What does it take to foster genuine loyalty in a world full of noise? In this enlightening episode, Michael Dodsworth discusses the concept of experiential commerce and its significance in today’s saturated market. Learn how brands can create memorable, hype-driven experiences that resonate with fans long after the launch. Michael shares actionable strategies and stories that will inspire fellow founders to rethink their approach to customer engagement.
Listen on Podbean:
https://brainworkframework.podbean.com/
Connect with Michael Dodsworth:
Company Website: https://fanfare.io/
Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dodsworth/
Company LinedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fanfare-io/
Founder Spotlight: https://www.infinityvc.capital/founder-spotlights/michael-dodsworth
Connect with Chris Troka:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-troka-3a093058/
Website: https://focused-biz.com/
Website: https://christroka.com/ #brainwork #framework #business #experiential #commerce #strategies #approach #founders #engagement
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
I think considering what it isyou're trying to achieve, I think
(00:03):
there are different types oflimited edition collabs, drops,
limited editions, and so on.
They all have different purposes.
So it could be that you're tryingto draw people to the wider catalog.
You're trying to build an audience.
Maybe you're trying to build brandawareness, or maybe you already have
hype around a particular product,like a switch when you're just
trying to make it through launch day.
And so you really have to think aboutwhat your intent of that process is.
(00:25):
Like what are you trying to deliver?
What kind of metrics are you tryingto increase through this process
and then work your way upstream?
Like you have to be thinking aboutreaching people where they are.
You have to be thinkingabout social media.
You have to be thinking about howpeople discover the brand, how people
engage with the brand upstream.
And then from then think aboutcapturing as much data as you
(00:46):
can before the actual on sale.
So you know, having a wait list,having some idea about where people
are coming in, how often peoplecome back, that kind of thing.
You are listening to Brainwork Framework,a Business and Marketing podcast,
brought to you by Focused-biz.com.
Welcome back to another episode.
With us today is the founder andCEO of fanfare, Michael Dodsworth
(01:08):
with the founder of Fanfare.
They're a platform built to fix thebroken experience of high stakes product
launches for both brands and their fans.
Michael's so excited to have you on today.
How you doing?
I'm excited to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I find myself noddingthrough my own intro, right?
You're like, yeah, agree.
That's agree with all of those points.
Absolutely.
Tell us more
about your journey.
What were you doing before that kindaled you into what you're doing now?
(01:28):
So as you can probably tell from theaccent I'm not from around these parts.
I grew up in the northeast of the UKand this is gonna date me for sure, but
my brother brought home a Commodore 64.
One day I. And that was me set.
Like the, the idea of building somethingfrom scratch, from doing things like
that really resonated with me from a,from a very early age, I might add.
(01:50):
So went through an engineeringcourse and through, the first
company I joined was this companycalled Coral, which was a startup.
Based in the UK was scooped upby Salesforce in 2000, 2008.
So they moved the whole team outto San Francisco, which was a
very easy move for me to make.
And I think for the rest ofthe team, spent some years
(02:10):
as an engineer at Salesforce.
We were growing really quickly.
We had some really interesting issuesof scale, which came to influence
what we're doing now at fanfareand then started venturing outside.
So I did the small company, thevery large company went to a
medium sized company, Optimizely.
Just down the road spent some time workingon their consumer problems and building
(02:30):
up user profiles, things like that.
And that's when someone from my pastcame up to the Bay Area to talk about
Rival, which was a ticketing startup.
We were just a presentationdeck at that point.
I. But we had the XE ofTicketmaster wanting to take
on his old, his old company.
So I moved myself down to LA wasthe founding engineer at Rival.
(02:52):
And then fast forward to thestart of the pandemic, we were
scooped up by Ticketmaster.
So interesting journey there.
It's funny how these thingscome all the way around.
But yeah, I've spent a lot of timejust dealing with issues of scale
and especially in the last fewyears, dealing with issues where.
Consumers have a terrible experienceof the process, so we can, we can
talk a little bit more about howwe're addressing that at fanfare.
(03:15):
But at Rival, we built this whole systemto try and cater for these huge, most
coveted events that you can think of.
The SoFi Stadiums, the Taylor Swifton sales, and then coming out of this
experience and coming out of Ticketmaster,seeing this again and again in retail
and seeing brands, creators, artists.
Fail their biggest fansover and over and over.
(03:37):
Like I'm a Nintendo fan.
I'm not a Swifty, but I definitelytry to get Oasis tickets and like
the same experience is everywhere.
Like people expect chaos.
They expect to be at midnight with allof their tabs open, their friends on
the line, everyone doing the same thing.
And when things go live.
It's gonna suck.
(03:57):
The site's gonna fallover, nothing's gonna work.
You're gonna go throughcheckout, it's gonna fail to,
to register your credit card.
Like there's all all kindsof issues with that process.
So we built fanfare to solve thoseproblems and make that experience
something that people actuallyare entertained by or keep coming
back, or at least reward people'stime and effort in that process.
(04:18):
Wow, that is so cool.
And a lot of great backgroundexperience that prepared you for
everything that you're doing now.
And specifically when it comes tothat customer experience, I feel like.
You know, with the lack of choicesor competition out there, it seems
like every day is chaos for us.
You know, and whether that's fromthe, the backend of buying tickets
or just the customer serviceexperience as a whole, this is what
you know, what you're providing now.
(04:38):
This is what people want.
Something new, something different,and successful product launches,
and especially for businessowners, the scaling issue is tough.
Yeah, we built somethingabsolutely nice right now, but.
How do we get that to the next level?
That's such a challenge.
Yeah, and it's a model that I seemore and more brands picking up, you
know, with Gen Z and social media,like there's more ability to drive
(04:59):
hype and FOMO around a particularproduct or particular product launch.
It's a really powerful model.
But then as you say, youget into that problem of.
I have a million peopleshow up on launch day.
There is no way I can getmy arms around that problem.
People are gonna be upset,people are gonna be disappointed.
And even if you are a Nike and you haveyour sneakers app, like the trust goal
(05:21):
for the Sneakers app right now is at 20%.
I. Like, even brands with enormousresources struggle to deal with
these kinds of experiences.
So that's where we come in and wetry and, you know, provide like a
facilitator for these kind of events.
Is it, is it a lack of money for mostof these businesses or business owners?
Or is it lack to the resources orjust knowledge that, hey, if you put,
(05:43):
you know 10 times the traffic ontoyour website, it can't handle that?
Yeah, it's a mixed bag, honestly.
Like if you take TicketMaster, for example.
It's a decades old platform.
It was never built withthat kind of scale in mind.
And these things, you know, they'redifficult to try and refactor and change
whilst people are still like, whilst wateris still going through the pipes, right?
(06:06):
It's difficult.
To try and just replace a huge chunk ofsomething like Ticketmaster or Shopify
or whatever it is, while people areusing that platform and you see that,
you see increased traffic causes,things to start creak and fall over.
Scalability is not something that youcan go back and just add after the fact.
It has to be woven throughout theproduct from the very beginning, which
(06:27):
is what we've been pushing to do to do.
So yeah, I think that's part of it.
I think also just unsure about how torun a campaign or unsure about exactly
what kind of hype they're generating.
There's definitely a lack of dataabout demand, and you see that.
You see people put.
Google forms up on their productspage expecting that to be enough when
(06:47):
hundreds of thousands of people and botsand bad actors come in through their
product page and it just does not work.
We've seen some very bad examples andyou know, I think if your site falls
over and it's a normal business day,it's a bad time for sure, but it's,
it doesn't cause the kind of rage thatyou get when you fail on launch day.
Like those are moments.
(07:07):
That people immediately head toTwitter or Reddit or wherever they're
going, and you will get some negativesentiment coming out of those moments.
It's like the expectationsare higher there.
They know, Hey, you've beenplanning this, you knew about it.
Why weren't you ready for us?
Yeah.
And I've heard from people, they feellike maybe the failure was part of the
process, maybe it was a feature of theprocess, and that's absolutely not true.
(07:29):
Having been on the other side of it,there's a firefight happening on the
other side of things like people are.
Turning off certain payment methods.
They're, you know, trying to dealwith situations as they come up.
And like if you're going for a switchon launch day and you hit Best Buy and
it falls over, you go somewhere else.
Right?
Like you find the first placethat's available to take your
(07:49):
request and you stay there.
Right.
That's lost business for sure.
Absolutely.
And oftentimes for, for a lotof consumers and businesses.
There's just that one shot opportunity.
It, this is like a first impressionand that experience that they
have that's gonna carry through.
And like you said, they're gonna hoponto Twitter or social media and,
and really just rip you a new onebecause they didn't have a great
experience and they, they're angry.
(08:11):
They need to tell the world about it now.
Exactly.
Like people are ready that white.
Right.
Like you mistreat them in that moment.
Like you are in for some youare in for some pain for sure.
I was watching a, aJohnny Ive presentation.
He was talking about obsessing, aboutthe wrapping for their cables in some
particular product he was talkingabout, but like the idea of obsessing
(08:31):
not just about the final product, but.
All the way through that process issomething that's really important.
Like you build fandom by treatingpeople like as if they're VIPs
all the way through the process.
And if you fail in that moment, youare not treating people like VIPs.
Like they feel gypped in that momentand they, they don't come back.
(08:51):
Absolutely.
I feel like your serviceswould really help.
Yum.
Brands, specifically their Taco Bellbrand, I'm hearing online all the time.
Every Tuesday they have these specialpromos or like drops where if you
sign up and get this code, you canclaim for some rewards, but they're
always sold out or the website crashesor they can't get their order in.
And this, this is a recurringissue week after week, some people
(09:12):
still go back 'cause you knowthey have some brand loyalty.
But for, for many businesses,they don't get that chance.
Is this, is this now a feature or is TacoBell like still figuring out week by week?
Because you can't just turn on a switchand say, you know, our website can take 10
times as much traffic, or it fixes this.
There's a lot involved.
There's pieces like melded together.
Absolutely.
And as you increase demand,now you're inviting.
(09:35):
Bots and bad actors into the process.
And you know, that was always a challengeat Ticketmaster, pre Ticketmaster,
especially now it's easier and easierfor people to create sophisticated bots
that try and work around your process.
And now you get that secondaryfrustration of, you know, I showed up
for the switch two on launch day andnow it's on eBay for 10 x the price.
(09:56):
Like what happened?
Like someone got through, like,how did these people get through?
And the answer is like, theyworked around the system.
They worked around theprocess that you put in place.
So you are, you are entering into anarms race when you get successful.
And that's also not a thing thatbrands can get their arms around.
Like that's, that's something that, thatwe've spent a significant amount of time.
(10:17):
Addressing previous companiesand it's something that we
worked into to fanfare too.
Nice.
Absolutely.
And for a successful product launch,what does that look like for a
business starting out from theconception to actually launching it?
Are, are there some commonalities thatgood product launches should have?
That's a good question.
So I think considering what itis you're trying to achieve.
(10:37):
I think there are different typesof limited edition collabs, drops,
limited editions, and so on.
They all have different purposes.
So it could be that you're tryingto draw people to the wider catalog.
You're trying to build an audience.
Maybe you're trying to build brandawareness, or maybe you already have
hype around a particular product,like a switch when you're just
trying to make it through launch day.
And so you really have to think aboutwhat your intent of that process is.
(11:00):
Like, what are you trying to deliver?
What kind of metrics are you tryingto increase through this process?
And then work your way upstream.
Like you have to be thinking aboutreaching people where they are.
You have to be thinkingabout social media.
You have to be thinking about howpeople discover the brand, how people
engage with the brand upstream.
And then from then think aboutcapturing as much data as as you
(11:21):
can before the actual on sale.
So, you know, having a wait list,having some idea about where people
are coming in, how often peoplecome back, that kind of thing.
It's again, something that we encouragebrands to do is just wait list
from the very beginning so that youcan get some estimation of traffic
on the, on the actual launch day.
And then on the launch day, if you'renot using something that's gonna.
(11:45):
Or scale up, you just have tobe prepared for the worst case.
Honestly, you know, you may get 10x extra traffic that you expect.
You may get bots that come inand, and bring your site down and
cause some massive frustration.
And you just have to be ready to dealwith those issues in the moment and then
deal with those issues after the fact.
And if you're successful, also,like trying to keep that loop going.
(12:06):
We see a lot of brands, they just dothese one-offs, like Black Friday, cyber
Monday is a great example, one-offs.
And then come January, like you'renot expecting to see those people ever
come back until the next Black Friday.
It's an opportunity toreach out to those people.
Like trying to bring them intolike a limited edition or limited
access on sale for the next thing.
One of the things we've seensuccessful is if people fail.
(12:29):
A number of times, like youturn up for your Travis Scott
dunks and you fail five times.
Most brands just leave youout in the cold, right?
And, and that's it'sreally important signal.
These are potential VIPs.
You should try and bring thosepeople back into the brand.
So you should try and createsomething that's exclusive to the
L Club, like the people who, justun unlock you through the process.
(12:50):
I love what you mentioned about makingsure you have a wait list, because having
that customer data, just knowing, likeyou said, the demand that you can expect
but the fact that you can communicatedirectly one-on-one with that audience now
who expressed interest in it, and imaginehow that can build the relationship.
And customer engagement beyondthat, now you have suggested
products that might be better.
You can even absolutely consider couldyou take like a, I guess like an everyday
(13:14):
average normal product that would normallyjust be tossed onto the shelf and make it
into a fancy product launch and make itinto a bigger thing than normally would,
you know, it doesn't have to be new.
Could that happen with any other product?
Yeah.
We've seen brands do that successfully.
Like mischief is a great example.
Where they'll have products that, youknow, maybe they have 10 of a particular
product and you know, maybe they, theseare Jesus sandals that they're selling.
(13:37):
A very limited number of, like,that can be made into a thing if
you craft the campaign correctly,
like there's marketing involved.
Like you can use a bit more of justthe incentives, just the typical
marketing for your everyday products to.
Kind of create like a new productlaunch from it, kind of create demand.
Yeah, you can.
And I think you mentionedthe recommended products.
(13:58):
This is also something that we don't seebrands do and that we're building into
the platform right now, is the idea thatyou can go in, you could add polls and
things upfront, so you see like whatproduct are you interested in seeing next?
Like what kind of colorways areyou interested in seeing next?
And then if you fail, recommendsomething to those people in that moment.
Like, we know you are interestedin seeing these products.
(14:19):
Here is some stuff, and it could be aproduct that you have just sitting around
in the warehouse that's just taking upspace, but offer a discounted rate for
those products or offer them limitedaccess and access code to the next drop.
For that product.
Interesting.
Very nice.
Now, I'm kind of curious, becauseI ask all of, you know, business
owners, entrepreneurs, how, howAI is affecting their business.
Has it either been helpful orhurtful to you, and where do you
(14:42):
see the trend kind of changing?
Incredibly helpful.
I'm an engineer.
I have an engineer background, so I, Ihear from my friends and colleagues some
of the trepidation around AI for sure.
But these tools, especiallyin the last 12 months, are
incredible, like incredibly useful.
To someone who is switchingcontext frequently, who is like
(15:03):
stepping into domains that theydon't have a ton of experience in.
It just helps bridge that gap.
And I feel like right now there's noproblem that I see off in the future where
I don't think, you know, it's gonna bean incredibly painful process to ramp up.
Like I know I have something therethat I can reach to, to try and
get me up that hill more quicklythan I would've done normally.
(15:26):
And like had I started the business.
With these tools as they are rightnow, I would've shortcut so much pain.
You know, just in the, the basicsteps of setting up a company.
Like you can find available tools andthings out there, but you have to be
aware of those tools and you have to beaware of certain like hazards and bumps
in the road and all of those things.
So it's been incredibly helpfulthere on the engineering front.
(15:47):
Last couple of months have really.
Stepped up.
I'm coding right now actually.
I have a Claude code doing some stuffin the background and that's been
the way I've been working for thelast couple of months is just kicking
things off in the background, justpaying attention to it and then coming
back, which is making the engineeringteam way more productive than it was.
That's incredible.
Yeah, I know.
Businesses are using a AI in, in thedifferent realms of their business.
(16:11):
First it was just okay,it create some copy.
Okay.
Maybe does some images.
Now it's doing website coding now.
You can create a Python scriptand have some automations and
robots running in the background.
Just the stuff is in incredible.
And it definitely does bridgethe gap for those with limited
knowledge to just go into kind of,you know, planning, brainstorming,
putting all these pieces together.
So I'm just kind of, you know,curious to ask how I. Certain
(16:32):
businesses are using the AI tools.
Now I'm more curious about trends sinceyou first started and I guess have,
have product launches before the digitalage changed quite a bit since then.
What are still like the foundationor the principles that are still true
for like a successful product launch?
Yeah, I think the principlesare largely the same.
I think scarcity and fomo.
(16:55):
It's like an innate human trait that wecan't turn off like that has always been
successful in driving product sales.
I think what's different nowis the ability to create that
high firma around the products.
I think you see Emma Chamberlain.
Like, I'm just down the road fromcentury City Mall and there is a pot
mar and a an Emma chamber and coffeeplace right next to each other.
(17:15):
Always have giant linesoutside them, right?
The ability to drive traffic to storesand to online stores has vastly increased.
So, you know, if you're successful andyou build a campaign that can do this,
and I encourage people to look around.
Not just at the, you know, theKim Kardashians of the world.
You may not necessarily have KimKardashian that can sell your
products, but there are influencersout there, athletes out there
(17:39):
who have giant followings, wholike have been underutilized.
I think these are great brandambassadors, people who can
drive hype around your products.
So I would encourage that, thatmodel for more and more brands.
Absolutely.
I, I find that a lot of businesses, whenthey're trying to think of an idea, it's
usually the managers and directors thatthey're getting together in a meeting
(18:00):
rather than asking their customers.
It's like you literally havethis gold mine of information of.
Your ideal customer who actually wants totell you, this is what I want from your
product or service, this is what I expect,this is what I'm hoping in the future.
So I hope we can lean more into,like you mentioned, the polls, the
customer data driven insights because.
That that's your market.
Who is wants your product andthat's who you should be building
(18:22):
for and asking those questions to.
Yeah, and I think this ties togetherwith AI too, which is try and
differentiate yourself in any way you can.
I think with ai, like the standard hasthe, the bar has has definitely been.
Raised and the expectation is thingsare gonna be grammatically correct and
it's gonna look pretty good, right?
You differentiate yourself byjust having that human touch, that
(18:44):
kind of differentiating crackle toyour copy or to to whatever it is.
And that can reallyseparate you from the pack.
And the same is true for launches.
I dunno if you saw, there was adoctor squash on sale where they
were selling soap that was infusedby Sydney Sweeney's bathwater.
That's hilarious.
Crazy idea.
Yeah.
It's, it's a, it's likea, it's like, what?
(19:06):
Why, why would you ever do that?
But they crashed their sight.
They sold out in seconds.
Those soaps were goingfor 2000 pounds on eBay.
Shortly after.
You really need to think about waysto separate yourself from that pack.
And maybe that's doing somethingwith a little humor a little.
A little bit more of that cracklemischief again, is a great example.
If people go and look at whatmischief is doing, I think that's
(19:29):
a, a great example to follow
really.
I mean, it's always interestingwith just product launches
and, and marketing in general.
'cause it's like oftentimes we oftenthink we have to go for the direct sales.
We have to make an ad, you know,or we have to directly sell rather
than make something funny, somethinghilarious, something different.
Like you said, you have tostand out in, in the world
where chat BT and AI can just.
Pump out a bunch ofcopy and images for you.
(19:50):
You need something that's different.
And have you found differences betweenlike indirect or direct selling when
it comes to the marketing campaigns?
Because I feel like just, justthat concept of, yeah, it's infused
with Sidney Sweeney's bath water.
Like, who would've thought of that?
That's crazy.
So sometimes it's the out ofthe box that does really well.
It does.
But I think authenticity online, onsocial, like across all different
(20:11):
aspects, really, really pays off.
So if you have.
A narrative.
If you have a story that you can beauthentic with, and that's really gonna
help you differentiate yourself, right?
If people can, can get behind youand get behind the brand, and they
understand the narrative of the brand.
That's, that's really helpful.
Absolutely.
We're gonna have a few morequestions, but for this moment we
like to ask where can people findyou and connect with you online?
(20:32):
They can find me at fanfare.io.
We have a guidebook that we've justpublished that talks about all the
different aspects of this campaign,and you can find that fanfare.
Dot io slash playbookif you wanna find me.
LinkedIn is always a place that Ihang out for my sins, so if you wanna
connect with me and chat with me
on LinkedIn, very nice.
And we'll have those linksavailable done on the show notes
(20:53):
and the description for everybody.
We have a few more questions.
Michael wanted to ask you, if youhad to go back in time and give
yourself one piece of advice, whatwould that piece of advice be?
This is very vague.
I think it would be, go for it.
You know, I think I'm,I'm no spring chicken.
I've been doing this a while and I think,think I was probably ready to have done
this before, before I actually venturedinto this, and I found myself on these
(21:18):
shores by like taking the path leasttraveled, and that's always been the
thing that I kind of gravitate towards.
But.
I would definitely give myself a, a kickjust just to get me to, to step out of
comfort zones when I found myself in them.
Absolutely.
I think we all need that, andmany businesses don't even start,
or they fail because of that.
They, they wait a little too longor they're just hesitant to, to
jump off that board there andthen, or, or they just never try.
(21:41):
I. And I agree.
It's, it's like that action piece.
We, we definitely just need to try it.
There's some risk involved That'sgonna be scary, that comfortability.
Yeah.
We're gonna lose that.
But I, I think that's a growthopportunity for us when, when
we're learning, that's when we,you know, start to grow and expand.
I. Yeah.
And I, I, I think when I talk toengineering colleagues and, and people who
(22:02):
are more down that in that field, there'sdefinitely some trepidation about ai.
But I would say like when there'sbig moments like this, when
there's enormous change, there'senormous opportunity, there's huge
risks that come along with it.
But there's enormous opportunity andengineers in, in particular, like you
were using these tools on a daily basis.
You are.
Ahead of the curve withthese technologies.
(22:22):
You can go out and you can try andpush yourself to, to, you know, start
a company or, or do something that'syou know, maybe something that's a
little, a bit of a stretch for you.
But I, I think those are, there's greatopportunities in these moments, I think.
Absolutely.
We always like to ask our entrepreneursabout your past experiences, leaders,
the mentors that have maybe beenimpactful and helpful in your life.
(22:44):
Did you wanna give ashout out to anyone who.
Had inspired or mentored you alongin your entrepreneurial journey?
I've had a few.
I, I had a, an incredible manager,bill Press, who I met at Salesforce
and I think he instilled inme with a great sense of calm.
He was such a, a zen master whowas dealing with, like looking
(23:05):
back, he was dealing with a lot ofpressure and we had a lot of things
that we were working through and.
He was just so calm, collected,would work through problems with
the team and try and address liketheir actual deep down concerns.
As we were going through this, actuallyworked with him, Optimizely, where we
were going through an issue and he had,people were flaming out, they'd been
(23:26):
ups since four in the morning dealingwith issues and so on, and people
were fearful of change and the kindof pushing back on rolling things out.
And he sat us down, he listenedto our problems and then he,
he tried to really go deeper.
And figure out exactlywhere our concerns were.
Put a plan together to addressthose concerns and move forward.
And yeah, definitely lessonsfrom my days working with Bill.
(23:49):
Absolutely.
Has that helped change, change the waythat you lead and interact with people?
I, I assume you're probablymore calm under pressure now.
You're like, if, if that person can doit, and that's what I learned from it.
It just sets you up forsuccess going forward.
Yeah.
I think as a leader, people look toyou for how to act how to respond.
And if you freak out.
If you, if you lose your temperand all of those things, you
(24:13):
are, you are setting a, a set ofguidelines that people will follow.
People will.
We'll chart a course based on what you do.
So I think being calm, collected,you know, understanding where people
are coming from, people have concernsthat they may voice, that you need
to go a little deeper on to reallyunderstand where it's coming from.
Mm-hmm.
So I think that's really importantas a leader to, to really understand
(24:34):
what people's motivations are, whatthey're really going through to try and.
To try and make everythingas successful as you can.
Absolutely.
What are businesses failing ator what should they stop doing
with their product launches?
You keep seeing this all the timeand they need to get rid of this
specific thing within their productlaunches to stop doing can maybe,
(24:55):
how much time do we have?
I mean, honestly, just crossing yourfingers and hoping is never a good
strategy for this kind of thing.
Like we see so much bubblegum andsticky tape of all kinds of different
solutions, solutions to this problem.
The Google Forms is one case, but wesee people using all kinds of like
(25:17):
Air Table or Excel behind the scenes,and they expect that it's gonna
scale, or they just hope that it'sgonna scale and it always ends badly.
So I would say know that if you havea product launch coming Black Friday,
cyber Monday's coming up, like youmay get more traffic than you expect.
You may get bad actors and bots comingin that you don't expect, and don't
(25:38):
just hope that that things are gonnascale and things are gonna work well.
Yeah, absolutely.
There's definitely some great advice.
Wanted to ask you, what areyou looking forward to most in
the rest of 2025 or in June?
June of 2025 for recording?
But do you have any new productlaunches or exciting services or things
that you're gonna be switching up?
Or taking on differently forthe rest of 2025 and beyond?
(25:59):
Yeah, so we, we are buildingmore things upstream.
I mentioned the social media andannouncement aspect, so we're
building that into the platformto try and help people structure
the entire campaign around this.
It's an, it's an event you arecreating and it involves marketing.
It involves the e-comm directorand the coordination of all
(26:20):
those people in that moment.
So we wanna address the whole.
And deal with that.
One of the things I'm really excitedat coming from an events background,
we're gonna be launching real lifeproduct towards the end of the year.
So we've all seen the lines aroundthe block and the painful camping out
that people do for in real life drops.
I think there's some enormouspotential with gathering people
(26:43):
together, having a communal event.
Around a particular productor a popup or something.
So TBD there's more stuff to announcetowards the end of the year, but we
have something coming up in Paristhat hopefully we will we'll showcase
and, and people will be excited about.
Oh, that is very, very exciting.
I, I hope that can become popularand make its way over here.
Just more of that community driven,kind of like, get people involved.
(27:05):
I, I think that's somethingthat's missing and I feel brands
and businesses and consumers aremissing out on, on that connection.
Absolutely.
I think, you know, going to a live event.
You have 60,000 people sometimes all, likeif they could join a communal event, if an
athlete could launch a particular productin that stadium just for the people who
(27:26):
attend that event, that's a, that's areally engaging, compelling experience
and like it, it helps foster that fandom.
So I'm really excited for thatlaunch towards the end of the year.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I only have time for onemore question I'd like to ask.
Is there anything we haven'ttalked about yet that you have
a passion about, wanna share?
With our audience here.
I mean, I, I, I definitely have issueswith discount codes in particular.
(27:48):
We, we we're coming onto to BlackFriday, cyber Monday, and I see like
sometimes this is a path that peoplego down to try and create hype and
awareness is like 50% off through.
And, and for me, like.
Just so you know, you're trainingpeople to always expect those discounts.
Like we've all been to those storeswhere like if there's no discount,
(28:09):
I'm not purchasing, like I'm gonnawait a few months until they have
some other offer that's coming up.
Like you break pricing disciplineand then you are training your.
Customers to, to waitfor those discount codes.
So I think I would encourage peopleto try and find a better way that
doesn't break with pricing discipline,and encourages people to keep coming
back without those discount codes.
(28:29):
Right?
Absolutely.
'cause once you make that mistake, itcould be a quick race to the bottom.
You're just setting the wrong.
Expectations here, and you're gonna betrying to dig yourself out of that hole.
And it's gonna be tough.
It's gonna be a challenge.
Now you've conquered that price pointwith everybody, and I would do the same.
I would wait for that codeto come through my email.
I would be just waiting for it.
Like, all right, where'sthat next 50% off?
Come on through.
(28:50):
Yeah.
There was a furniture place backin the UK where they always had
like 90% off sales, and there'sno way that was 90% off for one.
But like, who's buying this when it's.
Full price, like no one's gonna turnup unless there's a 90% off sale.
It makes no sense.
Exactly.
There's a pop popular retailer here, aKohl's department store where everybody
knows them as just wildly inflatingthe prices to then knock 50% off.
(29:14):
And then they do like arewards program, like a rebate.
You get your Kohl's cash andyeah, it's a, it's a whole thing.
But now people have anchoredthat into their pricing strategy.
They just call that the, theKohl's pricing strategy now.
Exactly.
That.
Exactly.
Like people know what you're doing.
Yeah.
They know that that's nothow much those things cost.
Yeah.
It's not how you treat your customers.
(29:34):
No.
There's definitely a good way, you know,for for businesses both to do, do great,
do the, do the right thing, right.
And connect with consumersand kind of advocate for them.
Create that community as opposed to.
You need us.
We don't need you.
Here's your product.
Get outta here.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
That's how it feels sometimeswhen you, when you don't get.
(29:55):
Your product in a drop.
I think the Oasis Ticket debaclewas a, a great example where
legitimate fans lost their tickets.
Yes.
Just because the vendor justdecided like you did something
that registered as a bot for us.
No tickets for you.
Like maybe you booked a flight,maybe you booked a hotel.
Like that's horrendous
man.
So many lessons to be learned and it.
(30:16):
It just gives us insightfor, you know, having a more
successful launch in the future.
Whether you're small, medium, orlarge business, it's something
that you need to consider for.
For everyone who's listening, make sureyou check out Michael's links down the
show notes and the description here.
Michael, we appreciate you comingon and sharing your tips and
tricks and your wisdom with us.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you, Chris.
Absolute pleasure.
Thank you.
Thanks.
I think considering what it isyou're trying to achieve, I think
(00:03):
there are different types oflimited edition collabs, drops,
limited editions, and so on.
They all have different purposes.
So it could be that you're tryingto draw people to the wider catalog.
You're trying to build an audience.
Maybe you're trying to build brandawareness, or maybe you already have
hype around a particular product,like a switch when you're just
trying to make it through launch day.
And so you really have to think aboutwhat your intent of that process is.
(00:25):
Like what are you trying to deliver?
What kind of metrics are you tryingto increase through this process
and then work your way upstream?
Like you have to be thinking aboutreaching people where they are.
You have to be thinkingabout social media.
You have to be thinking about howpeople discover the brand, how people
engage with the brand upstream.
And then from then think aboutcapturing as much data as you
(00:46):
can before the actual on sale.
So you know, having a wait list,having some idea about where people
are coming in, how often peoplecome back, that kind of thing.
You are listening to Brainwork Framework,a Business and Marketing podcast,
brought to you by Focused-biz.com.
Welcome back to another episode.
With us today is the founder andCEO of fanfare, Michael Dodsworth
(01:08):
with the founder of Fanfare.
They're a platform built to fix thebroken experience of high stakes product
launches for both brands and their fans.
Michael's so excited to have you on today.
How you doing?
I'm excited to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I find myself noddingthrough my own intro, right?
You're like, yeah, agree.
That's agree with all of those points.
Absolutely.
Tell us more
about your journey.
What were you doing before that kindaled you into what you're doing now?
(01:28):
So as you can probably tell from theaccent I'm not from around these parts.
I grew up in the northeast of the UKand this is gonna date me for sure, but
my brother brought home a Commodore 64.
One day I. And that was me set.
Like the, the idea of building somethingfrom scratch, from doing things like
that really resonated with me from a,from a very early age, I might add.
(01:50):
So went through an engineeringcourse and through, the first
company I joined was this companycalled Coral, which was a startup.
Based in the UK was scooped upby Salesforce in 2000, 2008.
So they moved the whole team outto San Francisco, which was a
very easy move for me to make.
And I think for the rest ofthe team, spent some years
(02:10):
as an engineer at Salesforce.
We were growing really quickly.
We had some really interesting issuesof scale, which came to influence
what we're doing now at fanfareand then started venturing outside.
So I did the small company, thevery large company went to a
medium sized company, Optimizely.
Just down the road spent some time workingon their consumer problems and building
(02:30):
up user profiles, things like that.
And that's when someone from my pastcame up to the Bay Area to talk about
Rival, which was a ticketing startup.
We were just a presentationdeck at that point.
I. But we had the XE ofTicketmaster wanting to take
on his old, his old company.
So I moved myself down to LA wasthe founding engineer at Rival.
(02:52):
And then fast forward to thestart of the pandemic, we were
scooped up by Ticketmaster.
So interesting journey there.
It's funny how these thingscome all the way around.
But yeah, I've spent a lot of timejust dealing with issues of scale
and especially in the last fewyears, dealing with issues where.
Consumers have a terrible experienceof the process, so we can, we can
talk a little bit more about howwe're addressing that at fanfare.
(03:15):
But at Rival, we built this whole systemto try and cater for these huge, most
coveted events that you can think of.
The SoFi Stadiums, the Taylor Swifton sales, and then coming out of this
experience and coming out of Ticketmaster,seeing this again and again in retail
and seeing brands, creators, artists.
Fail their biggest fansover and over and over.
(03:37):
Like I'm a Nintendo fan.
I'm not a Swifty, but I definitelytry to get Oasis tickets and like
the same experience is everywhere.
Like people expect chaos.
They expect to be at midnight with allof their tabs open, their friends on
the line, everyone doing the same thing.
And when things go live.
It's gonna suck.
(03:57):
The site's gonna fallover, nothing's gonna work.
You're gonna go throughcheckout, it's gonna fail to,
to register your credit card.
Like there's all all kindsof issues with that process.
So we built fanfare to solve thoseproblems and make that experience
something that people actuallyare entertained by or keep coming
back, or at least reward people'stime and effort in that process.
(04:18):
Wow, that is so cool.
And a lot of great backgroundexperience that prepared you for
everything that you're doing now.
And specifically when it comes tothat customer experience, I feel like.
You know, with the lack of choicesor competition out there, it seems
like every day is chaos for us.
You know, and whether that's fromthe, the backend of buying tickets
or just the customer serviceexperience as a whole, this is what
you know, what you're providing now.
(04:38):
This is what people want.
Something new, something different,and successful product launches,
and especially for businessowners, the scaling issue is tough.
Yeah, we built somethingabsolutely nice right now, but.
How do we get that to the next level?
That's such a challenge.
Yeah, and it's a model that I seemore and more brands picking up, you
know, with Gen Z and social media,like there's more ability to drive
(04:59):
hype and FOMO around a particularproduct or particular product launch.
It's a really powerful model.
But then as you say, youget into that problem of.
I have a million peopleshow up on launch day.
There is no way I can getmy arms around that problem.
People are gonna be upset,people are gonna be disappointed.
And even if you are a Nike and you haveyour sneakers app, like the trust goal
(05:21):
for the Sneakers app right now is at 20%.
I. Like, even brands with enormousresources struggle to deal with
these kinds of experiences.
So that's where we come in and wetry and, you know, provide like a
facilitator for these kind of events.
Is it, is it a lack of money for mostof these businesses or business owners?
Or is it lack to the resources orjust knowledge that, hey, if you put,
(05:43):
you know 10 times the traffic ontoyour website, it can't handle that?
Yeah, it's a mixed bag, honestly.
Like if you take TicketMaster, for example.
It's a decades old platform.
It was never built withthat kind of scale in mind.
And these things, you know, they'redifficult to try and refactor and change
whilst people are still like, whilst wateris still going through the pipes, right?
(06:06):
It's difficult.
To try and just replace a huge chunk ofsomething like Ticketmaster or Shopify
or whatever it is, while people areusing that platform and you see that,
you see increased traffic causes,things to start creak and fall over.
Scalability is not something that youcan go back and just add after the fact.
It has to be woven throughout theproduct from the very beginning, which
(06:27):
is what we've been pushing to do to do.
So yeah, I think that's part of it.
I think also just unsure about how torun a campaign or unsure about exactly
what kind of hype they're generating.
There's definitely a lack of dataabout demand, and you see that.
You see people put.
Google forms up on their productspage expecting that to be enough when
(06:47):
hundreds of thousands of people and botsand bad actors come in through their
product page and it just does not work.
We've seen some very bad examples andyou know, I think if your site falls
over and it's a normal business day,it's a bad time for sure, but it's,
it doesn't cause the kind of rage thatyou get when you fail on launch day.
Like those are moments.
(07:07):
That people immediately head toTwitter or Reddit or wherever they're
going, and you will get some negativesentiment coming out of those moments.
It's like the expectationsare higher there.
They know, Hey, you've beenplanning this, you knew about it.
Why weren't you ready for us?
Yeah.
And I've heard from people, they feellike maybe the failure was part of the
process, maybe it was a feature of theprocess, and that's absolutely not true.
(07:29):
Having been on the other side of it,there's a firefight happening on the
other side of things like people are.
Turning off certain payment methods.
They're, you know, trying to dealwith situations as they come up.
And like if you're going for a switchon launch day and you hit Best Buy and
it falls over, you go somewhere else.
Right?
Like you find the first placethat's available to take your
(07:49):
request and you stay there.
Right.
That's lost business for sure.
Absolutely.
And oftentimes for, for a lotof consumers and businesses.
There's just that one shot opportunity.
It, this is like a first impressionand that experience that they
have that's gonna carry through.
And like you said, they're gonna hoponto Twitter or social media and,
and really just rip you a new onebecause they didn't have a great
experience and they, they're angry.
(08:11):
They need to tell the world about it now.
Exactly.
Like people are ready that white.
Right.
Like you mistreat them in that moment.
Like you are in for some youare in for some pain for sure.
I was watching a, aJohnny Ive presentation.
He was talking about obsessing, aboutthe wrapping for their cables in some
particular product he was talkingabout, but like the idea of obsessing
(08:31):
not just about the final product, but.
All the way through that process issomething that's really important.
Like you build fandom by treatingpeople like as if they're VIPs
all the way through the process.
And if you fail in that moment, youare not treating people like VIPs.
Like they feel gypped in that momentand they, they don't come back.
(08:51):
Absolutely.
I feel like your serviceswould really help.
Yum.
Brands, specifically their Taco Bellbrand, I'm hearing online all the time.
Every Tuesday they have these specialpromos or like drops where if you
sign up and get this code, you canclaim for some rewards, but they're
always sold out or the website crashesor they can't get their order in.
And this, this is a recurringissue week after week, some people
(09:12):
still go back 'cause you knowthey have some brand loyalty.
But for, for many businesses,they don't get that chance.
Is this, is this now a feature or is TacoBell like still figuring out week by week?
Because you can't just turn on a switchand say, you know, our website can take 10
times as much traffic, or it fixes this.
There's a lot involved.
There's pieces like melded together.
Absolutely.
And as you increase demand,now you're inviting.
(09:35):
Bots and bad actors into the process.
And you know, that was always a challengeat Ticketmaster, pre Ticketmaster,
especially now it's easier and easierfor people to create sophisticated bots
that try and work around your process.
And now you get that secondaryfrustration of, you know, I showed up
for the switch two on launch day andnow it's on eBay for 10 x the price.
(09:56):
Like what happened?
Like someone got through, like,how did these people get through?
And the answer is like, theyworked around the system.
They worked around theprocess that you put in place.
So you are, you are entering into anarms race when you get successful.
And that's also not a thing thatbrands can get their arms around.
Like that's, that's something that, thatwe've spent a significant amount of time.
(10:17):
Addressing previous companiesand it's something that we
worked into to fanfare too.
Nice.
Absolutely.
And for a successful product launch,what does that look like for a
business starting out from theconception to actually launching it?
Are, are there some commonalities thatgood product launches should have?
That's a good question.
So I think considering what itis you're trying to achieve.
(10:37):
I think there are different typesof limited edition collabs, drops,
limited editions, and so on.
They all have different purposes.
So it could be that you're tryingto draw people to the wider catalog.
You're trying to build an audience.
Maybe you're trying to build brandawareness, or maybe you already have
hype around a particular product,like a switch when you're just
trying to make it through launch day.
And so you really have to think aboutwhat your intent of that process is.
(11:00):
Like, what are you trying to deliver?
What kind of metrics are you tryingto increase through this process?
And then work your way upstream.
Like you have to be thinking aboutreaching people where they are.
You have to be thinkingabout social media.
You have to be thinking about howpeople discover the brand, how people
engage with the brand upstream.
And then from then think aboutcapturing as much data as as you
(11:21):
can before the actual on sale.
So, you know, having a wait list,having some idea about where people
are coming in, how often peoplecome back, that kind of thing.
It's again, something that we encouragebrands to do is just wait list
from the very beginning so that youcan get some estimation of traffic
on the, on the actual launch day.
And then on the launch day, if you'renot using something that's gonna.
(11:45):
Or scale up, you just have tobe prepared for the worst case.
Honestly, you know, you may get 10x extra traffic that you expect.
You may get bots that come inand, and bring your site down and
cause some massive frustration.
And you just have to be ready to dealwith those issues in the moment and then
deal with those issues after the fact.
And if you're successful, also,like trying to keep that loop going.
(12:06):
We see a lot of brands, they just dothese one-offs, like Black Friday, cyber
Monday is a great example, one-offs.
And then come January, like you'renot expecting to see those people ever
come back until the next Black Friday.
It's an opportunity toreach out to those people.
Like trying to bring them intolike a limited edition or limited
access on sale for the next thing.
One of the things we've seensuccessful is if people fail.
(12:29):
A number of times, like youturn up for your Travis Scott
dunks and you fail five times.
Most brands just leave youout in the cold, right?
And, and that's it'sreally important signal.
These are potential VIPs.
You should try and bring thosepeople back into the brand.
So you should try and createsomething that's exclusive to the
L Club, like the people who, justun unlock you through the process.
(12:50):
I love what you mentioned about makingsure you have a wait list, because having
that customer data, just knowing, likeyou said, the demand that you can expect
but the fact that you can communicatedirectly one-on-one with that audience now
who expressed interest in it, and imaginehow that can build the relationship.
And customer engagement beyondthat, now you have suggested
products that might be better.
You can even absolutely consider couldyou take like a, I guess like an everyday
(13:14):
average normal product that would normallyjust be tossed onto the shelf and make it
into a fancy product launch and make itinto a bigger thing than normally would,
you know, it doesn't have to be new.
Could that happen with any other product?
Yeah.
We've seen brands do that successfully.
Like mischief is a great example.
Where they'll have products that, youknow, maybe they have 10 of a particular
product and you know, maybe they, theseare Jesus sandals that they're selling.
(13:37):
A very limited number of, like,that can be made into a thing if
you craft the campaign correctly,
like there's marketing involved.
Like you can use a bit more of justthe incentives, just the typical
marketing for your everyday products to.
Kind of create like a new productlaunch from it, kind of create demand.
Yeah, you can.
And I think you mentionedthe recommended products.
(13:58):
This is also something that we don't seebrands do and that we're building into
the platform right now, is the idea thatyou can go in, you could add polls and
things upfront, so you see like whatproduct are you interested in seeing next?
Like what kind of colorways areyou interested in seeing next?
And then if you fail, recommendsomething to those people in that moment.
Like, we know you are interestedin seeing these products.
(14:19):
Here is some stuff, and it could be aproduct that you have just sitting around
in the warehouse that's just taking upspace, but offer a discounted rate for
those products or offer them limitedaccess and access code to the next drop.
For that product.
Interesting.
Very nice.
Now, I'm kind of curious, becauseI ask all of, you know, business
owners, entrepreneurs, how, howAI is affecting their business.
Has it either been helpful orhurtful to you, and where do you
(14:42):
see the trend kind of changing?
Incredibly helpful.
I'm an engineer.
I have an engineer background, so I, Ihear from my friends and colleagues some
of the trepidation around AI for sure.
But these tools, especiallyin the last 12 months, are
incredible, like incredibly useful.
To someone who is switchingcontext frequently, who is like
(15:03):
stepping into domains that theydon't have a ton of experience in.
It just helps bridge that gap.
And I feel like right now there's noproblem that I see off in the future where
I don't think, you know, it's gonna bean incredibly painful process to ramp up.
Like I know I have something therethat I can reach to, to try and
get me up that hill more quicklythan I would've done normally.
(15:26):
And like had I started the business.
With these tools as they are rightnow, I would've shortcut so much pain.
You know, just in the, the basicsteps of setting up a company.
Like you can find available tools andthings out there, but you have to be
aware of those tools and you have to beaware of certain like hazards and bumps
in the road and all of those things.
So it's been incredibly helpfulthere on the engineering front.
(15:47):
Last couple of months have really.
Stepped up.
I'm coding right now actually.
I have a Claude code doing some stuffin the background and that's been
the way I've been working for thelast couple of months is just kicking
things off in the background, justpaying attention to it and then coming
back, which is making the engineeringteam way more productive than it was.
That's incredible.
Yeah, I know.
Businesses are using a AI in, in thedifferent realms of their business.
(16:11):
First it was just okay,it create some copy.
Okay.
Maybe does some images.
Now it's doing website coding now.
You can create a Python scriptand have some automations and
robots running in the background.
Just the stuff is in incredible.
And it definitely does bridgethe gap for those with limited
knowledge to just go into kind of,you know, planning, brainstorming,
putting all these pieces together.
So I'm just kind of, you know,curious to ask how I. Certain
(16:32):
businesses are using the AI tools.
Now I'm more curious about trends sinceyou first started and I guess have,
have product launches before the digitalage changed quite a bit since then.
What are still like the foundationor the principles that are still true
for like a successful product launch?
Yeah, I think the principlesare largely the same.
I think scarcity and fomo.
(16:55):
It's like an innate human trait that wecan't turn off like that has always been
successful in driving product sales.
I think what's different nowis the ability to create that
high firma around the products.
I think you see Emma Chamberlain.
Like, I'm just down the road fromcentury City Mall and there is a pot
mar and a an Emma chamber and coffeeplace right next to each other.
(17:15):
Always have giant linesoutside them, right?
The ability to drive traffic to storesand to online stores has vastly increased.
So, you know, if you're successful andyou build a campaign that can do this,
and I encourage people to look around.
Not just at the, you know, theKim Kardashians of the world.
You may not necessarily have KimKardashian that can sell your
products, but there are influencersout there, athletes out there
(17:39):
who have giant followings, wholike have been underutilized.
I think these are great brandambassadors, people who can
drive hype around your products.
So I would encourage that, thatmodel for more and more brands.
Absolutely.
I, I find that a lot of businesses, whenthey're trying to think of an idea, it's
usually the managers and directors thatthey're getting together in a meeting
(18:00):
rather than asking their customers.
It's like you literally havethis gold mine of information of.
Your ideal customer who actually wants totell you, this is what I want from your
product or service, this is what I expect,this is what I'm hoping in the future.
So I hope we can lean more into,like you mentioned, the polls, the
customer data driven insights because.
That that's your market.
Who is wants your product andthat's who you should be building
(18:22):
for and asking those questions to.
Yeah, and I think this ties togetherwith AI too, which is try and
differentiate yourself in any way you can.
I think with ai, like the standard hasthe, the bar has has definitely been.
Raised and the expectation is thingsare gonna be grammatically correct and
it's gonna look pretty good, right?
You differentiate yourself byjust having that human touch, that
(18:44):
kind of differentiating crackle toyour copy or to to whatever it is.
And that can reallyseparate you from the pack.
And the same is true for launches.
I dunno if you saw, there was adoctor squash on sale where they
were selling soap that was infusedby Sydney Sweeney's bathwater.
That's hilarious.
Crazy idea.
Yeah.
It's, it's a, it's likea, it's like, what?
(19:06):
Why, why would you ever do that?
But they crashed their sight.
They sold out in seconds.
Those soaps were goingfor 2000 pounds on eBay.
Shortly after.
You really need to think about waysto separate yourself from that pack.
And maybe that's doing somethingwith a little humor a little.
A little bit more of that cracklemischief again, is a great example.
If people go and look at whatmischief is doing, I think that's
(19:29):
a, a great example to follow
really.
I mean, it's always interestingwith just product launches
and, and marketing in general.
'cause it's like oftentimes we oftenthink we have to go for the direct sales.
We have to make an ad, you know,or we have to directly sell rather
than make something funny, somethinghilarious, something different.
Like you said, you have tostand out in, in the world
where chat BT and AI can just.
Pump out a bunch ofcopy and images for you.
(19:50):
You need something that's different.
And have you found differences betweenlike indirect or direct selling when
it comes to the marketing campaigns?
Because I feel like just, justthat concept of, yeah, it's infused
with Sidney Sweeney's bath water.
Like, who would've thought of that?
That's crazy.
So sometimes it's the out ofthe box that does really well.
It does.
But I think authenticity online, onsocial, like across all different
(20:11):
aspects, really, really pays off.
So if you have.
A narrative.
If you have a story that you can beauthentic with, and that's really gonna
help you differentiate yourself, right?
If people can, can get behind youand get behind the brand, and they
understand the narrative of the brand.
That's, that's really helpful.
Absolutely.
We're gonna have a few morequestions, but for this moment we
like to ask where can people findyou and connect with you online?
(20:32):
They can find me at fanfare.io.
We have a guidebook that we've justpublished that talks about all the
different aspects of this campaign,and you can find that fanfare.
Dot io slash playbookif you wanna find me.
LinkedIn is always a place that Ihang out for my sins, so if you wanna
connect with me and chat with me
on LinkedIn, very nice.
And we'll have those linksavailable done on the show notes
(20:53):
and the description for everybody.
We have a few more questions.
Michael wanted to ask you, if youhad to go back in time and give
yourself one piece of advice, whatwould that piece of advice be?
This is very vague.
I think it would be, go for it.
You know, I think I'm,I'm no spring chicken.
I've been doing this a while and I think,think I was probably ready to have done
this before, before I actually venturedinto this, and I found myself on these
(21:18):
shores by like taking the path leasttraveled, and that's always been the
thing that I kind of gravitate towards.
But.
I would definitely give myself a, a kickjust just to get me to, to step out of
comfort zones when I found myself in them.
Absolutely.
I think we all need that, andmany businesses don't even start,
or they fail because of that.
They, they wait a little too longor they're just hesitant to, to
jump off that board there andthen, or, or they just never try.
(21:41):
I. And I agree.
It's, it's like that action piece.
We, we definitely just need to try it.
There's some risk involved That'sgonna be scary, that comfortability.
Yeah.
We're gonna lose that.
But I, I think that's a growthopportunity for us when, when
we're learning, that's when we,you know, start to grow and expand.
I. Yeah.
And I, I, I think when I talk toengineering colleagues and, and people who
(22:02):
are more down that in that field, there'sdefinitely some trepidation about ai.
But I would say like when there'sbig moments like this, when
there's enormous change, there'senormous opportunity, there's huge
risks that come along with it.
But there's enormous opportunity andengineers in, in particular, like you
were using these tools on a daily basis.
You are.
Ahead of the curve withthese technologies.
(22:22):
You can go out and you can try andpush yourself to, to, you know, start
a company or, or do something that'syou know, maybe something that's a
little, a bit of a stretch for you.
But I, I think those are, there's greatopportunities in these moments, I think.
Absolutely.
We always like to ask our entrepreneursabout your past experiences, leaders,
the mentors that have maybe beenimpactful and helpful in your life.
(22:44):
Did you wanna give ashout out to anyone who.
Had inspired or mentored you alongin your entrepreneurial journey?
I've had a few.
I, I had a, an incredible manager,bill Press, who I met at Salesforce
and I think he instilled inme with a great sense of calm.
He was such a, a zen master whowas dealing with, like looking
(23:05):
back, he was dealing with a lot ofpressure and we had a lot of things
that we were working through and.
He was just so calm, collected,would work through problems with
the team and try and address liketheir actual deep down concerns.
As we were going through this, actuallyworked with him, Optimizely, where we
were going through an issue and he had,people were flaming out, they'd been
(23:26):
ups since four in the morning dealingwith issues and so on, and people
were fearful of change and the kindof pushing back on rolling things out.
And he sat us down, he listenedto our problems and then he,
he tried to really go deeper.
And figure out exactlywhere our concerns were.
Put a plan together to addressthose concerns and move forward.
And yeah, definitely lessonsfrom my days working with Bill.
(23:49):
Absolutely.
Has that helped change, change the waythat you lead and interact with people?
I, I assume you're probablymore calm under pressure now.
You're like, if, if that person can doit, and that's what I learned from it.
It just sets you up forsuccess going forward.
Yeah.
I think as a leader, people look toyou for how to act how to respond.
And if you freak out.
If you, if you lose your temperand all of those things, you
(24:13):
are, you are setting a, a set ofguidelines that people will follow.
People will.
We'll chart a course based on what you do.
So I think being calm, collected,you know, understanding where people
are coming from, people have concernsthat they may voice, that you need
to go a little deeper on to reallyunderstand where it's coming from.
Mm-hmm.
So I think that's really importantas a leader to, to really understand
(24:34):
what people's motivations are, whatthey're really going through to try and.
To try and make everythingas successful as you can.
Absolutely.
What are businesses failing ator what should they stop doing
with their product launches?
You keep seeing this all the timeand they need to get rid of this
specific thing within their productlaunches to stop doing can maybe,
(24:55):
how much time do we have?
I mean, honestly, just crossing yourfingers and hoping is never a good
strategy for this kind of thing.
Like we see so much bubblegum andsticky tape of all kinds of different
solutions, solutions to this problem.
The Google Forms is one case, but wesee people using all kinds of like
(25:17):
Air Table or Excel behind the scenes,and they expect that it's gonna
scale, or they just hope that it'sgonna scale and it always ends badly.
So I would say know that if you havea product launch coming Black Friday,
cyber Monday's coming up, like youmay get more traffic than you expect.
You may get bad actors and bots comingin that you don't expect, and don't
(25:38):
just hope that that things are gonnascale and things are gonna work well.
Yeah, absolutely.
There's definitely some great advice.
Wanted to ask you, what areyou looking forward to most in
the rest of 2025 or in June?
June of 2025 for recording?
But do you have any new productlaunches or exciting services or things
that you're gonna be switching up?
Or taking on differently forthe rest of 2025 and beyond?
(25:59):
Yeah, so we, we are buildingmore things upstream.
I mentioned the social media andannouncement aspect, so we're
building that into the platformto try and help people structure
the entire campaign around this.
It's an, it's an event you arecreating and it involves marketing.
It involves the e-comm directorand the coordination of all
(26:20):
those people in that moment.
So we wanna address the whole.
And deal with that.
One of the things I'm really excitedat coming from an events background,
we're gonna be launching real lifeproduct towards the end of the year.
So we've all seen the lines aroundthe block and the painful camping out
that people do for in real life drops.
I think there's some enormouspotential with gathering people
(26:43):
together, having a communal event.
Around a particular productor a popup or something.
So TBD there's more stuff to announcetowards the end of the year, but we
have something coming up in Paristhat hopefully we will we'll showcase
and, and people will be excited about.
Oh, that is very, very exciting.
I, I hope that can become popularand make its way over here.
Just more of that community driven,kind of like, get people involved.
(27:05):
I, I think that's somethingthat's missing and I feel brands
and businesses and consumers aremissing out on, on that connection.
Absolutely.
I think, you know, going to a live event.
You have 60,000 people sometimes all, likeif they could join a communal event, if an
athlete could launch a particular productin that stadium just for the people who
(27:26):
attend that event, that's a, that's areally engaging, compelling experience
and like it, it helps foster that fandom.
So I'm really excited for thatlaunch towards the end of the year.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I only have time for onemore question I'd like to ask.
Is there anything we haven'ttalked about yet that you have
a passion about, wanna share?
With our audience here.
I mean, I, I, I definitely have issueswith discount codes in particular.
(27:48):
We, we we're coming onto to BlackFriday, cyber Monday, and I see like
sometimes this is a path that peoplego down to try and create hype and
awareness is like 50% off through.
And, and for me, like.
Just so you know, you're trainingpeople to always expect those discounts.
Like we've all been to those storeswhere like if there's no discount,
(28:09):
I'm not purchasing, like I'm gonnawait a few months until they have
some other offer that's coming up.
Like you break pricing disciplineand then you are training your.
Customers to, to waitfor those discount codes.
So I think I would encourage peopleto try and find a better way that
doesn't break with pricing discipline,and encourages people to keep coming
back without those discount codes.
(28:29):
Right?
Absolutely.
'cause once you make that mistake, itcould be a quick race to the bottom.
You're just setting the wrong.
Expectations here, and you're gonna betrying to dig yourself out of that hole.
And it's gonna be tough.
It's gonna be a challenge.
Now you've conquered that price pointwith everybody, and I would do the same.
I would wait for that codeto come through my email.
I would be just waiting for it.
Like, all right, where'sthat next 50% off?
Come on through.
(28:50):
Yeah.
There was a furniture place backin the UK where they always had
like 90% off sales, and there'sno way that was 90% off for one.
But like, who's buying this when it's.
Full price, like no one's gonna turnup unless there's a 90% off sale.
It makes no sense.
Exactly.
There's a pop popular retailer here, aKohl's department store where everybody
knows them as just wildly inflatingthe prices to then knock 50% off.
(29:14):
And then they do like arewards program, like a rebate.
You get your Kohl's cash andyeah, it's a, it's a whole thing.
But now people have anchoredthat into their pricing strategy.
They just call that the, theKohl's pricing strategy now.
Exactly.
That.
Exactly.
Like people know what you're doing.
Yeah.
They know that that's nothow much those things cost.
Yeah.
It's not how you treat your customers.
(29:34):
No.
There's definitely a good way, you know,for for businesses both to do, do great,
do the, do the right thing, right.
And connect with consumersand kind of advocate for them.
Create that community as opposed to.
You need us.
We don't need you.
Here's your product.
Get outta here.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
That's how it feels sometimeswhen you, when you don't get.
(29:55):
Your product in a drop.
I think the Oasis Ticket debaclewas a, a great example where
legitimate fans lost their tickets.
Yes.
Just because the vendor justdecided like you did something
that registered as a bot for us.
No tickets for you.
Like maybe you booked a flight,maybe you booked a hotel.
Like that's horrendous
man.
So many lessons to be learned and it.
(30:16):
It just gives us insightfor, you know, having a more
successful launch in the future.
Whether you're small, medium, orlarge business, it's something
that you need to consider for.
For everyone who's listening, make sureyou check out Michael's links down the
show notes and the description here.
Michael, we appreciate you comingon and sharing your tips and
tricks and your wisdom with us.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you, Chris.
Absolute pleasure.
Thank you.
Thanks.
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