Alan Jones

Today we're joined by Luke Marshall, who heads up Growth at Use Verb, a video job application tool. Luke, you are another industry veteran. You've been around for quite some time since kind of the dawn of the digital media world.

Luke Marshall

Yeah. I think when Twitter started hitting the scene, that's when I did as well. And Twitter's no longer called Twitter anymore, is it?

Alan Jones

No. No, it's not. And I miss it probably is. I'm sure, as much as you do too, mate. Before we get into Use Verb, I'd like to warm up with a couple of questions that help me understand who somebody is and where they're coming from.

And the first of those is, when you were a kid, what did you think you wanted to be when you grew up?

Luke Marshall

Good question. I think what I wanted to be growing up was, I think it was a marine biologist. I just loved the sound of that. You know, when the first Jurassic Park movie came, science looked really cool and I thought, I'll either do something around cool science or computers. Cool. Name a great marine dinosaur.

Oh, I think the one that springs to mind is that, um, I saw, which looks like a diplodocus but has fins and is quite large, and even looking at its size and how cumbersome it looks in the pictures, it's like, how did this thing even swim?

Alan Jones

Ooh. Yep, yep. I know exactly what you do. Kind of like a Loch Ness monster, but in real life, right?

Luke Marshall

Yeah, an actual one.

Alan Jones

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I still love those two and I think there were some marine dinosaurs in a couple of the Jurassic Park movies if memory serves. So, second question was, it seems like you started in startups pretty early in your career journey. What were you doing immediately prior to getting into startups?

Luke Marshall

Before touching startups, the first time I cut my teeth in the digital marketing world was at agencies. I worked at sort of big-ticket agencies, media agencies like Zeto and Universal McCann, working on blue-chip clients and basically running their media buying and trying to use data to get results, spend this amount of money and get this amount of signups or conversions or whatever it was.

And for someone who was in their early to mid twenties, I was in charge of very large budgets and probably irresponsibly, so no one should be in charge of $6 million online. Like, I would kill for those budgets now with the startup money that we have.

Alan Jones

Yeah, yeah. We've all gotten ruthlessly efficient over the years, haven't we?

Luke Marshall

Certainly, and I think it's probably gotten easier to measure, but I'd also say almost to a fault. There's a lot of information and data out there that is easy to get overwhelmed by. And often I find working with founders, it's easy to get stuck in that and trying to define a picture. Sometimes you've just gotta listen to your gut and follow the intuition and then the data will follow.

Alan Jones

That's good advice for everyone. Tell me a bit about Use Verb. It's a video job application tool. How long has it been around? How big's the team? How big's the business? How's it going?

Luke Marshall

Yeah, it's a video job application tool. And it actually started over 10 years ago. It was started by a founder named Paul Dhar and he's a multi-exit founder who is definitely a polymath, very charismatic guy, sold his first startup for a large sum to a mining company.

And had this itch about evergreen sort of industries and areas, and an evergreen industry and area that wouldn't go away for him was the fact that since the dawn of time, people are always looking for employment and people are always looking to hire. So he was like, okay, we need to play in this space and how can we add value?

One of the insights was that in the standard interview cycle, the most important part is meeting someone, which will usually happen at the interview stage, which is how it happens, rightly or wrongly. And if you can short circuit that and actually meet everyone you want to put through a hiring cycle at the start, we think it's a better way to do that.

So built the tech, launched big budgets, probably some big egos and big lessons yet to be learned. Really, it fizzled a bit. It didn't quite get the traction we were after, and he went back to the drawing board again and again. The team at peak was over a hundred employees and now is down to under 10.

He moved back to Australia and we're like, okay, what does reloading the chamber look like? Now we're sitting on something with video, B2B clearer ICP. We're about to go to market in the next month or so with agents, and we're sitting on something pretty exciting and just starting to get the glimmers and traction that we think can catapult it again. Cool.

Alan Jones

So what are the challenges in front of the business now?

Luke Marshall

I think a predictable pathway to growth is absolutely the problem that needs to be solved. Cracking a clearer product-market fit, getting repeatable traction and obviously bringing in revenue to help fund that is going to be key.

We're not out of the woods. This is a current problem we're working through. I've worked with a lot of clients growing them with digital and the nature of what we're doing is very experimental and we're running a lot of experiments at once on the tools with new tools and probably old tools as well. Basically seeing what sticks.

What we're seeing is our ICP and the clients that get the most value out of us tend to be multi-location hospitality venues or sales venues like customer-facing roles or retail. They have five to 20 stores and generally understand they need a people system that helps vet for that really quickly.

Use Verb by nature of being video-first works really well with high volume and it can actually help do the recruitment for those locations onsite with hiring posters that go up and just keep a pipeline of talent coming all the time. That's what we're seeing at the moment and we're like, okay, how do we blow this up?

Alan Jones

Alright, great. There must be competitors in this space. Adding video to interviews seems like a pretty straightforward insight. Who else is out there and how do you differentiate in a crowded space?

Luke Marshall

Video interviews have been around for some time and you're correct because the bit that we focus on is the video application. So cover letters, resumes. When you get hundreds of applications, you actually don't get meaningful information outta that. It's like looking for a needle outta haystack and the value doesn't really come until you meet someone.

With our tool, it's a 27 second video application that you yes or no swipe left or right. You get a gut check and a feel for the person and then vet for skills. I just went through this hiring process ourselves, dogfooding our own product for our first marketing hire, and being able to quickly assess and then check for the gut check in interviews. It really saved a lot of time and helped us make a hire much more quickly than we otherwise would.

Alan Jones

You said something unexpected there. I want to dig a little further. You said a 27 second video that seems very specific. It's not 20 and it's not 30, why 27?

Luke Marshall

Yeah, 30 is obviously sort of under 30 would be the default. I think it's just simple marketing here. A 27 second video is a very specific, memorable number and sort of goes into the anchoring psychology around pricing and things like that.

Alan Jones

Before the video interview begins they've got 27 seconds to leave an impression.

Luke Marshall

Yeah, I just went through this with a number of candidates now and the onboarding for the job seeker is really clear. It's like you get coached every step of the way. You can reshoot and refilm if you need to. You can give yourself captions and a teleprompter if you want. You've got full control over that video.

Speaking to a candidate this week, they said, I'll be honest, I tried three times. That's cool. You clearly care and are passionate about this role and wanted to put your best foot forward. I think what we find this delivers is an authentic feel for a person. It's under their control. They've got their best chance to put their foot forward.

On the other end, you're seeing someone give it their best shot, transmitting their energy through video.

Alan Jones

Okay, cool. So they can record a few takes and you get to see how many takes they've taken. Do you get to see all of the takes that they've recorded and the one they feel they did best on?

Luke Marshall

No, nothing like that. We're not trying to trip them up. They give us the final deliverable, the video they've got. Full control over the editing. They can withdraw their application at any time. This is more in the language of the people we're hiring. It's generally Generation Z. They're extremely video literate.

One thing that's played to Use Verb's advantage over this period of time they've been around is probably that TikTok ification, where that generation is far more comfortable speaking to a portrait video than I'd say you or myself are.

Alan Jones

Great, thank you. So who's the customer persona? Who in an organisation are you trying to reach and what do you know about the ideal customer profile?

Luke Marshall

We sort of gave you the ideal customer profile in terms of the account, but generally this person is either the business owner, someone managing operations for the business owner, or a sort of overworked HR resource. It's generally a people team of one to three.

The way we talk to these people is different because if we're talking to a head of talent who's inundated, we're like, how are you going with the hundreds of CVs you're seeing every week? We know how much time that takes. The data tells us. Interested in having a chat about solving that for you.

There's been some warm receptivity there, whereas a business owner, we've learned, is generally not interested in specifics. They're just interested in getting another problem off their plate. They're overworked and we find we need to hit them either on the phone or outside normal business hours because they're usually up against it during the day.

Alan Jones

What does the current funnel look like? How does it work?

Luke Marshall

I'll talk through the growth strategy in broad strokes and get your feedback. I am currently running a layer of outbound through a tool called Smart Lead and getting lists of customers within that ICP, then testing different messaging with the outbound and seeing what they respond to and what doesn't.

Does a heavily researched email work better than a non-researched email? What size and things like that. Another element to our funnel that we're testing is organic social. We know portrait video is working exceedingly well right now. It's just appeared on LinkedIn but obviously is already all over TikTok, Instagram Reels.

We're seeing some early promise from YouTube Shorts as well. We're getting into the cadence of uploading videos as much as we can to see what works, what's getting engagement, and look to fill that top-of-funnel awareness. We've got retargeting up to the wazoo, so if anyone comes to our website that is curious, we're retargeting with a series of ads to try and get them to sign up and prompt them to sign up.

We've got some website visitor tracking. The accuracy is about 15 to 30%. We've got a chance of seeing the domain and personally reaching out if we need to. Then LinkedIn cadence and prospecting because email is only one channel. We're cycling through that and approaching different plays like personalised connection requests, seeing if they're chatty, engaging with their posts, and testing that with some software as well.

Then probably some lower tech stuff like manual outreach, calling in favours, hitting our network, seeing if we can get some more information and feedback, and then going through our old customer lists and looking at what they hated or loved about the platform and seeing if we can find more of them.

Alan Jones

That sounds like you're hitting every possible channel known to humankind. That's great if it's manageable. It's interesting this new generation of ultra video. What's your hypothesis on why it's proving popular?

Luke Marshall

I think what changed either when TikTok arrived or later as TikTok's algorithm got better is it shifted the needle from keyword-based interests or what we're searching for on the web to basically what people are engaging with the most on a highly visual format like video.

This had a knock-on impact on the other social media and video companies as well. The YouTube algorithm right now is insanely good. I'm looking up complex workflows, building with multi-tools, plugging into an LLM and getting a result.

Then the next day I'm getting 10 or 15 recipes for that particular thing at the same time as showing me gaming content for Slay the Spire and NBA. It just absolutely knows who I am and what I'm about. So instead of things being reliant on me going to discover, feeds now are all about 'for you' content.

Your job isn't to try and get it in front of eyeballs. Trust that the algorithms are going to lead the right eyeballs to the content. The goal for us with video in particular is just unleashing as much as it can and creating a rapid learning curve because the eyeballs that find it most interesting or engaging that lead to conversion will arrive at that.

It seems like, remember when SEO became mainstream around 15 years ago? If you got in early and had a good domain, you could create a bit of a moat and build big massive businesses off the back of it. I feel like we're at that precipice now with portrait video and YouTube, obviously a massive company.

I still think it's a sleeping giant. There's not enough marketers, founders, startups leaning into this. The data I'm seeing from other practitioners of my ilk is that it's nuts. So if you can lean into it and solve for speed and get that learning as fast as you can, there's market share to be captured.

Alan Jones

Cool. So you are bringing down little nuggets of content in portrait mode videos, sharing them across those platforms. There's less competition there. The recommendation algorithms are doing a better job of serving that to the right potential customer for you. You're giving them something to watch which is kind of educational and valuable.

The fact that Use Verb is delivering their content is kind of adjacent to it. But sooner or later, they're gonna click on a link and start a trial, right?

Luke Marshall

Yeah. Obviously our tool works very well with portrait video as well, so that adjacency’s very helpful. I think something we’re testing and leaning into is different messaging.

I think we still haven’t cracked our messaging on the landing pages we’re running or the conversion funnel post sign-up, so we’re like, okay, is it TikTok for Use Verb or TikTok for hiring, or is it a rapid tool where we are leaning more into the QR codes element? We’re still working that out.

But I think setting up the right channels to test these messages and then just seeing what data comes through and repeating it, I feel like we’re on the right track. I feel like the problems to be solved aren’t necessarily standard marketing problems like how do we set up a page, set up our email onboarding, or automation?

It’s more how do we get as much content going as efficiently as possible, still being brand safe in a way that leads our prospects back to where we want them to go.

Alan Jones

Cool. I think there are some changes required as well in our creative teams when we move from focusing on landscape to portrait video content. In the old landscape days, you had kind of the middle third of the screen as where your presenter was, and then the right or left margin available for information and maybe some titles at the top.

So you could use the left and right sides of the screen to supplement what the presenter was delivering. Now in portrait video, you get more of the presenter in shot and the presenter is much closer to the lens than before. There’s much less space top and bottom, but at the same time, I think the TikTok content generation have become much more tolerant of overlays, so stuff that’s partially obscuring the presenter and the information.

For editors and content creators who grew up in the 16:9 landscape generation, that’s quite a different way to make and plan content. You’re much closer to your audience than before. You also need to think about cramming stuff in, and as long as it’s flashing up for a second or two then going away again, you’re not losing that contact between presenter and audience.

I think Gen Z’s high tolerance for stuff overwhelming on screen, and their ability to comprehend things much more quickly than millennials or Gen X means it can flash and be gone. It’s also interesting how much their content is self-referential, full of callbacks, and the subtleties stick.

We’re seeing older Gen Zs become mid-career workers, coming into their thirties now. They are becoming the subject matter experts. If the boss says, “How else can we deal with our challenge about processing job applications for open roles?” they are, or soon will be, the experts people turn to.

So I think now is the time for all online marketers to really take the time to understand Gen Z and fill some positions with those people and listen to what they say.

Luke Marshall

Yeah. Listen, what I’ll just say is trust what they’re saying. Some of the most fascinating conversations I have are with my friend’s kids. I just ask what they’re into. One story he shared was about impressing a girl at the arcade by practising dance moves on a machine. Someone on a local Discord noticed, called him amazing, and now that’s his girlfriend.

That whole story is mind-blowing because we were going to clubs trying to dance next to girls and hoping they might engage with us.

Alan Jones

That’s a great story. The future is a foreign land and we just visit it.

Luke Marshall

Yeah.

Alan Jones

But we can also be ethnographers and sociologists, study and appreciate the difference, and learn how to behave and interact in that world, even if we’re never actual natives ourselves.

Luke Marshall

Yeah. One tick in favour of older people is we’ve seen a lot of change and done a lot of adapting working in digital or tech already. So that interaction and experience with what has crashed and burned in the past can be a steady head. But it benefits from combining that with all the things we talked about and finding what’s interesting being done by these natives and running with it.

Alan Jones

So email marketing to the business owner is the weak part of how you get the purchase decision maker on board? Or what sort of cost per acquisition do you expect to see out of those campaigns at the moment?

Luke Marshall

Good question. The stack we’re running probably costs between $500 to $2,000 a month for the tech. We plug things in and run with them as we go.

We’ve yet to get significant traction acquiring customers and cracking that code, but we’re definitely making inroads. The average customer value for something like our tech sits around $5,000 to $15,000 per year. We’re comfortable with the responses and engagement from existing customers.

Still experimenting to figure out if we can predictably acquire these customers, we’ve got a war chest to play with. When we see a channel light up, we’ll scale up and invest more heavily. We’re about to make our first junior level marketing hire and starting to ratchet it up because the data is promising.

Alan Jones

Cool. Have you experimented with using AI to generate email copy and predict deliverability and response rates?

Luke Marshall

Not so much prediction, although I’m seeing new tech going into that area which seems interesting. We absolutely use AI to help with copy. We pump it through some verification tools first and enrich the data to make sure we’re talking to the right person at the right time.

Then we run matched audience ads across channels to make people more aware of us. With the copy, we use AI to create templated elements that are repeatable plus custom elements based on research. That combination works well because we can say, “Hey, we saw you had 80 open roles last year, you’ve grown your employee count by 200, and you’re probably getting about 30 applications per job, which adds up to about 50 days a year spent just looking at applications. Do you want to chat about this?”

We also try to avoid overly templated language. Hooks and bulletproof cold email templates get old fast. We add personality and sometimes get goofy to elicit a smile.

Alan Jones

Great. Well, you got one from me just then. Promising. Luke, are you running different landing pages for different campaigns, or is everyone landing on the same page?

Luke Marshall

One experiment we ran late last year was how nuts can we go with personalised landing pages. We grabbed a list of about 500 targets, put it into Airtable, connected it to a tool called Make, ran it through AI and generated pages in Webflow.

These pages said, “Hey John, I see you working at this location. You advertised a role on Seek recently. Click here to onboard with a free account.” We thought it was the hottest thing since sliced bread.

What we learned was it was probably too personalised because engagement was very low. Our ICP at the time was more individual hospitality venues and it tanked. Despite how clever we thought we were being, one bottleneck is generating enough landing pages at scale.

As a one-man team, I can do a lot, but design is my Achilles heel. We’re looking to outsource design and get a solution in the next few weeks so we can spin up more landing pages that look a certain calibre and test different structures like short vs long form, more video vs less, and individualised to role or industry.

Alan Jones

Role and industry targeting is pretty good. Sometimes personalisation can lead to uncanny valley where users freak out because you know too much without consent. So AB testing ideas around industry specialisation and role is good, though it might require a lot of client case study content.

One thing I noticed about the default landing page is the case studies feature all white men. The combination of very Anglo and very male might reduce response rates from people who aren’t of that gender or ethnicity.

Luke Marshall

I completely agree. It’s something we need to improve. Because the business has been around a long time but not quite hit its stride, there’s work to do creating more diverse studies. Our ICP includes heads of talent at fast-scaling organisations, usually younger and skew female, so pure anglicised white men won’t resonate. I love you calling that out and we need to improve.

Alan Jones

The landing page shows Hoffman from Liquor Shed, Ben from Lakeside Recreation Centre, Jason from Specsavers. They’ll appeal to business owners as close matches but probably won’t resonate as well with a younger demographic. The looping animation next to the call to action has more diversity and action, which I think will appeal to younger audiences.

It’s a pretty great general purpose landing page. I like that there’s a YouTube interview with Gage Rhodes. Might be necessary to use YouTube premium or Vimeo to avoid YouTube recommending other videos on that page. If someone clicks away and comes back, the recommended videos might distract them and cause them to leave the landing page.

Luke Marshall

Totally agree. We installed Microsoft Clarity in the last month to see session recordings and how users behave on the landing page. One demoralising thing is seeing a prospect view the page, click menus, scroll up and down, then stop for 30 minutes. They’ve probably taken a call in another tab and never come back. You work so hard to get them to the page, then you have to battle that.

Alan Jones

A day later, it’s tab number 76, memory runs out, browser quits, and you’ve lost them. You have to retarget again.

Luke Marshall

We all do it. I’m guilty. I’ve tried to minimise and just run with one tab. It doesn’t work. Our brains aren’t wired that way anymore.

Alan Jones

The temptation is too strong. Anything else I can help with today?

Luke Marshall

No, great to get spot feedback, check the thinking, get your takes. Love the input on diversity and the homepage. If you come across customers that fit our ICP or grumble about their people systems, we’d love to talk to them for user research and interviews.

Our policy is open door. We’re aggressively going after a market a step up from what we’re used to and have a lot to learn quickly. Great to jam with you and appreciate the offer of help.

Alan Jones

I really enjoyed speaking with you today, Luke. Thanks very much for coming on and telling us about Use Verb. Thanks for joining me for this and every episode of Pick My Brain, the advice podcast for every startup founder.

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