Andrew: Hey there, Freedom Fighters. You know me. I’m Andrew Warner. I’m the Founder of Mixergy.com, and of course, it’s home of the ambitious upstart. This intro’s going to be a little bit different. Usually what I do is I introduce my guest and then we start going into the story behind how the person built their business, and what they’ve learned along the way. You know the whole thing, frankly.
But I just liked how this conversation with today’s guest unfolded where we were just chatting before the interview and so instead of doing a formal intro for them, I’m just going to let you hear the whole conversation, as he and I had it on Skype. A little unusual, but frankly that’s what podcasting, that’s what the internet’s all about. Trying things and just going, and seeing what happens. So here it is from the minute I hit connect, to today’s guest, to the end, direct to you. How’s your day going?
Matt: You know, it’s good. It’s the standard, standard day full of running around. We’re in this cool phase in the company’s life where things are going too fast, which is fun. That’s how you do it, I guess.
Andrew: Congratulations, you guys have been at it for a while. It’s good to see how far you’ve come.
Matt: Yeah, almost, I think, nearly five years, maybe a little bit more than five years.
Andrew: Yeah, I just found an email from five years ago from Fred, your co-founder. That’s why I was texting you. It just occurred to me. He wanted to get on Mixergy a while back when you guys were getting started. So I thought maybe he’d want to be on here, but I’m good either way.
Matt: Oh, did you just text me?
Andrew: I did, yeah.
Matt: Oh, weird. I don’t think I have a text.
Andrew: Oh, strange. I wonder if it didn’t go through.
Matt: Oh, anyway. How are you? How’s your day?
Andrew: Good, yeah.
Matt: Where in the world are you?
Andrew: Right in the heart of San Francisco, not too far from the Ferry Building.
Matt: Oh, very cool, okay.
Andrew: How about you?
Matt: In Boston right now, although I’ll be in San Diego tomorrow and I was just in San Francisco two weeks ago.
Andrew: Well, if you come back in the future, let me know. It would be good to get together with you, and I usually get some local entrepreneurs together for drinks. It’d be good to see you.
Matt: That would be awesome. For better, for worse, I do board meetings out there twice a year and so, anyway.
Andrew: Yeah, I get it. That’s what brings people here.
Matt: Yeah, I’ll definitely shoot you a note.
Andrew: So how do I make this interview a win for you?
Matt: That is a question, it sounds like refined over time. I don’t know. To be honest, I wanted to do this because I really like the show and I like you. I don’t know that I went into having a particular goal to achieve, so our PR team would be like, “Oh, you’re hiring. Say you’re hiring.” But I think the thing I like about this show and the interviews you do is that . . . is it right to call it the show? That’s what I’ve always called it.
Andrew: Yeah, I don’t feel like it’s a show. But there’s no better word, so I go with that, too.
Matt: I really like how truthful it is. I like how people don’t get on here and blow smoke sometimes, but it’s truthful. So I think that that would be cool, having a truthful documentation of the journey and how we got here.
Andrew: What’s the harsh truth for you?
Matt: I think for us, at Placester that it’s just been an enormous amount of fucking hard work, and that I think the only reason that Fred and I have been successful is just because we don’t give up. I think that sometimes that’s a message that folks forget.
They’re looking for lottery tickets. They’re looking for easy ways to raise money. They’re looking for easy wins with customers, and the only truth that we’ve found is that, persistence is really the only way that you knock it out of the park. And as long as you have a real problem, and you listen to your customers, and you build something . . .
Andrew: What about the idea that it’s been five years, and you’ve watched so many people lap you?
Matt: What do you mean lap us?
Andrew: I don’t know what I mean, either. I was hoping you would get that. But so many people get so much further ahead.
Matt: Well, I don’t know. I mean we do have a weird . . . maybe it’s not right to describe it as weird. Our industry is very strange. It’s very nontraditional. There’s a reason why real estate has been so hard to crack. So hard to improve from the real estate professional’s side and so I view our company as being, and this is factually incorrect, but I view our company as being about two and a half years old. And the reason I think that is because it took us the first three years to solve the big problem that prevents base level innovation when you’re dealing with your . . .
Andrew: What’s the big problem?
Matt: They wouldn’t like me calling them a problem. But it’s the MLS system here in the United States. The MLS system is full of people who genuinely care about real estate agents. It’s just they’re not technically up to the challenge, to empower an agent to have access to their data in a way that you, Andrew a consumer, would consider modern or up-to-date.
Andrew: The MLS is what has all the house listings in the country essentially and if I want to get access to them, someone like you needs to make it accessible to me, but they don’t make it easy for you to get it.
Matt: That’s exactly right. But so the nuance and what most people don’t know is that there are 1000 MLS’s in the United States, 1000 individual, non-overlapping, regional, monopoly MLS’s that have all the local data in the U.S., and so that doesn’t matter. The only part that matters is that because the scale is so broad, and the diversity is so broad, it means it’s really, really hard to build a central platform, to aggregate all the data into one product or one platform.
And if you don’t have aggregation in software, if you don’t have consistency you can’t build anything at scale. You can’t sell it to lots of people and get economies of scale, and lower the price, and create innovation. All of the things that you would expect the internet to do don’t work if you can’t sell it to everyone at once. And so we spent the first three years going door-to-door to the 1000 MLS’s, and getting all the data.
Andrew: That’s crazy.
Matt: And asking nicely.
Andrew: And everybody has to do that, there’s no one place that has all access.
Matt: No. That’s literally the answer. Every real estate agent in the country . . . real estate agents on the whole from a small business perspective have quite a bit of money to spend, relative to other small businesses, and they want to pay a lot of money to have great technology. They interact with their consumers every day. They know that their consumers don’t like the tech they have. The issue is that there’s no single place for them to go and get that data, so that’s the big inhibitor of innovation in this space. If they could just write a check, they would, but they couldn’t.
Andrew: Why doesn’t one person solve that problem by combining all the data into one data collection that other companies could work with?
Matt: That’s what we’re trying to do. I’m not saying that we’re trying to build . . .
Andrew: I thought that you guys help individual real estate agents or brokers. I know that there’s difference in the language depending on the city, right? That they mean the same thing, real estate agent, real estate broker?
Matt: It’s a slight nuance difference. We would say an agent is the person who helps you buy or sell a home, and a broker would be the word we would use, although it’s colloquial for sure, we would use to describe the person who all the agents work for.
Andrew: I see, okay. So I thought what you do is help both of them create online marketing, and that includes create a website that their eventual customers can use, to see what’s going on. That includes helping to promote that side and so on, right?
Matt: For sure. So it’s we view ourselves as a data company that has aggregated all of this data into a platform, and the first thing we’re doing with that platform is building the core products that are going to do the lowest hanging fruit, hardest problems to solve for these folks, for these agents and brokers.
But eventually our hope is at some point to make this an open ecosystem, so that if you’re a developer or you’re somebody who’s bringing a valuable piece of software to the table, and you can use that data responsibly in a way that the MLS’s feel comfortable, we would love to be a conduit of giving you that data, of normalizing that data, of opening up the real estate ecosystem.
Andrew: You know what? We’ve been talking for so long. I’ve actually been enjoying it. I’m wondering if we should just leave this in, as the start of the interview and not edit it out, right?
Matt: For sure, yeah.
Andrew: But what I should do at this point, we’re eight minutes into the conversation, I’ll just do the intro. Joining me is Matt Barba. He is the Co-Founder of Placester. It’s a real estate marketing platform, and we talked a little bit about what they do. I’m glad we did because, I think, calling it a real estate marketing platform is oversimplifying it, right.
Matt: Sure, yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly right.
Andrew: We’ll get into more of what you do. But I should also say that this interview is sponsored by a new sponsor. It’s called Content Promotion. If you have any content that you want promoted, these guys at ContentPromotion.com will get you influencers to help promote it. It’s also sponsored by, and now actually since we’ve already started, I should go straight to my spreadsheet to see who else is sponsoring this interview. Brand Bucket, of course, Brand Bucket, I’ll tell you guys more about why if you need a brand, including a website and a logo, and everything else, you should go to Brand Bucket.com.
So Matt, I’ll give you a little bit more behind the scenes stuff here, as long as we’re talking. Here’s the way I usually set my stories up in the interviews. What were you doing just before? And then you have the inciting incident that, boom, takes off the story. Then you have the high of getting started, and so on. This is the way that Hollywood does it, too.
I was watching Toy Story recently. In Toy Story Woody has this houseful of toys that all respect him and a kid that loves him. Andy loves, and adores, and sleeps with Woody. Then suddenly Buzz Lightyear comes in, or actually there’s a party, right? And Buzz Lightyear comes into the mix and there we see the inciting incident of Buzz Lightyear and so on, and then the highs and lows of the story keep going. And that’s that same format that we use at Mixergy.
Matt: Sure.
Andrew: So let’s go to that and talk about how you were a student at Boston . . . actually what were you doing there? You were a student at Boston University. You hired an agent to go look for an apartment for you, right?
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: Why would you need an agent to look for an apartment?
Matt: It’s the way it works, and I shouldn’t say it’s the only way it works, but it’s a predominant way that people rent real estate here in the city. We can get into the meta of why the market evolved like that. But that’s how most landlords make their properties known to the world is through agents.
Andrew: That’s the way it works in New York, also. I just thought maybe in Boston, hardly anyone did it, but you were a rich kid who decided that you needed somebody to go and look for a place for you.
Matt: I wish. We got to think about it a lot like, “Why do agents evolve?” That’s an interesting question for us to think about. And so for us we think that it’s in cities where there are lots of small owners, where there are lots of small owners, that necessitates the need to aggregate the data into agents, who can then distribute it out to people. Because the individual owners have very little desire to let perspective tenants in and show their properties. For whatever reason, it just evolved this way in Boston.
Andrew: And you looked at how much this guy made. It sounds like you’re a real Mixergy fan, and what did you notice?
Matt: Yeah, he wouldn’t tell me exactly how much he made. But at the time, I started coding when I was very young. I was doing freelance work for spending money and to chip in on the bills and at school, and this guy was driving a three-series, and iPod’s had just come out, and he had every song on his iPod. And he was saying he made $60,000 or $70 grand, and he did this part-time and I was blown away.
Because even if you’re making $40 or $50 bucks, and I wasn’t a phenomenal engineer or anything, I wasn’t making top dollar. But even if you’re making $40 or $50 bucks, you’re still working every hour. And the thing that stood out to me about real estate was, “Wow, this person’s part-time, making a lot of money” and so it clicked, and so that summer that’s when I got my license with a couple of buddies.
Andrew: And you started doing this? Showing people apartments, helping them find a new home?
Matt: It was all rentals, and our office was very focused on rentals. I actually worked for the guy that I got the apartment from, and I was a bad agent. I mean I was just not very good.
Andrew: Why? What made you a bad agent?
Matt: I think for me, the best agents they’re like the best salespeople, which is they understand the scope of the market, and they help the consumer come to a conclusion about a decision rather quickly and make the consumer feel like they have all the information. Even if there are some edge cases, that we’re not talking about, that narrow the scope very fast. So you can make a buying decision quickly.
I approach it from an engineering mindset, and I like the edge cases, and I’m always like, “Well, we could go check out a couple more apartments. There might be one over here that you might like. This one’s a little bit more, but you might like the granite’s a little bit different” or “The floors are a little bit . . . ” or whatever. “The location’s a little better,” and that was just not a successful to make a lot of money quickly.
Andrew: Because you’re spending so much time on each prospect.
Matt: Oh, yeah, exactly. It just wasn’t a smart move. But to me, that was naturally how I was wired. But the thing that was really cool for me about my time in the office was that I spent a lot of time building tools for myself. I just felt like it was very intuitive. The marketing process, to me, was very repetitive. There was no reason why it shouldn’t be automated, you shouldn’t be able to just post on Craigslist, the website shouldn’t just be able to update instantaneously. You know what I mean, like that? It just seemed like why isn’t that happening? So I would write tools and programs to auto-post, and scripts to update the website, and all that stuff.
Andrew: This is all for yourself, and then you started a side project that actually allowed you to sell something to people, outside of your world? What was the side project?
Matt: So we convinced my boss and a couple of this buddies, who are all running offices in the area, to give us all the data. That was the keys to the kingdom. What listings were available for rent in an area? We just built this . . . Google Maps had just come out, and I like everybody else on the planet was like, “Oh, a map. We should put homes on it” because that’s a useful new interface. And so we got all the data, and we dropped all the listings on the map, and we just started marketing it around campus. I went to BU in Boston, and it was great.
We sold leads back to the offices. Students looking for homes and we made $25 or $30 bucks a lead, and made some serious money and I was blown away. I was like, “We’re taking this thing national.” This was the first time, I had seriously made money on a product that I had built and so I was just like, “We’re going to scale this thing. This is the new wave of the future,” and of course, a million people had that idea, and some are really successful now and all that fun stuff.
Andrew: Who’s the most successful person doing it now?
Matt: I think the big name . . . this is a very hot button topic in the real estate world. But I think you can’t ignore who we would call ZRT’s, Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com. The quintessential listing on a map selling leads back to agents.
Andrew: You know what? This is on my mind, so I’ll just say it to get it off my mind. I don’t feel like doing sponsorship messages, today. I really like the new sponsor. I’m just going to let it go and I’ll tell you why. It’s because now my timing’s off, and I don’t care about the timing. I’d much rather get lost in the conversation, like we did right as soon as we started talking.
Matt: Okay, that sounds cool, man.
Andrew: I’m sure I’ve lost $6000, and the guy who plugged this lost his share of the revenue, and I’m okay with it. Then you met your co-founder Fred. How’d the two of you meet?
Matt: We met through the BU Network. So this is at the moment in time where we had just been generating a little bit of money. It was a couple of thousand dollars on this side project, and I was like, “We’ve got to scale this thing,” and so we started emailing people in the community, the Boston community and the BU community who had been successful, and who were either engineers or software, running software companies, and I emailed Fred. At the time he was running this pretty big agency here in Boston, and surprisingly enough he won’t give me a straight answer to this day why he responded.
But he took the meeting himself. There were 60 people in his agency, so he had people who could’ve met with a college kid. But he took the meeting, and we really hit it off. I should say we didn’t hit it off. He said the idea was terrible because a whole bunch of other people were doing it. Zillow had just raised their Series A. You know what I mean? But we just hit it off as friends and it wasn’t for . . . oh, go ahead. I’m sorry.
Andrew: You go ahead. I was interrupting.
Matt: I was just going to say it wasn’t until two years later that we formally started Placester. But we just clicked. I just loved . . . it was the honesty. It was the first time somebody was really tapped into the startup community who I’d met.
Andrew: I think he and I met around the time you met him. I met him in 2009, albeit email. He was a Mixergy fan. We started talking, and at first, I didn’t know if what he was saying was true or not because he was called the CTO of Mashable, right?
Matt: Yeah, sure, yeah.
Andrew: Then I’d look him up and he was running this other company that you just mentioned. So I had to email Pete and say, “Is this guy really for real or?” and Pete said, “Absolutely.” Yeah, Pete vouched for him really fast and so my guess is that Fred, and I always thought he went by Frederick because . . .
Matt: He does. I screwed that up for him. I call him Fred and then that . . .
Andrew: He doesn’t seem like a Fred. He’s much more of a Frederick, in my mind. I think there’s some very professional thing about him. Maybe it’s the photo that he uses on Google which shows up every time I see him in Gmail. But so my guess is that Pete, what am I forgetting?
Matt: Cashmore.
Andrew: Cashmore, thank you. Pete Cashmore needed somebody to redo his site. Fred’s company, Frederick’s company ran that, and even though he wasn’t officially working for Mashable, he was like their CTO.
Matt: I think to be honest I don’t know all the precise details. But my understanding was there was some transitions periods where Fred was selling his agency and he was full-time in Mashable, and I don’t know the exact timelines. But I do think you’re right. That’s how it kicked off. Was Fred was big in the WordPress community and obviously Mashable was a big WordPress user and that’s how that . . .
Andrew: Not always. So I’ve known Pete since the early days of Mashable. Partially because I organized a party with him in L.A., like a Mixergy/Mashable thing, and so on and he had the worst CRM for a while there. Because he was banking on this small CRM by a really good pair of guys from L.A. that I got to know, I like them. But it was not WordPress and the thing was just not moving fast enough, and I believe as an outsider at this point, it just felt like a mess.
And I think that having Fred on and getting it on WordPress, allowed Mashable to do so many more things and to really grow to where they are today. Like, you get on the wrong horse and suddenly the world’s behind you. Like someone getting on Identica instead of Twitter and having and a huge following on Identica and suddenly realizing, “Oh, no,” right?
Matt: I think you’re spot on. To me, I view it through the lens of my perspective, right. So I look at that and I see Fred in that. Fred’s . . . am I allowed to curse on this show?
Andrew: Yes.
Matt: He’s a fucking machine. Do you know what I mean? The guy’s just amazing, and I’m super biased because he’s my partner and my co-founder. We’re running this company together. But the guy’s just a machine. He knows his stuff and he’s great. He’s really structured.
Andrew: That’s why I texted you a little before we started. I realized, “Wait, I talked to this guy for years. We talked about having him on Mixergy. It never fit. The company . . .” We were talking about Placester back when he started. But Placester wasn’t big enough at the time, and so it just occurred to me, maybe we should have Fred on. But I’m sorry. It stinks when there’s someone who’s been watching for a long time and there’s finally an opportunity.
Matt: He’s like 20-feet away. I could go interrupt him. Maybe he’s in a meeting. I don’t know.
Andrew: If he’s not, later on in this interview let’s see if we could just get him to come on and say hi. Like I said, I’ve been emailing him back and forth for years. It would be good to see him.
All right, so I’m looking here at my notes. At some point you guys decided that you were going to launch a whole new business, one that you both agree made sense, and that wasn’t super competitive. What I’m curious about is how do you go from this other business to finding this new business, is the one that took off? This new business model, I should say that took off.
Matt: It’s certainly great from a press perspective to view it, to frame it as a clean cut, and I don’t think it was. I graduated from BU a little early, like a little more than a semester early and so I had a lot of time. I was doing freelance work on the side to make money after school and to pay rent.
Andrew: So this is in the two to three years that you mentioned earlier that you wouldn’t really consider the beginning of Placester.
Matt: Right, and Trey and I were like, maybe it’s not right to say. But we were like messing around, like, goofing around on a lot of different ideas, and it gradually morphed into this very clear picture of a problem in the industry after we had been circling around a lot of things. A great example is we figured out pretty quickly that this portal idea that we were playing with early on wasn’t really going to work. It was going to work in Boston, and it was going to make a little bit of money.
But we just had this ambition, and we couldn’t shake the fact that it just felt like this was going to be a big deal. That there was something big here, and we kept on maneuvering around, until we found it. Then there was just this moment when it clicked and became clear that, “Wow, consumers are online. That’s obvious. Everybody knows that one. But all the businesses are getting pulled online too, and they need tools. So why don’t they have them and why doesn’t somebody build them?”
Andrew: And then a collection of tools is what you ended up trying to figure out. So I’m looking at actually an early version of your site and right now I can’t even tell . . .
Matt: Uh-oh.
Andrew: Yeah, this is from the way back machine. But when I got this screenshot, I forgot to take the date. So basically it says and it makes sense, it says, “Free and easy way to advertise your rental,” right?
Matt: Yeah, very early.
Andrew: “Placester, your place on the web.” So that was one of the early focuses of the business. Just allow someone to post, like you were saying you created it for yourself, to post on all these different platforms that they already use, like Zillow, like Oodle, I see. I don’t know what Oodle is anymore, but it used to be up, like HotPads.com.
Matt: Yeah, for sure.
Andrew: That was the original, original thing, but it wasn’t working.
Matt: It wasn’t. We were getting people who were signing up. We were getting people who would pay, but it just didn’t . . . it felt like I was going door-to-door. I would code for six or seven hours a day or I should say at night and then during the morning, I would walk into agencies in Boston, and I would say, “Hey, you know we’re building this tool that does X,” and we experimented with a lot of X’s.
We did syndication for a while. We did listing management for a while. We did CRM for a while. We were on the hunt for this thing that people couldn’t get enough of. Just like syndication in this example, it was a slog. This was not a thing that people were craving and we transitioned. We basically jumped into a new product idea pretty quickly.
Andrew: How did you know that that one wasn’t the right one?
Matt: I guess we told ourselves this story that said, “When we find the right one, people are going to run into all of these problems.” Because we were building these prototypes very, very fast and we were always cutting corners left and right. And so people were going run into problems, but they were going to ignore them, and continue to push to use the product, and they were just going fight past them. And it didn’t happen for us, until we got to websites.
When we got to websites, which is of course, a small component of what we do today. But when we got to websites it exploded. It was like, we could put your listings on a website and it was a bad product, and people loved it.
Andrew: Meaning their listing on their own personal site. So if Andrew Warner is going to start offering real estate in Boston or San Francisco, I need a website and they couldn’t go to WordPress.org and set it up themselves.
Matt: So this is great, exactly. This is the million-dollar question, “Why can’t you setup a WordPress website and stick your listings on it?” And it just turned out that there’s no way to sync up the listings to your WordPress site, and so you can’t update 10,000 listings a day from the MLS or even 20. You’d have to hire someone. It would be a nightmare.
Andrew: I see. Because I don’t just want the ones that I’m personally representing and taking people to. If you’re coming to my site, I want you to have access to all the listings in the area, even the ones they’d never heard of before.
Matt: For sure.
Andrew: Because if you pick one of those, then I get a commission.
Matt: Exactly, exactly.
Andrew: I see and that was the magic, and so you just kept feeling around and you said, “Look, this works. This works. This works, but until we find something that’s so good they can’t ignore us, so good that they can’t stop throwing money at us, we haven’t found our home in the business world.”
Matt: That’s exactly right. The reason we thought that was because every time we talked to an agent or broker we never had a conversation that wasn’t like, “You guys need to solve this problem for us.” They couldn’t really tell us what the problem was or the solution. But they were just like, “We have no tools and no technology. This is awful. You need to fix this.”
Andrew: How would they articulate beyond that that let you know that there was a bigger problem, that creating websites for them was the answer?
Matt: It was a pure guess. What we did was we did a whole bunch of customer interviews and what came out were about eight products, like rough sort of product categories that people were talking about. I couldn’t remember them all.
So syndication was one, the distribution of listings to websites, a listing database where they could manage their own listings, CRM, websites, some marketing automation, email-marketing tools. And we just whipped through them, and built many products for all of them. Then I would go door-to-door and be like, “Do you want to buy this?”
Andrew: Literally and walk in the door?
Matt: Oh, yeah. If you set an appointment they’d . . . You just have to pretend like you’re trying to buy a home or rent a home, and then be like, “Hey, I’m actually here to try to sell you some software,” and they’d throw you out half the time. But the other half they’re nice people. They’ll have a conversation and that’s how we got our first 50 customers before Techstars.
Andrew: You literally walking door-to-door acting like a customer being brought in?
Matt: Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of real estate agencies in Boston.
Andrew: What’s the advantage of doing it that way? I think it was the founder of GrubHub who said he did the same thing, door-to-door trying to get restaurants to list their stuff with him. What’s the advantage of going door-to-door?
Matt: I guess so the first thing is I didn’t really know any better. I didn’t maybe have the sense to think, “Well, I’ll just call them on the phone and try to do phone sales.” It just seemed like because I was an agent and I interacted with everyone in person that just pretending to be a consumer and walking in and talking to an agent, seemed intuitive to me. But the amazing thing for me was that you built a relationship with these people, and if you could get over the initial hurdle of trying to sell them something, they would give you pretty genuine feedback.
They’re like most small businesses. They really care about their business because it feeds their family and all agents are independent contractors. They only eat what they kill, and so they had really great advice, and they wanted us to win. And so you can be a human. Do you know what I mean? They can see that you’re excited about it, and you’re passionate about it, and that you care. So I don’t know if that’s a good answer.
Andrew: That’s a really good answer and still I see myself after I leave an office feeling good about it, even if I fail. But before going into the office, I can see myself saying, “I don’t know. Why am I doing this? Why don’t I get a sandwich? Is there a bathroom in the area here? Let me go pee quickly. How about another cup of coffee to get myself worked up,” right. I can see doing that in the early days of business. Did you have those feelings?
Matt: Oh, yeah, 100%.
Andrew: How did you get past that?
Matt: It was this persistence thing. I don’t know that I got past it every single time, and there were days when I was just like, I had a rough day before or I was trying to work on a feature and I just didn’t get where I wanted to go, and I was frustrated. There were days that psyched myself out and I was like, “No, I can’t do this today.” But the thing was you go to sleep and you wake up and you do it again. For us, it was slowly building progress. It came really handy when we were talking and working with the MLS’s. It took us years to get it done, which is not a quick turnaround.
Andrew: So according to your LinkedIn profile, you started the company in 2011, right?
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: How long before you can feed yourself based on the business?
Matt: So we raised money. I think we’re still not profitable and we’ll do it at some point.
Andrew: But even once you raised money you were able to at least take a salary and stop doing other businesses, right?
Matt: Exactly.
Andrew: Is that when you were finally able to do it full-time?
Matt: So I was freelancing on the side all the way up until we did Techstars, which was four or five months before the founding date that Fred and I said we started the company at. And then a month before Techstars we raised $100 grand and I remember we paid ourselves, I don’t know $1500 a month, $2000 a month. It was enough to cover rent and a little bit of food and I would do a little bit of freelancing. And at the time Techstars, they gave us $18,000 or something like that, no serious money.
And we decided because we figured out the core MLS problem in Techstars, and we figured out that it was going to be a real slog to figure it out, to solve it and so we said, “We’ve got to raise money. There’s no way to do this without money.” And so it took us about three to four months, maybe a little bit longer after Techstars to get it done. We raised a million dollars and that’s when we started. We’d take a big salary enough to live off of and not eat away at savings.
Andrew: I don’t think I’ve ever seen Fred without a suit. I’ve seen him without a tie once or twice online, but never without a suit.
Matt: He’s a well-dressed individual.
Andrew: He is, so does that mean he was able to . . . I guess he paid himself from side gigs.
Matt: Well, Fred is, this is sort of a weird thing to say. He’s way more successful. Fred is four to five years older than me and he had sold a couple of companies before we started Placester together.
Andrew: I see. So you were in Ramen profitable mode. He was still in Ramen, but at least he didn’t have to eat Ramen when he went home.
Matt: That’s exactly right.
Andrew: Okay. The first version of the site reminds me of Andrew Mason. When he came on here he talked about how Groupon started as a WordPress site with a plugin. Today people don’t respect him, I think, as much as they did before and it’s such a shame, because the guy is still freaking brilliant. Go back and watch, anyone who’s listening to me should go back and listen to or read the transcript of my interview with him.
He’s so methodical, so thought out. He built a billion dollar business and because it didn’t continue to grow forever, people now don’t feel that he’s an incredible entrepreneur, and frankly go build a billion dollar business. It’s still a successful business. So anyway, you did the same thing. What was your basic WordPress setup that you were offering people?
Matt: Yeah, so once we figured out that websites was the trick we said, “Okay. Fred knows a lot about WordPress, knows a lot about scaling WordPress.” I grew up coding in PHP and so it was fairly straightforward to just jump right in and so we said, “We’re not going to reinvent the wheel. We’ll just write a plugin that does this MLS syncing component, and then you’ll get all the other WordPress features for free” and that was literally our core product for three and a half years.
Andrew: Three and a half years people were paying you to get a WordPress site with plugin that got the MLS? What is it called, the multi-listing service?
Matt: Multiple listing service.
Andrew: Multiple listing service and that’s what they were paying you how much for?
Matt: We started at $45 a month. We experimented with a bunch of free trial and all that, and we could never . . . we just couldn’t get it to work because people would free trial us into the floor.
Andrew: You mean they would get a site, then close it, and then do it again?
Matt: No, they would get a free trial site. They would try to set it up. Their trial would expire. They would complain that they didn’t get enough time and we’d just never get anyone to commit to anything. We were handholding them across the finish line. So we said, “No, no, no, screw this. Charge them right up front. You’re going to pay every month. If you want to take a year to setup your site, have fun. You want to take five minutes, have fun.”
And all you’d do was you would sign a form. It would literally dump your information into our account system. Your billing information into, I forget what we used at the time, just whatever our billing system was. Then it would just pop you right into the WordPress admin screen. That was the whole product.
Andrew: Beautiful, it makes so much sense.
Matt: The beautiful thing we just got all this amazing functionality from the WordPress community. We, of course, contributed back all of the plugin work that we did was completely open source. We open sourced everything except for the data because we’re legally not allowed to, or I should say the API’s.
But it was cool. It was a very fun time, and then from there, it was very intuitive. People would say, “Hey, I’ve got this website. I want to promote.” So we started going down, “Well, how do you do that?” They were like, “This promotion’s working and we’re getting leads, how do we engage with them?” So we went down that path.
Andrew: Then you started adding a CRM and so it was just . . . I see. So this is another guess. Shuki Lehavi was on here. He’s, I think in the auto space, and one of the things I learned from him was, you can create software that anyone can use, but make it so that only a small group of people . . . make it so it’s for a small group of people.
His example was, if you build a website builder, you’re going to start competing against Squarespace and WordPress and all these other guys. But if you build a website builder for the auto industry then you’ve got much less competition and you go directly to what these people need and you become their savior. He said, “That’s the answer.”
Matt: Exactly and it’s really interesting and now they have a word for it. But it’s this whole idea of this vertical companies or vertical enterprise or vertical SaaS, but he’s spot on. It’s just like there are these bastions of the internet where the traditional horizontal SaaS tool providers just don’t touch and if you find one, these people desperately want tools. It’s not like real estate is the one market that doesn’t want a CRM. Hell, no. There’s just a reason they don’t have it, and if you give it to them, they’re fantastic people and they thank you for it. It’s a cool cycle.
Andrew: I talk to a lot of Y Combinator entrepreneurs here who talked to me about what they learned from being in YC. But Techstars, I get those entrepreneurs on and I think at times I’ve forgotten to ask them, what’s one thing that you’ve learned or you’ve got or you’ve changed your business because you’re a part of the Techstars Accelerator Program?
Matt: So I didn’t know how to work. This is maybe a very personal thing. I really didn’t know how to work with a mentor. Of course, I had teachers, but I didn’t know how to work with a mentor and that was one of the things that Techstars taught really well, really fast. Because the whole thing . . .
Andrew: How do you work with a mentor?
Matt: Well, I think that there’s way of doing it, right? I remember back when I first started Techstars, I was very guarded about what we were doing and why we were doing it, and the challenges that we were running into. Because I was really afraid that I was going to look dumb, do you know what I mean? The person was going to be like, “You don’t know this? Fuck you” and leave.
Andrew: And I get it, and by the way, I don’t want to dismiss that because some of these people are so incredibly bright. You know they’re just looking for kindred spirits in the brains department and you don’t want to be the fool that they have to suffer gladly because they’re part of Techstars, right?
Matt: Right, and so it was this very cool experience where we got to sit down with these crazy operators. I remember the first meeting was with this guy Adam Barry who’s this phenomenal entrepreneur, a great operator and he had had big marketing, CMO marketing roles in major Boston companies at Brightcove, at Alair. I was just blown away because the dude was spending any time with us. He was the nicest guy, wanted to help and we learned how to work with folks who knew a lot more about the world than we did. And to me, as a younger entrepreneur in my career, that’s one of the most powerful skills I’ve learned.
Because if we’re going to continue to scale this company and particularly at the rate at which it’s going today I’ve got to be able to work with, and support, and help make people who are much more experienced than me, very successful. That’s my whole job now. We’re 110 people. Do you know what I mean? It’s all about making people who know exponentially more about literally everything, successful. So that was very . . .
Andrew: So how do you, if they are so much more successful than you, how do you make them more successful when you’re a piker compared to some of the people that you admire and want to work with?
Matt: It’s a good question. I don’t know that there’s a universal answer. I take the approach of one, hard work is in many ways the cure for nearly every gap that you have, and so I employ that strategy. One is I think that as you get bigger you run into problems that typically are easily solved with either priorities, process/procedure or cross-functional interaction. Not to turn this into an MBA seminar, but those are the big challenges that you run into as you scale. And so priorities are easy. That’s one you always have to fight with as a company.
Cross-functional interaction is much more nuanced, and so as you get bigger when you’re an engineer and you sit next to the guy doing selling there’s no such thing as cross-functional interaction because you guys are buddies, and you eat lunch or whatever. As a company gets bigger cross-functional interaction gets a lot harder and so facilitating that interaction, creating a culture in a consistent way that we all are supposed to interact with each other and work with each other and those kinds of standards.
Andrew: What about for your mentors? Let’s suppose I get a mentor.
Matt: Yeah, okay.
Andrew: It just occurred to me I don’t have a mentor. I’ve had people who I’ve paid who are further ahead.
Matt: [Inaudible 00:40:51].
Andrew: Or have just chatted with, but not in a very formal mentor setting, how do I make it worth their while?
Matt: Typically the best ones that I’ve found have already convinced them of that themselves, that there is some value there. I found it nearly impossible to convince somebody who hasn’t decided that there’s value there, that there’s somehow value.
Andrew: I see.
Matt: It’s a giving back thing. I’m sure you work with entrepreneurs outside of the show. Why do you do that? Probably because you just like it.
Andrew: No, no. I was thinking about that and why do I help other entrepreneurs, in interviewing for example, and I’ve discovered that whenever I help them, I think through my interview process in a better way. So they might get 5% of what I know that they would never have figured out otherwise. But now I’ve reinforced that 5% and thought about another set of ideas that I hadn’t considered before.
I have to tell them how I think through my structure for a story for an interview and that forces me to think it through and live up to it in interviews. I see. What about, you mentioned several times that Frederick’s older than you, that he’s more advanced than you.
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: I get the sense that at times you might’ve felt intimidated by that and it changed the way you interacted with him.
Matt: That’s an interesting point. I don’t know. He never created that dynamic which was in and of itself a very powerful thing. Is that the right way to say it? It was a very interesting thing for me because it made me feel powerful. If you’re engaging with somebody just like in that mentor conversation we were having, you’re engaging with somebody who’s incredibly experienced, as sort of a peer or an equal.
That makes you like, “Hey, I can do this.” Do you know what I mean? “This isn’t terrible.” For the first three months, there was certainly some getting to know each other. But now it’s we’re best friends. I think that’s the way that I think about it. We’re partners first and best friends.
Andrew: What about this? I looked at your LinkedIn profile. Like I said, it said you guys you started at Placester at 2011. I’m looking at his it says June 2014. Is that intentional?
Matt: I don’t know why it says June ’14. I have no idea.
Andrew: Okay. I thought maybe it was am indication, yeah. Here’s another thing that I saw about him. On LinkedIn he has one recommendation for Placester. It’s from Bob Garfield. Do you know Bob Garfield?
Matt: No.
Andrew: I’ll tell you who Bob Garfield. Bob Garfield does one of the best NPR programs and he’s also a columnist. I think he writes for Ad Week or something. He’s been a media critic for years. Bob Garfield somehow is connected to him and Placester and his comment here is, “When Fred leaves the room, the average IQ plummets. It’s on the verge of being intimidating, but also inspiring to see him in action.” Is that the way you feel, too?
Matt: I don’t know that I feel intimidated. I agree that the IQ plummets. I think that he’s been a fantastic and he still is a fantastic partner.
Andrew: Bob Garfield, here’s a little secret from me about Bob Garfield. I’ve really respected his media analysis for years and we had an opportunity to have him on Mixergy and I pushed for it, even though what the hell does Bob Garfield have to do with tech startups. I said to the team, “Find a way to make this work. We have to find a way. How can’t entrepreneurs learn from him?” And we found it and I don’t remember what it is. Let me just do a Mixergy search for Bob Garfield. Authentic Customer Relationships, that’s what we came up with.
Actually to be even more open I thought, “Then maybe we’ll become besties, and he’ll understand how Mixergy is solving the problem that he keeps talking about, which is that the media doesn’t know how to make money.” I thought then I could at some explain to him the way for the media to make money is not by throwing more advertising at its audience, but by creating things, products and ideas that the audience wants to pay for and one example of that is Mixergy.
Another example of it is Forbes. Forbes to this day has advertising and I’m sure they make a lot of money from advertising. But they also have these conferences that you get to go to, these experiences, these products that they create for themselves that are really customized to a Forbes audience. Like one of them is, get this. I think you get to be on the beach with Steve Forbes. I swear I could be a little bit off. Maybe it’s on a pool or something, but it’s some kind of water activity and Steve Forbes. Who the hell wants that? Forbes readers want it because it also includes stock analysis.
Matt: Oh, I see.
Andrew: I had the whole, long sidetrack there. What did you do to get all those MLS’s put together, all those deals?
Matt: There was certainly more to it tactically. But at the highest level, we would go in door-to-door and we would just introduce ourselves and say, “Hey, my name is Matt with Placester” and we had other folks in the team who would do it too, like this guy Henry was hugely instrumental in doing it. We would just go in and introduce ourselves. “Hey, my name’s X from Placester. We really want to solve this core problem that your members have. We’re good guys and here’s the software. Can we try to convince you?” A lot of people would say no. I mean the first year I think we got 50 or 75 MLS’s.
Andrew: And how many are there?
Matt: A thousand, yeah, maybe a little bit less than 1000. But they sort of merge and breakup every once in a while and it was just very slow going. But we would take every conversation with could and we would update the product when we needed to and be responsive. And it just turned out that a lot of people hadn’t done that with them, and if you treated them right, and you treated them respectfully, and you listened to what they were saying, they tended to like you a lot, and they tended to work with you, and called their friends.
It just took persistence. But once we got it over the hurdle I think we got to 600 or something like that, and our brand got out there. It became much easier and today we are great friends with a lot of them. Our businesses are deeply intertwined together.
Andrew: Now when you were below 5% how did the product work? How would a real estate agent, a real estate broker have a website that allowed him to show all the available properties when you all had was fewer than 5% of them?
Matt: The answer is it would only work for the regions that were covered by that 5%. So as an example, if we only had the San Francisco MLS, well that was great for all the agents in San Francisco.
Andrew: So then you’d go after the agents in San Francisco. They had all the listings that they need. They don’t need some Utah listing that you just haven’t gotten around to yet.
Matt: Exactly and part of the upshot for us about raising money was, we actually didn’t spend a lot of time trying to acquire agents. In this example in San Francisco, we just said, “Okay, great. We’ve got San Francisco. We’ll get a couple of people there. We’ll make sure they’re happy. Then we’ll move onto the next region.” That’s kind of what our strategy was. We just kept on moving on. We didn’t really start trying to refine the product or distribute the product or I should say promote the product, until we had somewhere between 75% and 80% coverage in the United States.
Andrew: I see. I know at first you were going door-to-door and then you shifted to telesales, right?
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: What was your process for locking in a new customer at $45 a month and later on it went down to $10 a month, I think, right?
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: What was your process for getting those customers when you were making calls to them?
Matt: Do you mean what was the pitch or?
Andrew: Yeah, the pitch is what happens on one call. The process is more of, “We get their name and email address. We send them an email. Then we follow up with a straight to voicemail message. Then we send them a gift card.” Then what else was there beyond the call?
Matt: So we made the decision that when we wanted to ramp up customer acquisition we said, “HubSpot’s in our backyard, so the key way we’re going to do this is content.” Not just because we knew a lot of guys over there and we knew the playbook. But we felt like there was really big education gap in real estate, just about how to do things on the internet.
Andrew: That’s why you guys created, what was it called, The Academy?
Matt: That’s exactly right.
Andrew: Is it still up?
Matt: Yeah, and it’s about 20% of the industry reads it every month, which sounds like a lot. It’s about 200,000 people in real estate read it every month, and it’s helpful tips and tricks. Everything from classic click baits sell stuff to really thoughtful guides that go in-depth about, “Hey, if you’re going to do SEO right for real estate, how do you do that?”
Andrew: I see that and by the way the reason I didn’t see it on the current webpage is because your video that I have up on my screen is at the center of my screen, right under my webcam. And that was where The Academy was on your site. Now that I see it, I can see Twenty Lifesaving Real Estate Blog Ideas for Agents. Three Essential Real Estate Marketing Strategies. Fifteen Real Estate SEO Ideas to Help You Dominate Search. So these are all articles on your site and then the idea is to get somebody to join the newsletter?
Matt: So the process for us was, you find a piece of content. Your spot on. We would get you to join the newsletter. So we do it’s forced registration after. The team experiments with it, but it’s somewhere between 10 and 30 seconds. That newsletter just basically adds you to our content drip. We do a lot of email. We do five emails a week. We mail every day minus Thursdays and Saturdays. They experiment with the days and it’s all content and then occasionally there’s a webinar that goes out or a particular offer that goes out over email.
Originally we leaned pretty aggressively into webinars as a way of having this one-to-many style conversation and then we would have an offer, a promotional offer on the webinar, and that would get people to raise their hands. If those people signed up, great, mission accomplished. If they didn’t, we would personally call each one of the people on the webinar and just have a conversation with him, “Hey, what are you looking to do? Why did you join the webinar? Was it helpful? Do you want to check out the product?” And this was in the very early days and that would begin a sales conversation.
Andrew: I see.
Matt: And we tend to and sometimes we get criticized for it, but we really like it as a company. We like to get on the phone with people really early and maybe it comes from our DNA, but have a conversation with somebody. The worst they can do is just tell you to leave them alone and never talk to them again. But the best you can do is learn something or maybe they’ll buy the product.
Andrew: How do you make sure that that comes back to you as a team? If the salesman’s calling someone and they hear, “No, I don’t like you because you don’t have an Apple watch,” you want to know and a lot of people are asking for it. How do you get that back to the engineers?
Matt: So we solved the problem differently at different levels of scale. Today the way we solve their problem is we do surveys. So we have an internal survey that the sales team fills out after every conversation with a customer that classifies the conversation along a series of key metrics that the engineering and product teams are curious about, and then anything that the sales team thinks is also interesting.
That gets rolled up into a visualization deck that gets emailed to the entire company every week, and then you can drill down from there. All the survey data is public within the company. So you can drill down and you could say, “Hey Nick, you had a great conversation with this customer. Tell me more about it,” and you can go find the salesperson. We try to engineer some crazy stuff in Salesforce. It just never worked. We just have a Google form survey that the team fills out. It’s super low tech.
Andrew: That’s really simple. Looking at your list of features from the pricing page and you guys go from $10 all the way up to $200 a month. At $10 a month, it didn’t make sense for me, why you would make calls. If there’s a $200 option than I can see that it does pay. So I’m seeing all these different features that you have. In addition to a responsive website, you also offer people lead captures. You offer brokers, what else, drip email marketing, advertising, coaching sessions, lead management, website setup that you will help them with.
One of the things that I’ve heard from the beginning of doing Mixergy is instead of just trying to go out and get new customers, which is a good thing obviously. Find more products for the customers that exist to make them happier. It’s tough to figure out what to create for them. What is the very first thing you created after you got into webpage creation for them, the website creation?
Matt: It was, yeah, right after websites we did Google AdWords management.
Andrew: So how did you know that that was the next thing to do?
Matt: Everyone would complain that they wouldn’t get enough traffic to their website. The really engaged users would complain that they weren’t getting enough traffic. Because we were engineers, we said, “Hey. That’s not how the internet works. You don’t just get traffic for free. You have to promote it.” And they would say, “Oh, that’s really interesting. We didn’t know that. How do you promote it?”
And then we had gone down this path of classic, “Well, do you spend time and do marketing?” or “Do you spend money and do advertising?” And they all opted to spend money on advertising because they had no time.
Andrew: And you would talk to them and say, “Which would you prefer, time or money?”
Matt: We would ask them and we would always get these really mixed results. The time that the matrix collapsed and we would see a singular decision was always when we asked them for money. When we asked the customer before they said, “Oh, great. We really want to go down this path of marketing.” And we said, “Awesome, we need you . . . ” I think we engineered an experiment.
We said, “Hey you’re going to pay us $200 a month and you’re going to get all these premium content features that are going to make all the content that you write way better.” They’d be like, “Oh, no, no. I can’t. I don’t have time.” And we did parallel experiments around, “Hey, give us $500 a month. We will drive traffic for you. We’ll drive this amount of traffic and if you are unhappy, if we miss our traffic goal, we’ll give you your money back.” And they were like, “We’ll take it.” So then we built a product around it.
Andrew: And you did that after you got them to say, “Yes, I would pay money for it?”
Matt: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We did it manually for the first 20-30 folks, just managing their Google AdWords. Then we built up a deeper API level integration, etc.
Andrew: It looks like your site is still built with WordPress.
Matt: It is.
Andrew: Are you guys using Infusionsoft for your own email marketing? I forgot how I saw it, but now I see it on BuiltWith.com. Infusionsoft is your marketing. What’s the system that you use for your customer’s marketing?
Matt: It’s all custom built. So the custom-built system on top of Amazon’s email service for our marketing automation, for all of our email based marketing, yeah.
Andrew: We asked you about your lowest moment, the producer here at Mixergy did, and you said the moment where you had just three months of money in the bank and then it’s a fear in the back of your head. What was your fear?
Matt: I think there’s always a fear when you start it’s the early days of the company you’re scraping, you’re pulling in all your favors to get things to go your way, right? You’re like convincing your friends like, “Hey. Come over here.” You’re pitching people to leave what appears from your perspective to be great comfort to come be at the company. You’re convincing customers who you’ve built personal relationships with, and so there’s this deep fear that you’ll fail in front of this community that you’ve built.
Andrew: Was there one person that you were especially worried about failing in front of?
Matt: No. To me, it’s always this amorphous . . . when I personally think of letting people down it’s always as a company or as a community. It’s never one particular individual. I don’t know. I’m just wired like that.
Andrew: Me, too. That sometimes makes it harder because it becomes this invisible force that feels like it’s everybody.
Matt: Totally irrational and you can’t quell it. If it was, pick a person, if it was Fred. I could be like, “Fred, I’m super nervous about letting you down” and he’d be like, “Don’t worry. You’ve got it.” But it’s not him. He could say that . . .
Andrew: Oh, let’s see if the connection’s still . . . I think we lost the connection here for a moment. Let’s give it a moment to reconnect.
Matt: We were doing so well.
Andrew: Yes, yeah. It was just really flowing. So what I was going to ask you as a follow up. What led to you getting so close?
Matt: When we were going through that process of partnering with all the MLS’s, that was just a very tricky time. Because as a company you’re job is to make money and either show profitability or show growth, and a path to profitability and we were doing neither or I should say maybe we were doing the thing that we were pitching people would lead to one of those two outcomes by partnering with all these MLS’s.
And so it just took a lot of convincing and we have this incredibly supportive group of investors. But it took a lot of convincing that this path of partnering with these MLS’s and aggregating this data and then hopefully building a product on top of that was going to yield a big, meaningful company that was going to produce returns on their money. I don’t know that there was anything super interesting in there. It was just a very real struggle of a business, grinding it out.
Andrew: All right, I think I’ve got everything here in the interview. Let me see. Yeah, I think we’ve got all the major ones. Now I’m thinking at the end of the interview, do we go to Frederick?
Matt: Do you want me to see if he’s around?
Andrew: Well, now I’m thinking maybe we should do it. You said he sold a few companies. How about I just have him come back here and talk about one of those companies. Which one should I ask him to talk about? Which is the one that you’re most interested in?
Matt: That’s a good question. The thing that I think is really interesting is W3 Total Cache. I don’t know if you would consider it a company. It certainly is a company.
Andrew: I don’t think I do. Isn’t it a free plugin for WordPress?
Matt: Yeah, but there’s a team behind it and it makes money.
Andrew: It does.
Matt: It does make money and it powers some absurd percentage of WordPress sites.
Andrew: Yeah, I remember actually complaining. So because I do these interviews, whenever there’s a problem I complain to Matt, Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress. Actually he’s not technically the founder of WordPress, but he’s the father of Automatic, the founder of the company that turned WordPress into this giant thing. Anyway he wrote on Hacker News a few years ago something about how people are overestimating how many viruses there are on WordPress and they’re beating them back.
So I sent him a private email saying, “No, I actually got a virus on WordPress. Here’s how painful that could be” and he was really helpful. He talked to me about that and then he asked me about other stuff that was going on, on the site and he goes, “Get rid of this and here is the cache program that I recommend.” I’m like 95% sure that it was Frederick’s plugin which we ended up installing.
The only 5% hesitation is that unless I see it in front of me, I feel like I can’t say it 100%. All right, so I can see how that is the one to go with and I believe we still even have it on the site. But that’s the business you think I should interview him about?
Matt: I don’t know. So to me, that’s the one I’m the most interested in. I come at it for better or for worse from an engineer’s perspective I think the business is very cool. It solves a very real problem. It operates at this massive scale that’s so deceptive and I always think businesses like that are very interesting. Where they’re just like in the background and nobody knows how large they are.
Andrew: Meanwhile they’re part of everyone’s workday. You don’t know it, but because of him.
Matt: Exactly.
Andrew: Because of that plugin the sites you like are up.
Matt: Yeah, and one of the things for me personally I really like open source and I think it’s just this very cool business model. I don’t know. There’s some interesting angles in there from my perspective.
Andrew: All right. I’ll have him on and talk to him about that.
Matt: It might not be his most interesting business, but it’s the one that I like the most.
Andrew: We could check in with him and see if he has a different preference or if he thinks there’s . . . he knows Mixergy well enough to say, “Andrew here’s what I think the audience will be into.”
Matt: For sure.
Andrew: He is the audience. But I was going to have you show where he is. But I like the idea that now he’s like this mythical creature or person in the back. So big and powerful because of the way we’ve talked him up that if a human being shows up on camera, people are going to feel a little let down. So why don’t we just hold off on that. I think we’ve explained who is and I’d love to have him on. There’s an open invitation. Bob Garfield likes him, so how bad can the guy be?
Matt: Right.
Andrew: There’s one other thing that I missed in this interview. Usually before we start I do the clapboard and in this case, we were just rolling so I didn’t do the clapboard and I figured I’d do it at the end. Then somewhere in the middle of the conversation we dropped and now Joe because we don’t have the clapboard, do you know what this is?
Matt: No.
Andrew: This is a clapboard. I didn’t know what a clapboard was used for until I did Mixergy. Here’s what it is. This is for Joe. Joe leave this in the interview. What Joe does is he needs to have a separate audio file for our conversation from the video file, right? And when you watch people shoot film often what they do is they have some guy do the clapboard and it’s partially so that you can then align the audio and the video together.
Matt: Oh, the coordination.
Andrew: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew: Yeah, so what he does is he looks in the audio and he says, “Where’s that big bump that comes from the sound that goes like this and let’s line it up with the moment where these two pieces come together.” So now Joe’s going to have to do something really weird to connect our audio and video for the first part of the conversation. Joe, I’m sorry. Thanks for doing it.
I know when I was doing it here that I would do Joe, if this is any help. I would look for the word P. Because if you find . . . not find. You look for the P sound in audio because people’s lips come together very clearly to make the P sound and the sound P is very easy to see on the audio file, maybe very easy as an exaggeration, but it’s relatively easy.
Matt: Well, I hope it saves Joe some time.
Andrew: Sorry.
Matt: I said I hope it saved Joe some time looking for . . .
Andrew: I hope it does. Joe, I’m sorry. I’ve been there. It’s a real pain when there’s no clapboard. All right, why don’t we close out with this Matt? You said that you guys are hiring and I really mean it when I ask guests what’s a win for you? I want this to be helpful for my audience and I demand that, but I also want it to be really helpful for you. You said hiring is the answer. Who are you guys hiring for and where does someone go to find out about it?
Matt: Placester.com/careers is where they are all located and there’s a navigation link. You go to [inaudible 01:05:17] and careers and we’re hiring, I think we’ve got 25 open roles now. Sales support, engineering, some really interesting stuff on the engineering side, like we have every home in America in a database, pretty cool dataset to play with. It gets updated in real time. Very interesting stuff.
Andrew: I see you’re looking for user experience designers, account manager for a small to medium sized businesses, account manager who’s going to talk the enterprise team. How about this? If somebody as a result of this interview and this is kind of a long shot because we have so many entrepreneurs. I don’t know that they’re going to go looking for a job just because they’re listening to this interview.
But I could see people saying, “You know, I like this guy. I like the way he thinks. I’d like to work for someone like that to have them be my mentor.” If you end up finding someone and hiring him or her because of this interview, would you do two private dinners with them where you just get to talk to them about their careers, not how they help with Placester and not where their lives are going within the company? But career goals going forward that would help them think through their lives?
Matt: One thousand percent.
Andrew: All right, so if you guys end up going to work for Placester let him know after you get hired that you did it because of this interview and go have dinner and get a mentor. Apparently I don’t have a mentor. I could use one. You could use one, too. Matt, this has been fantastic. I like the way we just got into the conversation the way we did.
Matt: Yeah, thank you so much for having me on the show. I appreciate it.
Andrew: Thanks for being on and to ContentPromotion.com, I’m sorry I didn’t get to talk about you. I will and the second sponsor who is, I’ve talked about you guys over at Brand Bucket. I’ll talk about you later and sorry you’re not getting the commission for those ads, but we’ll work it out, too. Thanks, Matt.
Matt: Thank you, Andrew.
Andrew: You bet. Thank you all for being a part of Mixergy.
Matt: All right, see you.
