The Struggles to Identifying Your Ideal Customer Profile | ep103

Video by: College Recruiter Niche Job Search Site. Hosts: Peter M. Zollman and Steven Rothberg. Guest: Jason Barnard, Founder and CEO of Kalicube®. June 17, 2025.

Watch here: The Struggles to Identifying Your Ideal Customer Profile | ep103

Professionals who are new to an industry or just about any kind of startup face the same struggle: how to build their brand so that potential customers can find them when trying to determine if they can trust them enough to do business with them.

Today’s guest on the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces Podcast is Jason Barnard of Kalicube®, which helps individuals build their personal brands online so that potential customers who are researching you get the information they need to feel comfortable enough to give you a chance.

Cohosts Peter M. Zollman of AIM Group and Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site learn about how building your brand is linked to the importance of niching down by understanding the profile of your ideal customer.

Introducing Jason Barnard and Kalicube’s Mission to Control Personal Branding in Google and AI

[00:00:00] Steven Rothberg: Welcome to episode 103 of the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces podcast. I am one of your two co-hosts. I’m Steven Rothberg with College Recruiter Job Site where we believe that every student in recent graduate deserves a great career and that it should be easy and inexpensive for employers to hire them.

I am joined today on this. Very fair. It’s not quite spring, it’s not quite summer here in Minneapolis, but I do know it’s well into summer in Orlando. Good to see you, Peter. 

[00:00:49] Peter M. Zollman: It is indeed into summer. It’s bright and sunny out, and we will probably at four o’clock in the afternoon get our thunder showers as we do every afternoon.

I’m Peter Zollman with the AIM Group. We provide business intelligence, conferences and consulting for Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces, and I can’t believe I’ve put up with you for 103 episodes. 

[00:01:15] Steven Rothberg: It only feels like 303. 

[00:01:17] Peter M. Zollman: Yeah. What can I tell you? And with us today from the South of France is Jason Barnard, CEO, and founder of Kalicube.

And he specializes in Personal Brand Intelligence and he also believes in branding by putting big things on the wall behind them. Those of us who sit in our home offices just have nothing behind us. I got Flossy the Flamingo, but Jason, let me shut up and introduce you and tell us about Kalicube briefly, and then we’ll ask you some questions. 

[00:02:01] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Thank you so much, Peter. Yeah. You can see behind me what we do is we make sure that Google makes you look like a superstar. And when we make Google make you look like a superstar, you’ve mastered AI, and AI, ChatGPT will make you look like a superstar.

And you mentioned Personal Brand. We focus on high net worth individuals who are entrepreneurs. That’s our ideal client. And we’ll go into that, but fundamentally, because we can bring the most value. 

[00:02:32] Peter M. Zollman: You had me excited until you said high net worth individuals, and I thought nevermind, I’m done.

[00:02:39] Jason Barnard: In that case, high net worth individuals are very ambitious. 

[00:02:43] Peter M. Zollman: Oh. At my age, I’m not, very ambitious anymore either, so I’m over two. Why does Personal Branding through Google and extending into AI make you a superstar? And what do you do? And I’m not asking you for a commercial ’cause we try to avoid commercials, but what do you do and why should anybody want to be a superstar on Google slash AI?

[00:03:18] Jason Barnard: Yeah superstar is perhaps exaggerating for most people, but I’ll tell you the story behind it really quickly. I created Kalicube because I had found the way to solve my own problem, and I realized it was a problem for a lot of people. And my problem was that when you search my name on Google in 2012, it said- Jason Barnard is a voiceover artist for children’s cartoons. He played the role of a blue dog. 

[00:03:46] Steven Rothberg: Blues Clues? Darn it. 

[00:03:50] Jason Barnard: But for credibility when you’re trying to build a business in Digital Marketing that isn’t very good. So I figured out how to get Google to make my Google Business Card, what I would call it now, represent what I wanted people to see, my credibility as a digital marketer and an entrepreneur.

And once I’d done that business picked up, I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, probably millions over the years until I sorted out that bottom of funnel problem. Once I sorted it out, I realized that the people have that problem. Kalicube was built, or I built Kalicube to solve that problem for other people.

Why Personal Brand SERPs Matter More for Individuals Than Corporations in Google and AI

[00:04:24] Steven Rothberg: Interesting. So I wanna dive into how does building your brand on Google so that your brand shows up when people are searching for you rather than somebody else’s brand showing up when people are searching for you. How does that relate to finding your ideal customer? 

[00:04:42] Jason Barnard: That’s a great question because my first pitch was to companies, and the problem with companies is their names tend to be unique in their region because of trademark laws and because of registering the business and people pay attention to it.

But we all share names with other people. So when I was pitching to businesses, they were saying my Brand SERP, which is what it’s called, a Brand Search Engine Results Page, looks fine. I come up top, looks pretty good. I don’t care. People are competing with other people with the same name. So the need is much, much, bigger and much more in your face and more valuable, especially to an entrepreneur.

So my initial pitch was to corporations wasted a few years doing that, and I’ve now realized the fully of my ways. 

[00:05:32] Peter M. Zollman: And how does this tie into people? And job boards. How does that matter to people who are searching for a job or for employers, job boards, et cetera who are, helping employers find those people.

[00:05:52] Jason Barnard: I love that compound question because it has the two sides to it. Number one is people looking for a job. Who are you going to entrust with your CV to help you find that job? You’re gonna search Steven to see whether he as the CEO of his company, college recruiter, is reliable, authoritative within that field, can I trust him? And from a recruiting perspective. You are gonna look people up. You might look them up on LinkedIn, you might look them up on Google. More and more you’re gonna be asking chat, GPT. What do you think about this person? So what I love about what we do is we have solved a universal problem with a very simple solution.

And we could potentially sell it to everybody. Everybody looking for a job, everybody offering jobs because everybody needs that search result or the AI result for their name to look absolutely fabulous companies or people. But we focus on the high net worth ambitious entrepreneurs because they’re the people who get the most value, the monetary value directly from what we do.

How Kalicube Narrowed Its Focus From Serving Everyone to Targeting High-Value Entrepreneurs

[00:07:02] Steven Rothberg: So I definitely get the importance of making it easier for your customers, potential customers to find you and the right you. I’m still struggling to see the connection and I know before we hit record and we were in the green room, you were talking about this a little bit about like how about three weeks ago, my word not yours.

You had an epiphany, but how does that connect to niching down to finding and focusing on your ideal customer. Again I see how it connects to them finding you, but how does that connect to you finding them or identifying who you should be going after? 

[00:07:48] Jason Barnard: Who you should go after for us was spectacularly difficult because everybody, every company, every person, every product needs this.

When you’ve got somebody bottom of the funnel in business, how you show up on Google or in AI is fundamentally important because the person is bottom of funnel about to do business with you, partner, buy from you, work for you potentially. And so it’s tempting to say I can serve everybody, therefore I should target everybody.

And it’s a huge mistake. And I was told years ago not to do that. And of course I didn’t listen. I went and did it anyway. But the nice thing that’s come out about it is if you look here, there’s a free download. 

[00:08:30] Steven Rothberg: For those who are listening on audio Kalicube, K-A-L-I-C-U-B-E.com/guides, G-U-I-D-E-S.

[00:08:42] Jason Barnard: Yep. And we’ve got. Eight or nine guides, 60 pages each, which teach you exactly what we do for our clients. So if you wanna read all of this stuff and do it yourself, you are welcome. Because I feel that it’s an existential question and problem that everybody would do well to solve. I’m not telling you should solve it.

I’m not here to tell you what you should do with your life I think it’s an important thing. And we will serve the people who are time poor and money rich who want it done with data, with expertise, fast, get the results as fast as they possibly can. And that’s the journey I took over the last three years is going down from everybody.

To realizing that the premium service for somebody for whom this is very valuable is what I should be doing. And fellow entrepreneurs, absolutely the perfect audience for us. 

Explaining the HubSpot Wheel Model and How It Educates Google and AI About Your Brand

[00:09:38] Peter M. Zollman: So one of the questions you set us up with is, what is the simple HubSpot wheel model? For managing Corporate and Personal Brand in Google and AI.

Now, I’m not gonna ask that question, so no, go ahead and tell us about the Simple HubSpot wheel model, because that sounds like it’ll take two minutes and run us out the clock. 

[00:10:03] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Exactly. So the HubSpot wheel model is the very simple solution. So you can read the 60 pages of one of the guides.

There are multiple guides, but it fundamentally comes down to all of these machines. Google and AI are looking for a single source of truth about you, from you, and that we call the Entity Home. That’s the hub. It’s a hub where the machines will come and look for information. Then the wheel is all of the corroboration around the web, your LinkedIn profile, your YouTube profile.

Somebody’s written an article about you. All of that needs to corroborate the story that you are giving them on the hub, the source of information about you from you. Then you, the spokes are the links from your hub to the wheel and from the wheel back to the hub, and then the machine goes into what we call the Infinite Loop of Self Corroboration.

Where it sees your message, the facts, your claims, who you are, who you serve, why you’re credible on your hub, go out to the wheel, the corroboration, see the same thing, come back, see the same thing. Go out on another spoke, see the same thing, come back. And with that, you can educate the machines, whether it’s Google ChatGPT, Bing, Siri, Alexa, all of them work the same way.

So simple. That was a two minute explanation. Not even one minute. 

[00:11:21] Peter M. Zollman: That was a minute and 22 seconds, in fact. 

[00:11:25] Jason Barnard: These are the bots. 

[00:11:26] Steven Rothberg: We’re doing a little bit of a coffee mug competition here on video. Peter has the same group. I have my College Recruiter and Jason being the competitive person that he is, I think I’ve counted three mugs so far, but they’re probably another 12 waiting just off screen.

[00:11:47] Peter M. Zollman: I could make a joke about your mug, but I won’t do that Steve. Your ugly mug, in fact, but that might not be referring to the ceramic drinking vessel. But it might be. 

Kalicube’s Team Size, Growth Goals, and Pricing for Entrepreneur-Focused Brand Services

[00:12:01] Steven Rothberg: That was so punny. That was so punny. I think we have time for one more question. Peter do you wanna, grab it?

[00:12:09] Peter M. Zollman: Yeah. And I’m gonna make it a compound question. How many people in your company, what does it cost to do this? I don’t count ’cause I’m not high net worth nor ambitious, et cetera, but is it a big company, a little company? And what does this cost? Might as well ask. 

[00:12:29] Jason Barnard: Compound question.

Brilliant. 16 people, including me. We’re aiming for $15 million a year. In five years time. We had the team meeting today, everybody’s on board. We set the approach. We’ve got, everybody knows what their role is and we’re off and running. We’re off to the races, absolutely brilliant. 

Our typical client that we serve directly is the ambitious entrepreneur. The entrepreneur who understands their Personal Brand drives a lot of business today, allows them to pivot easily in the future, and protects their legacy, and they would expect to pay $3,000 a month for our services to support them with that, making sure Google and AI, ChatGPT, Siri, Alexa say the best possible things about them when somebody’s searching their name or even when they’re relevant to a conversation that’s related to what they can offer, the person that is talking to the AI about their problem. 

[00:13:31] Steven Rothberg: I love that Jason, and I think for those of our listeners and viewers who are newer to the industry, maybe newer to a professional job, your Personal Brand is really important. It follows you. And for those who are leading startups, the Corporate Brand is really important. I don’t think that very many new entrepreneurs appreciate how much business they’re losing. From people who never contact them to begin with. These are people who maybe they go to your website, but then they look for corroboration and if your LinkedIn company page has 17 followers. A lot of established organizations are just simply not gonna work with you. And, that’s a frustration that I hear from startup job boards over and over again. Nobody will give me a chance we can’t get business from established players. And I think the branding is a big part of that. 

[00:14:29] Jason Barnard: Which is a brilliant point.

Our head of sales, Leanne talks a lot about opportunity doors silently closing. You didn’t even know they were there. 

[00:14:40] Peter M. Zollman: In my case, most of the doors are slammed shut in front of me rather than, I, walk in and they immediately usher me out. On that note, guys, we’re going to wrap up.

Thank you very much, Jason. Thank you, Steven, for doing this again, and we’ll see you in a couple of weeks. 

[00:14:59] Jason Barnard: Awesome. Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Steven.