Kate Bradley Chernis is the Founder & CEO of Lately, the only social media management platform that creates content FOR you with the power of A.I. View a 60 second sneak peek here: https://youtu.be/RlbRiAwwBiQ. As a former marketing agency owner, Kate initially created the idea for Lately out of spreadsheets for then-client, Walmart, who saw a 130% ROI, year-over-year for three years. Prior to founding Lately, Kate served 20 million listeners as Music Director and on-air host at Sirius/XM. She’s also an award-winning radio producer, engineer and voice talent with 25 years of national broadcast communications, brand-building, sales and marketing expertise.
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Narrator
At a crossroads of uncertainty and opportunity. How do you navigate forward? This podcast focuses on making smart choices in a rapidly changing world. We investigate the challenges of being at a crossroads and finding opportunities that arise out of disruption. Listen in on future forward conversations with the brightest luminaries, movers and shakers. Let's navigate forward together and create what's next.
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Lisa Thee
Welcome everyone, to the Navigating for podcast. My name is Lisa Thee. I'll be your host today. One of my favorite activities in life is collecting expert and thought leaders and innovators, and I'm excited to be sharing one of my favorite ones with you today. I'm really excited to introduce Kate and bring her into the conversation. Kate is an awesome artificial intelligence software company founder recovering from XM Radio and just somebody that I think makes innovation so relatable and accessible to people. And we're really thrilled to be talking to you today. Kate, thank you so much for joining us.
00;00;58;02 - 00;01;23;28
Kate Churnis
Thank you so much. I put on lipstick just for this occasion, by the way, first time in like six months, because I was like, I think she's going to be wearing lipstick, too. So. Oh, I can totally relate to that, because as a female founder myself of an AI startup, I have to lux it's homeless or camera ready and there is nothing in between.
00;01;24;01 - 00;01;49;04
Kate Churnis
And I'm not going to tell you which percentage I live in on any given day, but it may slant more towards needing public assistance. You know what's so funny about that is so before all this, we've been a dispersed team from the beginning and working from home and Zoom has been our best friend for ages. And you know what was cool of me being warts and all, even in my wardrobe, is now like, everybody's doing it and I'm pissed.
00;01;49;04 - 00;02;15;21
Kate Churnis
I'm like, Guys, this is my mojo. You know, I got to come up with some other green curtain to pull back, you know, So. So the the best form of flattery is imitation. And so, you know, just one step ahead of the pack, as usual. Yeah. You know, what's funny is over the years, investors always, like, gave me crap about that and they were like, you can't, you know, found a company when everybody's not in the same room.
00;02;15;21 - 00;02;30;26
Kate Churnis
And I was like, Are you kidding me? Think of I mean, because I've been working from home for 15 years now and like, I'm the kind of person that probably like you, I stand up at the fridge and eat lunch if I eat lunch at all, because it's not productive to sit down and while away the time, frankly.
00;02;30;26 - 00;02;49;04
Kate Churnis
Right. And so, like, I don't like being bothered at the WaterCooler. I hate it when people come and interrupt me and knock on my door. You know, frankly, I do. I'm not very nice like that. So I was like, now I'm like, man in Indiana, Like, my company made this transition pretty easily because there was no transition to make for us.
00;02;49;04 - 00;03;08;08
Lisa Thee
Yeah, yeah. I started in the tech industry in the early 2000 and myself as well. I've been working from home all but three years of the last 20 and it was because I was always on global teams. So we were always looking at things from a global perspective and geographically dispersed so there wasn't any office to report to.
00;03;08;08 - 00;03;36;16
Kate Churnis
That really reflected the work that we were doing. So I can relate very much to getting very accustomed to being in my own home environment, and I'm excited that a lot of the world gets to experience that now as well because it really does free you from a lot of the commute time and they get ready time. And what I found is I can repurpose that towards actual self-care like taking a walk and seeing the tops of the trees and the blue sky, and it makes me way less cranky.
00;03;36;19 - 00;03;52;20
Lisa Thee
That's so smartly said, because it's true. I mean, my you know, my husband is still grappling with like I have some non-negotiables every day. One of them is meditating. One of them is going to the gym or going outdoors and working out with my trainer as is the case these days. But I have to do it every day.
00;03;52;20 - 00;04;08;04
Lisa Thee
And he's like, How do you make time to do that? And I was like, Well, it's really hard to make the time, but I, I do. I make it because I don't kill you or anybody else, you know, but that. So I want to be on the news for the right reasons, not the wrong ones. I can relate.
00;04;08;07 - 00;04;29;20
Kate Churnis
Yeah. And I had to learn the hard way by like getting to the Harry edge of burnout, by not doing any of those things. Why I have to do those every day. So I think you are a faster learner than I am. Well, I don't know about that, but we've we've all been there and I find that my female friends especially, we are very bad at listening to the signals that our bodies are giving us.
00;04;29;20 - 00;04;48;13
Kate Churnis
Right. So a lot of times for me, stress manifests physically and I don't listen. I do now. I got I got way down to I was incapacitated for a while. So like, now I listen, I know right away if something's wrong, you know, you know what's so interesting, Lisa, is so I'll share. I've told a few people that.
00;04;48;20 - 00;05;11;22
Kate Churnis
So I have a partial permanent disability. I can't type or touch my phone at all without an enormous amount of pain. Now I look normal, right? It's. But this is my jam. And so I, I would have never guessed. And yeah, I also have one. So I'm looking really no way So see women who are you know you know we're always like overcoming a million things, right.
00;05;11;22 - 00;05;30;14
Kate Churnis
So what's the irony is I got it when I was when I was at XM, it was a boys club and there was sexual harassment galore and all the things. And and honestly, it was so normal. I didn't even know it was bad. I didn't at all. But what I did know was bad. I was like, why am I not getting credit for the work I'm doing here?
00;05;30;14 - 00;05;55;00
Kate Churnis
This is starting to piss me off a lot. And my my body started, you know, I had all these rashes and I kept in. I fell down the stairs and tourism ligaments and then, you know, all these things were happening. And so I started when I couldn't type anymore. I freaked out. This is 12 years ago now. And I at the time, Dragon actually speaking was like only a couple of years old and I learned about it.
00;05;55;01 - 00;06;14;08
Kate Churnis
This is that's voice activated software that lets you talk to your computer. And I found there's like three coaches in the country. One of the ones in D.C. I had no money to pay her and Exxon wouldn't help me. They didn't believe anything was wrong with me because I look normal, right? So like, I hired her with CDs because it's all I could pay her to help me.
00;06;14;10 - 00;06;34;25
Kate Churnis
I know. And I learned how to do this thing. And, you know, we move on and this is part of my life. But so the irony, the gift and the irony is the same thing, which I love, is that I still talk for a living every day because I talk to my computer all day long. But I also cheat because I hear what I write.
00;06;34;25 - 00;07;03;23
Kate Churnis
And I write for a living. I write marketing for a living, right? Yes. Yes. That it's so brilliant. And I love how it naturally evolved to make work work for you. But in addition, it actually helps you enhance what your secret strengths were all along. Right? Right. Like that's the hopefully we get wiser as we get older and you're able to see that the threat is connected and not, you know, all over the place.
00;07;03;23 - 00;07;30;29
Kate Churnis
A big knot. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. My my hidden disability is that I was diagnosed in 2017 with post-traumatic stress disorder after being in the darkest corners of the Internet professionally for about a year. I just met so many child survivors of online abuse and hearing their victims stories really just brought me to a place where, frankly, I couldn't be with my young children without having invasive thoughts of somebody hurting them.
00;07;31;06 - 00;07;59;26
Kate Churnis
And it really was a long, harrowing journey back to getting to function again. And meditation and self-care and exercise are key ingredients in that cocktail for me. And I also can very much relate to not being able to hear my own body's wisdom. You know, they say the body keep score, right until it was too late. And now I have a much earlier warning signal device I'm listening to when I need to start making some adjustments again.
00;07;59;26 - 00;08;29;09
Lisa Thee
It's true. And good for you. And it's so I find that it's so just surprising because as women especially, like we've got this, you know, center fuge of where life happens right in our bellies here. And so we're like built to be antennas of, you know, just sensitivity and yet when it comes to ourselves, we just wall it up a lot.
00;08;29;11 - 00;08;52;07
Lisa Thee
Yeah. I find as somebody who might be described as type A never, never, ever, I have a really hard time letting down others. I make commitments to you whether that be my company, whether that be my children, whether that be my husband, whether that be my friends. I'm really good at not whole at not being accountable to myself.
00;08;52;08 - 00;09;08;24
Kate Churnis
How about you? Yeah. I mean, it's funny. You have to learn. We have to learn to do it right. You know, in in one of the things I started prioritizing, actually, when I, when I got to XM, it was this is a while ago, they had a gym in the building like this is before. You know, Google was like going crazy with all their things.
00;09;08;29 - 00;09;29;06
Kate Churnis
So that was like really exciting. And I thought, okay, actually, for the first time in my whole life, I don't have a car payment because I paid it off. I was driving a little Toyota Tercel 1995, the green model, two door, one mirror and a four speed picture it in my mind's eye car, but I paid that sucker off 200 bucks a month.
00;09;29;12 - 00;09;47;23
Kate Churnis
And I was like, you know, I don't have a car payment. I'm going to pay a trainer to help to help me learn how to be healthy and work out every day. And it was liberating. There was this new value of of my health. And so that translated to me. Now I have about a team of nine people who keep me upright.
00;09;47;23 - 00;10;09;03
Kate Churnis
I'm not even kidding because the stress of being an entrepreneur just being a human is is very stressful. So can you tell us a little bit more about your company and how you're helping to address some of those gaps that I see with so many entrepreneurs? Yeah, So thank you so much. And I'm actually terrible at describing our own platform.
00;10;09;06 - 00;10;32;01
Kate Churnis
You know, the shoemaker sometimes has no shoes, which is the bane of my existence because I'm supposed to be good at marketing. But anyways, so lately, Adams's long form content into dozens and dozens of social media posts are short form content. Right? And so we'll take a video or a podcast or blog, and you feed it into the brain, and the brain dices it up into a million smaller videos.
00;10;32;03 - 00;10;58;16
Kate Churnis
But that wall is awesome and amazing. The true awesomeness is the AI behind it, right? So the AI literally learns by studying your analytics of what your customers want to read here or watch, and it only pulls out the best quotes from this podcast into mini video clips. We do these word clouds to help customers visualize. I mean, so we're very word based, just to take it way down to people.
00;10;58;16 - 00;11;23;05
Kate Churnis
Right. And let me back up in the marketing landscape that there's thousands of tools, there's about 9000 tools, and they really all fall into two buckets. Lisa Right. So one bucket is content management and another is content analytics, and some do both. But what nobody does is the whole beginning part because it doesn't matter how good your management is or how good your analytics, you can't polish a turd, as they say, right?
00;11;23;05 - 00;11;41;28
Kate Churnis
So what you write what you as I'm thinking of some how much lipstick I've tried to put on a pig before. There you go. I think that's what it is. That's what it is. Right. And so that's the let's look at the basics, right? What's the 1 to 1? What is is what you're writing? Because essentially even video can be transcribed into text.
00;11;41;28 - 00;12;13;26
Kate Churnis
So it's all down to text eventually, Right. Is that going to be compelling or resonating with your audiences? What is it going to make them jump out of their screens? And so that's what we try to give to our customers and really give them the starting point, right? So this is another key thing, which is people are freaked out a bit about I stop being freaked out about I we're far, far, you know, in the life of AI, if it's a human, we're only at like three months old, so it's don't worry you.
00;12;13;28 - 00;12;44;16
Kate Churnis
But like also humans and I work together, I learns from humans. And in marketing and sales as we're doing so well here today, like, I feel like I already know you and we're already like high fiving and toasting is humans communicate emotion, Right? Right. Yeah. So human on their own. Awesome A.I. on own awesome humans and AI, that's one plus one equals three to to be for all those math majors out there.
00;12;44;16 - 00;13;10;02
Lisa Thee
Yeah. There you go. I was a fiction writing major. You. That's my math. That is a great lead in to my next question, which was tell us a little bit about your background. How how did you end up leading an AI company and was it a little bit less traditional?
00;13;10;02 - 00;13;36;20
Kate Churnis
Um, surprise, surprise, it was. So, yeah, so I was, I was a line cook for years, so I love Anthony Bourdain. I mean, that book was like, It's all true. I've lived all that. I've been the woman in that kitchen, right? And I love the piracy of the kitchen because I love the piracy of startup life. And I went from being a line cook to I was a rock and roll deejay up and down the Eastern seaboard. My last gig was broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day for XM Satellite Radio, so I was there when it was still a startup.
00;13;36;22 - 00;14;02;09
Kate Churnis
My radio voice is a little bit different. Lisa I feel so smooth, yet engaged. You know, it's interesting. So you learn. I learned the power of, of manipulating your voice and, and, um, before and just to continue. That's right. So then I was a marketing agency owner as well. I'll tell you how I got there. But that was the beginnings of lately, essentially.
00;14;02;11 - 00;14;24;22
Kate Churnis
But with your voice. What's so interesting is, is your voice is a is a musical note, right? You can manipulate that and music. So the neuroscience of music tells us that every song you ever hear it must quickly examine all the hundreds and thousands of songs you've ever heard before in order to index it in in your mind's catalog.
00;14;24;22 - 00;14;48;03
Kate Churnis
Right. Which means, wow, D'alger. Yeah. Is is a default of listening to music, which is why music is so emotional because you have memories tied to every song. Right now, your voice is a note like I said, it's a frequency. So similarly, when you hear people talk, you have visceral reactions to the sound of their voice. And when you read text, you read it out loud in your mind.
00;14;48;03 - 00;15;21;01
Kate Churnis
You hear the text, right? Oh, interesting. Yeah. So in radio, my job was to hold the microphone. Right, I have the mic, but if I'm doing a good job, I'm making you feel like you have a voice and it's a two way street and you trust me. Trust is the commodity we wield, right? Same in writing. My job is to figure out how to make you feel comfortable with new stuff by couching it in the familiar in that lexicon of nostalgia, right?
00;15;21;02 - 00;15;44;16
Lisa Thee
Saying it's all the same. I love how you're helping to shape that vision for our audience, because a lot of the of our listeners are coming from the technology industry probably don't have an English degree. I know myself, I studied engineering and nobody ever talked to us about feelings, nostalgia, couching, maybe couching. You know, we started on couches as probably as close as we got to it.
00;15;44;16 - 00;16;03;16
Lisa Thee
So I love that you've thought through how to solve that customer problem of how do you make people that are doing really cool new things in the world make them accessible to people in familiar ways?
00;16;03;16 - 00;16;23;09
Kate Churnis
Yeah, what I love I love metaphors and I love applying metaphors to weird places. So like, my rule of thumb is it's always right in front of you. Meaning like, let's look at what's what have you. What have you done today? What have you done in your life that you can apply to this situation? Right. And so it was the same with radio. So So let me jump back to the marketing agency. Um, it was a wild story. So here I was. Um, raise your hand.
00;16;23;09 - 00;16;42;26
Kate Churnis
Women. Women listeners, because this one's for you. So here I was at XM, you know, all the sexual harassment going on and my body was killing me, so I made a lateral move to another music related startup, actually. And the same thing. I didn't look like there's anything wrong with me boys club right up my my high knee the whole time.
00;16;42;26 - 00;17;03;02
Kate Churnis
And I was very miserable person. I was crying and toxic and I couldn't see a way out. And I doesn't count if you do it in the closet. No. Learned nobody, right? Nobody knows. Yeah. And, and sometimes I feel like I have to go all the way down to come out, you know? So I was down and I used to smoke.
00;17;03;02 - 00;17;21;25
Kate Churnis
I loved smoking. And so I was smoking all the time. And I was just toxic, you know? We might have that in. Yeah. Old days now, you know, misery loves company, right? So, um, so Lisa, my dad had it. I was at their house for the weekend, and I was ruining this weekend by crying all the time, frankly.
00;17;21;25 - 00;17;41;00
Kate Churnis
And he lovingly shook me by the shoulders and said, You can't work for other people. And there's no shame in that, Right? Wow. Yeah. So much. Well, because he hit on two things. Number one was the shame. That's what I felt. I felt I wasn't getting an A and I couldn't figure out why because I was doing a work.
00;17;41;00 - 00;18;03;19
Kate Churnis
And so I was so focused on how disappointing my male bosses, because as happens to so many people and women especially, the first thing you think is, what am I doing wrong? And you run through all the reasons why you've left it up, right? Not like what they've done. And with any human on any planet, we all have things that we do amazing and things that we do.
00;18;03;22 - 00;18;18;17
Kate Churnis
And it a lot of it is in the eye of the person that's judging the situation. If they have a positive affect with you, they're going to see all the great things. And if they have a negative aspect, they're going to see all the things you don't do. So great. So yeah, to be human is to have bias.
00;18;18;17 - 00;18;41;03
Kate Churnis
And it's so easy to think that you're the problem when you're in an environment where the negative is getting echo chamber for you. Yeah, And honestly that's we didn't I didn't know that this word gaslighting, I didn't know it then, but that's what was happening. Right. Right. You certainly know how to feel it though. You do. Yeah. It's, it's so validating to have a word to put on it, you know, now.
00;18;41;03 - 00;19;04;02
Kate Churnis
But so my, so my dad, we had that moment and then, and then obviously I was like, oh my dad owns his own business and my mom owned her own business and, and oh, people do this. So my boyfriend now husband, he's so thoughtful. He went to Barnes and Noble because that's what you did. You went to the bookstore and he bought me a well known book, Geico Osakis Art of the Start.
00;19;04;07 - 00;19;22;11
Kate Churnis
Right? Huh. That will put that one on the listener notes for anybody who's thought about what it would be like to be on their own. Yeah, it's just on that note. Well, I started reading the book and I could see well, first of all, he says, like in the first chapter or second chapter, you don't need a plan.
00;19;22;11 - 00;19;41;01
Kate Churnis
Just get started. And then so I was like, Well, then I don't need this book. So I stopped reading the book, although I did pick it up later and I tried to reread it some more and I did stop again. And the reason is because once you're in it, nobody can tell you what to do. Those books are for inspiring you to start doing it.
00;19;41;01 - 00;20;04;23
Kate Churnis
You know what I mean? Because there's no map to this journey. I, I love that. In fact, on my nights and weekends is a passion project. This year, my friend Emily Kennedy and I have launched an entrepreneurship one or one course targeting female founders for that reason, because we were like, we spent so much time worrying about things that didn't matter at all when we were getting our own companies off the ground.
00;20;04;23 - 00;20;21;21
Kate Churnis
I'm like, Where was the person to just tell me, Get a lean canvas, Don't do a business plan? Where was the person to tell me? Stop thinking about whether you want to use Zoom or Skype or WebEx or Gmail. Just use the Google Suite for the first year until you grow big enough that you actually have to pay for it and then figure it out then.
00;20;21;23 - 00;20;40;05
Lisa Thee
So we're trying to bring that kind of that girlfriends Guide element to getting out of your own way, right? I love that sign me up. I'd love to be a part of that, honestly, because all you know, so I wrote this on LinkedIn a little while ago and what I wrote was them colon. You're doing it wrong. Me.
00;20;40;05 - 00;21;05;14
Kate Churnis
Colon But it's working. That's kind of my running joke with most people is I've never been qualified for a job I've been given and have never been failed at when I've been tasked with. So there you go. Do it your own way. Right? Do your own way. Yeah. So. So exactly. And so. So with the Guy Kawasaki book, by the way, what was also kismet was I had read The Secret.
00;21;05;14 - 00;21;25;24
Kate Churnis
I was reading The Secret because that's a terrible book, let's be honest. It's so called Read It in College, right around the same time I read this Ocean Prophecy, and I was gonna sit around coffee shop. It reads Aura. Really? Exactly. So I was embarrassed to be reading it, but I was just trying to do anything. I needed to change my situation and I was just trying to use the tools I had.
00;21;25;27 - 00;21;45;02
Kate Churnis
And as I read it, I realized everything coming out of my mouth was so toxic. All I was saying was how much I hated my life and my job and like that. That had to stop, right? So the next day I met, um, I met a couple of guys for lunch. I didn't know anything about them. They were hand-delivering a product for my job, which is unusual.
00;21;45;02 - 00;22;20;22
Kate Churnis
People would usually mail it. They happened to be angel investors and they were like, We love you. Let's start a company. Here's 50,000 bucks. True story. I love that. In fact, I had a similar kind of experience where a mentor, mentor of mine, I was talking with him and I'm like, Oh, I can't keep up with this. I can't sustain this level of work working in corporate America with two little kids and all the things and commutes and all this stuff and I mean, my husband doesn't like to when I say this, but I'm going to matter openly anyways.
00;22;20;24 - 00;22;52;16
Kate Churnis
Apparently I wasn't that pleasant to live with during that season. Go figure. Raised. And so with that, I got a little bit of external feedback that perhaps shifting that perspective could be great. And ultimately within four weeks, that same long term mentor happened to be an angel investor. I wasn't super familiar with that term at the time. For our listeners that aren't in the entrepreneurship world, those are people that are individual accredited investors that will put money into very early stage ideas to help them get off the ground.
00;22;52;19 - 00;23;18;04
Kate Churnis
And he was like, Well, come back to me and tell me what you want to do with your co-founder and we sat down for a dinner at a sushi restaurant and we had a like super cheesy pitch deck as I did not know what that entailed at the time. And you know, at the end we're like, we would like to ask $100,000 for 10% of our company, which what the heck are we doing like this?
00;23;18;05 - 00;23;44;01
Kate Churnis
And like now I watched Shark Taking. I'm like, that's a lot of money we asked for. And he's like, I think you're going to need 200,000. Give me 20%. And I'm like, Holy moly. So yes, I love that. We continue to layer on our combination of trauma. Yeah, wonky books about manifestation and getting people to give us money because they just think we can do something good with it.
00;23;44;07 - 00;24;10;06
Lisa Thee
That's the best part, because these two stories hopefully will validate other people's, you know, motivations and that the fact that it can happen, not in the obvious ways, I think is so important that people know that, right? Yeah. And I think a lot of it is community building and communication and and really your brand, right? That person didn't give me money because they thought I had the best idea in the whole wide world.
00;24;10;09 - 00;24;28;21
Kate Churnis
That person gave me money because we've worked together for years. They've seen me through the times when it shouldn't have worked. And I just dug really deep with grit to make it happen. And they'd seen that enough times to know, you know what, show pivot should change. We'll figure out where you want this land. And she's going to be a good steward of this money and make this investment grow.
00;24;28;21 - 00;24;51;19
Kate Churnis
Right. You know, So on that note, one of the best pieces of advice anyone had ever given me and I didn't listen for a long time and it's the it's the cheesiest piece of advice ever, which is be yourself. And the more I started doing that in my business and in my pitching and then in my marketing, in the messaging of the marketing, which you've seen that as well, everything started to the channel changed, right?
00;24;51;19 - 00;25;13;01
Kate Churnis
And it's not that I was fake before and I knew I knew the idea of authenticity through radio, right? So like, that was why I made listeners into fans, because I would purposely even though I would have that smooth voice, I would do silly things like, you know, make drop, drop, drop something or like, you know, because that was actually normal.
00;25;13;01 - 00;25;46;06
Kate Churnis
I mean, I just was kind of an F up. I mean, I'm not a smooth person and so I just let it ride. And Mentor had said to me, you know, the most powerful thing on on the radio is silence. And I was like, Oh, because people turn it up, right? So that made me stop being afraid of those mistakes and then I learned how to again turn that persona into the voice of of who we are as a marketing team and lately, and then to help other people do that through lately as well.
00;25;46;07 - 00;26;07;28
Kate Churnis
Right. So, you know, our mission is to, like I said, start you at third base. But the human, you know, getting it home, we found that people it's just so fascinating to me, Lisa. People think that they're boring. They don't know how to put their voice on it. Right. I, I was just talking about that with a friend actually today.
00;26;07;28 - 00;26;23;11
Kate Churnis
He was setting some of these things up to make sure that our audio sounded good. And he was like, I'm going to go in your email, but I promise I'm not going to read anything. And I was like, Oh, go right ahead. And somebody was assigned to spy on me. I feel so bad for them. They'd be so bored.
00;26;23;14 - 00;26;53;18
Kate Churnis
Like maybe me at 25 would have been a really fun ride along. But like me at 43, man, I'm not sure I'd be tuning in, so I can relate to that feeling of being like, It's funny. Well, they just get to be boring. They don't know what things to highlight, you know? And so it's been interesting just to hear that and then to help help people like sift through, you know, what it is about them to pull forward and to get that voice, you know, clear and to show them how to teach the AI to, you know, to learn that from them as well.
00;26;53;18 - 00;27;13;24
Kate Churnis
And I think of like, if you just think of any CEO that, you know, at any large fortune company and or CMO is talking with the CMO, right, because they should know better. So if you look at the CMO's LinkedIn feed, I can't think of one that isn't like this right now and I hopefully someone will write and tell me they're so plastic.
00;27;13;24 - 00;27;37;01
Kate Churnis
Everything they say is incredibly boring and unenthusiastic and inhuman right? And I think to myself, I get mad because they have this, especially the the women, their very powerful microphone to show us all how to do it. And they're they're pissing on it, frankly. Right. Like they're just not there's nothing there. It's a it's a piece of cloth.
00;27;37;03 - 00;28;02;05
Kate Churnis
It's it's curated. It's had its image forward. It's what I worry about for the next generation that when we hand out smartphones like candy to eight, nine, ten year olds and they're they've got a social presence by you know puberty is marketing even going to be a skill anymore? Are these digital natives going to be like, I've been branded myself since I was 12?
00;28;02;05 - 00;28;21;10
Lisa Thee
What are you talking about? Like, are they going to start teaching it in business school? Because it's like also like part of breathing and getting dressed before you go to work and things like that? I don't know. Yeah, I have thought about that myself. Well, you know, so the just to talk about that for a second. So marketing hasn't changed since the wheel was invented, right?
00;28;21;10 - 00;28;39;13
Kate Churnis
I mean, it's all trust and emotion based still. I was watching, you know, of course, we were all watching the crown. If you're not watching the crown, we can't be friends. Come on. And so and some other Princess Diana biopics. And so, you know, what she did is what we're talking about. The reason that she stood out is because she hugged people.
00;28;39;13 - 00;29;02;02
Kate Churnis
She was real with them. Right? Warm. She was warm and and warm and more than warm, I think also willing to jump jump over, jump into the fourth screen or jump over the line or whatever it is, you know, And of course, if everybody does that all the time, then, you know, we're overdoing it. But the thing is that people don't have the guts to do it, you know?
00;29;02;07 - 00;29;21;26
Kate Churnis
I mean, I don't have an edit button and I don't have any shame, so I don't have the time to deal with that. I'm not your cup of tea. There's lots of coffee shops around, right? That's right. That's well-put. But I think also, like I'm I'm in the business of getting things done. That's how how I operate my life.
00;29;21;26 - 00;29;41;21
Kate Churnis
I'm very impatient. I like to be productive and I want to get there as fast as possible. So for me, that means communicating. I'm manipulating everybody, right? That's what we're all doing. I want you to do something for me all day long. I either want my husband to do to to put something in the fridge or I want to make the sale or I want to get my engineer to fix the bug we all have.
00;29;41;21 - 00;29;59;19
Kate Churnis
This is everybody. This is a universal thing, right? So I'm just thinking about like, how can I get these things done as fast as humanly possible? And one really good way is to cut through the noise, right? Yeah. So I think there's a lot of people that are thinking through how to cut through the noise, and there's so many people that claim they've figured it out.
00;29;59;19 - 00;30;19;14
Lisa Thee
So do you have any tips you can share with us to spare us from wasting time trying to cut through the noise? Because I must say, if I'm in a one on one conversation, I know how to relate. I know how to engage and I know how to adapt what I'm doing based on the feedback I'm getting. You put me in a one too many environment, especially online. The feedback is so slow, it's really hard to adjust real time. So can you share with us some tips for stopping to waste time?
00;30;19;17 - 00;30;40;12
Kate Churnis
That's true. So because I was a rock and roll deejay and I talked into a black box of nowhere and no one for a living for a dozen years, I got good at that. And part of it is imagination on your end, right?
00;30;40;12 - 00;30;57;14
Kate Churnis
So you have to imagine that you're always talking to one person, whoever they are. Just if you have. I used to draw a picture of the person and like, label little things about them. When I was on the air just so I could figure out who that was. Yeah. And I changed who I was talking to. I learned I had to learn different, different ways.
00;30;57;14 - 00;31;18;06
Kate Churnis
Like, for example, I if I was talking to at first when I was like, well, I guess our audience is, is man, okay, whatever, whoever they are. And I like my voice. That was so soft for them, turned off the women. So I learned to crack my voice and make that smoothness a little more accessible. By the way.
00;31;18;08 - 00;31;44;15
Kate Churnis
So when I'm writing social media, I'm absolutely thinking of one single person that I'm writing to. It's often it's actually often Lauren She doesn't know this. Hey, Lauren, Lauren's my head of growth, so usually she's the person I'm writing for, amazingly enough, because she laughs at my jokes. Frankly. So number one is to be very clear on who that is.
00;31;44;18 - 00;32;08;05
Kate Churnis
And then number two is to think about what the objective is in. If it's social media, there's only two objectives. This is so easy click or reshare. That's it, right? You make it sound so easy. It feels so overwhelming when you're new to it. And it does. You have to start small and you have to be very again, very methodical.
00;32;08;05 - 00;32;22;10
Kate Churnis
So again, when I was on the air, every time I cracked the mic, I had to have a mission, but I didn't want it to sound like I mapped it out. So I knew I had to have an intro and I knew I had to get to read the copy for the commercial and I knew I had to get out of it.
00;32;22;10 - 00;32;41;01
Kate Churnis
Right? And so knowing those things, then I started to and I'll tell you how this applies to social media, but then I started to. So if every time I cracked the mic, I had to ID the station. You're listening to XM 50 The loft, right? Or Hey, it's Kate on XM 50, The loft. I had to say this and I'd say it every time.
00;32;41;01 - 00;33;02;25
Kate Churnis
So in order not to sound annoying and boring, I would write out 50 ways to say that right? Smart. Yep. Or like, we would have to use hyperbole a lot if you like the song. That song was so awesome. You guys dig that? Whatever. So I would write out all different kinds of ways to sort of, you know, stuff that would sound like me in writing, in social media, in real life.
00;33;02;25 - 00;33;19;10
Kate Churnis
I swear like a sailor, I'm a terrible mouth. Don't bring me to anybody's dinner. I'm awful. And I can. Yeah, I know what I can. Auto factories in Detroit. I may suffer from a similar affliction. Yeah, it's just. It is what it is. And I know this, but online, I really try not to do that. So I have to supplement.
00;33;19;10 - 00;33;42;08
Kate Churnis
So I say I'm a child of the eighties and I'm corny. That's what I know about myself. So I say things like Hold onto your bagels or Holy hot pickled Howard Pinos or jump in. Jojo's a fit, right? I have to find some other clever way. Yeah things and and for me those stand out right I mean they do I can see it in the results of the analytics.
00;33;42;08 - 00;34;00;21
Kate Churnis
It gives me voice. It makes you trust me because I'm being, you know, different, you know, all those things. But the easiest way to get started is you don't have to be everywhere all the time to do it right. You just have to do one thing, Right? Right. That's all. So if it's just you give yourself a framework, like I said.
00;34;00;28 - 00;34;31;12
Kate Churnis
So if I'm going to write a social media post, there's an objective earth to everyone. It's never click. You're too small for that. It's it's share, right? Go for the share. Right. So people love a one liner. They love memes. The cards that you save are the ones that have the cool things on them, the stuff that you share, the one liners be the one liner, which means don't bury the lead right here in this conversation when we're talking to each other, you have to have some leads on the way in because it's too abrupt.
00;34;31;16 - 00;34;51;11
Kate Churnis
But in social, you don't write it because people are going to scroll by. It's just going to get it set right and be there. So vomit out what you're going to say, delete the first half of it, probably because it was probably a waste of time and characters. And then look for I'm giving you guys a lot of tips here, but you want to look for the the call to action, right?
00;34;51;11 - 00;35;14;27
Kate Churnis
There's always something and usually it's it's a verb, right? And start with the verb. So anytime you can say like, oh, you guys should go check out the new don't say check out, because that's the worst ever, you guys. That's the most vapid call to action ever. You guys, you guys have to see the new episode of The Crown, right?
00;35;14;27 - 00;35;38;01
Kate Churnis
So instead of saying all that, just say watch the crown and be jaw dropped at what really happens behind the scenes with, you know, two cousins who had mental disabilities that they hid away for years. Right. Which was horrible. But if you when you start it with something, when you start with a verb, it actually lets you get to that meat.
00;35;38;03 - 00;35;59;14
Kate Churnis
See how like with that sentence, I went off into something interesting because you're sort of forced then to get right to the emotional part, the interest, the value. We all we all want the value, right? Yeah, We've all lost our attention span. That's the world we live in today. And I think we all often suffer from writer's block.
00;35;59;18 - 00;36;17;08
Lisa Thee
It's the getting started. That's the hard part. So I think that's where your tool really comes in in terms of helping people to get out of their own way, because I think it's a lot easier to edit than to create. Do you have 4 to 1? Is the ratio for editing one, right? Really? So give me walk me the flow.
00;36;17;10 - 00;36;41;25
Kate Churnis
I'm doing this entrepreneurship course. I paid Facebook $1,000 to promote it. Ten people have clicked on it. Three were blood relatives. And I know that I'm doing something that's important to the world, but clearly I am missing the mark and all the people at the great marketing agency that told me this was going to do great. It's not Where would lately I come in to something like this?
00;36;41;28 - 00;36;59;06
Kate Churnis
Okay, so this is the manual version which I did for Walmart, and I got the 130% ROI year over year for three years, almost a dozen years ago. So anybody can do this. I did this by hand in Japan. Yes. But we do this automatically. So what you would do is say we're having so you you've got your workshop that you've given.
00;36;59;08 - 00;37;23;09
Kate Churnis
Awesome. I don't care how many people watched it. I don't care at all because it's the after the fact marketing that matters. Stop caring about think about how we live our lives. People nobody listens to radio live. You binge on Shopify, right? Nobody watches TV live. You're watching the whole series like later on Netflix, for example. So same with your marketing and same with how you market content, like longform content.
00;37;23;09 - 00;37;43;03
Kate Churnis
So you got your webinar after the fact, you would transcribe the whole thing and as you're transcribing the whole thing, you look for those one liners, the cool sentences are like life value tips or whatever they are. And then in a perfect world, you'd be able to match the video clips up to the people actually saying those one liners.
00;37;43;06 - 00;38;03;15
Kate Churnis
Then you say you get 100 like Aria, I would give you a hundred. So you get 100 out of an hour long show. Then you would trickle, drip, drip, feed them out over time. So once or twice a week you would publish these little gems because each one is different. You have a link back to the full content or to promote the next series, right?
00;38;03;15 - 00;38;29;28
Kate Churnis
Just like on TV. This is not I'm not inventing the wheel here. People write it. Yeah, but you are. You are mass producing the wheels so that we can all put them on ourselves and get somewhere a lot of faster. Yeah, that's. I mean, that's exactly right. Because we in order to get Walmart 130% ROI your year for you to get that right that's my goal is for you to push push a button and it'd be as big as Walmart.
00;38;30;00 - 00;38;52;25
Kate Churnis
So you would take those hundred post drip, feed them out over time. What's amazing is because each one is different and more interesting. The title of the of the show, Lisa de and Kate Bradley Chernus talk about A.I.. Who cares? Nobody knows who I am, right? Nobody cares. Hey, three blood relatives and seven random strangers. Take care. That's my that's my benchmark.
00;38;52;26 - 00;39;13;06
Lisa Thee
Yeah, That's a great headline, by the way, right there. Like, you know, that's that's perfect. Is that's so compelling, you know, dot, dot, dot. Link to the full show. Hashtag. Um, hold on. Your eyeballs are about to pop out of your head. Whatever. No. Well, holy moly. They both were lipstick. Yeah. Stop. Stop the self-defensive hashtag real talk, right?
00;39;13;06 - 00;39;35;18
Lisa Thee
Women in tech, right? There's all kinds of ways to because I think you said this in the beginning. What we're. What I'm interested in is doing is using what's already in front of me and maximizing it. Right. I don't have time to create content. You don't have time to create content. Now it's just crazy. Or because the thinking of this the hardest part, really.
00;39;35;20 - 00;39;59;25
Kate Churnis
And so if a machine can you can push a button and I can give you a hundred drafts of social posts that are 95%, sometimes 99% all the way there, sometimes 100 actually even then, why wouldn't you do that? Right. Especially when you know, AI is so demonstrated all in the customer journey? Most major brands are doing these types of campaigns with us, right?
00;40;00;02 - 00;40;18;11
Kate Churnis
Most people don't hear something. The first time you go, Oh, I'm signing up, I'm going, It's that reinforcement loop, it's there, I'm going to be aware of it. Then I'm going to ponder on it for a little while. Then I'm going to forget about it. Journey, they call it, right? Yes. And then then I'm going to have that one moment where like, Oh my gosh, I need this.
00;40;18;11 - 00;40;46;18
Kate Churnis
I need this yesterday. And and then there's like that magical button they can click and they can go back to those posts that have been kind of over times for Godin, right? Yeah, exactly. And we find, too, by the way, Lisa, that this is it's a systematic or an epidemic sort of like collapse on what do I write and how do I unlock the content that we're already creating so it doesn't like get totally wasted into the ether.
00;40;46;20 - 00;41;07;16
Kate Churnis
And what we're. So let me just plug for a second with the larger companies that we work with because it is so systemic was the word I was looking for across there. Everyone in the entire enterprise. We work with companies where the CMO will actually have one lately account and we'll will attach it to thousands of others so she can be a puppet for them.
00;41;07;23 - 00;41;32;25
Kate Churnis
Right? And the them are sales teams, recruitment teams, executives that do thought leadership, employee advocacy programs or franchises. Right. So, so, so, so clever. I remember when I was doing business development for Intel Corporation and they wanted us to have like social posts. And then we have like all these emails from legal like, don't talk about this and talk about that little.
00;41;32;28 - 00;41;51;14
Kate Churnis
Like I would just get like a paralyzed animal. Like, well, I want to say something, but I'm not sure what I'm allowed to say and where is that somebody I can look to that gives me something that's approved so that I helped carry the company water. But I don't drown myself in getting over my skis and saying something I shouldn't.
00;41;51;21 - 00;42;18;25
Kate Churnis
Exactly. Because that's that's what I did for Walmart, by the way. Like, so I created all these posts and then we disseminated them out to 20,000 participants in this marketing who. Yeah, and we had to create a way, by the way, so that and this happens with lately you the the puppeteer can either publish on your behalf so you don't think about it or they can give you the opportunity to do a little editing and localizing because their sales teams, for example, need to have that flexibility.
00;42;18;25 - 00;42;42;24
Kate Churnis
They need to be able to put their little personal twist on it. They have the trust of the corporation already to do that, right? So it's 100% I'm always drawn to how do I make this something my own right if 20 other people can do it exactly the same way I bought I want out. Yeah, exactly. And being able to stagger that content, I mean, so again, just remember the the AI is so smart.
00;42;42;24 - 00;43;03;22
Kate Churnis
It'll learn on your channel specifically what's working with your audience. Lisa's voice, it'll learn from me, it'll learn from the brand channels, right? So you can hone it in so that when the CMO says, okay, well here's the content for everybody, it can say, actually this is not working. Not going to work for Kate, by the way, or this doesn't work for Texas.
00;43;03;29 - 00;43;30;17
Kate Churnis
Right. You couldn't you can train it. Yeah. Okay. So we can we can prevent some of those gaffes and translation that make things super awkward. Yeah, because why Yes. When you can use a I that knows. I mean, hello. I think we've all gotten pretty spoiled by some of the ways that technology helps to accelerate us things with Alexa, things with using any kinds of personal assistant type of technology.
00;43;30;17 - 00;43;57;15
Lisa Thee
And it's really exciting to see how you've democratized this ability for brands to break through the noise down to small medium business. I think the large companies have always had this capability, right? But now you're making it available to a much broader audience. So what's there before? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I Gary Vaynerchuk is one of our customers and you know, Gary has a team of people that can do this for him, but he was like, This is amazing.
00;43;57;15 - 00;44;22;28
Lisa Thee
You're you give all of my listeners the ability to do what I I'm doing with the push of a button right And that's that's the jam because you have to be you have to be a radio station to make the to make noise to cut through the noise. Right. Yeah. I'm so grateful that you, throughout this journey have found a way to be incredibly authentic to yourself because that is what is making the thought leaders out there in the world resonate with this.
00;44;23;01 - 00;44;48;17
Lisa Thee
And you're bringing it to all of us. So for all of our listeners that have had tons of aha moments along this journey that want to follow who you are and what you're doing, Kate, where where can they find you after this interview? Thank you so much.
00;44;48;17 - 00;45;18;00
Kate Churnis
So I'm Kate Bradley from Lately, I get it. And I'm in all the places Lately I Kate Bradley, I think is my name or the Kate Bradley lately. I don't even remember anymore. But Kate Bradley Churnis Churnis rhymes with furnace and I'm everywhere and my team's everywhere. We're lately I online and we're humans. We're still not automating processes on purpose because we're learning from you. And that's the most important thing to us.
00;45;18;00 - 00;45;39;03
Lisa Thee
Yeah, One of the things that really caught my attention, so I saw the Gary Vee post about your company and I did the click and I learned a little bit more about you. And one of the things that I think you do really, really well that differentiates you in the market from anyone is offering these office hours that you have every week for people to learn to be better writers. Do you mind talking a little bit about what you're doing there? Because I think the community you bring together is amazeballs and I want it to grow.
00;45;39;06 - 00;46;03;15
Kate Churnis
Thank you so much. It is a great community. We I love our customers. And it's we've learned, by the way, that this is a hot button for them as they want to belong. That's a key that we use that in our marketing, right? Is belonging is a is a key factor for them. So office hours started because we just wanted a way to help people better and we couldn't.
00;46;03;18 - 00;46;22;16
Kate Churnis
My tech team was we were were so small we couldn't like do it fast enough. Right. And so we figured, all right, well, we'll just try to like, hold these classes. But what we learned in the in the classes is that people want more help with writing. So we do different kinds. One is a masterclass on writing where I'll take anybody's content live.
00;46;22;23 - 00;46;43;27
Kate Churnis
We auto generate, so we put it through the AI, it spits out a bunch of stuff, and then we go in and we add that human voice that we've been talking about, right? And it's so fun. And we always talk with the customers as well. We get ideas. It's a great exchange. And then we also do really fun interviews where we have guests like this.
00;46;44;00 - 00;47;06;20
Kate Churnis
And I try one thing I hate Lisa, I hate all the emails that I get from every social media, marketing or marketing company, big and small, that I can think of. And they all give you only 3000 for advice like, Hmm, five tips to making your writing more compelling. Be more compelling. You know, like, you know, and you're just like, This is asinine.
00;47;06;21 - 00;47;28;22
Kate Churnis
Why isn't this valuable? So, like, this is not actionable. It's it's too much. Like, let's just take like I said, let's just, like, take one little thing, you know, that everybody can walk away with and, like, go do that day. So. So and just to get off piece. So I teach or I teach a master writing class that I created for a lead gen that I offer for free to to some companies and groups.
00;47;28;22 - 00;47;55;16
Kate Churnis
Right. And it's always the most well attended standing room only and it's all me doing my my 26 crazy writing tips. Number one is never use the phrase check out which I did shamelessly before boast copied lazy call to action on the face of the planet that never results in anything. Lots of proof there anyways. And so the reason I, I do this class though, is because that demand for writing tips is so high.
00;47;55;16 - 00;48;22;26
Kate Churnis
But we all have that schoolmarm in our minds from growing up who didn't really teach you anything about communicating. No. Right now, No. Yeah, not at all. And so anyways, it's so fun to, to, to, to do those classes and after every single one I'm not kidding you. I get like 20 to 30 DMS or emails of people using my own tricks on me.
00;48;22;28 - 00;48;46;17
Lisa Thee
It's awesome. Oh, I love it. Well, Kate, this was an absolute pleasure. I already know that we are fast friends and I hope that we have many more conversations wishing you nothing but the best for your company. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening to the Navigating Forward podcast. We'd love to hear from you.
00;48;46;19 - 00;48;53;21
Narrator
At a crossroads of uncertainty and opportunity. How do you navigate forward? We'll see you next time.