Gobbledy - A Podcast about The Language of Marketing (Sagelett Digital)

Today on the podcast, we talk about Southwest Airlines, and whether they didn't get enough credit for making difficult marketing decisions about their business.

And do marketers understand how finance and ownership structure dictate marketing decisions?

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Music by East Lansing's greatest band, The Hannibals.

In this week’s Gobbledy Podcast, we talk about the sale of publisher The Skimm to Ziff Davis, Food52’s layoffs, and why the financial structures of those companies led them to make decisions that ultimately drove those businesses into decline.

Here’s the Workweek article I mentioned about the growth of Morning Brew and the shrinking of The Skimm: https://workweek.com/2025/03/20/perpetual-my-take-on-theskimms-acquisition/

The Gobbledy Newsletter is at:http://gobbledy.substack.com

You can reach me at jared@sagelett.com

I know I said I wouldn’t send an email about the Podcast, but 2 things happened:

Thing 1: I think this episode is really good and I want people to hear it. (You = people)

Thing 2: I just got an email from my newsletter hero Matt Levine at Bloomberg that was telling readers about this week’s podcast. So I am invoking the “C is for Cookie Corollary,” which is: if it’s good enough for Matt Levine, it’s good enough for me.

So…

This week I wanted to explore something that I’ve seen happen in the startup world: how does a company sell for a significant amount of money, yet the founder takes home nothing?

To answer this question, I spoke with Amit Shah, who has decades of experience as a founder, as someone who has worked in venture capital, and who sits on startup boards, to talk about why venture capital exists, and why our collective ignorance about how venture capital investments work can lead to you selling your business and walking away with, as we say in Yiddish, bupkus.

You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify…

You can subscribe to the Gobbledy Newsletter at http://gobbledy.email and you can email us at jared@sagelett.com. We’d love to hear from you…

Today I chat with Joanna Wiebe of the copywriting agency Copyhackers about the specific challenges of writing copy for software companies. This is a fun conversation for me because even as a consultant, Joanna deals with the same challenges CMOs do about convincing the leadership team why copy matters, and why less is more. Except when more is more.

This sums it up for me:

Joanna: (to me) How do you get executives at companies to understand why copy is important?Me: I don’t. I just keep getting fired.

Check out Copyhackers’ amazing copywriting tutorials at the website:https://copyhackers.com/

The Gobbledy Podcast is produced by Sagelett Digital, home of the 10 Week Gobbledy Transformation Program - in just 10 weeks we’ll transform your website copy from a buzzword extravaganza into a selling machine. Visit us at http://www.sagelett.com

Intro music from Quincentennial by Lansing’s greatest band The Hannibals.

Today I speak with Brandon Young, founder of the Amazon seller education company Seller Systems.

If you haven’t read the Gobbledy Newsletter where I talk about how Seller Systems has the best SaaS website I’ve ever seen (even though it’s not a SaaS company), it’d be worth a gander reading it now: SaaS Marketers Should Steal This Company’s Website

Brandon talks about how a website is a “sales page” - meaning, it’s supposed to do the selling for you. That’s definitely not how I hear most (any?) SaaS companies talk about their websites. It’s a unique perspective, and the way he thinks about it is really valuable for any software company to hear.

The Gobbledy Podcast is produced by Sagelett Digital, home of the 10 Week Gobbledy Transformation Program - in just 10 weeks we’ll transform your website copy from a buzzword extravaganza into a selling machine. Visit us at Sagelett.com

Intro music from Quincentennial by Lansing’s greatest band The Hannibals.

I’d love to hear your feedback - you can reach me at jared@sagelett.com

Today I speak with Mike Nelson, one of the founders of Really Good Emails, a website that curates - wait for it - really good emails. I wanted to hear about how email marketing has changed over time, but we ended up talking about vulnerability at work, and the reasons why it’s difficult for marketers to break out of doing the same thing they’ve always done.

The Gobbledy Podcast is produced by Sagelett Digital, home of the 10 Week Gobbledy Transformation Program - in just 10 weeks we’ll transform your website copy from a buzzword extravaganza into a selling machine. Visit us at Sagelett.com

Intro music from Quincentennial by Lansing’s greatest band The Hannibals.

I’d love to hear your feedback - you can reach me at jared@sagelett.com

I’ve been fascinated with the conflict between the PGA golf Tour and the LIV golf tour, and I decided to talk to my friend Nick Green, a longtime golf marketing consultant, about what’s going on there.

But I also wanted to talk about the broader marketing issue here - how should you respond when a well-funded competitor shows up at your doorstep. The lessons we can learn from golf definitely apply to the software world - and it turns out that insulting your competition may not be the best option.

The Gobbledy Podcast is produced by Sagelett Digital, a software messaging and positioning agency. http://sagelett.com

Nick Green runs Progressive Sports and Entertainment at https://www.progressivese.com/

Intro music by East Lansing’s greatest band, The Hannibals.

Today I speak with Shirin Oreizy of Next Step about behavioral science and four different concepts in human behavior and how marketers can use those (in a non-evil way!) to improve their campaigns.

The Gobbledy Podcast is produced by Sagelett Digital, a software messaging and positioning agency. http://sagelett.com

Shirin Oreizy runs Next Step at hellonextstep.com

Intro music by East Lansing’s greatest band, The Hannibals.

Today I speak with Parry Malm, CEO of Phrasee, a software company that helps marketers optimize the copy in their email marketing. We’ve all been talking for 20 years about how to make email marketing less promotional. Parry’s got a platform that can actually help with that.

The Gobbledy Podcast is produced by Sagelett Digital, a software messaging and positioning agency. http://sagelett.com

Intro music by East Lansing’s greatest band, The Hannibals.