2022 Highlights

Welcome to SparkTogether! Your hosts will set the stage for the day, discuss the rules of engagement, and maybe — maybe — we can convince Rand to tell us a story he’s never told before.

Wes Kao has been building and managing teams for years. She was no stranger to hiring effective employees. And in her past several years as a founder, she learned to level up her hiring and people management skills. But this came at the cost of a few bad hiring decisions.

She shares her stories, including the time she let a candidate's shiny background cloud her judgment. Or the time she was eager to hire someone after seeing them solve a seemingly unsolvable problem... but later experienced that they failed to deliver.

Your boss is making you do work you hate. They make you push through burnout. And they underpay you. What if this boss… is you? When you’re running your own business and the biggest flight risk is you, how do you even begin to unpack the problems, let alone propose a solution?

In this session, Joanna Wiebe opens up about her recent journey with burnout, the brutal truths she had to face, and her future plans for Copyhackers.

As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.

In this case, there wasn’t so much necessity as there was desperation. There Purna was, brand new job. A dauntingly massive remit at one of the world’s largest companies. And as for resources? Practically nothing. In fact, far less than she ever had, even working at the smallest of start-ups.

How to rub two quarters together and make them look like a million bucks? She leaned on her background in Instructional Design, to create and globally scale a scaled customer education program.

In this session, Purna will share her stories and learnings, from why more content marketers need to think like instructional designers to how to make the case and measure success.

When you’re a marketing agency and you hear “cannabis industry,” naturally, you start looking for keyword opportunities in the cannabis space. But you’ll quickly move on when you see how saturated that niche is.

But not Lavall and his team at GrowthSkills. Instead, they used audience research to find a niche within that niche. They identified a new set of high-volume keywords, grew their organic traffic, and then used that to fuel growth for their client. Just a few short years later, GrowthSkills runs one of the most trusted websites in the cannabis industry today. Lavall takes us behind the curtain to tell us their.

Katelyn Bourgoin didn’t mean to become a full-time creator. But after years of running a startup, navigating burnout, and then working on her consultancy, it ended up being a natural next step. As her following grew, she doubled down on solopreneurship.

Then she realized that wasn’t the dream either. These days, Katelyn is back in scaling-up mode. But she’s doing it with a fresh perspective, on her own terms, beholden to her own goals. All while she creates a balanced life with her family. This isn’t a growth-at-all-costs story. It’s the story of what you do when you create your own luck, and what you do with it next.

You’ve heard that recent Taylor Swift conspiracy theory. That maybe the reason she went to the Jets game a few weeks ago was to bury the news coverage of being the celebrity most responsible for emitting CO2 with her private jet usage. (Now, when you search for "Taylor Swift jet" you'll see coverage of the singer at various recent NFL games.)

It's a pretty kooky theory but once it was out there, it picked up steam like crazy. USA Today, Daily Mail, Vulture and more covered it. Wired even did a deep dive.

Where did this originate? From our good friend, SEO and machine learning expert, Britney Muller.

And for the first time ever, you'll get her behind-the-scenes story. Only at SparkTogether.

Textio invented the augmented writing category of software. It didn't exist before us and we broke it pretty big — big enough that many people have since copied it.

Only they didn't copy the most essential (to us) parts of the category. Instead, the market decided that "augmented writing" was any app with colorful highlights and/or a numeric score. So as the category definition changed and got commoditized, Textio has had to find ways to escape the category that we ourselves invented.

CEO and co-founder of Textio shares her company’s story.

Cyrus Shepard has more than a decade of hands-on SEO experience. And he hasn't always been on Google’s “nice” list. So when he applied as a Google Quality Rater on a lark, he was shocked to actually get the gig.

He passed the qualifying exams and then worked for $15 per hour. At the time of this writing, he’s technically still employed with the agency who staffs these search efforts. In this session, Cyrus will tell all, including the surprises and twists along the way, and why he failed the exam the first time.

It was six years ago that SaaS growth marketers Claire Suellentrop and Gia Laudi started Forget the Funnel, the customer-led growth training program and consultancy. Before that, both Claire and Gia worked for years in growth marketing roles at SaaS startups like Calendly, Unbounce, Wistia, Sprout Social, MeetEdgar, and lots more. So you could say their book, Forget the Funnel, was over a decade in the making.

To ensure a super-successful book launch day, Claire, Gia and the FTF team spent months lining up speaking appearances, presentations, newsletter sponsorships, guest posts, fun promotional campaigns with industry friends, and more.

Everything was all set. Until 48 hours before launch, when seemingly out of nowhere, Amazon pulled the rug out from underneath them — at the end of the day on a Friday, no less.

Suddenly, those months of meticulous planning circled down the drain.

Learn what the FTF team did next.