.png)
Firing The Man
THANK YOU TO OUR 25,000+ LISTENERS! We are so thankful to be one of the TOP E-Commerce Podcasts delivering high-quality authentic content to you! Serial Entrepreneur’s David Schomer and Ken Wilson share tips, advice, and insider knowledge about all things Amazon FBA, Walmart WFS, and E-Commerce. Discover how you can create multiple income streams by selling physical products online so that you can have the time and freedom to do what you love - whether that is spending more time with family or traveling the world. Ken and David have successfully created several six and seven figure online business ventures. During the journey, they have had major wins, losses, and lessons learned. This podcast will teach you about selling physical products online through platforms such as Fulfillment by Amazon, building a team, outsourcing, listing optimization, pay per click (PPC) advertising, driving traffic to your listings, and productivity tips / life hacks that will provide a path to be successful in building your online business. It’s a mix of interviews, special co-hosts and solo shows from Ken and David you’re not going to want to miss. Hit subscribe, and get ready to change your life.
Firing The Man
Scaling Success: From Startup to IPO with Eric Eden
Ever wondered how a company can grow from $5 million to $200 million in revenue and eventually go public on the New York Stock Exchange? You're in for a treat! In this episode, we sit down with Eric Eden, a marketing expert with over 20 years of experience leading internet service and SaaS companies. Eric shares his incredible journey, from working at the original dot-com domain registry to playing key roles at Vario and Cvent. He offers fascinating insights into the evolution of e-commerce and SaaS, giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the strategic vision it takes to achieve massive business growth.
But that's not all what does it really take to leave the corporate world and launch your own startup? We dive into the entrepreneurial story of two colleagues who, after their previous successes, pooled $5 million to start a self-funded company. They share their game-changing marketing strategies, using everything from guerrilla marketing to partnerships, and even newer channels like podcasting and YouTube. Their focus on maximizing ROI for every marketing move is full of valuable lessons for anyone looking to make the most of their marketing efforts.
Curious about where AI fits into all of this? Eric also explores how AI is reshaping marketing, from simplifying attribution with tools like Dig Growth to streamlining content creation with Descript for audio and video editing. We cover the importance of personalized buyer journeys, traffic strategies that work, and why some traditional tactics, like long blog posts, may no longer be effective. Plus, get a sneak peek into a new platform launch, the growing trend of fractional hiring, and what sets successful entrepreneurs apart. Whether you're deep into marketing or just starting out, this episode is packed with insights, strategies, and inspiration you won’t want to miss.
Connect With Eric Eden:
• http://www.x.com/ericjeden
• https://www.instagram.com/ericjeden
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/cmo-ericeden/
Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you are capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your hosts, serial entrepreneurs David Shomer and Ken Wilson.
Speaker 2:Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast. On today's episode, we have the pleasure of speaking with Eric Eden. Eric has over 20 years of experience leading marketing teams for internet service and SaaS companies. His experience includes building great marketing teams, implementing marketing technology solutions effectively, driving demand and driving growth. Eric's greatest gifts are strategic vision and the ability to implement dynamic marketing and branding strategies. Eric has a track record of managing large-scale projects and creating strategic plans that enable customer acquisition, sales growth and overall business development. We're really excited to have Eric on the show today. Welcome, eric.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me. It's great to be here on the number one podcast in the world Firing Demand. That's right.
Speaker 2:That's right. So, to set the table for conversation, can you give our listeners a little bit of background of your path in the business world?
Speaker 3:Yeah, if my daughters were here, they would tell you that I'm very old older than the internet, older than Google and it's been a great journey in the last 30 years or so seeing everything evolves across the internet, services and and tech space and SAS and mobile apps and AI, and I've been fortunate to have gotten to work for 10 companies full time as a marketing leader, a CMO, driving growth, and I've gotten to do a lot of really amazing things, including three companies that had exits for more than a billion dollars each, so I was glad to be part of those really big corporate initiatives driving things with marketing and e-commerce. But now I have my own startup and so it's great to be a founder of my own startup and building my fourth billion dollar company.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's awesome. Well cool, let's dig right in. So, eric, can you share a story about the most remarkable marketing you've done?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I'm going to share three really quick mini stories because this will really set the context for firing the man and why everybody should do it and why it's such a great thing. So my first job right out of college was the original dot com domain registry. So back in 1995, I started there there was less than 100,000 com domain names registered when I started and people were like this whole internet thing it's a fad, it's going to level off and they kept doing this. It's going to level off. I'm like you know, guys, I don't think so, I don't really think so. And so in the three years I was there, we registered 5 million domain names and I built the process that automated people applying for the domain names there and ultimately Network Solutions went public. It was one of the most successful IPOs, the dot-com era, and today there's over 350 million domain names registered and that's where a lot of the e-commerce happens. So that's mini story number one. Mini story number two is right after there.
Speaker 3:I went to a company called Vario which raised $2.5 billion in venture capital and they were a website hosting, an e-commerce company, and they bought 53 companies and rolled them up all into one big super minion, if you will, and essentially I worked on that and my task was this is in 1999. And this is why I'm the e-commerce OG is they were like sell 10,000 e-commerce websites to small businesses. And this might've been the hardest thing anyone ever asked me to do back in 1999, because e-commerce then was so hard. But the funniest part about it wasn't the hard thing about the technology of the banking and the payment processing. It was actually we called people and we were like your company should have a website. They're like my company doesn't need a website, my company will never need a website. Why are you even asking? That's dumb. We're like well, you know, so you can sell things online with a credit card. And they laughed at us and they said no one's ever going to buy anything on the internet with a credit card. And so that's sort of the framing for my career is that I came from these companies where, like, it was just started and no one even believed in it. They thought it was a fad, they thought it was ridiculous, and we did actually sell 10,000 e-commerce websites back around the year 2000.
Speaker 3:And Varia was public. It got a successful exit for five and a half billion, and so that really those two experiences really set the stage for me to keep working for other tech companies over the years and I largely went into SaaS. So that's a natural progression from domain names to websites and eCommerce hosting to SaaS, which is a combination of website application and e-commerce. And so my biggest success in SaaS was for 10 years I was the head of marketing at a SaaS company called Cvent which has event management software online, which basically was if you register for a conference, you can pay for it online. So it was an e-commerce tool for people who wanted to run events.
Speaker 3:And when I started there was very small, like $5 million in annual revenue, and over 10 years we built it up to $200 million in annual revenue and we did that by building a sales and marketing machine and so we were selling annual subscriptions to people running events and we built up a sales and marketing team of 700 people and we just did everything you could possibly imagine in marketing to win thousands of customers a year. And the proudest moment there was when we grew it to to that level and we got to go public on the New York Stock Exchange and I got to be with the management team and we went up there and we rang the opening bell as we went public and went on the New York Stock Exchange. So you string together 2000 days of really hard, unglorious work to get to a great moment like that, and so I've had the privilege to be a part of some really great things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah that's awesome, very nice, very nice. So you've been a part and I just want to make sure our listeners heard that correctly billion with a B billion dollar exits. Correct with a B billion dollar exits, correct.
Speaker 4:Yep absolutely.
Speaker 2:And so what are you taking from those three billion dollar exits and, as you work on your fourth, can you go into that, and what are some lessons you're taking with you along the way?
Speaker 3:So many lessons. I was a part of big teams at each of those companies. I'd like to think that I was an impactful part of those teams, leading marketing because marketing is a true driver of growth at all of those companies and most successful companies. So I'd like to think I was like a key part of the team, but it was a team effort with a lot of people. I was part of the leadership team and the senior management team, but I wasn't the founder or the owner. So I think the point of firing the man is I made a lot of other people, a lot of money, and I was happy to do that.
Speaker 3:Um, including the investors, the other founders of those companies, you know the CEOs, and they all worked hard, they earned it, but they also benefited from a lot of my ideas, my hard work and that's just the way it goes. So you know, and doing the fourth thing one of the biggest things I learned is start something of your own. Be one of the founders you know, have a bigger stake in it, because you can never really live the dream if you're just taking a salary doing it for other people right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's dive into that a little bit. So when you've had a long career working for other people, when did you decide to fire the man and go after your own venture?
Speaker 3:go after your own venture. So about a year and a half ago. This is fascinating because I worked with my co-founder 25 years ago at my first job at Network Solutions, and ever since then we've always sort of been working together in some capacity. Sometimes the companies I was working for we worked there together, Sometimes I hired him as a contractor to help me with projects. We've always been working together, and so it's really awesome that when I'm going out to do something of my own and be a founder, I get to do it with my best friend that I've worked with for 25 years and we are a little bit like an old married couple. Sometimes he'll be like I'm going to say, and then you're going to say, and then I'm going to say, and you're going to say that sort of thing, but it's really fantastic to work with your best friends and people you've worked with for a long time, and so that was one of the things that I liked best about going out from the corporate umbrella.
Speaker 3:The second piece of it that's really interesting is we use the profits from our previous ventures to fund what we're doing now. So we took about $5 million from previous things that we had made money on together and it put it into our new startup. And so, because we're self-funding it, we don't have the pressure of third-party investors venture capitalists, you know, or private equity who are going to come in and potentially say do what you're doing a different way or push out you know out the founders. That happens for very valid reasons. I've worked my entire career for PE and VC companies, so I've seen that happen. So my learning was find a way to self-fund it, do it yourself, own it.
Speaker 4:And then, of course, the natural progression of that is we get all the upside right, yeah, I really like that, and you and that's you've taken pretty much a career of experiences and then repackaged them up to to suit something that that you want with a partner that you work really well with and and it's proven, and so, yeah, that that's a I'm excited for you. That sounds and also, you know you guys are coming up with the ideas and then all the upside is on you. You don't have to answer to someone else or try other ideas if you don't want to Like, you can kind of build your own roadmap. So that's super exciting. I guess one question I've got is what is a little bit of a strategy like growing this new venture that you have? What are you guys focusing on for growth? Like, what are you like? You've got all this wealth of experience on all these other platforms, right, and so what are you got? What have you guys learned that's going to drive this growth that you're focusing on?
Speaker 3:What have you guys learned that's going to drive this growth that you're focusing on. So that's a really interesting question, because I've gotten to work so many companies across all the different channels in marketing, so there's so many different things you can do, from online advertising to email marketing to SEO. There's just so many options, if you will, of things you can do, and ultimately, we'll probably do some of those all over time. But the question, your question, was what do you prioritize and how do you get going? And a lot of it, I think, has to come down to what can we do that is more guerrilla, that is more viral in nature, because the reality is advertising today just going out and acquiring subscribers for our new product via advertising on Google or other online advertising platforms, including like LinkedIn and others it's just so expensive, it's prohibitively expensive for most businesses these days and they just keep upping the prices. So you have to think about the game differently, because the game has really changed. You can't just go out there, because I'll give you an example Over the years, I've been able to acquire a SaaS subscriber for about $2,000 to $3,000 in Google pay-per-click ad spend, and today, doing the same thing, it might cost $7,000 to $10,000 to acquire a subscriber from Google pay-per-click spend.
Speaker 3:And the reason is is that because some of the advertising platforms I was running a campaign on Google not too long ago and the reason is is that because some of the advertising platforms like I was running a campaign on Google not too long ago and some of the keywords are $40 a click. I know there's inflation, but $40 a click for a competitive keyword, this started in a dollar 20 years ago. We talk about how food is more expensive at McDonald's these days because of inflation, but, like I mean, $40 a click just breaks my mind, and you know LinkedIn and Facebook advertising isn't much better. And so the answer to your question is we're thinking differently about how to do guerrilla marketing, particularly when it's our own money. We're not just going to go throw money away because it's hard-earned money that we earn. So we're going to be doing things like we're going to be partnering with trade associations and groups and making offers to their members and paying them some money for co-marketing, instead of just blasting things out there broadly on Google.
Speaker 3:So just to give you a flavor, though, that's like one thing. Another thing is, you know, podcasting and YouTube, I think, are two channels for thought leadership that were definitely not really a thing, let's call it five years ago. They were there, but they weren't really scaled, and today, I think, a lot of companies are using these sorts of channels to scale and get awareness out there, and so that's a flavor for some of the things that we're going to be doing to win subscribers instead of just like email marketing possibilities. The list is endless, right.
Speaker 2:What framework are you using to evaluate profitability? Or where do I want to spend my time going after Sure?
Speaker 3:So marketing is an investment, right? So if I'm investing my own money as a founder, I'm looking at it, saying what is the exact ROI for every tactic and channel that I'm doing? And then I would want to focus in on the ones that have the best return on investment. But we've actually built some tools to do specifically that, because actually developing the product is like 10% of the cost, whereas acquisition of customers across marketing is more like 90% of the cost. So we're like we need to get really analytical about this and think like investors. And the answer to your question is think like an investor when you're looking at all these things, because everything directionally works.
Speaker 3:And the biggest mistake that a lot of marketers make is they're like okay, if I spend $10,000 on this and I get $10,000 worth of sales from it, then it's good, right? And the answer is no, it's not good, because marketing should be something like for a growth company let's call it 20% of revenue. So if you're spending $10,000, you really need to be making something like $50,000 to $100,000 in revenue. And people get that equation wrong all the time. And it's hard because there's a lot of things that factor into marketing there's people's time, there's the program spend. Sometimes you have salespeople involved and you have the costs related to that, so people don't really do these investment formulas correctly and that's what really ultimately torpedoes the growth and the valuation of a lot of companies.
Speaker 2:I think one thing that I know I definitely struggle with is and I'm going to make a comparison here Amazon PPC to Facebook. I like Amazon and also I'm a retired accountant, so I love spreadsheets, I love ROI, I love thinking of things in ROI. I like to look at a spreadsheet and say we put this much amount of dollars into PPC. Here's what was returned to us, here's the organic sales, here's the PPC sales, and I like that and that's very rankable to me. The contrast that would say, like Facebook ads, where you're building brand awareness. I and you know some of those customers go to your website and purchase, but some of them don't, and so I would say how are you evaluating some of those not Amazon PPC type marketing activities?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I get the question because you really have to get fingerprints on the weapon and, to use a CSI example, you have to really know what's working, and it's easier with some channels than others. Number one and number two there's this issue because sometimes you have many touches before you win one customer, unfortunately. So maybe they look at your website from STO and then they see a Facebook ad, like you said, and then maybe you email them and then there's multiple touches and how do you assign the credit? First touch, last touch spread the credit even peanut butter touch spread the credit even peanut butter. And so we have different ways of looking at that along those lines to see which marketing programs actually touch customers.
Speaker 3:But the reality is 100% of sales are influenced by marketing because people usually go to the website that marketing is created. They usually have multiple touch points of content that you've created, whether it's product marketing materials or thought leadership materials, and so for people to say it was only like something that came from sales is sort of a myth. And then I think the difficulty that you mentioned of well, what about the channels that are more like branding and awareness? My simple answer to that is I'm prioritizing the channels where I can really track it the best first, because that should probably be 80 to 90% of the mix, and then I'll take a risk of like 10% on branding and awareness and like PR falls into that category too.
Speaker 3:Like if you get an article in Forbes or another business publication, how do you know if that drove anything? You may never know, cause they just come to your website after reading it and like there's no way to tie it together unless you have the chance to talk to a customer. So you can do things like ask customers how they heard about you and things like that to get more insights. But broadly the answer is focus first on what you can track and what you can prove, where you can get fingerprints on the weapon. Put 90% of your effort into that first and then over time, as you get some success, you can afford to invest a little bit more in the branding and awareness. I think a lot of founders and entrepreneurs get that wrong. They start with the flip of that. They start with 80 or 90% on branding and awareness and like 10, 20% on demand gen, and then the model breaks.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And with the Facebook and I mean they're single the media ad buying can be broken just like that with attribution. We've seen that with Facebook, we've seen it with Google, we've seen it with a lot of things. And so focusing on where you can track the fingerprints on 90% is the core data that you know you're positive and if something is squishy, then just avoid it until you're in a position to where you can take that gamble. I really like that approach and it's it's, I think, now, curious. Did you use that approach at previous companies, or is this just when the the budget is coming out of your own pocket? Or or is that an approach that you've used to grow at other companies?
Speaker 3:So I did it at previous companies, but it was much harder. The further you go back, the less tools that existed to get fingerprints on the weapon. But, having always worked for VC and private equity backed companies, when you're working for the man and the investor, in particular VC and private equity backed companies, when you're working for the man and the investor, in particular these cases, god bless them. You know they, they um, it's their money, you're playing with their money. So they have a right to ask a lot of questions, right, so it's fair.
Speaker 3:But I had to actually, for some board meetings that I went to as a CMO, I would have to go in and provide monthly like 100 page reports of the exact ROI by channel, by region, by product line, and it was sort of like I had to prove every single thing was a good investment and then they would debate which things were a good investment or not. And it was kind of insane, like the level that investors would go to in previous jobs and sometimes they would be frustrated that we didn't have this level of visibility we're mentioning. They would pound on the table and say why are you a bad person for not tracking this? This is really hard, guys, it's really hard, you understand.
Speaker 2:This isn't just available.
Speaker 3:I can't just push a button and get it, so actually having to do it so many times in the past. I actually work with a really big team in India that I've worked with for the last 10 years across companies, because we've had to solve this problem so many times. We actually created a tool so that we could not have so much brain damage every time we have to do it called Dig Growth, and it basically does do attribution across channels for B2B companies, so you can see where your subscribers come from, and it lets you look at the data in all these different ways. And it lets you look at the data in all these different ways, and we built that just because and they sell it to other people now too because there wasn't really a great tool to do that. You could piece it together with some of the MarTech tools like HubSpot and Salesforce. You could kind of do it, but you couldn't really do it, to the point that investors were like, oh, this is great, this is all the information I wanted. That never came out of their mouths.
Speaker 3:So I just think that we live in a good time, because it's a golden age of MarTech and now it's getting much easier to get fingerprints on the weapon and you just have to put some priority on it and giving great analytics, because when it's your money to answer your question, it means even more than when it's other people's money. It's just like I could be having a lot of fun with this money. My partner and I talked about it. We could run this company, we could travel the world, we could rent yachts, we could be like the Kardashians, or we could start a company and try to make that $5 million into $100 million, and so that's what we did. But we are thoughtful of what we could be spending this money on. You put $10,000 in LinkedIn for advertising and it's gone in one day and you got nothing. That just makes you bash your head against the wall, right? So when you see things like that just picking a random example you know you don't want to let that happen.
Speaker 4:Right, sure, yeah, it makes a lot of sense and it, like the perspective is like, you know, you, you had been beaten up for decades by a VC and you've been answering to someone else how you're spending their money, and so you're very sharpened up on on finding that out, and I think that's a uh, probably a skillset that not very many people have at that level. Um, so, that's that's. Yeah, I think it's pretty cool. Um, uh, another question for you and I, I get, I've been getting hit up on uh, uh, instagram, facebook, on ads, as we all do, and one of them was, um, the last week it was having this you know, there's everywhere you turn around, there's new AI tools, right, and so this, this question, is AI, what's new in 2024? And so one thing that I was hit up with an ad, it was like, hey, let let our new software AI tool run your ads. And so my question to you is like what's changed in marketing in 2024 and in the media, ad and AI and stuff like that what's the new thing there?
Speaker 3:I think every single thing is changing. It's the answer to your question. Unfortunately, like every process in business, is being reimagined process and business is being reimagined. And the question being asked is is this a AI co-pilot case? Is it a case for an AI workflow, which is like semi-automated, or an AI agent, which is you can get to almost complete automation without a human review? I think we're still very early in the AI game.
Speaker 3:I'm using, like I've tried like 50 different AI tools this year and I think most of them are not quite there yet, but I think a lot of them will be there in like six to 12 months. So people keep saying AI is going to take our jobs. I'm like it's not the AI that's going to take your job, it's people who know how to do AI are going to take your job if you don't embrace it, and so I think that that's why I've been out there. I'm, I'm trying, you know, 50 different tools for for different things and it is a huge productivity booster. Marketing projects that used to take me two weeks. Take me a one day For my podcast.
Speaker 3:I produce all the podcasts myself. I do all the work. What would take 10 hours total manual time without these tools to do one episode. I can produce an episode from start to finish in like two hours using all the AI tools, so it is like a force multiplier of three, four, five times more efficient.
Speaker 3:I see that across a lot of things I do, and you still have to be a responsible human and it's not automating things yet, so we're not there, but it does make things a lot better, and you have to have really advanced strategies to use these tools to get high quality outputs. You don't just type something in and it gives you back a great result first. Really, what you have to do is you have to put something in, refine it five times, and then you get a really good result. You're like, wow, that's really good, but if you just refine things manually yourself five times, you'd also get a good result, but it just does it a lot faster. And so that's the analogy I give people is that I think the productivity gains are amazing and it's going to get better and better and better.
Speaker 2:Okay, so talking about, like the new AI type marketing activities and also revisiting kind of our conversation about ranking marketing activities and how do we compare them? What are some of the staples, like what's the Ford F-150, right of marketing, something that's been around for a really long time and just seems to withstand the test of time, and I would say a lot of our listeners are selling physical products and so if you can work that into your answer, that would be bonus points.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so. I think having a great website is still foundational, and whether or not you use AI to make your website better, I think there's a lot of ways you can do that, whether you're selling subscriptions or physical products, like you just need to have an amazing website, an amazing landing pages. For physical products. I did work for a couple of years for an ad tech company that worked with DTC brands. They were spending more than a million dollars a month in advertising on different sites and they were trying to get their conversion rates up from like 1% to 2%, and then I would look at it and they'd be sending a high percentage of their traffic to just their homepage or to one landing page as an example. So I just give that a practical example of you need to have a great website and great buyer journey experiences on the web for people. The more personalized the better, obviously, and those sorts of things are foundational. As an example, I still think that you need to focus on how do you get people to your website in a cost-effective way.
Speaker 3:So SEO is evolving With Google. They change things every day, but it's evolving now, perhaps more than ever, because they put the AI summaries at the top of Google and then they put videos at the top of the results and then they put the organic results under that. So I would say you need to find out if you're not going big in paid advertising and you want to get organic traffic, okay, how can you get into still the top of the search engine? So maybe that's different motions, like how do you get your company mentioned in the AI summaries? That's a different flavor of new SEO. How do you get into the video search results that Google is purposely putting at the top of the page right now? You need to create videos and you need to optimize those videos. You know, you know for the keywords, and that wasn't quite as prominent a couple of years ago.
Speaker 3:Some people are saying very extreme, like it's SEO Armageddon. Let's not be extreme, okay, but it is very, very different. Like, and I wonder myself, like some of the strategies, people say, create a thousand blog posts and you'll have amazing traffic forever, like that's not really a thing today. Like I don't think that long tail sort of works like it did, you know, five years ago, and so I think channels are very different. When I say every process and business is changing, you really have to look at things like using SEO as an example, say, wow, okay, this game has changed. I really need to think about this, right yeah?
Speaker 4:definitely. You know how you put that into perspective is that every process in business is changing, and you know SEO, you know blog writing, attribution, like pretty much everything. And you know the last couple of podcast guests we've had entrepreneurs, obviously, and and they're they're kind of the. The flavor that we're getting is like you is like everybody's testing things and everybody's kind of in a pause. They're kind of waiting for whatever is the. You know something to bubble up. That's really good.
Speaker 4:And you know your analogy of like hey, it's 80% there 90, but like maybe in six months or 12 months we'll have, you know, some tools that bubble up and, and you know, it almost kind of reminds me of uh, it's a little bit scary too, but it's almost. They reminds me of thecom and um. Evaluations were through the route like everything was going crazy for a couple of years and then everything you know, several of them bubbled up and everything else fell off, and so I think we are likely heading into something similar to that. But finding if you can find out what's going to bubble up to the top before anybody else does would be helpful. Just one thing, that's just really helpful for people.
Speaker 3:I think my suggestion for people would be that in the next six to 12 months because we're in this new era of AI is roll up your sleeves, experiment with it. Don't go big, Don't go all in, because it's not there yet. We're still in the first inning of this game, right. But if you do get in there in the next 6 to 12 months and you're experimenting with all the different tools and you understand what's possible and you're watching it, you'll see as the new winners emerge, because open AI may not be a winning player in AI. It may be a company that's going to be founded in the next six to 12 months. That takes things to the next level.
Speaker 3:That's what happened in the dot-com era, right? A lot of the dot-com companies were the early pioneers and they died on the planes with arrows in their backs. And other companies that came after the dot-com boom, you know, were the ultimate beneficiaries of the technology. So it's okay, I think, if people don't go big right now, don't put all their use, all their bullets right now. It's okay to take a couple months six, 12 months, whatever it's going to be and just watch and experiment and then get really smart about it so that when the winning thing is there, you're ready to really step on the gas with it and you're not taking 6-12 months to start experimenting at that point Right.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think that's excellent advice.
Speaker 2:You had mentioned that you've sampled about 50 different AI tools Any favorites, as you've been dipping your toe in the water.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So some of my favorites is I love d script for um audio video editing. It has some awesome um ai capabilities built into it, so I think that's a great example of what's going to be possible in the future um, and they have a great name for their ai capabilities, called underlord. It can be your AI intern, because they started joking about the fact it's not there yet. They don't call it Overlord, they call it Underlord because it's just like it's not quite there yet. You need to look over everything it does, and so we all kind of want an intern. So that's one example. Another great you know one that I really like is I really like things like sectaai, which is like a headshot generator, where and there's a number of these but you take like 30 selfies and then you upload the 30 selfies and it gives you back 200 pictures of you in different settings, wearing different outfits that you know. If you get back 200 pictures, you can definitely pick 20 out of them that are really amazing. And it's you. It's just like it's the same thing as someone editing it in Photoshop like they did 10 years ago. It's just, you know, helping with like generating outfits that don't have a stain on them, things like that. So I think it's like there's really great, you know, practical applications, um, you know, like that.
Speaker 3:I think that, um, there's a lot of sort of um tools for image generation and video generation from text that I think are right there on the bleeding edge, like tools for creating AI avatars that look and sound like a human, and some of those tools are really on the bleeding edge of this moment. You can sort of tell it's AI and it's sort of creepy and there's some nefarious uses for them, but I think that there'll be good uses for those. Because you think how hard it is from a corporate perspective to create good corporate videos. I would talk to someone they're like it's $10,000 per video and I'm just like, kill me now. It should not have been that expensive and stock images should not have been tens of thousands of dollars a year for companies I've been at, and so I think that some of these tools like I use Midjourney for generating images, which I think is good, but you know it's still not quite there yet.
Speaker 3:You had to really mess with it to get some great results. Like you have to be really great at direction to get really great results. So you can. You have to be really great at direction to get really great results. So you can, but I think that there's a lot of tools that wrap ChatGPT in different ways, and because ChatGPT 4.0 is not quite there yet, then all the tools that wrap it are not quite there yet, right?
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:All right, um can you discuss with us uh work for verse and uh who would? Who would benefit from the services you're providing?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so work versus? Is the new startup, the billion dollar company I'm working on? Is the new startup, the billion dollar company I'm working on? It's a pretty big swing, and why not?
Speaker 3:The idea is is we want to create a next generation version of LinkedIn, business networking, social media. That's next generation, and the idea for it is pretty simple it's that after 15 years of really bad social media platforms, we deserve something better, and what I mean by really bad social media platforms is platforms that are full of spam, fraud and bots, largely because it's advertising driven. I mean it's just horrible. It's horrible to the extent that and I talked to a relatively large sample of people over the last two years about this 30, 40% of people just it's so bad with those issues that they just give up. They're just like I'm done, like I'm not gonna be on any of these sites. It's all the way down to like you know how it tracks and listens to you to deliver ads. It's like some of those things are just like pure evil, right, and so I think the idea that we have is it's a business networking site where all of the professionals and the companies on it are verified, there's no bots, there's no fraud. There's no fraud and it's not another way for people to spam you. What it is is a way for you to build your professional brand, to build your company's brand, and it's a marketplace for talent that isn't really out there. In terms of LinkedIn, you can just sort of direct email each other. That's not very interesting, because you just get a lot of spam. What is interesting is is there a structured way from verified people that you can get opportunities to be like a keynote speaker or a board member or an advisor to a company? You can provide expert advice and get paid for it? There's not a great marketplace for providing those sorts of skills. That is widely available across industries, and so we've been building this with a very large team for the last two years and we're launching it in September, so we're just about 45 days away.
Speaker 3:We're really excited and it's going to be subscription based, no advertising, everyone's verified, no way for people to just get on there and spam each other. So the fraud and the bots and stuff like that won't be the same issue that it is across all the networks, including like Instagram. I mean, tiktok is basically just your Chinese bot for Chinese bots, but even on X, you know, a lot of people have just said they turned off comments because every time you post something, you just get barraged with a gazillion bots leaving weird spammy comments on your post. So it's like this world like. I understand why, like 40% of people are like I'm out on this, like we just need to find a better way to do this. And regulators around the world have been trying to force the social networks to move away from advertising, move to opt-in subscription models, but they're hesitant because they build multi-billion dollar big, huge businesses off this. I get it, but the user experience for people like is really terrible.
Speaker 3:The stat I'll leave you with here is is that LinkedIn in the last year said they removed 100 million fake profiles in the last year alone. Wow, I mean just trying to wrap your head around the scale of fraud and phishing and abuse. It's enough to make your head explode when you think about stats like that. And I don't think that Instagram, facebook X, twitter, tiktok I don't think any of those are any better. I think it's worse, probably, than LinkedIn.
Speaker 3:And so you know, with that in mind, like we've set out to solve that problem. And so you know, with that in mind, like we've set out to solve that problem and we think that we don't need to get a billion people using it. We'd rather have like 50 million of the right people using it that are all verified, that are real people Right and that can work with each other in a more structured way. So that's sort of our big swing. We're super excited about it. If anybody is interested in being on the beta group for it and they reach out to me on LinkedIn, I'll put them on the beta list and I'd love to have people's feedback.
Speaker 2:Outstanding. We'll post a link to your LinkedIn, as well as to the website and our show notes, to all of our listeners that are driving. But, boys, there are needs for this. I've always felt like LinkedIn is a restaurant us to the website and our show notes to all of our listeners that are driving. But I, boys, there are needs for this. I I've always felt like like linkedin is a restaurant that you go to lunch and you know you don't like the food, but you, you have to go there. It's only placed on the block and especially in the workplace, it's. You know, when you're back in the office, if you're on facebook, your boss looks at you as though you're, uh, messing around, not working. If you're on Facebook, your boss looks at you as though you're messing around, not working. If you're on LinkedIn, it's different. It's a different thing, and that one place to go for business people has bad food. So that's outstanding. That's outstanding.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I really like that concept. And, david's right, I'm a big fan of X, but my, my big fan of X is going down Cause every time, every time I turn, it's like I can't even do what I want on there because the bots have taken it over. And so, yeah, like in terms of marketing, I'm sure you guys are going to be marketing bot free, like that'll attract a lot of people that want something there that's that doesn't exist. Hey, we're bot free. Oh, okay, well, let me come on over, I'm gonna try that out. So, and I like that concept of like fractional, uh, fractional hiring and fractional services, um, that's that's also. I think there's a gap there. That's, uh, really like that concept.
Speaker 2:Um eric, anything else that I gotta. It's convenient that you're launching in an election year, because bots will be a hot topic from now until November, and so that will. That's great, that's great.
Speaker 4:The Russians and the Chinese are going to be spitting at Panama on any platform they can find. So anyway, that's a sidebar, david. Anything else, any other questions you want to ask, derek, before we get into the fire round.
Speaker 2:No, this has been a really fun conversation. Let's get into the fire round.
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely, Eric. Are you ready? I'm ready. What is your favorite book or podcast?
Speaker 3:So my favorite podcast is the All In podcast. It's got the four billionaires from Silicon Valley. They do an episode once a week. Love that. I also love my First Million, which is really on brand with this show, talking about how people who fire the man get out there and succeed as a founder. So those are two of my favorite podcasts. Good.
Speaker 4:Excellent. Next one what are your hobbies?
Speaker 3:I like to travel, so I've been to 63 countries around the world, so I love to travel. I love to do photography while I travel, and that's I. I also have a uh, a French bulldog who I'll never shut up about, and, uh, she's, she's my other hobby, but I often refer to her. As for my podcast, staff is like she's my chief marketing officer. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I have an English bulldog and he's upstairs and sometimes he is also my uh marketing officer, so that's awesome. One one follow up on the travel. What is your? You said 63 countries. That's a lot. What is your? What was your favorite one? Southern France.
Speaker 3:St Tropez Um once I achieve another billion dollar exit. I could.
Speaker 4:I could retire there, but it's that expensive. You probably need to to uh hang with the people there. Yeah, absolutely Um cool. Uh, what is one thing that you do not miss about working for the man?
Speaker 3:I don't miss the, the politics, and having to convince 50 other people for every single thing that needs to be done. I mean, that is just. That was just exhausting in so many ways.
Speaker 4:Okay, Awesome. Last one what do you think sets apart successful entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail or never get started?
Speaker 3:I think a big piece of it is just having the right culture, and part of that is cultural values like being curious, being ambitious, having belief in what you're doing. Those are three examples that you would give, because I gave you guys a pretty passionate pitch about what I'm doing with Work. First, if I didn't deeply believe in that, I couldn't wake up every day. I don't have anybody telling me I need to work 12 hours a day, six, seven days a week, but I drive myself because I believe in what I'm doing, I believe that it's impactful for people and I believe it'll be successful. So I think having those right sort of cultural values for me it's around curiosity and belief and just being ambitious and making the most out of life. I think that those you know for me are the things. It doesn't have to be those three things for everyone else, but have some. Have some North stars that that really help you through these couple thousand days of stringing together hard work before you get those glorious moments like ringing the bell at the New York soccer change.
Speaker 4:Yeah absolutely Um great advice. Uh, david, over to you to close out the show.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, Eric. This has been a really fun episode to record. I know our audience is really going to love it. I want to thank you for being a guest on our show. If people are interested in getting in touch with you or getting on the Workverse platform, what would be the best way?
Speaker 3:Yeah, they can hit me up on LinkedIn, or they can go to wordfirstcom and get started there.
Speaker 2:Outstanding, and we'll post links to all that in the show notes. Eric, thank you so much for your time today and looking forward to staying in touch. Thank you very much.
