Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. Right now is when I would usually do my intro, but let me just jump into the guy’s name. Brian Wong is here with me today. Brian, good to see you.
Brian: Good to see you as well, Andrew.
Andrew: I was looking for a way to include this in my intro. I’m not sure how. So, I’ll just say it to you. I got an email from you from like 2009. Do you remember it?
Brian: I do remember it.
Andrew: Why is it making you laugh like that?
Brian: I knew you were going to bring it up because that was me kind of going, “I really want to be on your show,” type of thing and trying to convince you.
Andrew: Yeah. You said, “I’m a huge fan of Mixergy. I now have a lot to prove as an entrepreneur and many steps to climb,” and then you went on to talk about what you had done. You said from follower information, which is software you’d created at the time to your gig at Digg where you created their Android app. You really had done a lot. You said, “What do you think? Is it time for a Mixergy interview?” Do you remember what I said?
Brian: I think you said later or you’re not ready yet.
Andrew: That’s it. So, now that it has been later, six years later–Kiip is doing great and we’ll talk about what Kiip does–what do you think of my response?
Brian: I think you were right. And I think I was never optimizing my career to get onto a talk show, which is good. Thank god. But I feel now there’s a lot more to share, for sure.
Andrew: Yeah. You were talking before we started about battle scars, about what you learned, about how much you have to share. That makes for such a good interview. But I admire how you were just were emailing me, pinging me. You were doing this for other people too and man, you got a lot of press, right?
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: What’s the piece of press that you’re proudest of?
Brian: Well, I think the one that’s most obvious was the one last summer on the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine. It was not only great exposure, but it was a great article. So, I was extremely thankful for that and it did a lot for our business. So, that was a great one.
Andrew: And Michael Arrington from TechCrunch who’s usually a pretty tough blogger wrote up a really nice piece about you when you got funding, really supportive and even went into the comments to rip in a couple of people who were questioning you. The Wall Street Journal wrote an article that I used heavily in preparation for this interview. Anyway, you’ve done a lot with press, but you’re not just a guy who’s empty PR. You’re a guy who built up this company, phenomenal business, right?
Kiip–what it does is it takes those special moments in apps, like when you get a specific score or accomplish something in a game or in any to-do app when you check off something–any moment where you earn something in a game, it gives you something in real life and that something in real life comes from your sponsors, right? Is that the way the product works?
Brian: Absolutely. So, we realized that the way brands are in your apps these days are pretty annoying and, in fact, are always interruptive and really never respectful of your user experience. And then I noticed in these apps, when you’re using them every day, there are going to be these moments.
Every app has this, like you mentioned in productivity or in gaming and even things like fitness where you can finish a run or even in your sports app when you find out your favorite player just did something great–every app has these moments. So, in that moment in time, we said, “Let’s have a brand reward you instead of just advertising to you.” That’s what served as the foundation for the company.
Andrew: I should say what I was doing when you were texting me saying, “Are you ready?” But first I should say this interview is sponsored by HostGator. If you need a web post, check out HostGator.com/Mixergy and it’s sponsored by Toptal.com. If you need a developer, go to Toptal.com/Mixergy. I’ll tell you more about those later.
But here’s what I was doing before we started. Frankly, I was talking to other people in the industry to get some low down on you to see, “What am I missing? Am I going to get snowed by this guy who just comes across as a really great guest? If I am, that’s going to be a horrible interview.”
So, I was spending a long time reading about you. I came in early today to call up other people. I didn’t find any dirt, which is both good and bad–good because it means that you’re doing great; bad because I like to have some edge. Anyway, the edge is going to come from your battle scars when we get to those.
Brian: Sure.
Andrew: How big is the business now? What kind of revenues are you doing?
Brian: So, I’m really proud. This year we’re going to close in on about $11 million in revenue. We’re close to 60 staff now across San Francisco and New York, primarily. So, we’ve really built it to a great–I’m actually in the middle of doing my board. I have a board meeting tomorrow afternoon. I just finished the first part of it, so now I have some time to talk to you.
We actually did 105 percent of our goal last quarter and we’re probably going to go at about 110 percent of Q4. So, it’s safe to say I’m very proud of what our team has accomplished and I’m very happy personally as well.
Andrew: I get that. Now, you’re a marketplace. Do you count the revenue that advertisers pay? Do you count the aggregated sales from advertisers as your revenue or do you count the portion that you get to keep after you pass on to publishers?
Brian: Gross versus net. So, our $11 million is at gross. But our margins are a lot higher than traditional advertising business, primarily because our effective rev share is closer to 60-40. So, we’ve been working on increasing that margin even further, but it’s different. We were always kind of presented with the challenge of, “Do we consider our net our gross or our gross our net?” But I think for now, having our gross as our gross is really the most strategic way to continue seeing the actual growth of the business for now.
Andrew: So, out of that, roughly $4 million goes to your publishers, roughly $6 comes to you, maybe it’s $7 million to you.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: Wow. Really phenomenal business. And this whole thing actually started after something bad happened at Digg. Now, we’re going to talk about a lot of good things. I’ve got to get to some of the bad ideas so the audience roots for you and it doesn’t look like you just were born on easy street. Talk about how you found out that you were getting laid off from Digg? This is before you created Kiip.
Brian: So, I was very excited to move down to Silicon Valley, got my first full-time job at Digg in business development. I was going to be doing publisher relationships. So, Digg had this button that a lot of folks still recognize and remember. My job was to get big websites to take that button and integrate the JavaScript into their websites.
Now, I got my Visa as a result of that. So, Digg had helped me get my H-1B. For those of you familiar with it, it’s not an easy Visa to get and it cost quite a bit. So, I managed to get that as well. Did a goodbye party, went down.
Anyways, five months into the gig, I get called into the CRO at the time, Chaz’s office and I get laid off. So, I, again essentially uproot, move and then five months later get laid off. And then that’s when I kind of needed to figure out what to do next. A few months after that was when the company was formed and then shortly thereafter we were funded and we were off to the races.
Andrew: You had already accomplished a lot by then. You created the Twitter app that I mentioned earlier in the interview. What was it called? It was called Follow Formation. That was back before Twitter recommended people to follow. You created a tool for people to figure out who they should follow. You already had a marketing agency. You were a wunderkind. You skipped four years of school. Everything was going well. You bank everything on going to Silicon Valley to one of the hottest startups and when they fire you, how did you feel about that?
Brian: Well, to clarify, firing and laid off are two very different things. I was laid off.
Andrew: Firing means it’s your fault. Laid off means, “We can’t continue.”
Brian: Firing means that I violated something and I deserve to get basically booted out. Laid off was because of them needing to downsize because of their cost measures. So, the reason why I clarify this is because I learned a lot of lessons from this. Digg at the time, people know this, they raised about $40 million in venture capital, were actually doing about the same revenues as Kiip was and had very different margins. I don’t remember exactly.
But I think they were like $12 million in revenue at the time, but raising way more money than we have obviously. I’m not trying to compare it, but you know what I mean. They obviously had huge issues around profitability and needed to downsize. They had a traffic sort of–basically, a big chunk of their traffic disappeared overnight because of a Google algorithm change. Now, when you look at who to cut, usually business development is like the first because it’s like, “Who’s the most dispensable?”
Obviously I was given the boot. It was, I think, a 15 percent staff reduction. So, it was quite a significant chunk of people that had to go. What happened after that, it’s a big fuzzy right now, but basically–if I went into details, it would be pretty funny–but basically because of my visa situation, if I literally was let go that day, I would have had to go back to Canada.
So, instead what happened was they kept me on for 30 days as a grace period to let me find another job, which is a very, very, very thing for them to do because technically two weeks’ severance is already enough and this was really kind of enough, but this was sort of a different story. What I ended up doing in that one month is had actually two speaking gigs in that month where I was supposed to be international representing Digg.
Because I was technically still employed by the company because of this grace period, before finding a new job, I decided to go around and actually speak on the company’s behalf even though I was technically not actually working there. So, I did that. I have no idea what the motivation was behind that, but I just did it. And then yeah, the visa lapsed and I went back into Canada, went back into the US on a tourist visa and was kind of asking questions of what next.
At the time, I reached out to the two people that I, for some reason, was very trusting in, not for some reason because of their character, but there were so many people to trust, but one of them was Scott Kveton over at Urban Airship and then Hiten Shah at KISSmetrics. Those two happened to be True Ventures portfolio companies. And I had approached them, actually, to get a job because Scott was hiring a BD guy and I think Hiten was hiring a BD guy.
Both of them I was telling about this idea for Kiip that I actually had while I was unemployed. It came to me actually after I got laid off from Digg. And then I told them about the idea and then they actually came back to me and said, “I don’t actually think you should work for us. You should start this.”
They both introduced me into True. That’s kind of what kicked off the whole fundraising process as well. I didn’t really know what fundraising really was as a process, to be honest. I’d only read about it in TechCrunch. And I had this idea and my whole thing was, “Let’s talk to some VCs,” and I happened to have some nice warm intros into True Ventures and let’s see what happens from there.
Andrew: And the idea came to you when you were on a flight. You were looking around at other people on the flight and you saw what?
Brian: I saw people on their phones playing games. As an entrepreneur, you’re usually very curious about exponentially growing behaviors that humans are exhibiting. Mobile gaming was one explosive one that I was just like, “Whoa, what is so addictive about these games and why are so many people playing them?” And then it hit me that these games had these mini dopamine rushes that were creating a lot of addiction. It was the moment where people were leveling up and hitting high scores.
So, my desire was to figure out what was that motivating factor for that moment and how I could harness that in the purposes of advertising because I had studied marketing and advertising in college. I also did design as well. That’s how I was able to design the Twitter tool you mentioned and did our design agency.
So, you can kind of see all the things that I had as a skill set growing up kind of converging in this idea, right? It’s everything in my passion for branding and advertising to my design and user experience skill combined with sort of mobile and sort of this whole desire to create something that people could be delighted by every day. And then that came together in the idea that we ended up coming up with.
Andrew: How amazing is it that Hiten would, in an interview, say, “What else are you working on?” When you tell him, he doesn’t get threatened or say, “This is my guy,” but instead says, “Let me help you do that instead of hiring you here?”
Brian: Yeah. And this is Silicon Valley in a nutshell. I couldn’t be more proud of the area, what it’s evolved into. The reason why it’s like this because people are so willing to share. They all know that everything comes around. You can act selfishly or you can act in the spirit of the entrepreneur. I think everyone acts in the spirit of the entrepreneur. That’s what I loved about that part of the world and why I decided to stay.
Andrew: You told our producer, “I just don’t like business plans.” And so instead you did what?
Brian: I actually whipped up a blank canvas on Photoshop and I designed what I though the reward would look like if you were to level up and get something from Best Buy, actually was the first mockup. I just did that. I had sort of a pseudo mockup on my phone that used my very limited knowledge of HTML to show what it looked like to act on the reward.
And then what I did was I kind of semi-bribed who is now my cofounder, Courtney, to plug in that web view into one of the games that he had developed. So, I was like, “Listen, all I need you to do is when I hit a level in your game, load up this web view, that’s it. It doesn’t take a lot in iOS. Let’s see if you can do this.” And he did it and that became our pitch.
Andrew: Why Courtney?
Brian: Courtney I had worked with at Digg. He was actually the only engineer at Digg that I had spent a lot of time with. Out of all the engineers, I think there were probably like 30, probably even 35 engineers there. I had a project where we were trying to integrate the upgraded version of the Digg button into a bunch of new sites.
Courtney was working on that Digg button and he was also working on analytics for that Digg button because publishers were interested in seeing how their articles were being dug and shared. So, Courtney and I had just spent a lot of time together. Courtney was also one of the engineers that interviewed me too. So, part of the Digg interview process was they had engineers interview every non-technical person just to see if there’s some level of proficiency.
So, Courtney, I just thought was a great test tube artist. He can basically test and create concepts extremely quickly and sort of just bring them to life and that’s really what we needed in the beginning was how many quick concepts could we just whip out of nowhere and not worry about it being like the Taj Mahal but whether or not it could be a feasible MVP.
So, he was an MVP master and so that’s why he was perfect in the beginning. Not only that, he brought in his other friend Amadeus, who is my other cofounder as well now who is like a savant in JavaScript animation and front-end development and user experience, which, by the way, to have all three of those in one person is basically like a unicorn. So, here we have a unicorn in design, a unicorn in MVP creation and then me a bozo in business and design. And then we kind of came together and formed the first team for the company.
Andrew: Why? Why did they trust you? You call yourself a bozo. You clearly aren’t a bozo. But you hadn’t done as much as they had. You didn’t have as much specific knowledge to bring in. Why did they say, “You know, we’re going to go with this guy who’s basically a kid.” You were still under 20. You weren’t drinking age.
Brian: No. I was 19 at the time. So, I don’t know if one of those calls you made was in to Courtney, but Courtney would probably tell you–and I don’t want to speak for him too much–that there was a recognition on their behalf that I had the ability to take things to market through my passion in selling and packaging and sort of designing.
Andrew: How did that express itself? I know the Digg button, which is that like button that people used to put on their websites, that was something you had to persuade sites to do. Is that where you showed them how persuasive?
Brian: That was one area that they saw a lot of my selling capacity. But the other was really the speaking engagements. So, like I said, those two at the end, those lingering two gigs, two of the seven that I ended up doing–it was really funny. Because what happened was Digg had one spokesperson at the time, Kevin Rose. There was no person in the org that was public enough that people were willing to invite in to interview and talk to.
My goal was just to build my personal brand as well. Digg was a great brand to associate myself with. Now, that wasn’t the main reason I joined the company, obviously, but it was one of the things that I was able to benefit from. In fact, I had gotten so many speaking gigs without their permission that they were forced–they being the PR team there at the time, Michelle, who’s actually, bless her heart, I forgot where she is now, but she was basically love and relationship with me because she’s like, “You book all these gigs and we can’t pull you from these gigs but we’re going to have to force ourselves to train you.”
So, they had media training one day and it was literally all these senior execs and me. And that day was one actually one of the most valuable days for me and just media in general because I got formally media trained from everything from broadcast to print to all these different things. That’s kind of what added to my arsenal of tricks and tools when I ended up going in to actually starting my own business as well.
Andrew: I also remember you getting a lot of articles too.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: It was articles written about you. Was it all the kind of emails that you sent me where it was just, “Hey, checking in. I think I’d be a good fit,” that kind of thing?
Brian: Pretty much. Yeah. There’s really no other way to do it. A lot of in people’s radar, top of mind, understanding what reporters are looking for and realizing that sometimes it’s not the right time, sometimes it is. I think the trick with–there’s no trick with PR. I think it’s be interesting. Have a good story to tell and make sure you build relationships because at the end of the day, the reporter and the journalist and the blogger is a human being and they don’t want to be treated as some lever you pull just to get an article.
So, that’s kind of how I did it. It also helped that at Digg, one of my other responsibilities was to build these communities of journalists and press staff–so, people who worked at these publications. So, we had hosted a few parties in LA and New York where I’d gotten quite close to the folks that worked at these big–
Andrew: How? What did you say to get close to them?
Brian: I was like, “Hey, come to our ridiculously awesome party in LA and New York.” So, usually free, open bar parties are a great way to get people out. The second was just to be a likeable person. I think one of the things that I realize was a key in business development was just be someone that people want to hang out.
Andrew: What makes you someone that people want to hang out with?
Brian: It’s hard to self-diagnose, but I think it’s because–it’s kind of a combination of like how comfortable can they be around you? Some people are generally kind of awkward and it makes everyone else awkward. I’m very much like a chameleon. I can get comfortable with anyone, really.
And then the second reason is I want to make sure people have fun. So, actually, whenever I’m at an event, it’s less about me. It’s more about them and whether or not they can enjoy themselves. If that’s the goal for a party or even any social event, that’s why I’ve always maintained that as my number one rule.
Andrew: What do you do to make people have fun? I know what I do. I try to get the conversation into something that’s personal and no one ever talks about that stuff outside of conversations with me usually.
Brian: Yeah. That’s exactly it. Get them into their comfort zone and then remind them that you’re not there to sell them, too. You’re just there to hang out. That’s the thing. This tactic works every time. A good smile and ask them like, “What’s your story?” And they’ll be like, “What do you mean my story? Like where I grew up?” “Yeah, if you want to start there if you want to.”
And then very quickly they’ll realize that you’re just there to hang out. I think people love being there especially at these events with people to hang out with. Now, there are certain situations where that’s not appropriate, where people are trying to get a deal done like, “Hey, what’s up man. Let’s hang out.”
But most times when you are in a social event, that’s one of the best ways to win someone over, to be that one guy who isn’t there to be like, “Yeah, so, what position are you in? Are you a decision maker on these budgets? What’s the process to get this closed?” It’s just people like they’ve been sold all day. The last thing they want to do is be sold again. You’re actually technically selling but you’re doing it in a very genuine way, which is I want to get to know you as a person.
A general selling strategy is if you don’t know your customer, you can’t sell them properly. So, part of this whole process is to get to know the person. You might even eventually become friends with them. That’s a great thing. That’s why I’ve become friends with a lot of these folks that I’ve actually worked with very closely.
Andrew: All right. I should do a quick sponsorship message for my sponsor, Toptal. If you need a developer, they are the ones to go to. Just type in those six letters, Toptal.com and they will find you the perfect developer for your working environment and the project that you’re working on. Brian, let me ask you this–if you had a top developer from Toptal, you could just bank on them being really good, what would you bring on them board at Kiip to do?
Brian: We already have worked with Toptal. We’ve brought on two engineers from them.
Andrew: Get out.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: Why do you guys use Toptal when you have so much money, so many connections? Why go to Toptal?
Brian: Well, there’s a moment in a startup’s hiring where you realize that you could really pound the pavement and bring on engineers the hard way and then there are these big marketplaces like Toptal and Hired.com–sorry to mention their other competitor–but basically there are companies like them that just make the process very easy. It happens to be sort of a convenient process that my team can just tap into and use. That’s why we decided to use them.
Andrew: So, a lot of big companies are using them, smaller ones also and that’s exactly it. When you work with Toptal, they get on the phone with you really fast. I’ve actually introduced some people from the audience to Toptal and they’ll respond within minutes to an email introduction. They get on the phone with you, as one past interviewee said, within an hour they got on the phone with a rep from Toptal.
You tell them exactly what you’re looking for, what project you’re working on, what kind of help you need, how long you need the person. Is it a full-time engagement? Part-time? Just a few extra hours? Do you have a big team? Do you have no one on your team and you need Toptal to do it? All those questions, Toptal will ask you so that they can go and find the perfect person for you and often that person can start within a day or two. That’s the advantage of working with Toptal and they have a really good network of the top three percent of developers.
You’ve seen me talk about Toptal in past interviews. Other guests have said they’ve used them or they’ve heard me talk about them and said, “I’ve never heard of this company before,” and they’ve written down Toptal to call them up or to go over to their website and hire from them. If you need a developer, follow what Brian and so many other top entrepreneurs have done.
Go to Toptal. In fact, let me give you a secret URL. I don’t think they’re offering this to anyone. Google it and tell me I’m wrong. If you go to Toptal.com/Mixergy, they’re going to give you 80 free developer hours if you pay for 80 and that is in addition to a trial period of up to two weeks. You’re not happy, you don’t pay. That’s how strongly they feel about their work. Don’t worry. The developer will still get paid. Toptal will pay for them.
Great company, Toptal.com/Mixergy. I can understand why Andreessen Horowitz is such a big supporter of them. Toptal.com/Mixergy. Thanks, Brian.
So, you told our producer that the first version was janky. What made you say that it–I don’t know anything about your janky. Actually, your conversation style, I think you’re really good. I think you were good at getting promotion. But here’s one of the things you didn’t mention earlier about your relationships. The way you dress even in all the photos that I’ve seen of you, you look good. You look like a designer.
A lot of designers–I was talking to Owen from Intercom. I said, “You care about every freaking Pixel, meanwhile I see you in the same t-shirt in every photo in my research.” He goes, “Yeah, I don’t care about that.” You do have a good look, right? So, why would you allow the first version–or what does janky mean to you in the first version of your product?
Brian: Well, janky meant more… Visually, on the surface, it was slick and polished, but the inner workings had not necessarily been formed yet. So, think of it as a concept car. It looks beautiful, but it probably has like plastic in the interior and you have no idea whether or not it actually can drive. So, I think aesthetic is important. This is really a takeaway. And this is really like a little mini life cheat. We always like to discount visual. We’d be like, “People can’t be so shallow and blah, blah, blah.”
Unfortunately, people are very shallow and they don’t want to admit it sometimes. It usually comes in the form of very quick heuristic judgments on everything from your email you just sent them to the deck you just sent them to the pitch you just sent them, to your proposal to practically anything. You just put that additional level of polish.
When I mean email–literally just spacing email properly, capitalizing it, adding bold titles to things that are lists and having nice bullet points–just simple things. If it’s a jumble of things that it’s difficult to read, people immediately discount it in their head. I’ve learned this time and time again. It’s also a reflection of your attention to detail at the end of the day as well. It’s not just about looks. It’s like, “Is this person willing to put in this additional few minutes just to make sure that something is presentable.”
That’s really been my principle forever, which is let’s make sure that people know that you are–if you can’t even get that right, how can they trust you as a client to figure out all these other areas that they want you to care about. So, that’s really the first line of defense, I feel, in gaining the confidence and trust of your clients.
Andrew: You took it to True Ventures. They invested. TechCrunch said that they thought you were the youngest person to get venture funding. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But you were definitely one of the youngest. You definitely beat Matt Mullenweg. You beat Mark Zuckerberg. I even read an article where you said, “This is my path to be that big,” and we’ll get to that in a moment in the battle scars portion. How hard was it, though, to raise money?
Brian: In the beginning because it was 2010, it had been two years since the crash in ’08, it was really not that tough to get the attention of intelligent investors. In fact, what I found is usually near the beginning of a new cycle, the most intelligent investors are the ones that are looking for opportunities because they know everything is undervalued. They can get in at a lower price and they’re generally smarter about it. That’s what I realized almost after the fact. So, now, looking back I’m like, “These guys are really clever.”
Thankfully to them, we obviously were able to raise and then create this business, otherwise it would not have existed. So, that’s kind of how I describe it. Today, the process is very different because the way you fundraise is radically different than it was five years ago. But at the time that I was raising, we had at our disposal angel investors and early seed stage funds like True that were willing to step up to the plate.
Andrew: All right. So, now you have investors. You have developers. You have a product. You guys build it out. You do it in stealth mode. Then you have to still get advertisers. I read that you got advertisers through your investors.
Brian: Yes. So, two of our angel investors happen to be serendipitously involved. One of them is Keith Balling, who’s the founder of Popchips. And the other was the CMO of Vitamin Water, Rohan Oza. So, he was there before the Coke acquisition. So, you can imagine how liquid his wealth became, which is great, obviously for companies he’s invested in.
Rohan I had run into at South By very randomly right at the beginning, like five years ago. Rohan happens to be really good friends with Keith and actually was the original seed investor in Popchips. So, conveniently both of them at the time were like, “We’re going to both invest.” And I was like, “Great.” And made some room for them in the round. And then Vitamin Water and Popchips became our first two customers.
So, using that, we decided to make sure we didn’t let them down and we had great case studies to show for it. We managed to use those case studies to rope in more CPG and beverage brands as our clients. CPG and beverage–sorry, consumer packaged goods–and beverages ended up being our top clients and still is to this day the top category of spending from clients.
Andrew: What did you learn about selling to them? They seem really hard. To me they’re a huge mystery. How do you get people who want customers in stores and are used to buying ads on television. How do you give them something that they want to keep coming back and buying more of. What did you learn?
Brian: What I learned is that at these brands, there’s always one guy or gal or two–it’s not a big handful–that want to do something awesome. Usually you’ll find them at South By and you’ll usually find them at these things that make them think about things a bit differently. They go to these places to get inspired. They don’t have that many bullets to use. They probably have maybe five or six bullets.
What I mean by bullets are these pilot projects, which usually would be in the form of like a $10k, $15k, $25k investment at work. So, they naturally have to kind of pick their battles and then invest in those and invest a lot of time. It’s less about the money. It’s about the fact that they need to devote part of their job to make it happen.
So, your goal to sell to these brands is to find that person. It’s very easy to know they’re not that person. That’s kind of the good news for anyone who’s trying to sell to these brands. Anyone that they just seem like they’re kind of risk-averse, just move on. You’re never going to sell to someone who’s trying to keep their steady job and their paycheck and their position and not trying to ruffle any feathers.
But now obviously more so than ever before, you have a lot of people who are being lauded for creating these change movements in organizations, whether junior or senior. So, you should be seeking those people out and trying to do it. Luckily, Keith and Rohan knew those people in their orgs and they both introduced us to those people and we used those relationships to continue building these programs.
The trick here is to make sure you never mess up. It’s really big pressure because you do one hiccup and it kind of stalls you for a while. The whole point of this is to make sure that you are trustworthy in working with them because they could have picked any other company that’s been doing this way longer that you have and with way more staff to support them than you do, but they took a bet on you. So, that’s really one way to make sure that you continue that success and track record and continue to introduce those.
You maybe have room in like ten pilots to like mess up once. Usually It’s not a mess-up it’s usually something like a legal hiccup or it was some type of–you kind of manage it like a fraud-related incident.
Andrew: Brian, that’s a hard thing to do when you’re just getting started and your product barely has legs.
Brian: Yeah.
Andrew: It seems dangerous to go to these bigger customers first. What do you think?
Brian: It is. You just kind of have this attitude of like, “I’m going to do everything to make it work.
Andrew: Even though the insertion orders, for example, need to be up to snuff for them.
Brian: Yeah. What I did was I spent a lot of time with people in the industry with no obligation kind of just learning what is this process like? What is this RFPIO process like? And really at the time, I also hired our first brand sales head, which conveniently happened to be the director of east coast sales at Digg. He came in and he was great. He taught me a lot.
And that’s the thing. When you’re an entrepreneur, realize you’re not going to be the one who knows everything at all. In fact, you’re never going to be the one that knows everything. Your team is going to be the experts. You need to trust them to teach you the right things and then for them to run their own process. So, when I hired Chris, he ended up coming in and putting all these things into place and ran that whole process for the brands.
Andrew: I see. Still, I thought everything was perfect because you had these investors, these supporters. In fact, I see that Rohan Oza was called by The Hollywood Reporter “The Brandfather” because I think he’s the guy who introduced 50 Cent or helped that 50 Cent deal with Vitamin Water. There’s a photo of him basically walking on water in this beautiful penthouse pool, it looks like. That’s how impressive he is.
So, I thought everything must have worked out well for you. Meanwhile, you said it didn’t in the beginning. You still had a marketplace where you needed both buyers and sellers to show up at once. If you have too many of one and none of the other, then no one is going to want to come back. You found this clever solution for this chicken and egg problem of which do you get first. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Brian: Yeah. With any marketplace, you need to pick one side or the other. That’s usually the answer I give people.
Andrew: How do you pick which side?
Brian: It’s really what feels right.
Andrew: Okay.
Brian: I was like, “Yeah, how do we convince these developers to integrate,” which is what we kind of wanted at the time. So, what we did is we actually just bought a bunch of gift cards for certain brands and kind of without their permission. I don’t know if you know this, but if you use Starbucks gift cards as a giveaway for like value for your brand, you need to tell them. They need to know. They need to approve it because it’s usage of their brand.
But we just did it. That’s how startups work. And you’re just like, “Whatever. I’ll just do first. Apologize later.” We bought a whole bunch of Starbucks gift cards, Best Buy gift cards, just a whole bunch. And we did two things with that. One, we used it to bring in developers. So, we said, “Hey, we have all these rewards running in. We’re going to have more coming. But there are already some in the system. Come and integrate.” So, they did.
The second was to convince the very brands that we bought gift cards for. We went back to Best Buy and said, “Look at how well these gift cards performed.” And they said, “Wow, that’s really great.” It wasn’t that easy. The net-net of us showing this to Best Buy was they ended up working with us. But that’s kind of how we ended up working with that. What we had in the beginning to build the two sides of the equation.
Andrew: That’s clever. I’ve seen people find different clever solutions for handling this new a marketplace issue. So, things are starting to build up for you, but you have to hire. How do you hire your first people?
Brian: We got so lucky in the beginning in hiring. I always tell people in early stage startups right now that’s the best time to hire the best talent. The reason being is you have such a wonderful trajectory unbeknownst to anyone ahead of you that is so exciting and blue skies is sort of the colloquial term. So, you can hire literally geniuses that think that their stock could be worth tons. That might not be the reason they joined, but it’s definitely a motivating factor.
So, our first three engineers now are kind of savants. I kind of knew they were pretty awesome at the beginning, but one of our first engineers was Mitchell Hashimoto, who you might even want to eventually interview at some point. He started a company called Vagrant. The company is HashiCorp, but they have a product called Vagrant, which something like some ridiculous number, like 70 percent of all startups use as their ops software–so, ops for the server ops.
Andrew: Can I follow up with you to ask for an intro to Mitchell?
Brian: Absolutely, man. Mitchell ended up starting this company after being at Kiip for a couple of years. I was even happy about the fact that he was with us for a couple years. At the beginning basically with this whole blue skies thing, we brought on a lot of really, really talented people in ops and in mobile engineering. We brought in this guy Grantland Chew, who ended up being one of the core mobile developers for the new Facebook Messenger app. So, Facebook stole him away from us, but whatever. You can really only rent them for so long.
Andrew: How did you get so many good people?
Brian: It was all word of mouth. It kind of started off as a couple. Between Mitchell and Grantland, they all knew a bunch of people. So, Mitchell, for example, is a UW alum, University of Washington. And he brought in his college roommate, Arman, who by the way they ended up cofounding HashiCorp together and they just raised a bunch of money.
You always want to find engineers that have a strong alma mater, can recruit their friends, are very legit in their universities–Mitch and Arman, Mitch was well known because he had created this way to automatically alert someone in school if the class they were trying to register for had an open slot. So, he was like famous already at UW for creating this tool.
So, as a result, he was kind of like this, I guess, this engineering prodigy already that people already knew about. When they learned that he had joined Kiip, everyone is like, “Wow, Mitch joined Kiip. That’s a really legit startup. Let’s go and joined them.” So, it kind of snowballs from there. That’s what happens naturally when you bring on talented engineers.
Andrew: I see. One of the criteria you have is, “We want to know does this person have a good network coming in, not just are they a good developer?”
Brian: Yes.
Andrew: I hadn’t heard that expressed from a startup before. I know the bigger companies will immediately, as soon as you start work say, “Which of your friends should we be talking to?”
Brian: Now it’s like desperate times calls for desperate measures, Andrew. Right now you have such a battle for talent. Like, I’m talking about bag an engineer and like kidnap them. That’s how desperate people are. It’s so weird to think about the way the tables are very different and how they’ve turned in the Valley. It’s more like it’s their privilege–sorry, it’s my privilege that they’re working for me, versus the other way around. It’s so weird, but that’s why it’s such an interesting part of the world.
Andrew: All right. Quick sponsorship message–this time it’s from HostGator. There it is. I always hold up the gator because I want you to remember when you’re looking for a hosting company, the gator is the one you want. It’s so easy to say, “What’s the name of that hosting company Andrew was talking about?” If you remember the alligator that’s chewing my head off right now, you will remember to go to HostGator.com.
Brian, if you were starting over and had nothing but a hosting package, what business would you start right now or how would you launch?
Brian: That’s classified.
Andrew: Really? Do you have one in mind and you’re not ready to talk about it?
Brian: I’ve got a bunch. I’ve got a bunch. They’ll probably be in the education area. Education is something I’ve been spending a lot of time looking into lately, but not any time soon.
Andrew: What do you think of–there are two things having gone through your history that seem to make sense. Number one, starting with a personal blog to this day it’s your own publication where you get to write your ideas and people get to know you. And number two, one of the first things I saw that you put up was, what was it–AirMarketing.com, which is an easy site for people to hire you as a marketer. I saw that you put it up relatively quickly because the first version of the site that I found on Internet Archive under case studies said, “Under construction.”
So, I thought, “This guy is just willing to put it up there. He’ll see if he gets some customers.” And then I think within time, Got Junk was listed as one of the customers there. And then I looked up your history and I saw you worked for Got Junk as an intern. I thought, “This is clever. This is an easy way to get started and build reputation.” So, that’s what you did.
So, there’s an easy thing to do, start a consulting company where you do what you’re especially good at, put it up on the site. We don’t even need to have case studies, but we’ve learned from Brian how to get case studies early on–find connections, the bigger the better. Do a good job for them and then list them as a case study.
So, those are two really easy things to get started. If you’re sitting here–actually, there aren’t too many people listening to Mixergy who haven’t started something, but those are easy ideas to start with. What there are more of in the Mixergy audience are people who hate their hosting company. You don’t have to stick with it if you don’t like them. All you have to do is go to HostGator.com/Mixergy.
You’ll see, they will migrate your site for you. If you’re on WordPress, they will move you over. If you’re not, they’ll make it really easy for you to go over to HostGator. They’re going to give you 24/7, 365 tech support. That means 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, they will give you tech support.
They’re going to make it easy for you to get up and running, they’re going to give you this package, this AdWords offer, a $100 search credit. They’re going to just do everything they can to make sure you have a really good experience with them, unlike your current hosting company, which probably doesn’t’ care anymore and wants you to submit a support ticket if your site is down. It’s horrible.
Go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. Sign up. They’ll take great care of you. And if you use that URL, they’ll even take 30 percent off. Start your business, move your existing site over. Either one, they’re there to take good care of you. I’m grateful to HostGator for sponsoring.
Andrew: There was a period there, Brian, where you guys got a little friction with Apple. This is something that I heard from your–you talked to our producer, you’re open about it, but also from a competitor who said there was an issue back then. Talk about it. I know you’re open about the issue.
Brian: Yeah. So, at the time, Apple was battling was incentivized installs and still, to this day, is with this company called Tapjoy. They were basically not letting anything pass their filters that had anything remotely related to rewarding and apps, like just anything to do with those two concepts they were not letting through their filters. We happened to be caught in the middle of that net. We were kind of just innocent bystanders, to be honest.
Our reward is very different. It’s thanks for doing what you already did and let’s delight you with something versus, “Oh, you need to get past this level, watch this video to get past that level.” So, it’s two very different ways. It’s like the carrot and stick approach, which is what they were doing, versus, “Here’s a present.” So, those are two very different approaches. But again, similar words meant a snafu there.
So, we were attempting to launch this thing called Kiipsake, mainly because it was such a great pun–I’m just kidding–but it was because we were trying to do this wallet to help people store the rewards they earned on apps that had been enabled with Kiip. Apple just wouldn’t have any of it. So, it just didn’t happen. So, Kiipsake is now a lesson in history and nothing much more than that.
Andrew: Lesson in bad timing, that if someone similar to you–
Brian: Bad timing and also like a blessing in disguise because I think trying to launch our own app was probably going to be a very stupid idea. So, I’m glad we didn’t do that.
Andrew: Why? Because you’d be competing with other people? That doesn’t seem like competition.
Brian: Well, because we’d had to maintain our own app. To this day, the strength of Kiip is the fact that we are embedded into 3,500 apps rather than just being a single one. So, by creating a destination, we create more friction for really no reason. Right now, you can redeem a reward to your email with Kiip. For five years, that’s been a seamless approach and people have continued to do it and it’s the best way that we’ve seen a reward redemption flow work so far, at least for now.
Andrew: You did a Product Hunt Ask Me Anything recently–they call it Product Hunt Live–where a competitor of yours, Nick Hatter came on and asked you a couple of questions–you’re smiling. What did you think about that?
Brian: A bunch of people emailed me about that. That’s interesting. I think my point there is I still hold to it and I’m not trying to be cheeky. It’s really true. A lot of entrepreneurs will ask me stuff like, “What about this company? What about that?” It will happen a lot in conversations, especially as an entrepreneur. It’s one of my pet peeves, actually. What you’ll do is you’ll walk into a conversation–I feel other entrepreneurs when this happen.
So, they’ll walk into a conversation and describe it and they’re like, “Yeah,” and someone will come in with this bonehead comment. So, “It’s like freaking Uber for flowers or something.” And they’re like, “No.” And it just, it like crushes them because what’s happening is you’re basically dumbing down their idea or trying to match it to something that is really not the essence of what they’ve tried to create.
So, in order to respect that entrepreneur, I always try to regurgitate that idea back to them in the very unique way that they’ve described it, if indeed they’re trying to create a unique concept. Some entrepreneurs have other objectives. I’m saying those that are trying to really be the change makers.
Now, with Nick, what I basically told him is it’s certainly possible for anyone to be an imitator. But you need to earn your right to be a competitor. By that, I mean you actually have to create a scalable business that is meaningfully threatening to a company’s direction or growth in order for it to be a true competitor. And that was really one of the messages I sent to him.
The other which is interesting is that competitors actually help you in some ways. Let me quickly explain this. They actually help you educate the marketplace. This is a story not a lot of people know but the founder of Taco Bell actually funded the founder of Del Taco. People don’t know this. The reason why he did this is because when Taco Bell launched, no one in America knew how to pronounce taco. Casual Mexican fast food was not a thing. People were, “Taco? What’s a taco?”
So, by funding Del Taco, both of them could go off to the races and start to populate the country with these joints and then everyone eventually learned what a taco was. So, sometimes it’s actually good to have competitors like that. That’s one of the takeaways of having a true competitor in your ecosystem.
Andrew: I see. One of the things that he asked you was about phone numbers and email addresses. Why is it that when someone gets an award through Kiip, you ask them for a phone number or email address?
Brian: So, we did this as a user experience play and continue to do the same thing, where what happens sometimes when you see something on a brand thing in a mobile app is you tap on it, it takes over the screen and everything has to happen there. Then we realized that most people when they’re in app, they might be interested in that thing you’re showing them, but they might not be in the mindset or have the time to act on it.
So, we just said, “Hey, when you see it, just put in your email, tap claim. It sends itself to your own email so you can address it when you have time. So, that’s the main reason why we chose to do that, to basically leverage a better user experience flow so that you can address an award and redeem it when you actually have time.
Andrew: I see. Do you guys do anything with that email address? What else do you do with it?
Brian: No. We have very strict rules against it. We don’t share it with the developer or the publisher–sorry, or the brand.
Andrew: Wow. All right. Do you email people yourselves?
Brian: No. It’s only to send them one email and that’s the reward information. So, it’s basically like a receipt. To think about it technically, it’s like when you buy something from Square, you’ll get an email receipt. It’s the same thing.
Andrew: So, from Nick, let’s move on to Mark Zuckerberg. I see so many references to the two of you when you were starting. And I feel like you were encouraging some of it. Meanwhile, before we started, you said, “I have these battle scars. I’m ready to talk about them.” And one of them is–and I wrote this down as you said it–you said one of them is when you realize you’re not going to be Uber. It feels like when you realize you’re not going to be Facebook could also be that phrase. Tell me when you started to realize that and why that’s such a big moment?
Brian: I think the reason why I’m sharing this is because a lot of entrepreneurs share this similar pain and not pain in a bad way, more pain in a growing, which is in the Valley, you’re encouraged to shoot for literally the stars, right? I’m talking spend as much as you can to grow as fast as you can and this is part of what I was mentioning to you earlier as well. The whole goal is to optimize for being that one out of 30 investments that a VC makes that becomes a so-called unicorn. Even now, that has shaky foundations, which we’ve seen from the latest press with regards to Theranos and a few other companies.
Andrew: Because some of these unicorns don’t have valuations that make them into billion-dollar–
Brian: That’s like a multi-hour long discussion later on. Anyway, the point is that’s how we’re trained. What I mean trained is literally everyone around us–VCs, you name it. I wanted to say this to tell other entrepreneurs that are watching this. It’s okay to not be a $100 billion company within two years, mainly because I’m not saying, Andrew, by that, that I’m not going to be Uber that we’re never going to hit $50 billion in valuation or become a multi-billion company. I’m not saying that at all. I’m just saying that if that doesn’t happen in two years, don’t be discouraged.
I think the challenge I’ve been seeing in the Valley these days is people are so quick to using–basically, it’s a dick measuring contest. You know, who can get to $1 billion within six months? And it’s like most of the world’s most valuable inventions did not happen overnight. In fact, it’s been said time and time again by Bill Gurley and the whole Silicon Valley fatherhood is that these companies, that biggest ones and most sustainable ones take decades to create. In fact, ten years minimum in order to create the sustainable, long-term business.
So, why I’m saying this is just because you’re not $50 billion doesn’t mean you’re not succeeding. I think that’s been an issue for a lot of entrepreneurs that will just drop projects because it just doesn’t seem like it’s taking off like a hockey stick. But if you’re really determined and you know this product will make a big difference–and this is the main takeaway for everyone listening–I know that the universal truism that not a single normal human being wants to tap on a banner out of purpose is very much something that needs to be fixed.
That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. There is no reason why something so despised should be so ubiquitous. That is why we continued to believe in exactly what we’ve been creating and continue to grow it. We’ll grow it for years to come. So, I’m going nowhere, primarily because I know this needs to be changed.
That’s why, if you have a conviction as an entrepreneur, you build that, you grow it and don’t drop it because your thing isn’t worth $50 billion. And that was the big moment that I had a couple years ago. I was like, “I don’t need to optimize for that. I need to optimize for what I believe in and will it be something that I can continue to grow because my heart and soul is aligned to how the company is growing as well?”
Andrew: I see. You call it a battle scar though. Was it scarring when you realized that yourself?
Brian: It’s scarring because you kind of need to remove yourself from the sort of the big cauldron of everyone kind of comparing each other’s valuations and start to really just not care and almost remove yourself in some cases.
Really, I find my best inspiration and source of news not being anything written within the San Francisco 7×7, but rather everything outside because our business is actually one that seems–not seem, it runs on money from companies that actually sell to regular Americans and not people who get their laundry delivered to them with two taps of a button and you know groceries and massages and who knows, right?
Andrew: I tap two buttons and I had a doctor come into my office from Circle Medical. It’s unreal.
Brian: There you go.
Andrew: But you’re right. Most people don’t do that.
Brian: Most of America doesn’t even know that stuff exists. They’re making ends meet by couponing and trying to just make sure that they don’t spend too much on things. There’s such a radical difference and realizing there’s a world outside of yours is an incredibly important thing as well as an entrepreneur.
Andrew: So, what do you read?
Brian: These days, I admit I haven’t been reading as much as I want to. Primarily, actually, because I have a very good excuse. I’ve been writing a book myself.
Andrew: I saw that. A book–no publisher, no name yet for the book.
Brian: There’s a publisher.
Andrew: There is? Okay.
Brian: We just haven’t announced it. It will be coming out in fall of next year. So, it’s a while.
Andrew: It’s BrianIsWritingABook.com is the URL.
Brian: Correct.
Andrew: It’s going to take me over to a Google Doc.
Brian: It’s that secretive, but I’m proud to say that I just completed the manuscript three weeks ago. It’s in the bag.
Andrew: It’s called “The (What) Manifesto?” What’s the blank?
Brian: I can’t tell you.
Andrew: Do you know what it’s about?
Brian: I do.
Andrew: What’s it about?
Brian: The premise of the book is around a lot of the things I just actually spoke to you about. There are sort of things that you can do in life that are not necessarily extremely laborious, like that one that I mentioned around polishing the visuals of your emails and your presentations. Little tweaks, things that you can do to really accelerate your progress in life and success. It’s basically a compilation of a lot of those.
And it’s things that I’ve picked up. It’s also things that I’ve learned from others. So, there are a few that I’ve learned from other people I’ve spent a lot of time with over the last five years and hopefully something to help people gain more progress in their lives regardless of whether or not heir an entrepreneur or a creative or working at another company.
Andrew: There are two more things I want to touch on. The first is your other battle scar and the second one we’ll get to in a moment. The second battle scar–don’t worry. I never make the last one tough. I learned my lesson. I had this one guest. Everything was going okay. I get a call from the guest while I’m about to leave the building to go home after having a couple of people over to the office for scotch. I’m so tired. I get the call and this guest was really angry with me.
And I finally took my transcript over to my coach, a producer of a top television interview show. I said, “What’s going on here? What could I possibly have said?” He said, “You’re really being very easy, very easy, very easy,” and then he looks at the last question and says, “It’s that last question, hitting them with the hard last question, you ruined the whole experience for the guest.” So, no more of that.
So, the second to last question is about money. You were saying in the beginning you’re treated one way with money. You actually were doing this, like the shower with money sign, right?
Brian: Well, it’s more like this. Venture capital is like a buffer. It’s like sort of delaying something. It’s delaying profitability, basically is a simple way to put it. In that process of it being delayed, you need to do a lot. You need to build the company. You need to grow the brand. You need to grow your customer base. You need to get to scale and revenues. You need to basically get to this inertia that is essentially unstoppable.
But with the buffer of VC money, you don’t actually feel that pressure the way that you should. The disciple is something that’s so rare in the Valley right now. Me just talking about it right now, most people are not going to care. But I guarantee you, when the economy starts to correct itself in the next 18 months, there are going to be a lot of discussions about this.
These are hard conversations to have. You’ve probably seen tweets from Mark Andreessen about burn rates through the roof and articles like the ones most recently about these sub-prime unicorns about having on-demand baristas and masseuses at all these startup offices and basically gross misuse of funds in a way that has nothing to do with building the business.
I guess all of this is to say that at the end of the day, Silicon Valley is about creating wealth, creating value and creating services that further the human race and the human quality of life. All the while, realizing that you need to make money too because at the end of the day, we live in a capitalist society. So, if you’re going to do this while losing money, it’s going to be bad. So, I think that’s one of the things that I really hope more entrepreneurs start to get discipline on.
The unfortunate challenge is that a lot of founder entrepreneurs that were raising money early and didn’t have a lot of adult supervision–what I mean by adult supervision is not like a chaperon or someone telling you, “Don’t eat pizza with your hands and touch everything else,” more like financial supervision, understanding what gross margins are, what profitability looks like, what your OpEx is and just basic things and understanding your business and how it’s supposed to operate.
A lot of these founder entrepreneurs don’t have that background because a lot of them didn’t study business nor realize that it’s important to bring on advisors and trust financial staff to ensure that they actually have a sustainable path moving forward as a business.
So, very quickly you see companies shutter their doors. You heard about Zirtual. You heard about Homejoy. I’m not saying any of those companies had a complete flaw win their ability to manage their finances. I’m just saying there was something that didn’t work there from a financial standpoint that I think unfortunately is going to hit more startups.
I just want to make sure more founders are aware of this because the more of us that are more careless about this, the more the momentum of the carelessness begins to engulf every other company that actually has something that has the potential to be profitable moving forward is unable to be funded as the result of the economy going the other direction.
Andrew: That makes sense. I wonder how many people even understood when we were talking about–I know most, but I think not enough people understood the difference between gross and net that we talked about at the top of the interview.
Brian: Absolutely.
Andrew: Cash flow versus the income statement is a huge one.
Brian: Absolutely.
Andrew: The final question is this. You say that you travel a lot. Even now as you’re building up this business, how much traveling are you doing?
Brian: This is another moment that I accepted about two years ago as well. This is the board recognizing this too. I’m the most effective when I’m in front of customers. I’m also very effective in front of my own team, but arguably in terms of value to the company, it’s also in front of customers. So, as a result, I do travel quite a bit. I’d say in a given month, 50 percent of it I’ll spend outside of San Francisco.
I will be in New York, usually where a lot of our customers are or in Orange County, where I’m visiting a few of our clients as well and speaking at an event. I find that’s a very efficient way to get my message out to a lot of our marketers. Our message as a company is very different than better mobile ads. If I was just that, we would not be where we are as a company. But through a better way to explain it, I’ve been able to convert a lot of people to be believers in moments.
I’m very proud–I will say this for the record–that the industry has really began to embrace moments as a big concept of how advertising should be moving forward. Google, as you saw, has a huge push in micro moments. Twitter released a moments product. Rocket Fuel is powering a lot of things we’re talking about. Universal McCann, one of the big agencies, is buying in moments. So, a lot of people have been taking our vernacular and I’m very proud of that.
Andrew: I kind of feel like Facebook is using moments different from you though. Facebook is using moments as a photo sharing, private photo sharing app. For you, a moment is a period in app usage that’s special.
Brian: Correct. So, you have this sort of this word being used everywhere, which creates awareness, which leads to relative confusion in the beginning. I can’t, again, share too much, but obviously there’s a very timely point in this whole process where we can come in and clarify everything, which is about to happen sometime soon.
But that’s, for me, really exciting. When you look at the way that I’ve built the business, we actually brought on a VP of operations which we ended up promoting to COO who’s like my internal CEO. He’s essentially the one who manages everything from the partnerships to the sales within the San Francisco office to our operations on the admin side and then HR and accounting and finance.
And then for me, I’ve got really kind of a combination of strategic partnerships along with sales and then along with investor management and then marketing as well. So, we’ve kind of split those responsibilities very nicely. That took like four years to really establish that. I’d say up until last year, there was still a lot of when I was gone, I’d be a bottleneck for a lot of stuff. But I’m very happy to report that now that’s less so and I’m very happy that’s happened.
Andrew: Well, congratulations on so much that you’ve done. It’s impressive. I knew that you were going to be on at some point in the future, but I also was a little worried that it was going to come across as a jerky thing to have said to you six years ago. Yeah, it’s almost exactly six years ago.
I’m proud of having said it and I’m proud of your response because quality matters. We want to get the right–not that you would have been a bad guest, but there’s something I’m trying to do here with Mixergy and I think you get it and I appreciate you being on here and telling your story and being a part of this program.
Brian: Thank you for having me.
Andrew: Cool. If anyone out there is listening to this interview and likes this approach–I really came into the office today to spend extra time doing research. We had a producer doing research by talking to Brian and a researcher do research for me to make sure everything was as good as we could possibly take it and my questions were as solid as they could possibly be.
If you like this approach and you haven’t yet subscribed to the podcast, please do and if you especially are eager to see me do more of it–frankly, I’ll do it whether you do this next thing or not–but I could use your support if you like this approach by just going into the iTunes store and rating this five stars. Frankly, even though it will hurt my reputation, if you think this is bad I would take a one-star rating just to see your feedback because I care about what you say more than I care about getting more ratings. But I’d love if you could give me more five-star ratings.
So, if you like this approach and you want to support it, go to iTunes, rate it five stars. If you haven’t subscribed, please subscribe in whatever podcast app you like. We make it really easy if you just go to Mixergy.com/Podcast for you to subscribe. And my sponsors are HostGator and Toptal. I’m grateful to them. Brian’s site is Kiip.me. Why didn’t you want me to introduce you as Kiip.me?
Brian: Well, because the name of the company is Kiip. The .me was because that was the only domain we could get in the beginning and then we shelled out some of the cash to get Kiip.com eventually.
Andrew: Oh, yeah, that’s what it is. If I type in .com, it still takes me to .me.
Brian: It does. It redirects. But we’re really happy that we now have the four-letter domain.
Andrew: I get it. So, you don’t have to keep emphasizing the .me.
Brian: Exactly. Why not?
Andrew: All right. Congratulations on it all. Thank you all for being a part of Mixergy. Bye, everyone.
