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Category: ENTBusinessNews

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  • SurveyMonkey CEO: Selling To the Enterprise Has Been Wildly Successful

    SurveyMonkey CEO: Selling To the Enterprise Has Been Wildly Successful

    “We really took a strategic imperative about two and a half to three years ago to step up our enterprise game,” says SurveyMonkey CEO Zander Lurie. “This has been a company that has thrived in going direct to end-users. We’ve built up a user base, a paid customer base, today of almost 700,000 people. But over the last three years, we’ve elevated our game. Today, enterprise represents 20 percent of our business. It helped us deliver our best quarter in history. We’re now growing 20 percent year-over-year.”

    Zander Lurie, CEO of SurveyMonkey, discusses how the company is driving its massive growth by focusing on enterprise solutions that are sold by the seat, in an interview on CNBC:

    The Category For Experience Management Is Massive

    The category for experience management is massive. Companies today are differentiating their products and services by their ability to be customer-centric. Everybody has access to off-the-shelf software and you can buy keywords on Google and you can target folks on Facebook but the ability to really be sensitive to what your customers care about and want is critical. Usabilla is the solution that we acquired earlier this year. They have a customer in KLM Dutch Airlines who was able to improve their app experience by a 2.8 to a 4.2 rating using our product. It really is about, can your managers and can your marketers listen to that feedback, understand the bugs, and then deliver and take action. That’s what survey software can do.

    We don’t compete with Adobe and Salesforce at all. Frankly, there are hundreds of thousands of Salesforce customers who need to be buying enterprise survey software. We exist in the Salesforce ecosystem and really try and help Salesforce customers get better data and get sentiment data from what their customers really care about. Salesforce, Microsoft, Adobe, those are big systems of record. They provide you a lot of operational data. Where SurveyMonkey competes and thrives is delivering for customers that sentiment data. How am I really doing? What can we improve upon? That’s where we’re selling a solution into the Salesforce ecosystem and we partner with Salesforce in a really productive way. It’s part of the reason they bought into our IPO last year. 

    Selling To the Enterprise Has Been Wildly Successful

    We really took a strategic imperative about two and a half to three years ago to step up our enterprise game. This has been a company that has thrived in going direct to end-users. We’ve built up a user base, a paid customer base, today of almost 700,000 people. But over the last three years, we’ve elevated our game. Today, enterprise represents 20 percent of our business. It helped us deliver our best quarter in history. We’re now growing 20 percent year-over-year. 

    We set about on our IPO last year and told investors our plan to make this business a lot more valuable. The two key driving factors first is to elevate our sales motion to sell directly to the enterprise. That has been wildly successful. We doubled year-over-year a hundred percent growth in revenue in the sales channel. We now have almost 5,000 customers, up 60 percent year over year. We now compete in that ecosystem and we have a really disruptive product. Consumers love our product. We’re now selling into the organization with a really talented sales team. 

    There’s Been So Much Account Sharing On SurveyMonkey

    Our team’s product is the collaborative self-serve product. We have a unique opportunity here. There’s been so much account sharing on SurveyMonkey over the years and in the current security environment, we’re asking people to pay for their own seat. That has driven a really healthy paid user growth. We see continued growth in those two areas. As I said, growth for us we’ve accelerated growth now twenty percent year-over-year, but we do it a disciplined way. We’re still able to deliver over $13 million dollars of unleveraged free cash flow in the quarter. We’re just not a company that’s going to grow at all cost. We want to have both healthy growth and disciplined cash flow.

    We use politics in a fun way to help get a beat on what’s going on out in the world. Just like we ask questions about if you are potentially interested in buying an electric car or what do you think of Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat, we also ask questions of the two and a half to three million people on our platform every day of who might you vote for and what issues are important to you. That really does give us a particular read on what American consumers are thinking.

    Selling To the Enterprise Has Been Wildly Successful, Says SurveyMonkey CEO Zander Lurie
  • Apple Headquarters Is The Most Unique Building Ever Constructed

    Apple Headquarters Is The Most Unique Building Ever Constructed

    Apple headquarters may be the most unique building ever constructed. The building is shaped like a spaceship as if it could ominously hover over cities foretelling their future destruction. The building encompasses 2.82 million square feet of office space and was constructed at an estimated cost of over $5 billion. The office complex is two-thirds the size of the Pentagon. Over 12,000 employees work at the space-themed headquarters.

    Even under the building is unique. In order to give Apple Park an environmentally-friendly vibe, the company built a huge underground parking garage that can hold 10,980 cars. Apple has an annual property tax bill of over $40 million on this building alone.

    The futuristic headquarters is located at 1 Apple Park Way in Cupertino, California. Over 80% of the Apple Campus site is green space that includes 7,000 plus trees. There are over 1,000 bikes on-site to help get employees around campus.

    Apple co-founder Steve Jobs announced plans for the new headquarters in one of his last public appearances the city council meeting in Cupertino on June 7, 2011. The charismatic CEO died on October 5, 2011.

    https://youtu.be/xL3gx4zWp5k

    The building is powered by 700,000 square feet of solar panels on campus as well as an on-site low-carbon central plant. It uses 100% renewable energy. Additionally, a ventilation system built into the design lets the building go without air conditioning or heating for 75% of the year.

    The sci-fi looking structure has become a tourist attraction in and of itself. The Apple Park Visitor Center is typically the first stop and tours can also be arranged.

    The structure’s walls include the largest curved glass panel in the world. Over 3,000 sheets of glass wrap the entire building.

    Apple built one of the world’s largest corporate dining halls, at over 60,000-foot it can accommodate 2,100 people. Additionally, there are 20,000 square feet of outdoor patios and terraces that incorporates an additional 1,750 seats.

    The campus is 175-acres and is roughly the size of 40 football fields. Apple prides itself on the forested atmosphere surrounding the office building. The landscaping includes 5 million square feet of grass and about 9,000 species of native and drought-resistant plants.

  • Goldman Sachs: Microsoft Making Significant Inroads In Cloud Market—At Amazon and Google’s Expense

    Goldman Sachs: Microsoft Making Significant Inroads In Cloud Market—At Amazon and Google’s Expense

    According to Business Insider, a recent Goldman Sachs poll shows Microsoft making significant inroads into the cloud market at Amazon and especially Google’s expense.

    Goldman Sachs polled 100 IT executives from Global 2000 companies to see what cloud platforms were in the best position moving forward. The results showed that while Amazon’s “AWS still gets the largest share of cloud revenue, a ‘significantly higher number of respondents’ indicated they use Microsoft Azure and plan to in the next three years.” In fact, “97 respondents said they are currently using Microsoft Azure, compared to 58 using AWS and 25 using Google Cloud Platform.”

    This should be deeply worrying to Amazon and Google. Amazon recently lost out to Microsoft in the bid for a Pentagon contract valued at $10 billion. Microsoft is also the second company to achieve the coveted Impact Level 6 security clearance—behind Amazon—allowing it to store sensitive government data in the cloud. Achieving that clearance will only improve the company’s odds of scoring other major contracts in the future.

    With Microsoft currently being used in so many companies, and the inherent advantage it has due to its established software ecosystem, Amazon and Google will have their work cut out trying to avoid losing any more market share.

  • Oracle Releases Tool to Help Improve Internet Routing Security

    Oracle Releases Tool to Help Improve Internet Routing Security

    In a blog post, Oracle announced the release of IXP Filter Check, a security tool designed to monitor route filtering at internet exchange points (IXPs).

    Oracle has partnered with the Internet Society in an effort to improve internet security. IXPs are what’s responsible for connections between different networks, but they also represent a vulnerable point, where connections can be routed incorrectly—either by mistake or maliciously.

    According to Oracle, “implementing route filtering at IXPs offers the opportunity to make real progress in the improvement of internet routing hygiene. IXPs serve a vital role in the infrastructure of the internet by facilitating thousands of connections between the networks of telecoms, content providers and other major businesses.

    “However, the implementation of route filtering can be complicated and to date there has been no way to independently and programmatically verify whether an IXP was appropriately filtering its routes. Using data graciously published by Packet Clearinghouse (PCH) and data processing supported by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the Oracle Internet Intelligence team developed IXP Filter Check to analyze route filtering at nearly 200 IXPs around the world.

    “By monitoring the routes passed by route servers at these IXPs, and identifying those routes that should have been filtered, IXP Filter Check identifies gaps in route filtering and aims to assist in technical compliance of MANRS IXP requirements.

    “In the course of its development, IXP Filter Check has identified major filtering misconfigurations at three IXPs including a month-long RPKI filter outage at one of the world’s largest IXPs. By detecting these problems, IXP Filter Check enabled cooperating route server administrators to fix their route filtering and also validated the need for third party technical review of route server filtering.”

    With IXP Filter Check system admins will have one more tool in their arsenal to protect networks and improve the security of the internet.

  • China Moving Toward Stronger Intellectual Property Protections

    China Moving Toward Stronger Intellectual Property Protections

    CNN is reporting that China is investigating stronger measures to protect intellectual property rights.

    Intellectual property (IP) has been one of the battlegrounds in the U.S. and China’s trade war. China has a long history of lax IP protections, especially for foreign companies. Many a company has had their IP stolen after doing business with Chinese companies, with one in five reporting their IP stolen within the last year.

    In response, the Trump administration has considered using the Commerce Department’s “entity list” to blacklist Chinese companies who repeatedly steal IP and violate U.S. patent and copyright laws. While the entity list is usually reserved for companies deemed a military or terrorist threat, the Trump administration has argued that economic security is part of national security as a whole, thereby making companies who damage it with illegal or unethical behavior a national security threat.

    It now appears the Chinese government may be ready to make concessions. According to CNN, China “has unveiled new guidelines about the protection of intellectual property, a move that could mark a big step toward appeasing the United States, and may even help pave the way for a long-awaited trade truce.

    “Beijing’s announcement Sunday was short on detail, though the country did indicate that it could introduce stronger IP protections and toughen punishments on those who infringe them. Such measures could address a concern that Washington has been railing on for ages.”

    According to Reuters, “the document said that by 2022, China should be making progress in issues that have affected intellectual property rights enforcement, such as low compensation, high costs, and the difficulty of proof. By 2025, there should be a better system of protection in place.”

  • View Velocity Is The Secret To Ranking On YouTube

    View Velocity Is The Secret To Ranking On YouTube

    “To determine rankings on their platform, YouTube uses a metric called the View Velocity,” says HubSpot SEO expert Braden Becker. “The View Velocity metric measures the number of subscribers who watch your video right after it’s been published. The higher your videos view velocity the higher your videos will rank. YouTube also accounts for the number of active subscribers you have when they rank your videos.”

    Braden Becker, Senior SEO Strategist at HubSpot, reveals the secrets of YouTube’s Ranking Algorithm in his latest video:

    The Secrets of YouTube’s Ranking Algorithm

    Since marketers are at the mercy of algorithms on nearly every publishing channel, knowing how each of these unique algorithms work is crucial to attracting and maintaining an audience. Luckily, while some channels are rather reserved about the secrets of their algorithms, YouTube has been remarkably transparent. To figure out which videos and channels that users are most likely to enjoy watching, YouTube follows their audience. This means they pay attention to which videos each user watches, what they don’t watch, how much time they spend watching each video, their likes, their dislikes, and “they’re not interested in” feedback. 

    What YouTube Pays The Most Attention To

    Ranking High In YouTube Search Results

    YouTube’s algorithm also uses different signals and metrics to rank and recommend videos on each section of their platform. With this in mind, let’s go over how the algorithm decides to serve content to its users on their search results, homepage, suggested videos, trending, and subscription sections. First, are the search results. The two biggest factors that affect your video search rankings are its keywords and relevance. When ranking videos in search, YouTube will consider how well your titles, descriptions, and content, match each user’s queries. They’ll also consider how many videos users have watched from your channel and the last time they watched other videos surrounding the same topic as your video.

    Positive Engagement With Your Videos Is Key

    Next is the home page and suggested videos. No two users will have the same experience on YouTube. They want to serve the most relevant personalized recommendations to each of their viewers. To do this they first analyze user’s activity history and find hundreds of videos that could be relevant to them. Then they rank these videos by how well each video has engaged and satisfied similar users, how often each viewer watches videos from a particular channel or topic, and how many times YouTube has already shown each video to its users. 

    Ranking On The Trending Page

    Next is trending. The trending page is a feast of new and popular videos in a user’s specific country. YouTube wants to balance popularity with novelty when they rank videos in this section, so they heavily consider view count and rate of view growth for each video they rank. 

    High “View Velocity” = High Ranking

    Last is subscriptions. YouTube has a subscriptions page where users can view all the recently uploaded videos from the channels they subscribe to. But this page isn’t the only benefit that channels get when they acquire a ton of subscribers. To determine rankings on their platform, YouTube uses a metric called the View Velocity, which measures the number of subscribers who watch your video right after it’s been published. The higher your videos view velocity the higher your videos will rank. YouTube also accounts for the number of active subscribers you have when they rank your videos.

    The Secrets of YouTube’s Ranking Algorithm with HubSpot SEO expert Braden Becker
  • Kevin O’Leary on China Trade War: What Trump Is Doing Is Starting To Work

    Kevin O’Leary on China Trade War: What Trump Is Doing Is Starting To Work

    “Mr. Wonderful” Kevin O’Leary of SharkTank got some high praise for his comments in support of the Trump Administration’s trade actions in pursuit of a free trade agreement with China. President Trump tweeted. “Thank you Mr. Wonderful, I like you too!”

    Kevin O’Leary of SharkTank on Trump’s trade policy: It’s starting to work.

    O’Leary later commented on Trump’s tweet and elaborated on why Trump is working to level the playing field for America doing business in China: 

    I was talking about the policy this administration is putting forward. Bottom line is everything has been tried for 17 years while I have actually been doing business in China. Nothing has worked to level playing field. I like what this administration is doing by trying new ideas. Let’s try something else. That’s what I’m talking about. Because to me, it’s starting to work. Everything else has not worked. I’ll keep it very simple. I don’t have a level playing field in China. They get to use our markets in ways that we can’t use theirs. That’s not okay anymore.

    Kevin O’Leary of SharkTank: I Like What This Administration Is Doing With Trade


  • Alibaba.com Opens World’s Largest B2B Marketplace To US Businesses

    Alibaba.com Opens World’s Largest B2B Marketplace To US Businesses

    “Alibaba.com is the largest B2B marketplace on the planet,” says John Caplan, the North America B2B President at Alibaba Group. “Today is a great day for US small businesses. Manufacturers and wholesalers can join Alibaba.com today to sell to the world. The platform is now open to enable those businesses to reach the 190 countries at four corners of the globe where we have ten million business buyers on the platform. That business is $23.9 trillion and in fact, it’s six times larger than the B2C market.”

    John Caplan, President, North America B2B at Alibaba Group, discusses opening Alibaba.com to US small businesses to reach 10 million new B2B buyers, in an interview on Bloomberg:

    Alibaba.com Now Open To US Small Businesses

    Today is a great day for US small businesses. Manufacturers and wholesalers can join Alibaba.com today to sell to the world. The platform is now open to enable those businesses to reach the 190 countries at four corners of the globe where we have ten million business buyers on the platform. That business is $23.9 trillion and in fact, it’s six times larger than the B2C market. Alibaba.com is the largest B2B marketplace on the planet. What we built are simple to use tools for small businesses to have a global storefront, to market to customers, and then to reach deep into the globe so that they can sell their goods.

    Today’s the big announcement. But in fact, one-third of the demand, the buyers on Alibaba.com, are here in the United States. So those folks we’ve been doing business with for 20 years since Jack founded the company. Now what we’re saying to them is you’ve been sourcing on the platform and now you can, in fact, sell to the world on the platform. We are entirely focused on the B2B market. It is $23.9 trillion. Alibaba.com is purpose-built to help small businesses sell to the world. We’re very focused on helping digitize small businesses around the globe.

    70 Percent of US Small Businesses Do Not Sell Online

    One interesting statistic, 70 percent of US small businesses do not sell online today. This market is not yet digitized. What we’ve created are simple to use tools to help small businesses get online. It’s an interesting space because. In fact, the value chain for small businesses, the value chain for B2B is so complex that no one has digitized it end-to-end other than Alibaba.com. 

    We’ve actually created a platform that enables a small business to message, talk to, negotiate with, pay, and handle the logistics for orders end-to-end. I think we’re in a class by ourselves.  Our business has seen a triple-digit growth and this plan has been in the works for many years. I joined Alibaba.com in 2017. The transformation of our business from a yellow page business to an end-to-end procurement platform is now adding the globalized supply to the platform.

    Alibaba.com Opens World’s Largest B2B Marketplace To US Businesses – John Caplan
  • Founders Syndrome Is a Real Thing, Says Craigslist Founder

    Founders Syndrome Is a Real Thing, Says Craigslist Founder

    “I wasn’t temperamentally suited to be CEO or really any kind of manager,” says Craiglist founder Craig Newmark. “So I was thinking maybe it is time to step down. I had also read about something called founder syndrome where somebody who’s good at starting something is really terrible at keeping it going. The biggest lesson is that founders syndrome is a real thing. The faster you think about that and then step down the better off you are.”

    Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, discusses the reality of founders syndrome where an entrepreneur might be really good at starting something but horrible at managing the business going forward in an Inc. featured video:

    As a Manager I Suck

    I can applaud myself thinking that it only took me a few months to overcome founder syndrome as opposed to running the company into the ground. The history of the first five years of Craigslist was just me running the thing, one year running it with volunteers, then after making it a company, one year with me as CEO. But towards the end of that year, people were kind enough to help me understand that as a manager I suck. I needed to find people who might be much better at it than I was. They were suggesting that maybe I didn’t have the right skill mix to be CEO. These are people who really cared about the site who believed and they were right.

    Founders Syndrome Is a Real Thing

    I wasn’t temperamentally suited to be CEO or really any kind of manager. So I was thinking maybe it is time to step down. I had also read about something called founder syndrome where somebody who’s good at starting something is really terrible at keeping it going. My decision to step down, well I winced a little bit because it was my creation and I didn’t want to feel stupid if I had made a big mistake. But it’s worked out and I don’t have regrets about stepping down. The biggest lesson is that founders syndrome is a real thing. The faster you think about that and then step down the better off you are. That worked out.

    Founders Syndrome Is a Real Thing, Says Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark
  • We’ve Seen Active Buyers Consistently Grow, Says eBay CEO

    We’ve Seen Active Buyers Consistently Grow, Says eBay CEO

    “The most important thing that we look at is the underlying health of the marketplace,” says eBay CEO Devin Wenig. “For me, that really comes down to three things. It’s how many people are shopping with us? How many people are selling with us? And how much inventory is in the marketplace? What’s on the shelves if you will. All three of those have never been higher. We’ve seen active buyers consistently grow, we added two million last quarter.”

    Devin Wenig, CEO of eBay, discusses their strong Q2 earnings announcement and growth going forward. Wenig also took the opportunity to slam the internet sales tax movement, saying the “internet sales tax is a regressive tax on small business,” in an interview on CNBC:

    We’ve Seen Active Buyers Consistently Grow

    The most important thing that we look at is the underlying health of the marketplace. For me, that really comes down to three things. It’s how many people are shopping with us? How many people are selling with us? And how much inventory is in the marketplace? What’s on the shelves if you will. All three of those have never been higher. We’ve seen active buyers consistently grow, we added two million last quarter. We continue to see growth in business sellers and inventory. If you look in our history every time those numbers grow GMV (gross merchandise value) grows. 

    What we’re facing right now is a couple of things and GMV can move up or down in the 90 day period. We are in the middle of a rollout of internet sales tax, which we know is making an impact, particularly on our US business. We’re also seeing the withdrawal of some of the marketing spend that we did last year, which was part of the plan. We said we would do that this year and we have a line of sight to it, and it’s explainable. So we’re not that concerned about GMV being soft in the short run. What we see is a healthy marketplace and we know when those metrics grow GMV follows, as it has in every year in our past 24 years.

    We’ve raised guidance now twice in the last two quarters. We don’t give GMV guidance. We give revenue guidance and earnings guidance. We started the year saying this year was about growing the underlying marketplace metrics and let’s get the two real growth priorities, advertising, and payments, going. And half of the way in I’d say I’m pleased but not satisfied. I’d say we’ve made a lot of progress against those priorities, although we still have a long way to go. But it’s given us the confidence to raise our forecast in Q1 and we raised it again yesterday. So that’s a good start, a good first half.

    Internet Sales Tax Is a Regressive Tax On Small Business

    At the beginning of the year, there were no states that had enacted a marketplace collection of sales tax. Now we have nine and there are 30 that have declared and 30 will be in place by the end of this year. Obviously, when a state declares an internet sales tax we must collect on behalf of the sellers. So we have a forward view as to how many states will enact that tax and where it will be in place by the end of the year. It will be 30 and it will cover the majority of our sales in the US and the fourth quarter of this year will be the peak. 

    The impact of internet sales tax will make a bigger impact before it wanes. It’ll wane as we lap out of it next year. I’ll just take the opportunity to say I think it’s a bad policy. We’ve been advocating on behalf of small businesses for years that an internet sales tax is a regressive tax on small business and that is exactly what we’re seeing.

    We’ve Seen Active Buyers Consistently Grow, Says eBay CEO Devin Wenig
  • There’s So Much Investor Subsidy In The Delivery Business Model, Says Domino’s CEO

    There’s So Much Investor Subsidy In The Delivery Business Model, Says Domino’s CEO

    “What we’re going to see here in the near term is that there’s so much investor subsidy into that (delivery) business model right now,” says Domino’s CEO Ritch Allison. “We’re not really sure where it’s going to shake out long term. There’s substantial discounting and over-investment in advertising right now to drive consumer demand. We don’t know how that’s going to shake out once consumers actually have to pay the full cost of that delivery because those fees are quite substantial relative to the cost of the underlying food.”

    Ritch Allison, CEO of Domino’s, discusses how investor subsidies of delivery companies like Grubhub and Uber Eats are impacting Domino’s in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    There’s So Much Investor Subsidy In The Delivery Business Model

    What we’re going to see here in the near term is that there’s so much investor subsidy into that (delivery) business model right now. We’re not really sure where it’s going to shake out long term. There’s substantial discounting and over-investment in advertising right now to drive consumer demand. We don’t know how that’s going to shake out once consumers actually have to pay the full cost of that delivery because those fees are quite substantial relative to the cost of the underlying food. 

    We also have not yet seen what’s going to happen with the supply of restaurants on these platforms as well. Over time it’ll be proven out whether or not that business is truly incremental and whether or not that business is actually accretive from a margin standpoint to the operators that are offering that service through the third-party aggregators. So long-term still a lot of questions but short term certainly some pressure.

    We’re not going to do foolish things in the short term in reaction. We’re still very focused on our franchisees’ profitability. That’s first and foremost in our minds and we’re still very focused on generating great returns and free cash flow for our investors. We’re generating cash flow now at a pace of about a million dollars a day in the Domino’s business. So some near-term activity here that’s creating some turbulence in the marketplace but we’re going to remain focused on our long-term strategy, great profitability for our franchisees and strong operating cash flow and returns for our investors.

    We Still Gained a Significant Amount of Market Share In Q2

    When you take a look at our business we still gained a significant amount of market share in the pizza category during the second quarter. Our retail sales were up 6.8 percent which is significantly higher than the growth in the category and frankly much higher than the growth in the restaurant industry in general. So while same-store sales at three percent were at the lower end of our long-term outlook, the overall retail sales growth driven by the combination of that same-store sales and really strong unit growth was still quite positive.

    It is a tougher operating environment than it has been in years past. We do have new competition in the marketplace that we’re fighting against every day. There are also labor pressures in the marketplace, certainly, the tight employment environment and some of the rising minimum wages across the country are putting some pressure on. But we are really in a position of strength as we enter into this more turbulent period. 

    Bringing Data-Driven Decision Making To International Markets

    In 2018 our average store in the US had operating cash flow as measured by EBITA of $141,000. Our franchisees are very healthy. Cash on cash returns in the business are really strong. That’s why when you take a look at what’s going on with units, we opened 45 units in the second quarter in the US and only closed three, it’s still a very healthy business model. We’re positioned quite well as we look forward relative to the rest of the restaurant industry to continue to be successful.

    We are we’re working hand-in-hand with our master franchisees around the world. As you look from market to market the issues in markets can be different depending upon those specific circumstances. What we’re trying to do is work with the markets to bring some of the same terrific data-driven decision-making that we’ve used to grow the business in the US over a number of years now and help our international markets in that regard. 

    Broadly, when you take a look at the international business, retail sales were up 9.8 percent in the second quarter. We are gaining share at a significant pace in the international markets as well as having great growth in the international markets this past quarter with a 158 net store openings. It remains a very healthy business despite the comps over the last few quarters being on the lower end.

    There’s So Much Investor Subsidy In The Delivery Business Model, Says Domino’s CEO Ritch Allison
  • The Response To Our Impossible Sliders Has Been Overwhelming, Says White Castle VP

    The Response To Our Impossible Sliders Has Been Overwhelming, Says White Castle VP

    “The response from customers (to our Impossible Slider) has been overwhelming,” says Jamie Richardson, Vice President at White Castle. “And with our 10,000 team members, the response has been overwhelming. We know we have got a winner. In working with Impossible, they’ve really put the study into this and have done it in a thoughtful way and have come up with something that tastes great. You put that in that White Castle original bun with one perfect pickle and you’ve got a winner.”

    Jamie Richardson, Vice President at White Castle, discusses the phenomenal success of the Impossible Slider, their vegan alternative to the original Slider, in an interview on CNBC:

    The Response To Our Impossible Sliders Has Been Overwhelming

    We are a family owned business that’s been around for almost a hundred years. We don’t make short term decisions. We look at things over the long haul, working together, and solving our customers’ problems. The response from customers has been overwhelming. And with our 10,000 team members, the response has been overwhelming. We know we have got a winner. We’re excited about what comes next in our friendship.

    It’s really interesting. One of the big things we are seeing, especially with our younger customers, our GenZ customers, and our Millennial customers, a lot these individuals have gone with a plant-based diet. So if you are in a car with three or four people you can be that veto vote. What we found is we’re getting more and more of those visits and that’s important to us. Oh, and by the way, here among friends, we don’t use the term “fake meat” because to us it’s a plant-based protein and that’s what makes it awesome.

    The Impossible Slider at White Castle

    Our Customers Tell Us They Love the Taste

    I don’t know what they (Tyson Foods and Perdue) are going to be able to accomplish (with alternative meats). But here’s what we do know. In working with Impossible, they’ve really put the study into this and have done it in a thoughtful way and have come up with something that tastes great. I think that the taste quotient is so important in terms of success in the marketplace. There are no tradeoffs. For our customers what they tell us is they love the taste. You put that in that White Castle original bun with one perfect pickle and you’ve got a winner.

    Customers are absolutely aware of the Impossible Slider (by brand name). That’s been the partnership that’s been able to brand it that way. It’s something we’ve known since 1921, the home of the original slider, in offering the first Impossible Slider. Absolutely, we’ve benefitted from a lot of good news coverage and people becoming more aware. A lot of people want to sample and try it. We serve omnivores. We have people who come in an order a double cheeseburger with extra bacon and have an Impossible to go along with it as well. It’s got a lot of broad appeal because candidly, the taste is what separates it from the rest of the pack.

    The Response To Our Impossible Sliders Has Been Overwhelming, Says White Castle VP Jamie Richardson
  • Fiverr Is The Everything Store For Digital Services, Says CEO

    Fiverr Is The Everything Store For Digital Services, Says CEO

    “Fiverr is the everything store for digital services,” says Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman. “The way people usually find freelancers is they post on Facebook asking if someone knows a good graphics designer. What we’re doing is we’re making it a one-click experience. There’s no bidding, betting, negotiating. There’s browse, search, buy. It’s an Amazon experience to buy a digital service.”

    Micha Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr, discusses today’s IPO and how Fiverr has become the Amazon for digital services in an interview on CNBC:

    Fiverr Is The Everything Store For Digital Services

    Fiverr connects freelancers with businesses of all sizes. Really, the uniqueness of the platform is that the experience of buying a digital service on Fiverr is very similar to shopping on Amazon. You browse, you search, you find something, you click order, and it’s done. Graphic design is one of our most popular services on the platform. Also popular are content marketing, videography, animation, music services, and marketing and advertising. Anything you can imagine.

    It’s the everything store for digital services. The system helps you productize your offering. You can define what you’re offering, how much time it’s going to take you to deliver, and the asking price. All the buyers have to do is screen through the offerings, find something they like, click order and pay, and they are done.

    It’s An Amazon Experience To Buy a Digital Product

    In the categories in which we operate there is a volume of activity of $100 billion in the US alone. It’s still only a single digit percentage online. It’s a very old-school business. The way people usually find freelancers is they post on Facebook asking if someone knows a good graphics designer. What we’re doing is we’re making it a one-click experience. There’s no bidding, betting, negotiating. There’s browse, search, buy. It’s an Amazon experience to buy a digital service. Nobody has done it before. The average time to make an order on Fiverr is 15 minutes. this is unbeatable. It’s unmatched.

    We take a take out of every transaction. It’s one of the industry-leading take rates of over 26 percent. If you look at the EBITDA margins, you see that they’re shrinking. The way we actually structured the business is that we continue to grow aggressively while shrinking our negative EBITDA. There is a clear path to profitability. We are operating in over 160 countries. Our growth is coming globally from the adoption of freelancing online.

    Our Primary Competitor is Definitely the Offline Market

    Our primary competitor is definitely the offline market. I don’t know if it’s 96 or 97 percent of the activity offline, but we don’t need to eat anyone’s lunch to grow. We just need to move offline activity to the online. The offline freelancing market is massive. we’ve estimated that market to be a hundred billion dollars in the US alone. Europe is 1.5 times bigger than the US. There are over 162 million freelancers between the EU and the US. The opportunity is massive and it’s just starting to come online. This is like 1995 for ecommerce. This is so exciting.

    Fiverr doesn’t hire its freelancers. It’s just the market that connects freelancers with businesses that have their digital needs. The way the marketplace is structured is such where we don’t have any employee-employer relationships. We are not relying on freelancers. We’re just connecting that supply with a demand that comes forward. We’re the platform on top of which they actually conduct their transaction. We just provide the platform to make that happen. It is very different than Uber and Lyft.

    Fiverr Is The Everything Store For Digital Services, Says Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman
  • Jeff Bezos: We Need To Have Billion Dollar Scale Failures

    Jeff Bezos: We Need To Have Billion Dollar Scale Failures

    “At Amazon, we still take risks all the time,” says Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “We encourage it. We talk about failure. We should be failing. Our failures have to grow with the company. We need big failures if we are going to be moving the needle. We need to have billion dollar scale failures. If we are not, we are not swinging hard enough.”

    Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, discusses how to be a successful entrepreneur by being customer obsessed in a conversation at the Amazon re:MARS conference in Las Vegas:

    The Most Important Thing Is To Be Customer Obsessed

    If you want to be an entrepreneur, the most important thing is to be customer obsessed. Don’t satisfy your customers, figure out how to absolutely delight them. That is the number one thing whoever your customers are. Passion. You have got to have some passion for the arena that you are going to develop and work in. Otherwise, you are going to be competing against people who do have compassion for that. They are going to build better products and services.

    You can’t be a mercenary. You have to be a missionary. Missionaries build better products and services. They always win. The mercenaries are just trying to make money. Paradoxically, the missionaries always end up making more money.

    We Need To Have Billion Dollar Scale Failures

    You have to pick something that you actually have a genuine passion for. You have to take risks. You have to be willing to take risks. If you aren’t going to take risks, if you come up with a business idea where there are no risks there, those ideas are probably already being done. There being done well by many many people. So have to have something that might not work. You have to accept that your business is going to be in many ways an experiment. It might fail. That’s okay. That’s what risk is.

    At Amazon, we still take risks all the time. We encourage it. We talk about failure. We should be failing. Our failures have to grow with the company. We need big failures if we are going to be moving the needle. We need to have billion dollar scale failures. If we are not, we are not swinging hard enough.

    Disagree and Commit

    If I have a new idea and I want to see it pursued I do have to build support for it. You need very smart people to embrace the idea and move it forward. We have a framework at Amazon, it’s one of our leadership principals, it’s called disagree and commit. That is extremely useful. After you discussed an idea, you do need to make a decision and move forward. The whole team needs to really commit to that. When I really feel strongly about something and the team disagrees with me I have a helpful phrase that I look to use which is, “I want you to gamble with me on this.”

    The truth is when you are in a position like that nobody knows what the right answer is.  You’re not saying I’m right on this. Go do this. You’re saying I want you to gamble with me on this because I don’t know if it is right either. I disagree and commit all the time. I promise the people when I do it, I’m very clear in saying, “I don’t agree with this. I think it is probably not going to work. But I will never say I told you so and I’m going to be on your team. I will do everything I can to make it work.”

    Broadband Access Is Going To Be a Fundamental Human Need

    A recent big bet (we’ve taken at Amazon) would be Project Kuiper. This is our LEO satellite constellation. The goal here is broadband everywhere. One of the things this does, it’s just the way the systems work, you have equal broadband all over the surfaces of the earth. Not exactly equal, it tends to be a little bit more concentrated toward the poles, unfortunately. You end up servicing the whole world.

    It’s really good because by definition you end up accessing people who are under bandwidth including rural and remote areas. I think you can see going forward that access to broadband is going to be very close to being a fundamental human need as we move forward.

    Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: We Need To Have Billion Dollar Scale Failures
  • How To Promote Your Content When You Don’t Have Money – Neil Patel

    How To Promote Your Content When You Don’t Have Money – Neil Patel

    “You know you need more traffic to your blog posts but you don’t have the money to spend to get those eyeballs,” says online marketing strategist Neil Patel. “What should you do? Today I’m going to teach you five ways to promote your content when you don’t have any money. Have you tried all the basic stuff that most of these marketers, including me, are talking about, and find that you’re not getting any results?”

    Neil Patel, online marketing strategist and founder of Neil Patel Digital, discusses how to promote your content when you don’t have money in his latest YouTube video:

    Tip 1 – Answer Quora Questions

    The first tip I have for you is to answer Quora questions. Quora is such a popular site, one of the most popular sites in the world. There are questions around everything; What is it like to be an Olympic gold medalist? How do you get traffic to a blog? Who is Neil Patel? There are questions on every topic under the sun.

    If you go on Quora, and you start answering all these questions, and you even link out to your blog whenever it’s relevant, you’ll find that you’re going to start getting more and more traffic. Why is this? Well, these Quora posts rank for everything in Google. It’s one of the simplest and easiest ways to get more traffic to your site.

    Who is Neil Patel? - Quora Result on Google Search
    Quora posts rank for everything in Google, Says Neil Patel

    Tip 2 – Go Live On Social Media

    The second tip I have for you is to go live on social media. Even if you don’t have the biggest social following, live videos are super engaging and all these socialites show it to almost all of your subscribers because they want to compete with all the television networks. If you look at people like Tai Lopez, some people may hate on him, but he’s a really smart marketer. When he goes live, he can generate hundreds and hundreds and thousands of dollars in sales, just from his live videos. It’s a smart tactic. Not only is he getting people to go wherever he wants but he’s also generating real revenue from it because a live audience is very captive.

    Tip 3 – Do Video Teasers

    The third tip I have for you is video teasers. If you just bust out your phone and you do a video teaser, talking about what you’re going to release, or this content, or what is new, and why they should check it out, or why they should be patient and wait for the next week, they’re more likely to come the next week and actually read that blog post. You know, Apple, whenever they launch new products, they do this whole event. They create all this mystery. They’re doing videos and conferences, breaking down what they’re going to release in the future. These teasers are a great way to build up the pent up demand for the product right when they launch it, and you can do the same with your content. You just have to create videos that tease people to let them know what’s coming out in the future.

    Tip 4 – Answer Questions On Social Media

    The fourth tip I have for you is to answer questions on social media. Whether it’s Facebook, whether it’s Twitter, people are tweeting, asking questions. Whether it’s groups, it doesn’t matter where it is. If you go there and you respond and help people out, they’re more likely to follow you. Not just on the social web, but they’re also going to follow you on your website. And the beautiful part about this, especially when you do it on sites that are your competitors, you’re going to get more link clicks because when you leave a comment, you can typically link back to your site. When you do this on the social web, you’ll find that you’re getting more followers and that way when you release more content, you’ll get more views. But it’s a very effective strategy, especially when you do it to competitors because they have your ideal audience.

    Tip 5 – Do Direct Outreach

    And last but not least, direct outreach. When you link out to people, let them know that you linked out to them. Just email asking to share your content. You know how many emails I get of people saying, hey Neil, I linked out to you. I love your content. If you like the post, feel free and share it. I don’t share all the time but I do it some of the time. It works, it even works with me. That’s just showing you that outreach, if you take the time, you can get extra shares. Sure, not 100% of the people are going to share your content or link back out to you, but if you do it in quantity, you will get extra traffic from it.

    How To Promote Your Content When You Don’t Have Money – Neil Patel
  • BlockchainWeek NYC 2019 Recap

    BlockchainWeek NYC 2019 Recap

    For the last five years, every spring CoinDesk has been hosting its blockchain technology conference Consensus in New York City. The idea is to bring together the top brands and developers in the cryptocurrency and blockchain spaces to learn what’s new and what’s next. The event has grown to include the surrounding Blockchain Week, which includes both official and unofficial events thanks to the volume of attendees.

    What’s New in Blockchain?

    Cryptocurrency is moving past the toddler stage and people are starting to pay more attention to the underlying blockchain technology as many are looking to make money from blockchain. The CryptoNouveau event was a great place to meet the top thinkers in the blockchain space and learn where they think the technology is going next.

    David Chaum, inventor of eCash, was there representing the company he founded, Elixxir, and to talk about cMix, which uses blockchain to create a secure, anonymous, digital method of communication, payments and app creation and usage. This has the potential to be revolutionary because it couples speed with protection of metadata, something not many blockchain applications can yet claim.

    Jules Miller, partner at IBM Blockchain Ventures and cofounder and parter at Prose Ventures, spoke about IBM’s Blockchain accelerator in her opening remarks. This was followed by a lightning round of short talks by other industry leaders.

    Tomer Sofinzon, founder and CEO of 20|30, spoke about his company’s efforts to create a universal wallet, as well as the Pillar Project, which is an open-sourced, nonprofit blockchain application that will give consumers control over their own personal information and reshape the relationship between consumers and service providers.

    Ryan Feit of SeedInvest discussed how his company is raising funds for highly vetted startups, which began with a movement to change securities laws to allow companies to raise funds online, opening the market to people who had previously lacked access to capital.

    Sebastian Serrano announced Ripio’s launch of its all-in-one fintech platform, which serves South American populations who have traditionally not had access to banking and credit. The platform offers users access to peer-to-peer loans with smart contracts, digital banking and more.

    Additional presenters at this lightning round event included Antonio Brasse of BlockQuake, a cryptocurrency network built on regulation and transparency, and Alex Mashinsky of Celsius Network, a cryptocurrency investing network that guarantees the highest returns on cryptocurrency investments thanks to their internal rules and methodologies. I also met Brian Zisk there and we talked about Chia, an environmentally friendly, enterprise-grade cryptocurrency.

    Consensus: The Big Show, But Not the Only Show

    Last year Consensus was packed. They ran out of room at 8500 people after expecting 4000. As a result, people made plans for auxiliary activities in the area and Consensus was much less crowded. There was a distinct lack of Lamborghinis parked out front, and from what I have been told the conversations were more prevalent and of a higher quality thanks to the lack of overcrowding of the space. 

    While not registered for the main event, I was able to get together with a number of industry professionals, speaking with companies like Tangem, which makes smart bank notes with high grade security and irretrievable private keys to keep a user’s cryptocurrency safe.

    crypto summit
    100x Crypto Summit PHOTO: BRIAN WALLACE

    Blockchain investor, advisor and evangelist Ian Balina spoke at the Consensus 100x Crypto Summit.

    “We believe the bitcoin price has bottomed and we are now entering a bull market with a strong likelihood of surpassing prior bitcoin highs of $19,000,” Balina said. “The initial exchange offering (IEO) trend has been a strong catalyst for the new bull market. Exchanges now have the responsibility of doing due diligence on new token offerings before making them available to their audience. They are regulatory concerns around this in some jurisdictions, but we don’t think the trend will go away. However the investment returns might decrease as the IEO space becomes saturated.”

    Blockchain week is a great opportunity to meet people from all over the world who are working on developments in the blockchain and cryptocurrency spaces, whether you attend official Consensus events or unofficial blockchain week events. Next year promises to be even better.

    This post initially appeared on CMSWire.

  • Your Choice Isn’t College or Oblivion, Says Mike Rowe

    Your Choice Isn’t College or Oblivion, Says Mike Rowe

    “Your choice isn’t college or oblivion. It’s not higher education or alternative education,” says Mike Rowe of the TV show Dirty Jobs. In 2008, Mike created the mikeroweWORKS Foundation to launch a national PR campaign for skilled labor. “There are so many ways to go, from apprenticeships to scholarships to fellowships to community college. All of it is equal. When you promote one form of education at the expense of the others you create the problem that we are having right now.”

    Mike Rowe, of Dirty Jobs and the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, discusses on Good Morning America the need for people to look at all job options, not just college:

    Your Choice Isn’t College or Oblivion

    We have seven million jobs now that are open and the vast majority don’t require a four-year degree. There’s a ton of opportunity that people don’t talk about. What we are talking about instead, unfortunately, is the best path for most people. It’s a cookie cutter approach to how to figure things out. For the last 40 years, that path has been really simple. Get a four-year degree, borrow whatever it takes to get it, and then get out into the world and pursue your dream. What’s happened as a result is the skills gap has gotten wider and the college debt is now approaching $1.6 trillion. And we are still lending money we don’t have to kids who can’t pay it back who are training for jobs that don’t exist anymore. It’s madness when there is so much opportunity around us.

    My foundation looks for people who are willing to hit the reset button, retool, learn skills that are in demand, and get to work. We are in a binary time right now. Everything is this or that. Blue collar or white collar. Left or right. Everything is framed with a false choice. Your choice isn’t college or oblivion. It’s not higher education or alternative education. There are so many ways to go, from apprenticeships to scholarships to fellowships to community college. All of it is equal. When you promote one form of education at the expense of the others you create the problem that we are having right now. It’s fine to push college but you can’t push college by saying if you don’t go over here you are going to wind up with some vocational consolation prize.

    A Job is Not the Proximate Cause of Your Happiness

    The mikeroweWORKS Foundation evolved out of Dirty Jobs. Part of the reason was the cognitive dissonance that occurs when you see somebody doing something that is supposed to make you miserable but instead is making you joyful. Dirty Jobbers as a group were having a ball. People couldn’t understand, why is everybody laughing in the sewer? Why is everybody having such a good time doing these jobs that I’ve been taught will make me sad and unhappy? The reason is that you’ve been lied to most of your life. A job is not the proximate cause of your happiness. You are.

    We all want to be passionate about what we do. But why would we wait until we’re doing the magical thing that allows us to be passionate? You don’t follow your passion you bring it with you. That was one of the big lessons from Dirty Jobbers. These people were passionate about what they were doing but they didn’t sit down and say what do I have to do to be happy? I need this job. I need this kind of mate. I need to live in this sort of zip code. I need this kind of education. You spend all your life checking boxes that basically give you permission to feel good about the thing you ought to feel good about right now.

    Your Choice Isn’t College or Oblivion, Says Mike Rowe


  • FCC Chairman to Robocallers: This Is Not Going To Stand!

    FCC Chairman to Robocallers: This Is Not Going To Stand!

    FCC Chairman Ajit Pai blasted robocallers today in an interview on Fox Business. He said that the FCC has taken aggressive regulatory action and has told the Justice Department that robocalling in one of the FCC’s top consumer protection priorities: “We need you to make this an issue to send a signal to all of the robocallers out there, even the ones who are beyond our shores, that this is not going to stand for America consumers.”

    Ajit Pai, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, discusses how the FCC is aggressively fighting the annoying and time wasting robocall industry in an interview on Fox Business:

    FCC To Robocallers: This is Not Going To Stand

    There are two different parts of our plan (to combat robocalls). First, is taking aggressive regulatory action. We have told the industry that we expect them to adopt what is called call authentication. That is essentially a digital fingerprint for every phone call this year. If they don’t, the FCC will take action to make sure that they do.

    Secondly, in terms of enforcement, we have imposed fines (totalling $205 million since 2015) and we have referred those cases to the Department of Justice which is in charge of collecting those fines. We have emphasized to the Department of Justice that this is one of our top consumer protection priorities. We need you to make this an issue to send a signal to all of the robocallers out there, even the ones who are beyond our shores, that this is not going to stand for America consumers.

    FCC Chairman to Robocallers: This Is Not Going To Stand!


  • We’re Trying to Build the Amazon Prime of Rental, Says Rent the Runway CEO

    We’re Trying to Build the Amazon Prime of Rental, Says Rent the Runway CEO

    “You will see the continuous expansion over the next year into many different categories,” says Rent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman. The company just raised additional funds at a $1 billion valuation. “Anything that you do not use every single day, we want to make it fiscally irresponsible for someone to not have a subscription to Rent the Runway. We’re trying to build the Amazon Prime of rental.”

    Jennifer Hyman, CEO of Rent the Runway, discusses in an interview on CNBC how her company benefits from the growing sharing economy and how ultimately she envisions Rent the Runway becoming the Amazon Prime of rental:

    We Benefit From the Advancement in the Sharing Economy

    It’s been 10 years since we’ve been working hard to pioneer this new form of dynamic ownership. Ten years ago we were not a darling of the industry and really had to partner with designers to show them that this was an entirely new customer base for them and a new revenue stream. This is just how young people are thinking about ownership across the board. I actually think we benefit from the advancements in the sharing economy. If you think about how this concept of dynamic ownership where we have unlimited choice and the ability to use whatever product we want whenever we want it, our digital worlds have already moved there.

    That’s how we consume entertainment. That’s how we consume music. The idea that you would have that closet in the cloud for the physical world and that form of dynamic ownership, the Millennial Generation Z consumer is so ready to adopt this behavior. That’s what we’ve seen since we launched our subscription, just this dramatic growth and acceleration, not only in how many users we have but in how frequently they use the product. They’re using it 120 days of the year with the unlimited subscription, which is now 70 percent of our revenue.

    Dynamic Ownership Applies to the Closet, the Home, and Beyond

    Think about how frequently millennials are moving and how your home has become this new bastion of self-expression. Your home used to be a private space and now because of social media, it’s as public as you taking photos of yourself every single day. So the ability to continuously dynamically change your home and have new items arriving we really think that this idea of dynamic ownership applies to the closet, the home, and beyond.

    Think about all the things that you don’t have to use every single day and bringing that into the physical world and think about the sustainability of this as well. The millennial and younger customer really cares about the fact that there’s a huge amount of waste. Over 80 percent of the closet is not used regularly. So to create a new contract with the customer where she could have the variety that she wants but she doesn’t have to accumulate all of this stuff that she doesn’t use. You couple that with the fact that this younger generation is living in cities where you don’t even have the space to house all of the extra stuff that you might have put in your garage.

    We’re Trying to Build the Amazon Prime of Rental

    It (revenue) really depends on the item. That metric changes every year based on our cost to serve, which goes down every year. It also matters what cost we procure the inventory at. We started a model last year which is a platform where brands are giving this inventory on consignment and we actually are revenue sharing with them on that inventory. It’s our own version of fulfilled by Amazon and it’s now a new revenue monetization stream for the 600 brands that we work with.

    You will see the continuous expansion over the next year into many different categories. Anything that you do not use every single day, we want to make it fiscally irresponsible for someone to not have a subscription to Rent the Runway. We’re trying to build the Amazon Prime of rental. Rent the Runway is primarily a logistics company. What we really do is we restore physical goods to perfect condition before we send them out to the next customer. We now know all of these different data points about any given fabric, how to restore it to perfect condition and how to maximize the turns while it still looks brand-new.


  • Direct to Consumer is a Fundamental Platform Shift, Says Tim Armstrong

    Direct to Consumer is a Fundamental Platform Shift, Says Tim Armstrong

    Direct to Consumer, or DTC, is a fundamental platform shift, according to former AOL and Verizon digital properties CEO Tim Armstrong. “There have been a couple times in my career where there has been what is basically a fundamental platform shift,” noted Armstrong. “I felt like direct-to-consumer was something that was going to be a platform shift. Not for probably the obvious reasons, but some of the reasons that were less obvious, but things that I thought were important for the future.”

    Tim Armstrong, former AOL and Verizon Oath CEO and current founder and CEO of The DTX Company, discusses how direct to consumer (DTC) ecommerce businesses represent a “fundamental platform shift,” in an interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher and Jason Del Rey at An Evening with Code Commerce in Las Vegas:

    Direct to Consumer is a Fundamental Platform Shift

    About a year and a half ago I started spending a lot more time just on where the underlying infrastructure in the world was changing around the internet and mobile and all the things that we’ve talked about for years. One of the things that stood out to me was there’s been a couple times in my career where there has been what is basically a fundamental platform shift. I felt like direct-to-consumer was something that was going to be a platform shift. Not for probably the obvious reasons, but some of the reasons that were less obvious, but things that I thought were important for the future.

    One was data management, just in terms of things like GDPR and similar things that were happening. I think the power and data is going to shift back more towards the consumer side over the next 10 or 20 years. I thought that would fuel direct to consumer. The second is that the product development cycles that were happening at the direct the consumer companies were much faster and much deeper than what was happening in the normal channels of product development. I think that’s another thing that over a 5, 10, 15, 20 year period these companies are going to have a real advantage in terms of how they develop products and distribute them.

    Customer Communication: Two Way or No Way

    The third thing was just the two-way communication. At DTX we have a growing team, but one of the things we say is two way or no way. Two-way communication with the customer having a direct relationship with companies. The last thing is how the relationships between consumers and companies are going to change. This seems like a really important trend and probably there’s a really big opportunity here. There may not be but that that’s what got me interested in it.

    What we’re doing right now is really kind of two simple things. One is we’re putting investments directly into DTC companies and we’ve done a number of those and we’ll do a few more. The second thing we’re doing is spending a lot of time on an acronym that I hear all the time now which is CAC, customer acquisition cost. Really, on the operating side of the business what we’re doing is not CAC, it’s CRAC, which is an unfortunate acronym, but it’s customer revenue and acquisition cost. Having the balance on the equation of those two things we’re going to be testing things in 2019, some experiences and and other things that will hopefully put the R back in the CAC equation.

    DTC Might Re-Engineer the Entire Way Commerce is Done

    All of my experiences and basically all the stuff I did on the media side was all two-way relationships. The more time I started to think about really what happened was the reason I thought about DTC’s. I started to go back to those memories based on meeting a lot of the DTC founders and of coaching CEOs for DTC founders. I started to think about things like GDPR and some of the things that are happening underneath the surface that I think is going to change long term. I thought wow, this might actually re-engineer the entire way commerce is done and this is a really interesting opportunity.

    There are a bunch of spaces online now you can look at where people are piling money and where there’s probably over investment. But DTC overall, if you went product by product, category by category, industry by industry, in DTC, there are so many companies that you’ve never heard of and rightly so. The Casper’s, the Warby Parker’s, those are amazing companies and they get a ton of notoriety. There are also about 10,000 other categories. They don’t have ten people, they might have one or two, but they’re doing interesting things in them.

    People ask us all the time, is there a DTC ceiling, these companies can only get so big? That may be true but I don’t think it’s true. What will happen is the aggregate of all these things together. If you have ten thousand DTC brands and they’re $10 million or $50 million or $500 million they may not have to look like Google and Facebook right now, but when you add up all of them together over time and what’s likely to happen with a condensing of the market in the next 10 or 20 years (it is significant).

    DTC Could Be an Amazing Transformation

    There are two things that stand out to me. One is every major press article around traditional commerce tends to be negative. Not all the time, but there’s so much angst around what’s happening in retail overall. A lot of it is deserved, but there are a lot of interesting things happening in traditional retail. The second one is the DTC categories that are super hot, the four or five super hot categories, get 90 percent of the coverage and press. What we’re seeing and we have people coming in offices all day doing DTC and there’s just an amazing amount of ingenuity, invention, and innovation happening in different categories.

    I think again it’s one of these things you’re going to wake up 5, 7, 10, or 15 years from now and say, wow, this was like a really amazing transformation. It’s going to be for the reasons that these companies all talk to their consumers all the time. The amount of product innovation that’s happening is truly tremendous. If you take the Beauty category or any category and you dig into all of the DTC brands and micro categories within, if you went to a Procter & Gamble or Unilever and look at all of their products, each one of their products has multiple DTC companies trying to innovate that space.

    I think you’ll end up seeing the recreation of really large consolidated companies. It may not happen for years, but I think it will happen. The reason is not because they were cheaper than what happens in the Unilever Procter & Gamble it’s because the product innovation is hard. Having spent so much time now with DTC companies, the amount of product innovation that happens at that those companies with direct consumer interactions seems to me to be deeper and faster than it is at most other traditional companies.


  • How to Offer Free Tools to Drive Email Collection and Leads

    How to Offer Free Tools to Drive Email Collection and Leads

    You can try a lot of stuff, but what used to work to collect emails doesn’t work as well now, says internet marketing experts Neil Patel & Eric Siu on their Marketing School podcast. What does work effectively they say are free tools. Entrepreneurs can even buy cheap scripts or full websites with these tools and rebrand them to drive email collection and leads.

    Neil Patel & Eric Siu, discussed the tactics they use to drive email collection on their Marketing School podcast (listen below):

    High-End Popup Software

    Let’s start with popup software. There are a lot of different email popup software tools out there. There is Bounce Exchange which charges thousands of dollars, and possibly as much as $10,000 a month. It’s a done-for-you service. The benefit is that they do all of the optimization and conversion stuff for you. (Neil Patel at one time used them successfully.)

    There is something else similar to Balance Exchange. It’s also a very done-for-you service, which means they will find out what your offers are and they will design the popups for you and they will manage it based on your desired conversion rate. This business is called Exit Intelligence. It’s somewhat more cost-effective at around $1,500 – $3,000 a month. It’s something that we are experimenting with right now.

    Email Collection Tools Don’t Work Like They Used To

    You can try a lot of stuff, but what used to work to collect emails doesn’t work as well now. You will find that exit popups don’t work as well as they used to. They still work, but just not as well. Content upgrades don’t work as well as they used to. Blocking out content and requiring a name and email to read it works well. I used to even block it out and make you share the content which worked well too.

    I found quizzes to work really well because you can collect leads at the same time. LeadQuizzes is another solution that you can use. In general, if you want to collect emails you have to figure out a better mousetrap. I don’t know what the better mousetrap is because it is going to vary by business. What I mean by that is that exit popups, content upgrades, quizzes, none of them work as well as they used to. You have to truly find something that is unique.

    Offer Free Tools to Effectively Collect Emails

    My version of it now is going to be to create a free tool and give it to people who have to register with their email address. That’s how you are going to effectively collect emails in 2019. It’s going to have to be something like a calculator or tool, something that is added value to people that are used to paying for it and who will gladly give you their email address.

    You don’t necessarily need to build a tool either. There is a site called 1Kprojects where you can actually buy tools. Developers make a lot of tools and end up throwing them away. Instead, they post them on this site to sell cheaply. You can also just buy scripts even cheaper, sometimes as low as $10 – $20. For whatever industry you are in you can literally buy a script or pre-made tool that you can leverage for email collection. It’s not hard to build a WordPress plugin either. It can be a basic tool.

    How Frank Kern is Driving Revenue From YouTube

    You know Frank Kern, the marketer. He’s all about the email before (content access). I’m actually observing what he is doing on YouTube where he’s going live every single day and he drives people to KernClass.com and people opt-in there. What happens is he not only collects the email addresses but he is actually driving revenue from those live videos too. He’s going live everyday and in a 30 day period he did over $350K.