Ryan Gould and the trouble with being interesting

A product team has finished something it wants the world to notice. The email is waiting to be written. Ryan Gould’s advice introduces an awkward possibility: perhaps this particular update does not deserve an email at all. A smaller change might belong on a website or in a social post. The customer has a day to get through, and the company’s enthusiasm is only one claim on it.

That is a revealing place to meet Gould. He works in an industry paid to attract attention, yet some of his most useful advice concerns when to ask for less of it. In his writing about product announcements, he returns to benefits, a specific audience, and a demonstration of what has changed. The recipient needs a reason to care. The effort invested by the maker does not automatically supply one.

Gould is based in Gilbert, Arizona, where he is COO and Executive Vice President of Client Strategy at Elevation Marketing. His professional territory is business-to-business marketing: companies explaining themselves to other companies, with sales and marketing expected to support the same commercial purpose. His public writing gives that broad remit a more intimate scale. Often, the real subject is one person encountering one message.

The launch that can wait

The product-update problem has a pleasingly uncomfortable quality. Inside a business, a new feature carries the memory of meetings, revisions, and decisions. Outside it, the feature arrives without that history. Asking a customer to share the excitement is rather like asking a dinner guest to admire how long you spent chopping onions. The work matters. The guest would still like dinner.

Gould’s approach makes the announcement earn its place. Who benefits from this change? Can they see it working? Is this the right group to receive it? Those questions give the message a boundary. They also require a company to imagine the customer’s experience before celebrating its own accomplishment.

The same economy appears in his advice on cold email. He addresses subject lines, personalization, concise messaging, and a clear next step. These are small editorial choices with practical consequences. A confusing message makes the recipient do the organizing. A relevant one has already done some of that work.

Read together, these pieces suggest a useful way of understanding Gould’s professional outlook: communication should reduce the work required to understand an offer. That is an interpretation of his writing, and it explains why his apparently modest recommendations belong in a larger story about strategy.

“Remember you’re a human being speaking to another human being”

Ryan Gould, writing on social media authenticity, 2020

After the booth comes down

By 2017, Gould was publishing as Elevation’s Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services. The following year, his subjects included trade-show lead nurturing. Events offer a particularly clear version of the problem he keeps examining: attracting someone is one task; carrying the conversation forward is another.

His trade-show advice pays attention to digital capture, information collected during an exchange, and follow-up that uses that context. The point is to preserve something about the meeting beyond the fact that a meeting occurred. A visitor who described a specific need has given the company more than a name to add to a list.

There is a quiet absurdity in spending heavily on an exhibit and then treating every visitor as interchangeable. The booth can be carefully designed while the next message arrives with all the warmth of a parking receipt. Gould’s account of lead nurturing asks the machinery behind the event to remember what the human encounter established.

That concern travels naturally into live chat, another subject he addressed in 2018. His recommendations include trained agents, relevant information, and a transcript customers can keep. He also cautions against intrusive pop-ups and noise. The chat window should offer assistance when someone needs it. A bell that rings merely because it can ring is a poor conversationalist.

A little less autobiography

Businesses have a natural appetite for talking about themselves. They have logos, histories, features, values, and often a rather expensive presentation explaining all four. Gould’s case for product-agnostic content asks them to spend some of that attention on what their prospective customers want to understand.

In that approach, expertise becomes useful before a product enters the conversation. A company can explain a problem, discuss a decision, or help someone make sense of a field. The commercial relationship is still possible. The reader first receives something that has value on its own.

This is a demanding form of generosity. It requires enough knowledge to explain a subject without constantly retreating to the brochure. It also changes the writer’s question from how much can be said about the company to how much can be understood by the reader.

Gould’s interest in podcasts and webinars fits this picture. In his 2018 writing, he treats both as formats that can work at different stages of a marketing funnel. Spoken explanation and demonstration give a business other ways to make its knowledge accessible. The medium has a job to do.

His later comparison of LinkedIn and Facebook is similarly tied to audience and purpose. The choice depends on whom a business is trying to reach and what it wants to accomplish; the two can also serve different roles in one plan. A platform is a place where people arrive with particular intentions. Choosing it well starts with taking those intentions seriously.

The social account with manners

In February 2020, Gould wrote about authenticity on social media. His recommendations included transparency, conversations, consistency, and keeping customers in view. He urged brands to respond openly and let their identity remain recognizable across channels.

The most memorable line is also the least elaborate: remember the human being on the other side. It is easy to agree with and surprisingly easy to forget when a publishing schedule needs filling. A calendar sees an empty slot. A reader sees another post.

There is a practical discipline in treating social media as a conversation. A question deserves an answer that belongs to it. Consistency asks a business to remain recognizable after the campaign theme changes. Transparency means allowing the public picture to contain more than immaculate victories. Gould presents these as working habits that support trust.

His writing about influencer relationships extends the idea to people outside the company. He favors being upfront about what a brand wants and building a relationship that can benefit both parties. An introduction has better prospects when it acknowledges that the other person already has a purpose, an audience, and a full day.

The customer who is already here

By 2021, Gould was making a related argument about retention. Businesses seeking growth should pay attention to the customers they already serve. In his account, an expansion opportunity can arise from understanding a client’s needs and offering informed advice about a product or feature that could help.

He describes a consulting approach to that exchange. It depends on knowing the product, the customer’s use of it, and the experience of comparable customers. The recommendation has to come from understanding. Otherwise, another sales opportunity becomes another reason for the client to brace for a pitch.

His market-research writing supplies a method for finding that understanding. He warns that a customer’s journey can differ from the experience of someone inside the business. He uses the example of booking a flight: the traveler must navigate choices that an airline employee may encounter very differently.

Gould advocates combining existing data with qualitative insight, mapping the journey, and continuing to collect feedback. The internal view is convenient, but it has blind spots. Listening gives a company a way to discover which parts of an experience make sense only to the people who built it.

That is where his customer advice meets his executive work. The person designing a message, the person answering a question, and the person discussing a renewal each see a piece of the relationship. Connecting their knowledge is part of the practical meaning of aligning sales and marketing.

A plan that can survive its first customer

Gould’s range includes technology that can make an offer easier to visualize. In 2020, he wrote about augmented reality for B2B sales, considering how interactive visualization might help a business buyer understand value. The format changes considerably from a brief email. The problem of comprehension remains familiar.

In March 2024, his startup guidance turned to the decisions that arrive before a marketing program is fully formed. A website, social channels, branding, and a budget can all seem urgent at once. He encouraged planning alongside action, using measurement to learn, and making changes when the evidence calls for them.

The advice leaves room for a first attempt to be imperfect. A plan establishes direction; contact with customers supplies information. Refinement is part of the work. For a new business, that offers a more useful ambition than producing a flawless marketing apparatus before anyone has encountered it.

Across the years, Gould has chosen to write about moments that are easy to dismiss as details: a follow-up, a chat response, an announcement, the usefulness of an explanation. Put those moments together and they begin to describe a professional life concerned with how a business becomes understandable to another person.

The product team can still be proud of its launch. The exhibitor can still admire the booth. The executive can still want growth. Gould’s recurring contribution is to bring the customer’s day into the room with those ambitions. Something interesting has happened inside the company. Now comes the work of making it matter outside.