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Epi 19: Build Customer Data Pipelines to Activate Sales Opportunities – Soumyadeb Mitra, CEO of RudderStack

infinityadmin March 17, 2021

Learn more about RudderStack at: https://rudderstack.com/

Find Soumyadeb Mitra on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/soumyadeb-mitra/ 

JC: Welcome, everybody, to another episode of the Future of BizTech. I’m your host, JC Granger and I’m here with Soumya Mitra, who is the founder and CEO of RudderStack. Soumya, thank you so much for coming on the show. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself and the company.

Soumyadeb: Thanks for having me, firstly. My name is Soumya Mitra or Soumyadeb Mitra, that’s my full name. This is my third company. I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life. I sold my previous company to a company called the 8×8, spent a year there, and then we started RudderStack in June 2019. I have a background in engineering. I worked in databases, worked in data for pretty much all my life. After my Ph.D., I joined a company called Data Domain, spent a couple of years there, and learned a lot about how to do a startup. The company went IPO, eventually was acquired so that was a great experience learning in a fast-growing startup. And then, I started a company, sold that too, did that for five years, I was the co-founder, CTO, sold that to 8×8 and then spent a year there and then started RudderStack. That’s my quick background.

JC: What about RudderStack? What kind of problems does it solve for its clients? I was taking a look at the website earlier, but why don’t you kind of give the audience the full rundown of RudderStack and exactly what it does for companies?

Soumyadeb: Yeah. We call ourselves a customer data pipeline company. What that means is, if you are any kind of a consumer or business, consumer company, or a B2B company, you want to understand what your customers are doing in your app. Let’s say if you are a FinTech company or if you are a consumer shopping company, you want to track everything that your customers are doing, all the products that they are making in the app, all the buttons they are clicking and all this stuff, right?

Soumyadeb: You may ask why do you want to do that? The first reason is to just understand your customers better. You want to understand what parts of the app they go to and what buttons they click on, what parts of the app is working better or not, and so on. That’s your product use cases.

Soumyadeb: Then, you also want to use that data for marketing. For example, this one, your prior product searches, you want to make them offers. And then, when somebody came to the checkout page and they drop off, then, you probably want to give them a discount coupon. Those kinds of marketing things, you want to do based on their prior activity in the app.

Soumyadeb: And then, there are all kinds of advanced machine learning use cases that have been based on all this data. You want to train the recommendation engine, people who click on this also click on that. How is that? Because you are tracking what people are doing in the app. Amazon does that and the company want to do that. And then, again, these are consumer, B2C kind of company use cases. They’re B2B use cases also. When you’re selling to other businesses, that’s where also you want to understand what your potential leads are doing with the computer website, what pages they go to, are they checking on the pricing page, what things are they doing in the free tier of the product, all these things you want to track so that you can sell better and you can do more personalized selling.

Soumyadeb: Now, all this requires you to collect all that data and to be able to track all that data, now, prior to, there was some solutions to do that. You can use a cloud analytics product, you can send everything to Google Analytics and analyze on that, but there has been a recent trend and all companies sprang to take more ownership of that data and sending to a third-party service, I want to collect all that myself, dump it into some kind of a data warehouse and do my own analysis, not just for data privacy and security reasons, but also generally, if you have access to that data, you can do a lot more things. You can do more analysis, more advanced analytics and so on, which you cannot do on a cloud.

Soumyadeb: Again, long way to, that’s what we enable customers to do so they can use our product and we have a hosted service, we are an open-source product, they can also download our software and run it themselves to help collect all this data.

JC: I like that it lets them keep a hold in their own data because you’re right, that has been an issue with third parties managing data and whatnot, so the fact that it allows a company to really keep their data in the house, in that sense, it’s really nice. Now, that being said, what kind of companies are typically the ones that hire you? Are you going after small businesses, mid-market, Fortune 1000, what kind of companies are typically the ones that hire you guys or use your services?

Soumyadeb: Yeah, we have a product and what we sell today is a cloud-hosted service that people can use. And then, we also have an open-source product that anyone can download and set it up. And then, we have an enterprise version of the product, which appeals to larger enterprises because there is more advanced features. We have three product offerings. Open source, anyone can set up and download. And on that, we have hundreds of companies deploying that all the way from small companies to pretty large brands like Goop, for example, is deploying that and so on. That’s on the open-source version.

Soumyadeb: On the cloud version, again, we have a spectrum of companies all the way from small startups like 10, 15 people startups to larger enterprises like Econs for example, is a fintech company there, 500 people there using RudderStack. We have some pretty large consumer brands using RudderStack, like, for example, the largest grocery delivery company out of India, out of Russia out, of Turkey. For some reason, we have good traction in the grocery delivery space, so they are all using RudderStack now.

JC: Ah. Okay.

Soumyadeb: And then, we have some large enterprises using the enterprise version of the product. There are a couple of PLCs we are doing and I don’t think I can name those companies until we close them, but these are really Fortune 100 companies who value the data ownership quite a bit and they cannot use a cloud-hosted service so they’re using RudderStack. It has been all over the place from the small companies, open-source developers to all the way to very large enterprises.

JC: Let me ask you a question, you said this was your third company, correct? This is your third business.

Soumyadeb: Yeah. Mm-hmm

JC: What motivated you to start this one? Why was RudderStack the next logical step for you after the last two companies?

Soumyadeb: Yeah. It kind of all adds up. My previous company was in the marketing tech space, so we are building a marketing tech platform for B2B businesses. Think of it as the VP of marketing at Cisco and you sell routers and you want to reach out to all IT people in Fortune 500 companies, right? How do you do that? We had a database of all that. We could show them ads, we could show them ads on Facebook, Twitter display, we could send them emails, a really complete marketing platform to do that.

Soumyadeb: I’ve been working in the marketing space and while working there, I saw that one big gap was, all these companies are trying to collect data about their users, showing how many people are investing, but they also want to understand what our existing people are doing with the product and so on. I saw the problem in my previous startup too. Now, there was this broad area called customer data platform that was taking off at the same time. I’ve been falling that space. Then I went to 8×8, we sold the company to 8×8, spent a year at 8×8 trying to solve similar problems. 8×8 was a public company, 25-year-old company, a lot of, a hundred thousand customers, over a billion people using our phone systems and we had a lot of data about those and if you are not collecting, you’re not analyzing all the data.

Soumyadeb: Then, again, all these interesting use cases we could have derived from collecting that data, as we are saying, the product analytics, marketing and so on, but there was no easy way to collect that data. There were a couple of solutions, but we had the same set of challenges, that being regulators in this field, the compliance requirements and all that stuff. There was not a great solution to help collect all the data.

Soumyadeb: That was also the impetus of it, it has problems, then I’m sure that dozens of other companies would need a solution that. Again, I think it’s not an idea that you get overnight. I’ve worked in the space for the last seven, eight years, first time faced the problem in a large public company and that was the motivation for starting RudderStack. I think most B2B companies start that way. There’s a problem in a real domain and then go in and try to solve that.

JC: What’s the user interface like once you have this data we’re so used to our data go to third parties, but that’s because they typically manage it well visually for us, make it easy to do something with. I guess my question is, how much effort have you guys put into the user experience? So even if I have all my data, how am I seeing it? Can I still API it out to a third-party if I want to, for example, for another company that maybe does really good at sorting that data in a certain way? Do I still have the option of releasing that data securely to a third party if I want to?

Soumyadeb: That’s a great question and that’s exactly what we do. There are a bunch of solutions we can help you collect all the data and dump into some kind of a data warehouse or a data lake that we dump all that data, but your insight point, it’s really hard to visualize that data. Your marketing team does not want to look into a data where it holds run sequel commands and so on. They want to manage it in a better product where it can create audiences, run campaigns. They want a complete SAS solution product, so their marketing team needs that. Your product analytics team may want to use some other cloud-hosted analytics solution for their use case.

Soumyadeb: At the same time, your data engineering team or your data science team, they don’t care about the UI. They want the raw dump into some kind of a data warehouse or data lake where they can do their machine learning training and so on. Th want the raw data, they don’t care about the UI.

Soumyadeb: You have all of these different consumers of that data in the organization, from the marketing to sales to support. They all have the best of great tools to want that data in. And that’s what we do at RudderStack. We’ll help you collect all that data and you can define policies, like this set of data should work with a product analytics solution. It can do things all like all the PII should be scrubbed off. If you are sending to, the product analytics does look at funnels and so on. You don’t need to send PII data there so you can do that through RudderStack and you can say that only this set of events go through  product analytics. You may not care about tracking every click and every product-

JC: Then, you can filter and segment who sees what in that data?

Soumyadeb: Exactly.

JC: That’s good. Okay, cool. As a marketing guy, my brain always goes there and I know that the audience can benefit from hearing how different business owners are getting their own business out there. What kind of marketing are you guys using to tell people about RudderStack and then, what have you found that’s been working the best?

Soumyadeb: Yeah. That’s a really interesting question. We are a one-and-a-half-year-old company, so by no means, we have figured it out, what is working, what is not. We’re still learning that.

JC: I’ve been doing this 20 years and I can barely figure it out. Jesus, it changes so quick.

Soumyadeb: Yeah. Exactly. But I think the first thing on that is, what person are we going to, like we are primarily selling to engineers, people and engineers both in small companies as well as large enterprises. It’s a really important selling motion and most open-source companies are like that. Some engineer in some company downloads thinks it’s working and then they talk to us for more advanced features.

Soumyadeb: The marketing, for us, is to figure out how to go and market to engineers. That’s always tricky. Engineers hate talking to salespeople. They hate marketing, the old-school marketing. They never click on ads. Most of them would have some kind of ad blocker in place. The way to reach them is to write great content. Content could be blogs, could be even code. We are an open-source company, so we have a detailed report with all the code open source.

Soumyadeb: And then, the code is also some kind of content or you’re writing some interesting blogs and then you try to promote that in communities where engineers are. Hacker News is a great community. I don’t know if you know Hacker News, but it’s one of the number one, it’s kind of like Reddit for developers. Every developer is on Hacker News and if you somehow get on the first page of Hacker News, then one-third of the world’s developers get to know about you or see you. We’ve been fortunate to get there a couple of times, both on our GitHub report, where we host our code, that went on first page. One or two of our blogs went to first page. That helped get exposure to the developer community.

Soumyadeb: And then, we have done things around Reddit and blogs, there are a couple of developer-focused blogs, like New Stack, TechCrunch, for example. Again, the way to market to developers is to write great content and somehow promote it in the communities they are on. So still figuring out, I’m not a marketer, so we are learning and seeing …

JC: That’s still helpful, though, because some people listening are, this is a very tech community for our audience. They probably have businesses that have a difficult demographic to go after also. Your advice being very content-heavy expertise style, that makes sense, so thank you for sharing that. That’s good.

JC: Where do you see the future of that cloud stack technology industry going? As an industry as a whole, where do you see your industry going in four, five years? What’s the future of that? What can people look forward to, do you think?

Soumyadeb: Yeah. I think, and this is a very interesting question and I have my own belief that may or may not align with what other people believe. If you look at the 90s, people were setting up their own stack. You’d buy Oracle and you buy SAP and then you buy Oracle database, you buy some application software like SAP and then you build your own application completely from scratch on top of that. And then that is your CRM. That’s where you track all your customer data and that is your ERP. That was the nineties.

Soumyadeb: Then came all the SAS revolution, starting with Salesforce. Everything, you don’t have to manage all that, give everything to a cloud provider. Send everything to Salesforce and they’ll track all their customer data and everything on customer data.

Soumyadeb: And then there’s a suite of SAS companies. Salesforce is tracking your customer data, your Google Analytics has your analytics data and then so on and they’re like 50 SAS companies people are putting together. Your marketing stack has started now becoming very complicated with all these SAS products for different things.

Soumyadeb: Now, the challenge with that approach is, now you start losing some control over your data. Your data is all over the place, you don’t have any consistency and then you have all these things running, like VOC marketing stacks where your data is in some kind of a marketing automation system that is linking to Salesforce, that is linking to something else. You have these one-off syncs running between 50 different places, right?

JC: Yeah.

Soumyadeb: Plus, there are challenges with data now, more and more companies are realizing that you want to take ownership of your data for various reasons like privacy, security is one thing, but also the kind of flexibility that you have if you have your own data. Salesforce only lets you access your CRM in certain ways. You can use their UI, you can use certain applications. I cannot send ClickStream data to Salesforce and use it for my training machine learning things. I want that data in somewhere else.

Soumyadeb: I feel there will be this decoupling of data and application going forward. Everything was coupled on your data. 90s was, your everything, your application and data, all in your data centers. Everything went to the cloud where your data is on the cloud, hosted and your application is also on the cloud, hosted by Salesforce or somebody else. We’ll probably see a cycle back from that, where your data would be under your control, where you have more direct access to your data.

Soumyadeb: And then, there are all kinds of applications on top. There will be a CRM application and so on, which may be cloud-hosted, managed by somebody, but the data stays with you. I believe there will be this unbundling of data and applications in maybe not five years, but definitely in 10 years and the infrastructure required to manage this data is also becoming easier.

Soumyadeb: If you look at Snowflake, it does the biggest IPO ever and why is that? More and more companies are putting all their data into Snowflake, in a cloud data warehouse so keeping track of your data is getting cheaper and easier and so on. That will only drive more of this. That’s the core thesis of cases of RudderStack. We believe once you have this decoupling of applications and your data, then you need to run these pipes. You have to move data around and so on. That’s where we play, if that makes sense.

JC: Where do you see your company in five years? Do you guys have any new features or tech that you’re releasing soon that you want to give the audience a little preview about or anything like that? Where’s RudderStack going?

Soumyadeb: Yeah. There is a three-month story to that, there’s a six-month story and there is a five-year story to that. Actually, there is a three-week study also. In two weeks, we are launching a big feature. It’s kind of details, I don’t know if it’s relevant for your audience, but generally, so far, we have been collecting, helping our customers collect ClickStream data. You have your app, you embed our SDK and you collect all the clicks and everything that happens in your app, you can track all that and we’ll collect all that, we’ll dump into your data warehouse, we’ll send it to wherever you want to send it to it. That was the piece that we had so far.

Soumyadeb: Now, one other big source of customer data is your cloud data. You have data in Salesforce, you have data in Marketo and all other cloud applications. When you try to bring that together, you have to pull data from the cloud sources also. That’s one big feature we are launching in two weeks.

Soumyadeb: The third thing we are also seeing is, okay, you got all this data into your data warehouse. And then, you did some modeling on top of the data. For example, you’ve computed a next best product to show to a customer or you computed a score for that customer. Is it a high-value customer or a low value customer? You did some competition on your warehouse, it could be a machine learning model, it could be a simple competition and you want to take that data and you want to sync it to some kind of a marketing tool.

Soumyadeb: You want to send it to some kind of an emailing tool so that you send an email based on those competitions. For high-value customers, you may want to give them some special coupons. You need that reverse pipe, take data from your warehouse back into all these tools so that you can run those campaigns. That’s the third part we are launching.

Soumyadeb: The way I see about RudderStack is even stream to pull all your ClickStream data, the cloud connectors, cloud extract, which we are calling to pull data from all your cloud applications. And then, once you put it in your warehouse, you do something, some magic there, and then you want to push it back to all these applications, so that’s the third piece we are calling the red house actions. These are the three pieces. They kind of complete the cloud, the customer data pipeline story. We are very excited to launch that in two weeks.

JC: That’s really exciting and by the time this airs, it’ll already be launched, just the delay in publishing. Do you only work with data in apps or is it web apps, mobile apps? What about just off my website, for example? I guess my last question about your company is, where specifically, or where do you mostly find your clients are using your stack? Is it mobile app companies, web app, or just e-commerce where they have a lot of data coming in from sales and stuff, things that and a lot of action on their website?

Soumyadeb: Yes. It is mobile apps and web apps. I think that’s the biggest thing. Between those two, if I had to take a guess, in the customer base, pretty much everyone has web property on mobile property. All consumer companies have that, so I think across our customers, 80% are using RudderStack to do both mobile than web tracking. But in terms of even volume, if I had to take a guess again, I think 80%, 70% would be mobile traffic because there’s just too much activity compared to web. That’s what it’s primarily used for. RudderStack is also used for service site tracking when you have a backend application and those are generating events. We can also generate events from that. We have SDKs for pretty much all the platforms all the way from the mobile apps web apps to service site SDKs.

JC: Soumya, you’ve been, like you said, an entrepreneur your whole life, it seems like, professional life anyway. If you had to give one piece of advice to the audience based on your experience, either previous or with this company, what’s the one thing that you would advise everyone, from everything you’ve learned?

Soumyadeb: Yeah. I can only give advice on being an entrepreneur and by no means I’m a super successful entrepreneur, so take that with a grain of salt, but one thing is, the market always wins. That’s one thing I’ve learned again and again. You may have the greatest product and the greatest team, but if the market is not there for what you’re building, then market wins, you lose. If you have a lousy product and a lousy team, but a great market, even then, the market wins. You’ll do okay.

JC: You just skate by, right?

Soumyadeb: Exactly. And if you have a great team and great product and a great market, that’s when magic happens. This is actually a quote from somebody. I forgot who, but the market always wins.

JC: I like that. I haven’t heard that, but I actually really like that. As a marketer, my mind takes that and the way I would see that for myself is, that just means that one of the biggest parts of the equation is targeting the right people because if the market always wins, that means that you have to make sure that you’re targeting the right market. If you pick the market first, in a way, and then reverse engineer what to provide them within, of course, something that you’re passionate about, educated about, you never just chase the money, that’s a losing equation, but if you say, “I want to help out these people,” and you say, “Well, what do I know, do I like doing that could do that?”, a you know, there’s a market for it and that seems essentially what you’re saying, with the market always wins. That’s the best equation.

Soumyadeb: I’ve learned that the hard way in my previous two companies. The first company was right out of college. I was fresh out of college, I had no idea about marketing and anything. I was engineer and totally, okay, I had this cool project I did in college. Why don’t I let go and sell this and it didn’t go anywhere, there was no market for that. Even in my previous company, we thought we had a good market when we were trying to build an ad tech platform, but the challenge then was, there was a market, but the market was very hard to penetrate. It was dominated by the big guys. The LinkedIns and the Facebooks and so on so even there, it was very hard for us to go and sell them in the market although we had a great team.

Soumyadeb: We are PhDs from Stanford and both my co-founders were, ex-McKinsey. We had the best possible team that could be on paper, but even then, it was not the greatest outcome for a company. I’m very bullish about my current team. We have a really great team and so on, but I think what is really different here is the market. It has been, again, a year and a half, it’s a long way to go, but I can see a stark difference in the first year of my previous two startups and my current startup so yeah, I think, hopefully something comes out.

JC: Well, congratulations for this next one here. Soumyadeb, thank you so much for being on the show here. How can the audience reach you or the company if they’re interested in your services or reaching out to you?

Soumyadeb: Yeah. The best way to reach me is by email. I’m kind of old school, I prefer email over social. It’s my first name, which is hard to pronounce, but yeah. It’s at soumyadeb@rudderstack.com or @gmail.com, either way. That’s the best way-

JC: And then RudderStack, right? R-U-D-D-E-R-stack.com?

Soumyadeb: Yeah.

JC: Perfect. All right, listen, Soumya, thank you so much for being on the show. Really appreciate it and we’ll talk to you soon, sir.

Soumyadeb: Yeah. I’m very excited to be here. Thanks for having me again and yeah, nice to meet you.

JC: Absolutely.

Soumyadeb: All right.

infinityadminEpi 19: Build Customer Data Pipelines to Activate Sales Opportunities – Soumyadeb Mitra, CEO of RudderStack
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Epi 18: Generate Repeat Buyers for Your Business Using AI – Jerry Abiog, CMO of Standard Insights

infinityadmin March 10, 2021

Learn more about Standard Insights at: https://standardinsights.io/

Find Jerry Abiog on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerryabiog/

JC: Well, welcome everyone to another episode of the Future of BizTech. I am your host, JC Granger. I have the pleasure of having with me, Jerry Abiog who is the co-founder and CMO of Standard Insights. Jerry, thank you so much for coming on this show. Tell everyone a little bit about yourself and the company.

Jerry: Yeah, JC. Thanks for having me on and giving me the opportunity to tell my story. So for your listeners out there, my name is Jerry Abiog and I am one of the four co-founders of Standard Insights. And how I got here, how I arrived to this moment, was I’ve got 25 years of sales and marketing experience and roughly 10 years ago, I left the corporate world. And at that time I went out on my own and started my own consultancy, helping software companies with sales and marketing initiatives. And along the way, I’ve had some great clients that have had successful exits and then not-so-great clients who are bust. And as I say in life, you learn from failure.

Jerry: And one of those clients, one of my big failures was I was working for a startup, helping them with sales and marketing. It was my first experience with an AI and machine learning startup. And like I mentioned before, it was another bust. But what I learned, two key lessons I learned back then is number one, it doesn’t matter what software you have, or you could have the best software on the planet; it has to be easy to use and solve your potential customer’s business problem. And number two, there was something bubbling beneath the surface with regards to AI-driven applications. So much so there was a study put out by Grand View Research a few years ago that the AI and machine learning industry is predicted to grow to roughly $500 billion in five years.

Jerry: So during this time, as my client was imploding, I was wondering what to do next. And then through serendipitous events, through mutual friends, I met my future co-founder. He was visiting from Chennai, India, visiting Atlanta. He used to live here in Atlanta and he pitched me this idea that he had, this prototype he had of this AI software that could help businesses drive repeat buyers. Mind you this gentleman’s experience was heavy-handed. He used to work here in Atlanta as a technological architect for General Electric and knowing what I learned from my past failure, I liked the guy, we got along well and thought his idea had enough merit to take it to the next step.

Jerry: So I took his idea, flew from Atlanta to Denver, to the outdoor retail show. When I returned back to Atlanta a week later, he’d secured two data clients. So that was how Standard Insights was born, and knock on wood, we’re off to the races.

JC: That’s awesome. Well, so tell the audience a little bit about what are the main one or two problems and pain points that you guys solve and for which is there any specific industry that it helps more than others? Things like that.

Jerry: So, number one, what do we solve? We help businesses drive repeat buyers using artificial intelligence and number two-

JC: That’s a great one liner by the way. I love that. Repeat buyers using artificial intelligence-

Jerry: It says so on the business card. And number two it’s industry agnostic. So as long as you have data, we can help you. Now we started off in the e-commerce realm because it was the easiest to get a foot in the door.

JC: A lot of data there.

Jerry: A lot of data there, and e-commerce companies were the early adopters of AI. But now, as we’ve seen, because of what’s happened with COVID and the idea of digital transformation, now the concept’s really taking off.

JC: I imagine a lot of SAS companies would be big for you too, because they have, like software companies, because they have a lot of data coming in and out from customers.

Jerry: Yeah, absolutely, but what we’re seeing a lot now with everything that’s going out there that needs help or the restaurants and brick and mortar stores.

JC: Let me ask a question. What about financial or regulated industries, like legal or financial, because I’ve always been curious where AI maybe overlaps or conflicts with a regulated industry, what kind of experience do you have in that? That’s just for me curious.

Jerry: Yeah, so funny you say that. So one of our other co-founders, he was talking to a potential maybe channel partner of ours that has worked in the financial industry. So I’ll let you know because the idea is there. They’ve got customers, they’ve got data that needs to be segmented, but you’re right. There’s a whole another level of regulations that you have to abide by. So I’ll shoot you an email once I find them.

JC: I really am curious because we’ve had some clients from those industries and they’re more challenging than others because of the regulations. You have to jump through so many hoops. I mean, I remember we had one financial client we did really well for, but I mean, the process of even just getting, let’s say an article submitted for them was insane. They had to go through a whole regulator who had to read every single thing. And they’d say, you can’t use that word or whatnot. So it was just frustrating. And that’s from a human standpoint where we can easily quickly change it. When you have AI, there’s a little more automation there and there’s a lot… It’s a scalable solution or a problem, right? So I always just thought that was interesting to see how AI and finance or legal came into that.

Jerry: Yeah. Now, I don’t know, just because with this whole COVID thing, and if you take finance out of it, just other verticals, this AI and digital transformation, it was part of their process, but it was going to be three to four years out. But because of COVID, it helped shrink that down. So now we can’t do this stuff way, way out. I mean, this is something we’ve got to consider now. So I don’t know if the financial industry, maybe the legal industry maybe have an aha moment. Like, Hey, I understand we were in this box before, but because of COVID and because our customers expect something different that we’ve got to act now, now, now, or maybe lose them to other folks.

JC: So it sounds like really your biggest market so far. You’ve got the e-commerce side, a lot of data that retail and restaurants, obviously because of the traffic flow of people. So there was something else on your site that I saw, iOrder menu. What was that about? I wanted to ask about that.

Jerry: Yeah. So I mentioned before we started off in the e-commerce realm nearly three years ago, so this is just 2021. So back in 2019, McDonald’s had purchased one of our competitors and it was an AI… It was a company similar to ours using artificial intelligence to help drive growth. So it was 2019 summer, 2019. We thought to ourselves, Hey, this could be a good idea to delve into restaurant hospitality verticals. So number one, our competitors got bought by McDonald’s big, big dollars, right? That’s number one. And number two, one of our other co-founders in Fort Myers, Florida actually owns a restaurant. So we developed a prototype, the other co-founder, tech co-founders developed a prototype in 2019, but it just kind of bombed. It failed.

Jerry: So we went to other verticals, we put it in the garage, but then COVID hits the whole planet early. Gosh, we’re coming up a year now, early 2020, we pulled out of the garage because we saw that, hey, everything was going curbside online, more so than it was prior to COVID. So at that time, this was March, April, last year. We decided to spin it off and call it its own product, if you will. iOrder menu to give that action-oriented feel to it.

JC: And how’s that been doing so far? I mean-

Jerry: It’s good. Just like with anything, there were some bumps and bruises, but just like in anything even with vaccines, right, the first folks that go out to the market, okay yeah they’re the first ones, but there’s a lot of mistakes there, right? So how many vaccines are out right now? I think in us there are two. So there’s more coming down the pipe. They’re obviously going to be improved. But if you pull up any article, the current digital menus are out there right now like Uber eats, they’re taking all your data. Grab hub is getting sued because they’re taking restaurant menus and putting them on their site and without the restaurant owner knowing it. A lot of data manipulation, just similar to what’s going on and the mess with Twitter and Facebook.

Jerry: I mean, these companies like it or not, I mean, they got your data. I’m not going to go as far as saying stealing it, but they’re using it for their benefit and not yours. And so we want to make our application data-driven, personalized recommendations and we want to develop it with four key factors that helped separate us from the other folks. So, yeah, so it was a little bit rough in the beginning, but now it’s going gangbusters.

JC: Who would you see in a company being the individuals that are using your software? So you’ve got your CEOs, your CMOs, your VPs, your directors, who’s actually going to be engaging with this software? What would their experience and day-to-day interaction with your software look like? Who is it and what would their interaction be?

Jerry: So typically we’ll reach out to them… so we work with mid-tier companies. So typically we’ll get access to the CEO and then once we’ve embedded in there, we’ll work with their head marketing person.

JC: Okay. Yeah. So you try to get into that CMO or VP of marketing.

Jerry: Yeah. The owner mode. Yeah. Right then and there just go straight to the top because we don’t want to waste time.

JC: Yeah, for sure. So let me ask you another thing here too is… Well actually let me make a comment. I think it’s really great that you talk a lot about the failures first. I’ve owned my agency for 10 years and people are like, well, how’d you get so good at marketing? I’m like, I’m not a genius. I just stepped on every single landmine in the field. I’m war-torn, right? That’s it. It’s the pure experience of it all. And I think a lot of people forget that the only way you get to these really great ideas and really great systems and software is like, what you have, the only way you get to that is because you’ve either gone through mistakes or mistakes happen to you. Maybe you were a victim of a mistake. You’re like, I’m going to save other companies from ever going through that.

JC: So I’m going to make this new company. It always comes from some sort of problem or series of issues and then you just keep dialing in and I have the marketing brain. So I look at it like that. Even campaigns start off with our best-educated guesses and really it’s the data and the experiences, the wins and the losses that are going to tell us how to navigate and get better and better. So at the end, it looks like we’re geniuses, but really we’re going back and forth a little bit here.

Jerry: JC, you’re absolutely right. I’m 50 years old. I don’t know a lot, but I do know that if someone comes to me and maybe pitching me an idea or whatever that may be like, I’ve never failed in life or what have you probably like, yeah, get out of here.

JC: Yeah, I don’t trust someone who’s never failed.

Jerry: I don’t trust you.

JC: Even if they’re not lying because I can’t trust how they’ll react when they do fail, right? Because they won’t know how to deal with it, right? I need to know that someone’s failed a ton. And even then I don’t mind if they fail on me, as long as they have the integrity of how to make up for it, right? Mistakes happen. Not every idea that you have is going to work out. But if you say, listen, I’m not going to give up until we get it right, then I’m okay. As a customer, I feel better.

Jerry: Yeah, absolutely.

JC: Yeah. So real quick here, I do have a question though. You have four co-founders. So what’s that like? I feel like it’s like a boarding school of CEOs. How do you guys get along well with four people? And how has that been? And I’m asking you this because a lot of people listening to this podcast are people in business like you, and I’m sure some of them have had, or are considering having other partners. So how did you get to four and then how has that worked out?

Jerry: Yeah. So it’s basically open and honest communication. So it started with two. The guy used to live here in Atlanta, right? So as we got momentum, we met another person in Florida because I’m here in Atlanta who had real life experience with dealing with negotiations, with venture capitalists. And this gentleman is actually an angel investor for Standard Cognition. So the planner named Standard Cognition, Standard Insights, their logos is capital S smaller C. Ours is capital S small letter I. He’s an angel investor for that company. And if you Google that company, they’re one of the projected unicorns. I think their valuation is 500 million on them. So you’re doing the artificial intelligence with the overhead cameras. So you go in the store and leave without paying because it records what you’re doing-

JC: Oh like those Amazon stores that they’re talking about.

Jerry: Just like with Amazon, again, we do a personalized recommendation like Amazon, but Amazon, people are angry with them right now. They’re a monopoly or whatever they’re called right now. But again, they have your data, right? You don’t get to own it. You don’t get to use it. You don’t get to use it for your benefit.

JC: But you guys would create this for a supermarket.

Jerry: Yeah. You control your data. So that was the other guy. And then to round out, so we’re more of the business end here on in the U.S., right? All sales and marketing and negotiations are done here. But on the tech side, I mentioned the gentleman that used to work for General Electric used to live here. And then we rounded out the team with the last co-founder has a Master’s in computer science. And he went to what amounts to the MIT of India. So you got the tech side, background statistics, worked for a Fortune 50 company when General Electric and another guy with a Master’s in computer science from the MIT of India.

Jerry: And then myself, I’ve worked for another startup. And then the other fourth co-founder, who’s got experience as an angel investor for high-value startup in artificial intelligence. But honestly, it’s just, we all have our different personalities, but it’s just working together towards a common goal and open and honest communication.

JC: I’m glad you guys are making it work. I know some haven’t, right? It doesn’t always go that way. So it’s good you guys have that going? I am curious though. So I’ve had a couple of different AI companies on the podcast before I’ve worked with AI companies, where do you see your industry going in five years? I mean, with the exponential curve of advancement that it’s on, this podcast is The Future of BizTech, tell me what you see as the future of your biz tech and not your company. I mean, just, but the industry in general.

Jerry: Well, so I mentioned before Grand View Research, $500 billion in four or five, six years, I think COVID helped accelerate that. So if you Google AI or just digital transformation, all these articles from people smarter than me, McKinsey, Deloitte, and that’s what they talk about digital transformation and that… So what’s the meaning of digital transformation? So it’s using digital technologies to fundamentally change number one, the way your business operates and number two, how it provides value to your customer. So it involves basically thinking outside the box, getting uncomfortable. And our favorite thing is possibly learning from failure because it’s not going to be perfect. So, but I think there’s going to be tremendous, tremendous growth with regards to artificial intelligence and the idea behind digital transformation.

JC: What about the integration of these checkout systems that you’re seeing, how you can use this for those cameras where you can check out without having to do anything. How fast do you think that’ll come? I mean, right now there’s little spot locations and a couple of cities here and there but when do you see like a full integration of-

Jerry: I think it’s going to be accelerated like in a snap of a finger. So they say that take my example, with digital transformation in the restaurant industry. All this stuff was cool to have maybe three, four, or five years out. But now in order to survive, you’ve got to do it today, even if COVID ended today. But people have gotten used to curbside pickup, doing things on their phones. That stuff is not going away. I mean, look at what we’re recording on zoom. I mean, who really used zoom last year, right?

Jerry: 10 years ago when I was in the corporate world, when we would do something like this, it was a big, giant elaborate setup. Now I’m doing this on my phone, right? Or even renting movies, it was Blockbuster, now everyone’s it’s all digital, right? You’ve got Netflix, you’ve got Hulu and a bunch of other companies doing that. I think it’s going to accelerate definitely. And COVID helped out with that.

JC: Where do you see your company-

Jerry: As bad as COVID’s been.

JC: Yeah. Where do you see your company in five years? So again, I like to be able to give the audience a couple of teasers about what maybe is coming down the pipeline for you guys specifically. What are you guys working on right now that people can look forward to in the next six months to a year?

Jerry: So we always try to expand our technology base and we want to make things sticky. So if you’re a customer of ours, we want to make it so hard that you can’t leave us basically, right? So we’re a tech stack upon tech stack upon a tech stack, like instead of you got one tool like a hammer screwdriver; it’s going to be a multipurpose pocket tool. Or if you’re just not a boxer, you’re an MMA fighter that knows boxing, Muay Thai wrestling, him lifts. So we want to be that well rounded tech company that once you’re our client, you’re not going to want to leave. And we do things-

JC: What are a few those specific features though, that maybe you don’t have out right now that you’re working on?

Jerry: Oh, that’s kind of the secret, but whatever we do with regards to software, right? You’re a CEO and I pitch you and I do the song and dance and you’re mesmerized and sign on the dotted line for a check. But if you don’t log in or your staff doesn’t log in, you’re not going to renew. So how do we combat that? Well, we’re there every step of the way. We offer managed services to help you with the software.

JC: It’s not just software. You actually have people who will be good account managers and actually help walk people through it and hold their hands, so to speak.

Jerry: Yeah. Hey, JC, here’s your login. Bye. Thanks for a check. And then when it comes time to renew, “Hey, JC, your renewal is up.” And you go, well, I never logged in. Yeah. You put a good presentation, but you never logged in or never used the software.

JC: No, that’s good. I like to hear that. There’s a customer service side then beyond just here’s the software. And again, repeat customers using AI. I mean, that’s the one-liner, right? So I mean, if a prospect is listening, if you’re having an issue with repeat business, then obviously something like Standard Insights would be something to go check out.

Jerry: So, one thing that we’re doing I’ll share with you is we’re integrating our platform into a store’s point of sale system, right? So you know, what a point of sale system is. So ours will be there, it’ll be on the point of sale desktop. Once it’s there and once you get your worker and you’re getting use, and you’re seeing our AI-driven recommendations in that screen, once that’s set up, they’re not going to want to leave because once those recommended… So we want to make it sticky as they say in the industry that you’re not going to want to leave.

JC: It always cost less money and takes less time to get a repeat customer than it does to go get a new one. So there’s a huge benefit there too.

Jerry: Yeah. Bang put out a study that said a 5% increase in repeat business can generate north of 25 to 90% in profitability. Because you’re right, it caught yeah.

JC: Yeah. What would be the best piece of advice, even just business-wise or generically that you’ve ever had that you can give the audience? Like just that one golden nugget. If you could give everyone here one piece of advice, what would it be?

Jerry: Well, you know what Winston Churchill said, right? Never let a good crisis go to waste. So COVID yeah, I know it sucks for a lot of people, not only here, but around the globe. But to take it a step further, learn to be uncomfortable, right? Because that’s the only way you grow and whether it’s at work or you what you do in your career, but also outside of work, do stuff that makes you uncomfortable. Like if you want to lose weight, you’ve never run, maybe walk around the block or just get up and do a 5k. Anything that challenges yourself, right?

Jerry: Maybe instead of spending all your time with what’s going on nowadays fighting with people on social media, that’s not going to help anyone out, right? So just be open to improving yourself on a daily basis and how do you improve yourself is being uncomfortable and challenging yourself.

JC: Oh, that’s awesome advice. I appreciate it. Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you want to tell the audience before we go?

Jerry: That’s about it. If they want to get a hold of me, they can find me on LinkedIn, Jerry Abiog, Standard Insights. They can go to our website standardinsights.io or shoot me an email, Jerry@standardinsights.io and be happy to chat.

JC: That’s awesome. Well, listen, Jerry, thank you so much for being on the show. Love your software, love the company. and really like you as a person too, especially with your thoughts and advice. Thanks for coming on.

Jerry: Hey, thanks, JC. Thanks for having me.

infinityadminEpi 18: Generate Repeat Buyers for Your Business Using AI – Jerry Abiog, CMO of Standard Insights
EP17-MeagenEisenberg-CMOTripActions-Update.png

Epi 17: Rethink Travel Management for Your Corporation – Meagen Eisenberg, CMO of TripActions

infinityadmin March 3, 2021

Learn more about TripActions at: https://tripactions.com/

Fin Meagen Eisenberg on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meageneisenberg/

JC: Well, welcome everybody to another episode of The Future of Biz Tech. I’m your host JC Granger, and I am here with Meagen Eisenberg, the CMO of TripActions. Meagen, thank you so much for coming on. Tell us a little bit about yourself and the company.

Meagen: Thank you for having me, definitely excited to be on. I am the CMO at TripActions. We are a full travel management and expense platform. We’ve got about 4000 customers global, around the world. It’s been a crazy, wild year of course, with COVID and us being in business travel, but we’ve launched about 40 new product enhancements and major releases so we’ve been busy as a team, building. I’m based out of the Bay Area, I’ve been here about two years. I’ve been in marketing over 20, and in Tech and love it. I love what we’re trying to do.

JC: Yeah, a fellow marketer. You’re in my head there. I’ve been doing it for about 20 years also, myself. What part of the Bay Area are you in right now?

Meagen: Right now, I’m in our Palo Alto office.

JC: I grew up out there. Palo Alto, Mountain View, San Jose, that whole little trifecta. Awesome.

JC: Let’s talk about that, though. You’re on the travel side. I see two sides of this. I see one is you guys obviously have been pretty affected by COVID, but it sounds like that has either A, forced a change for you guys to keep working. Or B, given you time to say, “Well, we might as well go work on all these other cool, new features.” Let’s talk about that. How has that affected your company? And then, maybe just the industry in general. It sounds obvious how it’s affected them. But I’m curious to see, how did you guys pivot to correct for that?

Meagen: Yeah, we’re still very much a full travel platform.

Meagen: One thing, though, is we had launched a product called TripActions Liquid, which is our payment and expense management, it’s a corporate card, there’s a virtual card, in February, about a week before everything shut down. So one thing we found is that the second largest spend at most companies is T&E, and 70% of that spend tends to be travel, but there’s a 30% of spend that’s not. So think about everyone setting up their at-home offices, buying software, doing marketing spend, digital paid search, you can do all of that on a corporate card and be able to much easier run the expenses on that, and do reconciliation. It accelerated that product greatly this year, because of the need for all these remote workers to be able to do payments and expensing.

Meagen: The other thing, as far as what’s happening in the industry, certainly we went from really being the best experience in business travel, to traveler safety and cost control. The tone shifted in the environment, it was very much around duty of care. We’ve built out a lot of features and enhancements around and emphasis on duty of care, a lot around cleanliness standards. When you think about travel, you want to make sure that’s a safe, secure, clean … What are the hotel’s hygiene practices? How about the airlines? Understanding that.

Meagen: Sustainability was big before, but is going to be even bigger as we get back to traveling. So making sure that we have carbon footprint, and a bunch of information in that, that people care about when they’re booking travel, whether they’re going to take a train or a plane. Which plane? What’s the most efficient way and lowest carbon footprint? And then, even ways to offset it, so a lot of work in that area.

Meagen: And, just a lot more dashboards for travel managers, trying to make sure they have visibility of where travelers are, where they’re going. We built out COVID dashboards that show reproduction numbers in the location you’re in and where you’re going, what are all the rules, waivers that people would want to know, quarantine information. That is now directly within the booking tool.

Meagen: The other thing that came about this year was unused travel credits. Think of the tens of millions of dollars in airline credits, when you start canceling en masse and companies need to manage that. Our customers, we not only made it very easy for them to run reports and track all their unused credits, now we auto apply it for the users as you book your next trip.

JC: Oh, okay.

Meagen: It automatically pulled in my credit. I had some personal credit, because I use our product for personal travel, and I had business credit. It auto applied, and then it deducted it from the cost, I was booking through United. Very easy. How was that a year and a half ago? I had to go find my email with the credit, I had to find that little code, I had to enter the code. I had to do it within a year, it was very complex. So we’ve taken a lot of the complexity out for our customers.

JC: Well, that’s huge. I’ve had to cancel a lot of trips recently, too, in this last year. Just like what you said, I have to literally keep the email unread.

Meagen: I was doing the same.

JC: Yeah, because I was paranoid that I’d lose it. When you lose the code you’re like, “Now what?”

Meagen: Yeah.

JC: Then, I’d forget, too. I canceled so many different trips, that I literally forgot that I had credit. For example, I use Amex a lot, so I go through their dashboard. Now, they’re pretty good at showing you what you have, through Delta, United, or whatever. And that’s nice, you can click on it and whatnot. But again, I wouldn’t realize I had it until I got in there. And then sometimes, again, if I lost the email, you might always be paranoid about that. I just thought that’s really interesting that you guys did that. And again, sometimes it takes these crazy events to force that innovation, because there’s nothing temporary about the benefit of what you just did there. That’s something that’ll be good after COVID, too.

Meagen: Yeah. Also, we’ve built it where it’s very easy for new customers to import all of their credits and users, and to be able to auto apply that so they don’t lose access to that and the credits, because it’s a big expense item that they need to be able to track and leverage.

JC: Does it sync up with all the different types? Again, does it sync up with American Express, where it’ll automatically go in there and pull that information out into your dashboard, so I don’t have to go to two, three different things? How does it work?

Meagen: No. Well, if you became a customer of TripActions, we would load that information into our platform. We’re not an integration tool into Amex, we would take that information and load it.

JC: So you have more of a personal touch, then. Tell us, how does that work then. I was on your website, it made it sound like I had a personal travel assistant kind of thing. Maybe walk us, the audience and myself, through how that is different than just something syncing up.

Meagen: Yeah. If you think about it, we are a full booking tool and TMC. We have travel, global travel agents, all around the world, that all are looking at the same platform, same data.

JC: Can you tell the audience what TMC is, for those who don’t know?

Meagen: Yeah, it’s a travel management company. It’s like an Amex GBT, or a BCD, someone who books tickets, can service, cancel, change, all of that. Our agents actually work on a tool called Travelzen, which is on the exact same platform that you use for booking. We’re six years old, born after the iPhone, so we are created and designed around your expected customer experience with your phone. I can book on a laptop, I can book on my phone, I can chat with an agent on the phone, I can text with the agent on a phone, or I can do it all on my own, full service. So once I book something, if I need to cancel it, I can go in and cancel. If I need to change it, I can do it within our platform and phone, or I can work with an agent on it.

Meagen: So the beautiful side of it is … Prior to TripActions, I’d used several of the legacy players. If I needed to make a change or cancellation, or let’s say my flight got canceled, what are your options? Well, you can go wait in line, at the airline. Or, you can call an agent. For us, you have all those options, but now you also have the ability to do it yourself, or chat with the agent. And, you can do it over wifi. I can be landing to make a connection, find out while I’m in-flight that my next flight is changed or canceled. I can be texting with an agent saying, “Hey, I got this alert that this is canceled. Can you book me on the next one?” They’ll respond back, “Yes, I’ve got you booked.” They know who I am.

Meagen: If you call in, first you have to wait for someone to pick up. Then, you have to say who I am, they have to figure out your policy, find out what trip you’re on. On TripActions, we already know all of that because it’s associated to your app on your phone and who you are, and we have duty-of-care, and it’s all on one platform.

JC: So I don’t have to go through all those security questions every time?

Meagen: That’s right.

JC: When I usually call Amex for example, they already verified. The fact that I’m even talking to them at all, they already know it’s me.

Meagen: That’s right. The other thing with Liquid, which I love … I’ve been a Liquid user before we launched it in February, about a year and a half. When I travel to London, Amsterdam, all of that, I have the corporate card. I can go get a coffee, go get lunch, go get dinner, I don’t have to keep the receipts. It automatically pulls in the information, reconciles it on the backend for finance, and submits the expense. It’s this whole concept of not having expense management for the traveler, or for finance. Because finance, at the end of every month, “Get all your expenses in, turn in your receipts.” You don’t have to do that anymore, because you’ve booked it on our platform and you used our payment card which is on our platform, it’s reconciling it already.

Meagen: We talk a lot about no expenses, and no expense reports.

JC: So you’re actually saving time for three different people. The person actually taking the travel, the people who have to reconcile on the backend, and then probably their managers. Because usually managers are the ones who have to usually go, review, approve, don’t approve, whatever, and then pass on to finance. That’s a lot. You think about how much money that costs companies, that’s a big deal.

Meagen: A lot of time. And, because it’s all on one platform, the policies are what really matter, they’re in there. You can set policies on your cards where you only turn them on when you’re on a business trip, so you’re not worried about fraud on corporate cards when people aren’t traveling. Since you booked travel on our platform, we know when you’re traveling, so we know when it makes sense to spend.

JC: Got it.

Meagen: The other thing is it hooks into your calendar. So if I go and have dinner with five people or 20 people, normally I would have to take a picture of the receipt, and then divide it against and load all the attendees. It will automatically pull in those that are on the calendar, and divide out the number by the people on the calendar.

JC: Okay.

Meagen: It’s integrated, you don’t need all these different systems. It just makes it so much easier for the traveler when they’re out on business, expensing. It can also set thresholds. It can set thresholds on meals, it can say, “No alcohol before five o’clock.” It could say, “No bottles of alcohol over $100.” You can get at the very lowest level, a meta level of spend, if you want. Or, you can have all the freedom of the world. Or you could say, “We do want receipts if it’s over $75.” Then, if it’s over $75 it texts me. It says, “Please load receipt.” I take a picture, it loads it in, reconciles it, I’m done.

JC: Wow, okay.

Meagen: All of that is a lot easier than the old fashioned way of running your expense reports.

JC: How do you guys charge? I guess, the second part of that question is how do you charge? And then also, that means who is this for? For example, is your price points at a point where it’s listen, this is probably best for companies that are doing a lot of travel, that have over 100 employees, or something like that. Or are you, “Hey, even if you’re not traveling that often, you can sign up for it and it only bills you when you use it.” Just, how does that work? What type of companies is this actually suited for?

Meagen: Yeah. We have clients commercial, mid-market, up to enterprise. I would say you would want at least 150 people at the company, to leverage that.

Meagen: Liquid does not have to be used just for travel, it can be used for any expensing. It could be used for shipping, it could be used for home office equipment, marketing spend, so there is a lot of different ways that you can use the card. Some people just use us for virtual, where it’s when they book flights and hotels, it’s running on a virtual card on the background. And others actually deploy corporate cards, physical cards, that their travelers or their employees can use. It just depends on how you want to set it up.

Meagen: But, you also don’t have to buy the travel component. You could just use it for expense management, or spend management, really.

JC: Sure. Okay. Now, to the marketing side. This is my favorite part, actually, and you’ve been doing this a long time. What are you guys doing for marketing right now? How are you guys getting the word out about TripActions? And then, what kind of advice would you give to listeners, as far as if they have a company that’s either similar, or they’re looking for advice? What have you guys been doing to keep your name out there, especially during all these crazy times right now?

Meagen: Yeah. I mean, marketers have definitely had to change. I would say, coming into COVID 40% of your budget was typically in events and in-person situations. And actually, a lot of pipeline and relationships were built that way. Now with COVID, of course we can’t go in-person yet, I think we’ll be out there in June or July. But, it’s a lot of going online, it’s digital, it’s paid search, it’s webinars. A lot of office hours, creating a lot of content.

Meagen: So the team’s been heavy on content, we launched a community where people can come and ask questions. Questions about COVID, business travel, credits, waivers, reproduction numbers, you name it. We have a thriving community now, because of all the questions and stuff that came up. We launched an academy. A lot of times, people will go back and redefine their roles during recessions or even depressions, and they’ll go and get certifications, so we launched a travel manager’s certification, 25 courses.

JC: Wow!

Meagen: We did about two a week, and there’s a certification at the end, targeting travel managers, procurement, finance. We built a lot since April, we built a ton of content there. We see about half our customers taking it, and half of the people registering for courses, over 11,000 I think, are prospects. It’s been a great way to become a trusted resource for travel managers and prospects, that are trying to learn what’s this new world look like. What should policy look like? How do we deliver duty of care? All the things and questions that are even more important than ever, now that we have COVID, and dealing with the pandemic, and keeping our employees and travelers safe. Content has been huge for us. Half the focus is on content.

Meagen: And then, trying to be creative in this environment. It’s a big ocean, you’ve got to go fishing. What’s the lure that we’re going to use? First, you’ve got to find out where are the fish, where are they going for information. And then, what kind of bait am I using to go get them? A lot of that, it’s creating the right content and then dropping it in the right environment. Is it Wall Street Journal, is it Business Insider, is it some online community, BTN? Wherever travel managers and CFOs are, getting in front of them. And then, making sure that we enable the field.

Meagen: And really, this year becoming a multi-product company. I think for us, we’ve got a pretty good brand around travel. We’ve got over 4000 customers, we’ve gone up-market, we have a lot more enterprise clients joining. But, they know us as travel. So what can we do to make sure they really know we actually are fintech as well? We’re a payments platform, and we’ve got this product called TripActions Liquid, this is how you can leverage it and use it, and the value prop. You know, it’s the finance audience, so getting those two together. So thinking a lot about what does that mean for our brand? How do we express that? How does that come across in our ads? And then, enabling the sales team and our customer success managers as they’re working with their customers, making sure they’re aware of how we can make their lives easier with our Liquid platform.

JC: That’s actually pretty amazing, that you guys really got creative to figure out how to survive through an event that, essentially, obliterated your industry. It’s interesting. There’s a book that I’m writing right now called Crisis Marketing.

Meagen: Yeah, I love it.

JC: How to survive and thrive during pandemics, bubble bursts, corporate scandals, things like that.

Meagen: Yeah.

JC: Because as you know, marketing has to change when you get a drastic event that changes the market, or changes financially, or just even the ability to do what you do. Nobody called this. Nobody said, “Hey, let’s insulate our travel company in case there’s a worldwide pandemic and no one’s traveling.” That’s not a thought, and no one can be blamed for that.

JC: But, you guys did a fantastic job at pivoting. And saying, “Okay, all that went away. So, what can we do to keep this afloat?” I might end up reaching out to you as a case study for that, while I’m writing it, if you don’t mind. You guys are a perfect example of what I was trying to talk about, of how to make that pivot, make those hard choices, and come up with new things, also, to reinvent yourself a little bit. I think that’s really cool.

Meagen: Happy to talk through that.

JC: Yeah. Yeah, well I guess we’ll do it for the next one.

JC: This is called The Future of Biz Tech for a reason. My first question is, what’s coming down the pipeline for TripActions? What’s the sneak peek of maybe the features or directions you guys are going, that the audience can hear now, so they know what to expect in the future from you guys?

Meagen: Yeah. A lot of discussions around the future of work. And, what does this mean, this work-from-home, work remote, mobility? What are businesses going to need, how does it change the environment? Right now, I’m in an office. Will we continue to stay in offices? Or, will we go to a hub-spoke model, where periodically, monthly, quarterly, you bring your entire company together? So, we’re doing a lot of innovation and work in our product around meetings and events. And what does that mean?

Meagen: If you imagine that world, we actually think people will end up traveling more. If you don’t have everyone in the office working together, day in day out, water cooler, bonding, aligning, you’re going to need to communicate more than ever, align objectives, and still bring people together. It may even be more expensive to bring them together when everyone’s remote, than having them all in an office, we’ll see.

Meagen: We need to create those tools and provide that. Where, let’s say you want to bring together and they’re spread out across the United States, or even spread out across Europe. Okay, should I have an Atlanta, Dallas, or New York? You’ll be able to go in our tool, put those cities in, and load the employees you want to all meet. It knows of course, because they’ve got employee data, where their location is. It knows all the inventory on the hotels, the meeting space that’s available at those hotels, the cost for airplane. We run all the dynamic pricing, the cost for flights, the room block, everything. We’ll spit out, “Hey, this is the cost to have it in Dallas, Atlanta, or New York.” You can decide what you want to do, put it in, and it’ll distribute invites to everyone to go book their travel.

Meagen: How much easier would meetings and events be, if we did that? The team is busy working on that, and bringing that future of work. We have an amazing product and engineering team, that has done a brilliant job, really going through COVID and delivering the needs of our customers around all the dashboards, and duty of care, and visibility, and all that stuff. It’s just amazing to see them tackle now what we believe the future of work to be, to provide for customers and future customers. And then, just to support our partners in the airlines and the hotels. They’re doing a lot of work around making sure they’ve got a safe environment for meetings and events, and bringing people together.

JC: That’s amazing, what you guys are doing. Now the second part of that question is, where do you see the travel industry, as far as what you guys do with software and whatnot? Where do you see the whole industry going in the next, let’s say, five years? There’s where you guys are going. But, what do you see from all this, if you had to fast forward? What do you think is coming down the pipeline, overall?

Meagen: Yeah, definitely enhanced duty of care. It’s no longer going to be an option, whether you use your booking tool or not, companies are going to need to know where employees are. You can’t go rogue and book just anything, you’re going to have to book on the tool, there’s going to be approval flows, health flows. I think there’s going to be health passports. There’s a lot of good work going in the area of making sure you can track your vaccines, and show proof of vaccine, so all of that in order to travel safely. You see the airlines right now, for international, mandating testing. How do you track that?

Meagen: I also think you can’t do global conferences over Zoom, you just can’t. The future, we’re going to get together with people, we’re going to need to meet in-person. I think you don’t sell big software deals, also. Selling $1 million without someone is only going to go for so long. As soon as your competitor meets with them and builds a relationship, they’re going to get that deal. I think, clearly in the next five years, we’re back out on the road, we’re meeting. It’s going to look a little different, we’re going to have some maybe tracking in health and vaccines, we’re going to be mandating tools of where you need to book travel. Cleanliness standards are definitely going to be front and center.

Meagen: I think we’re still going to be having meals and dinner, because there’s nothing more enjoyable than sharing a meal with someone and getting to know them.

JC: Food is happiness.

Meagen: Yes. People may not shake hands, I don’t know, but I think they’re still going to get together. Maybe we’re going to see masks for a while, I don’t know.

Meagen: I think sustainability is huge. It was always huge in Europe, I think it’s getting even bigger in the US. So globally, that is going to be something we care about, and how we offset carbon offsetting, and whether we take a train versus a plane on these shorter distances, I think you’ll see more of that. And, making sure we show those offerings.

Meagen: I had mentioned, obviously, the digital health passports.

JC: Yeah. I think that one, right there, I think is something that most people have not considered that absolutely will end up happening, because this is going to be that after action report. After this is all done, let’s say in the next year and a half, it’ll be everything looking back, hindsight. And saying, “How do we prevent this for the next one?” We were caught pretty off guard on this one, but I think that digital health passport, like you’re saying, I think that’s absolutely coming down the pipeline. That’ll probably be not just commercially, that’ll probably be something very my by the governments, which can be good and bad. But, at least there will be a standardization to it, which then can flow downstream into corporations where you guys have set guidelines, you know the base foundation that you have to build into the app is, and then the rest of the information flows.

JC: Are there going to be problems with it? Yeah. But, I absolutely agree with you, that the health passport digitally … Interestingly enough, the health passport digitally might actually end up helping regular passports go in a more digital fashion. None of this it’s going to take me six months to renew my passport, and I have a flight in two months.

Meagen: Yes.

JC: I think it’s going to end up forcing, there’s going to be ripple affects from this COVID stuff. It’s like microwave came from the NASA program.

Meagen: Yeah.

JC: Something completely random, how to heat your food in 10 seconds, came out of launching a spaceship to the moon. I think we’re going to see a lot of those. I completely agree with you, and I think that’s a really cool thing to be working on and to think about.

JC: Listen, thank you so much for coming on the show, and telling the audience about yourself, about the company, and specifically and especially, the future of where you see things going. Well how about this, is there anything I didn’t ask you that you think would be a benefit to the audience to hear?

Meagen: Yeah. I think the most important thing is we had to focus, when the crisis hit, we had to focus on what do our customers need, product market fit, cost control, and our employees. I think that applies to almost anything, as you’re running a business, is keep focused on what your customers need, make sure you’ve got product market fit, that’s what you’re building. Keep innovating, to keep top of mind. Obviously, we need to always be more efficient and control our costs. And, employees matter, and our health matters, and our mental health matters.

JC: Yeah, that’s fantastic. How can people reach out to you or the company, if they really love what you’re doing here, and they’re listening and they want to try and engage with you guys?

Meagen: Yeah. Tripaction.com is our website, we’ve got a lot of ways to connect us on there. You can follow us at @tripactions on our Twitter handle, and we are on Facebook and LinkedIn, and everything else. I’m on all those platforms as well, at @meisenberg.

JC: Awesome. Well listen, thank you so much for being on the show. And, I look forward to hopefully a follow-up conversation, maybe using you guys as a case study for the book.

Meagen: Great. I thank you for having me on.

JC: Thanks, Meagen. Bye, bye.

Meagen: Bye.

infinityadminEpi 17: Rethink Travel Management for Your Corporation – Meagen Eisenberg, CMO of TripActions
Ep16-RalphDangelmaier-CEO-BlueSnap.png

Epi 16: How Tech Companies Can Streamline Their Payment Processes with Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO of BlueSnap

infinityadmin February 24, 2021

Learn more about BlueSnap at: https://home.bluesnap.com/

Find Ralph Dangelmaier on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphdangelmaier/

JC: Welcome to another episode of The Future of BizTech. I am your host, JC Granger. I have the CEO of BlueSnap with us, Ralph Dangelmaier. Ralph, thank you so much for coming on the show. Why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and BlueSnap?

Ralph: Sure. Hi, JC. So I’ve been in payments. BlueSnap is a payments company and I’ve been a payments professional, I guess you call it or in FinTech now for about 30 years. BlueSnap is a company that helps businesses accept payments globally, either B2B or B2C. So it’s been a crazy time during the pandemic and it’s great to join your show and talk to your listeners.

JC: Awesome. Thanks. So a couple of questions here for you. What is the biggest pain point that your company solves for businesses and what businesses specifically do you really target?

Ralph: Yeah. So a pain point we solve, there’s a couple of them. Right now, the biggest pain point, and it’s almost like you’ve got to do this pre-pandemic and post-pandemic almost, but the biggest thing we solve is helping to automate and let businesses pay digitally through invoicing or through websites or through any kind of digital manner that they want. So right now that has been hot. We’ve been working with manufacturing services companies, SaaS companies, and trying to help them get their invoices out, embed payment links of either bank transfers or cars, whatever it may be and get those to their customers so they can pay their bills, receive them, give them a portal to look where the payments stand at the particular time.

Ralph: Because quite frankly, these businesses have created great technology. But when you look on the back office and look how they’re doing payments, a lot of this stuff is the same as it was doing 50 years ago. So a lot has evolved, but the payment piece has it. And very, very few payments are actually done digitally right now. So there’s a huge opportunity to get paid quicker, to save money and to automate this, and have a better experience for your customers, and it’s just not something that businesses have been thinking about really until the pandemic when people couldn’t come into the office and send out invoices and open mail and process checks and all those things.

Ralph: That’s very similar to what unfortunately happened in 9/11 when we moved from mailing paper checks across country to digitizing those checks and actually being able to process those on your phone or in your office. So that’s the biggest pain point we see right now during the pandemic. There’s lots of other pain points that happened with cross border payments, with fraud, with dealing with partial payments, dealing with returns and refunds, and all these other things that happens in payments. But most, I think companies think of payments as a nuisance, and our job is to make that a pleasurable experience and not a nuisance anymore.

JC: Is there any kind of specific industries that use BlueSnap more than others? Do you find like a lot of mom-and-pops are doing it within retail or do you find that it’s like you were saying, SaaS companies are coming on a lot?

Ralph: Yeah.

JC: With a marketing agency, for example, we use digital. So where do you kind of find the majority or is it kind of all over the map?

Ralph: It’s really all over the map. I mean, just recently we’ve done a ton in education. So a lot of invoices on schools. We work with a lot of digital PR agencies when they’re invoicing their clients. Tons of manufacturers of all kinds of things, auto parts, jet engine parts, tractors, all kinds of things that are equipment.

Ralph: You can imagine the logistics. We’ve signed up dozens of logistics companies and how they bill for logistics online. Services companies, oh my god, pools, lawyers, doctors. Huge entry this year to us for healthcare. So then nobody wants to do anything anymore in a healthcare. So now a payment gets texted to you. We did our first restaurants this year, of course, QR codes, pay at the table, order ahead.

Ralph: So anybody that has to make a payment, the technology is flexible enough that it can be embedded into whatever your invoicing platform is, or it could hang off a website or it could be old fashioned. You call it in and get into a portal. So there’s many ways to do it and it’s pretty straightforward. And it’s just something that people haven’t put on their priority list until recently.

JC: So let me ask you a question here. You talk about how it can be embedded. You say that a lot, as far as embedded into the platform. Is that something that most payment processors are able to do or is this something that kind of makes you guys stand out? Is there something unique about your code that allows a flexibility to put your… Like you said, embed your platform.

Ralph: Yeah. I think we do stand out. So there’s two ways to think of this. One way is a bank or payment processor. It gives you a toolkit of technology and you as a business have to really become the system integrator. You have to go out, find the code. You have to do the embedding yourself. You have to set up your fraud. You got to set everything up and you’ve got to process it. So it’s kind of like going to Home Depot and building your own shed. What we’ve done is we’ve prefabricated the sheds.

Ralph: So we’ve said here is… You have an invoice of $5,000. We’ve embedded an invoice. It’s probably going to be a bank transfer. Do you want to charge a fee or not to do that? This is most likely how it goes. We also have the technology to create the invoice for you.

Ralph: So if you’re using a Quicken, or QuickBooks, or a NetSuite, we can actually create the invoice and embed the payment as well. So we have more technology that’s built out, so the business doesn’t have to do the building. And most businesses don’t have enough invoices in reality, to put a team on it, to build out the right infrastructure.

Ralph: Now, of course, if you’re a $5 billion business, you’d do, but many don’t. So these businesses that are 20 to 30 million up to say, 5 billion, just need help in packaging the technology to meet the needs of cross border clients, bank transfer clients, car clients, invoices, non-invoices. So think of it as sort of a package solution that you can deploy depending on what the needs are of your payments or your customers.

JC: Okay. That’s really cool. And I like the simple integration of it. Essentially saving time. Now, you said that the company before in our pre-interview, you were saying that the company started in Israel, you said.

Ralph: Yeah.

JC: So tell us a little bit about what you know about the origins like how that started in when? And then what brought you into the company? Where did Ralph come in?

Ralph: I know. I’m still wondering that myself. Great question, Israel, which I’ve learned a lot about, and I got to say, I didn’t know a lot about Israel about eight years ago when I came in is as people… I generally know Start-up Nation. So what they did is not only they started a lot of really cool technology companies we all use, the ways and the wicks and folks like that, but they built an innovative payments company to help these startup agents sell outside of Israel. And that was BlueSnap.

Ralph: So what happened is, it was very focused on Israeli selling outside of Israel. And about 10 years of doing that, a bunch of US private equity firms bought the company and brought the idea to the United States and said, “If this works for Israeli customers selling outside of Israel. Why not use the same technology to help American businesses, sell outside of America? So they were early on in the idea of selling cross border. So that’s what happened.

Ralph: And after they did that in 2011 as well, about a year later, I came in the company to really bring in new investment, bring in new management and bring it to a level of scale that we are today, where we’re operating now in dozens of countries with thousands of merchants all around the world and helping them sell or collect invoices all over the world. So that’s a little bit of how the story happened.

JC: Let’s talk about that growth too. So as a marketer, I’ve always got that marketing brain on, right?

Ralph: Yeah.

JC: So I always like to ask on the show for the benefit of the audience too is what are you guys doing right now marketing wise to help grow your company? I’ve got to talk to Brie for a second there on your PR team. So I know you’re doing some PR, right?

Ralph: Yeah.

JC: But what else are you guys doing to help grow, and what kind of advice could you give or that the story you could tell that can help other business owners listening?

Ralph: Yeah. So we have a multi-pronged sort of marketing effort that goes on, right? The multi-facet is where I really get at. So we really do believe heavily in content. We think we’ve got a lot of really great content that we put out all over the place. We think people are going to start reading and absorbing your content maybe before they start to get to know who you are, and we think that content drives search engine optimization. We think it drives partner growth. That’s a core piece of what we do.

Ralph: I think we’re pretty active on social. We got tens of thousands of hours on myself and the company and we’re pretty active on posting. I think we’re very good about posting things about customers too, and how they’re solving problems, whether it’s music or whether it’s performance socks, or whether it’s buying cars online. All the things we sell, let’s talk about how they solve their problems because you may sell candy online and go, “I don’t have a payment problem.” Maybe you do.

Ralph: So we’re trying to do a lot of that. Yes, we do press releases. I mean, that’s sort of a second thing. We do account-based marketing as well. So we really look at similar like we signed up a lot of shipping companies or freight companies. So we said, “Geez, we have 10 that just signed up last month. Why don’t we go to the other 10 that are similar to them? And why don’t we send them customized notes and say, geez, happier clients do payments with us. Well, maybe you should look at how you’re doing your payments and work with us.” Because a lot of this is just awareness and time.

Ralph: We think within payments were really well-known around the banking communities and around the card brands, but we may not be around, there’s about 10 million businesses that we think we can serve around the world. It’s very hard to get your brand recognized there. So by using Google for search, by using the content, by doing account-based marketing, by doing some LinkedIn posts, by doing these press releases, we think we’ve got a touch point that’s going to reach partners and then to reach businesses.

Ralph: I’d steadily been growing our website. I mean, I think about eight years ago, our website, we cracked top hundred thousand in the world. And I think I just saw us crack a top 10,000 in the world. So we’re doing something right on getting eyeballs on our site. And I think with the pandemic now where people are saying, “I do have to innovate or think about payments differently,” it’s given us a little bit more of a lift. So we’ve tried to help people during this time.

JC:
Yeah. That’s pretty incredible. I mean, if you’re hitting top 10,000 or top 100,000, I mean, there’s like billions of websites.

Ralph: I know.

JC: If you’re anywhere near that 100,000 10,000, that’s huge. So the title of the podcast being The Future of BizTech, tell us… This is a two-part question. First off, tell us kind of what’s coming down the pipeline for BlueSnap. Maybe a sneak peek for the audience so they know where you guys are headed as far as technology-wise or features, things like that. And then also the second question is where do you think the payment processing industry is going in the next five years or so? What kind of new innovation or drastic changes do you see coming?

Ralph: Yeah. Well, I think if you asked me that question a year ago, I would have said over the next five years, businesses are going to look to digitize their payments because this whole manual AP/AR stuff is really crazy. It’s very hard to get data. You’re constantly loading things in and out of systems. They don’t reconcile. It’s a little backwards. And now, what I’ve seen happen in the last nine months is those five years is really shrunk to, I think, one or two years.

Ralph: So the industry is moving to digitize itself. I mean, right now, I think my stats are somewhat up to state here. I looked at 20% of the payments are digital and 80% are still manual. So we’ve got a long way to go to convert everyone from manual processes to digital processes. And a lot of them just don’t know how to do it. So I think there’s a big wave coming there.

Ralph: Okay. So if that’s the premise for what’s going to happen then what’s coming down the pike? Well, let’s talk about one of the obvious ones. Security, right? Everybody’s worried about someone hacking into my shop and payments going the wrong way. What happens then? So I think we got to spend a lot more time on security. There’s been some great regulations that have happened in Europe to support security by putting strong authentication on payments that happen. There’s been a great adoption recently by Visa, MasterCard, American Express, to put things like tokenization, which is scrambling up the cards or scrambling the data.

Ralph: We’ve been doing this in Israel for 10 years. These are adopted in the last couple of years. So this is going to be a big deal. Being able to recognize bad IPs, bad cards, bad actors, friendly fraud, all that stuff is going to be a big thing that’s going to happen as you move everything online. So there’s a huge piece of that. So we’ve been developing and have developed and will continue to develop products to help businesses through that transformation.

Ralph: The other thing that’s happening out in payments world is most people in the United States, we got things pretty easy. We have one or two ways to send payments, ACH and wire. We have cards. Well, every single country has its own internal payments network, like their own internal ACH or their internal PayPal. And people don’t realize that. So there’s hundreds of payment methods. Yes. Some become more famous like using Alipay. Then all of a sudden that’s become Apple pay, Google Pay.

Ralph: But there’s a hundred of those. Each country has one. So a lot of the countries want to pay using their own payment methods. They don’t want to be using an American method or a Chinese method. It’s almost insulting culturally. So it’s something that we find that people don’t understand. So we’re connecting to more of these networks around the world and places like Brazil and Holland and in Germany, so the businesses can pay locally, but the money can still settle in the United States. So that’s a big trend that we’re seeing here.

JC: I never considered that issue. I think that’s very interesting. You’re basically helping enable different countries to use their own so that their customers feel better and safer about it, but on the backend, you’re able to provide that infrastructure for them still so they don’t have to build it out themselves, but they can still say this is an Indian company or an Asian company, or Israeli company, things like that.

Ralph: Yeah, that’s right.

JC: That’s cool.

Ralph: People miss that. People miss that. We say there’s a hundred currency. So if you’re not going to use their payment type, at least don’t use their currency. Don’t insult them all the way through. Right? At least recognize you’re from Australia. We’re going to drop you an Australian dollar. Even though you may not offer the Australian payment type, which you should.

Ralph: It is insulting from that point of view and it’s kind of like gives the Americans kind of a bad rep. And so that’s a big deal. Look, the British got so upset about it. They Brexited, right? I mean, this is a big, big deal here and it’s something we don’t always pay attention to. I think it’s obvious now. So what’s going on with the economies and printing of money and inflation, all this stuff, I mean, these cryptocurrencies are going to have a place in the world. It’s still pretty small market. Bitcoin as you know, is coming up around $40,000.

Ralph: I remember a few years ago it was $300 a share. But it’s still a very, very small market, right? So it’s a very, very small market, but that is going to be a trend. And I think not only are you going to see cryptocurrencies come into play for payments, you’re also going to see governments start to back..

JC: And that’ll calm it down. That’ll make it less volatile. So then I guess you guys, are you guys already setting the groundwork to be able to adopt that, to be able to work with Bitcoin and whatnot? Is that something that’s kind of coming down the pipeline for BlueSnap?

Ralph: Yeah. We haven’t done it yet, but we’re setting the groundwork for it because up until recently, most of the transactions happen in cryptocurrency were transactions that weren’t tracked or traced. So the feeling was those maybe weren’t transactions that you wanted to be involved in. Now, it’s starting to become a little bit more mainstream and transactions will become, I think, less volatile and more like you say backed by countries. We think Bitcoin is backed by the cloud. No one owns it.

Ralph: If the US government or the British government comes out with a cryptocurrency, are they backed? Or even if Apple comes out with a digital currency, it’s at least backed by something that you know and trust versus what is Bitcoin? I mean, it could fluctuate in any way. I mean, it’s such a small market. It can bounce a lot on you. So there’s a lot of risk in that. It’s an interesting thing and it can’t be ignored. And I think it’s here to stay.

Ralph: Bitcoin have been around for 10 years. So it’s going to be around for the next 10 years and there’ll be other cryptocurrencies that come along. So there’s a lot of innovation coming in payments if I kind of back up to this automation and thinking as payments as part of your product and your back office to thinking about, “Oh my God, now it’s digital. How do I protect myself to where’s this thing going, using local languages, local currencies, and eventually cryptocurrencies?” There’s a huge innovation going on in payments.

Ralph: And this is kind of one of the reasons why the FinTech market is kind of hot. I mean, it’s been drawing a lot of investments. The stocks are warring. Private equities are putting money. There’s this new thing called SPACs that are gobbling up FinTech companies. So it’s a very robust market and there’s lots of different angles in it. And it’s kind of interesting. You’re out in San Jose and I have two kids that are out in San Jose.

JC: We’re out in Denver. I was saying, I grew up out in San Jose.

Ralph: Oh, you grew up in San Jose.

JC: Yeah. We’re out in Denver.

Ralph: But you’re in San Jose now. The point is, is that that the market is just funding tons of innovation and payments because there’s lots around it. There’s boarding, there’s fraud, there’s risks, there’s crypto, there’s banking. There’s millions of little pieces that go into the infrastructure that can be optimized as we go from this 20% digital to 80% digital, right? A lot is going to change over the next 10 years. So it’s a fun time to be doing it. When I started payments 30 years ago, I got to say it was a little boring. I got to say, I don’t think anyone’s bored at BlueSnap at this point in time.

JC: No, it’s exciting for sure. So listen, thanks for coming on the show. I wanted to ask you though is there anything else that I didn’t ask that you want the audience to know about whether it be industry-wise, BlueSnap? Is there anything else that you can tell them?

Ralph: Well, the best thing I could tell them is not to get overwhelmed by the back office of the payments and see if they can make that a priority over the next few years, to least automate or look at our efficiencies and handling their payments because wherever they are now, fixing it now is a lot easier than fixing it later. The bigger and badder it gets, it becomes much harder to change. And we’re seeing businesses that have many accounting systems and global invoicing, and it’s these big, huge complicated projects now to fix what they could have fixed when they were maybe a little smaller. So there’s no bad time to start it.

JC: Anyone from one from the audience if they’re interested in BlueSnap at like an enterprise level or individually, how can they reach out to you or to the company?

Ralph: Yeah, it’s super simple. It’s bluesnap.com. Everything’s online. There’s a lot of data out there. You can read up about things we’re talking about whether it’s invoicing online. There’s a form to contact someone with the information and believe it or not, I get quite a few emails myself. I’m at ralph@bluesnap.com and people reach me on LinkedIn or directly. I try to respond to everybody as best I can.

JC: That’s awesome, Ralph. Listen, thanks again for coming on the show. I greatly appreciate it. And here’s to a profitable and an awesome 2021 for you.

Ralph: Thanks. You too.

infinityadminEpi 16: How Tech Companies Can Streamline Their Payment Processes with Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO of BlueSnap
Ep15-DanMcCann-CEOSymTrain.png

Epi 15: Boost ROI with Simulated Work Experiences for Your Employees – Dan McCann, CEO of SymTrain

infinityadmin February 17, 2021

Learn more about SymTrain at: https://symtrain.com/

Find Dan McCann on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-mccann-24172a1/

JC: Well, welcome everybody to another episode of The Future of BizTech. I am your host, J.C. Granger. I am here with Dan McCann, the CEO of SymTrain. Dan, thank you so much for coming on. Tell the audience a little about yourself and your company, who help you out.

Dan: Yeah. Great, thanks JC. So my name’s Dan McCann and Founder of SymTrain. We started about three years ago. My background has been in the startup community really. I had founded a services company a lot like Infinity Marketing, where people were really important to us. And I ran that for about 15 years and we were doing outbound sales prospecting. And just a little bit of background on SymTrain, while we were there, we were kind of struggling to train people and get them up to speed fast enough and quick enough.

Dan: And it was a real problem for us because people were our product and their ability to deliver for our customers. So we spent a lot of time on that particular problem and over the years just tried a lot of different things. And finally, we realized folks learn by doing, right? And first and foremost, but it’s really expensive to drive a lot of resources to help one-on-one human-to-human train people. By doing so, most companies, myself included says, “Hey, go learn on the job. I’ll teach you everything you need to know, but then go do the job and you’ll figure it all out.” You’ll have that aha moment, JC.

Dan: And some people got it quickly and others didn’t and the ones that didn’t just got really frustrated and they leave. So from that perspective, we started investing in some technology that people could practice and learn what they’re doing in an environment where they’re not at risk and our clients weren’t at risk of learning on the job. And we had a great time with it. It worked out really well for us. And that time in that environment led us to this journey that said, “Hey, there’s an opportunity here for this technology and it’s kind of new.” We brought in a lot of conversational technology into it and voice as well as software and systems, and then started talking to the market and they said, “Yeah, there’s something here. We would pay for this. We would buy this.” So it worked out well for us given that journey and brought it to market. But being an entrepreneur at heart is kind of what led us to do this three years ago at SymTrain.

JC: So what does that look like from the ground level of another business utilizing your platform? I mean, can you kind of walk us through, for one, what types of businesses does it benefit the most just generically speaking and then if they were to go and say, “Okay well, I want to try this out,” what does that look like? What does their process and their flow user experience look like, and how does it make their day 10 times better than it would have been without it?

Dan: Yeah. Great. Thanks. Good question. And if you think about it, it’s because there’s conversations that take place and there’s also software or video. We have an ultimate vision of providing a digital coach for everyone, right? So that’s a big vision. And so early on, what we’ve done is said, okay, who does this really impact? Folks that are having interactions with other people, right? And what employees are doing that most often? So we’ve been targeting for the last couple years contact centers in your enterprise, your fortune 500 companies, those folks who have contact centers, where sales, service, support, even HR, where there’s a lot of interaction. And we just recently started getting this year into retail environments as well, where either obviously through the contact center originally where I’m talking to customers who are doing returns and that sort of or even purchases in an omni-channel way in terms of that communication.

Dan: So that’s really our target market. And what folks are doing, like I mentioned before with our own background, is we found that first off people don’t like to struggle, right? People don’t go into their job saying, “Hey, I’m going to give a half effort.” Right? But managers go, “Man, my people are giving half effort. I don’t understand it.” So there’s a little bit of a disconnect there and the key is people, they get nervous. They get scared. They actually fear the observation, right? And the Hawthorne effect of people watching me and observing me and that anxiety builds up and people start to shut down.

Dan: And so what our clients are doing is they’re putting their employees, whether they’ve been in role for 10 years or they’re brand new hires right out of school, into these what I call safe simulated environments to practice and learn how to execute a good conversation, how to execute a return from a customer, how to update a policy or sell and close a deal, or overcome an objection, do that in an environment where you could practice and learn and get repetition and even feedbacks because there’s a lot of analytics in SymTrain on how well you’re doing and you get feedback on that.

Dan: So what our customers are doing is they pick a couple of use cases and teams within their business and say, “Let’s go, let’s put the salespeople through objection handling.” Or, “Let’s do the onboarding training.” And it builds up over time, which is a great way we work with our customers is they can build content in here. It’s real simple environment. There’s no code. You don’t need developers or big technicians, which is definitely a competitive advantage for SymTrain compared to some other tools that are doing conversational AI and some analytics.

Dan: Yeah. So a client’s able to do that, put it in front of their employees, get instant feedback, not just on what their employees think like, “Hey, how’d it go?” “Yeah, this was great. Thank you.” But actually behavioral changes, they can see it right in SymTrain that they’re making an impact on their delivery, on their content of what they’re saying. Also the sentiment or emotional delivery, they’re getting scores back and they’re seeing the impact that people are making. So it’s not just on how well the training is going, but it actually, they can measure performance right within SymTrain that then applies to the floor. So the return on putting people through SymTrain is two to four weeks ROI in terms of going through this, which clients love. And then we just expand with them and continue to grow in other areas with our customers that way.

JC: Have you seen an uptick in business with the pandemic and companies going more remote having kind of forcing them to train people off site, or was this something that was used more in-house in an office environment?

Dan: So it’s a combination, JC, of both. So I mean, contact centers is our initial target market, right? And when you say your vision is a digital coach for everyone, we see a much greater future than that down the road. But our customers, these contact center folks are going virtual, right? So they’re not coming in to these contact centers and they’re going remote and they’re onboarding remote learners. What happened for us, to answer your question, COVID did provide a bit of a tailwind for us, changed the world, right? But for some companies it provided a tailwind, because now you’re onboarding people remotely and they’re working virtually and you have to keep them engaged, right? And you keep them focused and executing.

Dan: But you don’t have the resource to do that. And you have these breakout rooms in Microsoft teams or Zoom, and you’re figuring out different delivery models. But with SymTrain, employees are able to work on their own, go through the repetition, get a feel for it. And then when they get back together with their groups, they’re doing better. They’re more confident. And so yeah, it did help us. I mean, in fairness this year, we grew a lot and the impact of COVID did help as customers are bringing on more remote workers and trying to drive a higher level of engagement without losing any performance capabilities.

JC: And how long would you say you’ve had the company? Did you start it? Did you come in later?

Dan: Yeah. So it’s three years, we’ve been at it at SymTrain and it was developed or incubated in that prior company that I owned, right? That sales prospecting business that’s still active today and they still use our software at SymTrain, but we started it there. We incubated it and we realized they were doing sales prospecting for B2B, but there was a much bigger market for SymTraining, if you will, and people getting this exposure and those other roles, service, support, HR in addition to sales, right? Big impact areas. So we broke it off three years ago, spun it out and have been going at it since then in terms of just time to market and how we got started in here.

JC: When did you realize… Starting a new company is a tough thing. I mean, I’ve been through it, you’ve been through it multiple times. When did you realize that SymTrain was going to make it? When did that anxiety of, oh crap, is this even going to work, when did that start to subside? What was that moment? I feel like everyone usually knows that moment when they were like, okay, we’re good.

Dan: Yeah. JC, so for Infinity Marketing, has it subsided you yet after 10 years?

JC: I don’t know, 10 years. I think my moment, I think was probably… Because I started with nothing. I mean, with what I had in my pocket, kind of thing. So I think my moment was when I realized that I had like 90 days of runway for rent, right? Then I was like, okay, all right, I got this. You know what I mean? But that day-to-day stuff was killer in the beginning. Kind of what was that for you?

Dan: Yeah. So this is awesome. So my point was maybe it never happens depending on the individual, but I think there were kind of two, right? The first one was what gave us the confidence to launch SymTrain in the first place. We saw the impact it was making, right? And we were trading North of 50% of our new hires, right? And the ones that we were bringing in, it was taking six months to get them to full speed and productivity. And the excuse, the reason excuse was, hey, this is really difficult. It’s challenging, not everyone can do it, but the answer was we just weren’t doing things effectively and well. And then when we brought the software and we realized, hey, look, it’s no longer taking us eight weeks to graduate 50% of our class, we were doing in two or three weeks.

Dan: And I was like, “Wow, this is huge.” Right? And they were doing way better. And then we were retaining so many more people that we started talking to folks in the marketplace like what do you think? Conversational simulations and having system navigation combined in these scenarios and situational training, what are you guys doing to performance-based training? And everyone said either, “We don’t do it. We learn on the job. So this is awesome.” Or, “Hey, it’s a very manual exercise for us. It’s very expensive and we wish we could do more. So your technology would be helpful.” So that was number one like wow, this is something we got to take to market. We realized this would be good. And then the other one is we signed up really big clients, right? Like top five or 10 in their industry sectors like banking, insurance, communication, even healthcare, retail, consumer products.

Dan: So once we got to renewals where we were anxious about the renewal, JC, and they were expanding and they’re saying, “Hey, we’re going into this and this area, and we’re going to take it over here. And here’s our game plan for SymTrain in our business.” We said, “Whoa, this is great.” That was the time where we felt, okay, there’s something here. We’re going to be able to make this work and grow it. So that was kind of the two points of time where we really felt good that we had something that was going to be successful.

JC: That’s cool. I’m a marketing guy, you know that, right? That’s where my head’s always at. A lot of the audience is in that tech industry, a lot of them are owners of their own businesses, or they’re going to be starting up their own, what can you tell the people listening like what are you guys doing for marketing to keep yourself relevant and out there, right? How are you staying ahead of competitors? Are you doing more direct outreach because you’re going top shelf? Are you doing more inbound and content? What gives SymTrain a flow from eyes on the page angle, right?

Dan: I think we are an outbound organization. And what that means for folks listening is we do a lot of outreach to very targeted accounts and targeted personas within those accounts, right? And we get our message to them via social, via email, via phone. It’s a lot of prospecting oriented activities. I will tell you wildly envious of those inbound organizations that have perfected and mastered the approach of being able to target because our target is so pinpointed today, right? And we have very specific industries, very specific roles and titles and value prop for them. But we’re starting to drive a little bit more content this year.

Dan: And that’s part of our goal. And our roadmap is to start to compliment our outbound efforts with content in the market, folks could see us as experts in our space and can look to say, “Hey, we need performance-based training and assessment. And we don’t have the resource or the time or the budget to do it with humans so if we can automate that, who knows about that?” Right? So SymTrain’s one of those unique folks. So that’s on our roadmap and we’re aspirational to create, JC, that inbound environment. But definitely for us, it’s all been outbound and it’s been very targeted in our efforts.

JC: I’m going to ask you a personal question. I haven’t asked much on the show yet, but I want to ask you, what did you want to be when you grew up, so to speak? Like when you were a kid, what was your dream job? And if it wasn’t this, then how did you get to this?

Dan: Yeah, that’s an awesome question. So when I was a little kid, I wanted to be a cowboy and then I wanted to be a pilot up until about eight or so. But then once I got into middle school, I always wanted to be a teacher, right? I wanted to coach. I was an athlete throughout my childhood and into high school and college. I played baseball through college and still play today even as an old man. I haven’t given that up but I really love coaching and developing those people that are with me or folks on my team. So I always wanted to be a teacher, right? And so in the-

JC: That’s very relevant to what you’re doing now. I mean, you basically tried to automate teaching for people to help their employees. That’s pretty fantastic.

Dan: It’s exactly right. And so my prior job, I started that company where we were doing prospecting, you couldn’t get me out of training, right? Like Dan, you own the company, you’re the COO, you need to do other things, you can’t do training, but I was so passionate and I loved it. You’re exactly right. It’s kind of led to this journey to SymTrain where it’s exactly what I’m doing right now. I’m doing teaching and it’s the environment I’ve always wanted to be in, especially in this learn by doing approach that SymTrain has with our customers, right? So all their employees can come in and learn how to do their job by actually performing job functions and tasks and develop those skills in this simulated environment. So yeah, very much I am able to do now what I aspired to do as a young kid.

JC: That’s awesome. That’s cool. Now, as far as again, people listening, you’ve talked about how you work with really big companies. So the impression might be that it’s really expensive and I don’t have to necessarily hear your price points unless you want to give them, but how does it work? I mean, can small businesses use you at a lower level or is it a per license? Like just how is your model when it comes to payment? Just in general, how does your pricing structure work? Is it all top end, contracts only or do you have like someone could sign up online and free trial it? How does it work?

Dan: Yeah. Great question. So we’re not quite at the point yet where you can sign up online and free trial it, we will get there probably by the end of this year and get to that point. But what’s unique about how we go to market is there’s no real front end costs, you don’t have to make a huge investment in SymTrain, right? So what you can do is you could actually just pay for usage. So some of our clients come in and they pay us and say, “Hey, we’re just going to use X amount. We might have 20,000 employees, but we want to use this with these 100 employees.” Right? So they just pay for that amount. So it’s a very low barrier of entry to get in and start using us, which to your question does allow mid markets to participate the same as larger.

Dan: The key for SymTrain is because you’re automating a very manual activity, you think about it, it’s like people don’t love role-play. Some like it more than others. I’m one of those weirdos that love it, right? I just love doing role-play and exercises with my peers. I would actually call people up before I got started and role play with them and not even tell them I was doing it, right? And they’re like, “What are you doing Dan?” And I’m like, “Oh, I’m just getting ready for the day.” But that was kind of unique, but being able to provide that environment, you kind of need a certain level, right? With five employees or 10, there’s no really need for automating those efforts, right?

Dan: But once you get North of 50 to 100 and you’ve got multiple managers and you got a lot of people you’re bringing on and they’re doing these tasks in new hire and in role, it starts to make more sense North of 100 people. But the good news is cost-wise, it’s real simple. So you’re going to make an impact early because you’re not really paying these huge upfront fees and cost to bring SymTraining in-house.

JC: Got it. With the nature of the podcast, the Future of BizTech, can you tell the audience something that’s going to be coming down the pipeline? Like what’s SymTrain’s coming up with next and then secondary to that, where do you see the automation of training going in the future for industries? So kind of what’s coming in the future for your company and then where do you see the future of what you do in general going in business?

Dan: Yeah. So a couple things, right? So on the technology side, I mentioned it’s very lightweight. So what SymTrain has done that’s pretty unique and the reason… There’s folks in the market that do simulations and it’s a big heavy lift, right? And so it’s a big cost tied to it, but with SymTrain, we’re using a lot of contemporary technology, a lot of companies are spending tons of money on voice, on AI, Siri, Alexa, and these are big companies with billions and billions of dollars behind, and we’re able to leverage what they’re doing and put it into a very unique deliverable, right? So what’s down the road is easier access for folks, right? Got mobile access today, in the contact center, you’re doing things on your IVR systems or your phone systems, if you will, being able to distribute content through LMS, through workforce management solutions where customers spend a lot of their time.

Dan: So that’s a really great piece of it. And then the other side is a higher level of authenticity, right? And you look at some of those Alexa or Siri scenarios and they’re getting better and better. And so is SymTrain creating more authentic conversations and more customizable, dynamic flows within a dialogue, which is really exciting for us, right? And a lot of our clients or prospects when they talk about it like, “Oh, kind of we get it,” you’re going in and you’re making decisions and you have decision trees. And our answer is no, you’re not making any decisions. You’re actually executing on these scenarios in SymTrain, which is uniquely different than a lot of the technology that’s out there today.

Dan: You don’t decide on what are you going to do next, you actually do it in SymTrain, which is awesome, right? So focusing more and more on that and tying that closer to the production floor. And we’re spending a lot of time, JC, just in our offering environment and developing content because our customers have a lot of this content in-house it just happens to be sitting in a data warehouse somewhere or so they have bought it-

JC: They’re sitting on the goldmine, but they don’t know how to get the gold out.

Dan: Correct.

JC: You’re the mining company that can extract it from the mine, so to speak. It’s all there, it’s just not organized and useful at the moment.

Dan: 100%. That’s exactly right.

JC: You’ve got to put that in your sales material now. So you’re right there. That’s for you. That’s a gift.

Dan: I love it.

JC: I just gave you that analogy.

Dan: Well, JC, I’ll take it. The gold mine that’s in-house that you’re able to extract.

JC: Yeah. You’re the mining company.

Dan: It’s awesome. The mining company for training content that… Yeah. I love it. I love it.

JC: If I don’t see this website update, I’m going to be offended.

Dan: We definitely will. We definitely will. So I mean, here’s the good news, right? We are talking about the future of SymTrain too. So those are things we’re working on now. So this website update might be six months out versus six days out, by the way. But yeah, so there’s a lot of great stuff that’s happening with voice technology today and it’s becoming way more mainstream. I mentioned we’ve been at it for three years, right? So three years ago we had to do a lot of explaining, hey, voice in conversations and tying that to software or video and recreating scenarios, we don’t get it.

Dan: A lot of our prospects and suspects, they get it now way more like, “Oh, can you do this or that?” “Yeah, absolutely.” “Hey, let me see it. Can I take a look?” So which is definitely one way our customers love to pull back the onion and see is just getting a demo or taking a look at how SymTrain can work with scenarios that are very similar to the problems and struggles they have with getting folks to be able to perform their job and drive a certain level of expertise.

JC: That’s awesome. Listen, I love what you guys are doing there. I can tell you right now from my personal experience, I wasn’t even able to grow as an agency effectively until I figured out how to automate that training process. And because I would say that the difference between an entrepreneur and a CEO is the ability to let go. You don’t have to like it because I don’t like it, right? You just have to accept it. You have to do it anyway. And the only way to do that is to take a large part of that training and whatnot off your plate. But what I find is that as a CEO, it’s hard to trust someone else to do it the way I would do it. So when you set up your own training, the way that you would train someone, you feel better that all you have is managers pointing those employees to that training.

JC: You can update it now or you can have your people update it a little bit but when the core of your training comes from the top, the person who has the most vested interest in it financially, emotionally, mentally, I find that that makes me feel a lot better, that anxiety subside you. You talked about two moments. My second moment was when I started automating the training for my company because I was like, wow, I don’t have to worry about is this person going to do it the way I would do it because I just told them how I do it. So will they do it every time the way I do? No, but again, that is part of letting go if you’re going to expand otherwise you’re an entrepreneur, that’s it, right? And there’s a lot of those and that’s still very small percent of the population and there’s nothing to be ashamed of being a small business entrepreneur. That’s a lifestyle.

Dan: And you own your own job at that point, JC.

JC: Absolutely. But if you want to grow, if your goal is to expand and be multi multi-million or have investors, things like that, you got to let it go, but this is a great organized way to do it, where you feel more comfortable that the way things are going to happen or the way you would do them yourself. So I think what you guys are doing is great. Thank you so much for being on the show and also for providing such great service just to B2B or for businesses in general. How can people reach out either to you, to the company, if they hear this and they go, “Holy crap, I want to talk more,” what’s a good contact?

Dan: Yeah. So we have a contact me on the website at symtrain.com. There’s a video on there that walks through how SymTrain works so people can see that and reach out.

JC: And for audio… Because we have video going, but for audio, for podcast listeners SymTrain is spelled S-Y-M-T-R-A-I-N, correct?

Dan: Yeah. Thank you. Definitely. Yeah, symtrain.com.

JC: Yeah. Just want to make sure.

Dan: We did buy the SIM as well, so it’ll-

JC: Okay. All right. So even if they go to the other one, okay.

Dan: That’s perfect. And which helps because you can reach out to me directly, I’m Dan.McCann, M-C-C-A-N-N. I love talking to folks about the problem and the challenges and getting into an initial discussion. I even love demoing the product, obviously. So if folks reached out to me, that would be awesome. Love to talk to them about challenges they’re having and onboarding folks or change management with their in role people or helping even develop leadership traits within their organization, right? So that level of consistency across business functions and departments is a huge value add. So we have clients who just work with us on delivering new software, a new process out to their folks in the field or in role, and they can do consistent delivery and getting people performing those within SymTrain before they have to take it live on the job. So yeah, love to talk to folks.

JC: I think that’s really great that you’re offering your personal contact info because I think just the fact that you have the time to even tell people they can reach out to you on their own means that you’re obviously using SymTrain for yourself, right? I mean, like we just said, there’s no way you can take that kind of time off your plate unless you’re automating those other things. So again, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for letting our audience contact you directly if they like. And I look forward to seeing my goldmine line on your website sometime.

Dan: It’ll be there. It’ll definitely be there.

JC: Thanks so much, Dan.

Dan: Right. And I appreciate what you’re doing, right? Future of BizTech, it’s important stuff, right? And getting folks ready to perform whatever the technology is to automate different functions within the business, it’s really important. So thanks for doing this, JC.

JC: Yeah. No, my pleasure. I’m just a tech nerd who always likes to know what’s coming next. So this is my way of finding out firsthand before anyone else, right? Thanks Dan for coming on. Talk to you soon.

Dan: Great talking to you again, take care. See you, JC.

JC: Well, welcome everybody to another episode of The Future of BizTech. I am your host, J.C. Granger. I am here with Dan McCann, the CEO of SymTrain. Dan, thank you so much for coming on. Tell the audience a little about yourself and your company, who help you out.

Dan: Yeah. Great, thanks JC. So my name’s Dan McCann and Founder of SymTrain. We started about three years ago. My background has been in the startup community really. I had founded a services company a lot like Infinity Marketing, where people were really important to us. And I ran that for about 15 years and we were doing outbound sales prospecting. And just a little bit of background on SymTrain, while we were there, we were kind of struggling to train people and get them up to speed fast enough and quick enough.

Dan: And it was a real problem for us because people were our product and their ability to deliver for our customers. So we spent a lot of time on that particular problem and over the years just tried a lot of different things. And finally, we realized folks learn by doing, right? And first and foremost, but it’s really expensive to drive a lot of resources to help one-on-one human-to-human train people. By doing so, most companies, myself included says, “Hey, go learn on the job. I’ll teach you everything you need to know, but then go do the job and you’ll figure it all out.” You’ll have that aha moment, JC.

Dan: And some people got it quickly and others didn’t and the ones that didn’t just got really frustrated and they leave. So from that perspective, we started investing in some technology that people could practice and learn what they’re doing in an environment where they’re not at risk and our clients weren’t at risk of learning on the job. And we had a great time with it. It worked out really well for us. And that time in that environment led us to this journey that said, “Hey, there’s an opportunity here for this technology and it’s kind of new.” We brought in a lot of conversational technology into it and voice as well as software and systems, and then started talking to the market and they said, “Yeah, there’s something here. We would pay for this. We would buy this.” So it worked out well for us given that journey and brought it to market. But being an entrepreneur at heart is kind of what led us to do this three years ago at SymTrain.

JC: So what does that look like from the ground level of another business utilizing your platform? I mean, can you kind of walk us through, for one, what types of businesses does it benefit the most just generically speaking and then if they were to go and say, “Okay well, I want to try this out,” what does that look like? What does their process and their flow user experience look like, and how does it make their day 10 times better than it would have been without it?

Dan: Yeah. Great. Thanks. Good question. And if you think about it, it’s because there’s conversations that take place and there’s also software or video. We have an ultimate vision of providing a digital coach for everyone, right? So that’s a big vision. And so early on, what we’ve done is said, okay, who does this really impact? Folks that are having interactions with other people, right? And what employees are doing that most often? So we’ve been targeting for the last couple years contact centers in your enterprise, your fortune 500 companies, those folks who have contact centers, where sales, service, support, even HR, where there’s a lot of interaction. And we just recently started getting this year into retail environments as well, where either obviously through the contact center originally where I’m talking to customers who are doing returns and that sort of or even purchases in an omni-channel way in terms of that communication.

Dan: So that’s really our target market. And what folks are doing, like I mentioned before with our own background, is we found that first off people don’t like to struggle, right? People don’t go into their job saying, “Hey, I’m going to give a half effort.” Right? But managers go, “Man, my people are giving half effort. I don’t understand it.” So there’s a little bit of a disconnect there and the key is people, they get nervous. They get scared. They actually fear the observation, right? And the Hawthorne effect of people watching me and observing me and that anxiety builds up and people start to shut down.

Dan: And so what our clients are doing is they’re putting their employees, whether they’ve been in role for 10 years or they’re brand new hires right out of school, into these what I call safe simulated environments to practice and learn how to execute a good conversation, how to execute a return from a customer, how to update a policy or sell and close a deal, or overcome an objection, do that in an environment where you could practice and learn and get repetition and even feedbacks because there’s a lot of analytics in SymTrain on how well you’re doing and you get feedback on that.

Dan: So what our customers are doing is they pick a couple of use cases and teams within their business and say, “Let’s go, let’s put the salespeople through objection handling.” Or, “Let’s do the onboarding training.” And it builds up over time, which is a great way we work with our customers is they can build content in here. It’s real simple environment. There’s no code. You don’t need developers or big technicians, which is definitely a competitive advantage for SymTrain compared to some other tools that are doing conversational AI and some analytics.

Dan: Yeah. So a client’s able to do that, put it in front of their employees, get instant feedback, not just on what their employees think like, “Hey, how’d it go?” “Yeah, this was great. Thank you.” But actually behavioral changes, they can see it right in SymTrain that they’re making an impact on their delivery, on their content of what they’re saying. Also the sentiment or emotional delivery, they’re getting scores back and they’re seeing the impact that people are making. So it’s not just on how well the training is going, but it actually, they can measure performance right within SymTrain that then applies to the floor. So the return on putting people through SymTrain is two to four weeks ROI in terms of going through this, which clients love. And then we just expand with them and continue to grow in other areas with our customers that way.

JC: Have you seen an uptick in business with the pandemic and companies going more remote having kind of forcing them to train people off site, or was this something that was used more in-house in an office environment?

Dan: So it’s a combination, JC, of both. So I mean, contact centers is our initial target market, right? And when you say your vision is a digital coach for everyone, we see a much greater future than that down the road. But our customers, these contact center folks are going virtual, right? So they’re not coming in to these contact centers and they’re going remote and they’re onboarding remote learners. What happened for us, to answer your question, COVID did provide a bit of a tailwind for us, changed the world, right? But for some companies it provided a tailwind, because now you’re onboarding people remotely and they’re working virtually and you have to keep them engaged, right? And you keep them focused and executing.

Dan: But you don’t have the resource to do that. And you have these breakout rooms in Microsoft teams or Zoom, and you’re figuring out different delivery models. But with SymTrain, employees are able to work on their own, go through the repetition, get a feel for it. And then when they get back together with their groups, they’re doing better. They’re more confident. And so yeah, it did help us. I mean, in fairness this year, we grew a lot and the impact of COVID did help as customers are bringing on more remote workers and trying to drive a higher level of engagement without losing any performance capabilities.

JC: And how long would you say you’ve had the company? Did you start it? Did you come in later?

Dan: Yeah. So it’s three years, we’ve been at it at SymTrain and it was developed or incubated in that prior company that I owned, right? That sales prospecting business that’s still active today and they still use our software at SymTrain, but we started it there. We incubated it and we realized they were doing sales prospecting for B2B, but there was a much bigger market for SymTraining, if you will, and people getting this exposure and those other roles, service, support, HR in addition to sales, right? Big impact areas. So we broke it off three years ago, spun it out and have been going at it since then in terms of just time to market and how we got started in here.

JC: When did you realize… Starting a new company is a tough thing. I mean, I’ve been through it, you’ve been through it multiple times. When did you realize that SymTrain was going to make it? When did that anxiety of, oh crap, is this even going to work, when did that start to subside? What was that moment? I feel like everyone usually knows that moment when they were like, okay, we’re good.

Dan: Yeah. JC, so for Infinity Marketing, has it subsided you yet after 10 years?

JC: I don’t know, 10 years. I think my moment, I think was probably… Because I started with nothing. I mean, with what I had in my pocket, kind of thing. So I think my moment was when I realized that I had like 90 days of runway for rent, right? Then I was like, okay, all right, I got this. You know what I mean? But that day-to-day stuff was killer in the beginning. Kind of what was that for you?

Dan: Yeah. So this is awesome. So my point was maybe it never happens depending on the individual, but I think there were kind of two, right? The first one was what gave us the confidence to launch SymTrain in the first place. We saw the impact it was making, right? And we were trading North of 50% of our new hires, right? And the ones that we were bringing in, it was taking six months to get them to full speed and productivity. And the excuse, the reason excuse was, hey, this is really difficult. It’s challenging, not everyone can do it, but the answer was we just weren’t doing things effectively and well. And then when we brought the software and we realized, hey, look, it’s no longer taking us eight weeks to graduate 50% of our class, we were doing in two or three weeks.

Dan: And I was like, “Wow, this is huge.” Right? And they were doing way better. And then we were retaining so many more people that we started talking to folks in the marketplace like what do you think? Conversational simulations and having system navigation combined in these scenarios and situational training, what are you guys doing to performance-based training? And everyone said either, “We don’t do it. We learn on the job. So this is awesome.” Or, “Hey, it’s a very manual exercise for us. It’s very expensive and we wish we could do more. So your technology would be helpful.” So that was number one like wow, this is something we got to take to market. We realized this would be good. And then the other one is we signed up really big clients, right? Like top five or 10 in their industry sectors like banking, insurance, communication, even healthcare, retail, consumer products.

Dan: So once we got to renewals where we were anxious about the renewal, JC, and they were expanding and they’re saying, “Hey, we’re going into this and this area, and we’re going to take it over here. And here’s our game plan for SymTrain in our business.” We said, “Whoa, this is great.” That was the time where we felt, okay, there’s something here. We’re going to be able to make this work and grow it. So that was kind of the two points of time where we really felt good that we had something that was going to be successful.

JC: That’s cool. I’m a marketing guy, you know that, right? That’s where my head’s always at. A lot of the audience is in that tech industry, a lot of them are owners of their own businesses, or they’re going to be starting up their own, what can you tell the people listening like what are you guys doing for marketing to keep yourself relevant and out there, right? How are you staying ahead of competitors? Are you doing more direct outreach because you’re going top shelf? Are you doing more inbound and content? What gives SymTrain a flow from eyes on the page angle, right?

Dan: I think we are an outbound organization. And what that means for folks listening is we do a lot of outreach to very targeted accounts and targeted personas within those accounts, right? And we get our message to them via social, via email, via phone. It’s a lot of prospecting oriented activities. I will tell you wildly envious of those inbound organizations that have perfected and mastered the approach of being able to target because our target is so pinpointed today, right? And we have very specific industries, very specific roles and titles and value prop for them. But we’re starting to drive a little bit more content this year.

Dan: And that’s part of our goal. And our roadmap is to start to compliment our outbound efforts with content in the market, folks could see us as experts in our space and can look to say, “Hey, we need performance-based training and assessment. And we don’t have the resource or the time or the budget to do it with humans so if we can automate that, who knows about that?” Right? So SymTrain’s one of those unique folks. So that’s on our roadmap and we’re aspirational to create, JC, that inbound environment. But definitely for us, it’s all been outbound and it’s been very targeted in our efforts.

JC: I’m going to ask you a personal question. I haven’t asked much on the show yet, but I want to ask you, what did you want to be when you grew up, so to speak? Like when you were a kid, what was your dream job? And if it wasn’t this, then how did you get to this?

Dan: Yeah, that’s an awesome question. So when I was a little kid, I wanted to be a cowboy and then I wanted to be a pilot up until about eight or so. But then once I got into middle school, I always wanted to be a teacher, right? I wanted to coach. I was an athlete throughout my childhood and into high school and college. I played baseball through college and still play today even as an old man. I haven’t given that up but I really love coaching and developing those people that are with me or folks on my team. So I always wanted to be a teacher, right? And so in the-

JC: That’s very relevant to what you’re doing now. I mean, you basically tried to automate teaching for people to help their employees. That’s pretty fantastic.

Dan: It’s exactly right. And so my prior job, I started that company where we were doing prospecting, you couldn’t get me out of training, right? Like Dan, you own the company, you’re the COO, you need to do other things, you can’t do training, but I was so passionate and I loved it. You’re exactly right. It’s kind of led to this journey to SymTrain where it’s exactly what I’m doing right now. I’m doing teaching and it’s the environment I’ve always wanted to be in, especially in this learn by doing approach that SymTrain has with our customers, right? So all their employees can come in and learn how to do their job by actually performing job functions and tasks and develop those skills in this simulated environment. So yeah, very much I am able to do now what I aspired to do as a young kid.

JC: That’s awesome. That’s cool. Now, as far as again, people listening, you’ve talked about how you work with really big companies. So the impression might be that it’s really expensive and I don’t have to necessarily hear your price points unless you want to give them, but how does it work? I mean, can small businesses use you at a lower level or is it a per license? Like just how is your model when it comes to payment? Just in general, how does your pricing structure work? Is it all top end, contracts only or do you have like someone could sign up online and free trial it? How does it work?

Dan: Yeah. Great question. So we’re not quite at the point yet where you can sign up online and free trial it, we will get there probably by the end of this year and get to that point. But what’s unique about how we go to market is there’s no real front end costs, you don’t have to make a huge investment in SymTrain, right? So what you can do is you could actually just pay for usage. So some of our clients come in and they pay us and say, “Hey, we’re just going to use X amount. We might have 20,000 employees, but we want to use this with these 100 employees.” Right? So they just pay for that amount. So it’s a very low barrier of entry to get in and start using us, which to your question does allow mid markets to participate the same as larger.

Dan: The key for SymTrain is because you’re automating a very manual activity, you think about it, it’s like people don’t love role-play. Some like it more than others. I’m one of those weirdos that love it, right? I just love doing role-play and exercises with my peers. I would actually call people up before I got started and role play with them and not even tell them I was doing it, right? And they’re like, “What are you doing Dan?” And I’m like, “Oh, I’m just getting ready for the day.” But that was kind of unique, but being able to provide that environment, you kind of need a certain level, right? With five employees or 10, there’s no really need for automating those efforts, right?

Dan: But once you get North of 50 to 100 and you’ve got multiple managers and you got a lot of people you’re bringing on and they’re doing these tasks in new hire and in role, it starts to make more sense North of 100 people. But the good news is cost-wise, it’s real simple. So you’re going to make an impact early because you’re not really paying these huge upfront fees and cost to bring SymTraining in-house.

JC: Got it. With the nature of the podcast, the Future of BizTech, can you tell the audience something that’s going to be coming down the pipeline? Like what’s SymTrain’s coming up with next and then secondary to that, where do you see the automation of training going in the future for industries? So kind of what’s coming in the future for your company and then where do you see the future of what you do in general going in business?

Dan: Yeah. So a couple things, right? So on the technology side, I mentioned it’s very lightweight. So what SymTrain has done that’s pretty unique and the reason… There’s folks in the market that do simulations and it’s a big heavy lift, right? And so it’s a big cost tied to it, but with SymTrain, we’re using a lot of contemporary technology, a lot of companies are spending tons of money on voice, on AI, Siri, Alexa, and these are big companies with billions and billions of dollars behind, and we’re able to leverage what they’re doing and put it into a very unique deliverable, right? So what’s down the road is easier access for folks, right? Got mobile access today, in the contact center, you’re doing things on your IVR systems or your phone systems, if you will, being able to distribute content through LMS, through workforce management solutions where customers spend a lot of their time.

Dan: So that’s a really great piece of it. And then the other side is a higher level of authenticity, right? And you look at some of those Alexa or Siri scenarios and they’re getting better and better. And so is SymTrain creating more authentic conversations and more customizable, dynamic flows within a dialogue, which is really exciting for us, right? And a lot of our clients or prospects when they talk about it like, “Oh, kind of we get it,” you’re going in and you’re making decisions and you have decision trees. And our answer is no, you’re not making any decisions. You’re actually executing on these scenarios in SymTrain, which is uniquely different than a lot of the technology that’s out there today.

Dan: You don’t decide on what are you going to do next, you actually do it in SymTrain, which is awesome, right? So focusing more and more on that and tying that closer to the production floor. And we’re spending a lot of time, JC, just in our offering environment and developing content because our customers have a lot of this content in-house it just happens to be sitting in a data warehouse somewhere or so they have bought it-

JC: They’re sitting on the goldmine, but they don’t know how to get the gold out.

Dan: Correct.

JC: You’re the mining company that can extract it from the mine, so to speak. It’s all there, it’s just not organized and useful at the moment.

Dan: 100%. That’s exactly right.

JC: You’ve got to put that in your sales material now. So you’re right there. That’s for you. That’s a gift.

Dan: I love it.

JC: I just gave you that analogy.

Dan: Well, JC, I’ll take it. The gold mine that’s in-house that you’re able to extract.

JC: Yeah. You’re the mining company.

Dan: It’s awesome. The mining company for training content that… Yeah. I love it. I love it.

JC: If I don’t see this website update, I’m going to be offended.

Dan: We definitely will. We definitely will. So I mean, here’s the good news, right? We are talking about the future of SymTrain too. So those are things we’re working on now. So this website update might be six months out versus six days out, by the way. But yeah, so there’s a lot of great stuff that’s happening with voice technology today and it’s becoming way more mainstream. I mentioned we’ve been at it for three years, right? So three years ago we had to do a lot of explaining, hey, voice in conversations and tying that to software or video and recreating scenarios, we don’t get it.

Dan: A lot of our prospects and suspects, they get it now way more like, “Oh, can you do this or that?” “Yeah, absolutely.” “Hey, let me see it. Can I take a look?” So which is definitely one way our customers love to pull back the onion and see is just getting a demo or taking a look at how SymTrain can work with scenarios that are very similar to the problems and struggles they have with getting folks to be able to perform their job and drive a certain level of expertise.

JC: That’s awesome. Listen, I love what you guys are doing there. I can tell you right now from my personal experience, I wasn’t even able to grow as an agency effectively until I figured out how to automate that training process. And because I would say that the difference between an entrepreneur and a CEO is the ability to let go. You don’t have to like it because I don’t like it, right? You just have to accept it. You have to do it anyway. And the only way to do that is to take a large part of that training and whatnot off your plate. But what I find is that as a CEO, it’s hard to trust someone else to do it the way I would do it. So when you set up your own training, the way that you would train someone, you feel better that all you have is managers pointing those employees to that training.

JC: You can update it now or you can have your people update it a little bit but when the core of your training comes from the top, the person who has the most vested interest in it financially, emotionally, mentally, I find that that makes me feel a lot better, that anxiety subside you. You talked about two moments. My second moment was when I started automating the training for my company because I was like, wow, I don’t have to worry about is this person going to do it the way I would do it because I just told them how I do it. So will they do it every time the way I do? No, but again, that is part of letting go if you’re going to expand otherwise you’re an entrepreneur, that’s it, right? And there’s a lot of those and that’s still very small percent of the population and there’s nothing to be ashamed of being a small business entrepreneur. That’s a lifestyle.

Dan: And you own your own job at that point, JC.

JC: Absolutely. But if you want to grow, if your goal is to expand and be multi multi-million or have investors, things like that, you got to let it go, but this is a great organized way to do it, where you feel more comfortable that the way things are going to happen or the way you would do them yourself. So I think what you guys are doing is great. Thank you so much for being on the show and also for providing such great service just to B2B or for businesses in general. How can people reach out either to you, to the company, if they hear this and they go, “Holy crap, I want to talk more,” what’s a good contact?

Dan: Yeah. So we have a contact me on the website at symtrain.com. There’s a video on there that walks through how SymTrain works so people can see that and reach out.

JC: And for audio… Because we have video going, but for audio, for podcast listeners SymTrain is spelled S-Y-M-T-R-A-I-N, correct?

Dan: Yeah. Thank you. Definitely. Yeah, symtrain.com.

JC: Yeah. Just want to make sure.

Dan: We did buy the SIM as well, so it’ll-

JC: Okay. All right. So even if they go to the other one, okay.

Dan: That’s perfect. And which helps because you can reach out to me directly, I’m Dan.McCann, M-C-C-A-N-N. I love talking to folks about the problem and the challenges and getting into an initial discussion. I even love demoing the product, obviously. So if folks reached out to me, that would be awesome. Love to talk to them about challenges they’re having and onboarding folks or change management with their in role people or helping even develop leadership traits within their organization, right? So that level of consistency across business functions and departments is a huge value add. So we have clients who just work with us on delivering new software, a new process out to their folks in the field or in role, and they can do consistent delivery and getting people performing those within SymTrain before they have to take it live on the job. So yeah, love to talk to folks.

JC: I think that’s really great that you’re offering your personal contact info because I think just the fact that you have the time to even tell people they can reach out to you on their own means that you’re obviously using SymTrain for yourself, right? I mean, like we just said, there’s no way you can take that kind of time off your plate unless you’re automating those other things. So again, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for letting our audience contact you directly if they like. And I look forward to seeing my goldmine line on your website sometime.

Dan: It’ll be there. It’ll definitely be there.

JC: Thanks so much, Dan.

Dan: Right. And I appreciate what you’re doing, right? Future of BizTech, it’s important stuff, right? And getting folks ready to perform whatever the technology is to automate different functions within the business, it’s really important. So thanks for doing this, JC.

JC: Yeah. No, my pleasure. I’m just a tech nerd who always likes to know what’s coming next. So this is my way of finding out firsthand before anyone else, right? Thanks Dan for coming on. Talk to you soon.

Dan: Great talking to you again, take care. See you, JC.

infinityadminEpi 15: Boost ROI with Simulated Work Experiences for Your Employees – Dan McCann, CEO of SymTrain
Ep14-JeffPerkins-CMOParkMobile-Graphic.png

Epi 14: Modernize & Improve Your Customer’s Experience Using Tech Applications – Jeff Perkins, CMO of ParkMobile

infinityadmin February 10, 2021

Learn more about ParkMobile at: https://parkmobile.io/

Find Jeff Perkins on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffperkins1/

JC: Well, welcome to another episode of The Future of BizTech. I am your host, JC Granger, and I am with Jeff Perkins, the CMO of ParkMobile. Jeff, thank you so much for coming on the show. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what you’re doing at ParkMobile? A little bit about them too?

Jeff: Sure, JC. Thanks for having me, excited to be here. So, I’m the chief marketing officer and the head of product at ParkMobile. For those not familiar, ParkMobile is the number one app that you can use to pay for parking in the United States. So, we have over 21 million users of the app, we’re available in most major cities across the US, every place from New York to Philadelphia, to Los Angeles, Washington DC, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Minneapolis. So we’re really available anywhere you go and it’s the same app. So, if you’re traveling from Philly to Los Angeles, you can use the same app to park in both cities, which is really nice and a lot of people like that. In addition to the on-street parking, we also offer parking at stadium venues. So back before COVID, when people used to go to concerts and sporting events, you’d be able to pay for parking easily or reserve a spot, actually, in advance.

Jeff: You don’t have to worry about going down to the game or the concert, not knowing where you’re going to park. You just book your parking with ParkMobile and you have it covered. For me, I’m a career marketer. So I started in the advertising business, way back before actually there was all this digital. So I was the guy who was doing television ads, early on in my career. Later I made the pivot from the agency side to the client-side, where I’ve been really since 2007. So, had a great run as a mid-level marketing manager and then all the way up to the CMO suite, so had a great run and I’m from Atlanta. So, we’re in the Atlanta tech community here and my current gig has been a super fun ride. I’ve been there about three years now.

JC: That’s awesome. And real quick here, I don’t know if you had mentioned this here before I read it, but you’re a professor, correct?

Jeff: Well, not a real professor. They call them adjunct professors. So I taught actually at the beginning of this year, before all the schools went into lockdown in February, I taught my first MBA-level graduate class. It was a week long intensive course in the essential skills for modern marketers. And it really came out of me, one, so I went to Emory University for business school and that’s where I taught the course. So it was fun going back and being able to be on the other side of the desk and teaching students. But the second part was really, going through an MBA program and interviewing a lot of people coming out of MBA programs, you very clearly see where the gaps are in the MBA curriculum. So students come out with a lot of analytical skills, a lot of strategic skills, which are great, but oftentimes when you’re getting into an entry-level marketing role at a company, those skills aren’t as important as understanding marketing technology and, “How do I set up a campaign in the marketing automation system that we have?”

Jeff: And so, I wanted to really educate the students on, “Hey, when you actually get out of business school, this is the stuff you’re really going to do. And here’s how you run email campaigns and here’s Google AdWords and Google Analytics and all these tools out there.” And so, just trying to educate them and give them fluency in what it’s really like when you’re going into the marketing world and give them skills that hopefully they can apply right away. And so-

JC: Spoken like a true marketer, for sure. Now for ParkMobile, so I’ve used ParkMobile before and when I heard you will come on the show, I thought, “Aw, this is really cool.” I literally used this the other day, right? So, for anyone who’s gone to a meter, has that little green squares and it has like, “This is the zone you’re in.” You have the app, you just downloaded it, it takes it from your credit card. What I really like about ParkMobile, was that I could extend my time without having to go back to the car. I remember that was a really big deal for me because I could be in a coffee shop or whatnot, but if I’m in a meeting and I parked, I don’t have to go back out to the meter. I can just hit the thing. But that’s on the personal side. For Future of BizTech, this is more B2B stuff, tell the audience how ParkMobile is used in your B2B aspect. How do companies and businesses benefit from ParkMobile?

Jeff: Sure. So, when we look at the market in really two ways, one is the B to C way, the consumer way. So making sure people download the app and are using the app. And so that’s a big part of what we do at ParkMobile, but then the other side is, really promoting a value proposition to cities and parking operators and all kinds of businesses that have parking and parking to sell, and making sure they understand why it’s important that they offer ParkMobile at their locations or at their venues. And so, we spend a lot of time focused on the industry and focused on business, to show them all these ways ParkMobile can help your business. And I’ll show you. I’ll give you a few examples. So major event venues, Mercedes-Benz Stadium here in Atlanta, when they built the stadium, they knew they wouldn’t have enough parking for everybody coming to a game.

Jeff: They also knew they were building a stadium right in the middle of an urban core of a city with really bad traffic. And so, that was a recipe for disaster when it comes to parking. And you think about the impact of that on an event venue, what’s the impact of someone not having a good experience parking or not getting parked quickly? One, they miss kickoff or they miss the start of the concert, they don’t get there early, so they can’t go to concessions. They can’t go to the, there’s lost revenue there. And they also have a bad experience coming into the arena, which could influence how they feel when they’re at the game or at the event. So stadiums are very savvy. They actually measure this now. They call it Arrival Experience, because they know that better arrival experience basically translates to more revenue for the team, for the stadium, for the venue.

Jeff: And so, what we did with Mercedes-Benz Stadium and variety of other venues across the country, who said, “Let’s enable people to prepay for parking, to book a parking spot before they even come to the event.” And what that did, is it really relieved game day traffic, because instead of you having 75,000 people all driving to the same location, nobody knowing where they’re going to park, we have almost 70% of people going to games, book their parking ahead and they drive right to that lot. And they have a variety of lots to choose from. So, if you’re going to a game with kids, you may want to be closer to the stadium and you’re willing to sit in traffic a little longer. If you’re going to the game with your buddies, you may want to hit the bars on the way to the stadium, which are a little further out and you don’t mind walking a mile to get to the stadium.

Jeff: And so, you’re able to pick the spot that’s right for you and then you navigate right to that parking lot. So you don’t have to worry about sitting in traffic, circling the block, getting waved in by some sketchy guy in the street with a flag, you basically have a spot that’s waiting for you in a lot, it’s guaranteed. And so, that’s one way businesses have figured out that we can help them. It’s that really creating a better parking program, which will create a better experience at the venue. Another thing we do with businesses is, we have what we call a Fleet Program. So a lot of businesses out there, both big and small, they have cars on the road every day. And what happened in the past, well, your drivers basically would, if they parked, they might just take a ticket and they would expense it.

Jeff: So they’d take that parking ticket on the corporate car. They might just pay with petty cash and put in some expense report for a certain amount of petty cash in parking. What we’ve done is given those companies the ability to use the ParkMobile App, to track all of the parking for all of their drivers. Now companies like Comcast and AT&T, and Whole Foods that are doing deliveries and driving around these urban areas where ParkMobile has all the parking, they now can have a ParkMobile business account and that lets the drivers pay with ParkMobile, which is really easy for the driver. And it also lets the business on the other end, the fleet managers there, understand where their drivers are going, how much are the drivers spending on parking? And eliminate any potential fraud in the system. Right? So if you have people just putting cash into meters, it’s very hard to track, but if you have everyone paying through app as a business, it makes it very trackable. There’s a clear audit trail. You understand who’s parking where, where they’re going and really, a lot of our business customers really like that feature.

JC: On that note, when I had an office downtown, so we’re based out of Denver, so we were right, I mean, right downtown. I mean, there’s no parking, basically in the building we were in, didn’t have it’s own parking structure underneath. It had a side lot that it has them deal with. But I remember that my biggest issue, if we were going to have clients or prospective clients or prospective employees come to the office, parking was the biggest issue that we had. And so with your app, if I’m a business owner at an office, I’m not a brick-and-mortar, but I’m in an office building for example, and let’s say the parking, there’s only four people that are at that office space. So basically there’s not a good visitor parking scenario.

JC: Can I download your app with the business version and can I pay for the parking? If the client told me what their license plate number was or whatever, can I pay for it from my app, and then share that with them? So they know exactly where to go. They park and they’d be set. Is there an ability for a business to take care of their, either customers, clients, employees, things like that, from a real easy experience like that?

Jeff: 100%, 100%. So one of the features of the app, is that you can make parking reservations in garages. So it doesn’t have to be tied necessarily to a sporting event. You just go into our app, you can look under the reservations tab and it shows you all the buildings in your area where you can make a parking reservation. So if you wanted to do that for a client, that would be quick and easy for you to do either in the app or actually we have a web interface as well, that you can go right in there, make that reservation, send it to the client and say, “Hey, this is where I booked your parking.” And you book it for a set amount of hours. So say our meeting is from two to three. So I’m going to book the garage from 1:30 to 3:30, just to give us a little buffer time.

Jeff: And so that really gives you the ability, before the meeting, to send that pass to the client. They just drive up to the garage, they show the pass and they don’t have to come out of pocket for any expenses related to the meeting. We see a lot of companies doing that because it’s a nice gesture, especially if you have clients coming in. You want them not to, again, similar to the sporting event example, say if you have a client coming in, it’s a prospect, it’s a new business meeting, you want that experience to be very seamless for the client. You don’t want them frustrated because they couldn’t find parking as they come into your office. So yeah, our reservations feature really lets you do that. It’s used by a lot of companies to make that process easy.

JC: That’s cool. Your assistant or your receptionist could just have it on their screen and they could just call the person, what would they need? Just need, say, “Hey, license plate number,” or do they need to say make, model, what’s the minimum amount of information that they would have to gather so they could do that for them remotely?

Jeff: It would most likely be just the license plate number.

JC: Oh, okay.

Jeff: That would be all they need.

JC: See, that’s really cool. That’s really simple. I did that a lot when I was downtown, we did that for clients. So again, when I heard you’re coming, I was like, “Oh, this is great. I love ParkMobile.” But a lot of people, that’s a big frustration for business owners, especially in downtown areas and high-rise style offices. Now during COVID hasn’t been obviously as big an issue, but that brings me to the next question then, how has COVID effected ParkMobile? Is there anywhere where it’s gained where you wouldn’t think that this would be something that ParkMobile could get into, that it helped or is it like, “Hey, less people parking around right now. So it’s slower, but as you know, the vaccines coming out now and things are going to pick up”? But how you guys been affected by that?

Jeff: Yeah. It’s been a challenging year for us, like many businesses. We make money when people park and so if people aren’t parking, it’s going to have a significant impact on our revenue. March and April were not pretty, but as cities and states started to reopen in a limited capacity, we really saw a lot of our transaction volume come back. The summer was very good because we have a lot of beach communities that use ParkMobile exclusively in the summer. So a lot of the northeastern beaches are on the Jersey shore. The Delaware beaches, they don’t charge for parking except in the summer. And so because people weren’t traveling abroad or going to summer camp this summer, everyone was at the beach, and we ended up having a really good summer from a transaction volume perspective. But it’s been tough because the core of our business are the heavy users, the commuters that are going into those urban areas every day and those people aren’t back at offices yet, and just like you and I, we’re working from home.

Jeff: And so, until those people come back, it’s going to be challenging and our transaction volume is going to be lower than where we thought it would be in a pre-COVID world. On the flip side though, the thing that has been interesting about COVID, is that it’s really, I think, accelerated the move for a lot of our clients to contactless payments. And so that’s been something that has been very good for us in a lot of ways. So, a lot of cities or a lot of operators who in the past maybe, they had planned to add a mobile payment option but it wasn’t top priority or they were slow-walking it or it was getting caught up in bureaucracy, suddenly with COVID, they don’t want people touching machines.

Jeff: They don’t want to have the coin collectors out there taking dirty coins out of physical parking equipment. Right? So, what they decided and were able to do very quickly, was add a contactless payment option to what they’re doing and then promoting that as well. The governor of Delaware actually was tweeting out about how everybody should use ParkMobile and nobody should use the physical parking lot hardware to reduce the spread of COVID. And so, we saw this really big increase in demand to implement ParkMobile in all of these new locations, which has been great for us and our sales team had record years from a new client acquisition standpoint. So, that’s been really positive and what’s going to happen as more people get vaccinated and people get back to go into offices again, people are going to events again, we really expect our business to hockey-stick in a big way because we’ve acquired more new clients this year than we have in the company’s history.

Jeff: And now it’s just a matter of getting ready for that big spike to come once people are comfortable and vaccinated and ready to go back into a normal post-COVID world. So, very dark days, a lot of excitement on the horizon for us, we’re really seeing that light at the end of the tunnel now. So, it’s an exciting time at the company.

JC: Let me ask you a question. If a business owner has some extra parking, they just happened to be lucky and they have more spots than they really need, is there a way for them to utilize ParkMobile where they can make money on their spots? So it becomes a drop point for people to book and they can park there? I mean, you guys are a transactional app, I believe, so you make a small percentage. So if I had a building and had 20 spots, I never have more than five people there ever at a time, could I take 15 of those spots, put a ParkMobile tag on it and then now I’m part of the app where people needed to park there and go somewhere else and I’m okay with that, would I be able to make money on that? How does that work? Is there any legal issues with that? How does that-

Jeff: Yep. It’s actually really easy to do. We have a lot of companies, a lot of retail operators do this, because what happens with the retail operators during the day, it’s free parking but then at night, they have a lot of people maybe parking in their lot and going to bars or restaurants nearby-

JC: They might as well make money.

Jeff: … hey, guys, “Hey, we’re letting all these people park for free on our property.” And so what you see is a lot of these lots end up, they put up ParkMobile signs say, “Hey, after eight o’clock you have to pay for parking here in ParkMobile.” And sometimes it’s a flat rate or sometimes hourly rate, but that’s been great for a lot of these retail shopping centers because then they’re able to make money off-hours when they’re not open but they’re making money on the parking. And all they have to do is pay someone to enforce it, which usually is not that expensive.

JC: No. And they probably have a tow company that has already approached them to come to their lot. And plus that’s a better user experience too, in my opinion. You go to a lot and all you see are tow-away signs and you’re like, “Ah, I need to park somewhere.” And it gives you almost a bad taste in your mouth for that business. It shouldn’t but it does. But if you go to that same spot, because you’re looking for a place to park and they allow a way to do it, that’s fantastic because now not only are you like, “Hey, thanks ParkMobile.” But you’re like, “Hey, thanks, PF Chang’s for letting me park here.” There’s a positive association now with this restaurant or this mom-and-pop business because you were able… They weren’t the type to say, “Well, if you park here, even after hours when no one’s here, we’re going to tow you.” And it’s like, “You weren’t even using it anyway.”

JC: And so now giving the ability and showing people like, “No, no, it’s okay. You can totally park here.” And they’re going to make some money on it and you can feel safe you’re not going to get towed away and it’s a more convenient spot. So I think that’s really cool for, if you are a mom-and-pop shop or you are retail space, or even if you own the building and you have tenants and you know you have more parking spaces than you need, it’s a great way for additional income. Now, given the whole theme of the podcast, that The Future of BizTech, what are some new features coming down the pipeline that you guys are set to release? What can people look forward to, not only with ParkMobile’s new releases, but the second part of the question is, how do you think just the mobile parking in general is… Because you have competitors out there. So it’s an industry building and expanding. So one, what are you guys coming up with next and then secondly, where do you see the industry going in general in changing things?

Jeff: Yeah. So, I would say one of the big themes we have for 2021, is about giving people more choice when it comes to making parking payments. And so in the past, what we’ve done is, we’ve said, “Okay, you have two options. You can pay at the meter or you can pay in the ParkMobile App.” Right? So two options, pretty good options overall, but what happens oftentimes people say, “Well, I prefer to pay mobile or preferred contactless, but man, I have to download another app and I’m just in the city for a day and I don’t want to have this random app on my phone. I already have an app from my hometown and they don’t accept that in the city.” And so, we’ve realized this and we’ve gotten a lot of this feedback from our users that, “Hey, why do I always have to download an app?” Right?

Jeff: And so, what we’re doing this year, is we’re saying, “Okay, yes, you can download the app.” The best experience is going to be the full-featured ParkMobile App. That’s the mothership. That’s where you get the most innovation. But for people who maybe don’t want that full-featured app experience or just have an aversion to downloading yet another app, we’re going to have a web version of the ParkMobile App, so-

JC: Just QR code-based?

Jeff: So it’ll be QR code-based or Text2Park. So you can just text a number and it’ll just shoot you a link to get right into the payment flow.

JC: That’s smart. That’s smart.

Jeff: And so what’s really nice about that is, okay, now you have full feature ParkMobile App for the heavier users. You have the web app, which will be really nice for the more occasional users who don’t want to download that app and it’s a really simple, elegant experience. Gets you in and out. All the same functionality though. So like you said, you could still extend the time of the parking session, right? So all these features that you have, that you like in the ParkMobile App, you have most of them in the web app and you also have an option for a guest checkout. So if you don’t want to create an account, which we always recommend, because it’s just easy to have your license plate and your credit card stored there for you. But if you’re one of these people, you’re like, “Well, I don’t want big brother having all my information. I pay as I go.” Cool. We can accommodate you with that as well. So, we’re giving people a lot more choice with the ways they could use mobile and contactless to pay for parking.

Jeff: And the thing that we actually just launched in December, is a partnership with Google Pay that I’m really excited about, where’ve we basically taken the ParkMobile App and inserted it into the Google Pay experience. So if you have the Google Pay app on iOS or Android, now you can open ParkMobile right from inside Google Pay and you go… It’s a very similar process. You put your zone number in and you pay for parking right there. And so again, maybe you have Google Pay on your phone, you don’t want to download the ParkMobile App, “Hey, I’m just going to use the Google Pay ParkMobile.” And you pay right there through the Google Pay app. You don’t pay..

JC: I was going to ask if you had payment systems like Apple Pay? It’s like if I double-tap the right button, especially if you’re checking out as a guest, the other part people don’t want to do is, they don’t want to type in the whole credit card number and the whole thing. People like Autofill or a safe way for their payment. So even if I am checking out as a guest, the good news is more people are now understanding how QR codes work because of COVID, which is interesting, because of restaurant menus. People who have never used QR codes before are totally versed on what to do now, simply because of COVID. So it’s one of those unintended consequences that really push people more in the technology area.

JC: And what’s cool is, now people will know they just put up the camera to the parking meter. They know they expect a little link thing will dropdown. They click on it. As you’re saying, it’ll be seamless. It won’t make them make an account they don’t want to, they can check out as a guest. But the last part I was thinking is like, “Okay, but the other bottleneck is putting in your credit card.” But if you’re able to, even from the web app, if you’re able to quickly import from Apple Pay or Google Pay, I mean, boom, hands done. You’re in and out of that car in 10 seconds. Right? So, that’s awesome. Listen, well, thank you for being on the show, but also, I know we had talked offline a little bit, you have a new book coming out. I want to hear about that really quick here and tell the audience about your new book.

Jeff: I do. The book comes out, probably about middle of 2021. So, the working title is How Not To Suck At Marketing. Basically-

JC: Maybe I should read it.

Jeff: It’s a list of everything I’ve done in my career and like, “Don’t do this.” What I wanted to try to put together, because I do read a lot of these marketing books that are out there, and one of the gaps in maybe the marketing content that I’ve seen, is just content about how to navigate a career in marketing and how to go from, like I did, went from agency to client-side, then from middle management to the C-suite. And so how do you do that? Right? And what are some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way to climb that ladder and get to an executive position, that other people can learn from? And the other side is also, “How do you just not get fired from your marketing job?” Which seems to happen all too often to people in our profession. So-

JC: That should be one or two chapters right there, “Step one, here’s how not to get fired.” That’s awesome. Is there anything that I haven’t asked you today or that you want to share with the audience before we go?

Jeff: No. I think for anyone that’s listening and out there and if you’re interested in learning more about either mobile apps or parking, hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m happy to follow up after this. And if you don’t have the ParkMobile app-

JC: How can people reach you? Is there an email or anything or on LinkedIn… Is there a certain way to spell your name or anything like that?

Jeff: I think it’s Jeff Perkins 1 in the profile name, the linkedin.com/in/jeff perkins1. That’s probably the best place if you want to get me, just hit me up there and we could continue the conversation. And of course, everyone must download the ParkMobile App and go and pay for parking. And actually, I should say this, we’re in January, 2021 right now, one of the interesting things during COVID, especially when people weren’t parking at all, we said, “Well, what are we going to do with our app that nobody’s using?” And we converted it into a fundraising tool.

JC: Oh.

Jeff: So if you go into the ParkMobile App and you type in the zone number, 99123, it enables you to make a donation-

JC: 99123?

Jeff: 99123. You can make a donation actually to Feeding America, which it’s the big national organization that funds a lot of the local food banks and communities around the country. So, an example of taking lemons and making lemonade, right? Maybe we can use our app and our user base of millions of users, to raise money for these great causes right through our parking.

JC: That’s fantastic. I love that because when things are hard, obviously it’s very easy to think about, “How do we save us? How do we help us so we can survive?” And it takes that extra mental step to say, “How can we help others too?” So I commend you for that. I think that’s fantastic. If you guys aren’t throwing that around all over social media, you should be. That’s awesome. Again, thank you for being on the show, Jeff, and for everyone listening again, my personal experience with ParkMobile has been great, not just as a consumer, but again, I also used to use this when I was at my office downtown and it was a great way for my assistant to easily book parking for our clients in advance. So if you have that same situation, COVID is going to be done here eventually and everyone’s going to be back to work and parking will be an issue again, unfortunately. So thanks again, Jeff. And we appreciate your time, sir.

Jeff: All right, JC.

JC: Thanks.

infinityadminEpi 14: Modernize & Improve Your Customer’s Experience Using Tech Applications – Jeff Perkins, CMO of ParkMobile
FutureofBizTech-Episode13-KarynScott.png

Epi 13: Using Situational Awareness AI to Maximize Revenue with Karyn Scott, CMO of Kloudspot

infinityadmin February 3, 2021

Learn more about Kloudspot at: https://kloudspot.com/ 

Find Karyn Scott on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karynscott/

JC: Well, welcome everybody to another episode of The Future of BizTech, I am your host JC Granger. I am here with Karyn Scott, the CMO of Kloudspot. Karyn, thank you so much for coming on the show. Why don’t you tell all the audience here a little bit about yourself and what Kloudspot does.

Karyn: Sure. And thank you so much for thinking of me and thinking of Kloudspot for this episode, we’re very excited to be here. So yeah, Karyn Scott, I am now with Kloudspot and my journey has been 20-ish plus years. I won’t define the ish. And technology, I’ve been in technology marketing for all of my career, mostly because A, I’m a tech junkie, but B, I’ve always been inspired and attracted to companies that are doing really cool things with technology to change the way people live, work, learn, and or play. And to the second part of your question, why Kloudspot and what we’re doing? I’ll get to what we’re doing in a minute but what attracted me here is, it’s an immense opportunity right now to have a technology that’s really able to help people through the challenging times that we’re in at the moment.

Karyn: So what is Kloudspot? Kloudspot is a situational awareness and intelligence platform. All right, so what does that actually mean in English? So what we are is a SaaS offering that rides on the edge of a network, any network. We’re network agnostic, we’re cloud agnostic. I joke sometimes that we’re Switzerland from a technology standpoint, anything in and anything out. But what we do is we are able to ingest data from any source, whether it’s connected cameras, connected thermal scanners, wifi, BLE, you name it. Data that’s being slung out there and we all live casting off a sea of data all the time, ingested into our platform, where you can put privacy policies into place. You can create specific applications and then trigger out to all sorts of enterprise applications.

Karyn: For example, what’s really timely right now is a lot of people are using Kloudspot to be able to detect PPE compliance and detect footfall analysis and detect thermal scanning and temperatures. So that information can come in and be projected for example, on digital displays, so that people know how to maintain health and safety.

JC: That’s really cool. Did you start with the company from the ground up or did you come in after? I think I might have missed them.

Karyn: Yeah, no. And I didn’t give you that history, I apologize for that. So Kloudspot was founded in 2016 by two ex-Cisco folks. I’m actually ex-Cisco as well, but I didn’t know these guys during that time there. Who were largely responsible for building the wifi infrastructure that the world runs on today that you and I use today. And those engineers left Cisco founded Kloudspot, mostly for situational awareness and location-based services. So understanding what’s happening within a perimeter space and what’s going on between the devices and the people moving around in the space. But what’s happened in the journey over the past four years, is that sort of been interesting, not necessarily a driver, what’s become a driver, is the intelligence you can extract from all those signals and be able to drive engagements and interactions with the people casting off that data.

Karyn: And I joined in July of this past year, shortly after Guillermo Diaz, who is now our CEO. He was also at Cisco, he was the CIO at Cisco. I knew him and he started, I think in February or March. And he pinged me to sort of help him out with some marketing guidance and how to position the business and messaging. And back to my original reason for being in technology, I was so captivated by what this technology can do that I just couldn’t say, yes fast enough and decided to jump in and join the fun.

JC: So what kind of companies do you find benefit the most from what you guys do? And do you have like government contracts also? This seems like a really high end, network-style solution. What companies are benefiting from what you guys do the most?

Karyn: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. And the answer is, anyone and any organization that can define a perimeter and has a need to understand what’s happening within that perimeter, will benefit. And I know that’s a very loosey, goosey answer, but it’s actually the reality. So we see applications from education, so understanding the student engagement and the student as a consumer of education and understanding how to tailor, customize education experiences. Especially now with a lot of the remote learning going on, one example. Another one that we talked about earlier is, offices reopening. That’s what the entire world is focusing on. Now how can we ensure that when people do come back to work, they want to come back to work? They feel it’s safe to be back in the office. So monitoring all those metrics that are useful in making that happen.

Karyn: Construction sites, there are OSHA compliances, there are delivery compliances. There’s a whole host of things, that set of organizations that are in the construction business can do with the data that they are collecting. To your point about governments, one of the big applications that we’re seeing is around smart cities. I read an IDC study that said $189 billion TAM in cities trying to become more intelligent. What does that mean? Energy sensors for light in parks to have smart systems there, waste management, police and fire, and making sure people are being dispatched to true emergencies versus maybe not. Public information, cross-selling discounts for people to drive foot traffic, when foot traffic opens again to different stores and malls, that sort of thing.

Karyn: We were not born obviously to help out with COVID because thankfully COVID wasn’t around then. The real early use cases were things around stadiums, experiences in malls, retail, because those really were the early adopters of trying to figure out how to make sense of the data the people in the space we’re casting off and come back with targeted engagements.

JC: Yeah. Something you said there that I’ve noticed a lot is, there’s so many different things out there that can collect data. Collecting data effectively is the easy part.

Karyn: Right.

JC: What I like about what you said is that your system helps with making sense of it.

Karyn: Correct.

JC: And I think that’s where a lot of softwares fail. They say, “Well, here’s all the analytics.” It’s like, “Okay, what does that mean?” And also something you said made me believe that your system kind of works in a way where it tells the difference between what should be happening versus what is happening. When you’re talking about school behavior or construction sites and OSHA, OSHA has a very set amount of rules. These things should be happening over here, but it sounds like your software can detect the difference between like, “Yeah, this is what should be happening, but here’s, what’s actually happening. And here’s how it can intelligently drive those or those make sense of that.” So that a human can go, “Okay, well we need to change this, this.” Am I getting that right?

Karyn: You are and it’s one step further because it’s an AI-driven intelligence platform. So it gets smarter through machine learning over time and can start to predict. And that’s the really exciting part. It becomes a predictive analytics tool. It will start to predict intent, predict behavior, predict likely actions and outcomes.

JC: So I can actually tell you that … I always think about that funny board on the wall at a construction site, it says, “One hundred and twenty-six days since an incident.” Or whatever, like an injury or something, but I feel like your software will not only say, “Well, here’s how long it’s been since one.” But it would predict and say, “Listen, with the way things are going. You’re a week or two out tops from having an incident.” Are you talking about those kinds of lines?

Karyn: Those kinds of lines. And again, it’s a flexible open platform that you can write to it, to do whatever you want. So it could even go one step further than that and say, “Here are the actions we’ve already taken in routing your data a certain way.” So you extend that time or you avert that process.

JC: Sure. But it sounds like it is a predictive model in a way, unless I’m reading this wrong. So what about applications like weather? Could this be plugged into the national weather system and it can … Because obviously they already have something. I mean, they have predictive models already, but I guess my point is, does your software also run similar where it can say, “Well, here’s everything from the past and here’s what’s happening currently. So we think it’s going to do this.” I’m trying to do an analogy. Is your system something that would act somewhat like a predictive weather software or something like that?

Karyn: It certainly could and the beauty in the platform, as I mentioned earlier, the agnostic piece of it, we don’t sell direct to end-users. We sell through third-party systems, integrators, partners, and distributors because those are the folks that are hired to create those specific applications. So absolutely you could have a use case where a company has hired a particular integrator to develop that type of an application, to do those sort of predictive analytics. The power is in the platform. It’s completely up to the person who’s programming it, to get the most out of it.

JC: So that sounds pretty cool for you then as a CMO because you’re a marketing person like I am.

Karyn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

JC: It’s not going to be the same thing every day. There’s pros and cons of an agnostic system, right?

Karyn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

JC: On one hand you get that predictive nature, free marketing. But for you, it sounds like you get to kind of spread it out a little bit and see which industries you want to go after. But like you said, you have third-party distributors that do this. Talk to us, we get a lot of CEOs in here, but we don’t get many CMOs. And so tell us from your point of view, what is it like marketing for a company like this? I mean, when you have a system that can be used for almost anything, how do you narrow down your focus to who you’re really trying to advertise this to? What does a day in your job look like when it comes to marketing a system like this?

Karyn: This platform, yeah. It’s an excellent question. And we pivoted the focus of the organization and the marketing of the organization pretty heavily to help organizations that are trying to reopen and focus a lot on health and safety because we are living in this time of COVID. And we are living in this era where, whether you’re a city, whether you’re a business, whether you’re a hospital, whether you’re a school, table stakes are now health and safety, right alongside with privacy. So a lot of our focus has been on promoting the value and the use cases the platform has in things like PPE detection, in things like social distancing, in things like capacity and footfall, counting. In things like hand sanitization, monitoring all of the things that are very top of mind for many businesses today.

Karyn: I mean, the fact of the matter is there isn’t a business you can think of probably that isn’t thinking of, how do I create an environment where people feel safe coming back to dinner, safe coming back to send their children to school safe, coming back to the shopping mall? So that’s really where our focus and my focus, in particular, has been along those use cases in the last five, six months since I’ve been here.

JC: So does your system or your platform, does it sit over here to the right and then people plug into it or does your platform sit on top of their servers in their cloud and whatnot? Which direction does it go or does it just sync up in a real-time data way? How does it actually get integrated?

Karyn: Right. That’s a great question. It rides on the edge of the network, which is great from a privacy standpoint because the data itself … We don’t store any of the data. So that’s fantastic from a privacy standpoint. And that’s the first question we have, certainly when we’re talking with CIOs and tech people in these discussions. So it rides on the edge of the network and it ingests data from any sensor into the system. And then through common APIs, it integrates out into any software that you might be using. So for example, and we just announced this about a couple of months ago. We have an integration with Microsoft Teams, where all of the data that is coming through the system can be pushed live through Microsoft Teams to employees globally in real time, to digital displays in the office.

Karyn: So for example, if you’re monitoring, I don’t know, outages of a network that you’re managing for another customer, all of that stuff can easily within that Microsoft Teams environment be integrated without having to jump out and go elsewhere, number one. Number two is, the thing our customers really love about the Kloudspot platform, is it aggregates all of the data from all of the data sources that you may have into a single dashboard. That’s pretty significant and we hear that from our customers all the time. That having a single source of truth, a single pane of glass, where all of their data sources sit and all of the aggregation of the data visualization models exist, really makes their life less complicated.

Karyn: And imagine a situation where you’re having to monitor siloed and disparate systems, and then trying to stitch together what this analysis is telling you, what that analysis is telling you, it comes all into one common platform. And I wanted to respond to a comment you had earlier about it being sort of high end, not necessarily true. We just announced a bundle last month called the QuickStart Bundle and there are details on Kloudspot, if anybody is interested. Where we’ve actually stitched together almost a starter kit, that within a day, a company can be up and running and open their doors. Again, where it includes some hardware, we’re not a hardware company, but we’ve bundled together some hardware. Digital displays, access points, the Kloudspot platform. So everything is all in one, at a very low cost of entry. Our dealers of course sell that, so I can’t quote a particular price but a really affordable cost of entry because we wanted to make sure … It’s not just the enterprise play here, this is for small business, for medium business, who really can make the use of what they have already.

Karyn: And that’s another from a marketing standpoint, since you asked about that, part of the value is to monetize what you’ve already owned. You’ve already spent a ton of money in your infrastructure, in your racks and your servers and your access points in all of that. You spent a ton of money on your business applications, whether it’s Slack, DocuSign, Salesforce, Tableau, whatever it is you’re using in your business. We integrate all of that together and aggregate it together in a single pane of glass, which a lot of our customers really understand the value of. So it helps fuel your investment.

JC: And what kind of marketing do you do? Do you guys invest in a lot of content marketing? Are you guys doing, how are you getting in front of the distributors to convince them to buy it from you to attach it to these companies and platforms?

Karyn: Yeah, and we’re really early in that journey, to be honest. All right, we really just started gearing up since Guillermo came on as CEO back in, I think it was February. So we’re nascent in our journey. My focus the last six months has really been two-fold. One, building that foundation. Getting the market infrastructure into place so that we can then fuel forward. From a marketing standpoint, I don’t believe in turning on the water until your plugs and your pipes have been connected to the city water supply. It doesn’t actually make any sense. So that’s a lot of what I’ve been focused on. Building that infrastructure out so that we can take on that demand engine piece of it. And watch this space in a couple of weeks, we’re about to relaunch our website and our partner portal, so that that one-stop-shop for our partners to get content and training and information that’s important to them, as well as a whole guided experience for people in all the different verticals that you and I talked about a little bit.

JC: I want to switch back a little bit to the COVID side of things here. Right now, as we’re recording this, vaccines are coming out, which is great. On the other side, we’re at this peak, spike, the irony of the polarization of where we’re at right now is huge because, we’re losing more people per day and more infections and deaths and stuff per day than ever. And it’s just exponential, but yet we have this horizon coming with the vaccines. How is your company going to, or what is it already doing right now? How is it integrating into that to make that transition? You talked a little bit earlier about that, but is there anything coming soon that we haven’t seen that people can go, “Hey, Kloudspot is going to be doing X, Y, Z, and that’s going to help with this transition back to whatever this new normal will look like.”

Karyn: Yeah. The next normal we’ll have to see, hopefully, this will be a dark chapter in the medical school textbooks, just like polio and some of those others someday. And we’ll look back on it. I’m constantly telling my kids, this may be the worst thing that happens in your lifetime. So we’ll see. But to answer that question. Again, it’s really back to the individual use cases because we are the canvas that can then be created into whatever you want. But a lot of the use cases, we’re beginning to see that are important given what you just outlined. Making vaccination sites and hospitals safe.

Karyn: So for example, we have one company, I can’t talk about it yet because they haven’t deployed fully, but it’s a hospital system that’s using Kloudspot to use connected hand sanitizers, which I didn’t actually know existed, but they do. As well as PPE scanning and thermal scanning for temperature, contactless. So that there’s a way to make sure that when you’re scheduled to come in and have your COVID shot, you can feel confident that the person doing it is safe. That they have done their hand sanitization, that they are in fact, in mass compliance. That the room has been sanitized to a certain standard. So you have a lot of comfort in going in and having that done.

Karyn: Part of what we hear all the time on the news is, half the population is afraid to go do this. Hopefully with some of these applications that are being enabled by the Kloudspot platform, can give people comfort in the fact that the experience at least will be safe and not pose any kind of a risk. So that was one very exciting use case that’s coming down the pike soon. It hearkens back to your earlier question, for us, it’s all about the use cases and what exciting things the customers are doing. So as those things begin to come online from a marketing standpoint, it’s my responsibility really to share those use cases, to share those customer stories, so that other people can see what’s possible through technology.

JC: That’s really cool. As the title of the podcast, The Future of BizTech.

Karyn: Yeah.

JC: Two-part question. First is, where do you see the future of your company? Because right now, obviously you guys have the system developed and the use cases are the ones that are developing themselves at this point. And I’m sure some of them surprise you every now and then. Like, “Oh wow. I didn’t think that it could be used for that. That’s really cool.” So I think that, that’s a cool part about your system, but the first part of the question is, where do you think your company is going in the future, as far as that future of the BizTech. And then secondly is, where do you think the industry you exist in is going as a whole? So from the broader sense of the cloud analytics, predictive modeling and whatnot, where do you see the future of both of those going?

Karyn: Yeah, those are great questions. I mean, from a Kloudspot standpoint, there’s sort of the near term and the longer term. Near term, as we mentioned, it’s all about how do we do our part and how do our peers in the technology industry do our collective parts in enabling the transition to whatever this new normal, next normal way of life is going to be? Be that health and safety or whatever else. So we’re very excited to participate in that journey. In fact, we just made another announcement a couple of weeks ago that we’re part of the telecom infrastructure project that Facebook is spearheading along with 8 or 10 other companies to federate the access to wifi. Because at the end of the day, at least in my view and I’ve blogged about this. Equality will never exist in the world until access to free wifi and reliable wifi is there for everybody and anybody to enjoy. So Facebook is spearheading this initiative and we’re doing our part from the wifi standpoint to be part of it.

Karyn: So that’s one area where I think our company is going to continue to evolve in bringing products and services to the market. When I say the market, I mean the development community who’s creating for the end user, that can really help them make intelligence of any space that they’re in. And part of what you’ll see coming out of Kloudspot going forward in the next year, 2021, are these campaigns around intelligent spaces, intelligent office, which we talked a little bit about. Intelligent school, intelligent construction site, intelligent city parks. All of these kinds of things, because everybody is slinging immense amounts of data. Everyone has three … My mother has three different devices. She has her laptop, she’s got her cell phone, she’s got a smartwatch. Everybody has a lot of connectivity going on and everyone’s dropping digital breadcrumbs.

Karyn: And to the point you made earlier, our job at Kloudspot is to help companies swim through that swirling sea of data that’s out there and be able to automatically extract the nuggets that are meaningful to their particular business. So they in turn can drive meaningful engagements with the people in their perimeter, whatever that may be. Again, be that a mall, a school, a stadium, what have you. We envision the day when we can go back to sport’s arenas and all that kind of stuff. So that’s sort of the Kloudspot piece of it. And I’m personally intrigued with how the virtual and physical worlds are really starting to blur in a positive way.

Karyn: One example, back to the workspace we were talking about earlier. I don’t believe you’re ever going to have offices with cubes on top of cubes ever again, that’s probably never going to happen. So how do you create a situation where this virtual world exists within the physical world and make it seamless? So that’s, that. The second part of your question, around this whole AI-driven intelligence space, where that’s going? There’s not a day that goes by where there isn’t some super fascinating announcement from some super unique company. To your point, that we may not have heard of. Really doing something to better the world through AI, robotics, machine learning, all of this.

Karyn: For example, one company that I sit on the board of called FarmWise, has come up with an AI-driven robotics technology to listen to plants. So they can determine at a plant level what pesticides or controls are needed versus wasting the time, energy, money, and potential problems in the pesticides in the environment, spraying an entire crop. That to me is just mind-blowing to think about. That there’s a way to-

JC: More segmented.

Karyn: More segmented, but you see that every day and you see companies getting funded and getting support and really talented people from the technology space gravitating towards these arenas. Because I think that’s really a lot of what the future is going to bring. It’s going to be more personalized experiences. It’s going to be solving the real problems in this world, like food, like climate change, like safe water, like access to free wifi and all of these things. And I think the technology and in particular, the artificial intelligence-driven piece of it and the ability to predict engagements, I think is going to be a net positive in any space.

JC: Oh, that’s wonderful.

Karyn: Yeah, it’s very exciting.

JC: Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that you think would be of benefit to the audience to hear whether it be about the industry or your company or yourself?

Karyn: I don’t think so. I think we covered a lot of territories there. I’m not sure anybody’s interested in me personally, but if you are, you can look at my LinkedIn. I am excited by the Kloudspot opportunity and in particular, in bringing part of my passion around philanthropy and giving back and shaping next gen to the forefront. One of the key values that we have here at Kloudspot is, not only is it our responsibility to help a rising tide lift all boats from a technology standpoint, but from making sure underserved populations not only have access to technology, but have access to experiences. So one of the things that we’re doing is, we’re really focused on a partnership with schools for underserved children to bring them in early in the high school journey for professional examples and that sort of thing. My former employer Salesforce, was the king or queen as you will, at that. And they put a very high bar and we’re all trying to reach that.

JC: No, I agree. Okay. So how can people reach you if they’re interested in Kloudspot, they want to learn more or partnerships, things like that? What would be some good ways to get a hold of you?

Karyn: Sure. You can either go to Kloudspot.com or you can feel free to ping me, karyn@cloudspot.com. Karyn with a K and with a Y. And we are very open to any organization interested in learning more, any third-party integrator with customers looking to use AI and machine learning and situational awareness to solve problems. And anybody who just would like to chat about these kinds of topics. I love having a great brainstorm with folks, much like this. So I’m really grateful for the opportunity.

JC: That’s awesome. Well listen, thank you so much for being on the show. I can’t wait to get this episode out there and we’ll make sure that we send you the links of course, as well. So you guys can share it, but thanks again for being on the show. I appreciate it so much, Karyn.

Karyn: Honored to have the opportunity. Yeah, be safe and have a happy holiday.

JC: You too.

infinityadminEpi 13: Using Situational Awareness AI to Maximize Revenue with Karyn Scott, CMO of Kloudspot
BizTech-Ep12-Graphics.png

Epi 12: How Developers Can Make Money Fixing Issues – Drew Angell, Founder & CEO of GitCommits

infinityadmin January 27, 2021

Learn more about GitCommits at: https://www.gitcommits.com/ 

Find Drew Angell on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akangell/

JC: Welcome everybody to another episode of The Future of BizTech. I’m your host JC granger, and I have with me here, Drew, who is the founder and CEO of GitCommits. Drew Angell, please tell everyone about yourself and a little bit of your background.

Drew: Sure. Yeah. I’ve been doing web development for quite some time, primarily specializing in payments and a lot of PayPal stuff. That’s kind of for the past 20 years or so. I’ve had my business Angell Eye where we’ve been doing a lot of web development and things like that, kind of turned into a partnership with PayPal. And out of that has branched GitCommits, which is a new platform that we’re launching that we’re pretty excited about that should help kind of grow all sorts of development stuff within us here.

JC: Tell us a little bit about that. Tell us about GitCommits and then segue also into what is the biggest pain point or problem that GitCommits solves for companies?

Drew: Okay. Sure. To try to keep it short as possible here, it’s basically a way to take the Git community, so GitHub and Bitbucket primarily are the most popular ones, but GitHub is what we’re starting with, and it allows the community to help you complete your tickets. I mean, that kind of happens already, but what we’re trying to do is add an incentive to allow the community to have a reason to complete your issues and help you get more of your work done. Or on the developer side, it can help you find work easily.

Drew: So the way it kind of came about was… Just a quick story here from my own use. We do a lot of WordPress plugins for PayPal, WordPress and WooCommerce plugins. So we have to maintain those and develop feature requests, bug reports, things like that all the time. On GitHub, it’s open-source, it’s a free plugin. And there were times where I would come in… I loved it when I would wake up in the morning, sit down at my computer and, “Oh, look, there are support requests that came through.” Somebody in the developer community had been using our plugin, found one of our existing issues and just completed it for me. I didn’t have to talk to them. I didn’t have to interview them. I didn’t have to give them any information. It’s just, “Hey, they saw the issue. They fixed it for me.” I merge it in. It was done. That’s beautiful.

Drew: So I wanted more of that. The incentive they had is that they were using our plugin. They happened to run into the problem, and they happened to have the ability to fix it. So they went ahead and did it. There’s a lot of other issues that people who aren’t using our plugin would have the ability to fix. But since they’re not using our plugin, they don’t really have the incentive to do it. So the whole idea here is to give them an incentive where we can add a bounty or fund an issue. This particular issue might be worth $5 and another one might be worth $100 or whatever the case may be. Then developers all over the community can go in there and knock them out, submit pull requests, and I’ll just payout when I accept their pull request. So that means I’ve reviewed their code and I’m happy with it.

JC: See, that’s really cool. That kind of gets my tech tail wagging so to speak because I love… What I think is really cool, the simplified version of my head is essentially you’re crowdsourcing your coding, right? You’re crowdsourcing the support tickets from a technical standpoint basically. Right?

Drew: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. In fact, that term specifically, it’s not there as of today, the actual crowdsourcing, but we’re adding that where we can have… Right now it’s just if I own the project, I can add a bounty or add funding to a ticket and then somebody can complete it. But again, with the case of our plugins, for example, there’s a lot of users out there and a lot of them might be willing to put a dollar or $5 or whatever towards. So what we’re adding right now, it’s not quite there but it’s coming soon, is the ability to have multiple bounties on a single issue. And then that would be more of a true crowdfunding or crowdsourcing.

Drew: Right now, we’re kind of, I guess, crowdsourcing for the developers using GitHub to do that. But crowdfunding will come here soon where you can add multiple bounties. And then again, the idea will be in our example, with our plugins, we can have the community fund the issues and the community complete the issues. So we’ll just manage the plugin itself. But hopefully, the community can knock out a lot of that work for the crowd-sourcing.

JC: How big of a fix is it? So for example, like if you had a plug-in company, how many issues do you see on average that they have outstanding, that they could use this help with? I mean, is it like five or six? Is it hundreds? Is it thousands? I mean like how big of a demand is really sitting out there for what you guys are helping people facilitate?

Drew: If it’s a relatively popular plugin, there’s usually going to be, I would say in the hundreds, if not thousands, of issues in somebody’s repository. Now that depends on how long they’ve had it running. Over time, you have your plugin out there for a month. You’re not going to have a lot of feedback yet, but if you’ve had it out there for years, you’re going to get a lot of feature requests and a lot of small bug reports, bigger bug reports. And over time, you’re prioritizing things, your backlog just gets built up with lots of little stuff that’s important. It needs to be there. It needs to be done, but it just never quite makes a priority. So that ends up being hundreds or thousands of tickets. Those are a perfect type of thing where the community can knock those out for you if you just start placing bounties on them.

JC: Let’s say there is no community. Let’s say there is no GitCommit, a plugin that, let’s say, has a hundred outstanding tickets. If they don’t have any other help other than their internal resources, how long do you typically see…. How long would it take them to get to through all hundred? I know that’s kind of a loaded question, but on average, how long do you see these outstanding, right? It’s kind of like seeing those houses on Zillow. This house has been on the market for like a year. Okay. So how long are these tickets typically outstanding that aren’t being solved because they don’t have the internal resources typically to do it?

Drew: I mean, that is kind of a loaded question. It’s hard to answer that one because it’s pretty subjective and it’s very relative to a lot of things. But a lot of them will sit on there for months or years even sometimes just because they’re not getting the attention. Again, they’re important. They need to be there. There is an issue created. It’s like someday we’d like to do that, but they’ll just sit there forever. Now, the more important stuff, the stuff that the internal team is focusing on, you’re usually closing a ticket if not just one day. If it’s a small ticket, then it might take a week or a month for a bigger project, maybe a few tickets to have them done. But again, during that month when you’re focused on those tickets, you’ve got lots of other little tickets getting out into your backlog from your customers or your users. So it just continues to kind of load up. Again, depending on what exactly the issue is and how big of a task it’s going to be, it’s kind of hard to say how long it’ll sit there.

JC: So then I imagine GitCommits community grows, the more it grows and these bounties, these $5, $10, $100 dollars, whatever the company believes it’s worth to get these solved. I mean, is it crazy to say that if someone had a thousand open that if your community was up and running huge, that it could be done in a day or two days or week or month? I mean like how fast if… Let’s say fast forward. Because you’re a startup, correct? Right?

Drew: Yep.

JC: So fast forward when the community has grown and it’s feeding itself, so to speak. If a new plugin or any kind of company comes in with, let’s say, a thousand tickets. They just now are open to this or whatnot. How long could that be knocked out? I mean, how fast would that backlog be taken care of?

Drew: I mean, that’s again, just kind of guessing here, not necessarily… Think about the community. There are tens of thousands of developers out there, if not more than that. Just a lot of them are waiting, looking for work. So if you had a repository of a thousand issues and then you joined GitCommits and you threw all thousand of them up there with whatever bounty or even half of, whatever the case may be. If you had them all funded, I mean, shoot, depending on exactly… If they’re smaller tickets and get them thinking in the future, we’ve got this platform running, we’ve got a lot of developers actively joining this or jumping on the site every day to browse the issue library and see what funded issues they can knock out. I mean, if you had a thousand and we had a few thousand even developers ready to do it, they’d knock them all out. I mean probably a bunch of them in just that day, but I mean, a couple of weeks, I would say, you could have all those knocked out with a lot of traffic in the community.

JC: And that’s just crazy to think about, because it almost sounds like… And I hate comparing new companies to existing ones, but I think it gives a frame of reference. You know when people said like, “The Uber of”? I hate that, but I get it. Yours kind of sounds like the Fiverr of coding issues, of solving those tickets where you got a community of people who can knock it out fast, easy, but it sounds even easier than Fiverr because in Fiverr, you have this community of people and you have to reach out to them to say, “Here’s what I’ve got.” Whereas with yours, it’s just sitting there and anyone who wants to come take a look at it can just start on it right away. Is that right?

Drew: That’s exactly right. That’s kind of what, again, with my own example. When we’re doing our plugins, the first thing we do, no matter what is create our GitHub issue. That’s our management system. That’s where we put the details of what the problem is, what needs to be done. Here’s all the resources you need to fix it. So all that info is in that ticket. Then from there, I’d have to go to Fiverr or Upwork or any of these other popular job places, post a job there, invite people or wait for people to apply. Then go through all those applications, interview them, find somebody, give them access, all those steps. I can eliminate all that. I’ve already done the GitHub part. I’ve created my issue. It’s now out there in the community. If I go ahead and fund it on GitCommits, I’m done. Now, GitCommits can take over letting the developers come and I can move on and do whatever else I need to do. And in theory, the next day I might wake up and boom, some of my issues have been completed. I don’t even have to talk to anybody.

JC: That’s crazy. How do you do quality control? Like if an audience member is listening and they have these issues that they have out there, they might be thinking, “Well, okay, well, what if somebody says they fixed it, but it’s not done correctly?” How do they know that the issue was actually fixed so they can pay that out?

Drew: Sure. Again, what we tried to do with this as follow the natural Git workflow as much as possible. Again, you’ve created your issue. You’ve got it on GitHub or wherever the case may be. A developer comes along and they commit their code and submit a pull request to you. So in general, you’ll have some sort of a team that’s going to review those pull requests and you’ll have your internal team that’s merging that code. So again, that happens regardless of where the work came from. Basically, the simple answer is you’re doing a review, and until you actually say, “Yes, this code is good,” and you merge it into your repository, that’s when it pays out. If you don’t merge it because you did your review and it was no good, then you don’t pay anything out. And of course, you can communicate back and forth if you find a problem, just like you would naturally. You’d let them know, “Hey, I reviewed the code. Everything’s good except for this one piece,” whatever the case may be or, “No, it was no good at all.”

Drew: You communicate and then once they’ve fixed it up and you’re happy with it so that you’re willing to merge it, that’s the point that triggers the payout.

JC: That’s really cool. Right now, as we’re recording this anyway, we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, unemployment is really high. How is GitCommits either helping with that… I mean, how do you see that integrated into what’s going on right now between high unemployment and pandemic stuff, you’re working from home? I mean, it seems obvious, but I want to see what your take is on how this can be a part of a very large solution.

Drew: Yeah, sure. Basically, a lot of people now are sitting at home trying to figure out what to do with how they can do their own business. They’re taking this time to finally start their own thing or finally learn to code or whatever they’re wanting to do. As more people are looking for that work, we’ll have this place that you can just easily go. And again, in the future, when we get this ball rolling here, all these people that are sitting at home looking for development work to do can just go to GitCommits, browse the issue library, and there’ll be funded work. They’re ready to go. You don’t have to apply for it. You don’t have to do any of that stuff. So that’s one side.

Drew: I mean the others on the flip side of it, if you are the product owner, it gives you a chance to get that thing started. You’ve been working your full-time job, you come home, you got family, it’s hard to kind of do your thing. Now, people had that free time and maybe they’re starting. They did decide to go ahead and build their plugin or they needed help getting this thing launched. Well, create your issues, get it up there on GitHub and let the community help you get that thing done. So yeah, just having that time now to get those issues created or do the work, it’s just kind of a perfect fit because you can do it from anywhere that you have a laptop and some internet access and get your work done.

JC: Yeah. Get your work done. I like that. Does this only work for plugins, or is there any other types of companies or softwares that this either can now help or in the future? How does that work?

Drew: Yeah, basically it works for anything that you can do with Git in general. So the plugins are just an easy example, and that’s just what I use myself, kind of how this thing was born. But I mean, people use Git for all sorts of stuff, whether it’s open-source free projects, private repositories, or even graphic designers sometimes use Git to do version control on their graphics that they’re creating. So if you had a repository with some Adobe illustrator artwork in there or something like that and you wanted to have the community help you knock out some issues with that, you could use it for that. So again, anything that you can use Git for version control, you can put it on GitHub or any of those repositories, and then that would work with GitCommits.

JC: That’s really cool. Where do you see… In the spirit of the future of biz tech, this is where it’s at now, if you had to fast forward in your head five years from now and not necessarily just GitCommits, but what you’re doing sounds really unique to me. I haven’t heard of another platform out there that allows this to work in the manner that yours does. Especially what I like about it, again, is that a company can just put all their issues out there, and then it just happens. People are already… They take a look, they code it out, it gets accepted, they get paid. I mean, it’s simple. Even the company doesn’t even have to reach out or anything. And that’s innovative in itself.

JC: But first question being is where do you see GitCommits in five years? And then the second question is, it seems like you’re one of the first, if not the first, to this arena, but there will be those who follow, which can be good. Right? It forces innovation, it keeps people nipping at your heels so that you can always push that envelope. Where do you see even just this industry idea of going in five years, let alone GitCommits?

Drew: Yeah. So basically I guess I would say the goal is to turn this thing into kind of the place where developers go to either get work done or find work to do. And just simplifying the whole thing. If this thing’s all running in five years from now, we’ll have loads of issues in there. Any time anybody ever has a job that they want to do, “Hey, just go to GitCommits and browse your issue or browse the issue library, find some issues, knock them out.” So again, just eliminating the whole interview process, payroll, onboarding new people into your platform, and creating user accounts and whatever product.

JC: Yeah, because who cares? If they code it out and it works, then it works. Who cares who they are or where they’re from?

Drew: Exactly. You don’t need to really know them. Now, naturally, if the same person is committing a lot of code for you, you’re probably going to start communicating with them and maybe start working more directly with them. So it’s an avenue for that as well. It kind of almost becomes the interview process.

JC: Yeah, that’s true.

Drew: Where they are completing some tickets for you and you see, “Oh, hey, this guy’s doing good. He’s knocking these out quickly.” I’m going to reach out to him and say, “Hey, are you interested in coming on as a more dedicated user? Or would you just prefer to keep…” Probably still do the same thing with the platform, but you can bring them on and just assign them directly. That’s one of the things in GitCommits. There are various project types, so you could have just a contest or anybody can commit code to it. Or you can say, “No, this is a traditional one. I only want this one person working on this.” So once you’ve established that relationship with somebody, you could just create your tickets and just assign them directly to them.

JC: Well, and that’s cool for the business. But even from the other side of it, the developers, it acts as their application, even if there’s no one hiring, right? They can just say, “Well, hey, I want to go work for this company. So I’m going to slam out a ton of these issues today and this week or this month or whatever, and try to get my foot in the door.” Right? So this also seems like it’s almost like a backdoor into getting some sort of full-time employment or contract with a company you really like. Because if they have issues outstanding and you’re like, “I want to be a developer or coder for them,” you can just go on there and just start. I mean like, literally, like you said, without even the interview process in the beginning anyway, and then that can develop into that relationship where they might say, “Hey, this guy has slammed out a hundred things for us. He does it fast. He does it well. It all checks out. Let’s hire him.” You know what I mean?

JC: What I love about it is I see both sides. There are so many advantages to both sides of this, which I think is really cool.

Drew: Yeah. I mean, back to that, it becomes their application. It becomes their resume because they also have a history now. Like on GitHub, for example, when you commit code to somebody, it logs all that. It’s like a social network for code. That’s what GitHub is. So now you’ve got a profile that shows I’ve had 5,000 code commits accepted, and that looks good on you. So not only are you doing the work, you’re getting paid without having to go through interviews and all that, but you’re building that resume out and of course, right now, GitCommits itself doesn’t have a lot of that. We’re leaving it up to GitHub right now or Bitbucket, GitLab, et cetera. But we’ll start tying a lot of that in. We’ll have review systems and we’ll kind of curate all that data together and consolidate it in one place so that you’ll have like a GitCommits profile where you can see all your GitHub and Bitbucket and GitLab history in that one place and turn that into your resume basically.

JC: What would be the advantage of a developer or a company listening right now to get on board with GitCommits? By the way, does it cost anything? How does it work? Is there a set of fees? Is it just free and everybody just does it? How does the money flow and who pays what in that sense?

Drew: Yeah. So basically, there are two sides. There’s a product owner or whoever has the software, has the Git repository that you’re managing. And then of course you have your developer side. So for the product owners, it’s totally free. You just post your issues or you add your bounties. The only payout you make is the amount you choose to pay as the bounty for that specific issue when somebody completes it. The developer side, when they complete an issue, we do charge a fee on that side. Right now, we’re starting at 5% and then the PayPal fee would be different. The total fee for the developer has got to be around eight, maybe up to 10% at the most right now, which is still about half of any of the other things that we’ve mentioned already when you’re trying to post jobs and you can get work done through those avenues.

Drew: So again, on the product owner side, totally free other than your bounty that you’re paying out, which you would be paying for the work anyway. Then on the developer side, work that into what you’re willing to do. But yeah, when you complete your job and you get paid, you’ll pay the PayPal fee as well as the GitCommits’ platform fee.

JC: Got it. Okay. So there’s no entry cost. It’s just the only people paying is only after they’d been paid basically.

Drew: Right. Exactly. Yeah. There’s no payout until either work is done and you’re paying out just that work. Or if you’re a developer, you don’t pay anything until you’ve received money and then you’re just paying a fee out of that. Now over time, if you’re doing a lot of volume on the platform, we’ll structure fees differently and you’ll pay a lesser amount if you’re doing more volume.

JC: Sure. Some sort of tier system.

Drew: Yeah, exactly. So we’ll build all that out. But yeah, right now, like I said, we’re coming in about half of what the other guys are doing right now and doing it a little bit differently. So we think it’ll be a good tool.

JC: Let me ask you a personal question. I’m just curious, it’s going to be completely unrelated, but what did you want to be when you grew up, so to speak, when you were a kid? And then how did that, if it is the same as what you do now, great, but if not, how did it change? What was that point where you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to do this now instead”? What was your childhood dream versus that evolution to what you do now?

Drew: I was kind of lucky in that sense. I never really had to go through that what do I want to do stage? I mean, I guess when I was super young, 10 years old, I was, “I’m going to be an athlete.” I used to be pretty good, not so much anymore. But yeah, then I mean about, I guess it was maybe 12, 13 is when I started kind of getting into computers. From that time on, it was just, “I want to do something with computers.” I didn’t really know what, I just knew computers were my thing. Over time, turned into graphic design stuff and then just kind of fell more into coding. That’s what really grabbed me, just the ability to tell the computer what you want it to do and it just does exactly what you said and nothing more, nothing less. So that was just pretty fascinating to me. And dived down that rabbit hole and here we are today.

JC: You’re probably one of the few people I’ve interviewed or talked to where literally their childhood dream, it evolved into literally what you’re doing now, which is fantastic. Mine was not. Mine was kind of like that after college dream, and then I’m still doing that, but that’s challenging. That’s a big one.

Drew: Yeah, I was lucky.

JC: I am curious. What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given business-wise? As something to share with the audience, some words of wisdom that were passed to you over the years.

Drew: It’s kind of a funny answer, I guess, I’ll give here. Because unfortunately, I’m not doing a very good job of following that best piece of advice, which is, “Don’t grow too fast.” And I find myself doing that all the time. I get all these ideas and then I want to put a new team together and do this and I get overwhelmed with it sometimes. So I need to step back and follow that advice. That really is the best. I honestly can’t even remember who it was that told me that because it was a while ago now. It was kind of when I was first getting started with all this. But yeah, I just remember him saying, “It’s easy to want to do a whole lot of stuff, but take a step back. Don’t grow too fast. Get yourself going piece by piece.” I’ve been good at that with some things and I’m kind of falling out of it. I’m glad you asked that. You reminded me of that good piece of advice. I need to get back to that.

JC: Keep you on track

Drew: Yeah, exactly.

JC: Well, this has been awesome, man. Is there anything I haven’t asked you yet that you think would be a benefit to the listeners to hear? I mean, is there anything that you want to close with?

Drew: Just one more piece of functionality that I didn’t really bring up yet. On the other side of all this, I mentioned the bounties and I mentioned placing a value on your bounty. As a developer, we have an extension for offers that you can install. So if you’re on GitHub and you’re browsing all the issues on GitHub, and maybe it’s not even on GitCommits yet because that product owner doesn’t even know about GitCommits maybe, you can install the offer plugin and you can actually submit an offer. “Hey, I’m willing to do this issue for a hundred dollars,” or whatever the case may be. That we’ll introduce or send a message to that product owner and show them, “Hey, you’ve got a bouncy request here or a bounty offer of a hundred dollars.” So that’ll introduce it, and then you can counteroffer, counter and back and forth until you agree on a price. That’ll just be a tool for developers that they can use to find work even when GitCommits may not necessarily have a perfect issue there for them to start on.

JC: So they can just install this plugin or this extension on their browser. And even if the company or the plugin that they want to help out, isn’t part of it, it will still send them these messages regardless so that they could get it, right? Almost like introduces and prods the company that has the issues that like, “Hey, I’m a developer. I want to solve this for you for a certain amount of money.” And I don’t even need to have any kind of weird intro. Like your extension creates that communication between them automatically.

Drew: Yeah. Let’s say I have to GitCommits extension in my browser, I’m on GitHub. I find a ticket that, “Oh, I can do that.” So I might, say, make an offer. When I do that, it’ll just put a comment inside that issue notes, so the product owner will see that and it’ll have links out to GitCommits, et cetera. So that’ll kind of inform that product owner, “Oh, Hey, what is this GitCommit? I got a bounty. What is this?” So it’ll kind of teach them about it, and then also introduces them to that person that’s willing and ready to do that work for them. So then they can go ahead and either accept it or, again, counter back and forth until you agree on a price and then get going. Yeah, the idea there is that even if the GitCommits issue library isn’t necessarily full or if you’re not finding something there that you need, GitHub itself has thousands of issues out there. You can absolutely find something.

JC: What I like about that is there’s a virality component to what you just did there. What’s weird is usually things that are viral are created by the source. Whereas with this, it kind of sounds like the virality is in the hands of the users. Because if I’m a developer and I want to go help with this issue on this particular plugin company, but they’ve never even heard of GitCommits or this platform before, just by me having this extension and commenting on theirs, it’ll automatically not only show them and communicate with them that I’m willing to do this for a certain amount of money, but because it’s in the comments section, then everybody can see it. Right?

Drew: Yep. Absolutely. And also just-

JC: That’s absolutely brilliant. I mean like legitimately brilliant because I mean just again, tech tail wagging right now. I love that component because you’ve decentralized the viral component of it. Right? You allow even just that person using it automatically shows other people that it can be used and what it is. That sounds kind of like a really cool snowball effect you’d have going there.

Drew: Yeah. That’s exactly the idea. We want to get it in the hands of a lot of developers and get them making offers.

JC: Well, that’s awesome. Drew, listen, I want to thank you for being on the show. I interview a lot of people, but I got to tell you, I really like the really unique stuff. I don’t usually interview startups, but because it’s the future of BizTech and your idea is so unique and almost kind of that first to market concept, I couldn’t resist. So thank you for coming on the show. How can people listening reach you or the company, a website, email, LinkedIn, stuff like that? How can people listening get ahold of you if they need to?

Drew: Yeah. The easiest thing I would say, just go to GitCommits.com. G-I-T Commits, C-O-M-M-I-T-S.com. There are contact channels there. You can find all the social links and everything on the website. So that’s probably just the easiest way to go. Reach out directly through the contact there or through the social channels. And I’d love to answer any questions you have.

JC: Awesome. Well, listen, thanks again so much for being on the show. I look forward to having this air for everybody.

Drew: All right. Thanks a lot for having me. I really appreciate it.

infinityadminEpi 12: How Developers Can Make Money Fixing Issues – Drew Angell, Founder & CEO of GitCommits
BizTech-Ep11Graphics.png

Epi 11: 3 Ways to Increase Email Marketing Conversions – Melissa Sargeant, CMO of Litmus

infinityadmin January 20, 2021

Learn more about Litmus at: https://www.litmus.com/

Find Melissa Sargeant on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-sargeant-a133142/

JC: Well, welcome everybody to another installment of The Future of BizTech. I’m your host, JC Granger. And I have with me here, Melissa Sargent. She is the CMO of Litmus. Melissa, thank you so much for coming on the show. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your experience and your resume, so they have an idea of who’s speaking.

Melissa: Thank you very much. I’m really excited to be part of the podcast. As you mentioned, I am the CMO of Litmus. I’ve been here for just a little bit over a year. Prior to my tenure at Litmus, I was the CMO of SugarCRM. And before that, I was the CMO of ChannelAdvisor in the e-commerce space. Even before that, I worked at a company called Avalara as a VP of marketing there and spent the majority of my career at CA Technologies, formerly known as Computer Associates for about a decade in product marketing. And I actually started my journey in marketing nearly 30 years ago and started on the agency side, and moved in from the agency world to marketing communications to corporate communications to demand generation and eventually product marketing.

JC: That’s fantastic. I’m sure a lot of people listening have heard of SugarCRM and ChannelAdvisor. What was it like working with those companies in particular and what was it about working with them that catapulted you to where you’re at now?

Melissa: Yeah. ChannelAdvisor was a fantastic experience in that they’re in the e-commerce space. And one of the things that I was so excited about going there was I got to work with Amazon and Google and Facebook and eBay and all these really important platforms. So it really elevated my experience in working with these super big players on a partnership level to be able to advance the business. And then at Sugar, it was interesting because we competed against Salesforce. And one of my friends, when I was leaving ChannelAdvisor said to me, “Look, wrestling with Amazon every day isn’t enough for you, now you have to go and pick a fight with Salesforce?” And I said, I really didn’t think about it that way, but there maybe is something in that for me, that I liked the challenge of coming in and doing that.

Melissa: And I think that experience was really great for me at Sugar. And we also were a company that had been acquired by private equity, so it was my first experience in a private equity company. I’d either worked in publicly traded companies or companies that were bootstrapped or funded by VC. So to have that experience, and then we were also a very acquisitive company. So I got to participate in a number of acquisitions. And we were expanding our portfolio into things like marketing automation, which was really obviously exciting for me being a marketer. So I got just a fantastic experience in these high growth companies that’s incredibly valuable for me and my role at Litmus.

JC: That’s fantastic. So tell the audience a little bit about Litmus. Me personally, I’m an email marketer by trade. I’ve been doing digital marketing 20 years in emails, it’s all there really was back then. So I took a special liking to when I saw you come across my calendar for this, I was like, “Oh yeah, email stuff.” So tell the audience, I guess a little bit about Litmus. That 30,000 foot view, but then also, what are the biggest pain points and problems that Litmus solves for its clients?

Melissa: Yeah. When you think about how much noise is in the market today, people are bombarded with an average of 5,000 ads per day. So breaking through that noise is really, really challenging for companies to connect to their audiences, to connect to their customers and their prospects. At Litmus, we really help them put their most effective channel email first. And we do that by enabling them to collaborate more efficiently, optimize their workflows and really drive effectiveness throughout from start to finish for their email marketing program. And that helps them. When you’re doing email really, really well, your entire marketing mix goes really, really well. Because you can take those amazing insights from what you’re learning from email and apply it to optimize your entire channel mix. And so we do that by enabling them to effectively test their emails. So when you think about the challenge of sending a single email today, there are over 90 different combinations of clients and browsers, all these different options and devices that people read their emails on.

Melissa: Historically, you might’ve sent, okay, Joe, in the office. I’m going to send you this. Can you please look at this on your iPad? Can you look at this on your phone? Can you look at this and this client. It becomes a math problem to be able to solve for those problems for just a single email and test it. And know that when that email comes into the inbox, it’s going to reach the inbox, the person’s going to be able to read it effectively and get your message is nearly impossible. So we’ve automated all of that testing and previews parts so that they can know, by the time they hit send that it’s going to arrive in the inbox and it’s going to be of the highest quality possible.

JC: So it’s really, if I’m simplifying it then, Litmus is that last checkpoint before you cross the border, so to speak. So they’re making sure everything’s in order and everything’s ready to go. And then you can move forward so that you have the best experience. That it optimizes deliverability, optimizes, I’m sure, layouts and whatnot, like you were saying for different devices and different browsers and whatnot. Am I right on that?

Melissa: It’s actually optimizing the entire email workflow. So even before you run that testing, when you’re building your email, we have the ability to use visual code editors to more quickly build your emails. There’s a collaboration component where everyone in your organization … at the average organization, we do an annual state of email survey every year. It takes the average organization two weeks to produce a single email, and that’s because the committees of people that have to review them are getting larger and larger. With Litmus, you can build, collaborate and test your emails all in one place. So when that email’s ready to go, instead of having to create a PDF, send an email, send it to the 20 people that you need to have review it and give you feedback, they can all go into Litmus, look at the proof, make their comments, their feedback right there, and you can streamline that entire workflow.

JC: It’s a flipping tool. Awesome.

Melissa: Yeah, it’s absolutely. It’s a workflow-

JC: Collaborative.

Melissa: Yeah. Collaboration workflow optimization, drive efficiency, and then effectiveness, knowing that it’s going to get there. And then on top of that, once you hit send, we have powerful email analytics capabilities to tell you how that email is performing. Above and beyond what you’re traditionally used to seeing in terms of … we all know to look for open and click-through rates, but how much time did that person spend reading that email? What did they do after it? Were they viewing it in dark mode and was your email optimized for them to view it properly in dark mode? All of these insights are really, really helpful so that you can take them and use them to personalize, not just your next email campaign and make that even better, but actually take those insights and leverage them in your other marketing channels. What’s working well? If a message or an offer is working well in email, why wouldn’t it also work well in paid search?

JC: Okay. I could see that. And then now, to clarify too, are you guys also officially an email service provider? Does it send to or are you piggybacking onto whatever their platform is? Like Mailshake for example, piggybacks onto Gmail and Outlook, and this is its own dashboard and it plugs in. Is yours an actual email service provider and it has its own servers and IPS and it’s sending out, or is it piggybacking on other systems?

Melissa: Yeah. We are not an email service provider, so we partner with all of them. So Marketo, Eloqua. We basically, as you say, piggyback off of them. And Litmus allows you to sync automatically back and forth. So you can do your building, testing, collaboration, and Litmus sync that with your email service provider and then hit send from there.

JC: Okay, cool. I’m going to pivot a little bit here. I’m curious. I want to go back to you. What motivated you to join Litmus? I mean, you have an incredible resume, you’ve been through significant companies in the industry, why the change? Why go from SugarCRM, for example, to Litmus? What was it about the company and where they were going that really enticed you to join them?

Melissa: It was interesting because I wasn’t looking for a new gig. And when I was at Sugar, we were doing well and I was happy and they called and I thought, wow. Litmus called and I thought, well, this is really interesting because I’ve been doing this for a long time now and I’ve marketed all sorts of things. When I was at CA, I did networks and systems management, security management, project and portfolio management. I feel like I’ve done a range of things in the technology space, but this is the first time that I really get to market something that helps people in my job. And that was very, very exciting for me. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

Melissa: And Litmus had always been in my technology stack. I knew the company really, really well and how important it was for us. So it was nearly impossible for me to say no at that opportunity because I come to work every day with 180 other marketing geeks, and we talk about marketing all day long. And you just don’t get to do that at other technology companies. It’s a geek’s paradise, it’s a marketing geek’s paradise.

JC: Now with Litmus, when you joined, was Litmus already a big company? Were they smaller startup? Where was that entry point when you came in and then where are they now fast-forwarding to today?

Melissa: So I’ve been here a year and we’re about the same size in terms of the number of employees. The company is 15 years old and for a long time, we just basically sold things on the internet. So you would give us your credit card and a lot of companies still consume our services that way. About five years ago, we introduced … well, I guess it’s been three and a half, four years now, we introduced a direct sales organization. So we have a mid-market and enterprise sales team that goes through your more traditional B2B sales cycle. And again, for me as a marketer, it’s great because I get the best of both worlds. I get that e-commerce B2C type motion marketing programs that I get to run and the traditional B2B direct sales motion marketing programs that we run.

JC: And I’m curious, the first … this might be obvious. But other than let’s say email, obviously, what types of marketing are you guys currently doing at Litmus to promote Litmus? And I ask this because most of our listeners are really into B2B tech, but a lot of them are also listening because they might want to purchase this or whatnot, but maybe they haven’t heard of you before. So I’m just curious, other than email, which would be the obvious one for you guys, what else do you guys engage in and what have you found effective for promoting your system, your software?

Melissa: So we have a really balanced marketing mix. We are bought into all of the channels. So we have a combination of things that we do with paid search, paid social, SEO. We have a really strong content marketing machinery. Ultimately, content is the thing that fuels all of these different channels. We have a strong webinar program that’s widely participated in. We even have, like a lot of companies, we have a big annual event called Litmus Live and had big plans for it at the beginning of this year and had to do the online pivot that everybody else did. It worked out really, really well for us. Typically, when we do the in-person event, we get about 1500 people. And this year with the online format, we got over 5,000 people.

JC: Wow.

Melissa: So we were able to bring Litmus Live to a whole new group of an audience that we didn’t get to reach previously. So we have a very balanced mix, our demand machine is basically like a lot of other companies where we focus on the website is the centerpiece of that and trying to fuel everybody to go there and either start a trial, make an inquiry to talk to a salesperson, engage with our content, do their self qualification since we know that 60 to 70% of that qualification happens in the background before they even want to raise their hands. And to provide them with a wealth of success stories, blogs, really useful content that’s helpful to them in their jobs, regardless if they become a Litmus customer or not.

JC: I wanted to also then ask, with COVID going on obviously, how has that affected, not just Litmus as a company, but email marketing in general from your experience? I know what I’ve seen, but I’m curious, what have you seen as far as how email has either done better or worse or changed because of COVID right now?

Melissa: There’s definitely been an evolution this year. So at the beginning, and I think we all got these emails in our inboxes when companies were sending them out and using it as a communication vehicle, because it was the one way that they could touch their subscribers and their audiences to tell them what was going on with their business. And then I think a lot of companies took a beat because there was so much happening. We had social unrest that happened over the summer as well and everything with COVID. And people were really thoughtful in how they were messaging and how much they were messaging and really wanted to think through that a bit more. And I think now over the past few months, particularly in certain segments like e-commerce and things that have continued to thrive during this, do well during this period, we started to see certainly an uptick in the back half of the year in terms of not just the volume of email but the effort that’s going into, and to truly personalizing and driving those into a more targeted segmentation strategy.

Melissa: So historically, email has had this overall evolution where it was one too many, batch and blast style. Then we went to one-to-some and really now the trend is one-to-one and using it as a way to create those human-to-human connections with your subscribers and audience.

JC: I agree too. Like I said, I’ve been doing email for so long and what I’ve seen on the COVID side is I’ve seen that email got better and bigger as far as I saw, just because people were just stuck at their computers. And people who lost their jobs were now on their computers looking for jobs. But now if you’re blue-collar, you found yourself on your computer sending out resumes, which means you’re checking your email, which means email marketing had more of an audience before. So B2C really picked up on that aspect, as far as I saw. B2B took a hit in that March to June area. But after that, whoever was left standing knew they would be okay and then they went even bigger in to gobble up that market share. So I saw B2B pick up around June, July time. So that was my experience with that.

JC: But pivoting back to you again real quick here, what’s the best marketing, maybe email or whatever, what’s the best marketing advice you’ve ever been given before? Thinking back to all the people you’ve ever talked to, you’ve been doing this a while, what’s probably the best thing that you’ve heard that really just resonated and stuck with you through your career?

Melissa: I think it’s, “Run to the dumpster fire.” And if ever-

JC: I love that. I don’t know, I’m trying to get out of 2020 alive here, okay? I’m not trying to do another 2020, I’m trying to run away from this dumpster fire.

Melissa: And the reason I say that is, in every company that I’ve worked in, there’s always some program, some project that no one wants to touch. And it’s probably a longstanding problem that they’ve been trying to address. And my advice is to raise your hand and volunteer for that program. Because one, you’ll either make it better or you won’t. If you make it better, you’re a hero. If you don’t make it better, no one will blame you because it’s been a hot mess for a really long time.

JC: Yeah. They considered it impossible anyway.

Melissa: And you will stretch yourself in ways that you won’t do in other projects. And no one ever got better by doing things that are easy.

JC: That’s true.

Melissa: And so, run towards a dumpster fire, be the brave one who goes in and says, “I’ll take a run at this.”

JC: No, I agree with you. And I’ve done a lot in my life too. If you asked my parents, I’m pretty stubborn. I did everything the hard way, no matter what it was. I was like, “Oh, is that the easy way? Well, what about this over here?” I had an old boss of mine before I started my company, because I was doing this, because I was running towards these dumpster fires. And I remember one time, I accidentally basically did great. What everybody thought was impossible, just cracked the code, fixed the problem. And then they asked me to do more with it. I didn’t want to do it. I attacked it because I wanted to beat it, not because I wanted to own it.

Melissa: Right, right.

JC: The boss pulls me to his office and he goes, he says, “JC,” he says, “Be careful what you volunteer for. If you do a really good job, you just might be asked to do it again.”

Melissa: That’s right.

JC: And I had to. So the lesson learned both ways, which was funny. So obviously, as part of this podcast, the title being The Future of BizTech, I have to ask the main question here. So with Litmus specifically, what’s coming down the pipeline? How is Litmus going to affect change in the future for the industry? I mean, there’s a lot of email companies out there, we know this, you have a lot of competition. So what is coming up soon that’s going to put Litmus ahead of the game and how are they going to change the future of this BizTech?

Melissa: I can’t talk a lot about what’s on our product roadmap, but I can tell you, we’ve made some really strategic moves this year that are going to carry us through 2021 and we’ve got some pretty exciting things on tap there. The one area, and I think that it’s been … it’s probably one of the most challenging things within the marketing organization is, marketers are being asked to do more with less. A lot of people’s budgets were cut. We’re in budgeting season for companies that are on a calendar year. And trying to forecast what’s going to happen in 2021 is really challenging. So a lot of companies are forecasting very conservatively now until they see how things go in 2021. So this concept of doing more with less is going to continue. Because in marketing organizations, we know we’re the first ones to get our budgets cut and the last ones to get them increased when things get better. So-

JC: Which is ironic, given how money is made in a company. Chasing the tail.

Melissa: Yes. Yes. And so we’ve really been focusing on driving those efficiencies for the marketing organization so that they can get their emails out more quickly, they can collaborate more effectively, they can build them faster. And we’ve done that through our visual builder and our collaboration, our continued focus on improving and streamlining that workflow so that they can take that average time. It takes two weeks down to just a day or two to get an email built, approved and out the door. I think the other area that we’re focusing on is really this idea of marketing. It doesn’t end with send with your emails. And taking those insights that you get from email marketing and using them across your entire marketing mix to supercharge and get even greater ROI for the things that you’re doing, again, aligns really, really well with this, do more with less. The more insights that you can grab from all of your channels and leverage them, not just in that channel but across those different channels in a truly integrated way is really going to help you be more efficient, more effective and get better results.

JC: That’s great. And a question on top of that question with that in mind. Outside of Litmus, just the email marketing in general, where do you see email marketing in the next five years? I mean, things move so fast, technology is always outpacing sometimes the usability in some ways. Is there anything that you’ve been thinking about in five years, I swear … is going to happen. What would you say given your experience? Where do you see this going? What’s changing?

Melissa: I think the things that you’re going to see that are going to keep email marketing really, really relevant for the next five years are innovations around personalization. That’s something that as marketers, some people struggle just to get the first and last name correct, depending on the integrity of their data. But there’s going to be just a lot more evolution there in terms of, we know that subscribers and customers want us, they want more personalized experiences from us. They don’t want them to be too personalized so that they’re not creepy. But if you’re able to serve them content that’s highly relevant to things that they care about in a responsible way that they want to receive that information, you’re going to get better engagement.

Melissa: I think you’re going to see a lot of improvements and just a lot of focus on that from the email industry over the next five years. I also think things like AI are going to be very instrumental in doing that. Right now, it’s been companies that are using it in pockets but I think it’s going to become easier and more mainstream all with the goal of creating these personalized experiences that are personal, just not too personal.

JC: Sure. I’ve had this conversation with other guests about data and privacy laws, they only seem to be getting more strict.

Melissa: Yeah.

JC: So which would be a counterintuitive thing for personalization because to personalize, you need more data. But if we’re restricting data, I mean, now we’re almost at 20% of browsers that are now … people who are using the privacy version of their browsers and they’re not passing that information. So as marketers, we’re getting less and less information, we’re having more laws that are preventing data and data sharing. So how do you see the marketing industry or even email getting around that? How do you personalize more when you literally have less information slowly as you’re going?

Melissa: Right. And I think what all of these privacy laws are doing is really making us better marketers in this. We’re doing things in the way that we should have probably have been doing them all along. In that, to be able to personalize more, that means we need to ask for more information outright, for more first-party data or zero … some people even call it zero-party data from our subscribers, and let them truly opt-in to how they want us to communicate with them. And that way they know that we’re handling their information and in a responsible way, we’re only communicating to them things that they care about. And the things around AI and personalization are around insights that we’ve seen. That people who are interested in the same topics or same things that they’re interested in, they might also be interested in. So we’re really serving them up. It truly becomes a one-to-one human-to-human conversation. And maybe there’s fewer of them than there are today in mass as an organization, but they’re much more higher quality and we’re driving a personalized experience that’s a value to them.

JC: Well, I couldn’t agree more with that. So thank you so much for all that insight. Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that you think would benefit the audience to know about yourself or Litmus or the future of emails?

Melissa: I think it’s to think about your email program as more than just your email program. It’s your marketing program, and it can truly help everything that you’re doing across your channel mix. Don’t think about it in the total silo of email, or we need to get another email out on that. Think about it more broadly in how it can drive improvements across your entire mix and how you can use it in a more integrated faction to help elevate the rest of your mix.

JC: That’s great advice. So for anyone listening here … again, the audience is a lot more of the middle to top tier tech industry and whatnot. If somebody wanted to reach out to you personally with questions or for partnerships and whatnot, how would they reach you? What kind of information would you be able to give our audience here to talk to you?

Melissa: Sure. You can feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn at Melissa Sargent. I’m MH Sargent there, I’m also MH Sargent on Twitter. And then you can certainly reach out to us on the Litmus website at litmus.com. But if you want to reach me directly, I’m happy to connect with you on LinkedIn.

JC: Awesome. Well, listen, Melissa, thank you so much for being on this show. You gave a ton of great insights and I can’t wait for the audience to hear this.

Melissa: Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity.

infinityadminEpi 11: 3 Ways to Increase Email Marketing Conversions – Melissa Sargeant, CMO of Litmus
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Epi 10: Improve Your Company’s Workflow with Process Management – Keith Gillette, CEO of TaskTrain

infinityadmin January 13, 2021

Learn more about TaskTrain at: https://www.tasktrain.app/

Find Keith Gillette on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillette/

JC: Welcome, everyone, and thank you for listening to The Future of BizTech. I am your host, JC Granger, and then I have with me today Keith Gillette, the founder and CEO of TaskTrain. Keith, thank you so much for being on the show today. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself and TaskTrain, that 30,000-foot view.

Keith: Thanks so much for having me, JC. I appreciate you reaching out, and I’m really enthused to be here today. I’d now characterize myself as an emerging software entrepreneur. My background is in IT operations management. So, I started my career, as you can tell from the gray hair, a while ago, as a systems support specialist, a technician, and then went up as a network and systems administrator through the IT field, but quickly moved on to IT management and leadership, primarily in K-20 education, which is a continuing area of passion for me.

Keith: I had the honor of being elected to serve as the president of the Illinois Chief Technology Officers professional organization when I was living near Chicago, and I’ve headed several IT departments in various organizations, both as embedded director positions as well as in virtual and fractional CIO roles. So, my founding story for TaskTrain really comes from that background, being an embedded leader in a service organization, service departments, and the idea for TaskTrain, which I would characterize as a lightweight process management tool… I know. Sounds boring, but if you consider what a tool like Asana or Basecamp or Monday.com does for project management, TaskTrain tries to do for process management. So, with a project you’re trying to scaffold, a one-time, unique sequence of tasks that need to be done with a process, you’re trying to scaffold an ongoing sequence of tasks that need to be done repeatedly to support whatever value your service organization is delivering. And that’s where TaskTrain fits.

JC: And so, what kind of clients do you typically find that come to you that really have this need? Is it more like software clients or it’s big coding projects? Do you find that it’s HR specialists who are trying to onboard people? Who’s really using TaskTrain right now?

Keith: Right. Well, as I said, my background is in IT operations management, so that’s a key target market for us because things are very complicated in IT. We have a lot of recurring procedures, a lot of technical procedures that are very complicated to follow. And the experience that I had as a tech was that I would go in, and even if it’s something that I had done myself before, I would just not be able to remember all of the steps. But we’re moving into a situation right now where that same thing is true for many different service organizations. So, the HR example that you mentioned is another extremely common use case for the type of tool that TaskTrain is, that employee onboarding that you want to get right, those departing employee procedures, where you’ve got a sequence to follow, the paperwork to fill out for the benefits, the accounts that need to be deactivated. All of those things are exactly the type of use case that TaskTrain is really suited for.

JC: I interview a lot of software CEOs, and I find that the software that they develop has multiple features and things that they do. But I also find that only about, like, 20% or 30% of what it’s capable of is what people, their real pain points are, right? Nobody sells successfully all 20 features. There’s two or three really amazing features that people come in for, and the other features are bonus, basically. They’re like, “Oh wow, this is really convenient as well.” So, what is the biggest pain point, the biggest challenge, that your software seems to be solving for your demographic? I know it does a lot of things, but what do you find the feedback is where they’re like, “Oh, thank god you do this specifically, because we keep having that one problem”?

Keith: Well, that really varies from organization to organization, because the thing about TaskTrain is we’re a process management platform, right? So, what is your key process? What is your key process at Infinity Marketing? You have clients that you need to service. Those problems that you have in your ongoing operations for servicing those clients, that’s where your biggest pain point is. It’s going to be very different from my pain point, managing an IT department full of technicians, creating new accounts for users and deactivating accounts, setting up security profiles. It’s the actual business process that you’re involved in on a day-to-day basis, those are the problems that people have. If you’re that HR professional, it’s, “How do I make sure that everyone has the same onboarding experience? How do I make sure that all of the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed when we’re doing our human resources benefits consultations?” And really, it dives into the nitty-gritty of what people do on a day-to-day basis in their jobs.

JC: So, let’s take a step back here. What motivated you to start this company? I mean, you talked a bit about your history, but what was that point where you’re like, “Okay, I’ve got to go start this thing”? And I find a lot of people have frustration first, and then they realize that nobody’s solving it, so they’re going to go do it themselves. But was that how you started, or did you have this idea well before, and you just wanted to compete in the market? What made you want to start TaskTrain?

Keith: Well, this is very much a personal passion project for me. TaskTrain was a tool that I wished that I had when I was managing those IT departments that I mentioned at the beginning. So, I mentioned I came up as a systems administrator. I found that I was just too often burned by a lack of documentation. So, I became very diligent about documenting everything I did.

Keith: I carried that lesson with me. When I advanced to leadership, my motto became, “If it’s not documented, it’s not done.” And so, based on that experience, I decided that I wanted to turn that into a product, into TaskTrain, a SaaS application that integrates your standard operating procedures, that documentation that I would develop, into everyday workflow.

Keith: And now, the specific crystallizing event for me was a number of years ago, I listened to the audiobook of The Checklist Manifesto, a book by Harvard medical professor and surgeon Atul Gawande. And in that book, he talks about the tremendous benefit for his medical practice and for reducing medical errors by implementing something as simple as a checklist. So, when I heard Atul Gawande talking about the remarkable results from a humble checklist… He described them used in aviation, in construction, and then he made his own checklists in conjunction with a World Health Organization study that generated a 40% reduction in surgery deaths, a 36% reduction in major surgical complications. And I thought, well, this is really something that would be helpful in the day-to-day thing that I was encountering.

Keith: So, as a leader, I would ensure that my teams would develop that documentation, but even with the docs that we had in place and the competent and caring techs that I would hire, we still screwed up way more than we should have on entirely avoidable things. Right? If we had consistently followed the standard operating procedures, all of the steps were there, but did we? We had them, but they weren’t necessarily part of what we did on a day-to-day basis. They were on the internet or in a dusty binder. Right? And we even had a ticketing system, right? We had a case management system. All of the requests that we got in were logged, but there was still this gap between the standard operating procedures that we developed and the everyday management of workflow. And so, that’s really where TaskTrain came from, is marrying those two things.

JC: Yeah. What really intrigued me about what you do is it hit home a little bit for us, because one thing I was terrible at… We’re great at onboarding our own internal staff and whatnot. It was offboarding clients and staff that I ended up having these gaps. So, I realized, one time, after auditing our books, that we had been paying thousands of dollars over, like, a six-month period because we had forgotten to, for example, delete the email from that person, which charges per month on G Suite. A couple times, we’d actually forgotten to end a license for software that we were using for a client, even though they weren’t paying. And so, all this little leakage, right? All this financial leakage, all this… Even just having stuff out there in general, just not cleaning it up.

JC: And, yeah. It was costing us thousands of dollars. And so we finally were like, “Okay, we’ve got to get these processes in gear,” which we have. But what I find interesting about your software is that it seems like it allows or disallows the human factor to be as big a factor. Right? If you can get it set up first and you have that process, really, all you have to do is make sure that the person starts the process, because if they start it at all, well, then they’re going to go down these checklists and sub-checklist.

JC: And I was looking at the videos on your website and it looks like it has this broad thing where you could select… okay, well, let’s say offboarding a client or whatnot… and have sub-checklists, and you have to keep going through and then give some sort of notification. So, as long as the person starts the process at all, well, then the rest gets finished out. And that’s where we were having the problem. It wasn’t that we couldn’t start the process. We just had these little gaps where we were like, “Oh yeah, that’s right. We didn’t cancel that software subscription that we were using,” literally on behalf of that client. So, I mean, listen. All my lessons are learned the hard way, right?

Keith: Oh, yes. Yes.

JC: And so are yours.

Keith: We’ve all been here. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. So, that’s the pain point the TaskTrain would solve for you, is making sure that you’re not losing those thousands of dollars just because of something simple, something everyday, something simple. You just, you forget, because we live in a very complicated world.

JC: Because you’re fast. You’re moving fast. I mean, here’s the thing. Us losing the thousands of dollars, it was a drop in the bucket compared to our revenue, but that really wasn’t the point, because just as much as we are scalable as an agency, so is that problem. Right? So, that number would scale, also, had we not found it and fixed it. And I wish I had your system back then. I wouldn’t have had that problem to begin with.

JC: But let me ask you a question here. I’m an entrepreneur. You are as well. You take that risk, you roll the dice. You told me in the pre-show that you’re not venture-funded or anything like that. You’ve got some partners, but it’s not some huge, giant capital raise where you can just kind of throw money at the problem. So, I guess my question is, what was that turning point where you realized, “Okay, we’re out of the woods. We’re going to make it”? Right? Because you know what I’m talking about. That smile on your face right there, you know there’s this anxiety, this overwhelming anxiety, in that first stretch, because you don’t know. You’re like, “Are we going to make it or not?” Right? When was that turning point? Do you remember that moment when you realized, “We’re going to be okay. We’re hitting it. People are buying it”? Things like that?

Keith: Yeah. I’m still waiting for that. So, as an entrepreneur, do you have that moment? Because I’m very much looking forward to that, and-

JC: Well, now, I’ve been doing this 10 years. So, I mean, I had that moment, but I’ve also had my company 10 years. So, I hope I’ve had that moment by now.

Keith: So, you’re further along on the entrepreneurial path, and I look up to you as a role model for them in 10 years.

JC: You’re the only one. So, you’re the fan. You’re the fan. Got it.

Keith: I’m the fan. That’s great. That’s great. I mean, it is a nerve-racking thing to go out on your own and to try something new without a net, without other people’s money. And that gives me a lot of freedom, but it’s then all on me to make it happen. So, I’m just very pleased that my partners and I come to this point where we have built the product that I wanted to see, based on my experience, to solve this pain point that I think is very real for a lot of organizations of any size, but especially for small businesses who don’t have a big quality management department, big custom systems to manage their operations, that might catch these sorts of easy gaps in processes that we’ve been talking about, and getting to the point of a successful launch is what I’m most proud of right now. So, I’ll look forward to the point where I can look back and say, “We know we’ve made it beyond that point,” but that’s where we are in this moment.

JC: A lot of the audience is tech-based. Right? And so, there’s probably people listening who are in your same position. As a marketing guy, I always have to ask, how are you growing right now? What kind of advice can you give? Or even just, even if it’s a cautionary tale. How have you guys been growing internally? How have you been reaching out to your client base in a marketing or sales aspect?

Keith: Yeah. That’s been a real challenge for us because, as I’ve described, my background is not on the marketing side. I’m a tech nerd and have been all of my life. That’s my skill sets, and in this project, I’ve been forced to come up against my own limitations as someone with limited marketing skills, and then buried my head in the code to get the project to the point where it provides value to others.

Keith: So, I think that my experience there is going to be on the cautionary side, is that you’ve got to know your skill set and find a complementary skill set to match that. That’s something that I actually am looking for, again, right now. I had a great partner on the marketing side that got us a certain way. The environment’s changed. We’re obviously in the midst of huge societal change right now, with the pandemic and everything that’s going on, and he was no longer able to continue with us. So, this is a huge area for TaskTrain right now, is to figure out, where are we in this changing environment? The plans that he and I had laid for a launch, they’re gone now. Right? In terms of pursuing the initial markets that we had talked about, the strategies that we’d talked about, because of the pandemic. So, we’re still very much regrouping in that area.

JC: Yeah. And I talk to a lot of people where they’re in the same position. It’s really hard out there, but what I think is really great about your software and I think what will help you guys survive no matter what is the fact that because so many people are going remote, it’s forcing companies to make sure, because they’re not in house where they can just say, “Hey, did you do that? Did you do that?” Having these kinds of process things are going to be the make-or-break for companies who are transitioning to remote. So, I have a feeling you’re going to do just fine. It’s just a matter of finding that that special sauce or that equation, but what you guys offer has a massive demand right now, for sure.

JC: So, of course, the magical question of the hour for The Future of BizTech is, what is the future of TaskTrain? What’s coming down the pipeline? What is it that you see happening in the one-year, five-year mark for your industry? Tell me a little about that. Let’s look forward.

Keith: Looking forward toward the future is something I love. And in fact, I’m also, in addition to CEO of TaskTrain, is chief technology officer for an education startup that is focused solely on preparing students to co-create the future coming to us with all of the disruptive innovation that’s happening right now. But on the matter of the future of business technology, I don’t proclaim to have a crystal ball. I sort of subscribed to William Gibson, the science fiction author’s, adage that “the future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed yet.”

JC: Oh, I like that.

Keith: Yeah. You just need to look for the clues that are there in pockets right now. So, we can expect to see a lot more of the hints that are there right now. There’s a lot of specialized artificial intelligence that, of course, is huge in the hype cycle right now. 5G is rolling out. So, increasing mobile bandwidth is going to be huge. And in the coming year, of course, you have internet of things, autonomous vehicles on the horizon, and all kinds of automation coming in, advances beyond my field, in biotech and medtech, 3D printing, nanofabrication. All of these disruptive technologies are really currently reshaping the way we live and will continue to.

Keith: And the thing to remember, though, is that it’s going to take a long time for these things to really come together and to mature and for us to adapt to them, and all of this technological innovation and the associated business disruption that that technological innovation creates, what it does is it creates a lot of complexity for people and for organizations to deal with. And since not everything can be or will be automated, especially in the short term, that means that we are operating in an extraordinarily complicated and rapidly changing environment. And that means that people and organizations have to constantly adapt to a changing environment, which means on a business process level, complicated and frequently changing procedures.

Keith: And these are things that really tax our time, our attention, and our ability to execute effectively. And that’s, I think, where a tool like TaskTrain really helps. And that’s the path that I think we are looking to ride, is we have a platform right now that makes it super simple to, as a small business owner, as a service department of any size, for you to put your standard operating procedures and the associated training into a format that integrates it into everyday workflow.

Keith: And our internal motto is sort of, “Process to the people.” Disruptive technology is a democratizing force. And so, we’re riding the previous wave of that with mobile technology, with web technology, that makes it so easy for even small organizations to act like big organizations, right? In our presence on the web, in terms of marketing and advertising, and now, in terms of process management. You don’t have to have quality management staff. You don’t have to have a custom-built system for your operations. Whatever your bespoke processes, your procedures, are in-house, you can make those an automated part of your environment and bring in the consistent quality that only the big brands like Coke or Apple are well known for into whatever size operation that you have.

JC: Well, what do you guys have coming down the pipeline? Are there any sneak previews the audience gets about what’s coming next for TaskTrain?

Keith: Well, we’ve got our Zapier integration, which I think is a big part of the story in bringing together all of these disparate pieces of technology that so many companies are bringing in right now, and that integration platform, I think, is going to be key for many organizations. You’re finding the ubiquity of apps. There’s an app for this, there’s an app for that, and tying them all together so that you really can get your manual processes, which is something that TaskTrain excels at, tied into all of your other information systems in an automated way that makes it seamless. So, that’s something that we’re very excited about, is getting that integration, which is in the platform right now, but springing it out to the public side with our full launch this fall.

JC: Awesome. Well, listen, Keith, I really appreciate you being on the show. You’ve given a lot of great advice and tips for the audience. How can people reach you if they want to reach out to you directly, possibly, and also make sure, and TaskTrain itself, if they’re interested in the software?

Keith: Sure. So, you’ll find us at tasktrain.app, A-P-P, and you can just browse the website, click the try free button, sign up for an account, and we have an unlimited free platform. So, you’ve got the basic functionality available to try out for as long as you want. And if you want to reach out to me, I would love to hear from you, and we are right now looking for some service leaders who are committed to bringing good process management into their operations, and I can offer a process consultation with a Six Sigma-certified process analyst and some concierge onboarding onto the platform. You can contact me at Keith, K-E-I-T-H, at tasktrain.app.

JC: Awesome. Well, Keith, thanks again for being on the show. Wonderful to have you here, and I look forward to speaking with you as well soon.

Keith: Thanks so much, JC. I really appreciate it.Gi

infinityadminEpi 10: Improve Your Company’s Workflow with Process Management – Keith Gillette, CEO of TaskTrain
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Epi 9: Tips for Start-Ups Competing with The Industry’s Biggest Companies – Sneh Parmar, CEO of Lucky Labs

infinityadmin January 6, 2021

Learn more about Lucky Labs at: https://luckylabs.io/

Find Sneh Parmar on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/snehparmar/

JC: Well, welcome everybody to another episode of the Future of BizTech. I have here with me, the CEO of Lucky at luckylabs.io, Sneh Parmar. Sneh, thank you so much for being on the show. Tell everyone in the audience here a little bit about yourself and Lucky.

Sneh: Yeah, thanks so much, JC for having me. It’s a pleasure to meet everyone. I’ll tell you a little bit more about myself and the company. Yeah, so like JC said, my name is Sneh Parmar, I’m the CEO/co-founder of Lucky. We founded the company about a year and a half ago. We were working on it for a few more years before that, before we officially started full-time. I’m originally from Atlanta actually but I’m now living up in New York City right now through an accelerator program that we’re a part of. So basically I’m like co-residencies in both cities.

The company called Lucky, we basically, what we do is we help brands scale their supply chain infinitely using retailers as distribution networks. The way it would work is like as a consumer, you’d buy from a brand directly and the product would come to you from the closest location the product is available. So, depending on if they’re in retailers, then you can either go pick it up at any retailer near you or get it delivered in real-time. So, you can get it within a few hours or a day no matter where you’re buying it from. That’s a little bit about myself and the company, we’ll go from there.

JC: Well, that sounds very Amazon competitive.

Sneh: Mm-hmm (affirmative) and definitely it is, yeah, it’s good you mentioned that. So, one thing about Amazon which is super interesting is like, obviously Amazon is great. Everyone loves, they set the standard for two-day delivery, that’s always been their thing. But what’s interesting is a lot of brands now are actually moving away from Amazon because of the data side. Amazon doesn’t tell you what consumers are buying, what product. So, brands don’t have that data, they don’t control how the product is listed on the platform. And obviously, there’s a different model of pricing and fulfillment that Amazon takes care of.

So, what we’re doing is we’re moving that where now, the brands can actually control the whole purchasing experience because people are tending to go to more of the brand site to buy. So, they want to control the user experience, the user journey, all that. So, we’re letting them have that but also have the same model where now you can distribute it through these different channels which are the retail stores that you already sell through to have the same level of delivery speed that you would get through Amazon without having to use Amazon.

JC: That’s pretty incredible. I mean, how has that been received so far? I mean, how long have you been doing this? You said with-

Sneh: About a year and a half. So, it was like when we started, we went through some pivots until we found this specific model but I mean, it’s been interesting, it’s been a very interesting journey, I would say. I think when we first pivoted to this specific model where there were a lot of questions like, “Hey, how can this compete with the Amazons of the world, and bigger logistical companies out there and what are we doing differently?” I mean, I think what we realized was the way we were tackling it was from the brand side, consumer trend and behavior is going to buy directly from a brand.

And what’s interesting is all these DTC e-comm brands are starting up because in a shop you’ll find everything. They’re amazing, it’s like start-up e-commerce was aligned but there’s a lot of infrastructures that are so involved that they don’t have control over because they haven’t been there for years, they just started out. But the retailers actually have all that infrastructure in place. They have the distributions taken care of, they know the logistics, all that.

So, what we’re doing is we’re marrying both sides, we’re marrying this new generation of e-commerce brands with the old generation of retail stores and retail e-commerce sites to create an e-commerce system where all incentives are aligned. And it was interesting before Covid, it was actually very hard to convince these retailers to test out these new revenue channels and models. But ever since that, because of the new dynamic that countries in the world is in I would say, there’s been more interest and now we’re getting more traction because of that, because now we’re starting to see there are new innovations coming to play. Businesses, both e-commerce brands and retailers are looking for different ways to differentiate themselves from their customers but also find strategic advantages to keep them growing.

JC: That’s incredible. Well, what motivated you to start this company? I mean, you said that you kind of went through some pivots before but what day did you go, “You know what? We’ve got to start this, we’ve got to help out retailers,” I mean, what was that moment and what kind of motivated you along that path?

Sneh: Yeah. So, I mean, before this, we were always working with brands and that was always interesting to me, it just comes like growing up-

JC: What, retail brands, mostly?

Sneh: So, mostly e-commerce brands.

JC: E-commerce brands.

Sneh: DTC e-commerce actually. Those are usually the core of our platform. They are the customers, they are the ones that we would find a lot of value too. But I mean, as just because I grew up in this era, I grew up in an era where e-commerce is booming, it’s going extremely quick every single day and retailers are starting to pick that up. You saw these legacy retailers that never really put a focus on an e-commerce channel. Now, putting more emphasis like e-commerce channels than the physical stores. And then, with Covid and everything that had happened, we just saw this massive, massive transition of everyone just going virtual-only or online only.

And there’s all this retail structure that basically just shut down for time being and we’re starting to see all of that open back up now. But for a period of time, it was nothing, you couldn’t do anything about it. You’re stuck paying rent every month, that’s about it. So, we realized there’s this great asset out there which is these retail infrastructures that exist, that aren’t being leveraged to their almost capacity. And it was really interesting because we realized outside of just being a retail store where consumers can go in and purchase products, which I don’t think is ever going to go away, I think retail will always exist, it’ll just change from the way we have known about it for the past few decades.

And realizing, “Hey, this is a great asset. It provides a great logistical opportunity and also it’s close to consumers and brands sell wholesale eventually.” All these e-commerce brands, DTC, direct to consumer brands that are out there, once they get to a certain stage, you see them opening up their own stores, you see them distribute it across different retailers, it’s just a natural way to continue scaling. And we realized like, “Wait, we can do that at a much earlier stage. We don’t have to wait until an e-commerce brand that was out there for over five, 10 plus years doing billings in all the revenue and then eventually get to retail. We can help small emerging brands get into retail stores and then distribute it exactly from those retail stores while selling on a shelf.”

So now, it’s leveraging both the online channel which is consistently growing and helping these retailers generate foot traffic or do fulfillment from the stores and the retailers are benefiting because they now get customers that they never would have access to prior using the brands’ physical or digital touchpoints.

JC: Okay. And then, what was that turning point where you guys really started to take off? Because it’s hard starting any kind of SaaS or anything like that, a software thing, but at what point was it like, “Crap only two people care,” and all of a sudden like, “Oh crap, a whole bunch of people care.”

Sneh: Yeah, it was super interesting. I mean, as a super early-stage startup, we were just digging through our network trying to find the first few retailers of brands that will trust us, “Okay, cool. We’ll give this a shot. We trust you guys, you convinced us, we’ll give it a shot, we’ll give you a pilot.” So, we were able to sign up a few pilots. And then, once we were able to showcase value there and then what we started doing is it’s all about repetition, once you start understanding the pain points of retailers and brands, you understand a better way to storytell what you’re doing.

And I think that’s what really it comes down to. I think there’s a lot of great products out there, a lot of good B2B SaaS products out there that just don’t storytell well. So, they might solve a problem that your customer will be having but it’s probably not articulated in a way where the customer knows what problem you’re solving and that becomes a really big problem. So for us, I think we realized exactly how to articulate it to our core customers in a way where they understand, “Okay, this is the problem you’re solving. Okay, this is a large enough problem that we need to solve immediately.”

So, we were able to storytell much better over time with repetition. And once we started getting into a few brands, retailers, they started introducing us to their connections. And it was a huge network effect from there where we now just started scaling over time. And at that point, we realized, “Okay, cool.” The minute we noticed a retail brand that we worked with introduced us to another retailer brand that they knew we’re like, “Okay, cool. We have something there.” Because at that point, they’re putting their name on the line to introduce you to someone. It’s like when you make an attraction for someone that you’re like, “I trust this person enough to add value to both this person and then vice-versa.”

So, the fact that the retailers would rather want to do that, validate us and what we were doing, we’re just like, “Okay, cool. They trust us enough now,” and we’ve had enough of an impact for them, they want us to either scale internally with their own platforms or they’re introducing us to their friends that run other brands and retailers that they’re interested in using our platform technology.

JC: That’s amazing, the audience is a lot of tech people as well and some of them might have their own startup SaaS companies or whatnot. So, what I have to ask is, what kind of things are you doing for your own growth that you can advise people who are maybe just starting theirs up? So for example, what kind things are you doing for marketing or sales or things like that to really expand?

Sneh: Yeah. So, I think you do different things at different phases. So very early on, I think the only thing you should do and I think as a founder and specifically as a CEO, you should be very, very consumer-centric, customer-centric. You should focus everything you do to make sure your understanding of why your customers are using you versus a competitor, what interests them to buy your product and why do they continue using you after a feed pilot or beta? And then, continue building around them.

Because I think at the earliest days, that’s the only feedback you have. Up until then, everything is your own mind and you just have an idea like, this makes sense to you but does it actually make sense to that customer, will they actually hate this? Is it a big enough problem for them? They’re like, “I’ll pay you X amount of dollars per month, per year, whatever it may be to use your technology.” And I think at that point, I think you do things that don’t scale.

So, one of the biggest things I learned and I wish I’d learned this earlier was in the beginning, don’t do things at scale, you don’t need to do that. You don’t need to go out and create an email campaign list for over thousands of brands and companies and customers that you could think of and start creating drip campaigns and getting salespeople on it to generate a lead list, stuff like that, you don’t need to do that. It’s a waste of money, it’s a waste of time in the beginning.

In the beginning, you have to do things that don’t scale. Literally, go on Twitter and scram, DM your customers, DM the people, LinkedIn messages, whatever you have to do, stay a persistent bother them if you need until they say no but keep bothering them until they respond. And you’d get your first two, five, 10 customers that way. And it’s not going to scale, you know you can’t scale it but it’s the best way to get the early adopters. And then from there, they’ll help you move forward.

And then, now from a growth perspective, we’re at a point where now we’re scaling email campaign lists. We know the exact customer demographic, we know exactly how much revenue our customers make, what niche they’re in, what vertical they’re in, what stage of their growth they’re in that we know we can target them the best out of the highest likelihood of converting them into a customer. So now, we’re doing things at scale and I think the biggest thing that we’ve done is formed channel partnerships. So, we formed channel partnerships with some of the best largest marketing agencies out there to funnel brands to us and some of the most well-reputed retail associations to get retailers to get direct interactions from retailers.

JC: Well, that’s a good part, yeah, those partnerships can be big.

Sneh: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And especially as a young company, when you’re raising capital, have limited amount of capital, it’s like you don’t have unlimited capital to just spend everywhere. So because of that, you have to find ways where you can grow where it doesn’t start extremely costly for you as a company. You don’t want to go hire a full sales team, you want to do channel partnerships where yeah, you might blow up some of the revenue in the beginning but it’s much better because you know you’ll get a direct flow of businesses and customers and it’s a great way to scale in the beginning.

JC: So, how many retail or brands do you have on now and then how many do you think you’ll have on in 12 months? I think we had talked about that a little bit in the pre-show.

Sneh: Yeah. I know we were talking about that. So right now, we have 25 brands that are live, we have 65 in the pipeline but we’re adding more in our pipeline every week as we get better and better at our marketing email campaigns, et cetera. From the retail side, we have two retailers on board right now but based on I mean, they’re national, both of them are national, but they’re regionally launched right now. And then, we have another three in the pipeline.

12 months from now we’re hoping to, I mean, I would say we have a pretty aggressive growth strategy. Brands for us are much easier to onboard because we’re adding a direct value to them. So, we’re hoping to have about 750 to 1000 brands in a year, I would say that are using our technology. And then from the retail side, we are hoping for around 10 to 25 major retailers that we could work with.

JC: That’s amazing. I’m going to just do a personal question here. What was the best piece of business advice you ever got that you could share with the audience, something you learned the hard way?

Sneh: Yeah. I know. I think the best advice, I think for me at different phases of my journey and building a company, there are different pieces of advice that really stuck with me. One that I can think of right now, from the top of my head is to take all the advice you get with a grain of salt. And the reason being is, I’ll tell you, there are people we have on our advisory team, there are people that we know that are mentors of ours that are way more experienced than us, that have way more expertise than us for sure in the industry. But the way I look at it is from a founder’s perspective and what you’re building. No one has built a company that you’re building with the same circumstances that you’re going through at that time.

So, everyone has great advice. No one’s not want to give you advice, the good people out there, like our mentors, they’re going to want to help you of course, 100%. But I think at the end of the day, it’s up to your decision I’m like, “Hey, what’s the best decision to make?” Because one thing that happens, you talk to enough people, they’re going to give you conflicting advice. Some people would say, “Take road A,” some people would say, “Take road B,” but you as the founder have to decide which one to take based on the circumstances that you’re in, your expertise, what you know from your understanding the market and go with that like a gut feeling.

So, we take all of our advice very seriously and then we boil it down to saying, “Okay, what can we do now?” And then do that. And the advice that we can say like, “This is great but we’ll have to push it back to a time when we can actually utilize that or actually execute on it because we can’t right now, we don’t have the bandwidth to do that.”

JC: Well, that’s a good point. I mean, again like you said, everyone’s advice comes from some sort of experience but it’s not the same circumstances, it’s not the same company, it’s not the same goals. So, you got to kind of figure out where that advice fits into your plan. And sometimes that creates a conflict because let’s say, you didn’t take the advice exactly the way they said it and then say something didn’t work out like, “Oh see, I told you so,” and it’s like, “Okay well, yeah, Monday morning quarterback,” you make the best decision with the information you have at the time.

And sometimes, if you’re an entrepreneur, you got to roll the dice, not everything is going to work out. But you’re looking for that one in 10 risk that pays off and then everything else is paid for kind of thing.

Sneh: Yeah. And the way I look at it is, as you’re first-time founders, I think everything is calculated risks, everything you do, there’s no guarantee in anything. As a first-time founder, you can never be 100% certain something’s going to work. So, it was always like you have to take the best guess or calculated risk that you can, you know it like this has the most likelihood of succeeding. And if you mess up, that’s fine. I mean, everyone makes mistakes. Our team, we have a rule that we’re like, “We don’t care if you make a mistake, we encourage that because it actually means you’re trying new things. Otherwise, you’d be doing the same thing over and over again, you’re not growing or it’s not building substantial growth. Just don’t make the same mistake twice, just learn from them.”

So it’s like, “Yeah okay, I didn’t think that advice the first time, maybe I messed up and lost a week of time. Okay. Well now, okay let’s move, let’s go, let’s do it the way you think is right, let’s see if that works.” That way like, “You know Eric, I learned something and I just move on and keep going.” I think that’s the biggest thing and the persistence, I’ve seen a lot of companies quit because they didn’t see things work the first time around or the second time around. But it’s just every time you fall or every time something doesn’t go right, just get back up and try it in a different way.

JC: That is great advice. I want to go back real quick though, I want to go back from the point of view of the brand or the retailer. Walk me through from their point of view of what they were doing, how their system worked yesterday and then today, when they sign onto your service, for example, how do things change? How does their life get better? Yesterday, this is what they were doing and then after they got our system in flux, now this is what it looks like.

Sneh: Yep. So let’s see, I’ll start with today as what their system looks like now. Right now, as a consumer, you have two options of buying products from and you can go to the e-comm brands e-commerce site or you can go to the retailer store or the retailer’s e-commerce site. So, they’re both competing for the same customer which is fine but it causes a conflict of interest, there are no incentives that are aligned and the customer that day loses because they don’t have the best experience. What we’re doing is we’re changing the model where now, if you buy it and we’re working with the brands directly because consumer trend is pushing to buying directly from brands like e-commerce brands because that’s where you can be part of the consumer journey and you can understand the story and people want to feel part of the story now.

JC: Yeah, they want to buy directly from Nike, not a retailer that sells Nike.

Sneh: Lots are realizing, “Oh, they’re sustainable, I want to buy from them because they make me feel like I’m a sustainable consumer,” it makes you feel good. So, the way people were doing that is that you’d buy and all that, you’d go to the checkout process, you tell them your address and then you’d say, standard delivery or express delivery, it’d take about a week to come, week and a half because it’d be coming from a few States away.

What we’re doing is different, it’s like you as a consumer is so good at branding a website, you still buy directly from them. When you enter your address in, now when the shipping options pop up, it shows you, “Hey, do you want to pick it up from X store near you which is five blocks away or do you want to get it delivered within a few hours or a day next door?” And you just pick whichever option you want. And once the order occurs, because we have an integration with the brands and we have with the retailers, the order gets routed directly to the retailer’s store that’s closest to the consumer that has that product with.

JC: Yeah, so it comes with this little distribution, jump-off points basically.

Sneh: Exactly. So then, what the retailer does, it goes to their automated system. They basically put it on a shelf where you can pick it up or say like, “Here, you already paid for it, come to pick it up?” Or it’s like, “Alright cool, we’ll deliver it,” and they’ll deliver it within a few hours or a day max.

JC: But doesn’t a brand make less money in that sense? The main brand, when they make a little less because the retailer is the one that’s getting that, how does that work? So for example-

Sneh: Yeah, I understand what you’re saying, this is really interesting. So, this is why we let the brands let you buy directly from their online channel because it means their margins are much higher and you understand that. Because the action occurs on the brand’s site where they make the higher margins. And what occurs is when their retail fulfills it, they obviously let’s say, Bob got wholesale for this price. They buy let’s say 100 units per se. The brand sells 10, the retailer fulfills 10. So now, they have 90 products.

The retailer doesn’t make money off the product, they make money off the upsells of the consumer because they cannot upsell that consumer other products whether they come in-store or it’s getting delivered and then make incremental revenue in the fulfillment of the actual product because it’s actually cheaper for the brand so they make some money. But now at the end of the month or whenever the regular schedule is, the brand actually gets re-fulfilled by the brand, however many products that the brand sold off their site. So, the retailer still has that 100 units that they can sell that they bought wholesale so there’s something…

JC: That’s what I was looking for.

Sneh: To before. Yeah.

JC: Got it. Yeah. So, if you gave me 100 of your Nike boxes to sell but then someone used your system, for example, and they bought 20, you as my supplier would give me another 20 to replace this at 20, so this way I’m not out anything.

Sneh: And I got the people to come in store if they come to pick up.

JC: Exactly.

Sneh: And if they don’t, if I ship it to them, I can insert coupons or something like that.

JC: Yeah, upsell it.

Sneh: And you always, when you get to the retailer, obviously have an email confirmation if they’re delivering it. You can be like, “Hey, we’re bringing you these shoes. Do you want these socks with it or do you want these other purchases or t-shirts?”

JC: Yeah, that’s cool. See, that’s where all sides win. I was trying to figure out what the benefit was, but that makes total sense. I love that. Okay. So, again, in the spirit of the name of the podcast, The Future of BizTech, where do you see the technology you’re implementing? How do you see it affecting the retail and the brand industry in the next five to 10 years? If you do that kind of thought experiment, where could this really go?

Sneh: Yeah. And so, that’s one of the things I think we’re most excited about. And so, the investors that we’re talking to, the investors that invested in us, it’s like the future of commerce ’til now everything was done the same, that retail existed just the way it did for decades, e-commerce is growing but I mean, then it’s still just e-commerce, you just buy from an online store. There isn’t really much deep change there. There’s always been this thing by omnichannel, you can buy online or physically, it doesn’t really matter, it’s the same experience. We don’t think it really existed until now. What we’re trying to build as a true omnichannel commerce system, ecosystem, where we believe that the retail stores will in the future become stores where you can test products out like in-store experiences and distribution centers and the online solutions where you’ll buy products from.

I mean, you’ll be able to pick it up instantly anywhere near you. So, you’ll be able to, our future is like you buy online, literally let’s say you’re walking back from your office, you can just pick it up at any store near you that has a pod and you’ll know exactly which one to go to that’s closest to you. That’d be like the end goal for us, make the solution so much better where now, brands are so much closer to their customers and let customers know that. Because before, not even the brands had any insight, they didn’t have a 360-degree insight to where all the products were in the retail stores, how much was left and we’re providing all that data.

And the brands have that data now, they could push on to the consumer, which is much more valuable because now as a consumer, you can make an educated decision as like, “Oh, I can get this product within two hours. Let me buy this now,” or “Wait look, I think I’ll pick this up, that’s more sustainable. I’m saving the environment if I go pick it up in-store because I actually know that it’s available in store now.” So, that’s the future of commerce that we see, is being able to buy anywhere online but getting it delivered from the closest location to product is in real-time.

JC: That’s really cool. And as a consumer, obviously that’s a big deal because now, and here’s the thing too, what I think is big. Regardless of which side of this debate you fall on, there are concerns of one company having too much power with retail and Amazon being such a big company and they’re always advancing and trying to make things faster and better for the consumers, obviously. But to give those mom and pops, to give those smaller businesses a shot at competing, it sounds like your software helps them get there, helps them compete with the speed of delivery, it helps work out the relationship between them and the main brand that they’re reselling or whatnot, which is cool for the retailer side.
And then, the brand obviously benefits as well because Amazon takes a big chunk and they don’t give you the insights and there’s a good chance they’ll copy your product.

JC: That’s another one. Again, I’m not speaking bad of Amazon, that’s just the nature of what it is. They’ve just advanced so fast that it’s left brands and retailers scrambling to catch up and what I think is really cool about your software and your system is that it allows those brands and retailers to work together to kind of help balance those scales a little bit. And the consumer doesn’t lose out at all because a consumer can still get it fast and they can have a better buyer’s journey if they want as well. So, I commend you. I think what you’re doing is awesome.

When I saw this, when it came across my plate I was like, “Got to get this guy on the show. I love where this is going and I see the future of that.” And I think my opinion as part of the future of this is that it’ll help again, balance those scales, it’ll help retailers compete with the juggernaut of Amazon and it keeps everybody invested in it, it keeps everybody creating more innovation and whatnot. And if anything gets too one-sided, well then people would just kind of get lazy. You know what I mean? And then, the consumer suffers.

Sneh: They’ll quit. And that’s really our core, we always thought about it from the consumer end. It’s like, “How do we make it the best experience for the consumer?” Because at the end of the day, the brands are our customers and initially, that’s who we work with from the beginning. And we realized like if you go to any brand website right now like the e-commerce site, it’ll always be like, “Hey, there’s a delay right now because we don’t have the shipping structure,” because everyone’s doing so much online shopping, they just can’t fulfill it.

JC: But it’s forcing people to get innovative with infrastructure, for shipping for later now too.

Sneh: Exactly, exactly. And I guess, that’s always been super interesting for us. And as a brand, the way we thought about it is like, if a customer’s on your site or trying to buy your product, all you should care about is that they buy your product. And you should make it as easy as possible for a consumer to buy it if they’re interested. And the more difficult layers you add, the less likely they’re going to buy and everyone knows that. So, we try to make them pay if they’re on your brand’s website, they’ll know instantly when they’re checking out like, “Hey, you can buy this in real-time a few blocks away from you.” And they’ll be like, “Oh, that’s awesome, I’ll buy it right now and I just pick it up and test it out. And if I don’t like it, I can return it right there and then.”

JC: Well, and if they don’t want to go out of their house, it’s so close that it would get done the next day anyway so it doesn’t even matter or even same day. I think what’s cool is your system allows the possibility of same-day delivery because it’s already so close anyway, that’s where that could be. And right now, you have this infrastructure of contractors, of driver contractors. So, there’s already people available where someone would probably …

The next step in the evolution is probably some company coming up with this independent driver delivery. Again, we have DoorDash, there are companies that do that but I feel like somebody might make a company that only delivers retail stuff that your system is helping to supply in these local areas. Right. I feel like there’s a gap there that someone would end up filling when your stuff, when your system really takes hold of the market. I think it’s really cool. Is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you think would be a benefit to the audience to hear about either yourself or the company or where it’s going?

Sneh: Yeah. I mean, I’m trying to think. I mean, we basically discussed the company, the future, where we think we’re going to be going. And I mean, I think for us it’s getting more brands, retailers on board and sailing up the market. I think for me, I think I didn’t explain this in the beginning but my background is in consumer purchasing behavior so I spent a few years at Thinktank really learning about when, where, how and why people buy specific products. And that’s really the idea for the interest in this space came from commerce and especially with e-commerce blowing up, retail changing and all that.

So, that’s really where I started learning about like, “Oh, this could actually work, this makes sense because it’s how commerce is going to evolve.” And I think at the end of the day, everything boils down to just the customer experience, what they feel like and how they buy and does it make sense for them? So, that’s really where the Genesis of idea and the drive behind the product comes from because we believe that it can truly help people at the end of the day, have a better experience and by a result of helping the end consumer buy more products or how that better experience, the brands win. And because the brands win, the retailers win.

So, the way I look at it is it’s such a cyclical cycle where each part of the cycle helps each other continue to grow. And that’s really what we want to see. We don’t think retail, I always say like, we’re bullish on the retail, the chain of future retail changing obviously, but not going away entirely. I don’t think it will ever go away. I think there’ll always be retail that exists. So, we want to be there to help and want to help brands as well because they don’t have the infrastructure in place. And that the consumers want a better experience at the end of the day.

So, you want to help all three segments of the industry that we’re working with, enable a much better experience overall and work congruently where they both, by working with one part of the network, it actually incentivize and helps the other parts of the network, which is really cool.

JC: That’s amazing. Well, listen, I’m glad you were on the show here, this has been a fantastic interview. I learned a lot, I think the audience learned a lot. How can people reach you, reach out to you if they’re interested in buying?

Sneh: Yeah. I mean, yeah definitely you want to learn more, just chat or I’m always happy to have conversations. Feel free to email me at sneh@luckylabs.io and I mean, that’s probably the best way you can reach me, to get in touch with me.

JC: Awesome. Well listen, thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate it and I hope to talk to you soon myself again.

Sneh: Yeah, likewise, JC. Thanks so much for your time and letting us be on your podcast and show. It was great speaking to your guests and to everyone. I looking forward to talking to you guys more.

JC: Awesome. Thanks a lot of Sneh.

Sneh: Awesome, thank you guys. Have a good rest of your day. Bye.

infinityadminEpi 9: Tips for Start-Ups Competing with The Industry’s Biggest Companies – Sneh Parmar, CEO of Lucky Labs
FutureofBizTech-Epi8-ReBrand.png

Epi 8: Why Data Storage Matters for Your Business – Dany Bouchedid, CEO of COLOTRAQ

infinityadmin December 30, 2020

Learn more about COLOTRAQ at: https://www.colotraq.com/

Find Dany Bouchedid on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danybouchedid/

JC: Welcome to another edition of the Future Of BizTech. I’m your host JC Granger and I have with me here, Dany Bouchedid, the CEO of COLOTRAQ. Well Dany, thank you so much for coming on the show. Why don’t you introduce yourself a little bit and tell the listeners who you are and about COLOTRAQ.

Dany: Great. Thanks for having me on JC. COLOTRAQ is a 21-year-old company that is a full service broker of data center infrastructure services so that includes colocation both wholesale and retail managed services and any kind of related services like network services or connectivity. We recently added cyber security a couple years ago to our offering as well. And we launched about five years ago, a SaaS platform, cloud-based software called DCITRAQ and that basically allows businesses to go and build and source all of these products and services and build a really robust RFP from end to end and source all of these products and services directly from our network of over 400 vendors worldwide.

JC: See, that’s awesome. Now, obviously you own COLOTRAQ and you guys have great services for your clients there, but I’m really interested in this DCITRAQ because we really love to interview CEOs of SaaS companies specifically. Can you go a little more into that? Tell us, what motivated you to start that? What kind of problems does it solve for companies that are having right now? And what kind of price point is it for people listening to know if they can afford to utilize this? Give us the rundown on DCITRAQ.

Dany: Sure. Honestly, it started as a way for us to redo our own back office so that our staff could easily build RFPs, really robust RFQs and RFPs on behalf of clients and be able to register those RFPs and be able to compare side by side all the different vendors and all their offerings and then cross reference that against the customer requirements that are built into the RFP to be able to come up with a short list of potential buyers that match those requirements and be able to then manage that whole deal all the way through to close. And then we got the idea, hey, this would be pretty powerful if we put this in the hands of the clients, of the end users and their agents. We have an entire network of sub-agents that also use the software on behalf of their clients so it’s pretty scalable.

Dany: We built it on restful API technology so it’s very interoperable. You can plug it into your existing CRMs, whether it’s Salesforce or HubSpot or we can customize it. We’ve private labeled it for several of our agents as well. We can private label it, stick your logo on it and make it your back office. It’s robust and there’s nothing else like it. We had the vendor relationships already contractually in place over 400, like I said, worldwide, but why not try to automate as much of that sourcing and procurement process for us as well as for the clients directly?

JC: What kind of industries use this more than anything? And what size companies within those industries are typically the ones who are using this kind of for DCITRAQ?

Dany: Well the beauty of the line of work that we’re in is in terms of where the demand comes from for data center or cloud, 200 of the 400 vendors that we have signed up, also offer cloud-based infrastructure as a service. It’s really any business from any vertical, especially right now in this post pandemic world that we’re in, all these businesses that didn’t really think about virtualization before, they’re now thinking about it. Digital transformation, used to be a nice have, something to talk about. Now it becomes mission critical and essential. We’re seeing a lot of activity from every vertical. You can imagine everybody needs to host something in a data center or co-locate something or managed hosting or in the cloud – everything, not just your website, your enterprise portals, your own SaaS platforms for your company’s private SaaS platforms, they’re hosted.

Dany: The public SaaS platforms, they’re hosted. You all realize, even Salesforce and HubSpot, they’re taking up colocation, that’s how they’re offering that SaaS. That software has to reside on physical servers somewhere in the data center so we’re in the world where the rubber meets the road. I’ve said this often and it’s really just the whole ocean of technology is going to raise the demand for data center infrastructure services and has been.

JC: Well, it sounds like a pretty incredible resource. What kind of barrier is there to entry though for DCITRAQ? What kind of price point does it have? Is it just for small businesses be able to use? Is it for big businesses? Is it a $1,000 a month? Is it $5?

Dany: Sitting down, this is the part that most people are like, “What?” It’s actually completely free to use.

JC: Oh, really?

Dany: Yes. Because the way the revenue model works for us is you can go ahead and search and compare side by side all these vendors, 400 plats worldwide, look at their capabilities, download from the knowledge base, the built in knowledge base, any of the white papers, case studies, all the marketing collateral you can imagine is all built in there. Integrated CRM. You can gather all that, build your RFP and register it with all the vendors that make sense, then match your requirements. And once you decide to choose and contract with one of the vendors you found through us, through DCITRAQ, we would get commissions from the winning vendor from the sale side. Really it’s completely free from the buy side.

JC: Your vested interest isn’t in any particular vendor, you just want to provide the resource and they will reward you with saying, “Hey, thanks for bringing us a client. Here’s a percentage,” or whatnot.

Dany: You hit that on the head. We didn’t even rehearse that. That’s perfect. You hit that on the head. We are vendor agnostic, truly vendor agnostic. We’re neutral in the way we do this because we get paid a success fee regardless once you contract with a vendor. We try to take a customer centric approach. All the resources, all these tools is to make the customer experience as dynamic and as comprehensive as possible so that they come and use it and see value in using it. But it will dramatically change the way you source and procure data center infrastructure services. There’s no doubt about it.

JC: Well, and what industries do you see typically using this? For example, I would imagine software companies obviously need to have this kind of space. SaaS companies and whatnot. Is there any type of industry that isn’t obvious that would be using this? We know government agencies will probably use them, but other than again, other than government and let’s say SaaS, who else is using on a pretty large scale anyway, an actual real need to their business who really has to find these colocation? I guess beyond putting something on Google servers or Amazon or whatnot, what industries are really, that would surprise the audience, are using your services?

Dany: That’s a great question. The biggest surprise is who the biggest consumers are of colocation and data center, cloud providers. All the analysts. It’s very funny.

JC: I love that answer.

Dany: Years ago when cloud started coming out as a concept, I can’t tell you how many articles I would read by Gardner and Handle, big time analysts saying, “This is the end of colo. If you’re in colo, get out now.”

JC: Where would cloud sit though?

Dany: Where does the cloud live?

JC: In the clouds itself, it has to literally sit on servers.

Dany: And I think part of the confusion is also, the word cloud is so broad and so big. There’s public cloud, the big three, AWS, Azure and Google. And then there’s hundreds, hundreds of private cloud providers, SaaS providers, infrastructures of service providers, all these different cloud based platforms. They all need data center services at one point in time. And even the public cloud players, they’ve grown so fast that they’re not able to keep up by building their own. I think initially, Google built a million square foot facility thinking they were going to be able to do all this, but things have changed and they’re growing so fast that they’re the biggest customer.

JC: Yeah. Even they have to outsource now. Yeah, absolutely.

Dany: Yeah. They come and they have colo in all of these data centers and part of the drivers in the way the architecture, the IT architecture has changed is this whole million square foot data center in one spot in the country doesn’t make sense anymore. As demand has pushed out to the edge and because of edge computing architectures as a demand driver, it’s forced a lot of providers, a lot of these companies to have smaller micro data centers and micro colocation, two, three racks here, there. Three to five racks in multiple locations, closer to the edge, closer to their customers and subscribers. Yeah. These are part of the dynamics that have made the man for our world even greater than it already has been.

JC: Well, and obviously right now at the time of this recording, we’ve got a pandemic going on, mass droves of companies are moving to remote, because they have to. There’s not offices that people can really congregate in. How has your company either adapted or benefited or helped whatnot, given the current situation that we’re in with all this?

Dany: Yeah. For us as a, I’ll start with us as a company and then I’ll move out in concentric circles. But for us on day one, when we had to quarantine, there was no switch to flip over. We were already a completely virtualized organization. Our back office, we use DCITRAQ for our back office already cloud-based. Our accounting system, which is integrated in DCITRAQ and gives our agents commission snapshots into how much commissions they’re earning on the deals they’re registering through us, that’s been cloud-based for a couple years, our accounting system. Everything, our CRM is cloud-based, our phone systems, it’s been virtualized for 15 years. We’ve been doing these types of Zoom calls.

JC: You were already set up to weather this storm regardless.

Dany: Yeah, exactly. For us, as a transition, as a company, as a staff, it was very seamless and effortless. However, our clients not so much and I don’t mean small clients, you asked me about segmentation earlier. We’ve got a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company that is a 100 years old, 60, 70,000 employees worldwide, they have traditional phone systems. Right now they’re all at home using Teams as a band-aid. Microsoft Teams as a band-aid. But if you call their direct line, it’s ringing in their office and they can’t get it. It’ll send them an email with the voicemail, but it’s not completely integrated. We’ve been using the UCaaS platform, unified communications as a service, cloud-based telephony. We’ve been using that for, like I said, 15 years and this is part of the solutions now we can sell. We’re able to kind of sell everything we’ve been using. We walk the walk and practice what we preach and then we can help our clients with all those types of products and services.

JC: Well, it’s funny that you mention about how even the big companies like Amazon or whatnot, they have their own data centers, but even the big companies are having to find these collection of smaller ones basically to help offload some of this. My dad, he worked for Sun Microsystems for 20 years and I grew up in the Bay area and he worked in those kind of server farms. He worked telecom and I was in those big computer rooms with giant server racks and everything and the hum and the fans and everything. And I remember thinking, oh one day, this all gets smaller and it did, but then it grew back into itself on scale.

JC: Even though each server rack that the data that it could handle back then it can now be handled in this big, but because of the demand, you’re back to this size again. Those rooms look no different than they did before. They just hold more data now, which is really funny. And it kind of also reminds me, you know that show Silicon Valley?

Dany: Yes.

JC: That company? Yeah. Remember they had that idea about everyone’s cellphone being its own independent, almost cloud style server, where the internet now existed as a collection of people’s cellphone data and pinging so that people could take back the internet instead of it being owned by these big companies and whatnot and them owning the data and whatnot. It was a way for people to have their own private internet, even though that is in itself, although technically fictional, not realistically fictional. Again, the name of this podcast is the Future of BizTech. My question to you, Dany, is taking even a fictional comedy show concept like that, do you see this being a possibility? Because colocation, what if people became the colocation? What do you see as five, 10 years out in your industry, given the trajectory it’s going on and the demand?

Dany: Yeah. I see really no end in sight for demand for traditional data center services. Because again, as cloud continues to grow and more and more providers come into that arena, they’re all going to need physical colocation at some point. And while that does sound good, what you said about the show, realistically speaking, you really can’t circumvent data centers and believe me many have tried. There’s been theories of putting out a network of satellites, but here’s why you need physical terrestrial connectivity. These data centers are the hub where all the fiber and all the different carriers and the backbone providers terminate. Some of these meet-me rooms in these carrier hotels have upwards of 30, 40 different carriers that come into that meet-me room. You can’t replicate that kind of network redundancy on a phone or a personal device, or really even on premise, which is why so many enterprises have outsourced their on-prem data centers to colocation facilities.

Dany: Some of the biggest companies have had data centers in house forever and they can’t keep up. And then of course the next gen type data centers and the kind of operational efficiency they have, the kind of redundancy they have both from not just network redundancy, but power redundancy, 2n+n the number of generators, the type of UPS backup, the environmental controls, the fire suppression in case of a disaster, all the fail overs. Data centers are the backbone of all tech, of everything we know that goes over IP, which is everything right now. And I don’t see that changing at all. And in fact, they can’t build them fast enough. I saw an article in a finance and real estate journal talking about how much VC money and private equity money is going in right now in the middle of this pandemic into building more and more data centers. Follow the money and you’ll see.

JC: I have a question of evolution of technology evolution here. This is just, I want to get your opinion on this. This idea, just entered my head literally in real time right now. You have people who are building out their own server farms for bitcoin mining. With the demand of colocation right now, because like you said, they can’t build them fast enough, do you see a possibility that people who have these server farms for bitcoin mining, do you see, is there any way for them to double down or to transition? Would they make more money being an outsourced colocation farm for big companies versus mining for bitcoin, by any chance? It’s kind of the same setup in a way, isn’t it?

Dany: Yeah, and again, it’s funny, we didn’t choreograph this at all, but we’ve had tons of bitcoin mining companies come to us.

JC: Really? Okay. Yeah.

Dany: Here’s some of the challenges.

JC: I swear to god, to everyone on listening. Our pre-show consists of two questions and none of these were it.

Dany: So with bitcoin mining, it poses a whole set of different challenges for traditional colocation providers. Historically they punt on those deals. They’re actually no good for them. They don’t want them in their data centers for a whole host of reasons. Historically, the payment history, they tend to default on paying. They are power hogs, those rigs, those bitcoin mining rigs are power hogs and give off and disperse a lot of heat. They’re terrible on a data center. However, there are some providers and we are partners with several that will absolutely take those on and they may have to prepay a few months in advance and get creative with the way they do the contract.

Dany: But what’s happening as well is now on the sell side, on the supply side, there’s some speculative investors that are getting together and building purpose built data centers just for bitmine coining because you don’t really need with those data centers, they don’t want to pay premium dollars anyway, for a next gen tier three, tier four data center. There’s no need for that for bitcoin mining. You don’t even need that kind of network redundancy. Really they’re building these data centers now that are designed to attract bitcoin mining companies and those rigs and they’ll host them all day long.

JC: Well, but I guess my other question then is the reverse of that then, which is, could you see a situation and a future where people in their own homes, for example, have kind of the do it yourself bitcoin miners. That people have server racks in their basement or something, kind of doing it themselves. Do you see up scenario that’s possible where this person who has their own server set up in their house mining for bitcoin for themselves, but then a company like maybe yours, for example, a colocation company says, “Hey, you have five server racks and you’re doing this. If you put this software, this security encryption software into your and let us use your physical servers as part of a way to offload securely our data,” and you would pay them.

JC: Could you see a scenario where a colocation company could actually be sourced by thousands of just independent people who have their own smaller physical servers set up and have a thing where they’re basically mining them and then selling that space as a whole to clients? But it’s being sourced from thousands of teeny tiny server racks that are independently owned, but again, secure because of software whatnot. Do you see that as a possibility of converting people who would be normally doing it for bitcoin, but they’re saying, “Hey, I’m mining Bitcoin, but I can make more money renting my server racks to this colocation company.” Do you see any scenario where that would be possible?

Dany: You actually touched upon something that is happening already, but not by the colocation providers. There’s bitcoin mining companies that actually have products and little light applets and they’ll go out and they’ll sell the concept of, hey, download this and mine on your PCs, on your computers. And they build their network and whatever processing power that your PC is providing and that’s the kind of bitcoin mining and they build this whole network. The co-providers want no part of that. But what is happening is to really scale that business up, you’re going to need to go into a data center. Yeah. You can’t possibly match that kind of processing power and then also the kind of availability and reliability, because now you’re dealing with consumers and their computers.

JC: You can support them, but they can’t support you.

Dany: Got it. Exactly. If you really want a world class bitcoin mining operation, you really should look into having it in a data center. And then you can still go out and sell the software to clients to install on their machine. But you need to have those rigs redundant.

JC: Well, who knows maybe the next billion dollar idea is someone who solves that problem. Maybe someone comes up with a solution one day. Let me ask you a little about yourself personally. I ask this to all my guests, what did you want to do when you were a kid? What did you want to be when you grew up? And then how did that transition into what you are now?

Dany: Yeah, it’s actually a funny story, how I got into this business. Without saying my exact age, I’m a product of the eighties and the era of the movies Wall Street with Charlie Sheen and Martin Sheen. And I wanted to be an investment banker like every other kid at that point that I knew anyway, in the eighties. I actually pursued an MBA in finance in international business from NYU, Stern School of Business. And then in my senior year, which the year was 1999, this whole internet thing started coming about. And even NYU didn’t know anything about it so they had just created a department my senior year called eCommerce of all things. They didn’t know what else to call it so they called the department eCommerce and they had all these different classes. I had a bunch of electives still available so I took all my electives from this department because I was really always interested in tech.

Dany: This was not, it wasn’t really a career path, early eighties. Again, you go into investment banking, yo go into banking. And this is, if you look at my background and my bio, I did work on Wall Street. I worked at JP Morgan Chase. That was a career path, but my heart was always in tech. And so I took all the electives from those classes and one such class, my senior year, big lecture hall, everybody was interested in it. There had to be at least two, 250 students in this lecture hall and they didn’t have a coursebook. There was no textbook. Basically our entire syllabus was every week, they would bring in a dotcom CEO in 1999, because imagine that year and they would come and speak to us about some great dotcom idea that they just got – VC financing for and so on and so forth.

Dany: One week they brought in this guy, at the time, early thirties, relatively meek, mild mannered guy at the time. And he was telling us, they just secured series A and series B VC financing for his dotcom and this and that. And they’re going to be selling whatever online. We all line up after class, like we do with every guest speaker to ask a few questions. And finally, when it was my turn, I said to this guy, I said, “Look, I’m not very technical. I’m more on the business end, more of a business mind, but I really want to get in on this internet thing. Do you have any words of wisdom for me?” And he says, “Yes, one word, infrastructure.” I said, “Okay great.” I had no idea what that was.

JC: Thank you.

Dany: I’m in my twenties, met my friends at the bar in the Village. The following week, I go up to the professor and I say, “That guy we had last week, what was his name?” The professor goes, “Oh yeah, Jeff Bezos.” I said, “Yeah, him.”

JC: How did I know? Of course it was Jeff Bezos. Of course.

Dany: He said to me that I should look into infrastructure. And the professor said, “Well, we’re actually covering that in a few weeks. Do you want to start reading ahead?” Well, I started reading ahead and never looked back. That’s how I got into this business, really. It was one word from Bezos and the irony is for years, as I was building this company up, I was wondering to myself, what’s he talking? Why did he tell me that? They’re not infrastructure, they’re a retailer, they’re an online retailer.

JC: He had the plan. He had the plan.

Dany: Where he was that he said, “That’s where it is.” And now he’s known as the infrastructure king with AWS Cloud. It’s amazing, he knew back then, he had the plan.

JC: That’s awesome. Well, one of my questions that was going to be next was what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten, but I think that covers it. Who were some of your mentors kind of coming up? Is there anyone even, just personally, whether anybody recognize the name or not, isn’t really important, but I’m just curious, who really helped shape what you’re doing right now?

Dany: Sure. From the kind of in the trenches, the influence really for me comes from some of our channel partners. Some of our agents who were out there on the client premise, they’re the ones meeting and interacting with the clients, seeing the need and we have great relationships with them and we end up learning more from them. A lot of what we’ve done, DCITRAQ back to kind of come full circle, why that even exists, why did I build that? It was really demand driven from our partners that he said it would be really great if I can access this on a phone. It’s also accessible on their devices. If I’m going into a meeting with a client, I want to be able to search right away, who are the data center providers in Singapore?

Dany: This is where they need and Luxembourg and Amsterdam. And I want to know what they offer those providers so I can sound intelligent in the meeting and be informed. I want all that information, all that power at my fingertip. A lot of that knowledge, the feet on the street we really get from our partners. It depends, from marketing, I like to follow Seth Godin. I think he’s great from a marketing perspective, very original. There’s different disciplines as I’m sure, you know, being the CEO, I’m responsible for not just the technical piece here, I’m the acting CTO and the acting CFO at times and got to wear a bunch of different hats. But yeah, I think, our customers are out there doing it and we’re just enabling that. We’re either enabling the sales process for our agents or we’re enabling the digital transformation of our clients. I think that to me is the biggest influence for me.

JC: Coming back to DCITRAQ really quick here, and how do you spell that? Is it track C-K?

Dany: DCI like data center infrastructure, track T-R-A-Q.

JC: Oh, got it. T-R-A-Q. Okay. Got it. Where do you see that going? Right now it’s obviously you said it’s a pre-service. People can go on there. They can help identify the right vendors for themselves for when they’re offloading for their colocation needs and whatnot. What’s coming down the pipeline for DCITRAQ? Is it going to stay that way? Do you have future plans for it to have more features? Again, we love the SaaS stuff here so tell me a little about the future of DCITRAQ.

Dany: Yeah. It’s a living, breathing thing at this point because we constantly, we have in house developers. We don’t even sub that out. They’re literally on payroll. We’re constantly improving it. Adding modules this year. Early this year, we finally went live with the commission piece. The commissions module that allows the agent partners that use this on behalf of their clients who get paid from us for the winning deals, they now could see every month their commission statement, they know what they’re going to get paid each month from us and so forth. Now that’s fully integrated and our own staff can also work with our cloud based accounting system, right through DCITRAQ. That’s done. Now, we’re starting our metrics and reporting module. There’s going to be all kinds of awesome data mining, very powerful data mining and recording features for all three types of users, the client, the vendor, and then the agent in between who’s brokering that as well and as well as our staff.

Dany: We kind of are same user type as the agent. We basically have some of these same features. There’s a lot of reporting there that they’re going to be able to use. For the vendors, for example, they’re going to be able to see the demand where it’s coming from, what types of products and services seem to be trending, their own close and win ratio, where they’re losing, by what percentage are they losing? Maybe they should sharpen their pencils in pricing. They could see even down to the market where they’re off. And then conversely for the customer, they’ll be able to have at their fingertips, all kinds of historical pricing data and pricing metrics so they can actually do budgetary exercises and know before they even build an RFP and go to market with it, what the market looks like. They can really get a good pulse on the market. And we’ve got 21 years of data. It’s just a matter of formatting that in a way and then publishing it in a way that’s digestible for all these different users in DCITRAQ.

JC: Well, that’s awesome. Listen, I’m fascinated with it, I got to take a look at it before we had gotten on the show. I guess my last question is, tell me the one minute version of you mentioned cybersecurity earlier and that’s a big deal right now. Obviously, people are seeing intrusions on their email, on their servers. I mean, government agencies, corporations, you name it. How does DCITRAQ help people on the cybersecurity side? Does it list which vendors have certain levels of security? Are you showing being transparent with that so they understand what they’re getting into?

Dany: Yeah. Same concept. It’s the same engine for data center and colo and cloud providers, but apply it to cybersecurity. On the sell side, we’ve got cybersecurity vendors all signed up under contract in varying categories too. Not just companies that can help with threat detection, intrusion detection, or DDoS attacks. There’s so many aspects of cybersecurity. We’ve got the whole gamut covered of every type of provider and then comprehensive providers as well, that may touch upon different products and services. That’s on the vendor side. On the buy side you come in, you put in all your requirements and build an RFP or RFQ and then the software helps you almost like match.com for dating, if you will, or cars.com and trying to figure out which car is out there that meets your requirements. Same concept, really, it’s a matching algorithm that then compares all of your requirements and you can weight that. And what’s important to you and what’s not.

Dany: And then it’ll come up with the short list and then you put that out to bid with all these different cybersecurity vendors and whomever you close with. Again, we get commission like a salesperson would if you called their 800 number of a security company directly. Yeah, it’s really powerful and it allows, again that one stop shopping. Hate to use a cliche like that, but really under one roof or one software platform to be able to handle all of those things. And especially now that cybersecurity is such a major decision driver in how you colocate, where you colocate and how you architect your IT infrastructure. It’s a major driver. The CISOs in these organizations are involved and some of them were driving those decisions. That’s why we kind of integrated that. Again, out of necessity. Necessity is the mother of invention. And that’s how we’ve gotten to where we are, is just read and react and know what’s being asked for, what’s necessary, what’s a problem that’s really solved and then solving it.

JC: Well that’s awesome. Listen, I really appreciate you coming on the show. You’ve given a ton of really practical advice and probably eye opening stuff, as far as the colocation environment goes. Because a lot of people don’t really understand it that well. I want to thank you for that. How can people get a hold of you either directly, personally, if they wanted to reach out to you. And then also the company.

Dany: LinkedIn, for me, I’m always on LinkedIn. I’m very active on social media and I’m also on Twitter, so you can follow my account, Twitter is @danybouchedid and LinkedIn same name obviously. And then for the company, we also have social media pages for the company, both the parent company, COLOTRAQ and then DCITRAQ itself has its own accounts as well, DCITRAQ. And then if you want to kind of test drive the SaaS platform, the software, you can go on to www.dcitraq.com and give it a try. And if you want to learn more about the company.

JC: D-C-I-T-R-A-Q, you said, right?

Dany: T-R-A-Q. D-C-I-T-R-A-Q.

JC: Got it. Perfect.

Dany: Then COLOTRAQ, also T-R-A-Q.

JC: Awesome.

Dany: That was kind of a consistent thing.

JC: Well, Dany, thank you so much for coming on the show, sir, and I look forward to speaking with you in the future.

Dany: Great. Thanks for having me on, JC.

infinityadminEpi 8: Why Data Storage Matters for Your Business – Dany Bouchedid, CEO of COLOTRAQ