[Episode 10] The State of Marketing Ops 2023

Launch Codes hit double digits this week — Our 10th episode is live. This week Lauren McCormack, our VP of Consulting, joins Joe to discuss a whole lot of events.

Listen Below

• A year in review: 2023 State of MO Pros Report
• HubSpot is a Clear-Bit closer to data dominance
• Plotting efficiency when mapping out MOPs plans
• OpenAI turbo charges Chat-GPT
• AI will find you a job says LinkedIn
• Pairings
• Read The Transcript

State of Marketing Ops Report

This month MarketingOps.com released the 2023 State of the MO Pro Report. The report contains 553 responses collected between May and August 2023.

Three key findings:

• Widespread adoption of MOPs teams
• 88% of orgs over $10 million in annual revenue have dedicated MOPs person/team.
• 64% of orgs under $10 million in annual revenue have dedicated MOPs person/team.
• Smaller teams are trending
• 31% of participants are a solo team, up from 25% last year
• Data is now the primary responsibility
• Analyzing, unifying and reporting data number one responsibility
• Almost 70% of participants ranked data as number one this year compared to fourth place last year
• Top responsibility in 2022 was developing and implementing software/system integrations. Ranks 4th in this year’s report.

“Millions of dollars of rounds were being put into B2B SaaS only to have everything evaporate so abruptly, and now, frugality has been the mantra for 2023.” Lauren said. “It’s no surprise that teams have gotten smaller and to see the people that remain realizing that unlocking data or having governance over data is the future to their success.”

HubSpot acquires Clearbit to enhance its AI platform

Last week HubSpot announced it was acquiring the B2B data provider Clearbit to enhance its platform with third-party company data.

Gathering company data has gotten easier over the years but challenges remain around analyzing and using data. This acquisition means companies can enrich their internal customer data with real-time external context

Clearbit rebuilt its data pipeline earlier this year with LLMs at the core – reinventing how it processes, categorizes and enriches datasets.

“Thanks to this technology, Clearbit was now able to identify and enrich any company or contact data from any country in any language” CEO Matt Sornson wrote in a blog post about this change.

“The very first time I was exposed to Clearbit, I remember almost falling out of my chair,” said Joe. “The idea of this data enrichment was there and that they had invested so much in this combing the earth for contact information and being able to pop that into your CRM was magical.”

Needless to say, we’re excited to see what comes next from Clearbit with this acquisition.

Advice on developing marketing ops plans

Our question this week comes from the MarketingOps.com Slack Channel (used with permission from the founder, Mike Rizzo).

Looking for advice on developing marketing ops plans. I’ve been building out process and refining for efficiency with no real guiding light. Any recommendations?

“Revenue is your north star,” said Lauren. “The budget to build the cool stuff comes from the strategy, comes from tying to your revenue North Stars, comes from being able to articulate what the return on your time is to the bottom line.”

If you’re lacking direction, look at your company’s strategic plan for the year. See where can you support and lift the heavy rocks. Where can you build against numbers that will build job security for your boss’s boss?

Hot Takes

• Experimenting with personalized GPTs
• The team at RP is experimenting with training individual GPTs – look out for RP-GPT in the near future
• Joe referenced a Sam Altman quote “We have to get the world familiar with AI, so we’ll release it incrementally and not wait for it to be perfect.”
• AI will find you a job says LinkedIn
• LinkedIn announced it’s experimenting with a new generative AI feature for job hunters.
• Testing features to generate brief cover letter-like messages that candidates can send to hiring messengers on the platform. Is this the future of job applications?

Pairings

With Joe back in his home office after a week on the road for MOPs-Apalooza, read the episode recap here, he was able to showcase this week’s record, and it’s gorgeous! The record is ‘Cool It Down’ from the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs and the lead singer holds a special place in Joe’s heart (see why here). Lauren paired it with Starry Eyes by Dark Matter Coffee. It’s based out of Chicago, a very dark roast and has AMAZING packaging (check it out here).

Read The Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was created by AI using Descript and has not been edited.

[00:00:00] Joe Peters: Welcome to Launch Codes, the podcast about marketing operations, artificial intelligence, and more. Each week, you’ll hear from experts as they share insights, stories, and strategies. Welcome to Episode 10. I’m your host, Joe Peters. On today’s episode, a year in review, the 2023 State of MoPros report. Second, we have HubSpot is a clear bit closer to data dominance.

[00:00:30] Joe Peters: Then we’ll go to our community for a question on plotting efficiency when mapping out MOPS plans. And then we have a couple of hot takes on OpenAI turbocharging ChatGPT. And can AI find you a job, says, well, LinkedIn says so. So today I’m joined by Lauren McCormick. What are you excited about this week, Lauren?

[00:00:53] Joe Peters: Hey

[00:00:53] Lauren McCormack: everybody. I’m just excited for another conversation with you, Joe. So much to catch up on.

[00:00:59] Joe Peters: Oh yeah. It’s been a busy, busy week. That’s for sure. So funny enough if I wanted a Mopsapalooza flashback, I’m going to get one because our first topic today is, marketingops. com’s latest release on the 2023 state of the Mopro report.

[00:01:17] Joe Peters: And it’s a very interesting study. The data was collected over May, from May to August, so kind of a longer open period for respondents. But there are a couple of findings that are worth noting. First is in the area of widespread adoption of MOPS teams. So, 88 percent of orgs, over 10 million in ARR, or annual revenue, sorry, have a dedicated MOPS person team, compared to 64 percent of orgs under 10 million have a dedicated MOPS person team.

[00:01:55] Joe Peters: So, interesting on that first data point. And then, a couple of other ones. Smaller teams are trending. So we’re seeing 31 percent of participants are a solo team, which Lauren and I were, we’re quite familiar with that. That’s up from 25 percent last year. There could be a variety of things here that could be causing it.

[00:02:18] Joe Peters: But the third point is on the data, the primary responsibility. So. We’re seeing almost 70 percent of participants ranking data as the number one this year in terms of a responsibility that they’re taking hold on and, and that that’s a, that’s a big change and also really important change as we see our path towards AI adoption.

[00:02:43] Joe Peters: So. Lauren, out of these three, are there any surprises to you or anything that sort of comes to mind?

[00:02:52] Lauren McCormack: I think it’s a natural function of the change in the landscape that we’ve seen from venture capital. And the notion two years ago around expanding headcount for the sake of expanding headcount to show growth in a company to, to even just talk about LTV of customers, right?

[00:03:15] Lauren McCormack: And the investment at which, you know, millions of dollars of rounds were being put into B2B SaaS only to have everything evaporate so abruptly. And now, I think frugality has been the mantra for 2023, and it’s no surprise that teams have gotten smaller and definitely, I think, delightful, to your point, to see the people that remain realizing that unlocking data or having governance over data is the future to their success, it’s not, you know as we approach a GA4 kind of reduced cookie environment with increased standards around inbox, you know, deliverability restrictions, data’s the only way we’re going to unlock personalized relevant messaging.

[00:04:05] Lauren McCormack: That’s a welcome guest across platforms at scale. And I think marketers are starting to realize that now more than ever, that that’s where the true value lies is first party data.

[00:04:15] Joe Peters: Yeah, if we think of the opportunities with AI and data and, you know, it can also work against us a bit in terms of AI recognizing what isn’t really personalized messaging or direct messaging and anything that’s there from a spam perspective or might be conveyed as spam.

[00:04:37] Joe Peters: That, that’s, that’s going to be a challenge above and beyond all of these platform challenges we have to deal with as well.

[00:04:44] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, I think even just unlocking the first party data that you have in the now, not necessarily waiting for AI innovation, but taking your first party data around your MQLs, your SALs, your closed one business for the last year and getting it in platform around paid search and social and looking for more of the same.

[00:05:06] Lauren McCormack: I mean, that’s, that’s an opportunity at our doorstep now. And I, I do think that You know, years ago, it was hard for me to evangelize, sometimes it still is, with a couple of our clients, I, I still am having conversations around the intersection between first party data, paid search and social being kind of the, the quickest way to cash, to revenue, to ROAS, right, and, and the, but the underpinning foundation, the infrastructure and the architecture to make that happen is mobs, and people have seen them As disparate categories and functions for so long, but that intersection is so incredibly powerful and that’s where, that’s where I’ve spent a lot of my time professionally is just
trying to evangelize around that intersection of, of data and paid and ops and it’s, it’s a really powerful kind of trifecta if you can, if you can get ownership and you can optimize around all three points, it’s a, It’s a, it’s a definite path for growth for the org

[00:06:07] Joe Peters: and for you.

[00:06:08] Joe Peters: One hundred percent. And for careers. Yeah. And I think that’s the important, important point. One of the topics that came up, I’m going to say several times at Mopsapalooza was this idea of, of mops being able to take on this function of data ops as well. And I think that’s an important thing for people to see.

[00:06:30] Joe Peters: Why not? Recognize that this is a real opportunity for you in MOPS to, to have, I’m going to say, which are one of our most important battlefields over the next couple of years, if not far into the future.

[00:06:47] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, I mean, lean into the number, write the charter. Be the definitive, you know group within the org that, that puts pen to paper.

[00:06:56] Lauren McCormack: I, in your session in particular at Mopsapalooza, the notion that who, who, who else is better, you know, versed in the organization than Marketing Operations to own the treaties and to own the, the rules around engagement with new tech than Marketing Ops. We’re the ones that are innovating in the tools.

[00:07:17] Lauren McCormack: Heck, we have to be able to explain them to the rest of the org more often than not. So why not take on, you know, some of the opportunity with some of the onus that comes with ownership around these tools.

[00:07:28] Joe Peters: For sure. Well, let’s move to another interesting data topic, and that’s the HubSpot acquisition of Clearbit.

[00:07:37] Joe Peters: Yes. And what that means for enhancing its… It’s AI platform. So last week they announced they were acquiring a B2B data provider, Clearbit to enhance their platform with third party company, company data. And, you know, we’ve been a big fan of Clearbit for a long time. And so I think this is going to be an interesting acquisition in terms of being able to enrich internal customer data with that real time, external context, that it’s kind of a bit of a gap.

[00:08:10] Joe Peters: In well, let’s say native HubSpot, how you’re going to enrich it through other ways, or it was going to be something else. But I think we also heard that Clearbit rebuilt its data pipeline earlier this year with LLMs at the core, reinventing how it processes, categorizes, and enriches data set. And so I think here’s one interesting quote before I turn it over to you, Lauren, was thanks to this technology, Clearbit was now.

[00:08:41] Joe Peters: able to identify and enrich any company or contact data from any country in any language. And that was a quote from CEO Matt Sorenson. So I think this is a really interesting move and pretty strategic in HubSpot’s continued, let’s say, innovation and advancement as a As a platform in for marketing operations, well, and, and other parts of the business as well.

[00:09:16] Lauren McCormack: I’m so jealous. I’ve been a Marketo soul rather exclusively over the years, but, you know, dabbled in HubSpot and been tempted, you know, and curious around other platforms, you know, Active Campaign when they had Maria Pergolino. I’ve been somewhat curious, but often, you know, returned home to my roots, but with Clearbit, this is kind of where that powerful intersection that I was talking about comes into play.

[00:09:44] Lauren McCormack: Yeah. Yeah. They’re owned by HubSpot now, but I, I, I wielded Clearbit like a magic sword, 20 20 20 20 to like get into Facebook feeds, like it would give me the fuzzy match of business emails. I’ll say. Come with like a list of a thousand business emails from my target account. And it would give me a fuzzy match and say, here’s their likely social profile.

[00:10:08] Lauren McCormack: And so as people are scrolling through cute pictures of their kids and their nieces and nephews and neighbors on Halloween or over the weekend, you know, and all of a sudden this charming, you know B2B ad is popping up in a perfectly Perfectly targeted spot to meet them on the weekends and the evenings when they’re relaxed and amiable and treat like so Clearbit was wonderful then.

[00:10:34] Lauren McCormack: And I always thought, you know, we had at that time in my tech stack, multiple layers of data enrichment tools. And I always. I’ve always trusted Clear Bits Enrichment, and I won’t name names, right? Yeah. Classy. But I always trusted Data Enrichment the most, but I’ve always just loved their team. Like there’s a few people, like Sager especially over the years that have just been exceptional and watching them as a business shift.

[00:11:01] Lauren McCormack: earlier this year to like PLG and to have like, you know, like a free product for all and kind of like, what are you guys up to? Why, why are you, why are you stepping back into PLG after being B2B SaaS for paid model for so long? This explains it. Now I have my answers, Joe. Now I know why they wanted us all to come on board before, you know, they made this pivot, but I’m really intrigued to see where it’s going next.

[00:11:27] Lauren McCormack: And I’m kind of wondering what some of my clear bit merch, like my swag,

[00:11:35] Joe Peters: opportunities might be, might be even more That’s, that’s a hilarious point, but I think of the very first time I was exposed to Clearbit, I remember almost falling out of my chair that this was possible, right? The idea of this data enrichment was there and that they had invested so much in this combing the earth for contact information and being able to pop that into your CRM was…

[00:12:11] Joe Peters: Anyway, it’s still magical. It’s still, still magical.

[00:12:15] Lauren McCormack: It’s interesting, but it’s, it’s, I think they were super smart in realizing that what had been their proprietary secret sauce was now becoming public domain to some degree. I know they attempted to dip a toe in intent, but never before in my career have I seen such a jaundiced eye coming from demand marketers against intent data.

[00:12:36] Lauren McCormack: And, you know, they’re not the only game in town when it comes to data enrichment. They were wonderful at building like the TAM calculator. I helped beta test that, you know alongside their team and it’s, it’s cool stuff. I think proprietarily speaking, I mean, you can go in platform and you can look for a lot of the, the capabilities that they offer.

[00:13:00] Lauren McCormack: So they’re pivots and I think acquisition you know, out of all the course, kind of choose your own adventure paths. They could have been on from a company from a girl’s standpoint I think acquisition was perfect for them. And this is a great time for it. So i’m super excited to see where this takes them, but i’m just sad that it wasn’t adobe red Who would have made my name

[00:13:23] Joe Peters: a little bit you what you wonder if there were some stories of shopping around to see who was going to To bite on this one, but i’m sure really interesting stuff and Will be, once again, interesting to see where HubSpot’s going to take things.

[00:13:37] Joe Peters: Yeah, for sure. So, okay, let’s shift gears into our community question this week. This one’s an interesting one. So, I’m looking for advice on developing marketing ops plans. I’ve been building out, process, and refining for efficiency with no real guiding light. Any recommendations?

[00:14:01] Lauren McCormack: Revenue is your north star, friend.

[00:14:03] Lauren McCormack: Like I know it’s scary to lean into a number, especially if sales won’t even take your calls or give you the time of day. And but I think so many people at Mopsapalooza surprised me by articulating the CMO’s point of view, right? Which, of course, is the whole C suite and the board’s point of view.

[00:14:24] Lauren McCormack: You know my, my, my, Buddy, Arizona colleague down here, my, my Phoenix Mug Leader, Raja Wala, was talking about his kind of personality and the way that he’s always liked to build cool stuff. And the fact that he would go as a mop soul and he hated the strategy. He hated the conversations around building the PowerPoint for the deck and doing all the stuff.

[00:14:49] Lauren McCormack: You know, he wanted to build something super cool, you know, and whether or not it generated, you know, 5 million in pipeline or just was something that he could chat with his other, you know marketing ops souls about just from an interesting, you know, novel build standpoint. He had a pivot, I think, in his career where he realized.

[00:15:13] Lauren McCormack: The budget to build the cool stuff comes from the strategy, comes from tying to your revenue North Stars, comes from being able to articulate what the return on your time is to the bottom, the top line, right? So I think if you’re lacking direction, look at your company’s You know, strategic plan for the year, where can you support and lift the, the, the, the heavy rocks, where can you build against numbers that will build job security for your boss’s boss?

[00:15:48] Joe Peters: Well, think about it. What’s your CMO’s OKRs? Like, just like, maybe, yeah. It’s definitely not buying another technology to add to the stack. So yeah, so I think, I think you’re, you’re right. Like if, if you don’t have anything, just looking at revenue is just a great starting point. If not you can never go wrong there.

[00:16:15] Joe Peters: Pretty much.

[00:16:15] Lauren McCormack: It’s daunting. Like, I mean, some companies you know, I’ve been in a, in a case where contribution to pipeline, you know, I, I can barely tell you how many leads we got this month. Right. So work backwards from that number then and show. In incremental bite sized pieces, how you’re going to build that transparency and visibility.

[00:16:37] Lauren McCormack: And granted, prepare yourself, put a buffer point in there. Once you stand up reporting, you may not want to socialize it right away. It might be ugly, it might have some hard truths, you know. And it’s gonna, it’s gonna tell us maybe a half a story. Maybe it’s not even the full story. So don’t, don’t you know, work with a firm like ours.

[00:16:56] Lauren McCormack: Stand up reporting and then have a book. Meeting the next day to socialize that with your CMO give yourself some refinement time a little buffer is healthy, but Once you can start articulating that, you know Investment in in X Channel Gives wide contribution to close one business. Then you’re onto something, you’ve got job security, you’re able to do regression analysis so that if at the end of the year you have 5, 000 extra dollars, you know where to put it and what to, how to manage the expectations around what you’ll get back from it.

[00:17:29] Lauren McCormack: That’s the powerful conversation that I think. Would help you get to a place of transparency and visibility and alignment across the org. And that’s really what we’re supposed to be doing in ops, not just like gatekeeping and siloing and doing cool stuff under the cover of night. Like we’re supposed to be facilitating growth across the company at the end of the day.

[00:17:50] Joe Peters: Well, that’s some, some great advice. And hopefully that. Community member is listening in to this episode of Launch Codes, but all right, let’s move on to thank our sponsor. Thanks to our friends at Knack for sponsoring today’s episode. Knack is the no code platform that allows you to build campaigns in minutes.

[00:18:12] Joe Peters: Get AI powered translations in up to 75 languages in just minutes. Visit knack. com to learn more. That’s K N A K dot com. Alright, well let’s slide into our hot takes segment and as always, OpenAI is going to be part of the conversation and I know we were supposed to talk a little bit about GPT 4 Turbo and all of the things that we can get with that in terms of what they announced on developer day with, you know, context length increases and all these other things.

[00:18:51] Joe Peters: But I have to ask you, have you had a chance to play around or seen any of the build your own GPTs yet, Lauren? Have you seen any experiments?

[00:19:04] Lauren McCormack: A little bit. Yeah. Last week while, while you were in Anaheim, Lucas got under the hood. Our, our, our our brilliant scientists, our, our math major gone AI marketing ops genius.

[00:19:17] Lauren McCormack: Was, was experimenting a bit with training, you know individual agents that were, were representative of like the brain trust. You know what I mean? Let’s, let’s feed the monster, right? With as much as we can, as much proprietary knowledge as we can. And of course my first thing was like. Are we sure this is secure?

[00:19:39] Lauren McCormack: Lucas ? Yeah. Yeah. I was like, are we sure anything is secure? And I’m like, that is such a fear. Yeah. But,

[00:19:44] Joe Peters: But above and beyond, yeah. That, that, that’s always the question at the, at the forefront of our mind. But I do feel like there is an R-P-G-P-T coming out in the Yeah. In the future. And you know, we’ll probably kick it around internally for a bit first, but such an amazing.

[00:20:05] Joe Peters: opPortunity to play around, not just in, our little world, but in general, I think we’re going to see some of these custom GPTs just kind of take off and the way that you have the ability to not only to set. Some context by uploading some documents to sort of focus the, the GPT, but the ability to also connect other plugins or actually other APIs to do other tasks.

[00:20:34] Joe Peters: I think our imaginations have got to be opened up a little bit to see where the opportunities potentially could be, because it’s kind of mind blowing where, where you could. We, you could potentially go with this. So anyway,

[00:20:50] Lauren McCormack: it’s, it’s the, it’s the beginning of kind of the, the visualization and the expansion, I think of, of seeing what kind of potential we can realize with this technology.

[00:21:00] Lauren McCormack: You know, this is, these are the, the, the little widgets in the fact, these are the Pokemon that the Pokemon trainers will wield, right?

[00:21:09] Joe Peters: Well, I, I thought it was interesting I saw a little clip from, from Sam Altman when he was saying, we have to get the world familiar with AI. So we’re going to release it incrementally so people can become accustomed to it and not just wait for it to be perfect.

[00:21:29] Joe Peters: So I think that’s the other thing with these GPTs, like everything there’s, there’s going to still be the odd hallucination. You’re going to get some results that maybe you don’t like. But. We’re in this experimentation phase where we’ve, we’ve got to play around a little bit.

[00:21:44] Lauren McCormack: Yeah, definitely. This is the time to be curious and stay curious and ask questions of what the potential, the unbridled potential really looks like.

[00:21:53] Lauren McCormack: This is where dreaming big is going to pay off in, in spades. You can’t, you can’t just avoid it. That’s for sure.

[00:21:59] Joe Peters: Yeah. Well, it’s always nice to get a couple of new toys in the sandbox, that’s for sure. And so I feel like we got thrown a couple of new ones, so that’s, that’s pretty interesting. But let’s shift into the next topic, which is kind of funny, because we hear a lot about AI taking away everyone’s job.

[00:22:18] Joe Peters: Well, LinkedIn’s spinning that a little bit and saying that AI will find you jobs. And so they’re testing features to generate… Cover letter like messages so that candidates can send these into the hiring platforms.

[00:22:33] Lauren McCormack: I did my job. They pitched me. They’re like, Hey, test out our new, you know, generative AI tools to improve your LinkedIn presence.

[00:22:43] Lauren McCormack: I’m like, all right, let’s talk, you know, let’s see what you got there. And I didn’t spend a whole lot of time training my algorithm to be fair, but it does have plenty of data on me. But what it suggested for like a profile summary. It was incredibly boring. And I don’t know. It didn’t, it didn’t really capture any of my essence, I didn’t feel like.

[00:23:07] Lauren McCormack: And so I tried again, and maybe one more time, and then I just kind of abandoned. I think GPT understands me better, maybe because I have a name for my GPT relationship. But I don’t have a relationship with LinkedIn’s AI, clearly. They don’t, they don’t get me. And I felt, I felt kind of sad about that.

[00:23:29] Joe Peters: I think the last thing you want to do with your cover letter is have anyone on the receiving end think that, Oh, this was generated by AI.

[00:23:39] Joe Peters: You know, Like, if there’s a time to sort of try and stand out now, it’s going to be to abandon the AI and trying to make yourself notice. So, anyway, probably more, more, more to come here, but right now, probably safe to say our hot take is it’s a little bit underwhelming.

[00:24:01] Lauren McCormack: Mm hmm. So far. Yep.

[00:24:04] Joe Peters: Okay. Well, let’s move into, well, the fun’s not going to stop here.

[00:24:09] Joe Peters: We’re going to move into our airing segment and a chance to talk music for a little bit. So our album this week I have right here, just let me reach over. It is the Yai Yai Yazz, which and their latest album Cool It Down. Pretty cool cover here. Big fans of this band, but also of Karen Oh, the lead singer.

[00:24:33] Joe Peters: She, she is has a. Spot close to my heart when she started to have a family just around the same time that I started to be a dad, and so she took a little bit of a break, but then during that break to focus on being a mom, she recorded a soundtrack for Where the Wild Things Are, which was a favorite book in my house, and so that soundtrack and a movie was on repeat for many, many weeks as you know, kids are ought to do, but they’re back at it and back on the festival circuit.

[00:25:06] Joe Peters: And so this latest album, cool it down really a nice purple marble vinyl on, on this one. And the track we have is called burning. And which is kind of funny, cool it down, but then the single is called Burning. You wonder where their creative juxtaposition is there. But anyway It’s, you’re, so the way that we’re doing it now is on the podcast, on launch codes.

[00:25:33] Joe Peters: You have to wait till the very end. Now you have to, you have to hear the close, and then we have a little bit of an outro and you’ll be able to see the album if you’re watching the video on Spotify or YouTube, but. You’ll also be able to hear it the audio of the song. If but we’re, we’re putting it at the end just so that it doesn’t overlay against our voices and make it tricky for you to hear.

[00:25:57] Joe Peters: So that’s this week’s album. Now, why are we pairing with it for beverage this week?

[00:26:04] Lauren McCormack: So you got me thinking about this whole international. Need for for a coffee that’s available outside of Tucson. So So we’re all market yesterday and I picked up some dark matter, which also incidentally has an espresso called unicorn blood Which is really good.

[00:26:24] Lauren McCormack: Wow. Yeah, but for today we picked starry eyes It’s by Dark Matter. It’s their darkest roast. What a great packaging. Isn’t it gorgeous? They’re out of Chicago. And they’re a fun brand. I have to admit, I do like my, my darker, darker, darker roasts here in Tucson a bit more. I thought, considering the complexities of weather and, and just general Chicagoan nature, having been a Chicagoan for a good long while, that.

[00:26:53] Lauren McCormack: The darkest of dark roasts would come from my former hometown, but this is not a bad cup. I do pick up some brown sugar and it is their deepest, darkest roast from what I understand. But worth, worth a spin. And I think it should be more, more geographically available than some of my other choices have been.

[00:27:12] Lauren McCormack: You

[00:27:12] Joe Peters: know what, I was going to ask you that. Well, that looks delicious. And they get 10 out of 10 on the branding of Of the pound like that is that is amazing in my I was on the road last week for mops, a palooza, and then also did a little jaunt down to check out the San Diego part of the coast, which is really fantastic.

[00:27:35] Joe Peters: But in my hotel room, I’ve never seen this before. They set you up with a kettle and then had coffee that you put in like a tea bag and you don’t to it. And, you know, steeped it the way you would tea and pulled it out, but I’ve, I’ve had, I don’t know, probably several million coffees in my life at this point.

[00:28:00] Joe Peters: And I have never, ever seen that. Have you ever seen

[00:28:03] Lauren McCormack: that? It’s sensible. My French press is from Clearbit to take things fully. They sent me a French press once upon a time. I mean,

[00:28:13] Joe Peters: French press ish. Yeah.

[00:28:17] Lauren McCormack: Cold brew bags. But I’ve never, was it cold, bro? Or was it? No,

[00:28:22] Joe Peters: no, they gave you a kettle, which was also kind of a fancy, funky kind of new kettle.

[00:28:28] Joe Peters: You know, those ones that you put down and then you set the temperature on it and then press the button. So anyway, it was very Different, but something that I’d never come across. So the fact that it was a shock for me, it’s a surprise for the coffee connoisseur as well. Yeah.

[00:28:44] Lauren McCormack: Well, I know that instant coffee had its moment and I’m kind of happy that that didn’t catch on, but I’m curious.

[00:28:50] Joe Peters: No, no, no. This, this was, I’m going to say it was fairly delicious. Not. But definitely wasn’t instant coffee in any of the sink or whatever the,

[00:29:01] Lauren McCormack: And that wasn’t really a welcoming, I, the ritual itself is, is part of the charm, I think, you know,

[00:29:07] Joe Peters: but it was combining the Tea and coffee ritual, which was weird.

[00:29:13] Joe Peters: But anyway, sometimes you, you learn more than you you thought you were when you listened to LaunchCode. So we just added that little extra in for you this week, but well, thanks Lauren. And thanks everyone for listening this week. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review. You can find us on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple podcasts.

[00:29:33] Joe Peters: Stay connected with us on LinkedIn, or by joining our newsletter, also called Launch Codes, using the link in the description. And as always, thanks mom for watching. Have a great week, everyone. Take care, everybody.