Shoes Of Prey: The Lost Interview

Joining me is Michael Fox, co-founder of Shoes Of Prey, the fashion shoe company that lets women design their own shoes.

I interviewed his co-founder Jodie Fox back in 2011, but for some reason the interview was never published. Their company has grown significantly since it was bootstrapped two years ago. I invited Michael to tell us how they did it.

Michael Fox

Michael Fox

Shoes of Prey

Michael Fox is the co-founder of Shoes of Prey, the fashion shoe company that lets women design their own shoes.

 

roll-angle

Full Interview Transcript

Andrew: Listen up. I hate to have commercials interrupt this interview, so I’m going to tell you about three sponsors quickly now, and we’re going to go right into the program starting with, Walker Corporate Law. If you need a lawyer who understands the startup world and the tech community — I want you to go to WalkerCorporateLaw.com.Next I want to tell you about Shopify. When your friend asks you, “How can I sell something online?”, I want you to send them to Shopify, and explain to them that Shopify stores are easy to set up, they increase sales, and they’ll make your friends products look great — Shopify.

Finally I want to tell you about Grasshopper. Do you want a phone number that people can call and then press 1 for sales, 2 for tech support, etcetera, and have all of the calls be routed to the right person’s cell phone? Well get your number from Grasshopper.com.

Alright, 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. Michael Fox — before I even give the intro, I want to start by giving you an apology. I interviewed your co-founder almost two years ago today, and for some reason, that interview was never published. I can’t figure out why. I never don’t publish interviews. I remember doing the interview. I’ve got my notes from the interview, so I apologize. I didn’t even know that it didn’t get published because it was so fresh in my mind, until you and I started talking via email. So, I’m sorry and I’m glad that you’re here to do the interview.

Michael: Yea, no worries at all, Andrew.

Andrew: Here’s the intro that I had in “Evernote”, and that I remember reading when I talked to Jodie, your co-founder. It was, how does an e- commerce site sell $1.5 million worth of shoes with a crappy cartoon designer. Joining me was Jodie Fox, co-founder of Shoes Of Prey — the fashion shoe company that lets women design their own shoes. That was the intro, and it’s kind of appropriate to introduce this interview with that description because you guys still do that, right?

Michael: Yeah, yeah, exactly. We’ve updated our shoe designer though, so we don’t have the crappy cartoon version anymore.

Andrew: I remember actually, at the time, not being allowed. You asked me and said, “Andrew, we’re going to come up with this new design, but this new way for people to design their shoes, please don’t talk about it until its public.” And I didn’t.

Michael: Cool, yeah.

Andrew: What about the revenue? This was 1.5 million dollars back in September 2011. How far into the company were you guys at that point?

Michael: Yeah, so that was a series of funding rounds, so we self-funded the business up until we did our “Series A”. So, we closed the “Series A” funding round in June of 2012, twelve months ago, and yes, we’ve grown quite significantly since then.

Andrew: So you bootstrapped to over $1.5 million in sales?

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew: Impressive. What are your revenues today?

Michael: That’s not a number we share at the moment, but we’ve grown quite significantly since then. We’ve grown to a team of 50, and yeah, we’re growing nicely.

Andrew: You shared the number with me privately, and of course, I never reveal what people share with me privately. It’s impressive, but if you’re keeping it private, I know that at some point you guys are going to go for another round of funding. How do you feel about what I’ve noticed here, living in San Francisco, that revenue numbers, everything, is kind of a shared secret — where I will have somebody over for scotch here at the office, and they will tell me what their company does for revenue, what other people’s company’s do, what their revenues are, what their problems are. How do you feel about this wall coming down?

Michael: To be honest, I told you the revenue number, and we do tell it. Obviously tell potential investors and other people, and it probably gets out. I guess it’s just not something we’ve shared before, and it’s not something we’ve thought a great deal about. Why we don’t share it? Yes, potential to change. To be honest, we’re very open about the business normally. We have a blog, “22michaels.com” where we’re very open. We’ve sort of been blogging since before we started the business — two or three times a week on what we’re working on. Yeah, we’re very open on there, but the one thing we don’t share on there is revenue numbers, and yeah, we should probably re-think it. It’s a good point.

Andrew: The crappy cartoon designer — what is that a reference to? It came from an e-mail you sent me before I interviewed Jodie. What was that “crappy cartoon” thing?

Michael: Obviously, our business allows women to design their perfect shoe — it’s a part of the mass customization trend. So, you can go on our website, design your fashion high-heels — it’s the stylish shoe that we do seek and change. The toe shape, change the heel type, the heel height, the back, the leathers, the colors, add decorations. I mean, you can design; there are 300,000 trillion possible designs that you can come up with on the site. So when we originally, our first version of that shoe designer, it’s kind of a minimum viable product I suppose we went for. Still took about three months to build; that sort of thing is hard to do in a browser and make it fast and easy to use. But it wasn’t at all photo-realistic, it was kind of a two-dimensional drawing of the shoe. You couldn’t rotate it, and it looked kind of like a cartoon drawing of the shoe.

Andrew: So, the whole idea behind this company is, we’re going to find you your perfect shoe. I’m looking at you right now; it is Australian time, it’s 6 AM. You are dressed incredibly sharply, I’m feeling really insecure here about the way that I’m looking on camera, because you’re looking great! Even the handkerchief is perfectly placed. You’re someone who personally, exudes style. Your business is about giving women stylish shoes that are perfect for their feet, and still, you use the term minimum viable product. You still believe in releasing something before it looks right. Why? How can? Talk about the wrestling match that you might’ve had internally before you used that.

Michael: Yeah, I guess. It basically wasn’t possible to build anything better than what we had with the cartoon designer. It certainly wasn’t going to be easy to do within the launch tine frame that we wanted to launch the business within. So, yeah, I guess there were things that we had to compromise on, and that was one of them. So we got a third co-founder, Mike Nap, he was a former software engineer at Google. It still took him 3 months of solid full-time programming to build that.

You know the minimum viable products sort of, philosophy, we wanted to prove out that the business worked before we went overboard investing in building other shoes on it. Because we’re doing something totally different; no one had ever done custom women’s fashion shoes online before. It wasn’t like we were taking a concept from another market and applying it in Australia or anything like that. So, because we didn’t know, we didn’t actually really know whether women would want to design their own shoes and order them.

Andrew: So, you wanted to put something out there to just verify this hunch of yours? Made sense.

Michael: Yeah!

Andrew: Where did this idea come from for this business?

Michael: I’ll give you a sort of, longer background story. So, Jodie, Mike and I all met at law school — About ten years ago. We also went down our separate career paths after law school. Mike went to Google as a software engineer; he’d studied computer science and law. Jodie worked as a lawyer for about three years, and then went to an advertising agency by the WPP Group. So she has a strong branding and offline marketing background, and she’s aligned with a passion for women’s shoes. I worked as a lawyer for a year, went to a large retailer here in Australia called, [??] under the two year graduate program there; they’re kind of like a Pep Boys in the U. S. Then I went to Google, and did advertising sales there for two and a half years. We’re all friends and all wanted to look at starting a business together.

Andrew: We’re you more than friends? I see that you and Jodie had the same last name.

Michael: Yeah, so actually, we were married at the time we started the business. We’ve since separated. We still get along great.

Andrew: So you’re separated, but you’re still working together?

Michael: Yeah, yeah. Jodie sits pretty much next to me in the office, still best friends, still great working together. Just didn’t work out marriage- wise. So, yeah, we wanted to start a business together. We looked at our skill sets, and we figured that our skill sets matched an online retail business. We had a tech guy, Jodie with the fashion and online marketing background, and I had the online marketing and retail background. We we’re inspired by a book by Seth Godin called “Purple Cow”, and I know you’ve interviewed Seth before so, I’m sure you know the book. But for people that haven’t come across the book, the analogy is, imagine you’re driving past a paddock full of cows; the paddock’s full of brown, black, and white cows. You wouldn’t pay any attention to any of those cows, but imagine you saw a purple cow in the paddock — you’d be like “God! Check it out Andrew, there’s a purple cow over there”.

You’d be photographing it, putting it on Facebook, and Instagram telling all of your friends about it. So, the analogy is, you want your business or product to be like that purple cow, and really stand out from all of the brown, black, and white cows. So we we’re inspired by that book, and wanted to find a “purple cow” product to sell in the online retail space. Jodie, whenever she’d do holidays to Europe, she’d book stopovers in Asia. There are stores in Asia where you can design your own shoes, so second and third trips doing that. Lots of her friends were asking her to design shoes for them. And she’s got a really strong passion for that product. So we were lying on the beach Christmas 2008. It’s summer in Christmas in Australia. So we’re lying on the beach and had all these thoughts going through our mind. It’s like yeah, we want an online retail space, we want a Purple Cow. Women seem to like designing their own shoes. Well, why don’t we try doing that online? No one’s done that before.

Andrew: And once you have that as the two of you on the beach, why bring Mike in? Why bring a third partner?

Michael: Yeah, actually Mike was kind of always involved in the thought process from the very beginning and yeah, was kind of thinking through. He’s the one with the tech background. Jodie and I can’t code. We’re not just using him for his skills. We’re obviously very good friends with Mike and really like Mike. We’d kind of mucked around with a few other startups before that, the three of us as well. We’d done an online dating site and a travel guide website just sort of on weekends and part time in the years that we were working in our other jobs prior to starting Shoes Of Prey. So we had a good feel…

Andrew: …Well this is, in fact, sorry did we just lose? There. I thought we lost the video for a second. What’s going on in the background? Is there someone who’s cleaning up or getting started?

Michael: Yeah I came into the office early. I figured it would be quiet in here, but the cleaners obviously come in at 6:00 a.m. on a Thursday morning.

Andrew: I wanted to acknowledge it, because I tend to sniffle. I have an endlessly runny nose, and I wanted the audience to know that that’s not me sniffling like that. It’s someone wiping, I think.

Michael: Yeah, yeah. And they’re changing things at the moment.

Andrew: Tell me, what did you learn from the side projects that didn’t become the hits that you’re running today – the dating site and so on?

Michael: Yeah good question. So from the dating site that was kind of our first attempt at a Purple Cow. We decided to kind of try the CUMA route with the dating site. It was called DarwinDating, as in Charles Darwin, and the concept was it was online dating but for attractive people only. So you had to submit a photo to the dating site. The existing members would vote on whether you were hot enough to get into the dating site. That kind of sounds cruel, but it was kind of done as a…

Andrew: …That’s kind of cool…

Michael: …[??]…

Andrew: …So existing members decide whether I can be a part of the site.

Michael: Exactly. Yeah.

Andrew: I love that. Alright. And so what happened with that?

Michael: It actually went reasonably well. The Purple Cow element of it works. We got quite a bit of press. We ended up with about 5,000 or so members in Sydney and about 5,000 or so members in London. So we had two cities where we’re kind of getting close to critical mass. But even with those numbers to build out a dating site and to start charging people that’s probably about the border line.

Obviously, a dating site requires critical mass of people in a city, in a geographic area. So it worked from the Purple Cow perspective. So that’s the thing we took from that experience. We wanted to take that Purple Cow idea and apply that to our next business. But it was a hard business to get going because of critical mass. And it was a little bit too niche for, you know, a humorous dating site that only lets hot people in. That was a little bit too niche to get to critical mass.

Andrew: Did you go the minimum viable product route with that business, too, where you were testing the market? Or did you find yourselves overbuilding and learning your lesson?

Michael: Yeah. Again we had very, very minimum viable product. We weren’t charging people. We thought that we went down the track but we didn’t obviously build any of the payment processing systems in or anything like that. And when we launched it was very basic functionality for people to communicate with each other within the dating site. We built a little bit more of that out at the time, but the minimum viable product philosophy’s great.

Andrew: I’m curious about how you got customers, how you built up the product when you had no money, how you got to millions of dollars before you even took on funding. But I’m a little curious, before I even get to all of that, about mindset. I’ve talked to several entrepreneurs who’ve said I’m not feeling fully myself right, I’m not feeling like I could take on this new business that I’m starting because I started this other business and it didn’t go so well, I started two other businesses and they both had to be closed. Those thoughts are weighing on them. So I’m wondering, for you, why didn’t these two businesses that didn’t take off and didn’t set the world on fire why didn’t they make you think I can’t do this it’s not for me?

Michael: Yeah. That’s an interesting question. I suppose it probably relates to mindset. Like glass half full glass half empty type people. I think we’re very glass half full, and I hope it’s not arrogance, but I suppose it was kind of thinking through, what are the reasons that it failed? So, firstly we were sort of very young and it was kind of our first venture, using Darwin Dating as an example, so when we looked at it, parts of it had worked, so the purple cow element had worked, and we had seen that we could get word of mouth from that purple cow concept, though parts of it didn’t work.

We had got a few bits of it wrong, so we would fix something that was just too (?) and too hard to get critical mass, and we hadn’t thought through the dating industry and the fact that it was kind of a critical mass business and that kind of network effect, and you’ve got to build that up before you can launch. So, we looked at the lessons and we thought, well it’s not like we failed completely. We got some of it right, we got most of it wrong. We were only doing it kind of evenings and weekends as well, so it’s not like we had committed a huge amount of time and we had hardly spent any money on it, so we hadn’t committed a huge amount of capital. So, we kind of looked at that and went, yeah, for doing something on evenings and weekends, we’re reasonably happy with that. It looks like we can definitely work together. That was another really good thing that came out of it. We all got on well working together.

Yeah, so we kind of looked at that and went, yeah, well there is more positives out of that than negatives so we came to give it another go. To be fair, though, it was probably three years from starting Darwin Dating and kind of the first year of Darwin Dating was exciting and then the next two years kind of petered out a little bit. So, the next two years we were sort of in our full time jobs, kind of focusing more on those. So, it was really just kind of a two year gap between pretty much when we finished up on Darwin Dating with when we started Shoes of Prey, so we took some time to focus on our normal careers, but then we got the bug again.

Andrew: The lesson is still there. And that is that you took what worked from it and you were going to keep using it, and you were going to learn from the parts that didn’t work. Like you were going after a business that you didn’t understand as well, that was maybe more competitive than you were willing to go into, etc. That’s the kind of thing, the kind of realization that you can come to on your own and feel good about, but if someone tells you that, you might feel like they are Pollyanna, like they are sugar-coating your past failure.

If you didn’t have this mind-set of optimism and I sat you down and said, “No, but Michael, look at what you learned. You learned that you can build a purple cow. You learned that you can build a business. You learned that you and your co-founders can work together. You learned that an idea can start to go. That’s a lot of value, start your business.” If I were to push that on you, you wouldn’t take it, so I guess maybe the answer is that I can’t push my audience to feel that way. I have to find a way to let them come to the realization that you just came to and you expressed. That’s more me thinking out loud, but it’s an important topic for me right now.

Michael: No, it’s good.

Andrew: So, building a dating site if fairly easy, because we are talking about just bits. Once you get into a business that includes atoms, it becomes harder. Where were you going to have the shoes built once the site was up?

Michael: And this is one of the really hard parts about our business. We’ve kind of got three really hard parts to the business. The tech side, which we’ve kind of touched on, the manufacturing, and then the normal sort of customer acquisition issues that an unknown retailer has. On the manufacturing side, the first thing we did was we took some holidays from our jobs and went over to Asia for a couple of weeks to talk to suppliers. We sort of looked on web sites like Ali Baba, we went to big industry events for the shoe industries, we went to some shoe trade fairs, places like that.

We ended up meeting a whole range of factories, but the primary response we got from anyone we spoke to was their minimum order is 1,000 pairs of shoes, and we’d go, oh, no, we want to order one pair of each shoe. And they’d go, oh, you mean 100. And we’d go, no, one. So it took a little, it’s just totally different to the way the industry works. So, we got probably hundreds of no’s, but people were kind of interested in what we were doing and eventually someone we talked to at a trade fair would tell us, you should go check with this person, they might be interested. We got passed along and eventually we found a couple of suppliers who were happy to work with us.

We are probably fortunate too that it was early 2009, so kind of global financial crisis time, so a lot of suppliers and shoemakers were down on their normal orders, so they were willing to try something a little different and new. Then once we got started working with particularly one good supplier, then as the business grew and they were making reasonable out of it, so the relationships continued.

Andrew: And the supplier is going to make one shoe at a time for you? You took the order on-line with your cartoon designer that people used to build their ideal shoe, you pass it on to this person, and that person would create the shoe and send it out to your customer?

Michael: Yeah, exactly. We hired people in China right from the beginning so our supplier would make the shoe, they’d send it to us in China, we’d do all the quality control, then do all the packaging, we kind of go purple cow with our packaging as well, so we wanted to do all of that ourselves, and then we ship it directly from China to the customer.

Andrew: How long did it take you to find this one person?

Michael: Not a huge amount of time. I think the first week, we did a two week trip, so it was kind of 14 full on days going around getting supplies and I think we actually met the supplier in the end on that first trip, but it was another three or four trips over there to kind of build the relationship and get everything set up and running. We spend a lot of time in China early on in the life of the business.

Andrew: I see, so we’re talking about maybe two, three months?

Michael: Yeah, I guess, we would have met them, so we had the idea December 2008, we would have met them in March 2009, and then we launched in October 2009. So it was kind of a, yeah it was, you’re right, it would have been two or three months to kind of get them over the line and get comfortable with working with us and then it was another three or four months before we launched to get everything up and running with them.

Andrew: What happens in the three or four months if you’re building minimum viable product? Why do you need so much time?

Michael: Yeah, so with us, for our product, a lot of the time, so Mark and I did a trip, another two week or so trip to China, we went to our suppliers factory and photographed, we had to photograph all of the different shoes at the, all of the same angle so that Mark could then trace all those shoes for the designer. We had to sort of map all the different colors and letters and materials that we wanted to include in the designer and photograph all of those nicely so that we had images for the website and so that Mark could do renders of those different materials.

We had to set up processes with the supplier, so what information did they need on an order form to make making the shoe easier for them, what was the process for giving them that order form, what were the delivery times going to be, what were the payment terms going to be, all of those sorts of things. Was there anything else we could do to make the process more efficient for them, how were they going to set up the manufacturing of the shoes one at a time, because it was different to what they normally did.

There were all these issues that we needed to work out, plus I did a couple of rounds of beater testing before we actually launched, so we sort of emailed out friends and said “hey, this is what we’re thinking of doing , this is what the retail price is going to be, would you be interested in designing some shoes? We’ll do it for half price and we’ll just do it off photographs?” So we wanted to use our friends but we wanted to still have the price, have them pay some money to test whether that would actually, whether people would actually want, even though their our friends and they’re probably going to say yes anyway, we wanted to test whether they would pay money for the product.

Andrew: Test to see if they want to pay as a way of validating the idea and the way that you were asking them to design their shoes wasn’t even a cartoon designer at that point, it was photographs? How are they going to custom design their own shoes using photographs that you have?

Michael: Yeah, so we used those photos that we’d taken from the shoes all from the same angles, so we kind of laid all the photos out on the table and said what kind of toe shape do you want? This kind of pointy toe? I’d like to look at the heel heights, and go this kind of heel height, maybe the stiletto heel, I love this bow on it and then we’d have all the letters and colors and materials there as well, so they could look at those and go “Okay, I want the bow in this color, the heel in this color” so they could sort of pick off the photos.

Andrew: I see, and so they never got to see the full product together, but they can select the options that they wanted for their shoes.

Michael: Yeah, yeah. So definitely not a perfect user experience, but still a good way to kind of validate what we’re doing.

Andrew: So what did you learn from doing it that way?

Michael: So we learned that people really liked the concept and the idea and they’re willing to pay money for it. So when we’d done kind of similar, well not quite the same, we’d told our friends obviously about dial and dating and I think maybe one or two of our friends decided to apply to get on dial and dating, whereas when we emailed our female friends about shoes and pray, we probably had like a 20 or 30% take up rate. So, it’s still our friends, it’s not representative of the population, but comparing the take up rate of dial and dating with the take up rating of shoes and pray, this was kind of, just comparing those two, it’s kind of off the scale, like the response we got.

So that gave us confidence that what we were doing was worth pursuing. Then, we learnt, we got to talk to customers and understand the design process that they were going through, it was different to what they were doing on the website, but when they were pointing to the different photographs, we sort of learned what was going through their minds, so that helped us when we built the UI for the shoe designer. We got feedback from customers too about the styles they liked, the parts of the process that they liked, what else they’d like to see us do on the website.

We got a feel for the information that we need to put on the website based on the questions they were asking. So they’re asking, “So what happens if it doesn’t fit?” So, okay, all right, returns policy is going to be important. We need to really think throughout our returns policy. Yeah, it was really good. For an online retail business we don’t normally get to talk to our customers really closely, so it was just an awesome [??] to talk to customers and get direct feedback.

Andrew: I see. So you actually would just spread photos out on a table and say, “These are the different options. What do you like?” I see. And were you showing them all the options at once? The bow, the heel, the toe, etc? I see and that way you can see, and tell me if I’m wrong, I’m talking too much in this interview, but if I’m understanding this right, what you’re able to see is what are they trying to design first? The heel, the bow, the toe, something else? And if you start to see a pattern there, then that’s what you have your builder do first? Is that right?

Michael: Yeah, this is interesting, I’m trying to think back. So, the first version of that shoe design is actually still our current version as we didn’t want to build a step-by-step shoe designer. And, actually, maybe part of this thinking came from that testing. Whether it was exactly that testing, the impression we got from customers was that this was a really fun, exciting, creative process for them. They really enjoyed the process. Designing the shoes with each of these test people took an hour and they loved it.

They felt like they could unleash their creativity on the shoes they were designing, and so one of the things we took from that was that we didn’t want to have a structured design process, and step people through step 1, pick your toes, step 2, pick your heel. Because people would jump from doing the heel to changing the toe, they’ll jump to the colors and everything else, so we integrated that into the design where we don’t have a step-by-step process. You can kind of adjust anything on the fly and in any order you like. The downside of that is it makes the design process harder for the customer because there is not a structured process to follow to design your shoe. But we feel that the creativity element benefit outweighs the cons.

Andrew: I bought custom-made shirts online and a suit from Argon Reed [SP] that’s custom-made, and from what I remember they all took me step-by-step through a process. How do you want your collar done? How do you want the buttons? And so on. I see. Maybe it’s a difference between men and women, or it just happened to be these sites did it that way. But I can see how watching customers would give you that kind of feedback. All right, so now it’s validating your idea, it’s showing you how people interact with your idea so you know what to build, you’ve talked to me about who built it, it’s Mike, you’ve talked to me about how long it took. Once you’re launched, though…actually, before I ask you that. Were you guys still working at the time? Or doing this full time?

Michael: Yeah, so we kept our jobs as long as we could because we kind of wanted to validate the product as much as we could. Mark and I were working at Google, and it’s a fantastic company to work for, fantastic place to work, and it’s a tough decision to leave there. So we didn’t want to make that decision lightly, so we kind of put it off as much as we could. We got to the point, I think Mike left Google first, so he left in about April 2009, because we kind of got to the point well, if we’re going to build this shoe designer it’s going to either take a year and it’s going to be hell because it’s going to be every evening and every weekend or it’s going to be 3 months full time.

So we figured Mike should leave first and we kind of worked out a plan to share our salaries and everything so it all kind of balanced out. So Mike spent 3 months building the design and when he finished that, it kind of got to the point, around July 2009, when we needed to do lots of testing, we need to get all the processes and systems up and running, so I left my job in July and went full time. We figured we could wait for Jodi [SP] to leave her job, so we launched in October 2009, and the launch went well. Our first 3 months were great, so Jodi left her job in January, 2010. Then we started [??] from there. So we left it as long as we could, we used evenings, weekends, holidays as much as we could to sort of prove out that the concept worked.

Andrew: So, you guys are leaving your jobs, you and Mike, and essentially Jodi is losing salary, too, because she’s supporting this. You guys are in it together, so who left first isn’t that huge a difference. The point is, you’re leaving before you even have revenue, before you have a real business. That’s a big risk, and you guys don’t take risks easily. What made you say, “Yes, it’s time to do this. This idea is going to make it and is not going to be [??].

Michael: Yeah, there’s definitely a leap of faith involved in it. Yeah.

Andrew: Why did you leap here? Why did you feel like I have faith in this idea at this point?

Michael: Yeah, so we’d learned good lessons from the travel guide website and particularly from the dating website. So we were applying those. That sort of feedback we’d had, we’d done some of that testing with customers and talked to lots of women about the idea. And the response that we were getting about ShoesOfPrey was, oh my God if you can do this this would be the most amazing thing ever. People really genuinely loved the idea and the concept. Whereas with DarwinDating they kind of had a bit of a chuckle but they said yeah that’s not really for me. So that kind of validation was really positive, and I think we just had the entrepreneurial bug and we really wanted to try something.

Andrew: Yeah.

Michael: It got to the point in our careers too where we’d been working for sort of five or six years post-college and it was kind of getting to the point the opportunity cost gets higher as your salary goes up. So it was sort of at the point where it’s kind of either now or never. We think we’ve got a good idea. We learned good lessons from last time. And we’ve fixed the issues, we’ve sort of solved the issues that we had last time around. Yeah, we think this has got a decent chance at success so let’s have a go.

Andrew: I see. Alright, so the question that I interrupted myself when I was starting to ask is, where do you get customers?

Michael: Yeah.

Andrew: You have to train people to understand what the business is. I’m going to stop yapping and let you answer.

Michael: No no. So yeah it’s a tricky one, and it’s kind of changing over the life of our business. But really the core part of it is still that Purple Cow concept really works. You know, women love shoes to begin with and they kind of love fashion to begin with, and there’s a lot of women who are very passionate about shoes. And when you allow them to design their own shoes their passion rates just go up exponentially.

Andrew: I mean sure. But the early people who see it, you need some traffic to get that going.

Michael: Yeah.

Andrew: I mean even Seth Godin’s example of the Purple Cow, no one would know about that Purple Cow unless there was someone driving by the barn. You know, and if it was a barn that maybe one person that wasn’t very social that drove past it would be useless. So what did you do? Did you talk to bloggers? Did you buy ads? Did you do something else?

Michael: Yeah, yeah. It’s actually the very first thing we did. We launched at like 7:00 p.m. one evening. And then we sent an email out to our friends just sort of sharing with them what we’d built. We sent it to about 800 or so people. It was kind of an email describing hey here’s what we’ve been working on the last nine months, we’d love you to check it out, here’s a $50 credit if you’d like to use it and the $50 credit applies if you pass this email on to your friends, we’d love for you to share it with your friends and you can pass it on and they’ll get a $50 credit as well. So that email we sent to 800 people. We worked out we got about 3,200 visits to our website via that email. So it did get forwarded around, and actually friends that we’d forgotten to include on the email it got forwarded to them. And they emailed us back saying congratulations so excited that you got this up and running. So we sort of saw the email get forwarded around the Web as well. Yeah, so we got 3,200 visits, not a huge amount but that was kind of enough to kickstart things. So we got a few orders off that, and then it just kind of spread out from there. So from there it got forwarded on to some fashion bloggers who wrote about it. Yeah it got a little bit of business press here in Australia as well. That kind of got the…

Andrew: …Did it just happen? It seems like the business press has so much to talk about, bloggers have so much to talk about, that unless you grab them by the lapels and say here, look at this for a second, they’re not going to even notice that you exist. So, what did you do to get them notice you exist?

Michael: It was really just that story of being able to design your own shoes, and if that message…

Andrew: …So you went to them with the story? You actively e-mailed them and solicited their attention?

Michael: Actually not really at the start, no. It was that e-mail forwarding around. So I guess we forwarded the e-mail to 800 friends. They forwarded it on to have 3,200 visits maybe to sort of five or 6,000 people that they forwarded it on to. Then I guess some of those people got it and thought oh my friend’s a fashion blogger she might be interested in this. So they forwarded it on to their fashion blogger friend. Or my friend writes the such and such business magazine or newspaper and forwarded it on to them. And then because the concept is kind of a fairly bright shade of purple when those people received it enough of them liked the concept to then write about it.

Andrew: OK.

Michael: It really was that kind of viral spread. We didn’t really do much pushing of it when we launched because we were still only three and I’d hired our first team member in China. So really only four people when we launched and we were kind of focused on just getting the processes and everything right, answering customer emails, all that kind of stuff, we didn’t really have time to focus on the marketing at that point.

Andrew: What about this, I first was introduced to you on January 31, 2011, over two years ago, almost two and a half years ago, through Danny Wong, who worked at BlankLabel.com, another company that does custom made clothing. Were you guys in a group of, or somehow staying in touch with other people who were taking on this one-to-one design, and that helped spread the word?

Michael: Yeah, as we’re not based in Silicon Valley, obviously, we’re based in Sydney, Australia, so the entrepreneurial and tech scene’s not as big here as it is in Silicon Valley, but it still exists. We got to know other entrepreneurs here in Australia, and we’re in the mass customization space, and so we’re, other mass customization people are curious, we chat to each other. We got to know Danny and Fan really well, from Blank Label, and we sort of caught up with them quite regularly and got to know lots of other people in the mass customization space. It’s sharing, we’ll have a lot of similar issues, so, one, there’s the Purple Cow, so we get the viral effect, but one of the downsides of our business is the paradox of choice.

When you can choose from thee hundred thousand trillion possible designs, it becomes really hard to actually pick which one you want. I don’t know if you’ve seen that, read that sort of case study about the jam, so. You have fifty jams on a stand versus six jams on a stand, AB testing, that. The stand with six jams sells like five times as many jams because people, when they’ve got fifty jams, there might be five types of strawberry jam they’re trying, they’re going, oh, I can’t decide which of these strawberry jams I want to buy, and it’s just too hard.

Andrew: And frankly, also, there’s the idea that this is so new that people maybe don’t get it right away, they don’t understand.

Michael: Right.

Andrew: They are not just picking from a broader collection of shoes, they’re getting to make it. Or maybe the quality, they worry, is not going to be as good. What about the return policy? Were any of these things issues for you?

Michael: Absolutely. All of those things you just mentioned.

Andrew: What do you do about returns?

Michael: So, returns, we realized very early on talking to customers, particularly when we’re sitting there with the photographs, for example, they’re like, “I really want to do this, but I’m not quite sure what the shoe’s going to look like, because I haven’t actually seen it, will it fit?” so we realized very early on that we needed a very generous returns policy, and we’re very much a liable business. 20% of our sales are in the U.S., 20% are in the UK, Australia’s only about 25% of our sales, so when we looked at other markets that we wanted to grow in, like, we looked at obviously Zappos in the U. S., and they kind of led the charge on the sort of no questions asked one year return policy, so we realized, just that, to sell shoes online, we would probably need a return policy like that, and to sell custom shoes online, where people are buying off a cartoon drawing, in our first iteration, we absolutely have to take back shoes.

Andrew: So how can you do that? How can you take back shoes that I custom made that nobody else will, or maybe wouldn’t like, what do you do?

Michael: It’s expensive for us, basically, because Zappos can put the shoes back on the warehouse shelf and resell them, we can’t, because while I’m sure your shoes would be beautiful, Andrew, and someone else would want to buy them, they’re very hard to resell. So, we kind of just had to build that into our margin. So, we looked at Zappos return rate, around 35%, and we figured, you know, we wouldn’t quite market the same way as them, you know, they market “Buy three pairs, keep one, and send two back,” we’re obviously not going to market like that, so we kind of budgeted for a 25 or 30% remake rate for sizing, we kind of factored that into our margins, and that remake rate ended up being quite a bit lower, so, it’s kind of worked out okay.

Andrew: So, going back to Danny Wong and these other guys, what do you do to actively stay in touch with other people who are in your space?

Michael: Yeah, it’s kind of, how do we, I guess, in the first place, getting in touch was just kind of chance, few chance meetings, people knew people in our network, and so we got to meet a few other mass customization people, and when you get to know each other, you build up a relationship, and as you and I experienced, Danny Wong, he’s done an interview with you before, and he’s seen good things come from it, for BlankLabel, so he introduces us, because he thinks it’ll be good for us, and Danny probably introduced us to some other mass customization businesses as well, and just gradually, the word gets around, and you meet all these people, and then, yeah, it’s kind of regular.

Andrew: So it’s not anything formal. I’ve seen some entrepreneurs do things like, they had a quick mailing list with all their competitors, and they just stayed in touch, or others, who is it, Nathan Latka just talks to every single one of them. I don’t know how he does it.

He runs Heyo. I guess he will go to lunch with them. He seems to have a whole list of people who are in his space just to stay in touch. All right. So I thought we’d do something a little more formal. There isn’t anything more formal.

The first thing you did was, you emailed your friends. They passed it on. It’s time to grow. You can’t keep counting on your friends. What’s the next thing that you do to market the idea?

Michael: Yes. So, probably our next big marketing hit was around March or April 2010. This is about 6 months after our launch. Mark [SP] was sort of trolling around on YouTube, probably on a Friday night watching YouTube videos, and he came across this concept of, sort of fashionables [??] on YouTube.

So it ends up being these, sort of all the teenage girls on YouTube, they go do a shopping trip and they come back on YouTube and sort of show off all of the products that they bought. Other ones do kind of makeup videos. They do kind of makeup tutorials.

Andrew: I’ve heard of them. They get incredible amount of traffic just for showing off makeup and teaching people how to put it on. I get it.

Michael: It’s incredible. So Mark saw this and thought, well, maybe they’d be interested in custom women’s shoes.

He sent one of them an email. This girl, Blair Fowler. She’s 16-years-old, somewhere in the Midwest, U. S. So he sent Blair an email and said, “Hey, you know look, been watching your videos, love your videos, would you be interested in designing some shoes?”

Her Hollywood agent wrote back to us and said, “Yes, you can send Blair some shoes. If she likes the shoes, here’s her fee, and she’d be happy to do a video for you.”

Andrew: And she charged to look at your shoes.

Michael: To do the video, not to look at the shoes. If she was going to go ahead she wanted to walk the product first before she’d consider doing a video. And then pay a fee. So we looked at the fee, and we looked at the traffic, and we thought that was all reasonable. We looked at the size of their channel and the views their videos are getting, and we thought that was all reasonable.

We structured it so she did a video about designing around shoes. We ran a competition in the video so her viewers could watch the video, then go to our website, design a pair of shoes, come back to the video on YouTube and leave a comment on the video on YouTube describing the shoes they’ve designed and an event that they’d wear them to.

We sort of thought before this, we didn’t really have any concept. We knew her videos got a half-million views each. We figured that maybe 50,000 of these people might come to our website. Maybe we’ll get 5,000 entries to the competition. Something like that.

We weren’t really sure. The day that video went live we had 200,000 people visit our website. To put that into perspective, for the [??] of our business for the six months prior to that, we’d had lots of business press, we’d had coverage in fashion magazines, but in that six months since we’d launched we’d had 200,000 people to our website. The day that video went live we had 200,000 people come to our website.

Andrew: So this 16 year old, with her one video, got more people to your site, or about as many people, as all your other work combined.

Michael: Yeah, amazing, amazing. That competition that I mentioned, some 93,000 people then went and designed a shoe on our website, came back to the video on YouTube, left a comment on YouTube describing the shoes they’ve designed, and an event they’d wear them to.

Andrew: There are 95,239 comments underneath that video. 95,000 comments, not views! Almost exactly three-quarters of a million views on that video.

Michael: It’s incredible. It ended up being the third most viewed video on YouTube worldwide that week. It was the most commented-on video on YouTube worldwide for the week. It kind of ranks high in the search engine rankings and still continues to get views. This is, kind of, three years later.

Andrew: Did it get you customers? Or just traffic?

Michael: Yes. What was really interesting about her, we hadn’t really thought through who our audience actually was and, she’s 16, and the kind of people that look up to her and are doing the makeup tutorial videos are like 13 and 14-year-old girls.

When the video went live, we had Chat on our website, and I was sitting on Chat talking to customers and suddenly, these 20 Chat windows pop up and it’s all these 13 and 14-year-old girls talking to me saying, “I want to be a shoe designer when I grow up. How can I be a shoe designer?” There’d be like 20 [??] conversations. What’s going on [??]. Blair’s video just went live and then quickly realized that this was not our target customer. They loved designing and they loved the concept, but they didn’t have a couple hundred dollars to spend on a pair of custom women’s shoes.

We realized that pretty early on so wrote a blog post, 22michaels.com blog describing the story that I’ve just shared with you, and describing it in quite a bit of detail, and we sort of compared that to, we’d been on a couple of TV shows and different things like that, and just the numbers, looking at the performance of YouTube versus TV, it was just kind of, you know, astounding, the numbers that we were seeing. So we shared that, in a blog post, and then that blog post kind of went viral, on HackerNews, and sort of different places like that, and sort of in the tech scene, and then went kind of viral with business press beyond that. And so that got our brand and our business in front of our target customer, which is kind of professional women.

And the other thing we did, we kind of tweaked the website to make the share buttons on the website much more prominent, so we had all these 13 and 14 year old girls sharing their shoe designs on the web, which then got those shoe designs in front of their older sisters, their mums, people like that who were our target customer. So, within about three weeks, we didn’t see, we saw this massive spike of traffic, but we didn’t see sales spiking anything the same way, but within about three weeks of the video going live, when we’re getting all this press, and shares, and everything else, our sales had tripled, yeah, they pretty much tripled in three weeks, after the [???] video, and they kind of never fell below that mark again, so we continued to grow from there.

Andrew: Wow, way to go, Blair.

Michael: Yeah, it was amazing. And since then, we’ve done a few more collaborations with those.

Andrew: With her, or with other people?

Michael: With her, and with other people. I say tripled, that was off a low base, it was kind of a six month mark of our business, so when we do them now, we have that sort of sized uplift for us, percentage wise, but it’s still really good uplift.

Andrew: It’s so cute, the top response that I see here on my screen is, “You’re so pretty.” It just keeps going with comments like that. “Maybe design your own handbag, design your own socks, LOL” I think was the biggest comment on that video. So, it starts to take off, you’re doing well, at what point can you start getting a salary from this business?

Michael: So, we didn’t draw a salary until we did our Series A funding round, because we were bootstrapping up until that point. So, Jodie, Mark, and I, we’d saved up, because we’d been doing dialog dating [?] and travel guide websites for different things for kind of a few years beforehand, so we thought, there’s a decent chance we might want to start a business, and if we don’t want to do that, it’s good to save for a house deposit anyway, so we all agreed to save quite a bit of money.

So we basically had saved the equivalent of kind of an angel round, we had about half a million dollars between us, U. S. dollars, that sort of angel fund, we probably put 200 of that into the business to get things up and running, and then it meant we had sort of 300 grand to not draw a salary for the first couple years of the business, so we kind of lived off our savings. I mean, it was essentially sort of an angel round, that’s what most start-ups would do, but we just did that ourselves. So, yeah, it wasn’t until we did the Series A round, and we owned the whole business up until that point so whether we drew a salary or not didn’t effect things, but once we got investors in, it kind of made sense to draw a salary them.

Andrew: How much into your own personal savings, or, how close did you get to zero with that $300,000?

Michael: Pretty much, we were hitting zero as we did the Series A, even a bit of credit card debt and different things.

Andrew: Oh, wow. So, what’s it like to raise money when you’re an Australian company?

Michael: It’s challenging. Early on in the life of the business, written up on TechCrunch a few times, which was exciting, and then, once that happens, U.S. VCs start contacting you, so we got all excited, U.S. VCs are interested, this will be great, we can do a funding round. But, almost like clockwork, they would all say, “We love the space you’re in, we love what you’ve achieved, but, for a two or three million Series A round, we need you to move to the U.S., to do it,” and we didn’t want to do it.

So a few good reasons that being based in Australia is good for this business, particularly time zones with China, so we have a team of 12 in China and a team of 25 in Sydney, and so to be able to synch up time zones, there’s only a two hour time difference between Sydney and China, that’s a massive advantage, so particularly for that reason, we didn’t want to move. So, without fail, all these U. S. VCs were saying, “No, either move to the U. S., or come back to us when you’re doing a Series B or something bigger.” So that was a little disappointing, so we ended up talking to some of the Australian investors, but we ended up putting a round together, we got 9 different investors to raise a $3 million U. S. round, so we ended up with five angel investors, a small Australian VC.

Andrew: Mike Cannon-Brookes.

Michael: Mike Cannon-Brookes from the last thing. So he was one of the angel investors.

Andrew: Crunch Fund, Michael Arrington’s fund invested?

Michael: Yeah. That was actually Michael Cannon-Brookes had an interest. So we had two U. S. investors of the nine. So there was Crunch Fund and Bill Tye [SP], an angel investor in San Francisco.

Andrew: I see. All right. So now you’ve got . . . Are you guys raising another round? Do you want to talk about that?

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. So we’re looking to do a series B round later this year. We did the series A 12 months ago. And so we’re hitting a lot of targets. Since then we’ve got growth metrics, so we’ve still got some of that money, the $3 million left in the bank now. So that should take us through to the end of this year, and then the focus, as I understand it, is fairly normal for a series A business. You do sort of traction, do a series A round, to then prove out the concept further and try to fine scalable customer acquisition channels.

Andrew: Did you find that because so far all I’m seeing is videos with 16- year-old girls to email to friends? What’s the scalable advertising channel, marketing channel?

Michael: For us it’s a mix of some pay channels but then that word of mouth kind of putting those pay channels on steroids. Different online channels work for us. Search engine marketing works well for us to a decent level. As the business grows, we’re sort of expanding the campaigns that we run in search engine marketing. Those campaigns, those keywords are quite small, but it’s expanding out to wedding shoes and high heels and other categories like that. Those are really large.

Andrew: How do you add the viral component to that?

Michael: So really it’s just once we introduce someone to the brand, to the product, they go and tell their friends about it. We haven’t really worked it out. It’s tough to work out with the kind of viral co-efficient it is, but we see when we get a traffic spark of the 200,000 people from that YouTube video. It’s a spark, but then the graph kind of levels out at a much higher level than it was before. It’s just kind of people with the viral effect going on. So we see that with any kind of marketing activities that we do. We’ve been experimenting through a whole bunch of online channels. We’ve been experimenting with TV advertising in the UK, and that’s looking promising as well.

Andrew: The product seems to have evolved to a point where in the beginning you weren’t giving people much direction. And then later on as you progressed you basically said, “Here is the shoe”, almost like buying it in the store. But if you want to customize it, then you can do that, but we’re starting you off with the basic show that you can customize or even love the way that it is. Is that right?

Michael: Yeah. So this is really kind of interesting, lots of AB testing going on and trying to understand the months that a customer . . . We’ve sort of worked out the different customers. They would prefer different design processes, so we’re still trying to work out and understand and work out how we can integrate that onto our website. So you might say weddings is a decent portion of our sales. So if the wedding shoe customer generally has something very specific is mind. They might have already got the dress, and they know that they want this blue pair of shoes or they are having a wedding on the beach so they want a wedge heel.

They’ve got a very specific shoe in mind, so for them if they can find the sort of starting point of what they want to start with and then just modify that. Or often they just go straight to the designer and design exactly what they’re looking for. Whereas a lot of our customers, another big portion of our customers, just come to the website. They’re just inspired. They are creative. They just design from scratch. So for those customers it really helps to give them a starting point. So they’ll often start with kind of a gallery. So often they’ll go to the gallery and go, “That one inspires me.” They’ll click on that shoe and modify that design.

We’re doing thing like integrating. You go to our shoe designer at the moment on the left-hand side. It’s kind of inspirations. So if you design something, it would say “leopard print”. If you select leopard print in the designer, we’ll show you photographs of shoes that were made using leopard print to kind of inspire you and give you ideas. On the right-hand side around the letters, we suggest kind of matching or contrasting colors from what you’ve just selected. We try to guide people through the designing process, but with that going step by step process, we want to keep the sort of creativity and the free flow of the design happening.

Andrew: Let me do a quick plug here and then I want to ask you about something new that I saw online connected to you. I should have asked you if you wanted to even talk about this in the interview, but I think it will be fine.

The plug is for Mixergy Premium, and the reason, Michael, that you and I reconnected and I discovered that somehow we lost your interview, and I’m still going to hunt for it. Some backup system must have it. Anyway, back to this. You were trying to sign up for Mixergy Premium. You had a tech support issue, and I jumped right in there, and I was pissed that something broke for you. But my question is, what were you trying to sign up for? What was it that drew you to Mixergy Premium? What were you trying to watch?

Michael: It was actually my co-founder, Mark, who went through that process. But we’ve watched your videos for probably two, three years now. I think we’d been watching videos, actually, since before Danny introduced us. I think we might’ve been asked. We knew Danny had done that interview with you, and I think we asked Danny for the introduction early on in the life of the business when we still had huge amounts to learn. But the kind of videos that you do, we loved watching entrepreneurs who’d gone on the journey that we were going on, and I’m giving you a big plug here, but I think it’s because your questioning style is great.

You kind of, even in this interview now, you’ve kind of got straight to the heart of a lot of the issues. I know that three years ago, I would’ve loved to have heard from entrepreneurs who had gone on the journey. And I think you get great people that you’re interviewing. We’ve just always been really inspired by the interviews that you do, and even as we’ve gone on the journey, we’ve continued to watch the videos and Mark, in particular, he would’ve watched a lot of your videos over the years.

Andrew: I talked to Noah Kagan of Appsumo, and he helped me realize that one of the big reasons why people watch is, if they’re not in San Francisco, if they’re not in the U.S., even, this is a way of connecting and having those conversations that I was telling you about seem to happen all the time here. Does that feel right?

Michael: Yeah, yeah. That’s a really good point. There’s a decent tech startup scene here in Australia now, but actually three and a half, four years ago when we were starting the business, there wasn’t really a lot going on here. So yeah, your videos, particularly back then, you’re exactly right. It was hard to pick up the phone or shoot an E-mail to someone in the tech scene in Sydney, because there just weren’t that many people. So to watch your video was a really good substitute for that.

Andrew: It’s insane. Soon after I’m done here with the day, I think at 5:30, the guy from Arden Read is going to be here for scotch, and someone else is going to join also, and this stuff happens all the time, because people just pass through the city. The Arden Read guy bought a truck, he’s a fan of Mixergy, he built his business, bought a truck now where he gets to measure people in the truck and give them a perfectly fitting suit, and so he’s doing a cross country trip, and of course, he’s going to come by San Francisco. And of course he’s going to spend a lot of time here. And so I meet up with him, but it just happens so much that I have to find a way to regulate it, to not allow it to take over my life.

Michael: I imagine.

Andrew: So, anyway, thank you, and I see here, actually, I found his tech support email. It did come from Mike. You guys were trying to buy the annual membership, which I especially appreciate. And so thank you for that, and thank you also for the compliments on Mixergy. If you guys are listening and want to sign up, go to mixergypremium.com. Hundreds and hundreds of interviews with entrepreneurs who break down how they built their businesses and over a hundred now courses with entrepreneurs who teach one thing that they do especially well, like how to get people to come to their sites, how to sell, etc. All right. All mixergypremium.com, I guarantee it.

The final question is this. I keep looking at your glasses, and I just love your whole freaking style. But see, I couldn’t just say, I love your style, for some reason. I’m embarrassed to even admit that I acknowledge the styles. I have to add the word freaking. I really like your style, and I realize it’s because you guys, did you launch, or are you launching something called sneakingduck.com, which is [??] glasses?

Michael: Yes. When we’re planning out choosing product, we kind of planned out two different concepts at the same time, so this is back in probably December 2008. It would’ve been around the same time maybe for Sneaking Duck. And actually the concept is not custom glasses. It’s essentially what [??] launched. So we had a similar idea at the same time [??] weighing out which one do we want to do. We felt that [??] was more of the purple cow, so we went with [??]. We kind of had this business plan sitting there for a glasses business. We had the experience, but actually this kind of built up the more time we spend in China. We’re buying, the three of us all wear glasses, and we’re ending up buying 10, 15 pairs of glasses in China because they’re so cheap. We’re matching them to different outfits and turning them into a fashion accessory.

It was that experience for us as consumers we thought, “Why aren’t people doing this online?” In Australia, and I think it’s similar in the U.S., glasses are $500 or $600 to get a frames and a set of lenses.

Andrew: It’s outrageous.

Michael: Yeah…

Andrew: You saw that 60 Minutes piece, right?

Michael: Right.

Andrew: If anyone didn’t see it in the audience, you’ve got to check it out. Leslie Stahl did a piece on Luxottica and how they basically own and lock up the whole eyeglass market and how if you’re buying something and you think that you’re buying it from an independent store or a brand that’s independent and especially cool, it’s all coming from Luxottica.

As a result of their ownership and lock down of this market–I don’t think you can say this, I’m going to say this, and Leslie can say it–prices are skyrocketing. She’s apparently wearing a pair of $4000 glasses, but that’s an outrageous, extreme. For the most part, glasses are very expensive, in the hundreds of dollars. What you’re doing is you’re reducing the price by going straight to China and cutting out the Luxottica connection.

Michael: Exactly. We had that business plan sitting there, and (?) well in the U.S. It’s a tricky decision because do you want to focus on the business or do you want to do a couple of things. But we decided to launch the business plan here in Australia a couple years ago, just focused on Australia. Turning glasses into a fashion accessory is the concept.

Andrew: That looks good. I like how clean it is. All right, Michael, thank you so much for doing this interview. The site, of course, Shoes of Prey, or 22Michaels.com where you can follow his blog and see what he’s learning as he’s building his business. Finally, sneakingduck.com. If I had to give just one URL, what would it be? It would probably be shoesofprey.com, right?

Michael: Yeah. It depends on what people are interested in. Actually, the 22Michaels.com blog probably is the one most relevant for your audience.

Andrew: All right. 22Michaels.com. Thank you so much for doing this.

Michael: No, (?). Thank you.

Andrew: Thank you all for being a part of it.

Who should we feature on Mixergy? Let us know who you think would make a great interviewee.

x