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All right, let’s get started. Hey there freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com home of the ambitious upstart and the place where over 600 entrepreneurs have come to tell you their stories. Tell you about the highs, tell you about their challenges. How they got from the challenges to those high moments. They did it all so that you can learn from their experiences, build you own success story, and hopefully, I think, you should come back here and tell your story to others and do for them what others have done for you.
The question for this interview is how does a toolbar company sell for a reported $45 million? Dror Ceder is the co-founder of Wibiya, a platform for publishers to integrate applications into their sites through a web based toolbar. In April, 2011 he sold his company to Conduit. That’s a company that he met in a surprising way, as you’ll hear personally.
Dror, welcome!
Dror: Thank you, it’s great to be here.
Andrew: Most people in their lives will not get to sell their businesses, one that they’ve nurtured from nothing and built up. Do you remember the day when you sold your company? What was that like?
Dror: That was a special day. The entire process is a long process but that specific day is something that I really remember good. It was me and the other founder of Wibiya, Daniel, were on a trip to New York. It was seven in the morning, 7 a.m. We were in the hotel. We were staying in the same room, separate beds. The phone rings and on the phone is the VP of Marketing of Conduit. He’s like, did you open your email? I’m like it’s 7 a.m. here, we’re just waking up. No, I haven’t opened my email yet. He’s like open your email, open your email.
I open my email and then there’s a big picture of the Conduit CEO, Ronon Shilo, signing the acquisition documents. It was a lot of documents. Then we hear in the background noise “congratulations” and there were a lot of people there. It was a really happy atmosphere and we’re just waking up. We’re just rubbing our eyes to this amazing feeling. It was such a special feeling.
We straight away did a conference call with all the Wibiya employees. They were sitting in a garage in a house in Israel. We told them the news. It was really exciting to see all the people cheering and being so happy. Then each of us, me and Daniel, we called our wives, each one. It was just one of those moments that you call your wife. I called my wife and she answers and I tell her it’s over, the deal’s over. It was a really tough few months. She was so smiling and happy.
That feeling of excitement and adrenaline and you feel it in your tummy, that it’s burning of really happiness. That’s something that you were able to achieve it. As well as Daniel, it was the exact same thing. I can’t explain in words too much the feeling but it’s just like burning inside of you. You get addicted to that.
Andrew: It’s a good addiction to have. It’s a good thing to keep striving for. The reason I wanted to start off with that is because we often do talk about the challenges and how we overcome them and how figure out solutions to problems as they come up. It’s important, I think, to get in touch with that feeling of what it’s like when you cross a milestone. When you hit that big accomplishment.
At the same time I do want to stress that this wasn’t an easy process. In fact, you called your wife to tell her about the happiness. Your wife was there at the low moment too. Can you tell your audience about it and then we’ll tell your story about the company and how you built it up. People will really learn from your experience. But share that low moment first.
Dror: There was a lot of low moments along the way, for sure. It was a roller coaster, as I’m sure you’re told a lot. My low moment was during university and me and Daniel and Aviv, the first founder, were working on a completely different project called Junga. I was studying and these were really, really tough days. What would happen is I had to take a night shift, night work, so I could sustain myself and eat. I had to study and there was a lot of studying to do. I needed to do the start up as well.
What would happen is I would wake up, go to university, go to school. Study until the evening. Then take the car, I had a ’92 Peugeot. There’s no air conditioning in it whatsoever and it gets in the summer in Israel, I can tell you that. You drive all the way to work and you work from 8:00 in the evening until 5:00 A.M. in the morning. During that time that I worked you also do a lot of stuff regarding the start up. Come back, sleep for two and a half hours, then wake up. Go to university again, study all over again. It goes on and on. I didn’t see my wife, almost. I didn’t see my friends. When I came back on the weekends to my family they said I looked like a ghost. Really, really tough time. Really tough time.
Andrew: Is it a waste of time to have gone through that? I know we’re supposed to say that we learn something from these periods but did you really? Or was it just a waste of time because you went in the wrong direction with Junga?
Dror: It was definitely not. It was definitely the right decision to go with Junga. Because the only way you learn is from your own experience usually.
Andrew: What did you learn from this experience where the site isn’t up, you had to make a drastic change from it? What did you take away from it?
Dror: We did every mistake possible. Anything you can imagine. We did all the wrong things. All the no no’s. We worked on the product for two years without launching it. We were discussing a tremendous amount of features that are not necessary for the product. We always said this feature is important, this feature is important, this feature is important. We didn’t even talk to our customers and we worked on this for two years. We had all kinds of conflict regarding a lot of different features that we needed to do. You see all three of us, all of the three founders, discussing it for an entire week. None of that is important. We just need to launch the product.
I think that was a very big mistake that we didn’t launch. That’s something you learn from that. That’s how you learn. I think you learn also from listening, and I’ll get to that point later. But you learn the most from your own experiences.
Andrew: All right, I’ve written down some of the things that you said you did wrong with Junga so that I can come back and ask you specifically what Junga was and how you learned those lessons. Then I also want to find out how, with the new business, with Wibiya, you did things differently. Let’s first explain to people what is this? What is Wibiya? I introduced it as a platform for publishers to integrate applications into their sites through a web-based tool bar. Can you give me a specific website and just tell me how they would use Wibiya and what the end users of that website would do with Wibiya?
Dror: Sure. Wibiya enables publishers, if you have a website, to integrate all kinds of features into your site. If it’s social tools, like you want to integrate Twitter and Facebook, and many other things, or tools to enrich your content, increase your patronage. Let’s take for an example a website called Social Media Examiner. It’s a well known website. So they integrated the Wibiya bar into their site, and it really helped them to keep users on their site.
So for example, there’s a lot of users that today click on Facebook buttons and Twitter buttons, and get directed to Twitter and Facebook. And then suddenly they’re on facebook.com, somebody is chatting to them, and they leave the website completely. And we give an entire experience of Twitter and Facebook on your website, minimizing that bounce rate. Also, you want to show a YouTube channel, you want to show all your videos without people going to YouTube, so you are able to do that. You want to communicate with them and show them [??] that they’ll be able to see what you want. Maybe you have a promotion, maybe your site’s going to be down. And all kinds of different things.
Andrew: I see. And in fact, I see it here on your website, which is now wibiya.conduit.com. And yeah, there’s a Twitter button on the bottom, share button. There’s also access to your YouTube videos and also I can chat with people who are on the site right now, and apparently there are 46 happy Wibiya users online, according to the bar. All right. And that’s what you’re allowing people to add to their websites, and as you explained, the reason that you want to do this is to keep people on their site and to add more features to their site. There’s also a revenue-generating piece of that, what’s that?
Dror: So, we have all types of applications that you can put on the Wibiya bar itself, and also on your website. So there’s apps that actually generate revenue. So for example, we have an application from a company called InfoLink [sp], which they do in-text advertising. So you don’t need to know any coding. You just go and make a few clicks, click on the save button and that’s it, you have it on your website. So the whole concept of Wibiya is once you add our script, once, that’s it, you never need to touch anything to add all kinds of functionality and apps on your website. So even a mommy blog, somebody that HTML is a curse to her, would be able to easily add all kinds of features.
Andrew: All right, and from what you told Jeremy in the pre-interview, you have 200,000 active publishers. Every day you get 1500 new publishers registering just through word of mouth. You have over 200 million unique users a month, who are using the product. In fact, you were at the DLD Conference and someone asked you a question. Do you remember what that question was and what your answer was to it? Know what I’m talking about?
Dror: So, we went to the DLD Conference in Munich, and somebody came to us. And we told him our numbers and he was really impressed. And he said, ‘So how many unique users are you reaching? How many unique users are using your product?’ And we were like, ‘We don’t really know. We don’t measure that.’ That wasn’t something that was important for us to track at the time. So we said, ‘OK, this is interesting.’ And then another person came and asked. So we came back to [??] and said, ‘Let’s start tracking unique users. This is an important metric. And then later on, we’ll definitely use it.’ So, we used Quantcast, it’s a service that helps you track all kinds of audience segments and also unique users. And then, just after a few days the data started coming in. And we saw that at that time, we were reaching 120 million unique users. And that just blew our minds, that our service is being used by 120 million users globally. It’s a second that you just stop and think, ‘Whoa.’
Andrew: It’s very comfortable to ride on the backs of successful publishers. By giving them something that’s useful to them, they let you reach you all their [??] and growing audiences. All right, let’s go back, as I said earlier and find out how you got here. You mentioned Daniel a couple of times, how did you and Daniel meet?
Dror: So, me and Daniel met at University. The first day of school, he sat down next to me and that was pretty much it. [laughs] And that’s how we met. The second year of University, we decided that we wanted to do something on the Internet. We saw a lot of potential, we had a couple of ideas. And we decided to start with a service called Joongel, which was a vertical search engine. It was a solution for search based on the longtail [sounds like] theory. So for example, if you would want to search for a flight from San Francisco to New York, you would type in all the details, all the information, click search and you would get an upper bar where you had the 10 most visited websites for flight search in the U.S. And then you can easily click on the logos, and on the bottom part, you’d be able to see the search results. You can see where the cheapest flights are, from Orbitz and Kayak and Priceline and all the other websites. So we did that for almost fifty vertical in the U.S.
Andrew: Can you give me another vertical as a description, just so I understand what Joongel’s vision was of the world?
Dror: Our vision was whatever you want to search, we’ll give you the top ten sites in your geographic location and you’ll be able to get that result really fast.
Andrew: And search just within those top sites?
Dror: Just those top sites.
Andrew: I see.
Dror: For example, I’ll give you another example. You want to look for a how-to video. You would search how to tie a tie. Then you would get from (inaudible), from [FiveMen.com], from all kinds of different video sites the results. You can really easily browse it and see. It goes from how-to videos to creative common images to cooking to whatever you want, tons of (inaudible).
Andrew: OK, you said that you spent two years building this. A lot of the long discussions internally, a lot of features. How does this happen? What happens over those two years? Did you plan to spend two years or was it something that just took over your life for two years?
Dror: We definitely didn’t plan for it to take two years. But it just took such a long time because we didn’t have any knowledge whatsoever. We just started. We took [it to] the beginning to do all the technical work. Didn’t work out.
Then we were lucky enough to meet Aviv, who is the first founder of Wibiya and also Junga. We started with Aviv as a freelancer and then he joined us completely onboard. Then it’s tough because we also need to survive so you need to work. Like I worked night shifts. Daniel had another work, Aviv had another job. We all had different jobs to survive and sustain ourselves. We didn’t have any money. It takes much longer.
Add to that all of the amount of mistakes we made. The long discussions, the unnecessary conflict about unnecessary features.
Andrew: Give me a description of a conflict over a feature that in retrospect was unnecessary. Because, you know what, it’s easy from a distance to say two years, what a mistake. But when you’re in those two years you feel like of course, a long period of gestation is wrong for other people for me, in my situation, it makes sense. You’re like a frog in boiling water, as they say. The water just boils slowly and you don’t recognize the temperature getting hot and so you end up getting killed. What was it like, take me through it so that I feel your pain and not look at it and go eh, those guys are crazy.
Dror: There are tons of examples. I’ll give you one. We had a grid of logos on the left side. We were talking for an entire week what is going to be the effect when you mouse over a specific logo? It’s going to be with this amount of shadow, this amount of shadow. It’s going to have this effect of transparency or not. For an entire week we discussed this. I’m talking about a feature that’s not even needed, you don’t need it.
We learned that features eventually are your enemy. That the hardest thing when creating a start up, it’s not to think of extra features you need and what will work for your target audience, but what features you want to kill. That’s the hardest part because you have 20 features but you should kill all the features that are not your core business. That’s the most difficult part, you need to make a guess that starts that the impetus. Features are enemies, that’s what we say today.
Andrew: If the Dror of today were to go back to the Dror that was back in university, starting Junga, and giving him advice would it be list out all of the features that you have in mind and then cross everything out except for one or two? Is that what you’re saying?
Dror: Not in that specific way but I would tell them first find what’s the core solution that you’re offering. You have a pain and there’s a really core solution. That’s core solution you’re now imaging, because you’re an entrepreneur, about the trillion extra features that would work and that would be great. You can’t release that product until you have that packet of features ready. I would tell them leave all those features. Don’t think of them. Do a minimally viable product that’s a solution for the real pain and release that. After that build all the extra features according to what your audience is asking for.
Andrew: What would that MVP, minimal viable product, have been for Junga with 20/20 hindsight, of course?
Dror: The minimally viable product for Junga would have been to choose one vertical in the beginning. To give that solution for one vertical and see how people reacted. Are people liking that? Are they searching that way? Are they not happy? Just to see what’s happening from there. That would have been in three weeks. In a month I reckon.
Andrew: But it would have been in that page that you created for that vertical? Still the ability to search on, let’s say I guess you might pick travel. Actually, which one would you pick? Travel’s great because there’s a lot of money but it’s tough because there’s a lot of competition there. Which one would you have gone for?
Dror: I would have gone for the [vertical] that the pain is most obvious. Travel flights, for example, that could be a really good vertical because people do want to compare prices really quickly. Also shopping, also reviews. I think reviews would be the best one. You’re searching for reviews, you’re doing research about a specific thing you want to buy and you really want to browse it quickly. That would be a really good vertical.
Andrew: OK, I as an end user would have come to Junga, could have only searched for reviews. Would have typed in Android Galaxy and I would have seen, what, ten different sites that have links to the Android Galaxy?
Dror: You actually, you can see the product you’re speaking about. We created specific pages for each vertical. We have Junga shopping, for example. You come, you type in the query. There’s only one search box. You see the logos on the left to [feel] that it’s credible. You click search then you get an upper bar with those ten websites, reviews. Then, at the bottom part, the review for what you’re searching for. That’s it. You can’t search any more vertical, any more functions, nothing. It’s really simple. You click and you need to see what’s happening. That would have been the (inaudible).
Andrew: You talked about the different logos and the arguments that you guys had about which way to go. Can you give me another example? I kind of felt that, that I could see myself in your shoes as you were describing that. Do you have another example of a feature that you guys were arguing about that you really all should have just scraped instead of trying to get it right?
Dror: This is another overkill feature. I have so many of these. It’s unbelievable how much we learned. Really we were, well I explained that, we did too much. Way too much. Another feature was once you opened the bar and you had all the logos for a specific vertical. Say, for example shopping. We had another box where you click on it and you get all the different verticals and you can switch between them. An example, you search for a camera. A Sony camera and suddenly you want to see reviews about it. You can click on more and click on reviews and it refreshes everything for you.
This was a feature we wouldn’t launch until we had it. We said we can’t launch the product until we have it. People won’t use it. They won’t have this and this. That’s another thing that we could have just skipped. Unnecessary. Maybe it’s a great feature but it was really unnecessary for the product.
Andrew: When you invest two years of your life into something how hard is it to say we’ve got to stop. It’s not working.
Dror: It’s a great question. We didn’t reach that point. And, once again, I’m elaborating on mistakes we’ve done. We changed the product along the way. It went through a couple of phases. It was without really talking to the end users. At the beginning we were a destination site where people had to come and search. Then we said, after a year or something we saw the market saturated, so many search engines are popping up, so we said we’re not going to compete with Google.
We had a guy coming to us. This is a brilliant story. Somebody came to us, on the phone, advised us and said can you search really quickly for one thing? Can you search for flipper? We were like what? He said for flipper. We said OK. We searched. Then he said where did you search for it? We said Google. He said why didn’t you search for it at Junga? We started to give excuses for ourselves why we didn’t use our own product that we were building. That hit us, at that moment, OK, we definitely don’t want to compete with Google.
We completely shifted to create Junga as a sort of search plug in for websites. They have all these search providers, tons of verticals, and they’ll choose what they want. To put their search engine first, and then Google, and then Bing, then how-to videos, then, I don’t know, creative content images. We completely shifted to another idea without executing the destination site.
Andrew: You never launched the destination site?
Dror: We did launch the destination website, it is live. Funny enough it’s getting around 1500 people a day still. We haven’t touched it for 3 years and it’s still alive. Completely owned by [Carter] at the moment. So we did launch it eventually but we completely shifted to another idea. That actually brings us to the beginning of the story of how we created Wibiya.
Andrew: OK, and as I understand it, this search bar that Google became, it was a search bar on a site, not just a little widget that they put in there, am I understanding that right?
Dror: We didn’t even have the widget yet. We completely shifted our idea but we didn’t create it again. At this moment, we said let’s see what the people want. The whole idea is to have the search box and after they searched, they get to another page and it refreshes where they have a search bar. It wasn’t like Wibiya where they had a search bar on site.
Andrew: I see. OK, so how long did it take you to build that?
Dror: We just shifted, we did an [MVP] for that, we didn’t do the entire thing. When we were going to build the entire thing that’s when it registered that we’re doing the wrong thing and completely shifted to Wibiya and that’s the story with how we started Wibiya.
Andrew: So what I understand is that you created basically a web page where you collected people’s email addresses but also Tech crunch 50 was somehow involved in this.
Dror: I’ll explain how we started with that. This is actually one of the two points that always when we talk with young entrepreneurs only starting. The two points that we find most important are one, get your product, if it’s a web product, at least in 3 months start testing it and doing MVP. The second is get out there. Go to places, meet people, you never know what will come from it.
Our story starts when we were flying to New York and Chicago from University. We were attending a entrepreneurship program and at the end of the year we were flying to New York and Chicago. We said OK, we’re flying to New York, let’s try maybe to meet the Tech French editor, Eric [??] at the time and maybe something will come out of it, who knows? So we contacted him and he agreed. We scheduled and appointment and we arrived to New York and went to his offices, really small offices. Sat down, waited for him. Waited, waited, waited, didn’t come, waited, waited, 15 minutes passed and he didn’t come and we were already standing up to go away when he arrived.
Then we talked to him and he said I think you guys should try to submit to [??] contents. The idea of doing that. The new idea we pitched to him. We did that and we went through a very difficult process at Tech French with a lot of interviews and to pitch it. Eventually we reached the semifinals there and we were able to pitch Google at the demo pit and not on stage but it’s still really good for us.
So we got accepted and then there is a very big decision to make. We don’t have any funding, are we going to spend now thousands of dollars on a trip to San Francisco, money that we don’t have, without knowing where this is going? We were thinking a lot about this and we said, we never know, we never know what could happen from this journey.
So we took a chance, took our savings, flew to San Francisco, went to Tech French. We pitched for 3 days, 400 people about the new product that we’re talking about here, search product. Each person came to us and said this is a really nice idea, but what would be even cooler would be if I could have a button that shows my users recent posts.
I said that’s cool, it’s not what we do but we appreciate the feedback. Then another person came and said it’s really cool but if I could have a button there just above the logos where my users can play games, that would be really cool. Every person almost, came and said the exact same thing. So we sat down and over there in San Francisco, we were staying in Travelodge, $35/night, at the airport. All kinds of stains on the floor.
Andrew: And on the sheets, I bet.
Dror: Yeah. Quite an experience, eating junk food, sitting down at night and thinking OK. Everybody’s asking for the other thing. We did A, they want B. What’s going on? And then we started to search on the internet, just quickly, to see, you know, why is everybody asking for this? And we found out that there’s no one application marketplace that lets you enter in different kinds of apps into your website. In any type of website you have, they won’t work with plug-ins and the blogger widgets. But if you had a karma site, or if you had a small business site, nothing that you can easily drag and drop without technical knowledge.
And at that point, that night, sitting on the bed in this dodgy hotel [laughs] saying, OK. We’re going to ditch Jungo and start from scratch. We’re not going to build this over Jungo. This is the pain everybody’s talking about, we created a solution for a pain that might not exist. And in that second we shifted to Wibiya.
Andrew: You know, we’re supposed to have a vision for the world and drive at that vision until we get there. Here you were, you already were pivoting, and the world was telling you no. Why don’t you stick with your vision? Why don’t you sharpen the way that you explain your vision? Why don’t you sharpen the way that you create the product that expresses your vision? Why do you say, I’m going to choose to listen to those people? And I’m not saying it as a criticism, it obviously worked. I want to understand why you do that so that I know, if I’m ever faced with a situation where 400 people tell me this isn’t the right thing, I’m not looking for the 401st person to say it is the right thing, or I’m not looking for a way to explain it to all those 400 people again properly.
Dror: So, that’s a great question. That’s a really good question. And the answer, there’s no simple answer, but I’ll tell you what I think, and this is how we acted. So, any advice you get is good advice, always, but not all advice you get is good for you, and that’s always something you need to remember along the way. Because you’re going to get, we got, tons of advice from tons of people, and everybody said a different thing. And it’s really important to understand.
Now, regarding your question, you know, once you have one person telling you something, and then another person telling you something, and then a third person telling you something, and they’re all saying the exact same thing in a way, you need to stop for a second and say, OK. There’s something here. All these people are repeating themselves. And you need to calculate the situation, and once you see such a mass of people that are telling you that they want another thing and not what you created, it’s time to stop and think why and comprehend. And I would say that you make a decision once you keep getting the repeat answer over and over and over again.
Andrew: I see. And really at this point you were getting a lot people saying, I want this widget, I want that widget. And you had a vision for how to do it. What was the product that you took into TechCrunch50? Was it already built? What was it?
Dror: So we launched the destination website of Jungo. That’s what we launched in TechCrunch50. We were there, you know, pitching. Avi was back in Israel, not sleeping, typing, you know, fixing all kinds of bugs. And that was good enough, but we pitched a completely different vision from the product launch.
Andrew: But that vision that you pitched, which was a search that people could integrate into their websites, didn’t exist?
Dror: It didn’t.
Andrew: It didn’t. Oh, OK.
Dror: Yeah.
Andrew: All right, cool. All right. So, now, you told us you’re getting hundreds of people who are sending you in a different direction. No one’s loving your product but they’re all loving this imaginary product that they wish you could build. You think you can build it. How long does it take you now to build this new business?
Dror: So by now we’ve learned, [laughs] we’ve had quite an experience. We were able to come to Israel and raise money from angel investors, and this wasn’t an easy time. We boarded the airplane in San Francisco, opened the newspaper, and we read that Lehman Brothers just went bankrupt. So we said, ‘Oh, this doesn’t look good for us.’ Wasn’t the best time to raise money. But we were still able to do that once we came back to Israel. Really, like, the pre-seed money, just to get us going. So we sat down, started planning, all three of us, this huge platform where you can integrate apps really easily. And then we said, ‘OK. How long will it take to build?’ Me and Daniel, you know, we turned around, looked at Avi and said, ‘Oh, Avi, Avi, [laughs] how long will it take to build?’ So he said, he told us, ‘Six months.’ And we’re like, our jaws [laughs] dropped down. We said, ‘No way we’re waiting now for another six months.’ So what we created, we took the different path of the MVP, the minimum viable product. So, what we first did now, we launched the product without laughing on a specific website and see if users want it, if somebody likes it. Maybe, it’s just in our imagination what we did.
At that time, there was the Facebook Chat Bar. So, we saw this bar and we said, “This is a great way to start, to implement and integrate different kinds of apps without changing the layout of your website which even somebody that’s not a techie can do”.
So, we took a website from a friend that he has a popular blog. We put the bar on his blog, and according to his request. It was easy to build that specific bar because he had weird requests that would take us a lot of time to develop, and we did the minimum we needed. And then, he said, “OK. Let’s put that on the blog and see what happens.”
At the same time, we created a landing page where people can just enter their email and saying we’d be on beta. If you want to be one of the first users to use it, put your email address. And so, we can still gather all these people that are interested in it. They think it’s a really great service and the guys that created LaunchRock [SP]. You can read it easily as a startup landing page where users can just enter emails to know when your product’s out.
It’s really good. I highly recommend it. It didn’t exist at the time, so we created our own.
Andrew: Basically, a page that says, “This is what the product is. When we launch it, if you want to be notified, give us your email address” and that’s how startups collect potential customers and users before they even launch.
Dror: Yeah. And they don’t need any development resources because even that specific page and the mechanisms to collect emails through the database, it’s not a big deal. It’s nothing, but it’s still for the two people that need to develop it. It takes that amount of time. This takes five minutes and a slide.
Andrew: OK. Then, you built it yourself. This tool bar, I remember actually Facebook doesn’t seem to have it anymore, but it was an old tool bar that was persistent on the screen, just on the bottom that allowed you to chat with your friends, and you can see all the open chats. You were recreating just that, not the ability to add widgets. You weren’t adding extra widgets for your friend’s site. You were just giving him a chat bar on the bottom of his site?
Dror: So, it wasn’t a chat bar. We gave him a bar with different types of applications on it.
Andrew: Which applications?
Dror: The application he chose was (?). He chose an application where there’s a tag cloud that people click and they can see all the different tags. He wanted a widget to play a game. He wanted g talk so people can talk to him, just click and talk to him directly when they’re on his website, stuff like that.
So, we just created it. It took us one month to create that bar with a lot of other stuff, but it took one month until we launched it on the site. And then, we said, “OK, let’s see what happens.” Suddenly, we get all these people starting to ask questions. Where did you get this? How can I get this? They had to look in the source code, where is it from. And we started to collect the emails. People started putting emails in the website.
Andrew: Let me hold off for a second there. I want to talk about the marketing because it’s tremendously effective if you’re getting that many people to come into your unlaunched site and ask to get the product that you haven’t even created.
But first, this minimum viable product, this tool bar that you created for your friend seemed to have a lot of features in it. G talk, Google talk service. There’s a tag cloud that allowed people to find blog posts based on the tag that he used when he categorized them. All of those things don’t seem easy. How do you build them quickly for him? What’s the way that you kind of cheated and created it quickly?
Dror: So, our vision was not to develop the apps by ourselves, but to integrate third party apps which means these are apps and functionalities that other people created. So, the G talk was a widget that we just integrated and the tag cloud somebody else created and we built it. There were a few small things that we created, like there was a translation app. So, we quickly created a translation app with a Google API.
Everything else was other people’s, something that people created by themselves, or we integrated into this bar.
Andrew: What about this? You launch it, and here’s one of the concerns that I think a lot of people have when they launch something this simple. They hear you say it’s right, but then they think to themselves, “If it’s so easy for me and I’m revealing this to the world, someone else is going to beat me to it. They’re going to create the exact same product. Google has an infinite number of developers, it feels like.
Y Combinator has hungry startups. Many of them have been funded with one idea that’s clearly not going anywhere and they’re searching for another. They can see my idea and duplicate it with the money and the firepower of Y Combinator. Ditto for TechStars, and ditto for some kid in a garage. So what about the sense that you’re creating something that anyone can just copy and steal your whole idea?
Dror: That is true for everything you do on the web, period. And it’s always like that, always people can come and copy you, but eventually there’s two things that you think about when creating a service or a product. One’s execution and the second is an idea. And the most important part of these two, or I would say the 90% of it, is execution. And it’s all down to how you execute your product. And even if somebody else is copying you, so they copy you, it doesn’t matter. You’re executing it, you have the vision, you know where you’re going with it. And if you talked about all the big companies, Google, and Yahoo and all these different companies that copy you, you can always remember it’s not the entire Google, all these thousands of employees that are going to try to do the same thing as you, or something similar. It’s a small team, most likely three to five to eight people, that are going to do that. So it’s a team versus a team. And, once again, you have your own vision, you know where you’re going. Once people start copying you, that should compliment you. That should mean that you’re on the right track, also.
Andrew: That’s easy to say from a distance, though. But if you have your vision, and you’ve laid out your vision in a bar, anyone can see where that vision is going, can’t they? We can all see, hmm, a toolbar that doesn’t take up a lot of space on a site, easy. A toolbar that gets its marketing by letting publishers integrate it into their site, and then those publishers end up spreading the word about it and feeding more publishers into the toolbar-maker’s system, easy.
A toolbar that allows a few gadgets today is easily going to allow more gadgets in the future, boom, we can copy all that. It took them a few hours to do it, it’ll take us a few hours to do it, and we’ll use Google’s marketing power. I mean, I’m not saying what you’re doing is wrong. I’ve seen often enough here that the direction you took here with Wibiya is the right direction. But I also want to articulate the concerns that people have when it’s their baby, when it’s their product. Did you feel any of those?
Dror: We have the exact same concerns . . .
Andrew: OK.
Dror: . . . completely, like we were . . . [??]
Andrew: Do you guys bat it back and forth internally?
Dror: When do we market it, you know, is this the right time to market it? If we do a lot of buzz around it and it’s not ready yet, what will happen? OK. So we used a couple of tactics. First tactic is perception, which is to create a perception that you have something that’s much bigger in scale, that’s a much bigger platform, even though there’s nothing behind it.
Andrew: I see.
Dror: I’ll just give a small anecdote. When we launched, after we created this and tested on this blog, we said, OK. So let’s build it. What we did, we created this entire website. It looks like a platform and it looks like you can integrate different types of apps, but what it was eventually was a bar, with 12 apps, with on and off mode. So each bar had exactly 12 apps, it was only on and off mode. But it looked, for people that started the product, like they’re integrating different types of tools, and it really looked like this robust platform.
Andrew: I see.
Dror: And it was nothing. It’s a tactic . . .
Andrew: I see.
Dror: . . . behind the scenes, but [??]. So, that was one of our tactics, to, you know. to show other people that are looking to do this that this is a big platform. You know, think before you go into this.
Andrew: Ah.
Dror: That, we did have a concern, and we did have people copy us. But, they copied us, and then they went a different direction a bit, and they didn’t go to what we did. And then we did something really good and they copied us again. But once you are always the innovator, you are always the person that knows where it’s going, I think you have the power of the execution, eventually. It’s definitely something that’s always scary, but it’s a huge market out there. Whatever you do on the internet, it’s massive, and even if you have 10 competitors, it doesn’t mean you can’t succeed, so I wouldn’t be scared of it.
Andrew: Did you come out first or did Meebo come out first?
Dror: So Meebo started to exist, their bar, before us, but it was maybe one website, it wasn’t, like, full-blown. You have to contact them and integrate them. I think it was just one big website, and it was live, and then we launched it.
Andrew: OK. How influenced were you by that one website that ran Meebo?
Dror: So we took a look at it but it was completely not our vision. We saw Meebo as a chat provider. At the time we thought it looked like they wanted to take the chat that Facebook did and do it on websites. We had a completely different vision for integrating apps on websites. The bar was the first solution with a plug and play solution. It didn’t mean that was the vision where we going.
Andrew
One more question about that minimally viable product. You launched on your friends site, then you had a website of your own that collected email addresses. Did that website that collected email addresses also give the impression of a bigger, more robust product that already existed? Were you already starting to puff your chest out and scare away competition?
Dror: I don’t know how one page can make a perception of this massive and robust (inaudible). It wasn’t such a thing. It was just, we had our logo. We had two [sentences there]. We had a field where you can put your email and that’s it. I don’t think it’s even needed. If people are interested in the service they’ll put their email. We had a few people that put their email in where they actually, you know, they were not looking to use the service but more looking to copy it.
Andrew: All right. I promised people that I would get back to how you got users. Part of the marketing was this decision to have what I’m seeing down here in the bottom right of your website of Wibiya.com. It’s a little i. Tell me about the discussion that went back and forth about whether to put that i in there and what is that i? The letter ‘i.’
Dror: I’ll tell you about the i but I’ll just take one step backwards and say that when we started Wibiya we were thinking how can this become viral? And how can this market itself? We chose to target [end] bloggers in the beginning because bloggers like to talk when they have shiny new things on their website. They want to make other people jealous and be proud. That was our strategy. We said we’ll create something that has a few particular features for bloggers in the beginning and then they’ll talk about it. That was our marketing strategy.
Regarding the i that you’re asking. In the beginning when we launched Wibiya there was no branding for the Wibiya brand. You didn’t see that it’s Wibiya. We got emails that people said they need to look for the source code to understand where they can get it from. Then we started having discussions that maybe we should put some a i or something that people understand that it’s from a different provider than the website itself.
We had tons of discussions on this and we had a lot of conflict between the three founders. Some of us said that this will demolish us because website owners don’t want to put any branding on their site that doesn’t belong to them and they’ll stop using us. The others said that nothing will happen. This will only impact our virality. We had a lot of discussions and a lot of conflict and eventually we said let’s put the i and see what happens. We put the small i in there and the world was silent.
Andrew: The world was what?
Dror: The world was silent. Nobody cared. Nothing happened. Everything was business as usual. We wasted a week of discussion about this i again and it was fine. Then we had the exact same discussion about turning that i into a Powered by Wibiya logo. Once again, this was bigger. Once again, this was not a small i. This is our Wibiya branding. People won’t want to use it. Again, over and over again.
Eventually we decided to change that to Powered by Wibiya. Once again, nothing happened. Everything was business as usual. The only thing that happened is that we got a huge boost of people coming from that to the Wibiya website. Suddenly our virality was really much stronger than before. Until we reached the point of (inaudible) 1,500 publishers a day just by seeing it on other websites or word of mouth. That’s the story of that.
The lesson learned is that until you don’t try, you don’t know. You can always roll back if you do things that are not good. Don’t think too much for the user. Let the user think for you.
Andrew: It’s amazing the kinds of debates that we have in the early days of building a product. The i, i for information as in information about this bar, or the logo on your site whether it would be on or off. David Cohen of Tech Stars said the answer is just do it and see if people yell. Or, if you have a feature that’s taking too much of your time and you’re not sure you need to keep it pull it out and see if people complain they want it back. If they do you can put it back with a new appreciation for how important it is. If they don’t you save yourself a lot of trouble.
Dror: Couldn’t agree more.
Andrew: What a great marketing, viral marketing plan that’s built right into the product. I’ve actually seen certain sites do this where they’ll let anyone put the bar up on their site but if you want to remove it you have to pay for the premium version. The premium version comes with extra features including lack of branding. Who is it? Kiss Insights, for example, does that. They have that pop up with the survey. If you pay you get rid of the logo. It doesn’t seem like a lot of people mind it so much so they end up using the free version and giving Kiss Insights a lot of attention, a lot of clicks back.
All right. Things are working out for you. You’ve raised the first round, is it time to raise another round or did you decide that you wanted to bring in revenue?
Dror: We raised the seed round then after that, a few months passed and we had only raised $100,000. We were taking salaries of $1,000 just to survive. To eat our cheese and bread. The months still passed and we needed to raise another round so we started to look for money. Eventually we got an offer from a person in a small VC firm in Israel that came to us, was really excited about the numbers, about what we do, about the vision. We actually left the meeting where he wrote the terms sheet on a piece of paper. Wasn’t a great term sheet, the terms weren’t that fantastic. After that we continued to search and were able to raise another $.5 million eventually.
Andrew: Did you take the money from the first person who sketched out on the piece of paper what the terms would be? Or did you just use that to prod other people?
Dror: We used that to leverage.
Andrew: Leverage to get money from other people?
Dror: Yeah. Because usually investors, a lot of the decisions they make are, I would say, according to their notion. If they feel that somebody wants to invest in this company they already feel more [horny] for that specific company and to try and put the money in. We did try to leverage it and we did leverage that specific offer. Eventually we got another offer.
Andrew: I see.
Dror: I can give you another story now. After we raised this, a few months passed. $.5 million, that’s it. $1,000 salaries, we have money forever. We don’t need to think ever about money. We’ll be able to make this company profitable and big without raising more money. A few months passed and then another investor came and spoke to us. He came from San Francisco to Israel. He wanted to meet up. Daniel came to me and said this person wants to meet up with us. I said we just raised $.5 million. Why do we need to speak to investors? We said OK, let’s talk to him and let’s do it.
We went to a coffee shop. We talked to the person. His name is Owen Dev. He said I’m really interested in what you guys are doing. When you come to San Francisco I want you to meet my partner. We said sounds great. Like two months passed, we came to San Francisco. We’re not looking for money at all. We went into a meeting with Owen and his partner in San Francisco. Downtown San Francisco. Once again took a car, tried to find parking, tried to find cheap parking in downtown San Francisco which does not exist. We were late to the meeting and we talked to them. We were not looking for money. We just told them about what we do and how much we scale.
We finished the meeting and all of them said we definitely want to be part of your success. We want in. We said OK, we’re not really searching at the moment. We were able, eventually, to close another $2 million round on really, really good terms after three weeks. It all started because we met this guy in a coffee shop back in Israel when I didn’t want to go. But Daniel told me let’s meet this guy. It brings us back to get out there. Go talk to people. You never know what will happen from these encounters that you think are not necessary.
Andrew: You know what, I have conversations all the time. Many of them don’t go anywhere. Some of them do. I can’t waste my time kissing lots of frogs hoping that one of them is going to be the prince that rescues my company. Help me understand how you knew that this guy was worth the time. Because you must have known that there was some value there. Also, what was it that you did that drew him over to you? That drew people with money to you to make an offer? Because I’ve got people in my audience who are sitting there on great products, they would meet anyone anytime. They’re not drawing the right people and they might be wasting their time with the wrong people.
Dror: I’m going to say get out there, I’m not saying meet any person that wants to talk to you. That’s a lot of time wasted that you can code and make progress. Still, there’s those special moments that you just can’t be bothered to go. There’s the really special meet ups with really important people. People that you know are important, maybe, for your business somehow but you really can’t be bothered and you need to finish this release or do other things.
With Orin we got a tip from another start up that he invested in. They told him about us. They called us and said we really think you should meet him. We got a really good tip from people we really appreciate. Then I said we don’t need to meet right now. And we really didn’t. We had a big release we needed to do. But still, a tip from somebody that you value his opinion and somebody that you appreciate, leverage that tip and meet that person he’s telling you to go meet.
Andrew: All right, what did you do then to lure the good people to you? It seems like he’s the second person who reached out to you. At least the second person who was pivotal in your career, who reached out to you. What do you do? Do you go and talk to bloggers and get them to write about your story? Are you making phone calls and networking all day? Because you’re in Israel, you’re not in Silicon Valley. You’re a new start up. You’re not a guy who has Kevin Rose type experience and reputation behind you. What do you do to draw those people to you?
Dror: Regarding the product itself, we do. We speak to a lot of bloggers and try to get coverage and try to make it interesting to them. To make something with a twist. It will be a bit different. It won’t be the usual pitch. It would be something a bit more spicy, funnier.
Andrew: Do you have an example of how you spice up a pitch?
Dror: How do you spice up a pitch? We were always saying where we worked. We worked in Daniel’s parents’ backyard in their garden with an open door to the entire house with the dog coming in and out. You start with something funny about we’re this tiny, small company with just a few people in a house with a dog, with a family in it. By the way, we have this amount of publishers and this amount of users.
Suddenly people think hmm, there’s an opportunity here that nobody’s taking. Why are they sitting in this small house and they have [this many] sales? They connect the dots of two things that don’t make sense and sounds like a really great opportunity. All kinds of small stuff like that. That’s one thing.
Networking is important. Networking is also important. Don’t go to every meet up out there. But we, at least, went to a lot of meet ups and that’s how we met people. You meet a few people and when you meet a person we always had a tactic. Not a tactic, it’s a question we ask. We would say at the end so who else do you think we should meet? That question did wonders for us. Anywhere we go, up until today, we still use it.
When we meet somebody, if it’s a big company, if it’s a small company, I always ask them so who else do you think I should meet? Suddenly they tell you a few people that they know that are important and they think are important enough to hear your pitch. Suddenly you get connections to them. That’s how you slowly go from one person to another but with value. Not just hi, I’m John and I have a small company that sells, whatever.
Andrew: One more question about back in the early days. When you’re building something quickly you tend to make mistakes or you tend to not build for scale. I know that, frankly, Mixergy is now growing really fast and it’s built on just Word Press and a couple of plug ins that maybe are starting to tear at the seams. Did you have similar situations where you were just trying to get the product out there? You did. Tell me about that.
Dror: We did. The first thing we did is use a lot of third party services. The best way to scale is to take all kinds of servers, Amazon web services, to feedback or support. They [??] or they get [??]. A lot of companies, you pay this really small amount and you get this amazing service and you have the ability with a couple of people to scale to a big company. With that sometimes there are problems. This was one of our biggest challenges in the beginning when you’re starting. We use Rackspace. The Rackspace, an elastic cloud.
It’s kind of a black hole where you don’t know what you’re paying for, but you have the ability to scale. Whatever happens, your service will be [??]. So we used that, and they said it’s great. We won’t shut down. Suddenly, after two months of service, and we’re still in private beta where it’s invite only, we get a bill for $17,000. I’m reminding you that at that stage we were a company with $100,000 in the bank. Less after that. We said, oh my god. What are we going to do?
So we built an [??]. The [??] worked great. We built a static platform, but our infrastructrue wasn’t built for scaling. We thought it was built for scaling because we had used the server. But it wasn’t. They had charged us for tons of information that we used. At that time, the [??] was 150 kilobytes. That’s the size of it. Today it’s 15 kilobytes. We didn’t use CDNs at the time. Today we use CDNs and it minimizes the cost dramatically. Today, for example, not today, but at least back then when we had 150 million unique users a month it cost $3500. That was the cost eventually that we would reach.
I’m reminding you at just the beginning that it cost $17,000 when we had half a million unique users. So you definitely use all the services out there to build to scale. I think that’s one of the most amazing thing on the Internet today. You have incredible services to put in your website and to look like a really big thing and get a lot of information without a need to build it. So definitely do that, but also keep in mind that you have the strength to scale and you won’t go bankrupt from it.
Andrew: I use Rack Space. In fact as soon as we’re done here I’m going to post your video. I’m going to upload it to a hard drive on the cloud on Rack Space, Joe will download it, put it up on the website, which is now thankfully using Cloud Flare to speed it up. You did things like that on a much bigger scale. You went from $17,000 a month back in the early days to $3500 a month today. Even as you’re bigger, your price is just a fraction of what it was before. Tell me how you met the guys at Conduit. I teased it at the beginning of the interview. These are the guys that ended up buying you for can we say now $45 million is what you sold it anymore?
Dror: Yeah, that’s the correct number.
Andrew: I don’t even have to say a reported anymore.
Dror: It’s a good story how we met. It goes back to [??]. We have a lot of stories where the company…
Andrew: I’m sorry you were starting to tell the story and then the connection froze for a moment.
Dror: What I’m saying is it connects back to getting out there. We had a lot of moments in the company’s life where we didn’t want to go somewhere and because we did, something amazing happened. Of course there are a lot of moments where nothing happened. This was a few days before my wedding, I was getting married and TechCrunch [??] in New York. We were deliberating if Daniel should go to New York or not. It’s important. On the other hand you need to get back to my wedding or I would kill him. So in the end, we said we should go. Definitely come back and you’ll make it. So he went to New York, he went to TechCrunch’s [??]…
You went with a couple of friends to a small burger joint in New York in The Meridian Hotel. It’s a small burger joint. You can’t even see it. It’s like next to the toilet. Really tiny. He sat down at the bar, or at one of the tables, and suddenly he sees two Israelis speaking Hebrew next to him. They’re Israeli, he’s Israeli. Start talking, you know, say where are you from? Where are you from? Funny enough, he found that these were the founders of Conduit. We started talking about all the synergies between our companies and what we could do together. We started brainstorming and thinking of a lot things. They said let’s definitely meet up next time we’re in Israel.
We came back to Israel. We went to see the Conduit folks. We thought there’s so much synergy, there’s tons of things we can do together. They started talking about also an option of an acquisition and what do we think about that. At that time we were not looking to get acquired. We were looking to build a much bigger company with our vision. That’s how we met them.
Eventually along the road what happened after a few more months we had another American company interested in us, from the East coast. They started talking to us and saying OK, we’re interested in acquisition. We started to talk about M&A. Then we had another company earlier on that was really interested in us from the West coast. A really, really big company. They joined the party as well for bidding and talking about M&A.
Then we said let’s talk to the Conduit folks. We had the most energy with them. It made the most sense with them. Let’s talk with them and see if they’re interested. We talked to them again and they were interested. They were, I think, the company that had the most not just synergy but vision, combined vision, that we thought is where we should go. A lot of good connections (inaudible). It all started from a burger joint.
Andrew: It’s like a guy from New York who goes backpacking through Europe and finds a girl in France who happens to be from his same neighborhood back in New York. It’s amazing but when you do leave the country people connect you and say oh, you guys are from the same city. You should meet.
Dror: That’s, by the way, how I met my wife.
Andrew: Is it really?
Dror: She’s from England. She’s from London. I met her in Thailand and now we’re living in America.
Andrew: She moved from England to Israel to be with you?
Dror: She moved from England to Israel, you could say to be with me.
Andrew: Was there something else that was bringing her there? Oh, I see. You don’t want to say. Too much pressure. I see. You ended up doing pretty well though.
You got money, you were able to share it with the family, I heard, afterwards? I would be very selfish. I didn’t give anyone a penny of anything that I earned. You did? What did you do?
Dror: When I talked to Jeremy before this interview one of the questions he asked me was what was the thing that brought me the most joy out of this whole story? I think definitely the most important thing for me was to share the wealth with the family. My family is very tight. Whatever’s mine is theirs. Just that feeling, to be able to give them something and know they have no worries, that makes me the happiest person there is. I also bought a new fridge.
Andrew: All right, let me give a quick plug here and then let me ask one final question that I wasn’t sure how to ask you. It might come out awkward but we’ll see.
First of all, what you may have noticed and the audience is now starting to notice, is that there’s a lot of work that goes into putting these interviews together. In addition to now having somebody who does research for me on all guests, except you for some reason. I got to find out what happened that your research is half done. But we have researchers on guests. We have a pre-interviewer. What did you think of the pre-interview process with Jeremy?
Dror: It was great. Really, really good. I really enjoyed it, by the way, and Jeremy’s a great guy. I think it’s also good for me as much as it’s good for you just to prepare yourself. It’s the same as start ups, you know. Before you enter something you don’t go hmm, looks good. I’ll go for that. You need to do some research to understand why you’re entering this field. Is there any gain there? Is there any opportunity there for the long run? These are things that I think you should always do, whatever your interests.
Andrew: I had one guy who went through the pre-interview process and he said oh my goodness, if you guys put this much work into putting together your interviews and this much work into putting together your courses I’ve got to sign up and be a premium member. Because I see now what goes into it and why it works so well. Yeah, it does. Having the pre-interview notes means that I’m hitting on the key ideas in your story and I don’t kick myself a month from now when I read somewhere else that there was some great story that we missed out on because it just didn’t happen to come up in conversation. I want to walk in prepared.
That’s really important to me, that every time that we generate revenue with Mixergy that it goes back out to create a good product. That’s not that important to the audience. What the audience cares about is, it’s great for you Andrew, but what’s in it for them with Mixergy Premium? This program where they get all these courses and all these interviews. What I’m trying to do is bring in some of the emails that I get from Premium members and let you guys know what’s happening with them.
I got an email just yesterday, actually, from Gabriel [Machuret] who is a Premium member. He said in the subject line “Andrew, I made over $100,000 more last year thanks to you.” He starts telling me about how it’s the courses and so on. I right away think great. Then I get curious. I said what happened? Can you tell me what you did? How did Mixergy Premium help you? He specifically told me.
He goes glad you asked, mate. He’s from Australia. I applied mainly the following: I used the techniques from Liam Martin of Time Doctor and I set up my own team in the Philippines. Five people now. Now he has five people in the Philippines who are helping him out with his business. Liam Martin taught how to do outsourcing. He has an outsourcing company so he was able to teach that. He goes I used the tools from Mark Brooks. The tools from Mark Brooks helped a lot, especially combined with Ari Focus System. Mark Brooks talked a lot about how he systemized his business. Then Ari talked about focus tools that will help you focus on your job.
Then he goes, but mainly the money came from Nicholas Holland who taught the closing sales course. That’s a course where we spent over an hour just talking about how to close sales. All right, then he says some things. Actually, I’ll read it. Nah, screw it.
Maybe I’ll show this interview in the future. I don’t know if I should be cursing if the guest hasn’t cursed is what happens. A lot of times guests curse and then they go oh, Andrew, should I do it? Then I go yeah, sure and I’ll curse too to make you feel comfortable. But you weren’t cursing so I figure I should stay clean too.
All right, he goes muy gracias (inaudible) and this is Gabriel [Machuret]. I’m going to give web address out. If you think that I misread this or if you find out more about the program and you want to contact him you’ll know how to find him. He’s at InternetNinja.co.au. As I said, he’s from Australia.
If you’re already a Premium member, take these courses. You can see that Gabriel has taken them, he’s applied them and you see what happened to his business. If you’re not a Premium member yet I hope you join us. Mixergy.com/premium. I know that you’re going to look at the rates and you’re going to say that this is so low that, apparently by charging so little I’m making the product feel less valuable to the audience. I have to raise the price in the future. But if you sign up now you’ll keep that price forever. As you can see, the rewards are there. Thank you Gabriel.
All right, Dror, by the way, I’m going to ask you what your feedback is on the way that I promoted it. But I’m going to tell you why. Every time I ask I get to get a little bit better at promoting my own stuff. Like I asked Tim Sykes recently and he said Andrew, don’t talk about what’s in the product. Talk about what people have gotten from the product. Talk about what people have gotten by signing up to Mixergy Premium. I put myself out there and I asked and I got feedback and it helped me. Hopefully this got a little bit better, the way I promoted it.
You’re a salesman, you’re a business person, you’re an entrepreneur who’s made it. What do you think of the way that I promoted my own product? Then I’ll ask you that secret question that’s not so secret. But what do you think? If you don’t mind giving me feedback.
Dror: First of all, it took me a few seconds to understand that you’re starting to promote it. Which is a good thing.
Andrew: OK.
Dror: It took me a while to put myself in the mode that OK, you’re now promoting something. Then you completely shift your head because you’re already thinking of it as something else. Overall I think the promotion was great. Still I would try to put maybe more narrative story about your Premium. Because it sounds fantastic, and I can tell you that just what Mixergy is doing is amazing. The amount of value that people can take from it is incredible. I think about 10 people now I’m going to send to your website. Maybe more stories, like reading stories that you can attach yourself to the people who are doing the premium. You talked about all these people but tell their stories really more. Just choose one person, or maybe two, or one’s enough maybe, and tell his story about how it helped him. I think that would put you more in touch. But I think it was great overall. It didn’t feel salesy.
Andrew: OK. If I would have, instead of reading his email, maybe told his story myself. Said hey, look, here’s a guy who contacted me maybe about a year ago. He was struggling because of whatever and then I tell the story of how he signed up and he was able to do this thing. Then he signed up and he was able to do that other thing. Now at the end he has $100,000 more last year with his business because he signed up. You’re looking for more of a story? More of an [art]?
Dror: Yes, stories are easier for me to emotionally attach myself to.
Andrew: Did it feel like it went too long?
Dror: A bit. A tiny bit.
Andrew: OK. I was wondering about that.
Dror: It wasn’t like you were a salesman so that was really good. It didn’t feel like you were OK, buy my book.
Andrew: I was wondering if it was going too long but at the same time I feel like I can’t hold back too much because then you sound apologetic. Then all people hear is this insecure person apologizing in between some kind of promotion. That’s way worse than promotion. I’m trying to let myself just go natural at it. This is really useful.
All right, now I’m going to see if I can create a narrative next time and maybe be a little bit clear about the shift in promotion or maybe not make it so promotiony. I’m not sure. I wrote it down. I write notes down all the time.
Here’s the thing, I wasn’t sure how to ask you this because I don’t want it to come across as an insult, and it’s not to you because you’ve said this. Well, here it is. You’ve said that one of the things that you’ve learned from this whole experience is to listen more. It seems, reading between the lines here in the notes, were you stubborn, are you a stubborn person? What’s the challenge there and how did you get over it? You’re smiling as I say the word ‘stubborn,’ did I hit on something?
Dror: Yes. No, I’m joking.
Andrew: Interview [waff], you jerk. Tell me about that. What am I picking up here?
Dror: This is something we didn’t do for two years so it’s a soft spot because we did it. I can definitely say if I would go back to when we started Junga we would listen to people much more. As I said, you know, any advice you get is good advice but you have to find advice that suits you. Once again, it’s very easy to convince yourself that none of these people know what they’re talking about. This advice doesn’t fit me, he doesn’t know. He’s not working on it. He’s not coding it. He’s not looking at the market.
One thing I did learn is to listen. At the beginning when somebody’s coming with feedback a lot of entrepreneurs, me as well, we are defensive. We are cutting people in the middle of their talking, in the middle of the sentence, we cut them off and say no, no, no, no. There’s always that no, no, no. That moment is something that I learned to stop a long time ago.
Once you learn to stop and listen to the other person. Accept that feedback as not somebody criticizing you but somebody trying to help you, to make you understand what they think. They’re telling you this because they don’t think it’s going to be great or they think you’re wasting your time. Which is still a valid point for trying to help you. Always stop, listen to what people say. That’s what we did today.
You can always learn something. I think that’s something that’s really important because if you take us back to the Junga days. When I look back, people told us launch the product already we told them the product can’t be launched until we have these five features ready, we didn’t stop and listen. We said OK, this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. We continued, didn’t stop to listen and digest the feedback that he just told us. That’s something that’s really important whatever you do. It doesn’t matter if you’re an employee or an entrepreneur, whatever you do. Listen, digest, then think if it’s good or not good, whatever fits you.
Andrew: It is so hard because we go into entrepreneurship because we have a vision. Because we want to do our thing. Then when someone gives us any other piece of advice, anything that seems contradictory, it’s really hard to listen to them. What do you do in the moment. Here, I’ll give you an example. I’m already taking much more of our time here than we originally agreed to but one last thing. Here’s the thing, because this happens to me.
I remember Erin Dragoshan introduced me to someone. He said look, this woman can do your customer service, she can do all kinds of stuff for you. I hired her to do just about everything. She’s now working with me. And then I say I’m stuck in email all day long answering email. He goes, ‘Well you asked Andrea to answer all you email right?’ and I said, ‘No, you don’t understand. I can’t have her talk to my customers. My customers want to talk to me.’ He goes, ‘She does it for me, she can do it for you.’ You’re different. You’re not public the way that I am. People aren’t trying to reach out to you. And I kept cutting him off. Here’s a friend who helped me out who’s now giving me a little bit of a feedback on a problem that’s really burning me. It wasn’t until a week or so later that I realized I cut him off. In the moment how do you recognize it, how do you stop yourself from cutting people off?
Dror: It’s when you see yourself speak too much. No, it happens to me all the time. You’re talking to somebody and suddenly you’re in a conversation and you’re always the person speaking. And when you understand you don’t, unless this is a person that’s not great in socializing and is not a big talker, which you need to talk for him. But if you speak too much, suddenly you stop and say OK I have to tone it down and more listen. But it’s tough, it’s tough. Because our instinct is always to be the person who knows because this is what we do on a daily basis but I think there’s always a place to stop and learn. As difficult as it is, even if you don’t listen to that person, and I have a lot of people I talk to and they bullshit. They don’t know what they’re talking about, they have no experience whatsoever, they have very strong opinions, about what’s wrong and what’s right, I still stop. I listen in my head. I’m mumbling to myself, bullshit.
I’m still listening. I’m still listening and in the end I say OK that’s an interesting perspective. If I feel like I can be honest with this person, I tell them what I think. But always listen and let them finish.
Andrew: That’s great advice for me too. I appreciate you doing this interview and going through our whole process here to get this done. I know that this is one of my favorite interviews and I know that the interview is much more useful to the audience because you were willing to be as open as you were about the setbacks in the beginning. Because you are willing to be as open about the highs and the successes so that we can live through you and also aspire to have similar highs in our business. And thanks for all the insight along the way about what you did wrong and what worked out well and what you did right. Dror Ceder, thank you for doing the interview.
Dror: It was pleasure. I really, really enjoyed it. If any of the people that are looking at this, if I can help or somebody I know can help, can just tweet me. I’ll be happy to help in anything.
Andrew: What’s your twitter address? That’s the way you prefer to be contacted?
Dror: It’s @DrorCeder, my full name.
Andrew: @DrorCeder. At D-R-O-R-C-E-D-E-R. Thank you for doing the interview and thank you all for watching.
Dror: Right, thank you, Andrew.
