How do you determine your product's market value beyond its features?
In today’s episode, Alan and Sjoerd Handgraaf, Sharetribe's chief marketing officer (CMO), discuss Sharetribe’s origins, product evolution, and how Sjoerd’s team identified its ideal product positioning by evaluating the true value it provides to marketplace founders. Sjoerd shares insights into the unique dynamics of building and branding two-sided marketplaces and explains how a “give first, ask later” philosophy has helped Sharetribe develop trust and lasting relationships with its community.
Sjoerd grew up as a do-it-yourself (DIY) punk rocker in a steel town in the Netherlands. He originally planned to become an English teacher, but love brought him to Finland, where he discovered the startup world. With his DIY background, Sjoerd joined Sharetribe as the first marketing hire in 2016 and became CMO in 2020. Sharetribe is a software as a service (SaaS) solution that aims to democratize the sharing economy by empowering marketplace founders with a no-code platform builder.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:07):
you ready to go beyond the basics of marketing?
I'm Alan Hart and this is Marketing Beyond, where we talk about the questions that sparkchange and share ideas that challenge the status quo.
Join us as we explore the future of marketing and its endless potential.
Why do people choose us?
(00:29):
What words do they use?
We went through support history.
We went through all our reviews online, both good and bad.
What are the terms that...
How do people out there actually understand our product?
And what do we think is the benefit?
Today on the show I've got Sword Hangrove.
(00:50):
He's the CMO at Share Tribe.
Share Tribe is building a no-code marketplace software for founders.
Sword has over a decade of experience in digital marketing and growth for startups with afocus on democratizing technology.
He's also a marketplace expert who advises marketplace startups on early growthstrategies.
(01:10):
Additionally, he hosts Two-Sided, the marketplace podcast where he interviews successfulmarketplace founders, investors, experts,
to discuss topics related to starting, building, and scaling online marketplacebusinesses.
On the show today, we talk about the two-sided marketplace, how it's unique, what it meansfor Share Tribe.
We talk about the power of getting your positioning right to get go-to-market clicking.
(01:35):
And we talk about his philosophy around give first.
That and much more with my guest, Sjoerd Hengra.
Sure.
Welcome to the show.
(01:55):
Thanks for having me.
We're going to have a lot of fun talking about your company, what you're doing from amarketing standpoint, et cetera.
But there's this thing about your background that I hear you were an aspiring record labelmogul.
And I'm not sure I've had one of those on the show before.
So let's talk about that.
Yeah, I think that's a grave, grave exaggeration.
(02:17):
Now, I used to be, still am, I think you can never really say that you're no longer apunk, but I used to be really into punk music and the punk scene when I lived in the
Netherlands, where I'm originally from.
And yeah, there is this sort of DIY do-it-yourself philosophy there that, you know,anybody can do what they want to bring out the record, you know, or play guitar, even if
they can't.
(02:37):
mean, that's sort of the foundation of the music.
And so I had a little record label.
because we wanted to put out my friend's band.
so I don't think I've ever been like aspiring.
And you know, there's not a lot of money in punk rock.
But um I was a record label boss for a while.
mean, we put out I think, I should have looked this up.
(02:59):
But we put out like one cassette, a CD, for those who still remember, and a DVD.
Nice, nice, nice.
Well, you shipped products, so you technically are record label.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
Well, you did mention you are uh Dutch, like birth, but you're living in Finland today,right?
(03:23):
And it's where the company is based.
Yeah.
The cultural differences, are they similar or very different?
They're quite a bit different actually.
The reason I'm there, because I did a student exchange with probably a country thatcouldn't be more of the same than the Netherlands, which is Denmark, where then on the
exchange I met my wife, which is the reason why I now move to Finland.
(03:46):
I Finnish people are quite like, I mean, from a global perspective, probably quitesimilar, but there are some things about they don't do small talk around here.
So it's, that's something to, especially in the Netherlands, because I think Dutch peoplehave a reputation of being extremely straightforward and just saying it like it is.
that, that has been, you know, that has some friction or adjustments on my side also, alsowithin the marriage, but, uh, but culturally I still think, you know, they're like
(04:15):
Northern, Western Europeans deal many, many other things.
But yeah, it's like,
I think in the States, like think like the Midwest comes to mind.
think that like that there's a lot in like Northern, like Northern Michigan, like upperpeninsula is where a lot of Finnish people go.
And I think that's sort of, think that's where you need to look for the, I always talk tosomeone earlier who was from Missouri and who'scribed themselves as like the show me
(04:40):
state.
I mean, that is really also what Finnish people are like, there's a great opportunity fora marketer because they're not so great at marketing themselves.
You know, they're like, oh, the product sells itself.
So a lot of opportunities for me.
That's funny.
Yeah.
I worked with some great Dutch colleagues and you're very accurate about the directness,which I appreciate to be honest, especially if they're on my team, we can get right down
(05:02):
to business.
But it's a little stilting when you first experience it.
Yeah, yeah, I know it is.
I mean, especially like, I think there's a lot of problems with British people, eventhough we're like really close, like geographically, they're like, just the way of saying
things without saying things that the British has sort of elevated to an art and Dutchpeople are like, why don't you just say it?
(05:25):
Yeah, it's fun.
It's fun those things.
it.
love it.
Well, from your, I guess, Dutch background growing up to school and other countries,what's been your path to where you are today, which you're the CMO at Share Tribe.
Yeah, that's one, know, the punk history maybe already sort of spoils it a bit, but Iwasn't never thought I was going to be a CMO.
(05:48):
I hadn't even really thought about marketing as a profession, I think, like growing up.
My dad has worked in the same steel factory, which sort of like, I come from this sort ofBruce Springsteen kind of town where like more than half the population works either
directly or indirectly in the steel factory.
marketing was not like something that people discussed at our house.
And I would actually...
(06:09):
trained to be or like educated to be an English teacher.
I have a bachelor from University of Amsterdam in English language and culture and a minorin education.
But then when I came to Finland, so after I met my wife at the exchange, I came to Finlandand said, okay, let's see.
Let's see what's happening.
We had a nice time.
Why not go there?
And I realized that the education system here is uh much further developed, honestly.
(06:32):
Like it's very well regarded worldwide also to finish the education system.
And so my degree didn't really
gave me any opportunity to do that as a profession.
But then because of the punk rock thing, like part of that was a lot of like thingshappening on the internet, like forums, et cetera, communities.
was part of this online music community and then combined that a little, think a littlebit with this sort of entrepreneurial mindset that I had from the record label and some
(06:56):
other small projects.
I was able to get a job with a startup here, a local, like a domestic country here, whichmade like a website builder, kind of like what Wix is, but then like 2008, 2009.
And they were looking for a community manager because they had just launched sort of theirglobal brand.
They were very successful nationally and they're like, Hey, we can do thisinternationally.
So then I got into this thing called startup, which was also new to me.
(07:18):
Like I had never heard of what is a startup, like no idea.
But for those people who work in like startup and tech startups, that you know, that likesort of traditional education isn't really that important.
Like it's very much of the merit based career growth.
So I started there, this company called Moogo at the time.
It didn't, didn't make it internationally nationally still big success.
(07:41):
And I started as community manager, then became project manager, then sort of moved slowlymore and more towards like business development and marketing side, especially marketing
side.
And then, you know, Finland is a rather small country.
So once you get into that startup scene, you sort of roll on that automatically roll,especially if you're a foreigner like myself, and you don't have the, you you have to
(08:01):
build quite actively on your network, but then you, you, move.
It's a special skillset that you get, I think, from working in a startup.
You don't assume that things are taken care of.
There is just a little bit DIY thing, like you need to take responsibility.
And so I moved to another startup where I had a little bit more senior marketing role,like sort of purely marketing focused.
Then I had a great opportunity at this company called Usition.
(08:23):
There were a music learning app, or they still are music learning app.
Probably anybody who's ever played guitar or tried to look up a guitar playing videotutorial on the net has seen a commercial by them, I'd imagine.
And from there on, I got an opportunity to work at Share Tribe who were looking for theirfirst marketing hire.
And I was really on board with their sort of mission.
(08:43):
So it was around the time, like I started there, uh, 2016.
And it was just around time when like, you know, Airbnb was getting really big.
It was a CD impact of these like marketplace type companies.
So these two sided companies that don't own their own inventory.
And I saw sort of a huge, you know, it was also.
(09:04):
I think the peak of like what was called the sharing economy at the time, which may be inretrospect, retrospective, my bit of a misnomer, like a bit more benevolent name than the
industry actually was.
But yeah, I was really convinced by that business model.
And that's what Share Tribe basically provides.
Maybe, maybe I can talk a little bit about that.
Otherwise this story doesn't make so much sense.
(09:27):
Yeah, tell me a little bit more about like what is shared tribe?
How you how do you guys operate?
Who you serve that kind of thing?
That'd be great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So ShareDrive basically makes software for marketplace founders.
So if you have an Airbnb for X, Etsy for X idea, then we have a SaaS solution software asa service solution for anybody who has just a little bit of internet savvy, as I would
(09:49):
say, non-technical, but like myself, like I said, English little major, not a coder.
Of course I've gotten a bit more technical over the years, but anybody who's not technicalor doesn't want to spend too much time or money upfront coding.
Uh, can launch a fully comprehensive marketplace handling everything from user management,listing management, payment, booking calendar, the whole, like any feature you can imagine
(10:13):
for that model comes pretty much out of the box.
Of course there are exceptions and, but we help, yeah, we try to help founders and we helpcurrently more than 1200 marketplace projects are powered by share tribe.
So, so yeah, so they were like, their mission was really like that.
They sort of targeted the thing like, we want to democratize the sharing economy.
And I was very.
Maybe the punk thing again.
(10:34):
I was like, that is something I can get behind.
Like that was a very, very cool thing.
And it was for me, an opportunity to the lead of a marketing team.
that was a, that was a cool, very cool opportunity.
That's awesome.
mean, you guys serving this, like the marketplace creator, if you will, pretty unique.
Like I'm curious in the evolution of the startup, was that always the focus out of thegate?
(10:59):
No, no, actually, it's a really cool story.
Part of this, you know, comes, I wasn't there at the very beginning.
I'm not one of the founders, but one, like I said, one of the earlier employees.
But the idea actually came was born as part of university research projects.
here, there's a very good technical university here.
Now it's called Aalto University, but it used be the healthy key Institute of Technology.
(11:20):
And they had a research project to make campus more sustainable.
And part of that was this sort of lending platform, right?
Like
As a student, if you've ever lived on a campus, you know that like who has a drill, youknow, I need a drill.
Who, we're throwing a party tonight, who has a smoke machine?
Like we have like that kind of exchange was sort of happening that or that was what theywanted to facilitate.
(11:41):
And it was quite a success.
I think it was quite a popular platform.
Like I said, like was early, I think that was maybe 2009, 10, 11, around that time.
And uh then the research project ended and the two founders, Antti and Juho, were, andthey got quite excited by this sort of like being software operator thing.
And they're like, Hey, we would like to, we would like to build a, we would like to turnthis into a business.
(12:05):
So they first started with trying to sell that platform to other universities and thenother institutions.
But I don't know anybody who's ever worked with organizations like that.
It's not a...
sales cycles are rather long.
So it's not like, you know, it's not like a hockey stick startup growth that you want tosee.
But then throughout like moving through that scene and talking to a lot of people, theyhad met a lot of people with really great ideas about bringing two things together, like
(12:30):
sharing economy or marketplace platform ideas who all ran into this problem of theplatform.
And so then, you know, like both moment, like, actually we have this platform.
Why don't we make it available to others and maybe.
earn some money off the back of it.
So that's how the idea for Shutter was born.
So it wasn't always the business focus, but quite soon that became the business focus.
(12:52):
And we started with a very, like for the time, very cool app, which was sort of like aWordPress type approach where you just sign in, you call it ellenhart.shutter.com.
It's immediately live.
can immediately...
You could immediately get users payments running.
You just needed to get a PayPal account connected and it worked.
It was very basic, but it was extremely fast, extremely reliable.
(13:17):
And over time we expanded the feature set a bit.
The problem with that was that first of all, this business or like our target audience,like startups, know, 99 out of a hundred don't make it.
So there's a lot of sort of natural churn, which for subscription businesses is not great.
And then.
On the other side, there were a couple of customers who were really great at sort ofproving their, you know, hypothesis with our product has sort of MPP going, even got some
(13:44):
traction, even having like some thousands of transactions, who then ran into a need forsome feature that we didn't have, like some custom feature, like each marketplace has
their own special sauce.
That's basically sort of the premise of shared rep also that they share like 80 % of thesame features, but then there's like 10 to 20 % like
special sauce that they need to build that we will never build.
(14:05):
So they can build it on top.
So then we were also losing the good customers.
So then we built a new product around 2018, which was more technical.
It was like, I don't know for those people who work with the marketers who work with CMSsaround that time, there was this rise of like the headless CMS, like content flow.
(14:25):
And so that was quite promising that like, it's something that sort of is like the backendas a service, but the
you know, the thing in which you presented, uh you have to build yourself, but we don'tneed to maintain it as a software company.
It's quite, it was quite good.
So we built that it was a success, but then we had the problem that to, in order to takethat product into use, you need to build a client app or whatever, which is really, really
(14:49):
a challenge.
So we had it and we had a really good name in this being easy to use software.
So we had a bit of a friction that we had these two products.
It was hard to choose which one was fitting.
So then we put basically.
We bet the entire farm on the third product, which we released 2024, January, 20, which issort of the best of both worlds.
it's the marketplace backend as a service with as a no code layer on top, which anybodycan get into use.
(15:13):
And if you reach the point where you want to build new features that you just take whatyou already have from the no code platform.
Host is somewhere else and you can build anything on top.
So I hope this wasn't too sales pitchy, but it is sort of like a sort of naturaldevelopment on, on how we got there and sort of what we learned from feedback.
from the founders and see what our customers are doing.
And when I say founders, mean our customers actually, the marketplace founders.
(15:38):
Right, right.
No, I think it's super helpful.
It's not every day I talk to growth companies like yours that have learned, have had thebenefit of pivoting the business a few different times and the learnings that you take and
then how you reapply and retrench and go back after the market.
Yeah.
I mean, it's nice to say it now.
(16:00):
was not, it was a pretty, you know, that last product, took longer than we thought.
had like, you can look it up on our blog with the CEO has written quite a nice post abouthow we were basically like flat for two years, kind of like juggling these two products
and then building the third one.
ah So it wasn't like, was a, it was a
(16:23):
Yeah, it was exciting, but it was also not nice at times, but luckily, it paid out.
I think we learned a lot.
It's also on the marketing side, like all the things we learned through that journey.
Well, and you we've talked a lot about the getting the product right.
How did you think about like getting your your positioning right?
Like how you talk about what the product can do and and how does that as you think aboutit and maybe as you've gone through some of these pivots, like how does messaging or
(16:53):
positioning help to drive go to market?
Yeah, that's a great question because that is definitely one of the lessons that I referthat we learned because I imagine, you know, like the situation where we were in, where we
have like this highly technical product that you need to be technical to use, you need tobe technical to understand the benefit.
And then the other one, which is easy to use, but has technical limitations.
(17:15):
Then also, but like, you know, internally suffering from the, maybe the bias that mosttech companies have that you forget that
99 % of the world doesn't even know that a software like yours exists, like a categorylike yours is just unknown.
then like to have to explain all of that on those couple of seconds that people, excuseme, couple of seconds that people spend on your website.
(17:37):
like, it's such an incredible challenge and we are doing it probably much worse than wethought we were.
So then when we had this new product, these two stories came together in our heads atleast like before we launched it, we had a really great sit down with the entire company
or like.
representative of all the, all the department.
We're not a massive company that we're like 25 people in full time and then an army offreelancers and then remote people.
(18:02):
But we had people from product, people from customer support, coders, uh, and marketingpeople.
And we really sat down and was like, okay, what are the things like, why do people chooseus?
Like what words do they use?
So we went through support history.
We went through all our reviews online, both good and bad.
Like what other terms that how do people.
(18:23):
How do people out there actually understand our product and what do we think is thebenefits?
And we sort of lined them up and we use this great book called, obviously awesome by uhApril Dunford.
It's a book about sort of, it's truly like a sort of a guide to how to position yourselfin a sort of medium size to small business.
And yeah, we went through, we went through this whole like her whole exercise.
(18:46):
We just did a little bit to our needs, but it's essentially like map out what are thecompetitive alternatives.
So not,
not competitors, which I think is a mistake that marketers often make, that you just lookat direct competitors, but what are the competitive alternatives of doing what you offer
customers to do?
And for most, for example, for most marketing software, a competitive alternative isspreadsheet.
(19:11):
That's what people do.
Or even worse, just not doing anything.
Doing nothing is the competitive alternative.
For example, if you think about a marketing software,
Increase lead quality or whatever.
Like most people just don't, just don't do that.
Like they don't need to like their solutions to their problem is just ignore it.
So when you look at those, then you look at what are your unique benefits compared tothose and then try to wrap those in like values.
(19:39):
not features because a lot of especially tech marketers are like quite fond of listing thefeatures, but like what is the value that it unlocks?
Right?
Like what is the thing that it gives to customers?
And then once you have.
a couple of convincing values, then imagine like who cares about this, like who benefitsfrom this.
And that really gives you a really nice sort of recipe for coming up with yourpositioning.
(20:02):
So you can tell like, make it clear, what is the category that you're in?
What are your value props and who cares about them and try to sort of catch them.
So for example, as an example, what that means is that we now, the same way that Iintroduced ShareTribe, also, if you go to our marketing site, we are a marketplace
software for founders.
So we are not marketplace software for enterprises.
(20:23):
We are not marketplace software for existing marketplace, even though we get better andbetter at that.
But that is not deny enterprise customers or existing marketplaces.
But that is not how we position ourselves.
This is not how we, we are really in a little bit of a transitioning at the moment, liketowards more as our product gets more and more mature, we are able to sort of also more
(20:43):
and more mature customers.
But when we came out with the product, our positioning was crystal clear that we are.
for people who are starting businesses, like not for people who want to transfer theirmarketplace business.
from all, know, from the all, there's no clear metric on how you measure your positioning,but we can see on all cylinders that it was hitting really well, like in terms of
(21:04):
conversion on the page, in terms of clicking on the ads, in terms of converting in theproduct, you know, it was very, of course, the fact that it was a great product also
helped.
No, no, like no small thanks to the people in product team.
But I think it also just made everybody in the company internally also aligned, right?
(21:25):
So that whatever gets told in sales or whatever, whenever someone reached out to supportwhere the question that they are already able to sort of narrow down, okay, what type of
customer is this?
What is the story that we're telling them?
Are they the ones that care about the extendability, scalability or the price or thespeed?
So was this very, I think the first time ever that we were like fully aligned as a companyinternally on who we are serving and what we're doing.
(21:51):
it was really, that was really, yeah, it was really, I mean, it sounds like it was reallygreat.
Like it's really, yeah, it's, really fantastic actually.
Yeah, it sounds phenomenal, just like the, to your point, like the galvanizing of theinternal alignment.
But the other thing I think about when you're talking about the values and who it speaksto, you know, the notion of like, if the words and phrases that you're using in your
(22:15):
communications or in your sales resonate that much heavier with your target, like they seethemselves in your marketing.
Right?
Like they see themselves in your sales messaging um and becomes a, you know, no one lovesto be sold to, but everyone loves to buy.
And I think it gives them an opportunity to see something that's worth buying.
(22:39):
Right?
Right.
Right from the get go.
So it's pretty interesting.
Yeah.
And it's also, can also be quite, you know, like I, I'm, I've been imagined, like, I'm no,no, if you do this, but, know, once you, you know, as your marketing career sort of
progresses, you get some insights and then you sort of start thinking back at previouspositions that you had or projects and like, if I would have known, this, or, know, if we
(23:01):
would have had, you know, I often think like, if it would have had Instagram advertisingfor one company I worked for, like we would have, we would have, you know, been so much
more.
And I feel that like with positioning also like,
I feel like that, but also with some company I feel like, if we would have donepositioning, like, I don't know if we would have liked the outcome of how people talk
about us or what is the thing, why do they buy us, right?
(23:25):
That they just buy us because we're the cheapest and not because of the feature orsomething like that.
So I think I can imagine it can also be pretty, pretty brutal to do an exercise.
Yeah, it could be for sure.
For sure.
Well, I think the last time we talked, you talked about this notion of or an approach ofgive first, ask later.
(23:46):
And you talked about that in terms of like how you approach it with marketing and content.
And I'd love you to just like tell us a little bit more about what that is, because I wasintrigued by the notion of give first.
Yeah, it's, it's, um, it's again, like, it's nice to be here and have this conversationand make it sound, you know, like this is all a well orchestrated plan.
(24:10):
I think this is something that it's sort of morphed into.
think part of it has been indeed that we always want to.
We've always been a bit of a value driven company who was just honestly like, likegenuinely like to help founders.
Like, uh, you know, we were all, most people from the early team are also very active inthe local startup scene.
I think that that that's first of all into it.
(24:32):
So the concept behind it is, is, is quite, it's quite simple is that in our case, people,customers build the backbone of their business on our software.
We're not a complimentary software.
We're not a CRM for veterinarians or something who already have a business practice.
They just need something that helps them go a little bit better.
(24:53):
Most of our customers would probably not have been.
a marketplace founder if it wouldn't be for our business, for our software, because theyjust simply, like I said, they can't afford a coder or they wouldn't know where to get
started.
But that comes with the turn as well, because we need to be, for people to trust theirentire business with us, we need to be a reliable partner.
(25:19):
And I think that's where this sort of give first, ask later comes in as one part, that wejust want to be really
You know, we show, give, we give first, we're very sort of straightforward in what we haveto offer.
We like to offer value out of the gate and only make the sale if it's really clear tothem.
So there's no features that you need to, you know, you need to pay for it.
(25:40):
You can try out everything before you need to upgrade, for example, but it also comes tothe content marketing.
So what we do with our content marketing is that we have a sort of debris for all of ourwriting that we have done always has always been that.
It should be able, it should be completely tech agnostic.
So, so marketplace business are actually quite special, right?
They're a very unique business.
(26:02):
basically building two businesses at the same time.
There are all kinds of concepts that do not occur in the SaaS businesses or servicebusiness or consultancy businesses.
And there is surprisingly little written about it.
So a lot of car founders make the same mistakes over and over again.
you know, we have seen that we've worked with so many.
what we have done is basically we have just put a sort of a
(26:25):
Like a marketplace, well, we have a thing called the Marketplace Academy.
have a best seller on Amazon called the Lean Marketplace, and we just sort of collectedall of those lessons in there.
And we still do that type of things where we just bring out all the advice that you canuse.
You don't need to sign up.
You don't need to leave your email address even.
You can use all of that information, all of the knowledge that we have discovered throughour, you know, 11 plus years of experience without ever touching a shared product.
(26:51):
And
When I say ask later, actually, maybe we never really ask.
Maybe we just hope that like, you you're like, I've heard about this, you know, I've everytime I Google for something relevant to marketplace businesses or every other time I come
across this shared tribe, hopefully that will, you know, put into your mind, maybe they'relike the ones to check out.
Because now actually, when I say this, I don't even know.
(27:13):
Do we ask later?
Like, honestly, like we just, we just, we just put value out in the world.
And we hope that that convinces people to at least give us a try.
think a bit to a detriment, this might also be like the, I've talked about this with more,with other people, especially from North America or States where there's a little bit
more, maybe sales here, like show, like a little bit more showy approach to sales or todoing things.
(27:37):
We're like, oh, why don't you cast your email here?
Or why don't you like do demos this or something like that?
Or why don't you hop on, you know, don't do cold calling and stuff.
I think it's part culturally because like I said, you know, actually good that we talkedabout this finishing because people finish people that don't like to like talk or convince
people to things that are maybe not like, not entirely the case.
(27:58):
But I think it's also just because we're a product that you really, you need us or youdon't.
This is not some intent purchase.
So, so our only job is to convince you that for your need, we are the best.
And I think that's where it is sort of give first ask later come from.
Yeah, no, I mean, I like the notion.
I always think about it as you're educating, you're helping people solve their problems.
(28:23):
And yes, hopefully they will buy or you will prompt prompt them to buy.
And and it works out because you've kind of brought them along on the journey.
So it's it's an interesting piece.
Yeah.
And I think, I also think like it becomes more and more important now.
Like, like, um, I got an email a couple of weeks ago from this, well, my growth marketwould be a sort of, I would not do him just, but, he's an adventure capital partner at
(28:49):
Andrews and Horowitz.
used to be earlier growth.
It's called Andrew Chen.
It's great.
Like he blogged, used to blog a lot more about a lot of his old times.
Really good.
Like a really like a growth guru in that way.
don't, maybe guru is a growth expert, like someone with real experience at some reallyhigh scale companies.
And he put out an email saying that like all channels, our marketing channels are dead.
Meaning that like all of the channels that exist right now, they are completely saturated.
(29:13):
Everybody has discovered the best practices.
Every house, like, because for a while in marketing, you know, let's say from, let's say2008 up onwards, we were in this sort of cycle where every couple of years, something new
got added, right?
Like Facebook.
uh
like Twitter, then Facebook, then there was Foursquare, know, there was local, was mobile,there was, you know, it felt like there was a bit of a change, everything.
(29:42):
And so there was a lot of times, or when this first, you know, social graph came out fromFacebook, that was like, like some, was a really mind blowing progression since sort of
like digital advertising, digital marketing.
And so
I think for a while you could get by as a company and not get by, but you could succeed asa company by just being really good at a channel, being first mover and just really maxing
(30:04):
out, know, like this famous story from Airbnb, for example, that they did this crossposting to uh Craigslist, for example, or what was it called?
Like Zynga, you remember, with like Farmfield that really just optimized the use ofFacebook Friend.
So there were all these like, there was always some sort of
thing, new thing on which you could drive your business.
(30:25):
think his point, I don't know if it is, but maybe I'm paraphrasing, but I think his pointwas, and I agree with that, and I think a lot of marketers also sort of feel this
intuitively, like in their gut that that is a bit gone.
And actually in marketing, we are sort of moving more back to basics and like also inproduct that like everybody can do the distribution now equally well.
(30:47):
So we're back again at is your product any good?
Or is your messaging around your product getting good?
Because those are the things that are sort of unique to our business.
And for example, when the gift first ask later, is your brand good?
do you actually, are you able to live up to that also?
Because any company can be nice on the outside, you know, like, so, so yeah, so I feelthat it's a bit of a, we've been locked out a little bit.
(31:11):
And I think like, maybe that's something else to think about as a marketer nowadays.
Like, is this like, what is our competitive advantage here?
And I'm not sure if there is a clear answer to that.
Well, one other thing I wanted to bring up is that you also have a podcast and it's calledTwo-Sided, the Marketplace Podcast.
We've been talking about marketplaces and you know, I think caveat that that podcast isabout kind of lessons learned, et cetera.
(31:37):
What have you learned doing that podcast about marketplace and marketing one?
Yeah, I learned a lot.
know, like it was part of an exercise just to produce more knowledge for our customers,honestly, you know, because the job of the podcast is to discover what makes marketplace
successful.
So I learned a ton, like I learned a ton about top things you shouldn't do as amarketplace.
(32:01):
Can I, do I have some time to tell one of those or?
Yeah.
So I think like.
I think the first lesson that I learned and that we, sort of also tried to instill in ourcustomers, which is a bit weird considering that we're selling platforms is that
marketplace founders often mistake their products, their platform for their product, whichby which I mean to say is that the product of a marketplace is not the platform, the app,
(32:28):
the website, what it takes place.
The product is actually making the transaction happen between the two sides.
So there's this concept in marketplace is called liquidity, which is the likelihood that.
A seller is able to sell their produce and the buyer is able to find something that theywant to buy or it could be renter, whatever is the role.
And that is the livelihood of your marketplace.
(32:48):
That is what you make.
That is your product.
Like liquidity is your product.
And it's less, so it's much less about, I see a lot of founders could also be a bitnervous to go out there, like worry a lot about some details.
maybe we need this integration.
Maybe we need that.
It's like, no, actually you just need to go out there.
and bring both sides together and see, they care enough to give you some premium on top ofthis, right?
(33:10):
Because this is how most marketplaces monetize that like you facilitate the exchange ofvalue and you take a little bit off the top as your business model.
Connected to that is sort of the second lesson, which is that you should make in thebeginning, in most cases, you should make your marketplace as small as you can.
(33:30):
Meaning that don't start a worldwide
global marketplace for car rental or something like that.
Because what you need to do, most marketplaces, they have some sort of limitations thatdemand and supply, they need to be in the same physical location, for example.
So just stick with the car rental example.
ah Here in Helsinki, for example, if I would start a car rental marketplace, I shouldprobably focus even on a neighborhood of Helsinki where, okay, when it's a peer-to-peer
(33:55):
car sharing marketplace like
Are there enough cars in this one neighborhood and do I get enough rental?
I shouldn't even care about the entire Helsinki, let alone Finland.
It should just be about those two things.
That's where your marketplace start.
So I think like, I think those, know, if there's any sort of things, two things that I'velearned that I, talked to lot of founders like mentioned again and again, it's like, these
are the two things that I check off at the gate that like, where are you, what are youdoing?
(34:19):
Are you doing this or are you not doing this?
Because I think this is the number one mistake that, number one and number two mistakethat marketplace founders make.
When it comes to podcasting, I don't know how much I learned about it besides the factthat it's hard to do.
(34:41):
It's cost a lot of time.
And maybe, and you can't really tell because it's just a conversation, but to listen, tohear what's the guest saying and then try not to guide it too much.
When it comes to marketing the podcast,
I have just benefited from the fact that over the years we have had uh a pretty good uhmailing list and community around the brand already.
(35:07):
So I think I was able to clean it.
So I don't want to, I'm not, I'm not super comfortable giving and taking advice from me onhow to grow the pocket because I think I had a bit of a starting capital in terms of.
built in audience almost.
That's good.
That's good.
Well, thanks for sharing that.
mean, the marketplace uh learnings alone are pretty interesting and marketplaces inthemselves are just so unique.
(35:34):
So appreciate you sharing.
uh
Yeah, what is cool, what's cool about is that, and I see that a lot is that I think onceyou get into this mode, you start seeing them everywhere or you start seeing opportunities
for them everywhere, right?
Like there is this sort of divide between demand and supply and so many levels.
think it's just, yeah, just, it doesn't make always sense, like for, you know, economicalreasons, but, but there's still so many to be built.
(36:02):
I can tell you, like I talked for the last year, I talked to
eight investors, like eight of the world's biggest marketplace investors or most special.
And they're all still fully bought in on the thesis and still like investing all the timein this and then seeing good outcomes, not just investing.
So yeah, still wide open.
Love it, love it.
Well, one of the things we like to do on the show is get to know you a little bit better.
(36:24):
There's a series of questions I wanna ask you that we ask everybody that comes on theshow.
So my first question is also my favorite.
Has there been an experience of your past that defines or makes up who you are today?
Yeah, I think I have to go back to the punk stuff again.
that, you know, like that, that was just, just blew my mind.
Just that like people who didn't play played like people could play music started and, andjust set up shows and everything.
(36:52):
This, this whole DIY thing is extremely powerful and actually has informed a lot of mymarketing, all of her marketing experiments almost that I do in the company that I first,
I first tried them out myself.
I was like, the podcast, for example, I could have.
I was like, I can do this.
I'm the first one.
I edited myself.
I didn't hire an editor.
So I think that is really just a sort of like anybody can do it is kind of like, I thinkan attitude that has really shaped me as a person and also as a professional in that.
(37:22):
What advice would you your younger self if you're starting this journey all over again?
I think maybe the advice I would give myself is to be even more entrepreneurial.
I think like if my younger self would live now, especially, I think the opportunities tobe entrepreneurial, not necessarily saying everybody should be a founder and not everybody
can be an entrepreneur, we can build a business, but to go out and do even more stuffbecause I think the opportunity, anybody can be an amateur podcaster, video maker, uh
(37:52):
marketer.
You know, the entry level for most of these things that were previously hidden behind ajob, that you have to be in a job in order to do something, I think has just disappeared
on almost anything.
So I think advice to my younger self would be, do even more, know, like turn the recordlabel into a massive media complex, whatever.
Like, I think that's what I would give.
(38:14):
Is there a topic either you're trying to learn more about yourself or you think marketersneed to be learning more about?
Yeah, this is going to be, I mean, people are going to tune out on the episode around thistime when it's AI, but it is, is unfortunately like, or not unfortunately, I don't know.
I think it's unavoidable.
think we are in the middle of a really interesting periods also within the company wherewe're trying to determine like, and I think this might be for several other companies as
(38:39):
well that, that how much are people searching through AI, know, like who, instead of goingto Google, how many people are actually
uh asking chat GBT for the more complex answers.
And for example, for a software like ours, which is rather complex uh and the audiencethat we're in, the little bit technical audience, we can see, because we have this
(39:02):
question in our onboarding wizard, we can see a rapid rise in people who indicate thatthey first heard about us through AI.
And I have no reason to expect that this is going away.
I think like one thing to learn, I think it's like how, you know,
Just imagine, like, think maybe just generally for marketers in AI, I think it's veryscary for a lot of marketers.
(39:26):
saw some, I thought a CEO wrote an email last week about like, basically telling everybodylike, Hey, sorry, my hands forced AI is coming for your job.
I'm like, I'm just, it was not a very considerate email, but I think that's a feeling thata lot of marketers have.
And I think as a reaction, many marketers sort of like stay away from it or like, thiscan't be good.
(39:47):
And I think.
And I think we can afford to slow roll on this one.
think like even just from, your career perspective, you know, there's lots of things notto like about it.
Like, let's, let's be clear.
I think it's not good at many, many things, but I think it will probably pay off as amarketer, as a career now to be an AI maximalist.
(40:10):
Just assume that what, you know, the tech bros are saying is going to be the future, thatit can do these things that it can then.
And then just go with that.
Just dive in because it's all what's so great about it.
And this is something that you can imagine I'm excited about is that it's quitedemocratized.
Almost everybody can afford a chat GBT subscription or one of these like AI codersubscriptions.
(40:34):
I think coming, this might be my DIY thing talking, but I've been running all kinds ofprojects about creating little apps for myself.
Is it really true that it can do that?
um
test out every time, you know, because they're like, it's kind of come for contentmarketing.
Like, well, is it really like what?
And if so, like, what is the thing like try it?
(40:55):
Because I think through that you start to learn all this a marketer, like, where is theunique thing that I can add?
Like, where is the unique value?
And I think that is really hard to do if you do not like, what is the word like emergeyourself.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
uh
So I agree with you.
(41:18):
I mean, I agree with you.
think there's a huge amount of learning that we need to do.
And maybe to bring it back to like your positioning conversation we were having earlier,we've got to position the human, you know, piece, right?
But the only way to do that is to your point, like we've got to experiment, we've got touse, we've got to understand how we're different and what the output is, et cetera.
(41:44):
we've got to the hard work.
Yeah, I think it's real because I think it's like, it's both extremely scary, right?
And I think if we would have, you know, if job security would be a little bit betterarranged globally, I think people would maybe be a lot more embracing of this.
think a lot of this has to do with like, but what about, but what about like, but what ifthere's no more colors?
(42:05):
And I think that that is just, I can see that around me that it sort of paralyzes people.
And I think that in defense of AI, if, if, you know, like,
If you, if that thing really can do something where you just don't add value, then we justdon't add value.
Like there's no point for us to, to like, to like, like it's the same as like howautomation used to go in factories earlier.
(42:28):
Like why would a human need to do that?
Like, of course the downside is that we're still going to have to work 40 hours per week,unfortunately.
Like they were not like, maybe that's the one thing I'd like to change that like, Hey,when, when are we seeing these like productivity increases, like reverted to a little bit
more free time, but,
But generally like career wise, yeah, I think that's the approach to take.
(42:50):
Yeah.
Well, I got two last questions for you.
One is, is there anything that you're just curious about that's going on in the world?
It could be a trend, a subculture, anything like that.
Yeah, quite connected to this AI.
just really like this already for a while, even for pre-AI when they're like maybe two,three years ago, well, maybe longer, when there was this rise of no code.
(43:10):
There was this rise also, what they call like these indie hackers, know, like singledevelopers or single somewhat technical people who built these, what they call like
microservices.
So they just build like a sort of portfolio of small bits, like making very specificservices like...
like AI avatar or something, or a particular thing about taxes for digital nomads orwhatever.
(43:35):
It's not always the most profound thing, but I just really like how they do kind of what Idescribed earlier, that like they take sort of all the opportunities that the web and
coding is offering nowadays and just sort of living this independent life.
they're still working hard, like don't get me wrong, but I just really like this sort of
(43:56):
creativity to the max and regard like sort of disregard boundaries.
Are they a marketer or a coder or a product person?
they, you know, some have a wide range of products that are absolutely unrelated.
They just happen to share the same technology and then they figured out, this also worksfor insurance people or something, you know, like, so I really like that.
(44:17):
And I think maybe that's where some of the world is going also, like as you can be moreand more of a business
with all these assisted things.
So I think that's a really interesting, I like following those people.
I love it.
Oh, last question.
What do you feel like is the largest opportunity or threat facing marketers today?
(44:39):
I think I already sort of discussed that honestly.
Like think that's like all these AI assisted things.
mean, like we can really disregard what I said about the free time, et cetera.
But if you just purely think of uh what can you do in your job?
how productive can you be?
And leave out the question of whether or not we should strive for that.
I think just the opportunities to level up your game with this sort of combination of andall this automation, like the amount of things that we put out with Chatterup,
(45:08):
we're not even two full-time people in the content team.
It includes myself and my colleague who doesn't work full-time.
And I think if you look at what we bring out, would think we would have a quite, if youwould compare it with five years ago, you would need at least, I don't know, five, six
people for that.
And I think that is the power, I think that's the opportunity and a friend, of course,because as that thing progresses,
(45:38):
know, who will, yeah, I mean, this is maybe not the nicest thing to end on, as less peopleare needed, maybe, then like, what does that mean?
I mean, that could be a threat to marketers.
if you're not adapting, where will that leave you?
And I think that that is maybe the thing we can't like I said earlier, I think we can'treally afford to wait for.
(46:00):
Does that make sense?
Yeah, no, it definitely makes sense.
makes sense.
Well, it's been a, I mean, hugely thought provoking conversation and I've learned a lot,especially around the marketplace businesses, which I don't spend a ton of time thinking
about every day, but sure.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Really appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks again for having me.
(46:20):
I enjoyed several of your other episodes.
So it's an honor to be here.
Thanks a lot, Alan.
Views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent theviews, thoughts, and opinions of Deloitte.
Material and information presented here is for general information purposes only and doesnot imply endorsement or opposition to any specific company, product, or service.
(46:43):
Hi, it's Alan again.
Marketing Beyond is a Deloitte digital podcast.
It's created and produced by me with close production support from Sam Robertson.
If you're new to Marketing Beyond, please feel free to write us a review and subscribe onyour favorite listening platform.
also invite you to explore the other Deloitte digital podcast at deloitte digital dot comslash us slash podcast and share the show with your friends and colleagues.
(47:11):
I love hearing from listeners.
can contact me at marketing beyond at Deloitte dot com.
You'll also find complete show notes and links to what's discussed in the podcast today.
and you can search our archives.
I'm Ellen Hart and this is Marketing Beyond.
you ready to go beyond the basics of marketing?
I'm Alan Hart and this is Marketing Beyond, where we talk about the questions that sparkchange and share ideas that challenge the status quo.
Join us as we explore the future of marketing and its endless potential.
Why do people choose us?
(00:29):
What words do they use?
We went through support history.
We went through all our reviews online, both good and bad.
What are the terms that...
How do people out there actually understand our product?
And what do we think is the benefit?
Today on the show I've got Sword Hangrove.
(00:50):
He's the CMO at Share Tribe.
Share Tribe is building a no-code marketplace software for founders.
Sword has over a decade of experience in digital marketing and growth for startups with afocus on democratizing technology.
He's also a marketplace expert who advises marketplace startups on early growthstrategies.
(01:10):
Additionally, he hosts Two-Sided, the marketplace podcast where he interviews successfulmarketplace founders, investors, experts,
to discuss topics related to starting, building, and scaling online marketplacebusinesses.
On the show today, we talk about the two-sided marketplace, how it's unique, what it meansfor Share Tribe.
We talk about the power of getting your positioning right to get go-to-market clicking.
(01:35):
And we talk about his philosophy around give first.
That and much more with my guest, Sjoerd Hengra.
Sure.
Welcome to the show.
(01:55):
Thanks for having me.
We're going to have a lot of fun talking about your company, what you're doing from amarketing standpoint, et cetera.
But there's this thing about your background that I hear you were an aspiring record labelmogul.
And I'm not sure I've had one of those on the show before.
So let's talk about that.
Yeah, I think that's a grave, grave exaggeration.
(02:17):
Now, I used to be, still am, I think you can never really say that you're no longer apunk, but I used to be really into punk music and the punk scene when I lived in the
Netherlands, where I'm originally from.
And yeah, there is this sort of DIY do-it-yourself philosophy there that, you know,anybody can do what they want to bring out the record, you know, or play guitar, even if
they can't.
(02:37):
mean, that's sort of the foundation of the music.
And so I had a little record label.
because we wanted to put out my friend's band.
so I don't think I've ever been like aspiring.
And you know, there's not a lot of money in punk rock.
But um I was a record label boss for a while.
mean, we put out I think, I should have looked this up.
(02:59):
But we put out like one cassette, a CD, for those who still remember, and a DVD.
Nice, nice, nice.
Well, you shipped products, so you technically are record label.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
Well, you did mention you are uh Dutch, like birth, but you're living in Finland today,right?
(03:23):
And it's where the company is based.
Yeah.
The cultural differences, are they similar or very different?
They're quite a bit different actually.
The reason I'm there, because I did a student exchange with probably a country thatcouldn't be more of the same than the Netherlands, which is Denmark, where then on the
exchange I met my wife, which is the reason why I now move to Finland.
(03:46):
I Finnish people are quite like, I mean, from a global perspective, probably quitesimilar, but there are some things about they don't do small talk around here.
So it's, that's something to, especially in the Netherlands, because I think Dutch peoplehave a reputation of being extremely straightforward and just saying it like it is.
that, that has been, you know, that has some friction or adjustments on my side also, alsowithin the marriage, but, uh, but culturally I still think, you know, they're like
(04:15):
Northern, Western Europeans deal many, many other things.
But yeah, it's like,
I think in the States, like think like the Midwest comes to mind.
think that like that there's a lot in like Northern, like Northern Michigan, like upperpeninsula is where a lot of Finnish people go.
And I think that's sort of, think that's where you need to look for the, I always talk tosomeone earlier who was from Missouri and who'scribed themselves as like the show me
(04:40):
state.
I mean, that is really also what Finnish people are like, there's a great opportunity fora marketer because they're not so great at marketing themselves.
You know, they're like, oh, the product sells itself.
So a lot of opportunities for me.
That's funny.
Yeah.
I worked with some great Dutch colleagues and you're very accurate about the directness,which I appreciate to be honest, especially if they're on my team, we can get right down
(05:02):
to business.
But it's a little stilting when you first experience it.
Yeah, yeah, I know it is.
I mean, especially like, I think there's a lot of problems with British people, eventhough we're like really close, like geographically, they're like, just the way of saying
things without saying things that the British has sort of elevated to an art and Dutchpeople are like, why don't you just say it?
(05:25):
Yeah, it's fun.
It's fun those things.
it.
love it.
Well, from your, I guess, Dutch background growing up to school and other countries,what's been your path to where you are today, which you're the CMO at Share Tribe.
Yeah, that's one, know, the punk history maybe already sort of spoils it a bit, but Iwasn't never thought I was going to be a CMO.
(05:48):
I hadn't even really thought about marketing as a profession, I think, like growing up.
My dad has worked in the same steel factory, which sort of like, I come from this sort ofBruce Springsteen kind of town where like more than half the population works either
directly or indirectly in the steel factory.
marketing was not like something that people discussed at our house.
And I would actually...
(06:09):
trained to be or like educated to be an English teacher.
I have a bachelor from University of Amsterdam in English language and culture and a minorin education.
But then when I came to Finland, so after I met my wife at the exchange, I came to Finlandand said, okay, let's see.
Let's see what's happening.
We had a nice time.
Why not go there?
And I realized that the education system here is uh much further developed, honestly.
(06:32):
Like it's very well regarded worldwide also to finish the education system.
And so my degree didn't really
gave me any opportunity to do that as a profession.
But then because of the punk rock thing, like part of that was a lot of like thingshappening on the internet, like forums, et cetera, communities.
was part of this online music community and then combined that a little, think a littlebit with this sort of entrepreneurial mindset that I had from the record label and some
(06:56):
other small projects.
I was able to get a job with a startup here, a local, like a domestic country here, whichmade like a website builder, kind of like what Wix is, but then like 2008, 2009.
And they were looking for a community manager because they had just launched sort of theirglobal brand.
They were very successful nationally and they're like, Hey, we can do thisinternationally.
So then I got into this thing called startup, which was also new to me.
(07:18):
Like I had never heard of what is a startup, like no idea.
But for those people who work in like startup and tech startups, that you know, that likesort of traditional education isn't really that important.
Like it's very much of the merit based career growth.
So I started there, this company called Moogo at the time.
It didn't, didn't make it internationally nationally still big success.
(07:41):
And I started as community manager, then became project manager, then sort of moved slowlymore and more towards like business development and marketing side, especially marketing
side.
And then, you know, Finland is a rather small country.
So once you get into that startup scene, you sort of roll on that automatically roll,especially if you're a foreigner like myself, and you don't have the, you you have to
(08:01):
build quite actively on your network, but then you, you, move.
It's a special skillset that you get, I think, from working in a startup.
You don't assume that things are taken care of.
There is just a little bit DIY thing, like you need to take responsibility.
And so I moved to another startup where I had a little bit more senior marketing role,like sort of purely marketing focused.
Then I had a great opportunity at this company called Usition.
(08:23):
There were a music learning app, or they still are music learning app.
Probably anybody who's ever played guitar or tried to look up a guitar playing videotutorial on the net has seen a commercial by them, I'd imagine.
And from there on, I got an opportunity to work at Share Tribe who were looking for theirfirst marketing hire.
And I was really on board with their sort of mission.
(08:43):
So it was around the time, like I started there, uh, 2016.
And it was just around time when like, you know, Airbnb was getting really big.
It was a CD impact of these like marketplace type companies.
So these two sided companies that don't own their own inventory.
And I saw sort of a huge, you know, it was also.
(09:04):
I think the peak of like what was called the sharing economy at the time, which may be inretrospect, retrospective, my bit of a misnomer, like a bit more benevolent name than the
industry actually was.
But yeah, I was really convinced by that business model.
And that's what Share Tribe basically provides.
Maybe, maybe I can talk a little bit about that.
Otherwise this story doesn't make so much sense.
(09:27):
Yeah, tell me a little bit more about like what is shared tribe?
How you how do you guys operate?
Who you serve that kind of thing?
That'd be great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So ShareDrive basically makes software for marketplace founders.
So if you have an Airbnb for X, Etsy for X idea, then we have a SaaS solution software asa service solution for anybody who has just a little bit of internet savvy, as I would
(09:49):
say, non-technical, but like myself, like I said, English little major, not a coder.
Of course I've gotten a bit more technical over the years, but anybody who's not technicalor doesn't want to spend too much time or money upfront coding.
Uh, can launch a fully comprehensive marketplace handling everything from user management,listing management, payment, booking calendar, the whole, like any feature you can imagine
(10:13):
for that model comes pretty much out of the box.
Of course there are exceptions and, but we help, yeah, we try to help founders and we helpcurrently more than 1200 marketplace projects are powered by share tribe.
So, so yeah, so they were like, their mission was really like that.
They sort of targeted the thing like, we want to democratize the sharing economy.
And I was very.
Maybe the punk thing again.
(10:34):
I was like, that is something I can get behind.
Like that was a very, very cool thing.
And it was for me, an opportunity to the lead of a marketing team.
that was a, that was a cool, very cool opportunity.
That's awesome.
mean, you guys serving this, like the marketplace creator, if you will, pretty unique.
Like I'm curious in the evolution of the startup, was that always the focus out of thegate?
(10:59):
No, no, actually, it's a really cool story.
Part of this, you know, comes, I wasn't there at the very beginning.
I'm not one of the founders, but one, like I said, one of the earlier employees.
But the idea actually came was born as part of university research projects.
here, there's a very good technical university here.
Now it's called Aalto University, but it used be the healthy key Institute of Technology.
(11:20):
And they had a research project to make campus more sustainable.
And part of that was this sort of lending platform, right?
Like
As a student, if you've ever lived on a campus, you know that like who has a drill, youknow, I need a drill.
Who, we're throwing a party tonight, who has a smoke machine?
Like we have like that kind of exchange was sort of happening that or that was what theywanted to facilitate.
(11:41):
And it was quite a success.
I think it was quite a popular platform.
Like I said, like was early, I think that was maybe 2009, 10, 11, around that time.
And uh then the research project ended and the two founders, Antti and Juho, were, andthey got quite excited by this sort of like being software operator thing.
And they're like, Hey, we would like to, we would like to build a, we would like to turnthis into a business.
(12:05):
So they first started with trying to sell that platform to other universities and thenother institutions.
But I don't know anybody who's ever worked with organizations like that.
It's not a...
sales cycles are rather long.
So it's not like, you know, it's not like a hockey stick startup growth that you want tosee.
But then throughout like moving through that scene and talking to a lot of people, theyhad met a lot of people with really great ideas about bringing two things together, like
(12:30):
sharing economy or marketplace platform ideas who all ran into this problem of theplatform.
And so then, you know, like both moment, like, actually we have this platform.
Why don't we make it available to others and maybe.
earn some money off the back of it.
So that's how the idea for Shutter was born.
So it wasn't always the business focus, but quite soon that became the business focus.
(12:52):
And we started with a very, like for the time, very cool app, which was sort of like aWordPress type approach where you just sign in, you call it ellenhart.shutter.com.
It's immediately live.
can immediately...
You could immediately get users payments running.
You just needed to get a PayPal account connected and it worked.
It was very basic, but it was extremely fast, extremely reliable.
(13:17):
And over time we expanded the feature set a bit.
The problem with that was that first of all, this business or like our target audience,like startups, know, 99 out of a hundred don't make it.
So there's a lot of sort of natural churn, which for subscription businesses is not great.
And then.
On the other side, there were a couple of customers who were really great at sort ofproving their, you know, hypothesis with our product has sort of MPP going, even got some
(13:44):
traction, even having like some thousands of transactions, who then ran into a need forsome feature that we didn't have, like some custom feature, like each marketplace has
their own special sauce.
That's basically sort of the premise of shared rep also that they share like 80 % of thesame features, but then there's like 10 to 20 % like
special sauce that they need to build that we will never build.
(14:05):
So they can build it on top.
So then we were also losing the good customers.
So then we built a new product around 2018, which was more technical.
It was like, I don't know for those people who work with the marketers who work with CMSsaround that time, there was this rise of like the headless CMS, like content flow.
(14:25):
And so that was quite promising that like, it's something that sort of is like the backendas a service, but the
you know, the thing in which you presented, uh you have to build yourself, but we don'tneed to maintain it as a software company.
It's quite, it was quite good.
So we built that it was a success, but then we had the problem that to, in order to takethat product into use, you need to build a client app or whatever, which is really, really
(14:49):
a challenge.
So we had it and we had a really good name in this being easy to use software.
So we had a bit of a friction that we had these two products.
It was hard to choose which one was fitting.
So then we put basically.
We bet the entire farm on the third product, which we released 2024, January, 20, which issort of the best of both worlds.
it's the marketplace backend as a service with as a no code layer on top, which anybodycan get into use.
(15:13):
And if you reach the point where you want to build new features that you just take whatyou already have from the no code platform.
Host is somewhere else and you can build anything on top.
So I hope this wasn't too sales pitchy, but it is sort of like a sort of naturaldevelopment on, on how we got there and sort of what we learned from feedback.
from the founders and see what our customers are doing.
And when I say founders, mean our customers actually, the marketplace founders.
(15:38):
Right, right.
No, I think it's super helpful.
It's not every day I talk to growth companies like yours that have learned, have had thebenefit of pivoting the business a few different times and the learnings that you take and
then how you reapply and retrench and go back after the market.
Yeah.
I mean, it's nice to say it now.
(16:00):
was not, it was a pretty, you know, that last product, took longer than we thought.
had like, you can look it up on our blog with the CEO has written quite a nice post abouthow we were basically like flat for two years, kind of like juggling these two products
and then building the third one.
ah So it wasn't like, was a, it was a
(16:23):
Yeah, it was exciting, but it was also not nice at times, but luckily, it paid out.
I think we learned a lot.
It's also on the marketing side, like all the things we learned through that journey.
Well, and you we've talked a lot about the getting the product right.
How did you think about like getting your your positioning right?
Like how you talk about what the product can do and and how does that as you think aboutit and maybe as you've gone through some of these pivots, like how does messaging or
(16:53):
positioning help to drive go to market?
Yeah, that's a great question because that is definitely one of the lessons that I referthat we learned because I imagine, you know, like the situation where we were in, where we
have like this highly technical product that you need to be technical to use, you need tobe technical to understand the benefit.
And then the other one, which is easy to use, but has technical limitations.
(17:15):
Then also, but like, you know, internally suffering from the, maybe the bias that mosttech companies have that you forget that
99 % of the world doesn't even know that a software like yours exists, like a categorylike yours is just unknown.
then like to have to explain all of that on those couple of seconds that people, excuseme, couple of seconds that people spend on your website.
(17:37):
like, it's such an incredible challenge and we are doing it probably much worse than wethought we were.
So then when we had this new product, these two stories came together in our heads atleast like before we launched it, we had a really great sit down with the entire company
or like.
representative of all the, all the department.
We're not a massive company that we're like 25 people in full time and then an army offreelancers and then remote people.
(18:02):
But we had people from product, people from customer support, coders, uh, and marketingpeople.
And we really sat down and was like, okay, what are the things like, why do people chooseus?
Like what words do they use?
So we went through support history.
We went through all our reviews online, both good and bad.
Like what other terms that how do people.
(18:23):
How do people out there actually understand our product and what do we think is thebenefits?
And we sort of lined them up and we use this great book called, obviously awesome by uhApril Dunford.
It's a book about sort of, it's truly like a sort of a guide to how to position yourselfin a sort of medium size to small business.
And yeah, we went through, we went through this whole like her whole exercise.
(18:46):
We just did a little bit to our needs, but it's essentially like map out what are thecompetitive alternatives.
So not,
not competitors, which I think is a mistake that marketers often make, that you just lookat direct competitors, but what are the competitive alternatives of doing what you offer
customers to do?
And for most, for example, for most marketing software, a competitive alternative isspreadsheet.
(19:11):
That's what people do.
Or even worse, just not doing anything.
Doing nothing is the competitive alternative.
For example, if you think about a marketing software,
Increase lead quality or whatever.
Like most people just don't, just don't do that.
Like they don't need to like their solutions to their problem is just ignore it.
So when you look at those, then you look at what are your unique benefits compared tothose and then try to wrap those in like values.
(19:39):
not features because a lot of especially tech marketers are like quite fond of listing thefeatures, but like what is the value that it unlocks?
Right?
Like what is the thing that it gives to customers?
And then once you have.
a couple of convincing values, then imagine like who cares about this, like who benefitsfrom this.
And that really gives you a really nice sort of recipe for coming up with yourpositioning.
(20:02):
So you can tell like, make it clear, what is the category that you're in?
What are your value props and who cares about them and try to sort of catch them.
So for example, as an example, what that means is that we now, the same way that Iintroduced ShareTribe, also, if you go to our marketing site, we are a marketplace
software for founders.
So we are not marketplace software for enterprises.
(20:23):
We are not marketplace software for existing marketplace, even though we get better andbetter at that.
But that is not deny enterprise customers or existing marketplaces.
But that is not how we position ourselves.
This is not how we, we are really in a little bit of a transitioning at the moment, liketowards more as our product gets more and more mature, we are able to sort of also more
(20:43):
and more mature customers.
But when we came out with the product, our positioning was crystal clear that we are.
for people who are starting businesses, like not for people who want to transfer theirmarketplace business.
from all, know, from the all, there's no clear metric on how you measure your positioning,but we can see on all cylinders that it was hitting really well, like in terms of
(21:04):
conversion on the page, in terms of clicking on the ads, in terms of converting in theproduct, you know, it was very, of course, the fact that it was a great product also
helped.
No, no, like no small thanks to the people in product team.
But I think it also just made everybody in the company internally also aligned, right?
(21:25):
So that whatever gets told in sales or whatever, whenever someone reached out to supportwhere the question that they are already able to sort of narrow down, okay, what type of
customer is this?
What is the story that we're telling them?
Are they the ones that care about the extendability, scalability or the price or thespeed?
So was this very, I think the first time ever that we were like fully aligned as a companyinternally on who we are serving and what we're doing.
(21:51):
it was really, that was really, yeah, it was really, I mean, it sounds like it was reallygreat.
Like it's really, yeah, it's, really fantastic actually.
Yeah, it sounds phenomenal, just like the, to your point, like the galvanizing of theinternal alignment.
But the other thing I think about when you're talking about the values and who it speaksto, you know, the notion of like, if the words and phrases that you're using in your
(22:15):
communications or in your sales resonate that much heavier with your target, like they seethemselves in your marketing.
Right?
Like they see themselves in your sales messaging um and becomes a, you know, no one lovesto be sold to, but everyone loves to buy.
And I think it gives them an opportunity to see something that's worth buying.
(22:39):
Right?
Right.
Right from the get go.
So it's pretty interesting.
Yeah.
And it's also, can also be quite, you know, like I, I'm, I've been imagined, like, I'm no,no, if you do this, but, know, once you, you know, as your marketing career sort of
progresses, you get some insights and then you sort of start thinking back at previouspositions that you had or projects and like, if I would have known, this, or, know, if we
(23:01):
would have had, you know, I often think like, if it would have had Instagram advertisingfor one company I worked for, like we would have, we would have, you know, been so much
more.
And I feel that like with positioning also like,
I feel like that, but also with some company I feel like, if we would have donepositioning, like, I don't know if we would have liked the outcome of how people talk
about us or what is the thing, why do they buy us, right?
(23:25):
That they just buy us because we're the cheapest and not because of the feature orsomething like that.
So I think I can imagine it can also be pretty, pretty brutal to do an exercise.
Yeah, it could be for sure.
For sure.
Well, I think the last time we talked, you talked about this notion of or an approach ofgive first, ask later.
(23:46):
And you talked about that in terms of like how you approach it with marketing and content.
And I'd love you to just like tell us a little bit more about what that is, because I wasintrigued by the notion of give first.
Yeah, it's, it's, um, it's again, like, it's nice to be here and have this conversationand make it sound, you know, like this is all a well orchestrated plan.
(24:10):
I think this is something that it's sort of morphed into.
think part of it has been indeed that we always want to.
We've always been a bit of a value driven company who was just honestly like, likegenuinely like to help founders.
Like, uh, you know, we were all, most people from the early team are also very active inthe local startup scene.
I think that that that's first of all into it.
(24:32):
So the concept behind it is, is, is quite, it's quite simple is that in our case, people,customers build the backbone of their business on our software.
We're not a complimentary software.
We're not a CRM for veterinarians or something who already have a business practice.
They just need something that helps them go a little bit better.
(24:53):
Most of our customers would probably not have been.
a marketplace founder if it wouldn't be for our business, for our software, because theyjust simply, like I said, they can't afford a coder or they wouldn't know where to get
started.
But that comes with the turn as well, because we need to be, for people to trust theirentire business with us, we need to be a reliable partner.
(25:19):
And I think that's where this sort of give first, ask later comes in as one part, that wejust want to be really
You know, we show, give, we give first, we're very sort of straightforward in what we haveto offer.
We like to offer value out of the gate and only make the sale if it's really clear tothem.
So there's no features that you need to, you know, you need to pay for it.
(25:40):
You can try out everything before you need to upgrade, for example, but it also comes tothe content marketing.
So what we do with our content marketing is that we have a sort of debris for all of ourwriting that we have done always has always been that.
It should be able, it should be completely tech agnostic.
So, so marketplace business are actually quite special, right?
They're a very unique business.
(26:02):
basically building two businesses at the same time.
There are all kinds of concepts that do not occur in the SaaS businesses or servicebusiness or consultancy businesses.
And there is surprisingly little written about it.
So a lot of car founders make the same mistakes over and over again.
you know, we have seen that we've worked with so many.
what we have done is basically we have just put a sort of a
(26:25):
Like a marketplace, well, we have a thing called the Marketplace Academy.
have a best seller on Amazon called the Lean Marketplace, and we just sort of collectedall of those lessons in there.
And we still do that type of things where we just bring out all the advice that you canuse.
You don't need to sign up.
You don't need to leave your email address even.
You can use all of that information, all of the knowledge that we have discovered throughour, you know, 11 plus years of experience without ever touching a shared product.
(26:51):
And
When I say ask later, actually, maybe we never really ask.
Maybe we just hope that like, you you're like, I've heard about this, you know, I've everytime I Google for something relevant to marketplace businesses or every other time I come
across this shared tribe, hopefully that will, you know, put into your mind, maybe they'relike the ones to check out.
Because now actually, when I say this, I don't even know.
(27:13):
Do we ask later?
Like, honestly, like we just, we just, we just put value out in the world.
And we hope that that convinces people to at least give us a try.
think a bit to a detriment, this might also be like the, I've talked about this with more,with other people, especially from North America or States where there's a little bit
more, maybe sales here, like show, like a little bit more showy approach to sales or todoing things.
(27:37):
We're like, oh, why don't you cast your email here?
Or why don't you like do demos this or something like that?
Or why don't you hop on, you know, don't do cold calling and stuff.
I think it's part culturally because like I said, you know, actually good that we talkedabout this finishing because people finish people that don't like to like talk or convince
people to things that are maybe not like, not entirely the case.
(27:58):
But I think it's also just because we're a product that you really, you need us or youdon't.
This is not some intent purchase.
So, so our only job is to convince you that for your need, we are the best.
And I think that's where it is sort of give first ask later come from.
Yeah, no, I mean, I like the notion.
I always think about it as you're educating, you're helping people solve their problems.
(28:23):
And yes, hopefully they will buy or you will prompt prompt them to buy.
And and it works out because you've kind of brought them along on the journey.
So it's it's an interesting piece.
Yeah.
And I think, I also think like it becomes more and more important now.
Like, like, um, I got an email a couple of weeks ago from this, well, my growth marketwould be a sort of, I would not do him just, but, he's an adventure capital partner at
(28:49):
Andrews and Horowitz.
used to be earlier growth.
It's called Andrew Chen.
It's great.
Like he blogged, used to blog a lot more about a lot of his old times.
Really good.
Like a really like a growth guru in that way.
don't, maybe guru is a growth expert, like someone with real experience at some reallyhigh scale companies.
And he put out an email saying that like all channels, our marketing channels are dead.
Meaning that like all of the channels that exist right now, they are completely saturated.
(29:13):
Everybody has discovered the best practices.
Every house, like, because for a while in marketing, you know, let's say from, let's say2008 up onwards, we were in this sort of cycle where every couple of years, something new
got added, right?
Like Facebook.
uh
like Twitter, then Facebook, then there was Foursquare, know, there was local, was mobile,there was, you know, it felt like there was a bit of a change, everything.
(29:42):
And so there was a lot of times, or when this first, you know, social graph came out fromFacebook, that was like, like some, was a really mind blowing progression since sort of
like digital advertising, digital marketing.
And so
I think for a while you could get by as a company and not get by, but you could succeed asa company by just being really good at a channel, being first mover and just really maxing
(30:04):
out, know, like this famous story from Airbnb, for example, that they did this crossposting to uh Craigslist, for example, or what was it called?
Like Zynga, you remember, with like Farmfield that really just optimized the use ofFacebook Friend.
So there were all these like, there was always some sort of
thing, new thing on which you could drive your business.
(30:25):
think his point, I don't know if it is, but maybe I'm paraphrasing, but I think his pointwas, and I agree with that, and I think a lot of marketers also sort of feel this
intuitively, like in their gut that that is a bit gone.
And actually in marketing, we are sort of moving more back to basics and like also inproduct that like everybody can do the distribution now equally well.
(30:47):
So we're back again at is your product any good?
Or is your messaging around your product getting good?
Because those are the things that are sort of unique to our business.
And for example, when the gift first ask later, is your brand good?
do you actually, are you able to live up to that also?
Because any company can be nice on the outside, you know, like, so, so yeah, so I feelthat it's a bit of a, we've been locked out a little bit.
(31:11):
And I think like, maybe that's something else to think about as a marketer nowadays.
Like, is this like, what is our competitive advantage here?
And I'm not sure if there is a clear answer to that.
Well, one other thing I wanted to bring up is that you also have a podcast and it's calledTwo-Sided, the Marketplace Podcast.
We've been talking about marketplaces and you know, I think caveat that that podcast isabout kind of lessons learned, et cetera.
(31:37):
What have you learned doing that podcast about marketplace and marketing one?
Yeah, I learned a lot.
know, like it was part of an exercise just to produce more knowledge for our customers,honestly, you know, because the job of the podcast is to discover what makes marketplace
successful.
So I learned a ton, like I learned a ton about top things you shouldn't do as amarketplace.
(32:01):
Can I, do I have some time to tell one of those or?
Yeah.
So I think like.
I think the first lesson that I learned and that we, sort of also tried to instill in ourcustomers, which is a bit weird considering that we're selling platforms is that
marketplace founders often mistake their products, their platform for their product, whichby which I mean to say is that the product of a marketplace is not the platform, the app,
(32:28):
the website, what it takes place.
The product is actually making the transaction happen between the two sides.
So there's this concept in marketplace is called liquidity, which is the likelihood that.
A seller is able to sell their produce and the buyer is able to find something that theywant to buy or it could be renter, whatever is the role.
And that is the livelihood of your marketplace.
(32:48):
That is what you make.
That is your product.
Like liquidity is your product.
And it's less, so it's much less about, I see a lot of founders could also be a bitnervous to go out there, like worry a lot about some details.
maybe we need this integration.
Maybe we need that.
It's like, no, actually you just need to go out there.
and bring both sides together and see, they care enough to give you some premium on top ofthis, right?
(33:10):
Because this is how most marketplaces monetize that like you facilitate the exchange ofvalue and you take a little bit off the top as your business model.
Connected to that is sort of the second lesson, which is that you should make in thebeginning, in most cases, you should make your marketplace as small as you can.
(33:30):
Meaning that don't start a worldwide
global marketplace for car rental or something like that.
Because what you need to do, most marketplaces, they have some sort of limitations thatdemand and supply, they need to be in the same physical location, for example.
So just stick with the car rental example.
ah Here in Helsinki, for example, if I would start a car rental marketplace, I shouldprobably focus even on a neighborhood of Helsinki where, okay, when it's a peer-to-peer
(33:55):
car sharing marketplace like
Are there enough cars in this one neighborhood and do I get enough rental?
I shouldn't even care about the entire Helsinki, let alone Finland.
It should just be about those two things.
That's where your marketplace start.
So I think like, I think those, know, if there's any sort of things, two things that I'velearned that I, talked to lot of founders like mentioned again and again, it's like, these
are the two things that I check off at the gate that like, where are you, what are youdoing?
(34:19):
Are you doing this or are you not doing this?
Because I think this is the number one mistake that, number one and number two mistakethat marketplace founders make.
When it comes to podcasting, I don't know how much I learned about it besides the factthat it's hard to do.
(34:41):
It's cost a lot of time.
And maybe, and you can't really tell because it's just a conversation, but to listen, tohear what's the guest saying and then try not to guide it too much.
When it comes to marketing the podcast,
I have just benefited from the fact that over the years we have had uh a pretty good uhmailing list and community around the brand already.
(35:07):
So I think I was able to clean it.
So I don't want to, I'm not, I'm not super comfortable giving and taking advice from me onhow to grow the pocket because I think I had a bit of a starting capital in terms of.
built in audience almost.
That's good.
That's good.
Well, thanks for sharing that.
mean, the marketplace uh learnings alone are pretty interesting and marketplaces inthemselves are just so unique.
(35:34):
So appreciate you sharing.
uh
Yeah, what is cool, what's cool about is that, and I see that a lot is that I think onceyou get into this mode, you start seeing them everywhere or you start seeing opportunities
for them everywhere, right?
Like there is this sort of divide between demand and supply and so many levels.
think it's just, yeah, just, it doesn't make always sense, like for, you know, economicalreasons, but, but there's still so many to be built.
(36:02):
I can tell you, like I talked for the last year, I talked to
eight investors, like eight of the world's biggest marketplace investors or most special.
And they're all still fully bought in on the thesis and still like investing all the timein this and then seeing good outcomes, not just investing.
So yeah, still wide open.
Love it, love it.
Well, one of the things we like to do on the show is get to know you a little bit better.
(36:24):
There's a series of questions I wanna ask you that we ask everybody that comes on theshow.
So my first question is also my favorite.
Has there been an experience of your past that defines or makes up who you are today?
Yeah, I think I have to go back to the punk stuff again.
that, you know, like that, that was just, just blew my mind.
Just that like people who didn't play played like people could play music started and, andjust set up shows and everything.
(36:52):
This, this whole DIY thing is extremely powerful and actually has informed a lot of mymarketing, all of her marketing experiments almost that I do in the company that I first,
I first tried them out myself.
I was like, the podcast, for example, I could have.
I was like, I can do this.
I'm the first one.
I edited myself.
I didn't hire an editor.
So I think that is really just a sort of like anybody can do it is kind of like, I thinkan attitude that has really shaped me as a person and also as a professional in that.
(37:22):
What advice would you your younger self if you're starting this journey all over again?
I think maybe the advice I would give myself is to be even more entrepreneurial.
I think like if my younger self would live now, especially, I think the opportunities tobe entrepreneurial, not necessarily saying everybody should be a founder and not everybody
can be an entrepreneur, we can build a business, but to go out and do even more stuffbecause I think the opportunity, anybody can be an amateur podcaster, video maker, uh
(37:52):
marketer.
You know, the entry level for most of these things that were previously hidden behind ajob, that you have to be in a job in order to do something, I think has just disappeared
on almost anything.
So I think advice to my younger self would be, do even more, know, like turn the recordlabel into a massive media complex, whatever.
Like, I think that's what I would give.
(38:14):
Is there a topic either you're trying to learn more about yourself or you think marketersneed to be learning more about?
Yeah, this is going to be, I mean, people are going to tune out on the episode around thistime when it's AI, but it is, is unfortunately like, or not unfortunately, I don't know.
I think it's unavoidable.
think we are in the middle of a really interesting periods also within the company wherewe're trying to determine like, and I think this might be for several other companies as
(38:39):
well that, that how much are people searching through AI, know, like who, instead of goingto Google, how many people are actually
uh asking chat GBT for the more complex answers.
And for example, for a software like ours, which is rather complex uh and the audiencethat we're in, the little bit technical audience, we can see, because we have this
(39:02):
question in our onboarding wizard, we can see a rapid rise in people who indicate thatthey first heard about us through AI.
And I have no reason to expect that this is going away.
I think like one thing to learn, I think it's like how, you know,
Just imagine, like, think maybe just generally for marketers in AI, I think it's veryscary for a lot of marketers.
(39:26):
saw some, I thought a CEO wrote an email last week about like, basically telling everybodylike, Hey, sorry, my hands forced AI is coming for your job.
I'm like, I'm just, it was not a very considerate email, but I think that's a feeling thata lot of marketers have.
And I think as a reaction, many marketers sort of like stay away from it or like, thiscan't be good.
(39:47):
And I think.
And I think we can afford to slow roll on this one.
think like even just from, your career perspective, you know, there's lots of things notto like about it.
Like, let's, let's be clear.
I think it's not good at many, many things, but I think it will probably pay off as amarketer, as a career now to be an AI maximalist.
(40:10):
Just assume that what, you know, the tech bros are saying is going to be the future, thatit can do these things that it can then.
And then just go with that.
Just dive in because it's all what's so great about it.
And this is something that you can imagine I'm excited about is that it's quitedemocratized.
Almost everybody can afford a chat GBT subscription or one of these like AI codersubscriptions.
(40:34):
I think coming, this might be my DIY thing talking, but I've been running all kinds ofprojects about creating little apps for myself.
Is it really true that it can do that?
um
test out every time, you know, because they're like, it's kind of come for contentmarketing.
Like, well, is it really like what?
And if so, like, what is the thing like try it?
(40:55):
Because I think through that you start to learn all this a marketer, like, where is theunique thing that I can add?
Like, where is the unique value?
And I think that is really hard to do if you do not like, what is the word like emergeyourself.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
uh
So I agree with you.
(41:18):
I mean, I agree with you.
think there's a huge amount of learning that we need to do.
And maybe to bring it back to like your positioning conversation we were having earlier,we've got to position the human, you know, piece, right?
But the only way to do that is to your point, like we've got to experiment, we've got touse, we've got to understand how we're different and what the output is, et cetera.
(41:44):
we've got to the hard work.
Yeah, I think it's real because I think it's like, it's both extremely scary, right?
And I think if we would have, you know, if job security would be a little bit betterarranged globally, I think people would maybe be a lot more embracing of this.
think a lot of this has to do with like, but what about, but what about like, but what ifthere's no more colors?
(42:05):
And I think that that is just, I can see that around me that it sort of paralyzes people.
And I think that in defense of AI, if, if, you know, like,
If you, if that thing really can do something where you just don't add value, then we justdon't add value.
Like there's no point for us to, to like, to like, like it's the same as like howautomation used to go in factories earlier.
(42:28):
Like why would a human need to do that?
Like, of course the downside is that we're still going to have to work 40 hours per week,unfortunately.
Like they were not like, maybe that's the one thing I'd like to change that like, Hey,when, when are we seeing these like productivity increases, like reverted to a little bit
more free time, but,
But generally like career wise, yeah, I think that's the approach to take.
(42:50):
Yeah.
Well, I got two last questions for you.
One is, is there anything that you're just curious about that's going on in the world?
It could be a trend, a subculture, anything like that.
Yeah, quite connected to this AI.
just really like this already for a while, even for pre-AI when they're like maybe two,three years ago, well, maybe longer, when there was this rise of no code.
(43:10):
There was this rise also, what they call like these indie hackers, know, like singledevelopers or single somewhat technical people who built these, what they call like
microservices.
So they just build like a sort of portfolio of small bits, like making very specificservices like...
like AI avatar or something, or a particular thing about taxes for digital nomads orwhatever.
(43:35):
It's not always the most profound thing, but I just really like how they do kind of what Idescribed earlier, that like they take sort of all the opportunities that the web and
coding is offering nowadays and just sort of living this independent life.
they're still working hard, like don't get me wrong, but I just really like this sort of
(43:56):
creativity to the max and regard like sort of disregard boundaries.
Are they a marketer or a coder or a product person?
they, you know, some have a wide range of products that are absolutely unrelated.
They just happen to share the same technology and then they figured out, this also worksfor insurance people or something, you know, like, so I really like that.
(44:17):
And I think maybe that's where some of the world is going also, like as you can be moreand more of a business
with all these assisted things.
So I think that's a really interesting, I like following those people.
I love it.
Oh, last question.
What do you feel like is the largest opportunity or threat facing marketers today?
(44:39):
I think I already sort of discussed that honestly.
Like think that's like all these AI assisted things.
mean, like we can really disregard what I said about the free time, et cetera.
But if you just purely think of uh what can you do in your job?
how productive can you be?
And leave out the question of whether or not we should strive for that.
I think just the opportunities to level up your game with this sort of combination of andall this automation, like the amount of things that we put out with Chatterup,
(45:08):
we're not even two full-time people in the content team.
It includes myself and my colleague who doesn't work full-time.
And I think if you look at what we bring out, would think we would have a quite, if youwould compare it with five years ago, you would need at least, I don't know, five, six
people for that.
And I think that is the power, I think that's the opportunity and a friend, of course,because as that thing progresses,
(45:38):
know, who will, yeah, I mean, this is maybe not the nicest thing to end on, as less peopleare needed, maybe, then like, what does that mean?
I mean, that could be a threat to marketers.
if you're not adapting, where will that leave you?
And I think that that is maybe the thing we can't like I said earlier, I think we can'treally afford to wait for.
(46:00):
Does that make sense?
Yeah, no, it definitely makes sense.
makes sense.
Well, it's been a, I mean, hugely thought provoking conversation and I've learned a lot,especially around the marketplace businesses, which I don't spend a ton of time thinking
about every day, but sure.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Really appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks again for having me.
(46:20):
I enjoyed several of your other episodes.
So it's an honor to be here.
Thanks a lot, Alan.
Views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent theviews, thoughts, and opinions of Deloitte.
Material and information presented here is for general information purposes only and doesnot imply endorsement or opposition to any specific company, product, or service.
(46:43):
Hi, it's Alan again.
Marketing Beyond is a Deloitte digital podcast.
It's created and produced by me with close production support from Sam Robertson.
If you're new to Marketing Beyond, please feel free to write us a review and subscribe onyour favorite listening platform.
also invite you to explore the other Deloitte digital podcast at deloitte digital dot comslash us slash podcast and share the show with your friends and colleagues.
(47:11):
I love hearing from listeners.
can contact me at marketing beyond at Deloitte dot com.
You'll also find complete show notes and links to what's discussed in the podcast today.
and you can search our archives.
I'm Ellen Hart and this is Marketing Beyond.
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