Welcome back to our Meet the Postie series. Each month I sit down with a fellow member of the Postie team to ask them questions about work, life, and everything in between. These posts are loaded with relatable stories, tips on stress management and work/life balance, fun photos, and more. Last month we sat down with Billy Hayes, a super-smart member of our Data Science team. This month you get to meet Ryan Riggins, a member of the Marketing Team! Ryan is the voice behind Postie, crafting all of our newsletters and social posts. He’s about as outdoorsy and well-travelled as they come. Let’s dive in more…
Name: Ryan Riggins
Location: Durango, Colorado
Title: Marketing Demand Manager
How long you’ve worked at Postie: Juuuuust over a year
If you could travel to space, who would you take with you: Col. Chris Hadfield
Pets: Billy, aka Bilbo Waggins, aka Bill Furry
Find Ryan on LinkedIn!
What inspired you to join Postie?
First of all, I was looking to be in a different industry than I was historically. AdTech has always been interesting to me. It’s fun. You can inject personality into marketing in AdTech, which is a more enjoyable day-to-day experience.
Being a marketer, it’s a lot easier to put myself in the shoes of our target audience. I knew I could really ramp pretty quickly and figure out how to speak to what we do in a way that would resonate with marketers.
Lastly, I would say, the idea of direct mail was surprising to me. I’ve run direct mail campaigns in past roles, but we did it very manually. Getting a little bit of exposure to what Postie had to offer was really compelling and interesting to me. When you look at the metrics compared to what you see on a daily basis, running programmatic campaigns, which is a lot of what I do on a daily basis, I was pretty blown away with Postie’s performance.
What do you love most about your job?
I’m still pretty impressed on a daily basis with the power of direct mail. Admittedly, I’ll be the first to say I regularly overlooked it at past companies. But the consistent performance Postie clients see, even in B2B, I‘m genuinely envious of when I see those numbers in case studies. It’s really compelling.
I also think what’s exciting is direct mail is having a moment as people are starting to trend away from the digital space. The programmatic ad world I live and breathe in is changing. The tolerance people have for those types of formats is kind of lapsing, and we are really well positioned to bring people into a channel that has had a major overhaul. I think the timing and the place is really exciting at Postie, and that makes me excited.
What are you most proud of professionally since joining Postie?
We’re a lean team here, so I would say, professionally and or personally, I’m proud that we have managed to not only get through one major go-to market with a new product launch but we’ve also spent a lot of time and energy standing up a pretty robust demand engine, and one that is pretty consistent.
Given the fact that we have so much to do on a daily basis, which I think is a pretty common saga for most marketers, I’m proud of being able to stay on top of all our deliverables while building even more.
Why don’t you tell us something about your professional development journey?
Okay, I’ll start this with a bit of with a bit of a story. My girlfriend’s little sister graduated from NYU a couple of years ago, and we went out to celebrate her graduation. I quickly found myself in the middle of a circle of recent college graduates, who were trying to figure out what they wanted to do next. I ended up being asked for advice and I thought to myself, “what advice do I have for these kids?”
Frankly, I don’t claim to have any advice, but one of my biggest things was to find your X factor. The way I defined that to them is that people like to work with interesting people, as long as you have a specific level of competency and are easy to work with you’ll have a competitive edge over other candidates.
My professional journey reflected this ethos by having a somewhat intentionally diverse trajectory. I’ve worked in a lot of different aspects of marketing at this point, demand being one, brand marketing is another, and in some cases, design. Having all that experience across the board has made me a pretty nimble marketer. I think I’m effective in a handful of different areas, but I’m probably not a master in any of them. I personally like that because it allows me to work for smaller to medium organizations where you don’t end up being too siloed. You have a better perspective of how your work impacts the larger organization. I like that a lot.
What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced since joining Postie?
For me, the biggest challenge has been building out messaging related to direct mail and promoting all the different aspects we offer. Obviously, I’m very excited about Postie, and I see the value on a daily basis. But nobody really likes getting sold to, that’s messaging 101. The more salesy you make it, the less authentic it feels, and the less likely people are to take it seriously or believe it. This presents the challenge of finding the balance so people find us enthusiastic but authentic.
I’ve worked really hard to build an authentic voice that’s genuine but is also intelligent, often sassy, and fun. Simply someone I’d enjoy having a conversation with in real life.
Writer’s note: Ryan has done an excellent job mastering our voice – just check us out on LinkedIn. 🤓
What have been some of the most important lessons you’ve learned throughout your entire career?
I’m the type of person, that needs some time to brainstorm to do my best work. Where other people are super fast to throw out ideas or concepts, I tend to pull inspiration from those folks and then take some time before I provide my input. It’s been a journey to realize that’s okay.
I typically find that when I’m out exercising, ideas usually come to me then. I try not to overwhelm myself, or force myself to generate an idea in the moment if it’s just not happening. I’m gonna get up, go ride my bike, and usually something pops into my head then.
How has your role evolved since joining Postie?
Initially, I was tasked with doing demand gen, so that obviously comes with traditional demand gen, plus “this,” plus “that,” plus “this” plus, plus… and so in my world, the pluses were running our social channels, doing a lot of operations work, or creative design/direction. I wear multiple hats on different days.
One of the things I wasn’t expecting to do was author our newsletters and really dive into the world of data science. Through that process, I’ve become more educated on the intricacies of data science and how Postie really wields it to provide a lot of cool findings and campaign performance.
I think it’s made me a better marketer, understanding the intricacies of how artificial intelligence and machine learning work specifically. How the subsets of machine learning play into our audience creation methods since so much of marketing is understanding who you are marketing to. The process has challenged me to figure out ways to explain complicated topics that are more digestible, and that has been an evolution of my job that I haven’t really done much in the past. That’s been really fun.
Where do you think you can have the biggest impact in your role?
The bottom line would be if I could bring in as many leads as our leadership wants. That’s a pretty big impact. Not just junk, but quality. That’s hard. And is nonstop. Something I strive to achieve every single day.
The other area is being the outward facing voice of Postie. I am the one setting the tone in a lot of ways for how people view us. That balance of Postie coming off as confident, not cocky, intelligent, but not arrogant has ripple effects. Striking that line is challenging.
What is the most important lesson you’ve learned from working with the team at Postie?
Honestly, it has been a lot of data science. This is one of the first companies I’ve worked for where we meet weekly and have discussions where we all get together and learn something about a new topic. My favorite ones are the data science discussions. I have a bit of a bone in my body that’s really fascinated by that, and then I peel back the next layer of the onion, and I’m like, “Well, never mind, I do not have a mathematic brain to comprehend this at an intimate level.” Being around people who do understand marketing mathematics at an intimate level and can explain it really well is probably one of my favorite parts of working here.
What’s your favorite memory from working at Postie?
We had an all-hands meeting in San Diego. One of the first nights we had a bonfire on the beach, and in that timeframe a handful of us witnessed a seagull riding on another seagull’s back, just walking around on the beach. It was funny and random at the same time
Fast forward to the end of our all hands, and we’re going around collectively talking about the things that we took away from the last couple of days. There’s always this kind of air of gravitas to these moments where I’m internally trying to think about something impactful or heartfelt to say.
But then one of our developers begins his statement with “so I saw this seagull riding another seagull,” and I just lost it. I thought t was the funniest thing in the world, and I turn around and everyone else is laughing, audible cackle laughs. It brought a levity to the room and was perfect.
I still think about that sometimes because it was so funny, and the comedic timing was impeccable. I couldn’t have beat it.
Do you have any strategies for dealing with stress at work?
My biggest coping mechanism is getting out and exercising. It’s riding my bike, going climbing, getting on the river, skiing. Whatever I can do to just move my body and get my heart rate up. It just does wonders for my mental health.
That said, I don’t get as stressed out any more about work as I used to. Obviously, we need to deliver and perform every day, but I’ve decided it’s not something worth losing sleep over.
What tips or advice would you give someone starting a new job in your field?
Start by figuring out where you want to work. Are you interested in working for small organizations? Are you interested in working at bigger organizations? And if you don’t know the answer to it, my first piece of advice would be, try doing both and see which one resonates with you. I think that would really influence a career path.
If you’re interested in working at bigger organizations, then I would say, go and developed experience in a specialty. That ads value for those big companies; they have the budget to hire specialists.
If you’re interested in seeing a holistic approach to the marketing world and how that impacts the whole company. If you like the smaller to medium-sized companies and like seeing the impacts that your day-to-day work is making on the organization, then you might end up being more useful as a generalist. And if that’s the case, then I would say, go and try working on all those disciplines for a little while to build that foundational knowledge. That makes you very versatile and really valuable to those organizations that don’t have the budget or the ability to hire large teams and they need somebody who can do multiple aspects of the job.
What industry changes or trends, do you think will have the biggest impact?
I was reading an article today about Gen Z and how the tech space doesn’t have the magnetism for younger workers as it did for millennials. I think a lot of people are gravitating towards industries that cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence. Which makes a lot of sense. It’s a smart move if you’re at the point in your life where you have the power to set yourself up on a specific trajectory. Marketing has the potential to be one of those career paths where AI is going to have a huge influence on it and how we go about conducting our jobs.
On the flip side, there’s been a lot of really crappy uses and applications of AI, and I think we saw a lot of it early on when people were having ChatGPT do everything for them. The Internet essentially became an AI bot, and everything I read was AI. It was brutal.
It’s the classic adoption bell curve when something new and flashy comes out. And admittedly, us marketers love flashy and new things, who doesn’t? It’s been this rapid adoption, with not a whole lot of great deliverables that come out of it. Largely because a lot of us don’t have the level of understanding to use these new tools effectively yet.
That’s something I personally try to think about when I write a lot of my content. It’s not AI content. I’m thinking through it and trying to inject as much value and personalti as humanly (pun intended) possible.
With so many companies using AI I’m personally starting to wonder who or what you can trust.
Do you have any mentors, Postie? Or otherwise, who you’d like to shout out? if so, how has this person made an impact in your life?
Our VP of Growth, Ambur Cole, has been a good mentor of mine. She was the one to hire me at my first tech company and what many would call my first real job after coming out of a career in the outdoor industry and mountain guiding.
I learned a lot initially from her on the demand side of the house.
I had another boss at a previous company who had a more sales-focused role but oversaw marketing. He was an exceptionally charismatic individual who worked super hard. His name is Jordan and he was my POC when I needed things in marketing like shiney new tools. Most of the time, I would get a yes. But when I would get a yes, I’d often say, “Hey, thanks so much. I’m really excited to use this. This is why I want it.” He’d respond, “I’ve said yes, you don’t need to sell past the yes.” That was a really good little takeaway from Jordan.
What do you enjoy doing outside of work?
It’s fluctuated over the years. I used to be genuinely obsessed with rock climbing. I was a climbing guide for a number of years and then that kind of waned.
Living in a landlocked state means you have to do land-based sports. I’ve been skiing since I was 3 years old, and it’s probably one of my favorite things to do when the season strikes.
Lately, riding my mountain bike has been a lot of fun. I got my first real mountain bike two or three seasons ago. The first season I had my mountain bike, I broke my collarbone and became a statistic. I’ve been getting my mojo back since, but it’s coming back.
One of my emerging passions, which is a little bit harder to do on a regular basis, has been surfing. Being landlocked, it’s kind of hard, but I’ve managed to get the opportunity to go surfing in places all over the world, like Indonesia, Africa, Alaska, South America, Central America, and Mexico.
What would your perfect weekend look like?
I’m a morning person so I love getting up early and getting out and getting after it. When I sleep in till 8 am, I feel like I’ve wasted the day. So, for me, it would be getting up at sunrise to meet a friend to go ride my bike and then in the afternoon go climb some pretty classic route in Yosemite Valley, and then from there jet set it out to a coast somewhere, finish the day in the ocean surfing, that would be the best day ever.
What’s something surprising that not many people know about you?
I’m a pretty open book, but one thing that always gets people is that I’ve never had Taco Bell. Also, I don’t drink coffee. But I love everything sweet. So I’m not this holier than thou person. I’ve got my vices, for sure.
To me, coffee is jet fuel. My heart gets racing when I drink it, and it feels weird. I don’t like it. Taco Bell … I don’t know. It just happened that way. And now it’s a point of principle that I just can’t eat it.
Do you follow any sports teams?
Nope! I’d rather play the sport than follow it. I do love the whole Formula 1: Drive to Survive series, but I don’t know if that’s considered ‘following’ sports. I don’t really follow the season. I just tune in for the highlight reels that Netflix shares, and I binge-watch them, and I get it out of my system, and I move on.
What types of books or movies do you enjoy?
I really like adventure books; I like travel books rooted in reality. I get inspired by them.I read a book once and it promptly inspired me to quit my job, and take off on an extended trip. That was an awesome book.
Not in the adventure (per se) genre, the book An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Plante Earth, by Colonel Chris Hatfield is one I’ve read multiple times, often with a highlighter. It documents the path of a fighter pilot, to test, pilot, and ultimately to an astronaut. So cool, I eat that stuff up.
Do you have any creative outlets or interests?
I used to be really into photography. My mom is a photographer, so i’ve spent a lot of time in photography studios growing up. I actually got hired a couple of times to do editorial content as a photographer. I really enjoy it, but I haven’tpicked up the camera so much lately.
I don’t know if I got tired of carrying heavy backpacks full of camera gear in the outdoors or what, but that was probably my biggest one.
For a little while I was writing a travel blog, I guess, which is kind of cringy to say out loud. I was doing this big, long trip across a couple of continents over the course of a year and thought it’d be fun to document. Eventually, I realized I didn’t want to spend my time writing blogs for people who aren’t here. I was cannibalizing my experience when instead I could just take photos, enjoy the experience that I worked hard to provide for myself, and then come back and share those photos and experiences with people in person. So I stopped doing that, but I enjoyed the design behind it, and the creative writing.
What’s a cause that you are passionate about?
I’ve historically been involved in a handful of search and rescue teams. I don’t know if that’s defined as a cause, but I think it’s kind of cool to get out there and go find somebody when they get lost.
It’s something that you can do to really inject yourself into the community down here in Southwest Colorado. It’s a smaller community, and it’s a lot of like-minded individuals who end up becoming your outdoor partners or the people you’re looking for.
What’s something you’ve always wanted to try or learn?
I’ve always wanted to be better mechanically. I want to strip an engine down and build it back up again.
I still own my first car I ever bought, her name’s Tooty. She’s a 1990 Toyota pickup truck and I’d like to restore her to her original glory, with a couple of upgrades, of course. The gratification of fixing something with your own hands that was broken is probably better than any drug you could hope for.
Or fly a plane. That might just eclipse fixing up Tootie. I’ve loved planes since I was a baby.
What’s the best thing that has happened to you this year?
I got a puppy, although it kind of depends on the day whether it’s the best or worst thing that’s happened to me this year. His name is Billy. He’s a 7-month old mutt. We got him at 8 weeks, and he’s been a constant work in progress.
I’m excited to continue working with him and getting him really dialed in with his training so we—he, my girlfriend, and me–can explore bigger and bigger places together.
What’s something that you’re proud of?
Honestly, it’s not something that’s necessarily happened recently, but the biggest thing I’m generally proud of is the fact that I have done a good job balancing work and play.
I’ve taken some awesome trips over the last couple of years, and the memories of those experiences have only grown fonder with time.
I think it’s easy to get caught up chasing a career, and then you blink, and so much time has gone by, and you wonder, “What have I done?” “What’s been memorable?”
I have a lot of good things to look back on, and I’m proud of that.
If you could pick any superpower, what would it be and why?
Speak every language on earth. It’s that or flying. Fying is pretty cliche, who doesn’t want to fly? So I pick speaking every language on earth.
When you travel internationally and you speak to people in their language, it’s disarming, and it opens up new doors and connections that you wouldn’t have been possible trying to communicate through Google translate.
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So long, Ryan! Thanks for the chat. With that, I’ll see you all next time! 🚀
