Launching Pink Bird and taking control of marketing with Frank Diepmaat

I'm happy to have Frank Diepmaat here with me in the studio today. And Frank joins us from Helsinki, is that right?

Yeah, that's that's correct. Yeah, the cold north.

Why Launch Now?

Awesome. Well, you're the first guest or founder that I've had from Finland, from Helsinki. So I'm excited to talk to you and see what's going on with your company Pink Bird Marketing Agency. It's very new — so tell us what made you decide that now is a good time to launch a marketing agency?

Yeah, like, well, when is not a good time to launch something, right? Like, when you want to get going, that's kind of the moment.

But yeah, really, I've kind of completely shifted my career to be in marketing. Always had like a lot of interest there, a lot of side projects going on. 

I just figured like hey if I'm doing this full-time and I was going to have some sort of passion project that helps me get better at what I do.

And you know at the same time help other people as well — so that was kind of my reason for starting.

Starting it now is because just like when wouldn't you start like once you have the idea once you are set on that you want to do something then you know you can read up on it endlessly or you can just get going.

In today's show:

• What's going on with the launch of the new agency

• Your experience in all those side projects you're involved in 

• Your path to get to marketing and Pink Bird and then we'll 

• Wrap up with some practical marketing advice for founders

What is your go-to-market strategy at the moment?

Yeah, so right now we're mostly focused on creating content. Because when you're starting off like a brand, basically, like you need to create associations with what you want to be known for.

And for us, we want to be known for being good or excellent at marketing. So to prove that we need reference cases, we need to put out case studies and expert level content to kind of get that sort of message out there.

And you can't just kind of show up and say like, Oh, we're an expert, by the way. 

So we've kind of gathered all the projects we've done over the past and the work we've done for other people and put that together.

And then we're just going to build on top of that. So mainly we're doing a blog now where we kind of just write content that is relevant to our audience. 

Mostly marketing strategies or just very practical day-to-day tips. For example, like how to improve your Twitter profile, stuff like that.

For distribution, we're going with Pinterest because it's actually a fantastic platform

It's a mix between a visual search engine and social media. So your content has a long shelf life. And basically, our strategy is to do a blog post, get it on Pinterest with six different pins, set a notification three months later, then we make new pins.

And it just builds up the long tail. So that's kind of the long term. Short term is appearing on podcasts, reaching out to people directly, just looking for opportunities on Twitter.

So we have kind of a long form content, long term content plan combined with more like direct outreach kind of things.

What drew you to the build in public community on Twitter / X? 

I've used it for previous projects going back a couple of years, but the whole build in public thing it was super interesting.

I actually found it through Paralect they were posting about it and eventually decided to use Twitter more because the people on Twitter convert really well — it's a very responsive platform and you can train the algorithm really quickly to sort of only put you into the crowd that you want to be in. 

So if you start following other founders you start following your potential customers and interacting with them like within no time you're kind of in that sphere. 

Whereas with other platforms — like my LinkedIn currently is kind of this weird sort of collective of all the different jobs I've had and every random co-worker I've had over the years. 

And it's like it's not my target audience mostly in there it's just people that I worked with in companies. On Twitter it's much more focused — you can make a new Twitter profile and if you stick to a niche you're going to grow quite quickly there. 

How are you organizing everything around the brand launch to be very efficient since it is still a side hustle?

That's actually a really good point. At least here in Finland we have this sort of service where you can launch your business quite quickly. It took like two seconds and you have everything. You have a VAT ID, you have everything.

In terms of other tools — some things I think are just kind of necessary especially if you're collaborating — something like Google Docs or if you do use Notion that's fine.  

But for me it was like okay I have this Google workspace and it has everything already like why am I also using Notion for stuff it's pointless so:

• a collaboration tool 

• get a social media management platform

• and you're going to need something for business insights, something that can give you leads, something that can, you know, get you data basically.

So for me now, we use Google, we have a group chat on Twitter, that's our communication channel. And other than that, I use Metricool to schedule all my social stuff.

What makes Metricool stand out among the thousands of social media planning platforms?

There are a lot and I've actually tried almost all of them. I should do a blog post or a video about it.

They actually have all the features that you might need — some of them like they'll just randomly like not have a social media platform in there. 

Like I've used Agora Pulse back when the Twitter API was still available to do like Twitter listening which was amazing for that but then they don't have YouTube statistics. 

Or you have YouTube statistics and it shows you views but I want to know what's the viewing duration like — what videos are being watched through, what's the algorithm gonna like?

In Metricool they just have all of that they have the video view durations, they have click-through rates they have everything kind of right in there. I'm paying like $18 a month whereas with the more expensive or the more premium platforms that have less features you'll be paying upwards of $100 a month.

So it's like kind of a no-brainer at this point — also their customer support, I'm like sponsored by this but I just get happy when companies actually do their customer support right.

It's like there's someone sitting right there just waiting for you to say something. And it's a human, not like a box.

So that is something that I think a lot of companies can learn something from.

Why are you driven to start Pink Bird as an agency rather than any sort of product?

I'm really interested in marketing and I've noticed that the experience I can take from my career at this point puts me at a really interesting intersection between tech, business development and marketing, sales — kind of in the middle there with all my experience.

I'm able to actually make very practical plans I can take a big picture and make something very practical really quickly and there seems to be a market for that.

Every time I have a talk with someone or they're like, oh, how should I tackle this or whatever, at the end of it, they're like, oh, shit, this is great.

So like, hey, I can really solve problems here. So it didn't really cross my mind, like, oh, I need to start a product, I need to start an agency.

It was more like, I am doing this now. I have all these projects I've done — I'm giving people advice.

Why not start a company with it, make a website, figure out an hourly rate and, you know, just go from there.

Do you have an ideal sort of solo founder, company? Who would you like to talk to?

So definitely people who are taking on their own marketing.

Usually, if you have a marketing team, and they're not figuring it out, maybe you hired the wrong people.

But marketing teams can get stuck, you know, if they just need a session — need to get unstuck, that's fine.

But mostly the audience for this would be people are kind of in a scale up phase at this point, or startups who just need a really, really concrete plan of like, okay, there are millions of options out there.

Often they only know one or two, like they have social media, they can do Google ads or something.

So basically, any organization that needs a concrete plan that they can get going with, like tomorrow!

Where did the PinkBird.net brand come from originally? How did you decide on this style?

I do really like the sort of like Miami vibe — you know like the pastel colors and all that the stuff, kind of the whole vaporwave vibe — a bit of like 90s graphics in there.

I don't know if you've ever seen vaporwaves just like look it up quite an interesting art style. But for the for the name itself, we started off as Amplique which sounds a bit French.

Nobody who's a native English speaker could pronounce it so quickly wanted to change it.

Actually my father used to have an advertising agency called Pink Panther Productions years ago so I think that kind of stuck in my mind and when I was brainstorming names and stuff I landed on Pink Bird and then after it was all registered and stuff I remembered. 

Oh yeah he had that advertising agency called Pink Panther after the cartoon. So maybe that was sort of subliminally stuck in my head somewhere.

That's how I landed on that.

And there are graphics everywhere you can use in Canva and whatever of flamingos.

So it's actually quite easy branding also to work with — there's a lot of material that you can can easily use.

The way people interact with content online has kind of changed.

Especially how they create content, like before 2016, 17 — you could find a lot of people online just doing things for fun.

They would just be having a blog or you know, they would work on a side project just for fun, basically.

And you can kind of see that shift during the creator economy and then of course also COVID-19 pushed a lot of people into the creator economy as the rest kind of dried up and you see this shift in content.

Going from just making it because you enjoy it to really seeing content being made to convert — at least in the creator space that's something I've noticed.

Now in terms of like what type of content does well that will never change — like fundamentally the type of things that people would want to share, practical information. Things that evoke emotions or storytelling there are stories written on caves in pictures basically and we're still doing that so fundamentally the types of content don't change. 

But the reasons why a lot of people create content now are changing with the advent of AI now, especially generative AI.

It's going to be more important than ever to make unique content that is unique to you.

You can get whatever you want generated. And I think very soon we're going to see that human content is kind of the premium stuff.