and put a book out. But I just got so lost in the moment that I didn’t realize that so much time went by. And then we spent the whole weekend like that. I think we met again at noon the next day. And then we went out to eat at Korean barbecue, and we sang karaoke. And we’ll troop who’s one of our young adults in our training program. And he has an agency serving down. So he hung out. And we did the same thing the next night stayed up until for like, you ever have those wild college sorts of days where you just go deep and you lose track of time, even though you’ve got like family responsibilities and things like that. And I love those kinds of serendipitous moments, because it wasn’t planned. I was having a fantastic time, like hanging out with good friends. Even though that was only the second time we ever met in person. We met via Zoom or whatever, like we’re meeting in Zoom, which is not the same thing. And at the same time we’re doing business. And so when you have that synergy where you’re with people you really like you’re really connecting and learning. It’s you’re creating content the same time, I think other people can feel like they’re coming along. And that can be done without a $6,000 camera and a fancy studio that can be done because of the nature of the quality of the ingredients that you have of the people you have of the preparation that’s in place. And I think people see that.
Jeremy Weisz 22:19
I mentioned Dennis, obviously, you built analytics at Yahoo as an early search engine engineer. I’d love to hear what you learned from working at Yahoo.
Dennis Yu 22:31
Well, you would think, at least I would have thought coming into Yahoo, even in the early days, that they would have their act together. Right, you’re thinking, I know, it’s early that they have the search engine. This is before Google. And I’m supposed to build this analytics to central database showing what’s going on, like how much traffic do we have across all of our properties. At that time, we didn’t have that many properties, now it’s you know, mail shopping, search, finance, sports, automotive, whatever dating. And I thought, well, there’s got to be a central database already. I figured, there’s some kind of like, centralized code check-in process. And it turns out that every one of these teams like the team that ran mail, the team that ran search, the team that ran dating, or horoscopes, all built their own separate little silo. So I have the engineering skills to work with huge databases. But the skill that I actually needed was being able to build relationships with each of these groups that were building their own product, because why would the people at Yahoo Mail, want to give me the time of day, they’re busy doing all the stuff they’re trying to do? Why would they want to give me a feed? So do I then bully them and say, well, if you don’t do this, I’m gonna tattle on you. Because the executives need the big report. And if you don’t give us the data, then they’re gonna get mad. And I’m gonna have Dan R., Dan Rosensweig, who’s our COO send them a nasty note to you that you don’t cooperate. No, I couldn’t do that, I had to play nice. So I had to take these other engineers out to lunch. And just be really nice to try to convince them to work with me. And the folks at Yahoo Sports would release some new fantasy sports product or whatever. And then that would break my system, because anytime their system changed, it would break my system, because they didn’t tell me right, because my system is counting on certain data to come through in a certain way to be able to do the analytics overall across the whole ecosystem. And then I had to go chase them down, saying, hey, you guys changed your database, our feed broke, can you really help me? So I would go play ultimate frisbee with these guys. Just to build friendships. And what I learned at Yahoo was, we did some really cool technical things like we built a database that was beyond the limit of commercial databases. You couldn’t even open the file. Dr. Jeremy, if you were there, right? We had to build our own operating system to handle this because the data volumes are so big. But aside from the technical feats, the most interesting part was how do you build relationships with people who are the top in the internet like that. The guy to cubes for me invented PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, David Follow, I would see him two or three times a day, he was the richest man in the world under 40. I’d be peeing, and he would walk up to the, you know, we’d be in the men’s bathroom and pee at the urinal next to me and look at me and say, hey, Dennis, how was your weekend? And I’m thinking, I’m taking a pee next to the richest man in the world under 40. What do I say to him? I ran a 10k. What did you do? David, you know. And so just, it’s weird, because when I first got to Yahoo, I was intimidated, I thought, they’re gonna expose me as being incompetent, they’re gonna kick me out immediately because I am not at the level of these people who wrote the code that powers the internet, they’re going to realize I’m a fraud. So I will try to avoid these people. But then I couldn’t do my job, because I had to pull all the data from all these places and make this centralized analytics platform that also helps serve ads and this kind of thing. And after a few months of that, some of these other people would come up to me some of the most respected engineers on the planet. And they would say, hey, Dennis, I’ve got an issue with this database, can you take a look at it? And let me know what you think? And I’d look at it and say, well, obviously, you’re going to do this, you’re going to organize your database this way. And you should join this way. This is the way you should write that query. Like, I’m thinking, why are you asking me this obvious question is such an easy question, right? And then I realized, wait, these are people who are world-class in their particular thing. But then when they come look at my thing, which is data and analytics, stuff that looks really easy to me, is actually a big deal to them. So I just took for granted a bunch of things that because I’d worked with so many huge databases, and I knew how to compile data and build models, that I just had this blind spot, right. And I think all of us have this where the thing that we do, like, you as a Doctor of Chiropractic, I’m sure there’s things that are very mundane and obvious to you, that are not to other people that are magical, but you don’t realize it’s magical. So that just kind of struck me at Yahoo, that all these other people would want. And I felt like a fraud. They come and ask me these questions. Hey, what do you think about this data model? Hey, can we analyze what’s going on here with these ads? Hey, how should we tweak these campaigns? And I would see instantly what the answer would be seemed obvious to me. And I didn’t want to say you’re an idiot, I can obviously see what you need to do to in the campaigns, your quality score is too low. And here’s why. Right?
Jeremy Weisz 22:31
Yeah, I love that. Really building relationships. And also, eventually realizing everyone has their thing and their special skill. It almost feels like magic to someone else. But to you, that’s normal. Talk about SEO for a second, obviously, being an early search engine engineer. What do you see as right now is a landscape of SEO and how people can improve their SEO?
Dennis Yu 28:05
Well, before he hit record, we did a search on your name. And we see that the number one result for your name is you. Thank goodness, you own your own name. But it’s your LinkedIn. And then the second one is Rise25/about, which is yours, too. But Google doesn’t know who you are that well, because Google is based on this, all these entities, which is put together in this framework called the Knowledge Graph, right, which is like all these objects you can think of as like a giant molecule, if you will, right. And so I think about Dr. Jeremy Weisz a Rise25, and your co-founder, Jonathan, these are all different objects, different nouns, right? If there’s not a website for that object, or your personal brand, then it makes it more difficult for Google to understand who you are, even though Google is super wise. And they have all this AI and Bard and whatnot. And my view, as a search engine engineer, is very different than the view of the people that try to do SEO, because my job is to protect the search results from the people trying to trick us. So I have a very different view. And I would argue that if you look at it from my view, which is that of the search engine, you’re going to completely demystify all the nonsense about SEO, from the people try to trick the engine, which are basically scammers. If you’re trying to trick the search engine, you are a scammer. We do not have the same financial interests. You’re not paying us, you’re getting someone to pay you to do SEO. The people that we are friendly with are those who have a shared economic interest. You’re paying money for ads. We’re gonna build systems that will help you out because we win together. So Google and SEOs are basically, the police which is us and the thief’s, which are these people selling SEO. So if you want to win in the world of SEO, don’t be a thief. Be honest. Share your stories. That’s why Google, they changed their search guidelines to EEAT. So a lot of people in the world of SEO have freaked out because Google changed from EAT to EEAT, which is that first E they added was experience. So when you share your Experience, and then Expertise, Authority, Trust, which is the rest of it, then that’s a real signal. That’s not something that you can pay somebody to just fabricate using ChatGPT just make up all these web pages using AI. Can’t do that, because it doesn’t have real experience. Unless you’re lying. You can hire someone to do your podcast to be able to pull the experience out. But what the search engines are looking for is real experience. Not how many title tags and H1 and meta descriptions and sitemaps and weird, SEO technobabble, they’re not looking for that. If you use WordPress, you’re already 90% of the way there with what any SEO person could do. The real difference is you’ve got to create real content that other people share. Meaning that’s what drives links. The core of SEO is inbound links by other people linking to you, not what you put on your website, which you can’t hire someone. So if I wanted to help you, let’s say you run a chiropractic office, and I wanted to help you more patients in Chicago, if I’m not well connected in Chicago. And if I don’t know, personally about chiropractic, I can’t help you with SEO, because I’ve got to have topical authority, and geographic relevancy. So the world of SEO is such that you can’t hold these people want to argue with me, but I’ve never lost this argument 30 years. You cannot sell SEO services. As much as people want to buy it. People sell stuff that people want to buy, you cannot sell SEO services, because SEO is the result. So let’s say Dr. Jeremy, I am overweight. I’ve lost 54 pounds in the last year, right? I want to lose another 20. Can I pay you? Can I just pay you $1,000 a month and you’ll just lose weight for me. And all I do is just pay you my I don’t have to do anything. You’ll just lose weight for me, right?
Jeremy Weisz 32:13
Maybe a tough one.
Dennis Yu 32:15
Yeah, but you’re an expert at weight loss, even says on your website, you even told me that you’re the world’s best weight loss coach, and weight loss experts. I’m just going to pay you for weight loss, right? Oh, wait, I have to do something for weight loss. You mean I have to eat a certain way I have to sleep? I have to, you know, exercise? Yeah. So with SEO, someone can coach you on it. Someone can coach you on the podcast, or can build your website and all that. But just like with weight loss, it’s even if you have someone really wants to help you, there’s stuff that only you can do. Right? As much as I want to help other people with SEO, as long as you can contribute that experience, happy clients, that kind of thing, then we have something to work with, right? And every agency should know this, but most don’t because they’re just selling a package because it’s driven by a salesperson just trying to sell what people want.
Jeremy Weisz 33:10
Before we hit record, you said something about everything’s SOPs. Yep. So talk about how you use SOPs in your business.
Dennis Yu 33:23
I like Gordon Ramsay, for example, right? I’ve eaten in his restaurants all over the place. And you ever watch these food shows, maybe of Rachael Ray, or whoever you like to watch. And I’m one of those where I see a great meal, I will get the recipe, I’ll order all the items from Whole Foods and have it delivered or whatnot. And then I’ll make it I’ll actually follow the recipe. And most of the time, I can get that same result. Of course, it’s a lot more effort than it looks on TV because you have to chop the things and all this preparing. But I’ve discovered that any kind of results can be traced back to an SOP. And in the world of digital marketing everything is driven by an SOP. And everything I’ve ever done has been driven by an SOP. Because if I’ve done it, I tried to see if I can replicate that result at least three times. And I turn that into a checklist of 12345. And then I give it to someone else saying okay, here’s how I use an SOP to be able to rank on somebody’s name, or how to drive more leads for a plumbing company or how to run Facebook ads to drive a particular result. Here’s the checklist I used. Now, you Dr. Jeremy, go follow that checklist. And if you’re stuck, come back and ask me but only asked me if you get stuck. And so this idea of learn to teach, which is, as you’ve discovered a pattern that works you put into an SOP is something that my whole life has been built around. And maybe it’s because I was into math and these technical kinds of things that are all driven by frameworks and formulas. But I think everything’s an SOP. And I think that if you want a repeatable result, if there is no SOP behind it, what are you going to do? I’ve flown six and a half million miles. And I know that there’s an SOP that that pilot, the last flight I was on two days ago, two days ago, there was a pilot who clearly was old, older in a good way, like, 60 something. And I know that every pilot, even if they flown their entire career, they know it like the back of their hand or whatever. They still go through that preflight checklist, right. But there is a 20-year-old or 20-something-year-old to look at a kid, you look like 21. And it was his first time flying. And so the captain made an announcement and he said, Hey, everybody, here’s so and so this is his first time flying, he just got out of flight school, this is his very first flight…
Jeremy Weisz 35:41
Is that really what you want to hear as a passenger. I got to get off, I’m gonna catch them next one.
Dennis Yu 35:48
But then the captain said, but you know what you wouldn’t have known unless I told you. And then I’m pretty sure he didn’t say this. But I’m pretty sure that as we were flying with a two-hour flight from Dallas, that the copilot in first officer, the kid was doing most of the flying while the captain was watching, right, just making sure there’s no mistakes. Because when you have a long flight, the flight goes through different handoff zones as you go between air traffic control centers, right. So you have to coordinate that communication. Otherwise, you could like run into another plane or some nonsense. And so we made it to Vegas. And as we were landing, we landed with a hard bump. And then when we were getting off the plane, that young, First Officer, that young pilot was there standing there, as we’re getting off the jet bridge, and I said, did you land that plane? And he sheepishly smiled and said, yeah, it was me. So we had a good laugh about that, because he did land the plane. We didn’t die. But maybe gotten nervous. Like he didn’t have the kind of fine touch that someone who’s done it thousands of times, but he still did it. According to the SOP, we didn’t crash and die, right. So that’s the way I view it. We’re training up thousands of young adults in digital marketing, they’re following SOPs, maybe they won’t land the plane as smoothly as I will. But they’re still gonna land the plane. And that’s what counts.
Jeremy Weisz 37:11
Dennis, first of all, thanks for sharing your journey and stories. I have one last question. Before I ask it, I just want to encourage people to check out blitzmetrics.com to learn more, you have lots of great resources, there’s courses, there’s dollar a day, I was watching a bunch of videos that you have on YouTube as well. So check that out. My last question is tech stack. You’re a technical guy. I love to hear some of your favorite software and apps that you love.
Dennis Yu 37:41
Yeah. Well, there’s so many depending on what you’re trying to do. It’s like asking a technician for all the tools in their toolbox, I’ll tell you a few of them. So I use Boomerang for Gmail as a way to keep track of messages. So I never lose track of a thing. We have Basecamp for project management, storing all these different tasks, everything gets assigned out, I don’t believe the mind is good for storage, because you’re gonna forget, the mind is for processing. So I have a project management system with Basecamp, and I always assigned something out to someone else to own it, so I don’t have to own it. If there’s no single owner of a particular project, it doesn’t get done. So that’s just something I’ve learned, you must have a clear owner. And because of that, we have other tools that tie into this accountability. So all of our workers, they use Timecamp, which is integrated with Basecamp. So all the tasks they do are tracked with the time, some are paid hourly, some are paid salary, but either way we track the time, which, in a remote workforce where people are working virtually, they don’t have to show up to an office, they don’t have to work a particular shift. But we still have to have accountability. We have weekly status reports. And if you don’t have your weekly status report, then there’s no way to sort of have the safety mechanism to make sure that everything’s going according to plan. And the way we do project management ties in with the way that we train. So we use LearnDash as our learning management system that integrates with WordPress, we have Infusionsoft as our email marketing system. We have as our favorite WordPress, plugins, LearnDash, or not LearnDash that is a WordPress plugin. We have a Rankmath, which is for SEO of the posts. So every post is trying to rank for a particular keyword Link Whisperer. I use Descripts as like the Swiss Army knife of video does everything like 15, 20 different things even like deep fake even correcting things. I can take a podcast from 2023 and have me say 2024, because it does things like that. We use LeadsBridge to be able to push our CRM data back to Facebook and Google and to other sources so that the ad systems can optimize. We have customers that AI which is a pixel that on the website. When someone comes to the website 30% of the time they can find their email address, even if they’re anonymous, and then send them an AI-driven email that’s personalized. That’s cool. That’s using OpenAI’s APIs. I love using ChatGPT. It’s got dally integrated. So it generates images, I pay the $20 a month for the pro version. There’s a lot of tools I use. But it’s not the tools, it’s the framework, the more tools you have, the more important it is to have a process to tie these components together. So the process is more important, it’s more important to have a Honda Accord, where everything’s the transmission engine, all this stuff is designed well to work together than it is to say, I’ll take a Lamborghini engine, Porsche brakes, Ferrari whatever, like you if you have a pile of best-of-breed parts, and you try to Frankenstein them together. It’s not as good as having a system that was designed all these components work well together and most people will try to follow us on any particular single tool and find it doesn’t work because they haven’t integrated in the process with all the other tools in their people. So we call that PPP people process platform. SOP comes before the tool. I’ll just say that.
Jeremy Weisz 41:00
Yep. I love it. Dennis, thank you, everyone check out blitzmetrics.com more episodes of the podcast. Dennis, we’ll see you next time. Thanks.
Dennis Yu 41:08
Thank you, Jeremy. Appreciate you.
