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The death of email and serious startups with Stewart Townsend image

The death of email and serious startups with Stewart Townsend

S2 E7 ยท Untitled SEO Podcast
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29 Plays1 year ago

The world of digital marketing there's always something that's 'dead'. Sometimes it's SEO that has kicked the bucket, other times it might be something as simple as the humble jpg.

Stewart Townsend has a long history of working in tech, but in the corporate world and in startups. Most of that time has been spent building 'bleeding edge' technology. So when Stewart declared that 'email is dead' I thought I ought to ask him the big 'why'.

Find Stewart on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/stewarttownsend/

More links
www.hullo.me - the sms product
and www.alwaysonmobile.io the company

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Transcript

Introduction to Season 2 and Special Guest

00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, welcome back to the Untitled SEO Podcast, and I have a guest today, but before I get on to that, I need to explain what we're doing in Season 2 of this podcast. We're doing LAN, that's Live Action Networking. I've been an SEO for around 25 years, and I've identified in that time that we just don't talk to each other enough.

SEO Networking and Collaboration

00:00:19
Speaker
So I'm getting people in the SEO profession and satellite industry, satellite niches onto the podcast for a good chat. Because quite frankly, we work at SEO with an abundance mindset. So till that end, none of us are competitors. We're all just here to help each other.

Guest Introduction and Background

00:00:37
Speaker
And I have a very special guest today who isn't necessarily an SEO consultant. But if you'd like to introduce yourself, honored guest, I bet you know a little bit about SEO.
00:00:48
Speaker
Yeah, I would definitely say I'm not an SEO expert, but I haven't just come back from Bangkok and spent a couple of weeks with about 400 SEO experts. I feel I should know a little bit more, but yeah. Yeah, my name is Shut Town's End.
00:01:04
Speaker
been around the block a little bit, been in corporate for part of my life and then some startups. And now I'm running a couple of startups myself as well. And looking to use sort of different techniques and aspects to get those moving along. Sorry, Andrew. So one of the things... Not at all. This is a conversation. I'm not thingy frost. See, I can't even remember his name.
00:01:35
Speaker
They're Frost Nixon. I can't remember. I was going to say Nick Frost, but no, he's the guy from Hot Fuzz and everything. I'm also not Nick Frost. One of the things that, what a weird intro. One of the things I like to ask my guests is how they got into tech. And your journey through tech is really interesting. So can you give us a potted history? Let's go back to how you got your first tech job.

Career Transition to Tech

00:02:02
Speaker
Yeah, so I was a mature university student, shall we say, I did a degree part time. So I could join a company that most listeners probably won't know about now, but a company called Sun Microsystems, which was the inventor of Unix and Java and Solaris and lots of lovely stuff. And I started there
00:02:23
Speaker
I think it was just over 30 with a load of graduates in a pre-sells role. So it was a technical role. I was writing unit scripts and doing networking. And before that, I used to sell steel. So there's hope for us all. Oh, wow. That is quite a shift. First of all, yeah, Sun Microsystems. I was a network admin in the 90s.
00:02:47
Speaker
and was on the Microsoft side of things, just as an independent and real, so in awe of Sun Microsystems. We were just looking up to them. For one thing, the guy who owned the company had his own fighter jet or something at the time. Scott McNealy, yeah. Yeah, loads of crazy stories. The transition from selling steel to tech,
00:03:12
Speaker
You say you went to university, but was there like one thing that triggered you to make the move or was it just for the sake of change?
00:03:18
Speaker
No, no, no. I sort of rewinding back a little bit further. When I was a teenager, it's one of those sliding door moments. I had to make a decision, which was I could go and do an apprenticeship at British Gas in their IT department, which was in a place called Stratford, which was a bus ride away. Or I could work at the garage and get ยฃ5 a week more, which was at the top of my road, which meant I could get up at 10 to 9.
00:03:45
Speaker
I was a teenager I made the wrong decision but I made what I thought was the right decision at the time around that and I always regretted it so I got married quite young and had my son when I was quite young and decided I don't want to sell steel for the rest of my life I want to actually go back to that but by that and the other way to get a job
00:04:04
Speaker
in corporate land was, I mean, even before that was to have a degree. So I went back to do a degree. So I did business information systems, HNC, and then a degree in business information systems as well. I managed to get in on the last graduate recruitment at SUN before they shut that program down.

Corporate vs. Startup Dynamics

00:04:28
Speaker
It's a hell of a time to be getting your start because
00:04:32
Speaker
It's certainly not the tail end of Sun, as you mentioned, like Java. I'm going to say Java and Unix is a big thing. This podcast is aimed at industry peers who are all now laughing at me going, oh, really, do you think? It's amazing. Just under 14 years. It is amazing the amount of people that when you speak to them about that time, who don't know about Sun or Java or Solaris and stuff.
00:05:02
Speaker
I moved over to Oracle for a year as part of the acquisition when Oracle acquired. But again, I always knew I was going to move on because by that time,
00:05:11
Speaker
Inside Sun, I built out and was running their startup accelerator. So my job was to find the next Google, the next Facebook, and get them to use Solaris and our x86 servers. Oracle didn't think that was a thing. I didn't quite fit in, because by then I wasn't wearing a corporate uniform. I was wearing flowery shirts. I met Mark Zuckerberg. I've met two prime ministers. I've met the Fonz. We don't do the thumbs with the Fonz.
00:05:38
Speaker
And it was a great time, but Oracle were not that type of company. So by that time I was like, right, I left and went into
00:05:46
Speaker
work for two startups, I suppose you could call Zendesk a startup at the time, and really worked out then. And that's when it started to understand more about SEO and content marketing and driving traffic than when you're in corporate. You don't get any of that. You don't understand it unless you're working those teams. When you're in a startup,
00:06:09
Speaker
you're doing everything and you start to understand more about how a business functions and how lead degenerates and how it's important for these sort of things that beforehand was just, it seemed like it was rocket science and then some other people in another office that did that type of thing. It seems to my mind to be a massive transition. You've just detailed it out very well, so I won't kind of push too much further on that.
00:06:34
Speaker
But what were the biggest shocks to you when you went from a corporate environment, as you say, people were saying, you just say, oh, make this happen, or do you just like wave your hands and magic happens in a room in another building, possibly in another country? What was the biggest shock when suddenly you found yourself a lot, a lot more involved?
00:06:53
Speaker
For me, it was actually doing work. So in corporate, you do do work and it feels like it's hard work. When you're in a 25 person startup and most of them are developers.
00:07:09
Speaker
then actually what happens is that you realize that, oh my God, this is hard work. So I've been doing pre-sales calls with somebody in Asia packet, 10 o'clock at night in bed. The next day I'd be trying to build a marketing plan. I'd be ordering pizza for the developers and doing hackathons. And it was just like, wow, this is total respect to people that go and put the life on the line, the mortgages and all that, or get investments to run this type of business.
00:07:38
Speaker
And I thought, oh, it was slightly changed. When I went to Zendesk, that was 250 people globally, and they took 60 million or 100 million by then. That was the same though. It was just full on consistently. So it was a massive transition. But for me, it was a great, I was already sort of aware of it because I've already been running this sort of startup accelerator. But it was a great transition in terms of learning new skills, being exposed to
00:08:03
Speaker
Marketing sales customer services success is like great i can i can be more skilled now i'm not just isolated one little box i know about financial services and how to sell into that because that's. It's good but it doesn't expose you to the big world. No and it's quite high pressure environment i think if you got the type of mind that can learn that way.
00:08:28
Speaker
That's the mindset that does very well in that environment because there isn't the luxury of just passing the buck to somebody else in the team. You stick out like a sore thumb if you can't make it work. You really do. Put it this way, you soon know when you've ordered the wrong pizza for 20 plus developers. That's my main concern. That's the most important thing ever. I get that right and you find.
00:08:57
Speaker
One of the first times I saw inside that kind of tech hub was one of the Google hubs in London. And I remember noticing that a lot of the tables had toilet rolls on. And I was thinking, surely they actually leave the table to use the toilet. And I looked around and they also had bottles of whiskey and stuff on the tables. And I was like,
00:09:19
Speaker
and can't be 100% sure that is what they do. I've seen developers in full flow, and I'm surprised they remember debris sometimes.

Investor Influence in Startups

00:09:27
Speaker
It's amazing. I'm celebrating it. I'm not poking fun. No, but it is. It's one story in full flow. I mean, these were C++ developers doing real time. We had access to Twitches, Firehose, real time. So we were sort of working against that.
00:09:44
Speaker
and they were, yeah, once they got in the zone, literally, the headphones on, if you interrupted them, it was like the end of the world, because they were just on it. And it was awesome, not to watch, that sounds a bit weird, but to see the outcome of it and go, right, okay, we just built that, yeah, just done it now, it's live, it's deployed. Whereas in corporate, it's like, are we doing the next release? Yeah, every six months, we'll do another release, a patch update and stuff. It's like, okay, that's really exciting, isn't it? Whereas in that sort of land, it's live, which is great.
00:10:15
Speaker
That's kind of the big change, certainly as far as I've seen it, and I'm very wary of making myself sound old. I mean, I am, but it's fascinating, I think, to people my age that that shift came. It was quite kind of punk rock.
00:10:31
Speaker
the shift to the power being the people with the knowledge and the people who could scale fast and build fast before a lot of investors came in and started putting some of that corporate style weight and responsibility on things. But I thought it would die out. I thought the investors would flatten it and make everything very beige. And I'm not greatly experienced in startups, but that doesn't appear to have happened. What's your experience? I mean, there's still people with the spark.
00:11:01
Speaker
There's still sparks there, but I think, again, we're in a bit of a different sort of situation now where investors are now starting to realize, actually, we need to put investments into companies that do generate revenue, and that's what we want to invest in. I think we're sort of moving along from this Airbnb, WeWork, those sort of aspects where it's like, we'll keep pumping cash in, because at some stage, it's going to make some money.
00:11:24
Speaker
But there still is, again, you know, the sort of rationale behind leaving Zendesk, which was about five or six years ago now, was it was getting back more into a corporate structure. And it was getting into a place where we all used to help each other. And then one day somebody in services said I'd asked for help with some of my partners.
00:11:44
Speaker
I can't do that. It's not my job. It's not my objectives. And it's like, okay, we're back in Salesforce again. We're back in Oracle. It's that sort of style. And that's what investors push when you go for an IPO and you go into sort of going onto shares and things like that, the company dynamics rapidly changes from

Challenges with SaaS and AI Tools

00:12:03
Speaker
that side. Whereas in a smaller organization, like when we were 20, even when we were sort of 25 people a day as if,
00:12:10
Speaker
Yeah, we had investors, we had a board, but it was just, we could just make things happen really quickly. You didn't ask for forgiveness. Things happened. There was a spark. We were just buzzing all the time. It was just exciting. But we still knew at the back of our minds, we have to make money. We're not here to just keep playing foosball all day. But yeah, it's definitely sort of flattening off a more
00:12:34
Speaker
I think less companies that come through that spark now anything what what i'm seeing as well is more family firm type investments more private investments than sort of vc style. In those sort of companies to help keep that momentum going and keep that the edge because of the edge those companies are going to grow literally just become another oracle.
00:12:58
Speaker
Yeah, I can see that and that it really was the Wild West. So it was an unknown territory, an unknown frontier from what I know. I haven't been there. I'm basing part of it on the air. Have you seen that series, Silicon Valley? Yeah. I'm kind of in my head that that is what you've lived through pretty much. But something interests me, we've worked with a few SaaS clients and there appears to be
00:13:27
Speaker
A lot of supporting software now. Somebody was talking about AppSumo as like crack for startups. You can go along now and there is something that will allegedly solve your problem. And I wonder if it's gone too far the other way. When you were first starting at Zendesk, for example, and there was nothing out there to help you or very, very little, I wonder if that
00:13:53
Speaker
was easier than trying to go onto AppSumo and see 2,000 apps that could possibly help you scale your SaaS. Watch your hands. You're still doing this now. Yeah, I love that term for AppSumo. That's great. I never know where SaaS is.
00:14:08
Speaker
he can put that into his marketing terms. Yeah, so what's happened now with those sort of lifetime deal type platforms and email as a lead is there's just too many out there because we've got the buzzwords around AI and then 10 years ago it was machine learning.
00:14:24
Speaker
You know, there's the whole world of SaaS. But what you have now is something becomes popular at Zendesk and then you'll get a factory that will reproduce that and make 10 or 20 different versions of it and stick it on AppSumo. So now we have too much choice. Whereas like you say, when they joined Zendesk and it was like, I was looking, I was running partners. I was looking for a partner relationship management system, which is similar to a CRM, but for partners.
00:14:49
Speaker
And it wasn't a big wide choice. It's quite a small area. Now that even that area has grown, not so much AppSumo wise, but generally in the world of SaaS, that has grown as well into a mature ecosystem.
00:15:03
Speaker
Yeah. I think the world as a whole, we've got too much choice of everything now and it makes it more complicated. I think the sort of my mantra is try and keep things as simple as possible or do one thing really well from that side because yeah, like you say, I'm an absolute member. I don't buy as much now because literally there is 50 million versions.
00:15:27
Speaker
I went through a stage where I was part of that briefcase club. I was just buying software for the sake of it that I've never used in my life. I've got a spreadsheet of stuff. Um, but literally it's like, I don't know, you'll have, um, AI writing blog content platforms. There must be about 500 million on there now cloning your voice, descriptive copies, all this sort of thing. It's like, and most of them are pretty poor, but they're just all copies. There's no, where's the innovation? Where's something new?
00:15:55
Speaker
No, exactly.

Innovation and Platform Dependency

00:15:57
Speaker
Something that really surprised me has happened in the last 24 hours. There's been a reminder of how we are still in a world that things can shift very quickly because there's so many startups getting so much funding for AI-related things.
00:16:13
Speaker
And we've been looking at them, you know, we use GPT-4 for data analysis and all sorts of things. And we were sort of looking at some of these other services and thinking, they're just a thin veneer of emulsion over GPT-4. And then yesterday, kind of this morning, really, GPT-4 changed, and now you can have your own flavors of GPT-4.
00:16:37
Speaker
There must be in Silicon Valley today, there must be a lot of investors and developers who are having an awful day. Yeah, because they just sort of swiped out. Yeah, they just ripped the guts of it out. But as you say, it wasn't based on a spark. It wasn't based on an original seed of an idea. It was an also ran
00:16:57
Speaker
I'm not saying GPT, it's only saying all the other skins are exposed. Yeah, it's essentially sort of people jumping in the bandwagon of here's a platform underneath that's now been exposed publicly and has got a lot of attention. I'll put a little layer on top of it, an interface, and that's it. Now we've got a product, away we go. Give me 50 million, great stuff. Right, where's the 50 million gone? I don't know, we bought some foosball tables. And it's gone. Pizza. Pizza, pizza's gone.
00:17:25
Speaker
But it's like when Twitter had a really sort of vibrant ecosystem of developers, and platforms were built on it, and then they just turned it off. You know, 10 years or so ago, when I was doing Tweetfest and such like that, it's literally they just destroyed companies in 24 hours. And that's always been the problem when
00:17:43
Speaker
companies build on third-party platforms and then sell as a SaaS service. They're always beholden to that platform from that side. And it's like, yep, your business has gone, right? Thank you very much. Move on. Whereas companies innovate and build their own idea. Boom. You know, you're out there doing it. I spoke to somebody probably about three or four years ago now and we were talking to them about doing some work with them and they
00:18:13
Speaker
They sat me down and they showed me this AI tool they had and it could generate photorealistic images or anything. This is four years ago. One of the things that raises a wry smile in the tech industry at the moment is everyone going about AI and we're like, I know people have been working in it for 20 years. It's not a new thing. But I keep meaning to look up how this company is doing because they'd done it from the ground up.

Advantages of Smaller Companies

00:18:42
Speaker
it wasn't a thin veneer, but the challenge there is still racing to stay ahead of the people who aren't creating genuine innovation. Stuart, we'll come to what you're doing now in a minute, but I'm quite interested in
00:19:00
Speaker
I mean, we'll review what you're doing in a minute, but you're still involved in startups. Is that fair thing to say? You're involved in original thought, new companies. So clearly addicted. Not in corporate land, no chance. So what's kept you in it for, I'm trying to do the maths here. It's been nine, 10 years that you've been in, apart from when you're at
00:19:26
Speaker
Yeah, so for a left Oracle, I think it was 2011, 2010. It's been about 12 or 13 years, yeah. 10 not to look backwards on the years now. Once it went past 30, it was like, I'm not looking back.
00:19:43
Speaker
I was just going to say, somebody asked me how old I was yesterday and I didn't want to work it out. I know the ballpark range. I'd just go on the selector box now and just keep going to the next one. But I think, again, it's just sort of an aspect of working to do sort of innovative areas and also anchoring it back to us. So I love data and I love sort of talking to people about concepts and things like that and selling that concept. But I think it's more the aspect of,
00:20:12
Speaker
working in smaller nimble companies or working with from sort of the consultancy side, I don't have to get involved in any politics. I don't have to worry about sitting in the cafe and trying to entertain people to make my way to be a VP or to get a budget or all that sort of stuff that comes with being involved in an office or work I can walk away from. I don't have to be part of it.
00:20:34
Speaker
And that, for me, is great, because I can do all the exciting stuff and then literally just say, OK, I'm not doing that, or I can make a decision myself.

Evolving Digital Marketing Strategies

00:20:45
Speaker
I don't have to be bound by anything. I think that's the core element. I used to hate that. I was never very good at it. It was just literally, I just say, I'm from the North. It's just what it is. It's just, say it as it is. I'm not going to suck up to anybody. It's just, if it's crap, it's crap. If it does this or it does that, it's just, yeah.
00:21:03
Speaker
Yeah, so I think that that's been the key element for me. So I can see that that opportunity to not toe the line then is is a driver there. And I say that because there's something that I want to talk to you about, which I am really interested by, because it's a bold statement that you've made in the past. And that's the emails dead.
00:21:27
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm sure anybody that uses MailChimp or MailChimp will hate this. Again, that comes from a couple of aspects. One is we all open email every day and delete email or unsubscribe or have too much email is one element. And really good emails land really well. I'm not discounting that. But actually the open rates and people's attention is miniscule now.
00:21:55
Speaker
So one of the companies that I mean invested in is probably the best way to describe it, is an SMS company. And that's part of the rationale. So SMS gets 95% open rate, email doesn't. And talking to people, literally, I was doing a trade show about four weeks ago, I was talking to people about this sort of concept of, do you actually read your emails?
00:22:21
Speaker
Do you read your work emails from your boss? Yeah. Do you read your emails that attract to sell you stuff? No. Why not? Because I've subscribed to them and I can't remember why or they're targeting me about something I don't like or they're trying to personalize it and make it really cheesy.
00:22:36
Speaker
and then I get too many of them and it's been a problem with email for since email was invented wanted if you're ever part of some microsystems and you're in group messages you'll get this concept of how do I unsubscribe from this group by not replying back to the email thread please do not
00:22:55
Speaker
That was an internal joke which i'm sure if anybody from the sun is listening we'll get that totally but but again it's just that concept you know it took too much information overload into it's like a look at you know the newsletters i'm subscribed to probably about twenty thirty a day i'm not reading them because it's just overwhelming.
00:23:13
Speaker
And maybe that's just me, or maybe it's just how I interact. But again, it's just something that I've lived with over the last four or five years of, I don't think email is that mechanism that really resonates or lands with people as it used to. That's my bold statement. It's realistic. I mean, my own experience, I've been involved with mailing systems, or since we used to have to build them on
00:23:42
Speaker
on Linux servers because things like MailChimp weren't really developed yet. And the sheer numbers we have to have on lists now to get get conversion rates that perhaps many years ago were far easier to do is quite high. And I think a part of the challenge there is that we were talking about
00:24:04
Speaker
software that backs up technology and moves becomes saturated. I think the supporting documentation around things like digital marketing also becomes saturated. If I had written a blog post in 2001 saying, look, you've got to be on email, you're missing out if you don't, that blog post naturally becomes a drop in the ocean 10 years later.
00:24:29
Speaker
And then here we are 25 years later, and there's now probably 200 million blog posts out there saying email is the thing. And it can't be the thing if everyone's doing the thing. It's just everything becomes like beige goo. So I'm interested in SMS. I'm always interested in what's next.
00:24:52
Speaker
And I'm not going to ask you to predict the future, but I am interested in your angle on the SMS thing, because I play devil's advocate. I still think of it as just a way you text your mum. Exactly, and everybody does. And ironically enough, even though it was invented, I don't know, 50 million years ago, as a little communication between engineers, it's still used predominantly as a way to text your mum.
00:25:19
Speaker
from that side. But actually in the US, that market has grown quicker than actually in Europe at the moment. They're moving, they're migrating a lot of their influence over marketing, direct communications over to SMS from email, because this whole open rate aspect, and they have tighter legislation over there for getting numbers and allocations. So there's none of this. Yeah, which I'm amazed at.
00:25:45
Speaker
When you go through a provider over there, it's a lot more stringent than it is in Europe. Now, of course, with SMS as well, it has a very stringent double opt-in GDPR compliance out of the box type of thing. But the use cases are really simple. It's literally you can target and personalize people because they've opted in to receive communications from you. So a typical use case would be
00:26:10
Speaker
a blind company or an appointment based company talking to people and they send 600 million leaflets out to houses, suddenly put a QR code on there that a consumer can scan and it sends an SMS message back automatically. They reply back, they get double opted in and then you can ask them some questions about what they're after.
00:26:30
Speaker
And also, it opens up some of the use cases in this business is people that are deaf that can't make phone calls or people that actually don't want to talk to people. I want to buy some blinds, but I don't want to speak to a million people because I'm a little bit grumpy like I am. I don't want to speak to a million people from that side. And it opens up different sort of parts of society that may not necessarily have access to email or read email, but they've got Nokia,
00:27:00
Speaker
62 10 from a million years ago and can open a text message. Yeah, so it's a big growing space.

Exploring SMS Technology

00:27:08
Speaker
But normally most people think of the mom or I've got a message from FedEx and my parcels being delivered or I've got an appointment reminder from a dentist or that sort of thing. There's a whole lot more you can do from sort of personalized outreach from that side. But yeah, some of the biggest growing companies are based in the US.
00:27:29
Speaker
When you put it like that, I am surprised that it hasn't happened faster. I mean, I remember being involved. I used to be involved for fun in running conferences. And I remember being very impressed with myself that I set up a system that would text, send an SMS message to delegates to remind them that sessions were starting and where to go. And I just cobbled that together myself. But I'm yet to see a really easy to use platform. It sounds like I'm building it up to
00:27:59
Speaker
to kind of, to plug your thing, which you're more than welcome to, but just the pennies are just dropping in my head going, yeah, we've seen the massive simplification of email services like MailChimp, Aweber and all the others. I've not spotted anything like that for SMS. And I do, I don't spend all my time on AppSumo, but you know, I am in the business as it were.
00:28:23
Speaker
The rationale, the reason is, so this particular company, we come from an enterprise background, so we used to sell to FedEx, to Vodafone, still sell to the National Health, doing anywhere up to 100 million messages a month through the platform.
00:28:39
Speaker
now we're sort of broadly forward into the mainstream. But what you'll tend to see is platforms that allow you to upload hundreds of thousands of phone numbers and then just send text messages out. But they're not a joined up conversation. Basically spam. We're not about that. So we're trying to change the face of the marketplace in terms of using it. And that trade show, you've nailed on the head there, Andrew. So essentially,
00:29:04
Speaker
The worst thing I hate about trade shows is we have to go around zap people and then you get a spreadsheet at the end of the people use act But you can't put any notes on there Again, you can have a QR code set up or a direct number on there people can message him
00:29:19
Speaker
Join the conversation be reminded of all the sessions when they're about to start they then get hooked in Automatically into the elements are interested in so if they've been to three stands It's like it just makes a whole process more streamlined and efficient and in real time So, you know, you're a trade show literally you can drop a message out going we're speaking at 2 o'clock on Mainstage a please come and see us and that goes to the people are interested not to those that aren't we don't get the message as simple as that
00:29:49
Speaker
I should have stuck with that really, shouldn't I? I'm going back like 15 years, probably there. You could have sold as a product. There's a lot of work. Yeah. Yeah, well, there's gateways. Oh, no. They're not like email gateways. They're very complex. And just think of it as well. If you're dropping messages out for a parcel courier, you want those messages to go to people in the countries in the morning. You don't want to send them. When you hit send,
00:30:14
Speaker
Typically that message goes live if you want to stage and go ahead at eight o'clock at night But I want them to get it eight o'clock in the morning in Indonesia and eight o'clock in the morning the US That's really complex that sort of thing all that is complex. So yeah, it's not It's not sort of been done in that fashion a lot of people are still building it out as
00:30:36
Speaker
either HubSpot sort of shopping cart integration, SMS messaging, very basic stuff, or mass marketing. Whereas we've built it as a customer communication channel, but from a marketing perspective, from that side. So you can put data into the platform, understand who the customer is, if it's a shoe company, okay, like BrownBrogues, size nine, I'm not size 10 or whatever. So don't send me messages about the discounts for
00:31:06
Speaker
blue brogues, size eight, because I'm not interested. So there's a lot of personalization in there.

Innovation and Future Outlook

00:31:11
Speaker
It's a really interesting space. It's just sort of quite not talked about a lot.
00:31:18
Speaker
Well, not at all. I've been around the block a few times myself and it's not something I've been aware of. We'll put a link in the show notes if you're okay with that. What's the name of the company? It's called, well, the platform's called Hello Me, but hello with a U because we're cool because obviously hello you can get access to expensive.
00:31:39
Speaker
So H-U-L-L-O dot me. And then the company behind it is called Always On Mobile. That's the enterprise offering. But I'd love to talk to people about use cases and ideas on it. Yeah, you've tweaked my sort of my geek curiosity here and the danger is that I would now just launch into a whole ton of very technical questions, which I'm not going to do.
00:32:04
Speaker
because this episode needs to be less than four hours long. And that's good because I would embarrass myself by not being able to answer them. I didn't build a platform. The guys that built your ex Rolls-Royce engineers. And a little bit like similar to my stories, they worked on Rolls-Royce for a long time.
00:32:23
Speaker
decided they were leaving and went off to sell this SMS company 20 years ago. 20 years ago, three weeks ago it was. Literally walked out and said, that's it, we're doing this. Crazy, absolute crazy. I always like to tenuously draw connections between things that happen in the digital space and bands. And some of the best bands get formed when bands that have already existed split up.
00:32:48
Speaker
and those members of the old conformed bands with other people. I managed to do it. It's a talent that I'm yet to monetize, if I'm honest. Stuart, thank you ever so much for taking the time to speak to us. It's been absolutely fascinating. You've come from an angle that I've not had the opportunity to explore somebody with the experience that you've had, and I very much value that. Is there any parting thought you'd like to leave our listeners with?
00:33:17
Speaker
No major thoughts, but it's just been great to actually have a conversation. I like this type of style of just, you know, no, no questions, preamble or anything. It's just, let's go in. It's, I think it always works out the best. So, um, no, no, it's been great. Really enjoyed it. Good, good to, um, explore some different ideas. Brilliant. Okay. I'm going to say goodbye, Stuart. Would you like to say goodbye?
00:33:41
Speaker
I'll say goodbye to everybody. Thank you very much. And if you want to get in touch with me, details have been in the show notes. Ask away. Ask any questions.