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  • Facebook Showing Huge Monetization Potential for Non-News Feed Apps

    Facebook Showing Huge Monetization Potential for Non-News Feed Apps

    According to Rich Greenfield, media and technology analyst at BTIG, Facebooks is starting to show huge monetization potential for apps that are not the news feed. “The reality is that as you look out more broadly over the next few years Facebook has got a lot of different initiatives that are at the very early stages of monetization,” Greenfield said. “They are just scratching the surface of Messenger, WhatsApp, Facebook Watch, and IGTV, which is the Instagram video platform.”

    Rich Greenfield, media and technology analyst at BTIG recently talked on Bloomberg about newer monetization opportunities on Facebook that may eventually even surpass the core news feed app:

    Facebook is Dominating Mobile Time Spent

    I think it’s less about this war between Apple and Facebook or YouTube versus Facebook, the reality is Facebook is one of the dominant companies in terms of mobile time spent. Despite all this fear that people are abandoning Facebook or not using its application, the reality is that there is a billion and a half people using Facebook every single day. Not all the other applications, but Facebook itself.

    800 Million People Using Facebook Marketplace

    There are 800 million people using Facebook Marketplace. I have never used the Marketplace tab and I don’t know anyone who has used the Marketplace tab, but they’re saying there are 800 million people using that Marketplace tab to transact. They actually highlighted cars as becoming a place of real transfer where people buying and selling cars.

    There are just so many things that Facebook is doing that are not always obvious to someone in the US. There are places in the world like Indonesia where Facebook Marketplace is the default way that goods are bought and sold. There are really some big differences globally such as the use of Messenger versus iMessage overseas and not all of that is apparent to a US investor.

    Huge Monetization Potential for Non-News Feed Apps

    The reality is that as you look out more broadly over the next few years Facebook has got a lot of different initiatives that are at the very early stages of monetization. They are just scratching the surface of Messenger, WhatsApp, Facebook Watch, and IGTV, which is the Instagram video platform. These are at the very early stages. What you do see is tremendous engagement across the family of Facebook apps and that creates a big long-term opportunity.

    That’s what the Street is excited about, that they are just beginning to give hint of monetization of these things beyond the core news feed.

  • Tom Patterson: Tommy John Launched Out of a Problem That I Wanted to Solve

    Tom Patterson: Tommy John Launched Out of a Problem That I Wanted to Solve

    Like many businesses, Tommy John was launched out of a personal need to solve a problem. Tom Patterson, CEO of Tommy John, was inspired to start his now wildly successful clothing company Tommy John because he couldn’t understand why nobody was doing anything to fix the undershirt and underwear problem he was having.

    Tom Patterson, CEO & Founder of Tommy John, recently talked with IAB at the Direct Brand Summit (DBS) about why he started the company with his wife Erin Fujimoto, who is Co-Founder & Head of Merchandising at Tommy John:

    Launched Out of a Problem That Needed Solving

    My background is I’m a former medical device salesman. I was like Will Smith and The Pursuit of Happiness selling medical devices. As my suiting and dress shirting was becoming more fitted and tailored I couldn’t figure out why all the undershirts in the market were designed to be form-fitting for a UPS box. I’d have to tuck them into my underwear, I’d buy a size bigger so they’re longer and they’d bunch up and shrink and stretch out and turn yellow.

    I ended up drawing a sketch with my limited art skills which took about an hour. Erin (Erin Fujimoto, co-founder) and I went to the garment district in downtown Los Angeles, bought some fabric, took it to a dry cleaner who had a tailor inside and said could you sew some prototypes together. Ten shirts later I sent them to friends and they loved them. We ended up making 200 shirts and then built a two-page PayPal checkout website in April of 2008 Tommy John was launched, really out of a problem that I had that I wanted to solve and then learned that many men suffer from the same issue.

    I Didn’t Want to Be This Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda Guy

    Launching Tommy John came from a personal need. I had lawn mowing businesses and snow blowing businesses that I had started before. Then I was watching The Big Idea, a TV  show with Donny Deutsch, it was really Shark Tank before Shark Tank and a lot of entrepreneurs had ideas and I thought what’s my idea? This undershirt was the idea.

    Fast forward to Fall of 2008, I was laid off my medical sales job and I read an article that there’s no better time to start a company than during a recession. I didn’t want to be this coulda, woulda, shoulda guy, ten years later having these regrets. What if I would have started this company, I had this idea, I wasn’t married yet, we didn’t have kids, didn’t own a home, and I thought there’s nothing really to lose. I can always go back and get another medical sales job but I didn’t want to have any regrets.

    I called a buyer at Neiman Marcus. My background was strategic selling and I was trained on how to get to decision makers, but instead of selling a medical device I was now selling underwear. Obviously, not as scientific and not as life-saving, some argue it maybe is, and we were launched into Neiman Marcus in 2009.

    Tommy John’s DNA is All About Comfort

    I thought at some point a business idea would come to me and it happened to be when I was at a hospital doing a presentation and everything was tucked in, but my undershirt was up to here like a midriff. Why doesn’t anyone fix the undershirt problem? Then it led to my underwear riding up. Why doesn’t anyone make underwear that stays in place through movement? It really is all rooted in comfort and I think Tommy John’s DNA is all about comfort. I think what you see in the market today with women wearing leggings everywhere and flats taking over high heels people just want to be comfortable.

  • James Patterson Says He is Releasing New Book ‘The Chef’ on Facebook Messenger

    James Patterson Says He is Releasing New Book ‘The Chef’ on Facebook Messenger

    James Patterson is releasing his next book “The Chef” on Facebook Messenger. It will be a hybrid combining the written word with video and photography in an attempt to appeal to the millions of millennials that are on Facebook and tend not to read literature.

    James Patterson, author of “The Chef” discussed this novel marketing strategy of releasing a hybrid book with video in an interview on CNBC:

    It’s About Drawing Attention to Books

    This is about just drawing attention to publishing to books. Books don’t get as much so we’re trying new things. What this is and what’s exciting about it to me is you read the book and then it goes to film and you read the book and it goes to film and you read the book and it goes to film. It’s kind of like a bookie, a book meets a movie, and it’s free on Facebook Messenger.

    Why did I do that? Why would I give away a book for free? It just draws more attention to books which I think publishers need to do more of that. It’s a good story and you’ve never ever seen anything like it. It’s just so different.

    Combining Film, Photography, Books, and Text

    I think that a lot of people go out to Messenger and it’s about a three-hour experience, the whole thing, and that’ll be a success. We’re gonna put it out in book form in February and it will be longer and available at a regular price.

    Literally, you’re reading text and then all of a sudden you see film of what you were reading about. Then it’ll come back and then it might go to photography the next thing and then it might go to newspaper headlines, so it’s just different. This just goes on for about three hours and you can watch it on your phone obviously or on your computer.

    I love that idea of combining film, photography, books, and text. We went to Facebook and they said, yeah we’re in. They thought it was an exciting thing to do and different and they need content obviously. Well, I shouldn’t say what they need, that’s for Mark and Sheryl and I don’t know, but I think they need content, so here we are.

    We Need Publishers That Are Willing to Experiment

    I think it’s a mixed bag. I think independent bookstores are doing better. The whole retail business is in flux, obviously, because so much is done online. So hopefully, Barnes & Noble will rebound and I think they will. We miss Borders.

    Maybe 20 years from now, who knows, maybe it’ll all be done online, but for the moment in this country we really need literature and that can’t be done online right now. We need good publishers that are willing to experiment and do things that are unusual.

    Amazon Has Lightened Up Which is Great

    I think Amazon has lightened up which I think is great. They’re in a position to do a lot of good. Initially, the sort of back and forth between them and publishers I didn’t think was healthy. I do think we need strong publishers and I think we need bookstores out in the world right now. As they say, that may change.

    I’ve changed my tune a little bit. I think they’re doing a better job now, there isn’t that back and forth thing that they were having with publishers. I like that Jeff is giving away a lot of money, I think that’s good.

    Facebook Messenger… Yay.

  • Ethan Allen CEO: Brick and Mortar by Itself is Not Relevant

    Ethan Allen CEO: Brick and Mortar by Itself is Not Relevant

    Ethan Allen CEO Farooq Kathwari made a bold point for a furniture retailer in a recent interview, following their quarterly earnings announcement: Brick and mortar by itself is not relevant.

    “Today we know that brick and mortar by itself is not relevant unless you are in a position to provide service,” Kathwari said. “Providing an interior design service is a great advantage and that’s what we are focused on.”

    Kathwari says the key is to use online not just for sales but also for customer outreach.

    Farooq Kathwari, chairman, president, and chief executive officer at Ethan Allen talks about how the company has made brick and mortar relevant again:

    Brick and Mortar by Itself is Not Relevant

    I discussed in our earnings call about the fact that today you have to differentiate yourself. You have to be in a position to be relevant. We have at Ethan Allen 1,200 interior designers that work for us in North America and about 500 internationally. We have 200 design centers. These 200 design centers are like brick and mortar.

    Today we know that brick and mortar by itself is not relevant unless you are in a position to provide service. Providing an interior design service is a great advantage and that’s what we are focused on.

    Less than 5 Percent of Sales are Online

    We absolutely are trying to appeal to millennials online. However, our online strategy is a bit different. We have today over 600 of our interior designers chatting online. So we are online. Our designers are working with clients and then bringing them into the design centers because we want them to see the product. We want them to experience it because this is not selling small stuff or toys, this is a serious purchase. Our online is very active and we are bringing people in.

    Our advertising is more in the traditional mediums and the digital mediums. We spend a fair amount on direct mail to about 2 million households a month. Digital mediums are strong. A combination of the two is very relevant. One has to do that.

  • Kynetic CEO Michael Rubin: We Owe All of Our Success to Amazon

    Kynetic CEO Michael Rubin: We Owe All of Our Success to Amazon

    Kynetic CEO Michael Rubin says that they owe all of their success to Amazon. “I owe all of our success to Amazon because we are such a big believer in what they were doing, a completely differentiative business model,” Rubin said. “What we’re doing is really all about vertical commerce.”

    Michael Rubin, CEO of Kynetic which also owns Fanatics, Rue Gilt Groupe, and ShopRunner and is one of the largest privately held companies in the United States, recently discussed how his companies have become so successful in an interview with Jim Cramer of Mad Money:

    What I See is How Much Opportunity There is In China

    What I see as an entrepreneur is how much opportunity there is in China. When I went there it’s one of those things you had to see to believe it. We had 45 million people watch our preseason basketball game. Think about that, 45 million people watching a preseason basketball game! That’s like half of a Super Bowl rating. That’s home rabid the basketball fans are in China.

    So for me, I think we have nothing but growth opportunity in China. We’re just launching Fanatics there. It’s a massive opportunity and we think we could build a multi-billion dollar business there. I couldn’t be more bullish on the opportunity.

    I Owe All of Our Success to Amazon

    Fanatics is a really exciting business. I’ll break this down really simply for you. I had a core belief that Amazon and Alibaba we’re going to control ecommerce everywhere in the world. So if you have that belief, you’ve got two options, completely differentiate yourself or go out of business. I’m not a guy who wants to go out of business so you’ve got to completely differentiate yourself.

    People say all the time, “How do you feel about Amazon?” I owe all of our success to Amazon because we are such a big believer in what they were doing, a completely differentiative business model. What we’re doing is really all about vertical commerce. We design, develop, and sell directly to the consumer most of the products that we have, so it’s a completely different business. Think about it like an H&M or a Zara, but in the sports license business and mostly online.

    Kynetic is All About Verticality

    We’re designing the jersey, well actually in the case of the jersey, Nike designs the jersey, but going forward we’re actually gonna manufacture the jersey and sell directly to the consumer. But I’ll tell you, just over the Super Bowl specifically, we sold two and a half million units of Eagles merchandise. Two and a half millions units of Eagles merchandise within a few weeks after the Super Bowl and we design those products, we manufacture those products, we ship them directly to the consumer.

    Because of the verticality, the consumer gets a wider assortment of merchandise, they get anything they want, they get it more quickly, and the leagues and teams make more money. We are also using that data to better communicate with the fans, so it’s a win-win for everyone.

    If you really think about the sports license business and if you think about the sports leagues, what a league wants and what a team wants is to have the best marketing brand in the world. Nike is this incredible brand, but they don’t wake up every day and go to bed every night thinking about how do I maximize every sale in the licensed sports business. So what the leagues did was smart, they said let’s split this from one set of rights to two sets of rights. Let’s work with Nike to be this incredible marketing partner and then really use it to drive the Nike brand and the NFL brand. At the same time let’s work with Fanatics to drive transactions. Now you’ve got two companies instead of one really growing the business as much as possible.

    We Made the Businesses What They Are Today

    For us, the truth be told and people ask this all the time, “Was eBay smart for selling the businesses? First, eBay was very focused, they didn’t want to be in the owned inventory business. Number two, these were teeny companies. When I bought Fanatics back from eBay it was a 250 million dollar company. It’s going to do $2.3 billion dollars this year. It has a completely different strategy. When we bought back Rue la la from eBay it was a $200 million business, then we bought Gilt and now it’s close to a billion-dollar business. ShopRunner didn’t have $100 million in transactions and next year it’s going to do three or four billion dollars in transactions.

    We took these businesses, we’ve developed the strategies, we’ve evolved them, and we’ve made them into what they are today. And Here’s the most exciting thing, we’re just getting going.

    My Loyalty is All About Who Makes Us the Most Money

    Other than the Sixers my loyalty is all about who makes us the most money, so I’m very easy to swap teams. If I own the Panthers I would be rooting to destroy the Eagles. I mean I love Jeffrey, he’s my buddy, but business is business and sports is sports. You’re there for one reason which is to win. I actually always laugh when people come up to me before a game and say, “Hey good luck.” I wish I could tell them good luck, but I’m like for the next three hours I hope you die. I love you before the game and I love you after the game, but there’s no love during the game.

  • SiriusXM CEO Jim Meyer: Audio is Thriving Like Never Before

    SiriusXM CEO Jim Meyer: Audio is Thriving Like Never Before

    It’s been an eventful quarter for SiriusXM, attaining their highest ever quarter of revenue at $1.47 billion and their highest ever adjusted EBITDA at $589 million.

    In the earning call SiriusXM CEO Jim Meyer talked about adding 300,000 net new self-pay subs in the third quarter, Amazon partnership, Pandora Acquisition, Connected Vehicle initiatives paying off, and how it’s going with Automatic Labs, which they acquired last year.

    SiriusXM CEO Jim Meyer opening statement during 2018 Q3 Earnings Call:

    Thrilled With Third Quarter Results

    I can’t think of a more exciting time for all of us at SiriusXM and I’m thrilled with the results we were able to deliver in the third quarter.

    With this momentum, I’m once again pleased to increase our guidance for 2018 subscribers, revenue and EBITDA growth. We are driving more subscribers through a bigger enabled fleet and maintaining our strong content lineup as you would expect us, both of which position the company for tremendous future success.

    But we’re going even further with our proposed acquisition of Pandora Media, our investments in 360L, our next-generation in-vehicle platform and our vastly expanded push to drive engagement outside of the car with better streaming apps, including our new marketing agreement with Amazon.

    Added 300,000 Net New Self-Pay Subscribers

    SiriusXM added about 300,000 net new self-pay subs in the third quarter, similar to the level we attained in last year’s third quarter. We overcame the headwind inherent to a bigger base by achieving one of our lowest ever churn rates for any third quarter and our self-pay base now stands at 28.5 million subscribers with total paid subscribers reaching 33.7 million.

    I’m thrilled we attained our highest ever quarter of revenue at $1.47 billion, our highest ever adjusted EBITDA at $589 million and our highest ever EBITDA margin, reaching 40% for the first time. We attained this margin by coupling strong revenue growth with equally impressive expense management.

    Auto sales continued at a high level in the third quarter, with a SAAR of about 16.9 million and I’m hearing in my conversations with the OEMs, they expect solid numbers to finish out this year. Our OEM relationships remain strong. Since the start of the third quarter alone, we extended agreements with Audi, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, and Volvo. As you might expect, with these OEMs and others, we are planning the future of our service in their vehicles well into the 2020s.

    We are receiving higher penetration commitments at some OEMs, more firm 360L deployment schedules and in some cases, improved financial terms. Car buyers love SiriusXM and OEMs have recognized this by agreeing to prominently place us in the dash for many years to come.

    Next year, we will make meaningful progress on additional 360L rollouts as we cycle into the 2020 model year. We prefer to let our OEM friends make their own announcements and I expect they will be doing that as we approach these higher deployments in the back half of 2020.

    Making Tangible Progress with Connected Vehicle Services

    A few years ago when SiriusXM began to invest in the connected vehicle services business, I told you it would be a marathon, not a sprint. And now, you can see us making tangible progress in ramping our CV services unit, which provides safety, security and convenience features to consumers at 12 different automotive brands. We are now achieving strong double-digit revenue growth here and seeing positive cash flow contributions from this business.

    Several OEMs, including Fiat Chrysler, Nissan, and Toyota, are ramping penetration of our CV services in their vehicles and we can’t be more thrilled at how this long-term investment is now paying off. This is yet another way that we also remain important to OEMs as they assess their entertainment and connectivity ecosystems.

    At Automatic Labs, which we acquired last year, we have an aftermarket solution to enable smart services in almost any car on the road. And here, we are also following a very deliberate strategy. Automatic recently launched a new Dealer Program to significantly grow our distribution and it’s already live at several pilot dealerships. This program enables dealers to offer car buyers three years of free crash alert and connected main services as well as free premium services like roadside assistance for six months.

    We expect dealers will recognize the opportunity to improve their long-term relationships with their customers and hopefully encourage repeat buyers. I’ve always been a student in the importance of a good distribution model. For years, the OEM market has served SiriusXM extremely well, first in the new channel, then in the used and significant growth opportunities still exist for us with the OEMs. But with the ubiquity of smartphones and the growing population of connected devices like smart speakers, enormous new opportunities to consume audio are being created.

    Audio is Thriving Like Never Before

    Audio is thriving like never before. This has created opportunities for many new businesses to flourish and for existing businesses like ours to evolve and grow in new directions. And let me reiterate, this is not a zero-sum game. The entire pie of audio consumption is actually growing. Clearly, we remain focused on extending our winning position in the vehicle, but we are also following through on our efforts to drive engagement and subscribers out of the car as well.

    When SiriusXM’s existing subscribers use our service elsewhere, it’s bound to increase the value proposition and make our relationship stickier. And by deploying our unmatched content lineup across improved apps and ever more connected devices, we now have an opportunity to grow with customers who may want a subscription that isn’t tied to a vehicle.

    There’s More to Come Between SiriusXM and Amazon

    In June 2017, we first launched the SiriusXM Alexa skill set to enable our service on Amazon’s Echo devices. It’s clear to me that audio on these smart speakers just clicks. It works beautifully. We immediately found traction with hundreds of thousands of our subscribers rushing to use the service on Amazon’s devices via the easy-to-use Alexa’s voice interface.

    As we began to contemplate a further push out of the car, part of our Bring Us Home campaign, we knew that collaborating with a skilled distributor like Amazon could drive a significant lift to our service outside of the car. And Amazon knows that diverse audio program is probably the biggest value driver today in the smart speaker universe.

    Last week, we announced a new promotion that allows existing Echo owners to easily obtain a free trial of SiriusXM. We are also bundling a free third-generation Echo Dot with six months or greater service commitments to our streaming-only or All Access plans. We are thrilled to be working with a dynamic company like Amazon. And importantly, we’re not just present on their platform, but actively cooperating with them to cross-promote and market to their base.

    I’ve always said I just want people to listen to our service wherever they want, however they want and it has to be easy. There’s more to come between SiriusXM and Amazon as we think of additional ways to extend this relationship. So, stay tuned.

    Creating the Best Audio Programming Available

    All of these efforts in technology and distribution would be for naught without our creative team, all of whom who work tirelessly for our subscribers, casting a wide net to capture and create the best audio programming available. We continue to launch specially created music channels from major artists that have proven to be a hit with our listeners such as Dave Matthews Band Radio. We presented fiery live performances just for subscribers like The Killers in the Hamptons, curated a special channel all summer long from The Beach Boys and then topped it off by reuniting them for the first time in years for a Town Hall in Hollywood.

    We’ve added provocative talent in talk and sports with a daily show from CNN’s Chris Cuomo, where callers can reach him directly, a new show from Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson, the return of Brett Favre’s very popular show on our NFL channel and we’ve added a new program highlighting women in sports.

    And while we know that sports fans love us, we work harder than ever to get them closer to the teams they follow. For that, we have just launched two exclusive sports channels, SiriusXM Big Ten Radio, and SiriusXM Big 12 Radio, that will deliver fans and alumni across the country in-depth access to Big Ten and Big 12 focus sports, talk and news plus extensive live game coverage.

    These channels join SiriusXM’s unparalleled lineup of college sports programming, which now features the all-college sports channel, ESPNU Radio, plus 24/7 channels focused on each of the Power Five athletic conferences, ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC. Quite honestly, with the result – with the recent addition of these conference channels, we dominate college sports coverage.

    A Business That is Humming Along and Throws Off Cash

    SiriusXM clearly has a great collection of content to match its excellence business model. The company’s high monetization and high variable margins let us make more and more cash flow as we grow bigger. This is a business that is humming along and it throws off cash in a highly predictable way that investors love and we continue to give that cash back to stockholders, $334 million of share repurchases in the third quarter plus nearly $50 million of dividends because after all, it’s your money.

    Let me be crystal clear about this. Nothing is changing in our capacity or our commitment to continue making significant capital returns to our stockholders for years to come, but we’re also investing in future platforms, hiring talented data scientists and software developers and constantly seeking out new content our subscribers will love. All this we do and we’ll keep doing.

    Goal is to Link Non-Converting Customers Back to Pandora

    This quarter, I’m pleased we were able to make a much bigger step towards setting the future path of our company with our proposed acquisition of Pandora Media. Over the years, Pandora has built a huge user base of approximately 70 million Americans and scaled $1-billion-plus advertising business.

    Over the past year, Roger Lynch and his team have taken important steps, so that Pandora’s business will thrive in the future. By sitting on the board for the past year, we’ve learned a tremendous amount about Pandora’s business and we have concluded we can do many things better together versus apart. Number one is the ability to cross-promote across the two platforms that could come from sharing of listening data and contact data.

    In addition, at SiriusXM, we are running about 23 million trials in new and used cars this year. And the truth is the flip side of our conversion statistics will tell you that most people don’t want to pay for radio at the end of the day. I feel there is a strong opportunity if we can link non-converters back to a Pandora or maybe a Pandora with a bit more content in a way that makes our combined business bigger, better and more profitable. There are many ways we believe that one plus one will exceed two very quickly and we plan to give you additional color on that over the next few months.

    Last Thursday, we filed for Hart-Scott approval of the Pandora acquisition. This morning, the go-shop period of our deal with Pandora expired uneventfully. We’re planning to get together and sharpen our pencils on our integration plan very soon. We and Pandora expect to file our S-4, which includes the proxy statement and prospectus with the SEC in the next few days as Pandora moves towards a stockholder vote later this year. We continue to expect to close in the first quarter.

    Last week, while I was out in Oakland for a Pandora board meeting, I had the privilege of speaking with a large group of Pandora’s talented employees. It was fantastic to talk about our shared future, what we can do with all of our financial resources, vast troves of data, unmatched content, enormous user bases and some of the most talented people in radio and technology. I am confident that together, these two companies will be even stronger.

    In the meantime, it’s full speed ahead at SiriusXM with a laser focus on reaching or exceeding our new higher 2018 guidance, exactly as you would hope and expect.

  • MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and His Story of Hope

    MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and His Story of Hope

    The Inventor and CEO of MyPillow, Mike Lindell, was at a Trump rally in Houston tonight where he talked passionately and from his heart about his past drug addiction and how he feels that MyPillow is a platform for hope.

    Mike Lindell also announced a new website and program that will soon be launched called the Lindell Recovery Network that will match drug addicts with stories of hope designed to motivate addicts to get help.

    Here is MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s story of hope:

    I Was a Crack Cocaine Addict

    I used to be a crack cocaine addict. On January 16, 2009, by the grace of God, I prayed and I was free from all these addictions. I’m actually going to be at the White House on Wednesday for the opiate crisis that we are working on and trying to solve all these things for the opiate addicts, such a tragedy now. I want to get the right people voted in so that we can keep on that path of getting rid of some of the regulations so we can help everybody.

    What I’m doing personally is helping the faith-based treatment centers. These are the ones that work; there’s Salvation Army, Teen Challenge, and Union Gospel. These are the treatment centers that have worked in our country. The Salvation Army goes back all the way to the late 1800’s.

    Announces The Lindell Recovery Network

    What I have that’s going to be coming out, I’ll tell it here first, is called The Lindell Recovery Network. If you are a 22-year-old opiate addict, you put in your age and what you are addicted to and all these stories that I’m gathering of hope come down from people your age. So you will go, wow, they all made it through.

    Then I’m going to be like their tour guide on the website where I’m going to say you go over here and see all these centers of hope I have vetted in this country over the last year. I’ll say you go to one of these centers and get help and when you come out I will be there for you.

    I’m Going to Have Pain Mentors

    I’m going to have pain mentors and I want to be one of the biggest employers in this country where I’m going to employ all of these mentors to help them when they come out. A lot of times when addicts come out of treatment they don’t have trust, people aren’t going to trust them right away. I’m going to be doing it for the prisons too.

    There are so many things that the President is working on now… they always try and stop things especially with the faith-based centers. Okay, we will give you money but you have to take Jesus out of the equation. That’s wrong. You need these centers so they help people so they have a base when they get out. It’s going to be amazing. I can see the opiate crisis shrinking. We are going to tackle it head on the same way it happened where it got big so fast.

    People relate to their own age group and their own addiction. For me, I had my friend come to me, I had been a cocaine addict for 20 years, then a crack addict for 9, but my friend came to me one month before I quit and for three years he had been clean and I said, Dick what are you doing here? He had found Jesus, he had gotten saved and I said as long as your here I asked, is it boring? He said no man it isn’t boring. I had all these questions that only he could answer.

    A Match Will Call Up Stories of Hope

    A 20-year-old opiate addict might not be able to relate to a 50-year-old meth addict. It’s like a match and when you get a match you see all these stories of hope. It’s going to be so amazing.

    At MyPillow I take addicts who have gotten help and give them second chances. Even like the Salvation Army, which is an amazing treatment center but nobody knows about them, so people that come out of there employers will grab them because they know they are amazing people. Addicts are amazing people, they are just hiding pain. I hope my story will give them hope. I have a book coming out that is going to offer hope. People need hope nowadays.

    MyPillow is a Platform for Helping People

    I would get these dreams and I used to always tell people, even my drug dealers, that I would come back someday and MyPillow was going to be a platform for helping people. The drug dealers did an intervention on me after I’d been up for 14 days. They wouldn’t sell me any drugs and I couldn’t get them on the street. I came upstairs at three in the morning and he took a picture and said you are going to need this for your book.

    You’ve been telling us for years that you are going to come back and help us, help the inner cities, and help us with our addiction and we are not going to let you die on us. I’d always tell them that MyPillow was a platform for God enabling us to help people and get that story of hope out there.

  • The Muse Founder Kathryn Minshew on the Importance of Trusting Your Instincts

    The Muse Founder Kathryn Minshew on the Importance of Trusting Your Instincts

    Kathryn Minshew, Founder & CEO of The Muse recently talked about the importance of making the important ‘irreversable’ decisions for her startup company. The Muse is a massively successful resource for people to craft and find fulfilling careers with over 50 million users.

    Although It’s not a job board you can find jobs on The Muse. Employers like to use The Muse to attract talent by telling a more authentic and compelling employer story.

    The Muse Founder and CEO Kathryn Minshew discussed the challenges of making decisions in a recent interview:

    I Wish I Would Have Learned to Trust My Instincts Earlier

    I wish I would have learned to trust my instincts. I started The Muse when I was 25, seven years ago. Because I was so young and was conscious of my inexperience I sometimes let other people overly influence the decisions that I made because it felt like I was so new to starting a business.

    Looking back, my instincts actually served me pretty well. Sometimes I trusted them and it was absolutely the right decision and there were other times I overruled them and went against my better judgment and I regretted it.

    As CEO You Bear Ultimate Responsibility for Success or Failure

    When you are a leader, particularly when you are the CEO of a startup company, at the end of the day everything that goes wrong or doesn’t work out you bear the ultimate responsibility for success or failure. When something happens that is a failure and you knew better, you overruled your own instincts or you let someone else make a decision that you really felt deep in your gut probably should have gone differently, I think those are the hardest mistakes to live with.

    I would rather trust my instincts and make the calls and deal with the results good and bad.

    Divide Decisions Into Two Categories

    Getting better at making decisions, especially small decisions is something I am absolutely working on right now. As you build a company, especially if you are trying to do something that no one has ever done before, you are solving countless problems and making countless decisions and that can be exhausting.

    I’ve tried to get better at dividing decisions into two categories, first, decisions that are reversible. These decisions I try to make quick and often try to delegate. You can get bogged down as a leader in overanalyzing these decisions, which I have definitely been guilty of. I’m working to just insure; how big is this decision, what are the impacts of getting it wrong, can we change our minds? If the answer to those is a green light I try and make it quick and move on.

    The other types of decisions are the bigger thornier decisions. It depends; is this a guiding light or principals decision or is this a structural or tactics decision?

    A Decision Making Metaphor I’ve Been Thinking About

    Here is a metaphor I’ve been thinking of. In the early days of starting a business, you are almost an explorer, so think sort of Louis and Clark, you are charting the wilderness and you have an idea. You have a small team, but ultimately you are deciding where to go. At some point, you find your market fit, your sweet spot and then you start building a town.

    You can be an explorer with great instincts with some level of training, or very little training in some instances, but when building a town you may want to actually bring in plumbers, electricians, people that have deep technical expertise. For things like that, I would empower those people, let them make decisions, and really lean into their skill sets because you hired them for a reason.

    You Can’t Delegate the Big Picture Direction Decisions

    When it comes to principals, the core ethics, the values, the big picture direction questions that’s where you can’t delegate because those are the most weighty and also the ones hardest to undo. People talk a lot about building culture, but changing culture is very hard. I think understanding where decisions fall and how reversible it is is a really important tactic for deciding how to delegate or when you need to just make a decision.

  • Bizzabo Wants to be the Salesforce of Events

    Bizzabo Wants to be the Salesforce of Events

    Putting on an event, marketing an event and more importantly, measuring the impact of your event has never been easy. Enter Bizzabo, a company that is working to become the Salesforce of Events.

    Recently, Tom Shelly, Product Marketing Director at Bizzabo, discussed how their cloud-based solution is disrupting the event industry:

    Bizzabo Event Cloud Empowers the Marketer

    Bizzabo is a cloud-based service, the same as Salesforce which invented the Sales Cloud and then we had Marketo that invented the Marketing Cloud, we came and said there needs to be an Events Cloud. Our audience is the event marketer and essentially we’re empowering that marketer to create events that are actually rewarding and impactful for the audiences.

    Bizzabo is an all-in-one platform that they use in order to manage the event, in order to promote the event, and in order to execute it. But the secret sauce and the wisdom behind the platform is the fact that it allows the marketer to measure the impact of the events and that’s something that sounds standard, but no one can actually measure.

    Before Bizzabo Measuring Event Success Was Impossible

    We know that 24 percent of the marketing budget is invested in events, but they can’t measure it. They literally cannot tell if the event was successful. Were they able to retain customers, acquire customers, and was it because of that event? The platform provides them with a lot of analytics and statistics and insights and recommendations to become better at what they’re doing and grow their business through events that they’re hosting.

    Bizzabo Software Using Artificial Intelligence

    We’re providing them those recommendations and we’re at the point right now of incorporating AI and machine learning and the best technologies out there to provide all the knowledge that they need automatically so that they don’t need to do much.

    It’s already a very profitable engine for many companies all over the world. We have HubSpot as a customer and WeWork and many others.

  • Drive.AI Launches Free Self-Driving Car Service in Arlington, Texas

    Drive.AI Launches Free Self-Driving Car Service in Arlington, Texas

    Drive.AI has launched a free self-driving car service in Arlington, Texas. “In Arlington, we are launching three different services,” said Drive.AI CEO Bijit Halde. “One for the game day, one for lunchtime service, and one that connects the Convention Center to Texas Live, the entertainment part of the city.”

    “Today, we started with three cars with the potential to expand as the need of the community grows,” noted Halde.

    Halde says that “they will be the same type of cars we had in Frisco, Texas, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth area.” He noted that it’s just a beginning and that the small size of the launch is only one way of looking at it. “We want to be very careful and deliberate because safety is of utmost concern. Also, user acceptability is a core concern. We start small and grow fast.”

    Riders will pay nothing Halde says and anyone in that area can access this service. Halde added, “In Frisco, we only had a mobile app. In Arlington, we have a mobile app and walk up kiosks where you can type in your name and phone number to get picked up.”

    Halde explained that the company feels there are three factors to success with launching a self-driving ride-hailing service. One, can we safely deploy? But driving is not just one problem. The other factors are driving in the city and driving on the freeways. Drive.AI considers those as two distinct problems.

    “We want to make sure that we take a small problem and solve it and then grow from there,” said Halde. “We don’t want to push the technology when the people aren’t ready.”

  • Christie’s Says AI Art is Not a Masterpiece, But Good Enough for $10K

    Christie’s Says AI Art is Not a Masterpiece, But Good Enough for $10K

    Christie’s announced that it is going to auction for the first time art that has been generated via an artificial intelligence algorithm. The art was created by Obvious, a Paris-based collective consisting of Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernier using AI software.

    Richard Lloyd, Christie’s International head of Prints & Multiples discussed AI art in an interview on CBS:

    AI Art Used Software Called the GAN Algorithm

    Obvious used a nifty piece of software called the GAN algorithm. What they did is uploaded thousands of images to a computer and that point it actually splits itself in two. One half is called the Generator and that analyzes those thousands of portraits and learns what a portrait is. It sort of parses through all those and then thinks now I am going to start creating my own versions of those.

    The second half of the computer, the Discriminator, tries to spot that. Everytime the title is run, if the Discriminator is able to say that a portrait is created by a computer the Generator runs it again. The cycle finishes when the Discriminator says I give up, I can’t tell the difference between the computer generated version and the human-generated version and that’s what pops out.

    AI Art to Sell for $10K

    We’ve estimated that it will sell for $7,000 to $10,000. We put a lot of thought into the estimate because if we put a huge amount people would say what are you basing that valuation on because this is the first.

    But also we thought that it was the right sweet spot where people would respect it as a work of art because the creators certainly think of it as that.

    Who is the Creator of AI Art?

    Who created the art? Is it the person who wrote the algorithm? Is it a combination of the artwork that was uploaded? Is it the people that tweaked the software? This is why this is inspiring and interesting because we’ve never really had to ask those questions before.

    I remember reading years ago that when TV news started, print journalists thought well that’s it, who’s going to read a newspaper? Everybody is just going to watch it. But in fact, both exist side by side. So I think that in the future in five to fifteen years time there will be parallel tracks. There will be human art and artificial intelligence art.

    AI Human Hybrid Art is the Future

    There will also be a hybrid which I think is coming down the pike in the near future. Artists have always been great early adopters. Warhol adapted screen printing which came from commercial packaging.

    Photographers took the camera and thought we can do weird and wonderful things with this. I think human artists will be working side by side with this algorithm to create hybrid art. It’s just the beginning and is so fascinating in what is going to be created.

    Just Don’t Call AI Art a Masterpiece

    I’ve done a lot of research into AI art and there is something about using human-centric words like masterpiece. You just kind of stop short. I think a great work of art is a link to another person. You think of Vango and what he was going through to create that. But this is an algorithm so…

  • Finery: A Hot Startup That Seeks To Be the Digital Wardrobe for Women

    Finery: A Hot Startup That Seeks To Be the Digital Wardrobe for Women

    Over 80% of the clothes women aren’t wearing is worth half a trillion dollars in the US according to Finery founder and CEO Whitney Casey. Finery, which was just listed in CNBC’s Upstart 100 list of promising young startups, keeps track of all your clothing purchases and creates a digital wardrobe and then helps style you in the clothes you already own.

    Whitney Casey, founder, and CEO of Finery discussed her company’s service and business model in a recent interview:

    Finery is a Digital Wardrobe

    Finery is a digital wardrobe. What we do is we find all of your purchases, from your e-receipts, from your browser history, from attaching your accounts, and then we instantly upload all of those items into a virtual closet so you can see everything you own. We have a bunch of tools on the site that can help you add items easily. You Google anything, you find the image, you push the little ‘F’ browser button and it uploads to your closet. That’s our tech. We go back ten years into your purchase history to find and call all those receipts and put it into this closet for you. The bigger picture of this is really about data and that’s the ethos that this company is built off of.

    We let you also take your account and upload your accounts such as Neiman Marcus, Target, or whatever. The data is really important and when we talk about data we tell women that we really think that your data should be working for you. It should not be working for Facebook. Women are the consumers with 85 percent of the consumer goods purchased by women. Yet, 91 percent of women say they don’t feel like advertisers or anyone really understand them.

    Why Do Women Need Finery?

    What’s great is we style you. A woman will spend eight years of her life shopping and two years getting dressed, we’re shaving the time off that. We also give you a return receipt. So think about this, you buy something and you have seven days left so you can no longer return, you need to know that so we ping you. Hey, it’s raining outside, here are five things you can wear from your closet. Hey, it’s Sunday, you have four interviews this week so here are five outfits for you from your closet.

    We have hundreds of thousands of users currently. But we have a big vision and it is around data because we really do feel like women need to have their data working for them. It’s very hard actually to get data from women because they don’t want this same purple boot following them around the internet like it does (via behavioral ads) for two years that they bought. Instead, they really want their data to be working for them and that’s what we’re doing.

    When you log in to a retail site why does it do you any good to log in with your Facebook account? It only does Facebook good so they can then advertise to you. What we want to do is create a login from your Finery account so that all of your data can come with you and then it could make your purchasing way easier.

    How Does Finery Make Money?

    We offer a rev share, we call it a knowledge tax. Companies pay us to give women a personalization lifeline. When you go to these retailers it’s not very easy, you sift through all of these pages. If you think about it, the service, the flywheel of giving women some utility and they give us more access to themselves and every time access makes the utility better.

    It’s crazy because 80% of the clothes you aren’t wearing is worth half a trillion dollars in the US. If we put RFID tags in all of your clothes we would we could know exactly where you’re wearing them and exactly the amount of time you’re wearing them and then break the cost. Via a consignment site, you could then just tap on any item in your wardrobe and then sell it. It all starts in your wardrobe, all of these all of these functionalities, re-commerce, commerce, rentals, it all has to start with the clothes that you own.

  • Ecommerce Startup Zola Seeks to Reinvent the Wedding Industry

    Ecommerce Startup Zola Seeks to Reinvent the Wedding Industry

    The wedding niche is a $100 billion industry in the US alone and is ripe for ecommerce startups. In 2013, Shan-lyn Ma and Nobu Nakaguchi realized through their own experiences that they could not only improve on but literally reinvent the wedding industry, so they started Zola.

    According to Shan-lyn Ma, Zola is the fastest growing wedding company in the US, with the goal of reinventing the wedding planning and registry experience. To date, it has received over $140 million in funding.

    Shan-lyn Ma, CEO, and co-founder of Zola recently talked about how Zola came about and where it’s going:

    Personal Experiences Were the Spark

    Zola means love in the Zulu language. In 2013, which was the year that we were brainstorming was also the year all my friends got married at exactly the same time. I was shopping on a lot of my friend’s department store registries and finding that it was the worst ecommerce shopping experience I had ever seen. Talking to my co-founder Nobu Nakaguchi, he’s married and he was complaining about how painful it was from the couple’s perspective.

    We had worked in design and product and technology together building great products and so we knew we could do a much better job and we knew our friends getting married deserved a much better product. Before Zola launched a couple would have an average of three registries and Zola takes that down to just one registry.

    Zola Weddings Launched Last Year

    Last year we launched a second product called Zola weddings. That includes is free a wedding website, our guest list manager,  and our checklist for all your to-do’s in order to plan your wedding. This was the number one request we were hearing from couples who were saying I love you for my registry, why can’t I just add a few more details about my wedding and I’ll make it my wedding website and then I’m done.

    Pitching Zola to Investors

    Regarding how we pitched Zola to investors, it was harder to show that emotional connection to a problem and how the product sold this better than anything else. We focused on how is this business model is innovating how we are redoing retail and we had the numbers to show it and they absolutely got it.

    Weddings are a $100 Billion Industry

    Weddings are a $100 billion industry in the US and globally it’s a $300 billion industry. When you think about it, weddings is one of the few industries remaining where we haven’t seen a dominant startup player or disruptor emerge to take the market.

    There’s no one that does everything that we do and there’s certainly no one that does it all on the website and on your mobile device serving every couple no matter who you are, no matter what your sexual orientation, no matter what you want your wedding to look like, or your religion. We are there to serve you and that is what is unique and that’s why we’re the fastest growing wedding company.

  • CaaStle CEO: Our Clothing as a Service (CAAS) Technology is not Disruptive

    CaaStle CEO: Our Clothing as a Service (CAAS) Technology is not Disruptive

    The clothing as a service business model is not disruptive for clothing retailers says CaaStle founder and CEO Christine Hunsicker. “It’s completely accretive and one of the big things about this technology is that it’s not disruptive. It’s not a disruptive model that’s threatening their businesses.”

    CaaStle is a fully managed service that allows retailers to offer Clothing as a Service (CaaS) to their consumers. CaaS is an access model that they say has “transformative benefits” for retailers and consumers. CaaStle says it simply provides technology, reverse logistics and managed services to help retailers participate in the new economy.

    CaaStle founder and CEO, Christine Hunsicker, recently discussed her CaaStle and why clothing as a service is not a disruptive model threatening retailers:

    Enables Clothing Retailers to Rent Clothing on a Subscription Basis

    CaaStle is a fully managed service that allows any retailer to offer a rental subscription service to their customers using their inventory. We are completely behind the scenes and nobody knows we exist. We are the people building the front end consumer experience, we’re handling the logistics and were handling the technology and the algorithms. We just take the clothing and the consumer list from the retailer and make it all happen.

    What we found is that fundamentally consumers rent very differently than they buy, so most of the things that you buy, and if you think about your own wardrobe, are gonna be the basic core and the staples, things that you can get a lot of wear out of, and that makes sense from a cost per wear perspective.

    When you rent you tend to go more towards the fashion and the trend. For a company like Express or like Ann Taylor or like New York & Company they’re going to continue to sell just like they always have. What they’re doing now is increasing engagement with their brand and increasing that brand loyalty through renting more of the fashion pieces.

    Our Clothing as a Service (CAAS) Technology is not Disruptive

    It’s completely accretive and one of the big things about this technology is that it’s not disruptive. It’s not a disruptive model that’s threatening their businesses. Right now it’s an opportunity for these retailers to jump on board and increase the number of new consumers they have and increase the spend that consumers have with them. It’s a significantly more profitable business and has very high engagement rates.

    It’s everyday clothing. You can’t be concerned that you may snag it or tear it or spill something on it, there’s going to be some damage that happens. We want the consumers and the retailers want the consumers to be very relaxed and comfortable in the clothing. It’s actually part of the service fee, there’s no nickel and diming for extra insurance. It’s going to happen that occasionally the clothing comes back damaged, very rarely though.

    We get paid on a per consumer basis so we’re completely aligned with the retailer to help them grow their base and maintain their base and have very happy consumers.

    We’re Building this Company to Take it Public

    As far as the Eloquii acquisition ($100 million) by Walmart, they have this strategy with Mark Lore (Walmart CEO) and under Andy Dunn to bring in a bunch of brands and expand their consumer base. As far as straight retail goes you saw it with Bonobos and Eloquii and ModCloth, this is just another step in that in that path.

    I think it’s great for the plus-size consumer. I think it’s great for the Eloquii customer. They’re going to be able to leverage the Walmart supply chain and logistics and deliver a better experience probably at a lower cost point.

    When it comes to, do we want to be acquired? We’re building this company to take it public. We don’t want to be acquired by any single player largely because we believe in fragmentation. If you believe the industry has been fragmented and will remain fragmented and if you want to impact the tremendous part of the economy you need to be a platform underlying all of the brands and the retailers as opposed to being a singular consumer-facing brand.

  • Ring CEO: I Have No Animosity For the Sharks

    Ring CEO: I Have No Animosity For the Sharks

    Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff has a rags to riches story that most entrepreneurs can only dream of. He was famously turned down on Shark Tank only to later sell his company to Amazon for $1 billion just this past February. Siminoff says he is now appearing on an upcoming Shark Tank episode on the other side as one of the Sharks. Even though he was turned down he says “I really have no animosity for any of the Sharks.”

    Jamie Siminoff, CEO of Ring, discusses his return to Shark Tank as an investor, the Ring integration with Amazon, and the true reason for the success of the Ring product line on Bloomberg:

    New Technological Innovations Coming to Ring Soon

    We are doing a number of things around battery life. One is around solar where we are adding a lot of solar accessories to our products. We are also going to be coming out with some other technology innovations that we will be announcing over the next couple of months.

    A lot of that technology comes from the integration that we have been able to do with Amazon, now being able to leverage a much bigger pool of technology and experts that we just couldn’t as a small independent company.

    Amazon has done a wonderful job of securing and protecting the privacy around their customers. We’ve focused on that for our neighbors. We are one of the best solutions for security in the neighborhood and I think we will just let customers continue to choose that.

    We Are the Market Leader Because Ring is Effective

    From the competition side, we’ve had literally hundreds of people come into the market. Why we’ve been able to keep such a large market share I believe is because we really are there to deliver effective affordable solutions to our customers.

    We are not just about selling a product, it’s about selling something with effectiveness and we’ve really been able to prove that. A study we did with the New York police showed we were able to reduce burglaries by 50 percent. It’s really about that effectiveness of our solution not just about the particular hardware product.

    I Have No Animosity for Any of the Sharks

    I think as an investor now that I’ve been able to go to the other side of the Tank I’m sure I will miss the next big Ring because investments are very tough to pick. Who’s the best, who’s not? I really have no animosity for any of the Sharks. That platform is really what helped build Ring into what it is today so I’m thankful that we just had the opportunity to be on it.

    I do wish that we had gotten money at the time because I was broke and it would have been very nice to have had that money, but we still made it. What I tell any entrepreneur that doesn’t get the money either from Shark Tank or another investor is we were turned down over 100 times and you just got to keep going.

  • 5 Ways to Instantly Improve Your Product Description Page for Better Conversions

    5 Ways to Instantly Improve Your Product Description Page for Better Conversions

    A visitor that arrives at your product description page is only a few clicks away from making a purchase. But whether they leave your site or buy your product depends in large part on the page design.

    Despite its importance, a lot of store owners don’t pay enough attention to their product page. Most are happy to just put up a photo and a brief description. This is a travesty since the product page can make or break a sale. If the customer doesn’t find the page appealing and informative, they won’t move on to the checkout.

    There are, however,  a number of fast and easy strategies you can implement right now to improve your product page and boost your sales. Let’s take a look:

    1. Analyze Your Customer’s Behavior

    One of the best ways to improve your conversions is to have a well-designed product description page. You’ll need to have the right balance of images and information, especially since shoppers tend to just scan the page. According to a Nielson report, 79 percent of consumers don’t read word by word. They just scan a page and pick out specific words and phrases.

    A heatmap is a great tool to use when designing a product page. It lets you track where your customers typically look, what they click on when they arrive at your page, and how far down they scroll when reading your content. Knowing where they’re looking gives you the chance to remove any distracting images or irrelevant data.

    [Image source: MockingFish]

    2. Establish Trust

    You want to build trust with your customers from the get-go. Product reviews and security seals are just two ways to go about this. But you can also establish trust by providing clear information on shipping costs, duration, and details like how many items can be ordered, etc. Knowing this key information will give your customers peace of mind and keep them moving toward your checkout page.

    [Image source: Harry’s]

    Summarize these details to save space, but make sure you place them in a strategic part of your page. For instance, customers who visit Harry’s product page will see this information next to a photo of the item on sale. Also, consider adding links in the description that offer more detailed information about the product. 

    3. Enable Chat on Select Pages

    Your prospective customers may get frustrated and exit your store when they have questions about an item and there’s nobody to advise them. And many consumers simply don’t have the time or patience to call customer service or email your company. You can use live chat to solve this problem and improve conversion rates.

    [Image source: ZenDesk]

    This feature also makes life easier for shoppers since they immediately get the answers they need. It also tells them that your company is efficient, always available to listen and willing to resolve their concerns, thus increasing brand trust. 

    4. Use Customer Photos as Social Proof

    People trust recommendations given by friends, family, and their fellow customers. It’s why many brands include customer reviews and feedback. But you can step up your game and enhance product page conversions by using customer-generated photos. Seeing your items showcased by customers helps put them in context. The social proof it provides can also influence a prospective buyer’s decision while giving your customers a realistic look of your product.

    Amazon.com uses this strategy quite well. The website allows customers to upload images of items they purchased via the site and links them to the review on the product page.

    5. Improve Product Titles

    Your product’s name is the first thing that will catch a shopper’s attention on the product page. So it makes it even more important to create a good product title that will entice them to look at what else you have in store. The title is where you can be creative while giving your customer key details about the item and its features.

    Make sure you use a tone that your demographic can relate to. For instance, fun and whimsical titles are good for a young audience while a formal voice is better for connecting with a B2B market. You can use different fonts, colors, or icons for your titles. You can also pick out interesting features of your product and highlight it in the title. For instance, UncommonGoods sells a set of socks with environmental motifs which they named “Protect The Planets Socks,” appealing to the environmentally conscious customer. 

    A well-thought of and designed product page can result in a positive shopping experience that will boost sales. Try to incorporate these five strategies and watch your conversions shoot up.

    [Featured image via Pixabay]

  • Zippin CEO: In 5-10 Years Every Store Will Be Checkout Free

    Zippin CEO: In 5-10 Years Every Store Will Be Checkout Free

    What if going to a store was easier than shopping online where you could just walk in and pick up your purchases and walk out with payment happening all in the background?

    You have heard about Amazon’s cashierless stores, Amazon Go, and their plans to open thousands of those stores in the coming years. Now there are startups that intend to bring this concept to all stores by providing a software platform and a technology solution to retailers.

    Zippin Co-founder and CEO Krishna Motukuri talked about the technology behind his new checkout-free solution in a recent CNBC profile:

    At Zippin, our mission is to banish checkout lines for good. You can simply walk in, check-in when you enter, pick up whatever you want, and simply walk out. If there was somebody that actually was able to follow a customer around the store and see what they were picking and just took a note of that information and then when they walked out simply just gave them a bill, it would be very convenient for the customer.

    We use overhead cameras that look straight down and get a bird’s-eye view of the entire store. That allows us to uniquely identify customers and we use that information to also understand which items they’re picking from the shelf and which ones they’re putting back. This information is paired with sensors that are on the shelf that worked with the cameras to accurately identify which products cart picked.

    As we’ve seen in the online world where ecommerce customers can actually see which product you’ve clicked on how long you actually considered it or whether you put it in the cart or taking it out, there will be retailers that will be responsible in the way they use that information.

    In addition to supermarkets and grocery stores, we’re also getting a lot of interest from hotels, airports, stadiums, and commercial buildings. For the first time, this technology allows you to operate a store more cost efficiently. We expect more of these smaller stores to appear in residential complexes and office buildings where there was nothing other than just a vending machine and some salty snacks before.

    Our next step is to actually take the technology to an existing retailer and implement it in their stores. I would say five to ten years you should expect every store will be checkout free.

  • What is Uniquely Different About the New Amazon 4-Star Store?

    What is Uniquely Different About the New Amazon 4-Star Store?

    Amazon 4-Star is Amazon’s first retail store focused on selling Amazon’s products. The first of presumably many stores just opened in the Soho area of New York City and of course has made a big splash in the media. But what’s special about this store and what makes it a unique shopping experience?

    Amazon Physical Stores VP Cameron Janes answers that question in a Bloomberg interview:

    Amazon 4-Star is Built Around What Our Customers Our Loving

    What is uniquely different is that we really built this store around our customers. It’s a direct reflection of our customers, not just what they’re buying, but really what they’re loving.

    Everything in the store is rated 4 star or above by our customers, is a top seller or is the newest trending on Amazon.com. Our goal is that customers can walk into this store and pick up anything and know that it is going to be a great product because customers online have already said so.

    The average rating of products in this store is 4.4 stars and collectively we have about 1,800 products in the store and they earned 1.8 million 5 star reviews. These are really high-quality products that our customers love. The product with the most customer reviews in Amazon 4-Star is actually the Fire TV Stick with Alexa voice remote with over 197,000 customer reviews and it’s rated 4.4 stars.

    Curation is What 4-Star is About

    Whenever your working offline you can’t have the endless aisle that you have online. When you are working offline you really have to curate and that’s actually what Amazon 4 star is all about. We have a highly curated selection from some of the top categories, the most popular categories on Amazon.com. We’ve got devices, electronics, kitchen, toys, home, and all of these hit that 4-star selection bar that we think is so important.

    Here at 4-Star what we are trying to do is create an experience where customers can come in, browse, have fun shopping find products they love. With all of these experiences, we are trying to find more ways to connect with our customers. Of course, customers love to shop online, but a lot of customers love to shop offline as well. What we can do with these experiences is create a new type of shopping experiences and help them discover new products.

    Our Focus is Connecting With Customers

    Another thing you can do in offline that you can’t do online is that customers can come in and touch the products themselves. Certainly, with our device category, customers can come in the store, play with the Fire TV, they can read on the Kindle, they can interact with the Amazon Echo and Alexa products and see how those products work in first person and make a more confident buying decision.

    Our focus here is on connecting with customers and if customers come in here and discover products that they love, we know they will come back and over time that can be something big. That’s really what we are focused on today.

  • Microsoft, Mastercard Teamup Enables Small Businesses to Trade Globally

    Microsoft, Mastercard Teamup Enables Small Businesses to Trade Globally

    Mastercard and Microsoft recently announced their latest collaboration—the Mastercard Track. The program is described as a distinct trade platform that can be used worldwide. It will reportedly simplify and automate payments between companies.

    Payments are supposed to be a fundamental and essential aspect of any business transaction. However, a lot of companies struggle with late payments. These delays are caused by inefficiency most of the time and result in profit loss and the erosion of trust between the buyer and supplier.

    Mastercard and Microsoft believe Track has the potential to solve this dilemma. The Track platform can automate and streamline procurement-to-payment procedures. Instead of having payments and invoices in separate systems, all data will be placed in one location. This will give companies improved visibility into their cash flow and help them to comply and conduct payments in a more efficient manner.

    Mastercard said that Track builds on and augments the company’s range of innovation and B2B assets, including its card and account-to-account payment solutions, data analytics, payment gateway, and fraud management services. Meanwhile, Microsoft will provide its very own Azure cloud system to run the Track platform, thereby giving it the protection of the company’s strict security and compliance standards.

    Mastercard Track will also be supported by a partnership comprised of nine procure-to-pay solutions companies and B2B networks – Basware, BirchStreet, Coupa, Ivalua, Jaggaer, Liaison Technologies, the Infor GT Nexus Commerce Network, Tradeshift, and the Tungsten Network.

    Michael Froman, Mastercard’s vice chairman and head of strategic growth, said that Mastercard Track is a tool that will “help reduce frictions in the global trading system and promote increased exports—especially by small and medium-sized businesses.”

    At the moment, companies have to navigate the various mechanisms that are currently in place for payments. Aside from that challenge, brands also have to deal with the lack of transparency and copious paper trail.

    Mastercard and Microsoft say that all account-based, bank transfer, or card-based payment systems will be connected on Track. The platform will also integrate invoice information and purchase order and will streamline the back-office.

    The platform is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses, especially ones involved in global exports. However, Track will also offer banks, B2B, insurance, and technology companies a business opportunity by providing value-added services. For instance, banks can give supply chain and trade loans on Track while technology brands can offer better data analytics.

    [Featured image via Pixabay]

  • Marcus Lemonis and Camping World Targeting the Millennial

    Marcus Lemonis and Camping World Targeting the Millennial

    One of the most fascinating entrepreneurs and CEO’s in the world is Marcus Lemonis, star of CNBC’s The Profit and CEO of Camping World, Good Sam Enterprises, and Gander Outdoors. He recently sat down with Jim Cramer of Mad Money to discuss his strategy for growing Camping World Holdings, Inc. (CWH) by focusing on high margin subscription-based products targeted to the Millennial customer with plenty of disposable income.

    Marcus Lemonis Talks to Jim Cramer:

    At the end of the day, we are an RV company first and foremost and our number-one asset is our customers that sit in our Good Sam file. That’s the most important part of our business. In order to grow that file and to grow the annuity part of our business, which is good Sam, we have to really grow our platform.

    We’re able to make dealership acquisitions anywhere between one and four times EBITDA. That’s trailing EBITDA, not adjusted like public companies like to do, but the real number. We provide a good exit strategy for a lot of dealers. As I looked at where this company needed to go, doubling the size of the dealership footprint was really the only option and Gander Outdoors was really the spark that really takes us there.

    The Good Sam file and the Good Sam Club are an important part of our business with over a hundred million dollars of our EBITDA coming from the Good Sam business itself. Essentially, it’s people that want to save money on campgrounds, camping, all hunting, fishing, camping equipment, but they also want to buy roadside assistance which is similar to Triple A, but for RVers. They want to get a warranty, and they want to have a credit card and enjoy all the benefits. We sell all of those affinity products. So as people walk in the front door those are fresh sets of eyes and fresh sets of people to be able to sell the products and services to.

    What we’re ultimately trying to do is find the Millennial, the Millennial who doesn’t want to go in their father’s Oldsmobile or their father’s motorhome. They want to go in a smaller unit, a lighter unit, and they want to pull it with their Prius, and we’ve made a concerted effort through Gander to enter that market.

  • Jamie Siminoff of Ring – From a SharkTank Reject to an Amazon Success

    Jamie Siminoff of Ring – From a SharkTank Reject to an Amazon Success

    You’ve all heard the story of Jamie Siminoff, creator of Doorbot, later renamed Ring, who was famously rejected on national TV on SharkTank, but then went on to create a wildly successful business. Earlier this year Amazon paid a reported $1 billion in cash for the business.

    Recently, Jamie Siminoff, Founder and Chief Inventor of Ring, had a discussion with John Biggs at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018.

    Here are the key highlights of how Jamie and his small startup hit it big:

    From a SharkTank Reject to an Amazon Success

    If you can get acquired by Amazon your about as lucky as you get because they really do let you just keep going.  Five years ago I was very much on the other side. I was on Shark Tank looking for money trying to get an investment.  I did not get one on the show and now it’s funny because everyone says to me, well you were so smart not to take that money. I’m like no, I was driving back from there to my garage almost in tears broke. I actually needed the money.

    I think Shark Tank has been a great show for families. Families watch the show, people watch it with their kids, it’s aspirational, and it shows that people can do things. It obviously has to be entertaining because it is TV so you need people to watch it but I think it has been good for overall for startups in general.

    For Ring, we were Doorbot at the time, it gave us awareness and credibility that we never would have had that sort of jumped us up. It was a great platform for us to launch off of and we really used it. We turned out to be the largest company ever to be on SharkTank and it was it was a great experience.

    We Were the Consummate Hustlers

    We were the consummate hustlers. Looking back at those days, you work the booth at TC, you go to CES, you just grind. You wear your shirt everywhere, you just grind and embarrass yourself. I think that level of a start-up at the beginning you almost have no shame. You have to just put yourself out there, get the stories out there, and get the name out there. You have to focus on the business, but you have to hustle.

    I always get asked by people that have a startup, what worked? What they really want is the one thing. They want me to tell them we did X, and then I can just go do X and be successful. The truth is it’s like 5,000 things that you have to do to make a successful company. The first thing though is you have to have a reason to be a business.

    A Company Should Start With a Core

    At Amazon, they call it thinking from the customer. That’s starting with the customer and working backward. We called our customer’s neighbors, so we always start with the neighbors and it’s always around a mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods. As a company you should start with some core that says why am I hustling, why am I trying to track you down at CES to get you to write a freaking article? You have to have that reason.

    There are a thousand things you have to do and wearing the shirt yeah, it’s all these little things. Wearing the Ring shirt, for example, creates a conversation on an airplane with someone who asks a question and then that leads to something. My family’s laughed at me because I literally wore the Ring t-shirt almost non-stop for seven years!

    Why Did I Sell Ring to Amazon?

    Why Did I sell Ring to Amazon? You hear all this stuff like this did you sell out? The company was started with a mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods.  From day one that’s been our mission. We’re going to reduce crime in neighborhoods by delivering effective and affordable products and services. We were working with Amazon on some integrations and other things and when Amazon came to us they had bought into the idea that the mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods made sense for Amazon on a strategic level. For Ring that became the best possible outcome, the fastest and most scalable with the best foundation. Amazon has enabled us to accelerate our business.

    The Truth of Business is Luck

    It’s cool when you get inside Amazon. They really do start, and this is from Jeff down, with customer backwards and infinite truths. Are people going to want to have a safer home and neighborhood in 50 or 100 years? Yes. They look at these like bigger truths around things. When they’re making these big decisions it’s really about an infinite truth of something that can make a customer’s journey or life better.

    The truth of business is luck, luck, luck, luck, luck. I worked hard, I focused, I did everything right, but the amount of luck that happened along the way,  getting on Shark Tank and having the right investors come when they did, having a house where if the freaking doorbell had reached to the garage I’d probably be here trying to pitch some other hardware thing in the roundup group.  

    Especially at this scale, to build a business to the size that we have so far and to have that success I think luck is a huge part of it. Timing is not in your control, you don’t know what’s gonna happen next year or the year after and all of these things went our way. You know, luck.