The way to do great marketing in a world full of garbage.

Today, Chad Hart uses Proofolio for almost everything. Customer case studies. A custom interview for his wife's photography business. Even the very recording that became this story. As he put it, when asked how he uses Proofolio in his own work: "In everything, right?"

But it wasn't always a link you could simply copy and send.

Rewind a few years, and Chad, co-founder of Proofolio, was doing this work the hard way. He had spent years running marketing teams, learning that the most powerful marketing wasn't the company talking about itself, it was real customers telling their real stories. The problem was that capturing those stories took enormous time, energy, and skill.

Chad describes the earliest version of that work vividly: transcripts taped across glass boardroom walls, markers and sticky notes everywhere, correlations drawn by hand.

Proofolio is what happened when Chad and Curtis decided that level of insight shouldn't require that level of labor.

Chad's whole philosophy starts with a blunt sentence:

His point is that the trust signals companies used to rely on have lost their power. Five-star reviews and testimonials, he argues, no longer move buyers the way they once did. "It used to be that five-star reviews meant something, but then, because marketers ruin everything, every company now has a five-star reviews."

He speaks from experience as a buyer, too. "I can't tell you how many products on Amazon I've purchased with a five-star review or 4.8 stars that I ended up returning, or it broke."

For Chad, the deeper problem is trust itself. A company can't be its own credible witness. As he explained: "you can't actually trust a company's word for it. You have to trust the people who use the service." When he shopped for a tent for a camping trip, that principle decided everything. He watched videos of people who had actually slept in the tents, and skipped anything without a real story behind it. "If someone's tent is good enough for me to buy, they're gonna have a video about it."

The old ways of building trust, he concluded, "don't really function and work anymore like they used to because people are ruining them."

Chad didn't discover Proofolio. He and Curtis built it, off the back of years of doing customer story work by hand.

The method they trusted was grounded in frameworks Chad had studied closely. "I had read Tony Ulwick. I had read Clayton Christensen. I had read Donald Miller. I had read all these different marketing and business authors." From those, he leaned on the buyer's journey, jobs to be done, the hero's journey, and outcome-driven innovation, "a few different theories or frameworks that you could use, but those are our favorite."

What convinced Chad this approach deserved to be a product was simple: it worked, and it worked because it was rooted in real conversations. "the reason we knew it was great is because we were actually talking to our customers who were telling us exactly why they gave us money. And the point of marketing is to make more of that happen."

Proofolio, in his words, exists so that others don't have to master all of that themselves. "They can just copy a link and send it out."

Chad walks through what happens after that single link goes out. First comes a short onboarding interview with Proofolio itself, so the platform can build an interviewer that sounds like your company. "You do an interview with Proofolio before anything else so that we can create this interview for you and make sure that everything feels and sounds like you."

That onboarding conversation is also the answer to a question Chad gets often: why does the interviewer ask what it asks? "The interviewer is built based off of an interview that we do with a business leader that starts their account with Proofolio," he explained. "We interview you so that we understand your business well enough that we can go create these custom interviews and then write case studies and stories that would be fit to publish on your website." The interviewer is shaped by your own story before it ever meets a customer.

Then you send the link, ideally to a happy customer. The interview walks that customer through their entire buyer's journey, from first recognizing a need, through research and evaluation, to the decision, the purchase, and the experience afterward. "We ask questions to go over that entire process, and we go deep when we can tell that there's something that needs to be addressed more."

Chad recommends keeping interviews to 10 to 15 minutes, noting most people won't give more, joking that few have "the stamina like I do right now to just stand and ramble."

From there, the assets flow into the platform: transcript, video, and drafted case studies built on the company's own messaging. The platform even clips the video into the portions Proofolio judges best. And the content can be searched inside the app or connected to tools like Claude or ChatGPT through an MCP that Chad insists is "copy, paste, sign in, and then it's done."

Do that even 10 or 15 times, he says, and "you now have a library of proof."

What changed is simple to say: the insight that once demanded weeks of skilled, obsessive effort now happens through a link.

Chad is candid about how daunting the old way felt. "In the beginning, it felt so overwhelming. The first time I did this, I didn't know what I was biting into." He had interviews in hand, knew what he needed to produce, "and I had no idea how to do it."

But the payoff, when it came, was real and lasting. The case studies he eventually wrote by hand became a durable business asset. "Those case studies that I ended up writing actually ended up being the highest converting pieces of content on that company's website for years." He dates that work back to 2016 and notes they remained top performers until at least 2024. The company continued the program after he left, and now uses Proofolio, so, in Chad's memorable phrase, "they get me even though they don't have me."

The speed shows up fast for new customers, too. Tyler at Listing Academy did the onboarding interview, sent his link to his list, and "within an hour, he had four people that had completed the interview." The case studies went straight onto a landing page.

The emotional outcome Chad keeps returning to is confidence, on both sides of the sale. Buyers, he says, "want confidence moving forward" and don't "want to have buyer's remorse two weeks later." And when confidence is already there, selling stops feeling like pressure. Without it, "that's when you have to sell, that's when you have to convince, and that just makes everyone feel gross."

Chad believes the AI interviewer outperforms the human it replaced. He would know. He was that human.

Back when he ran interviews himself at RedX, skill was never the problem. Stamina was. "By interview seven or eight, I was done, right? I was tired of having that same conversation. And even though I was good at it, I had to put on a happy face, had to smile, had to grind through it, and every interview kind of blended together in my mind."

The interviewer he helped build has no such ceiling. "The AI interviewer that we have will have the same level of engaging, excellent, deep, thoughtful conversation every single time." And it keeps hours no employee ever will: "the AI interviewer is available at 12:59 AM, right? Like, good luck finding a customer-success rep that would be happy at 12:59 AM to talk to a customer."

Customers feel the difference on their end too. Fatigue never flattens the tenth interview of the day, because there is no tenth interview of the day: every conversation is the interviewer's first.

Near the end of the interview, Chad was asked what he'd say to a marketing leader who believed everything he'd said and was about to close the tab anyway. He answered by trying, in real time, to build the case for doing this without Proofolio.

He started generously. "Do it yourself. I did it manually for years before ever having this, so it can be done." He even sketched the syllabus: "Go understand and learn buyer's journey. Go read all the books on jobs to be done and outcome-driven innovation. Attend Donald Miller seminars and courses... go do your homework, become expert in this thing, and then have them run it." A truly dedicated full-time human, he reasoned, might even produce better output, "because they're a human with full-time attention on a thing, and humans are really smart."

Then he heard himself say it, and stopped. "I say that and it doesn't ring true. This can still outperform that person, 'cause this runs 24/7, all day, and can collect hundreds of case studies a month."

The proof that settled it for him was Western Governors University. "Robert over there could not have hundreds of interviews at this point on his own. He had full-time staff: people literally assigned to do this thing, and they were getting, like, four a month."

He ended the argument with himself out loud: "I take back everything I said. Proofolio is the way to go."

Chad's vision for Proofolio reaches well beyond his own marketing. He described a photographer building educational content for clients, a university alumni team becoming "a strategic arm" of the institution, and even a family hoping to document a grandfather's life story, one five-minute video at a time.

What ties it all together is that the hard part is gone. The skill and stamina that once lived on glass boardroom walls are now, in Chad's telling, available to anyone. "This is something your grandma could do, right?"

Ask Chad who should buy Proofolio and he'll answer. Ask him who shouldn't, and he gets more animated.

The practical disqualifier is simple: "You shouldn't buy Proofolio if you don't have any customers, because this relies on customers to do case studies and interviews."

The philosophical one is the line he clearly means most. "Use this if you actually want to care about your customers. Like, your give a damn must be this high to ride the ride, you know? You have to actually care about the people that you're serving." And for the marketers who created the trust problem in the first place, he doesn't hedge: "If you're a black hat marketer, if you're doing shady stuff, if you're just trying to hack the next tactic, I genuinely don't want your money."

The interview opened and closed with the same question. The second answer was the keeper:

Then he added: "And everything else I said too. But that's just another way to say it."

Your customers already decided. Get it on the record.