October 26, 2023 • 36 mins
In this first episode we interview Justin, the co-founder of Safary, a privacy focused alternative to Google Analytics for web 3. We get personal with Justin, discussing his past experiences at an early-stage startup and a B2C labor marketplace called Wonolo that shaped his approach to marketing and community-building.
In this episode we dive deep into web 3 marketing and how Justin grew Safary's extremely strong web 3 growth community. He shares why he adds new people to the community in batches, and why he takes the time to onboard every new member personally.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey guys, welcome back to the Crescendo Go to
Market podcast.
And today we have Justin, thefounder of Safari, and he is one
of the best community growthleaders I've seen.
He's pioneering this newconcept of community-led growth.
Justin, do you want to give usa quick introduction to yourself
and what you do in the WebTreespace?
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hey everyone.
I'm Justin, co-founder ofSafari.
We founded the leading WebTreegrowth community and we're
building a privacy-centricalternative to Google Analytics
and WebTree.
My background is in two-sidedlabor market places doing
BDC-grave.
I'm happy to elaborate morewherever you want to dive in.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Yeah, I would love to learn more about what you were
doing prior to WebTree and howdid you get into marketing in
general.
I know you were quite involvedin product and ops.
How did you get into themarketing world?
What did that journey look like?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah, so the first company that I worked for, I was
the first hire at an earlystage, why I'd coordinate our
startup.
That startup built apeer-to-peer mock interview tool
for software engineers topractice interviewing.
So think about it as like yougo to the platform, I interview
you, you interview me, weprovide each other feedback at
the end, and the secret sauce ofthat business was really
(01:16):
community.
They built this great communityof people who were helping each
other practice for interviewsand then ultimately get a job,
and so that was one aspect ofsomething I was doing there.
As their first hire, I like tosay that I was their everything
else guy.
I joined a team of threeengineering founders, so I was
doing both B2B marketing, b2bsales, b2c community and then
(01:40):
also content in between, and sothat was one experience that I
had.
And the second one was at a B2Clabor marketplace called Winolo
, which you can think about asUber for warehouse workers, and
there I was leading aprogrammatic advertising
strategy, so doing a lot moreattribution and ad tech, which
is what I learned about thatwhole space.
(02:02):
I ended up building up thecompany's first experimentation
platform and program, so I'vereally had a lot of different
types of growth experiencethroughout my early career
before I did the 23.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Got it, and with Winolo that was a much larger
company.
I think it was like Series D orsomething.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Yeah, so in them they just raised a series C from
Bain, so there are about 100people.
I joined them around then andthen I left.
Two and a half years laterthey're on 400 people and it
closed to Series D.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
So with your, so with the first company you worked at
, which was your, I guess theinterviewing software right, so
you're essentially able tointerview each other, provide
each other feedback.
What was the B2B play there andwhat was the B2C play?
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, so the we basically started with this
market interview tool so it waspurely B2C helping software
developers help each otherpractice interviews, and then we
built a technical hiringmarketplace on top of it.
So the B2B side was people whowere looking to hire software
engineers and the B2C side wascandidates who were looking for
a new job.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Interesting, and then I guess that makes sense how
you got into the labormarketplace for essentially
warehouse workers as well,because it's kind of similar.
You're solving the recruitingslash hiring problem.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Yeah, the first time.
The first one was all for fulltime though they're hiring
software engineers full time andthe second one was very on
demand, so a warehouse workermight work one warehouse one day
, then a different job, adifferent day at a different
place.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Interesting.
Interesting, yeah, that'sfascinating because it's that
like two-sided marketplaceaspect of it definitely makes
marketing and community a lotmore difficult, right, because
you're not just trying to build,kind of like, the supply,
you're also trying to build ademand at the same time and you
(04:05):
kind of have to do them at thesame time as well.
But I guess the advantage youhad at the first company is
basically the community wasinterviewing each other and
helping each other, so you don'treally even need employers.
You didn't even need, like,people coming in to hire them,
because they're already werethere for a reason.
You just found a way tobasically take those people that
(04:26):
were already there and thenfind a way to essentially bring
in these employers to hire thosepeople.
Is that kind of accurate?
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah, and that sort of was.
That was definitely the secretsauce is that we had these
people practicing interviews,and so there are a couple of
things that happened there.
One we had this community ofpeople who were organically
helping each other and, you know, providing each other value in
a positive way.
So people were coming out toour platform and being like, wow
, I met great new people.
I got this service that wasfree to meet new people, help me
(04:59):
get my next job, and so thatmade them know a little bit more
loyal to our platform and tosearching jobs on our platform,
rather than like the classicmercenary.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
I just lost you.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Okay, I mean jobs, also sites.
So I think that was one veryhelpful aspect to it for us.
And the second is that weactually knew how people are
going to perform.
That's the other piece thatsort of came to us along the way
.
Right is that they'repracticing interviews on our
platform.
Then we know how they're goingto do an interview and so we
actually have higher sense ofwho's qualified, who's going to
(05:31):
get hired, who's not.
Based off of this proprietarydata that you wouldn't have had
if you're any other type ofrecruitment tool, we actually
knew how they were going toperform in a real interview
because we had interview datafrom them doing their practice
tests with somebody live Right.
So we knew how the firsttechnical interview they did at
a company was likely going to go.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Can you tell us about how you got into Web 3 and how
you decided to start buildingSafari?
What it is, and we'll go fromthere.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah.
So my co-founder, I dove intoWeb 3 at the end of 2021 and we
were immediately fascinated bythe potential for new business
models and freedom from the verypowerful intermediaries of our
time.
But as I, as we explored thespace, I was also really
dumbfounded by the insane growththat was happening from these
(06:23):
companies in the peak of thebull market.
Just like the notion that youcould have an airdrop for a
completely new company.
Then, like all of a suddenthey're driving like such high
revenue numbers and such likehigh user growth was like
absolutely insane to me as agrowth person.
But I was also confused thatnobody was really talking about
that either.
Like nobody was really talkingabout growth or marketing or the
(06:45):
strategies that were beingdeployed behind some of these
very interesting Web 3 nativetactics.
And so for me, safari was.
You know, we built Safari as acommunity basically for, like me
, right as I was, like I want aplace where I can talk to other
growth people about their growthstrategies, their challenges.
What does this all mean?
(07:06):
What is the impact of these Web3 native strategies on the
future of growth?
So Safari really began fromthere, which was a small batch
of 40 of us talking about whatis the future of Web 3 growth
and how does that affect Web 2growth?
And then we slowly grew fromthere.
But we've intentionally keptthe community quite small,
(07:26):
really only accepting the bestof the best, because we do very
high touch activities with them,as I was sort of alluding to
earlier Along the way we raisedaround and started building our
platform, which is now live formarketing attribution.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Awesome.
And what exactly?
Could you go a bit more intothe Safari, the platform right.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Yeah, so Safari the platform.
Safari is a marketingattribution platform that helps
Web 3 teams analyze themarketing cat channel, roi and
customer LTV.
You can really think about uslike a Google Analytics for Web
3 for helping companies trackchannel performance.
So that might be understandingwhere your users come from in
(08:13):
terms of the campaigns, themarketing channels, their
geography and other types ofinteresting aligned data
performance.
But it's also trackingconversion rates across channels
, understanding how your funnelworks, from those campaigns to
visitors to wallet sign-ins, tocustom events, on-chain and
off-chain that you care about.
(08:35):
And finally, it's the userjourney, which is really
understanding how users are notgetting across the website and
where they're dropping off, sothat you can improve your funnel
.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Got it.
So it's more than just an ad,got it.
It's more than an attributionplatform.
It's actually kind of amarketing analytics platform
that really allows you to have adeeper understanding.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Like basically like attribution plus mix panel.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Got it, got it.
What do you think of the GoogleAnalytics for Web Tree
comparison or analogy?
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Do you think that's accurate or yeah, I definitely
think that that's accurate.
I think that the one thing thatwe're trying to go more for is
not just not just solely top offunnel, but being able to
understand a little bit deeperinto your funnel and connecting
that with actually revenue data.
Downstream, I think that GoogleAnalytics, but also, more so,
(09:29):
the Web 2 attribution players.
They didn't spend a lot of timefocusing on the visualization
of data.
They mostly accepted that thatdata would get piped into your
own in-house BI tool.
But we are spending a lot oftime really trying to make our
dashboard attractive andsomething that people would just
use as is, if that makes sense,rather than expecting that that
(09:51):
data is going to go elsewhere.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Yeah, that's the one thing I noticed about Safari.
From this you know, basicallythe screenshots and mockups you
showed me where the UI and theUX is significantly better than
many other tools, even in Web 2.
And I think that's prettyimportant for where the space is
at right now, because mostpeople don't have a full-time
analytics person in-house to goand, you know, create clean
(10:17):
dashboards right.
It's the more user-friendly youmake it, I think, the more of
an edge there is.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, and I think we're at a time to where people
are looking for simplicity aswell.
A lot of the Web 2 analyticsplatforms got, in my opinion,
overly complicated and wasanalyzing a lot of data that
didn't really matter that much,and so we really focused on both
like the user experience frommaking beautiful dashboards,
that making beautiful dashboardsto visualize your data, but
(10:47):
also that are easy to understandand tracking the metrics that
really matter, rather thantrying to track everything and
anything.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Absolutely, absolutely.
That makes a lot of sense.
And with this platform right,because I know you first built a
community you have this reallyinteresting mechanism of batches
.
Did you start out with havingpeople come in different batches
, or did it start out as acommunity and then you decided,
hey, we're going to create thisbatching system.
How did that, like thecommunity originally grow?
(11:19):
And then, yeah, basically, howdid that evolve?
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Yeah, so we actually did batches since the beginning,
and I think that the thing thatwas different about Safari when
we first started was most,almost all communities were open
by default and we wanted Safarito be a closed community.
We were looking at a lot ofcommunities that were open.
There were like 10,000 people,20,000 people, and that just
didn't really seem like thecommunity experience that we
(11:47):
were expecting, and so we reallyfocused on making it a small
group of people, but a reallygreat experience for a small
group of people.
And so if you're going to havea small, if you're going to have
a closed community by default,then you have to think about
what is the mechanism in whichpeople apply and do you accept
them on a rolling basis intoyour community or do you do a
(12:09):
special experience for peopleall together in one?
And yeah, for us we always dothe batches, and I think that
that is something that I'vebecome more and more bullish on,
as we've done now six differentbatches.
I think that batches reallyhelp with both FOMO and hype to
get into a batch, so helpingwith the top of FOMO, but also
(12:33):
the great onboarding reallyhappens within a batch if every
single person joins yourcommunity at the same time, with
the same expectations and thesame moment.
So I think batches there are anumber of different things that
are really important for whybatching can set up communities
for success.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah, I think the batching aspect is brilliant.
So there are a couple of thingsthat I really loved about it,
the one thing being is this likeguided onboarding, where every
you know you had the firstonboarding called and you had
this.
You know you have theseindividual weekly calls where
you go into different areas ofweb tree marketing and you
(13:10):
invite different people from thecommunity to speak.
So I really enjoyed that, whereit's kind of this guided
experience.
And then the second piece whichI really appreciated is the
individual matchmaking, which itmust that must have taken a lot
of work where you guys actuallymatched members with each other
.
That was pretty mind blowing tome.
And, yeah, I'm curious how muchwork did that take and how did
(13:32):
you come up with that idea?
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah, it's.
I would love to say that itdoesn't take a lot of time, but
it takes an insane amount oftime.
There are two parts of thematching right.
There's the onboarding call.
So you know this, but obviously, for those who are listening,
every single person that joins aSafari batch has an onboarding
call with me or my co.
-founder.
(13:57):
So that means that we, when wehave a batch of AD, we meet AD
different people one on one fora 30 minute call.
So that alone is 40 hours oftime, and we use those calls to
basically figure out where eachperson is in their personal
growth, journey, growth, careerin this current moment and use
(14:18):
that information to figure outwho would be the most important
and most valuable person that wecould introduce them to in this
moment in time.
And so it's both the upfront ofhaving 40 hours with the calls
with 80 different people, andthen after that it's thinking
about who would be the mostnatural, best fit for this
person from that same group of80 and then building trust in
(14:41):
the match.
So I think that's a part thatwe've gone much better at over
time is, when you match twopeople, how do you inspire them
to understand that this is goingto be a match that's worth
their time and to trust thematch.
So it definitely takes a lot oftime and it's something that
we've gone a lot better at.
(15:02):
I think that this batchmatchmaking process had one of
the highest conversion rates sofar of like you get introduced
to actually like scheduling thesetting of a call and doing the
call of any batch before itreally comes from how we set up
the match one, before thematchmaking actually takes place
.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Yeah, I really appreciate that and it's
honestly I will say as somebodywho's in the latest batch it's
really worth checking out Safariapplying for the next batch.
It's a great community, thelevel of discussion is very high
, so overall, totally worth itto really try to get in.
And that takes me to my nextquestion, right, because you
(15:45):
guys built this incrediblecommunity and then basically we
decided to start buildingtooling, and so how did that
transition go from having areally strong community to
deciding, okay, this is theactual tool we want to build, or
actual software we want tobuild that and then be able to
kind of get community feedbackfor that?
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Yeah, we actually always were building tools under
the hood.
This might be news to some, buteven since the second batch
we're building different tools.
So back then we were verypassionate about.
One of the ethos for ourlisteners here is about this
idea of collaborative growth.
It's something that we verymuch embody within our community
(16:32):
of getting people to exchangeinsights with each other in real
time.
We were very inspired by Duneand how interesting it is to be
able to see dashboards that arepublic with on-chain data.
But we also thought it wasreally limiting that it was only
on-chain data and not off-chaindata too, because so much of
growth within Web 3 stillhappens off-chain, and so we had
(16:54):
built this very interestingopen mix panel an open
collaborative growth version ofthe mix panel where we had
Safari members connect theirDiscord data to our platform and
then make it public foreveryone within the community to
see and to comment on thosedifferent graphs as well,
because we really wanted to beable to not just talk about
(17:16):
growth strategies but alsoanalyze growth data together and
see how they inform differentgrowth strategies.
So that's been an interestingthing.
We've always been buildingdifferent products into the hood
, but we fundraising helped usreally take our development to
the next level and we're reallyproud of the platform that we've
(17:39):
built over the last five months.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Awesome.
And was there a process ofintroducing the product to the
community and getting their takeon it?
Or how did the community getinvolved with the product
ideation, creation, sort ofthings?
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Yeah.
So for batch 2, when we didthis open mix panel, we actually
onboarded people to directlyonto the platform and then they
had the community experience.
We really intertwined the two,and so that's something that
we've always been thinking aboutwhat is the community?
What is the product?
Where is the overlap?
I think at this point in time,we think about them a little bit
(18:19):
more separately than we didbefore.
Today, the product is theplatform where you could value
and, like you connect your dataand you work with your team, and
the community is our brands,our customer acquisition funnel.
It is our opportunity to meetand build relationships with the
best of the best growth leadersin the space, but we leave it
(18:41):
there, right?
So people, and many people fromthis current batch have
integrated Safari, but we don'tpush it, and I think that that
is very, very important for anycommunity builder that also has
a product to realize and thinkabout is that this is a very
fine balance and once you losetrust with your community then,
(19:02):
like, your community isbasically dead.
So we very much optimizetowards the community experience
over the product, with theimagination that people will
find our product if they'reinterested, and that's been a
good bet so far and has happenedorganically for us.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah, absolutely.
You know it's at that point,once they're in your community,
it's like, you know, it's a nobrainer to go check out the
actual product itself becauseyou're already getting so much
value from the community.
And I do think that, yeah, it's, it's a pretty brilliant way to
set it up and I'm sure there's.
You know, obviously I'm stillgoing through this batch, but
(19:44):
I'm sure there's definitelyinteresting ways where you can
probably integrate the productin a way that doesn't come
across as pushy Into into thecommunity as well, like in terms
of maybe even yeah, maybe justspitballing, like public
dashboards or something, butagain, that's, that's just
spitballing.
But yeah, it's superinteresting and I do agree 100%
(20:05):
with the community.
Trust has to be important andthis is the first time I've seen
, or like maybe I think there'stwo communities I can think of
safari and then wolf's downwhere I've seen this level of
like dedication to keeping thecommunity free of, essentially,
monetization, free of, like, anykind of financialization.
(20:27):
I think with Web three you havea lot of communities that are
based on NFT gating or, you know, token gating, where you can
essentially buy your way in, andthose communities I find are
not as sticky as the ones whereit's purely based on merit and
there's no other than thewebsite, other than maybe the
lessons you learn and the peopleyou meet and the networking.
(20:48):
So, yeah, really respect thatapproach and I do think that's
that's an approach that's reallyneeded in the space.
Now one question I have for youis are there any other
communities in the factory spacethat you think also have, are
like very close knit and havelike a really positive vibe that
(21:11):
you really respect in terms ofcommunity building?
Speaker 2 (21:15):
I mean, what existed before safari was the jump
community, and I was reallyinspired by Jeff, who's the
founder of jump.
He had this very similaronboarding strategy.
They did it in a rolling basis,not a batch basis, but he would
talk to every single personthat onboarded into jump and
(21:36):
that's.
I met him before.
As a result of that, as Ijoined that community and I was
really inspired by you know whatone might say is unscalable?
Doing the unscalable thingsactually does build a lot of
bonds between community members,and also bonds and allegiance
to the community itself.
There would be no jump withoutJoe.
(21:57):
I think that that is animportant thing for a lot of
community builders to realize aswell.
It's like your communityexperience begins with whether
you like the community builderor not, and then from there you
can find other ways to createvalue.
And you're referring to jumpcapital or no, there's a
(22:18):
community of marketers calledjump.
Okay, interesting, yeah, it'smore so, I'd say, on the the
brand marketing side.
So it really rose in 2021 witha lot of web two markers getting
curious about launching webthree activations for their
bigger brands in the space.
(22:39):
And so for us, you know, Safariis more of the web three native
growth leader side, so itcarved out our own niche.
But Jeff at one point in time,said that he had spoken to like
700 plus jump members one on oneto onboard them, which is
absolutely crazy.
I think that I'm still probablylike 400 maybe, in for how many
(23:06):
Safari members I've chattedwith or onboarded in.
But yeah, so quite a feat.
So I definitely respect that.
I think the other communitythat's really great is that
chain forest created a reallygreat community.
Unfortunately, chain forest hasjust shut down, I think like a
month or so ago, but that wasanother great community that I
(23:29):
thought had a lot of greatpeople in it.
High signal they also do thaton a rolling basis or not
batches.
Right now there are more techspace communities.
I'm seeing a lot of communitiespop up on telegram.
The two that I like the mostright now are BD3 and Bard, I
think both of them have a highquality group of people which
(23:50):
then has like 100 to 300 peoplein them.
That's just an interestingplace to learn things.
So I think the communitiesserve different functions at
different times, and one of thethings that I think about too
which may be as a hot take isthat I don't think communities
are meant to be forever.
I think that they serve acertain purpose in a certain
moment of time, and we shouldn'tthink about it as a failure if
(24:14):
a community shuts down becauseit just might not be needed
anymore, and that's okay.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Yeah, that makes sense.
And moving on to Safari, theproduct, what do you feel are
kind of the differentiators ascompared to some of the other
tooling out there?
And I know there's also apretty interesting unique
element when it comes to how youguys treat privacy, so maybe
you can touch on that as well.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Yeah, I think that the two things would be.
The differentiators are, one,the privacy aspect and two,
campaigns.
We're very focused on campaignsand how you measure campaigns,
and I think one of ourdifferentiators is our close
relationship with a number ofthese different marketing
channels.
Safari we created this databaseof all the web through growth
(25:07):
tools and market maps of thosegrowth tools and a lot of people
.
For many people, it was thefirst time that they really
understood what was going on inthe greater web through growth
space beyond them, maybecompetitors that they didn't
know about, or to be able to seeand categorize different
companies in this larger webthrough growth industry, and so
(25:27):
that making those maps has givenus a great opportunity to build
very high quality relationshipswith all the other builders in
the space.
And so that's one, one aspectthat I think is a little
different about us, and theother is this privacy space and
the way that we think aboutprivacy is that I think that
(25:48):
marketers have really beenpresented with a false choice
Historically, but to a web three, either you promote privacy and
you track nothing, or youreject privacy and you track
everything, and I think thatthat's a really false binary
that's been put in front ofmarketers.
And, if nothing else, I thinkweb three presents an
opportunity for us to thinkdifferently about that.
(26:10):
And so what we?
When we think about these things, we think about it from the
first principles point of viewof what is the data that is
actually needed from remark formarketing standpoint today, and
we're only going to track that.
If people ask us for otherthings, we will evolve, but
(26:32):
we're not going to come in withthe idea of, like we're trying
to track literally everything.
So we're trying to come at itfrom this first principles.
You tell us what you absolutelyneed to track and we will help
you track that, but we're notgoing to go out of our way to
try and find other things thatyou might want to track in the
future, unless it's specificallyasked of us.
(26:53):
So I think that's like adifference of ethos and I really
saw this a lot in my you knowthe other companies that I've
worked for in the past whotracked like, literally
everything under the sun, butlike a lot of times that data
wasn't useful, right, like itwas one of those things that,
like a new product manager getshired and is like let's go
(27:13):
through all the data and theylike find this thing or like
they do a presentation, all thisdata that nobody's ever looked
at before and then I was likecool, that's interesting.
And then like nobody uses thatdata ever again.
Right, so there are likecertain things, I think,
particular around, like campaigndata and these are journey that
are not like so demographic,specific on people.
(27:33):
That is very valuable, but Ithink that a lot of the
demographic data that is beingcollected which is, in my
opinion, the more creepy partsof data I think a lot of that is
actually not as neat as peoplethink it is, and so we built
this on how we can reflect thatdesign choice Interesting.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
And yeah, I mean, I think more and more we're
starting to see marketinganalytics move towards like
cohort based or just moreanonymized data, rather than
knowing everything about everyuser.
Right, like, I think that'sjust a trend we're seeing
overall and figuring out how todo marketing in a manner that
(28:17):
still respects privacy but it'sstill very effective.
That's like a huge challengethat has to be solved, right.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Yeah, and I think Define is the perfect space for
us to experiment with thosetypes of things.
Define marketers are superinteresting.
Like they actually really don'tcare about who this person is
like as a person, you know.
They want to understandeverything that they do on their
website, how they like moveacross the user funnel where
people drop off or they getconfused, but like on the like
(28:47):
the demographic level, theyactually don't need to know that
information and maybe some ofthese things will break down
when we get into likedecentralized web three commerce
that you need to know much moreabout, like the actual
demographics of people.
But I think that there's thisis like a great new world for us
to experiment with what itreally needs to collect less
data and do effective marketingin this new world that, as you
(29:09):
described.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
I guess where I would say probably demographic data
really comes into handy is whenyou're running like paid
advertising campaigns and you'redoing them at scale.
But then again, I think thesolution to that and you know
this is this is something whereif you have you don't
(29:34):
necessarily need to know likeyour individual user down to
like everything level right youcan still have this like cohort
of people or have this generalkind of like anonymized or hash
data that the marketer doesn'tneed to understand like every
single person.
(29:55):
But as long as they have thatand then the ad platforms can
ingest that data, you can stillbe very effective.
It's like and that's theinteresting thing about web
three and decentralized systemsis you could theoretically have
like this data that is very, Iguess, sensitive that if you
have multiple systems like adnetwork, if you have like kind
(30:17):
of an analytics platform, youcould theoretically have this
data be used across multiplesystems without anybody knowing
anything about the one specificuser, right?
So it could be almost likeencrypted in a way where even
the ad network can't see it,like they can use it but they
you know somebody at the adnetwork can't go in and be like
okay, I want to figure out whothis person is.
(30:40):
I don't know if that makessense or if I'm going completely
of the need.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
It totally makes sense and that's one aspect that
we're also working on is ourlead engineer has a PhD in
different in data privacy, andone of his like core focuses was
this thing called differentialprivacy, which is basically that
is how do you share a data setwith other people without them
(31:06):
being able to join that data setwith other things to figure out
?
You know personal identifyinginformation on one user within
that data set, so how do you addnoise?
How do you do other things tobe able to like, yeah, share
data sets, but in a privacypreserving way?
Speaker 1 (31:23):
Yeah, that's, that's interesting and I definitely see
where that's where things aregoing, because you kind of you
want to preserve performance,but you also want to be able to
preserve privacy, and I thinkthere is a way to do both and
you hit it on the nail there and, yeah, it sounds like you have
the right lead engineer to buildthis.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yep, absolutely.
Well, that's the unique thingis, you know, privacy for us is
not just a buzzword, you know,we've really built it into the
DNA of our team, and both of ourengineers today have privacy
focused backgrounds forengineering as well.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
So okay, I'll wrap it up.
In that case, I think wedefinitely went a lot more in
depth in the little audiocut-stunt help, but let's, let's
wrap it up.
Okay.
So, moving on from Safari, whatdo you think is the least
underutilized yet high ROImarketing channel in Web 3?
Speaker 2 (32:16):
It really depends on what company you're in, but I'd
say for Safari.
So Safari being like a Web 3B2B platform.
I think the high, the mostunderappreciated channel is
LinkedIn.
Everyone will tell you that,like, nobody in Web 3 is on
LinkedIn, they're all on Twitterand that's kind of not true in
my opinion.
Everyone still scrolls throughLinkedIn.
(32:37):
Very few people post onLinkedIn but they're always kind
of lurking, which creates thislike great asymmetric
opportunity.
Right, everyone's posting onTwitter all the time.
There's a ton of content andthere's a ton of people are
there.
Linkedin, there's very littleWeb 3 content always has been
and so if you're in a personalWeb 3, much like like you're
going to see, you know mycontent about Web 3 on LinkedIn
(33:02):
than somebody else's.
So I think that's a a keyopportunity to sort of break
through the noise that exists oncrypto Twitter as via LinkedIn.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Okay, great answer and I agree.
Next question what do you thinkis the main lesson that Web 2
growth leaders could take fromWeb 3 community building
strategies, and do you thinkit's even applicable to Web 2
marketing?
Speaker 2 (33:28):
I think it's totally applicable personally.
I mean fundamentally what I'mtalking about.
That we did with the communitythat I was building of those
developers doing mock interviewsback in 2018 is very similar to
Safari today in terms of thefunction of that community.
But I think what any Web 2growth leaders should be
(33:49):
listening to right now when itcomes to community is that alpha
, in my opinion, is fundamentalto any community, and by that I
basically mean there needs to besome benefit to join one
community over another communityand a way that that community
makes you, as an individual,joining it better.
And so for us, with Safari, theway that we think about our
community is how can weaccelerate the careers of our
(34:10):
members?
And that's done through onemeeting other people that are
great in your industry.
That's two learning Web 3growth tactics that you wouldn't
be able to find anywhere else.
That comes from having thosehigh quality members within the
community.
And then three, it's aboutusing the best tools, and that's
where our platform comes in.
Versus.
I think that a lot of people,both in Web 2 and in Web 3, have
(34:34):
made the mistake in terms ofthinking about their community
only in terms of like what canour community do for us as a
company when it comes to growthor monetization, and it's
obviously important to thinkabout those things.
But I believe that by thinkingabout how to help our community
first and foremost, it'll helpour brand in the end.
And so you can think aboutcommunity like a brand, like a
(34:58):
long term brand strategy, orlike SEO or anything else.
But if we're on being honest,like there aren't too many short
term strategies that work for along time, so I think that you
have to approach community withthat intent of knowing that this
is a a long term brand buildingstrategy, more than like a
short term, like extracting fromyour community strategy.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Absolutely agreed with that.
So, Justin, where can peoplefind out more about Safari?
Where can they go sign up for ademo of the platform?
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yeah, you can go sign up on our website, safariclub,
and that's safarily, soS-A-F-A-R-Y.
Our platform is free andself-serve, so you can just go
onto our website, explore theplatform yourself and, if you're
interested, you can integrateit all on your own.
And in terms of where you canlearn more about us, you can
(35:51):
find us on Twitter, at Twitter,at hashtag safariclub.
That's a great place to exploreour content and the other web.
Three growth resources that weprovide Awesome.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
Yeah, it was a pleasure having you on here.
It was great listening to youbasically go deep into community
led growth.
I think this is going to be thenext product.
You know, right now, productlike growth is the big buzzword.
Community led growth is goingto be the next big buzzword and
I think you're absolutely at theforefront of that.
So thanks again for being onthe podcast and for listeners.
(36:24):
If you're on iTunes, if you'reon Spotify, give us a like, give
us a review and I'll see you onthe next podcast.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
Thanks, this is great .
Hey guys, welcome back to the Crescendo Go to
Market podcast.
And today we have Justin, thefounder of Safari, and he is one
of the best community growthleaders I've seen.
He's pioneering this newconcept of community-led growth.
Justin, do you want to give usa quick introduction to yourself
and what you do in the WebTreespace?
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hey everyone.
I'm Justin, co-founder ofSafari.
We founded the leading WebTreegrowth community and we're
building a privacy-centricalternative to Google Analytics
and WebTree.
My background is in two-sidedlabor market places doing
BDC-grave.
I'm happy to elaborate morewherever you want to dive in.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Yeah, I would love to learn more about what you were
doing prior to WebTree and howdid you get into marketing in
general.
I know you were quite involvedin product and ops.
How did you get into themarketing world?
What did that journey look like?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah, so the first company that I worked for, I was
the first hire at an earlystage, why I'd coordinate our
startup.
That startup built apeer-to-peer mock interview tool
for software engineers topractice interviewing.
So think about it as like yougo to the platform, I interview
you, you interview me, weprovide each other feedback at
the end, and the secret sauce ofthat business was really
(01:16):
community.
They built this great communityof people who were helping each
other practice for interviewsand then ultimately get a job,
and so that was one aspect ofsomething I was doing there.
As their first hire, I like tosay that I was their everything
else guy.
I joined a team of threeengineering founders, so I was
doing both B2B marketing, b2bsales, b2c community and then
(01:40):
also content in between, and sothat was one experience that I
had.
And the second one was at a B2Clabor marketplace called Winolo
, which you can think about asUber for warehouse workers, and
there I was leading aprogrammatic advertising
strategy, so doing a lot moreattribution and ad tech, which
is what I learned about thatwhole space.
(02:02):
I ended up building up thecompany's first experimentation
platform and program, so I'vereally had a lot of different
types of growth experiencethroughout my early career
before I did the 23.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Got it, and with Winolo that was a much larger
company.
I think it was like Series D orsomething.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Yeah, so in them they just raised a series C from
Bain, so there are about 100people.
I joined them around then andthen I left.
Two and a half years laterthey're on 400 people and it
closed to Series D.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
So with your, so with the first company you worked at
, which was your, I guess theinterviewing software right, so
you're essentially able tointerview each other, provide
each other feedback.
What was the B2B play there andwhat was the B2C play?
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, so the we basically started with this
market interview tool so it waspurely B2C helping software
developers help each otherpractice interviews, and then we
built a technical hiringmarketplace on top of it.
So the B2B side was people whowere looking to hire software
engineers and the B2C side wascandidates who were looking for
a new job.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Interesting, and then I guess that makes sense how
you got into the labormarketplace for essentially
warehouse workers as well,because it's kind of similar.
You're solving the recruitingslash hiring problem.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Yeah, the first time.
The first one was all for fulltime though they're hiring
software engineers full time andthe second one was very on
demand, so a warehouse workermight work one warehouse one day
, then a different job, adifferent day at a different
place.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Interesting.
Interesting, yeah, that'sfascinating because it's that
like two-sided marketplaceaspect of it definitely makes
marketing and community a lotmore difficult, right, because
you're not just trying to build,kind of like, the supply,
you're also trying to build ademand at the same time and you
(04:05):
kind of have to do them at thesame time as well.
But I guess the advantage youhad at the first company is
basically the community wasinterviewing each other and
helping each other, so you don'treally even need employers.
You didn't even need, like,people coming in to hire them,
because they're already werethere for a reason.
You just found a way tobasically take those people that
(04:26):
were already there and thenfind a way to essentially bring
in these employers to hire thosepeople.
Is that kind of accurate?
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah, and that sort of was.
That was definitely the secretsauce is that we had these
people practicing interviews,and so there are a couple of
things that happened there.
One we had this community ofpeople who were organically
helping each other and, you know, providing each other value in
a positive way.
So people were coming out toour platform and being like, wow
, I met great new people.
I got this service that wasfree to meet new people, help me
(04:59):
get my next job, and so thatmade them know a little bit more
loyal to our platform and tosearching jobs on our platform,
rather than like the classicmercenary.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
I just lost you.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Okay, I mean jobs, also sites.
So I think that was one veryhelpful aspect to it for us.
And the second is that weactually knew how people are
going to perform.
That's the other piece thatsort of came to us along the way
.
Right is that they'repracticing interviews on our
platform.
Then we know how they're goingto do an interview and so we
actually have higher sense ofwho's qualified, who's going to
(05:31):
get hired, who's not.
Based off of this proprietarydata that you wouldn't have had
if you're any other type ofrecruitment tool, we actually
knew how they were going toperform in a real interview
because we had interview datafrom them doing their practice
tests with somebody live Right.
So we knew how the firsttechnical interview they did at
a company was likely going to go.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Can you tell us about how you got into Web 3 and how
you decided to start buildingSafari?
What it is, and we'll go fromthere.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah.
So my co-founder, I dove intoWeb 3 at the end of 2021 and we
were immediately fascinated bythe potential for new business
models and freedom from the verypowerful intermediaries of our
time.
But as I, as we explored thespace, I was also really
dumbfounded by the insane growththat was happening from these
(06:23):
companies in the peak of thebull market.
Just like the notion that youcould have an airdrop for a
completely new company.
Then, like all of a suddenthey're driving like such high
revenue numbers and such likehigh user growth was like
absolutely insane to me as agrowth person.
But I was also confused thatnobody was really talking about
that either.
Like nobody was really talkingabout growth or marketing or the
(06:45):
strategies that were beingdeployed behind some of these
very interesting Web 3 nativetactics.
And so for me, safari was.
You know, we built Safari as acommunity basically for, like me
, right as I was, like I want aplace where I can talk to other
growth people about their growthstrategies, their challenges.
What does this all mean?
(07:06):
What is the impact of these Web3 native strategies on the
future of growth?
So Safari really began fromthere, which was a small batch
of 40 of us talking about whatis the future of Web 3 growth
and how does that affect Web 2growth?
And then we slowly grew fromthere.
But we've intentionally keptthe community quite small,
(07:26):
really only accepting the bestof the best, because we do very
high touch activities with them,as I was sort of alluding to
earlier Along the way we raisedaround and started building our
platform, which is now live formarketing attribution.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Awesome.
And what exactly?
Could you go a bit more intothe Safari, the platform right.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Yeah, so Safari the platform.
Safari is a marketingattribution platform that helps
Web 3 teams analyze themarketing cat channel, roi and
customer LTV.
You can really think about uslike a Google Analytics for Web
3 for helping companies trackchannel performance.
So that might be understandingwhere your users come from in
(08:13):
terms of the campaigns, themarketing channels, their
geography and other types ofinteresting aligned data
performance.
But it's also trackingconversion rates across channels
, understanding how your funnelworks, from those campaigns to
visitors to wallet sign-ins, tocustom events, on-chain and
off-chain that you care about.
(08:35):
And finally, it's the userjourney, which is really
understanding how users are notgetting across the website and
where they're dropping off, sothat you can improve your funnel
.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Got it.
So it's more than just an ad,got it.
It's more than an attributionplatform.
It's actually kind of amarketing analytics platform
that really allows you to have adeeper understanding.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Like basically like attribution plus mix panel.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Got it, got it.
What do you think of the GoogleAnalytics for Web Tree
comparison or analogy?
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Do you think that's accurate or yeah, I definitely
think that that's accurate.
I think that the one thing thatwe're trying to go more for is
not just not just solely top offunnel, but being able to
understand a little bit deeperinto your funnel and connecting
that with actually revenue data.
Downstream, I think that GoogleAnalytics, but also, more so,
(09:29):
the Web 2 attribution players.
They didn't spend a lot of timefocusing on the visualization
of data.
They mostly accepted that thatdata would get piped into your
own in-house BI tool.
But we are spending a lot oftime really trying to make our
dashboard attractive andsomething that people would just
use as is, if that makes sense,rather than expecting that that
(09:51):
data is going to go elsewhere.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Yeah, that's the one thing I noticed about Safari.
From this you know, basicallythe screenshots and mockups you
showed me where the UI and theUX is significantly better than
many other tools, even in Web 2.
And I think that's prettyimportant for where the space is
at right now, because mostpeople don't have a full-time
analytics person in-house to goand, you know, create clean
(10:17):
dashboards right.
It's the more user-friendly youmake it, I think, the more of
an edge there is.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, and I think we're at a time to where people
are looking for simplicity aswell.
A lot of the Web 2 analyticsplatforms got, in my opinion,
overly complicated and wasanalyzing a lot of data that
didn't really matter that much,and so we really focused on both
like the user experience frommaking beautiful dashboards,
that making beautiful dashboardsto visualize your data, but
(10:47):
also that are easy to understandand tracking the metrics that
really matter, rather thantrying to track everything and
anything.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Absolutely, absolutely.
That makes a lot of sense.
And with this platform right,because I know you first built a
community you have this reallyinteresting mechanism of batches
.
Did you start out with havingpeople come in different batches
, or did it start out as acommunity and then you decided,
hey, we're going to create thisbatching system.
How did that, like thecommunity originally grow?
(11:19):
And then, yeah, basically, howdid that evolve?
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Yeah, so we actually did batches since the beginning,
and I think that the thing thatwas different about Safari when
we first started was most,almost all communities were open
by default and we wanted Safarito be a closed community.
We were looking at a lot ofcommunities that were open.
There were like 10,000 people,20,000 people, and that just
didn't really seem like thecommunity experience that we
(11:47):
were expecting, and so we reallyfocused on making it a small
group of people, but a reallygreat experience for a small
group of people.
And so if you're going to havea small, if you're going to have
a closed community by default,then you have to think about
what is the mechanism in whichpeople apply and do you accept
them on a rolling basis intoyour community or do you do a
(12:09):
special experience for peopleall together in one?
And yeah, for us we always dothe batches, and I think that
that is something that I'vebecome more and more bullish on,
as we've done now six differentbatches.
I think that batches reallyhelp with both FOMO and hype to
get into a batch, so helpingwith the top of FOMO, but also
(12:33):
the great onboarding reallyhappens within a batch if every
single person joins yourcommunity at the same time, with
the same expectations and thesame moment.
So I think batches there are anumber of different things that
are really important for whybatching can set up communities
for success.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah, I think the batching aspect is brilliant.
So there are a couple of thingsthat I really loved about it,
the one thing being is this likeguided onboarding, where every
you know you had the firstonboarding called and you had
this.
You know you have theseindividual weekly calls where
you go into different areas ofweb tree marketing and you
(13:10):
invite different people from thecommunity to speak.
So I really enjoyed that, whereit's kind of this guided
experience.
And then the second piece whichI really appreciated is the
individual matchmaking, which itmust that must have taken a lot
of work where you guys actuallymatched members with each other
.
That was pretty mind blowing tome.
And, yeah, I'm curious how muchwork did that take and how did
(13:32):
you come up with that idea?
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah, it's.
I would love to say that itdoesn't take a lot of time, but
it takes an insane amount oftime.
There are two parts of thematching right.
There's the onboarding call.
So you know this, but obviously, for those who are listening,
every single person that joins aSafari batch has an onboarding
call with me or my co.
-founder.
(13:57):
So that means that we, when wehave a batch of AD, we meet AD
different people one on one fora 30 minute call.
So that alone is 40 hours oftime, and we use those calls to
basically figure out where eachperson is in their personal
growth, journey, growth, careerin this current moment and use
(14:18):
that information to figure outwho would be the most important
and most valuable person that wecould introduce them to in this
moment in time.
And so it's both the upfront ofhaving 40 hours with the calls
with 80 different people, andthen after that it's thinking
about who would be the mostnatural, best fit for this
person from that same group of80 and then building trust in
(14:41):
the match.
So I think that's a part thatwe've gone much better at over
time is, when you match twopeople, how do you inspire them
to understand that this is goingto be a match that's worth
their time and to trust thematch.
So it definitely takes a lot oftime and it's something that
we've gone a lot better at.
(15:02):
I think that this batchmatchmaking process had one of
the highest conversion rates sofar of like you get introduced
to actually like scheduling thesetting of a call and doing the
call of any batch before itreally comes from how we set up
the match one, before thematchmaking actually takes place
.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Yeah, I really appreciate that and it's
honestly I will say as somebodywho's in the latest batch it's
really worth checking out Safariapplying for the next batch.
It's a great community, thelevel of discussion is very high
, so overall, totally worth itto really try to get in.
And that takes me to my nextquestion, right, because you
(15:45):
guys built this incrediblecommunity and then basically we
decided to start buildingtooling, and so how did that
transition go from having areally strong community to
deciding, okay, this is theactual tool we want to build, or
actual software we want tobuild that and then be able to
kind of get community feedbackfor that?
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Yeah, we actually always were building tools under
the hood.
This might be news to some, buteven since the second batch
we're building different tools.
So back then we were verypassionate about.
One of the ethos for ourlisteners here is about this
idea of collaborative growth.
It's something that we verymuch embody within our community
(16:32):
of getting people to exchangeinsights with each other in real
time.
We were very inspired by Duneand how interesting it is to be
able to see dashboards that arepublic with on-chain data.
But we also thought it wasreally limiting that it was only
on-chain data and not off-chaindata too, because so much of
growth within Web 3 stillhappens off-chain, and so we had
(16:54):
built this very interestingopen mix panel an open
collaborative growth version ofthe mix panel where we had
Safari members connect theirDiscord data to our platform and
then make it public foreveryone within the community to
see and to comment on thosedifferent graphs as well,
because we really wanted to beable to not just talk about
(17:16):
growth strategies but alsoanalyze growth data together and
see how they inform differentgrowth strategies.
So that's been an interestingthing.
We've always been buildingdifferent products into the hood
, but we fundraising helped usreally take our development to
the next level and we're reallyproud of the platform that we've
(17:39):
built over the last five months.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Awesome.
And was there a process ofintroducing the product to the
community and getting their takeon it?
Or how did the community getinvolved with the product
ideation, creation, sort ofthings?
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Yeah.
So for batch 2, when we didthis open mix panel, we actually
onboarded people to directlyonto the platform and then they
had the community experience.
We really intertwined the two,and so that's something that
we've always been thinking aboutwhat is the community?
What is the product?
Where is the overlap?
I think at this point in time,we think about them a little bit
(18:19):
more separately than we didbefore.
Today, the product is theplatform where you could value
and, like you connect your dataand you work with your team, and
the community is our brands,our customer acquisition funnel.
It is our opportunity to meetand build relationships with the
best of the best growth leadersin the space, but we leave it
(18:41):
there, right?
So people, and many people fromthis current batch have
integrated Safari, but we don'tpush it, and I think that that
is very, very important for anycommunity builder that also has
a product to realize and thinkabout is that this is a very
fine balance and once you losetrust with your community then,
(19:02):
like, your community isbasically dead.
So we very much optimizetowards the community experience
over the product, with theimagination that people will
find our product if they'reinterested, and that's been a
good bet so far and has happenedorganically for us.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah, absolutely.
You know it's at that point,once they're in your community,
it's like, you know, it's a nobrainer to go check out the
actual product itself becauseyou're already getting so much
value from the community.
And I do think that, yeah, it's, it's a pretty brilliant way to
set it up and I'm sure there's.
You know, obviously I'm stillgoing through this batch, but
(19:44):
I'm sure there's definitelyinteresting ways where you can
probably integrate the productin a way that doesn't come
across as pushy Into into thecommunity as well, like in terms
of maybe even yeah, maybe justspitballing, like public
dashboards or something, butagain, that's, that's just
spitballing.
But yeah, it's superinteresting and I do agree 100%
(20:05):
with the community.
Trust has to be important andthis is the first time I've seen
, or like maybe I think there'stwo communities I can think of
safari and then wolf's downwhere I've seen this level of
like dedication to keeping thecommunity free of, essentially,
monetization, free of, like, anykind of financialization.
(20:27):
I think with Web three you havea lot of communities that are
based on NFT gating or, you know, token gating, where you can
essentially buy your way in, andthose communities I find are
not as sticky as the ones whereit's purely based on merit and
there's no other than thewebsite, other than maybe the
lessons you learn and the peopleyou meet and the networking.
(20:48):
So, yeah, really respect thatapproach and I do think that's
that's an approach that's reallyneeded in the space.
Now one question I have for youis are there any other
communities in the factory spacethat you think also have, are
like very close knit and havelike a really positive vibe that
(21:11):
you really respect in terms ofcommunity building?
Speaker 2 (21:15):
I mean, what existed before safari was the jump
community, and I was reallyinspired by Jeff, who's the
founder of jump.
He had this very similaronboarding strategy.
They did it in a rolling basis,not a batch basis, but he would
talk to every single personthat onboarded into jump and
(21:36):
that's.
I met him before.
As a result of that, as Ijoined that community and I was
really inspired by you know whatone might say is unscalable?
Doing the unscalable thingsactually does build a lot of
bonds between community members,and also bonds and allegiance
to the community itself.
There would be no jump withoutJoe.
(21:57):
I think that that is animportant thing for a lot of
community builders to realize aswell.
It's like your communityexperience begins with whether
you like the community builderor not, and then from there you
can find other ways to createvalue.
And you're referring to jumpcapital or no, there's a
(22:18):
community of marketers calledjump.
Okay, interesting, yeah, it'smore so, I'd say, on the the
brand marketing side.
So it really rose in 2021 witha lot of web two markers getting
curious about launching webthree activations for their
bigger brands in the space.
(22:39):
And so for us, you know, Safariis more of the web three native
growth leader side, so itcarved out our own niche.
But Jeff at one point in time,said that he had spoken to like
700 plus jump members one on oneto onboard them, which is
absolutely crazy.
I think that I'm still probablylike 400 maybe, in for how many
(23:06):
Safari members I've chattedwith or onboarded in.
But yeah, so quite a feat.
So I definitely respect that.
I think the other communitythat's really great is that
chain forest created a reallygreat community.
Unfortunately, chain forest hasjust shut down, I think like a
month or so ago, but that wasanother great community that I
(23:29):
thought had a lot of greatpeople in it.
High signal they also do thaton a rolling basis or not
batches.
Right now there are more techspace communities.
I'm seeing a lot of communitiespop up on telegram.
The two that I like the mostright now are BD3 and Bard, I
think both of them have a highquality group of people which
(23:50):
then has like 100 to 300 peoplein them.
That's just an interestingplace to learn things.
So I think the communitiesserve different functions at
different times, and one of thethings that I think about too
which may be as a hot take isthat I don't think communities
are meant to be forever.
I think that they serve acertain purpose in a certain
moment of time, and we shouldn'tthink about it as a failure if
(24:14):
a community shuts down becauseit just might not be needed
anymore, and that's okay.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Yeah, that makes sense.
And moving on to Safari, theproduct, what do you feel are
kind of the differentiators ascompared to some of the other
tooling out there?
And I know there's also apretty interesting unique
element when it comes to how youguys treat privacy, so maybe
you can touch on that as well.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Yeah, I think that the two things would be.
The differentiators are, one,the privacy aspect and two,
campaigns.
We're very focused on campaignsand how you measure campaigns,
and I think one of ourdifferentiators is our close
relationship with a number ofthese different marketing
channels.
Safari we created this databaseof all the web through growth
(25:07):
tools and market maps of thosegrowth tools and a lot of people
.
For many people, it was thefirst time that they really
understood what was going on inthe greater web through growth
space beyond them, maybecompetitors that they didn't
know about, or to be able to seeand categorize different
companies in this larger webthrough growth industry, and so
(25:27):
that making those maps has givenus a great opportunity to build
very high quality relationshipswith all the other builders in
the space.
And so that's one, one aspectthat I think is a little
different about us, and theother is this privacy space and
the way that we think aboutprivacy is that I think that
(25:48):
marketers have really beenpresented with a false choice
Historically, but to a web three, either you promote privacy and
you track nothing, or youreject privacy and you track
everything, and I think thatthat's a really false binary
that's been put in front ofmarketers.
And, if nothing else, I thinkweb three presents an
opportunity for us to thinkdifferently about that.
(26:10):
And so what we?
When we think about these things, we think about it from the
first principles point of viewof what is the data that is
actually needed from remark formarketing standpoint today, and
we're only going to track that.
If people ask us for otherthings, we will evolve, but
(26:32):
we're not going to come in withthe idea of, like we're trying
to track literally everything.
So we're trying to come at itfrom this first principles.
You tell us what you absolutelyneed to track and we will help
you track that, but we're notgoing to go out of our way to
try and find other things thatyou might want to track in the
future, unless it's specificallyasked of us.
(26:53):
So I think that's like adifference of ethos and I really
saw this a lot in my you knowthe other companies that I've
worked for in the past whotracked like, literally
everything under the sun, butlike a lot of times that data
wasn't useful, right, like itwas one of those things that,
like a new product manager getshired and is like let's go
(27:13):
through all the data and theylike find this thing or like
they do a presentation, all thisdata that nobody's ever looked
at before and then I was likecool, that's interesting.
And then like nobody uses thatdata ever again.
Right, so there are likecertain things, I think,
particular around, like campaigndata and these are journey that
are not like so demographic,specific on people.
(27:33):
That is very valuable, but Ithink that a lot of the
demographic data that is beingcollected which is, in my
opinion, the more creepy partsof data I think a lot of that is
actually not as neat as peoplethink it is, and so we built
this on how we can reflect thatdesign choice Interesting.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
And yeah, I mean, I think more and more we're
starting to see marketinganalytics move towards like
cohort based or just moreanonymized data, rather than
knowing everything about everyuser.
Right, like, I think that'sjust a trend we're seeing
overall and figuring out how todo marketing in a manner that
(28:17):
still respects privacy but it'sstill very effective.
That's like a huge challengethat has to be solved, right.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Yeah, and I think Define is the perfect space for
us to experiment with thosetypes of things.
Define marketers are superinteresting.
Like they actually really don'tcare about who this person is
like as a person, you know.
They want to understandeverything that they do on their
website, how they like moveacross the user funnel where
people drop off or they getconfused, but like on the like
(28:47):
the demographic level, theyactually don't need to know that
information and maybe some ofthese things will break down
when we get into likedecentralized web three commerce
that you need to know much moreabout, like the actual
demographics of people.
But I think that there's thisis like a great new world for us
to experiment with what itreally needs to collect less
data and do effective marketingin this new world that, as you
(29:09):
described.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
I guess where I would say probably demographic data
really comes into handy is whenyou're running like paid
advertising campaigns and you'redoing them at scale.
But then again, I think thesolution to that and you know
this is this is something whereif you have you don't
(29:34):
necessarily need to know likeyour individual user down to
like everything level right youcan still have this like cohort
of people or have this generalkind of like anonymized or hash
data that the marketer doesn'tneed to understand like every
single person.
(29:55):
But as long as they have thatand then the ad platforms can
ingest that data, you can stillbe very effective.
It's like and that's theinteresting thing about web
three and decentralized systemsis you could theoretically have
like this data that is very, Iguess, sensitive that if you
have multiple systems like adnetwork, if you have like kind
(30:17):
of an analytics platform, youcould theoretically have this
data be used across multiplesystems without anybody knowing
anything about the one specificuser, right?
So it could be almost likeencrypted in a way where even
the ad network can't see it,like they can use it but they
you know somebody at the adnetwork can't go in and be like
okay, I want to figure out whothis person is.
(30:40):
I don't know if that makessense or if I'm going completely
of the need.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
It totally makes sense and that's one aspect that
we're also working on is ourlead engineer has a PhD in
different in data privacy, andone of his like core focuses was
this thing called differentialprivacy, which is basically that
is how do you share a data setwith other people without them
(31:06):
being able to join that data setwith other things to figure out
?
You know personal identifyinginformation on one user within
that data set, so how do you addnoise?
How do you do other things tobe able to like, yeah, share
data sets, but in a privacypreserving way?
Speaker 1 (31:23):
Yeah, that's, that's interesting and I definitely see
where that's where things aregoing, because you kind of you
want to preserve performance,but you also want to be able to
preserve privacy, and I thinkthere is a way to do both and
you hit it on the nail there and, yeah, it sounds like you have
the right lead engineer to buildthis.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yep, absolutely.
Well, that's the unique thingis, you know, privacy for us is
not just a buzzword, you know,we've really built it into the
DNA of our team, and both of ourengineers today have privacy
focused backgrounds forengineering as well.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
So okay, I'll wrap it up.
In that case, I think wedefinitely went a lot more in
depth in the little audiocut-stunt help, but let's, let's
wrap it up.
Okay.
So, moving on from Safari, whatdo you think is the least
underutilized yet high ROImarketing channel in Web 3?
Speaker 2 (32:16):
It really depends on what company you're in, but I'd
say for Safari.
So Safari being like a Web 3B2B platform.
I think the high, the mostunderappreciated channel is
LinkedIn.
Everyone will tell you that,like, nobody in Web 3 is on
LinkedIn, they're all on Twitterand that's kind of not true in
my opinion.
Everyone still scrolls throughLinkedIn.
(32:37):
Very few people post onLinkedIn but they're always kind
of lurking, which creates thislike great asymmetric
opportunity.
Right, everyone's posting onTwitter all the time.
There's a ton of content andthere's a ton of people are
there.
Linkedin, there's very littleWeb 3 content always has been
and so if you're in a personalWeb 3, much like like you're
going to see, you know mycontent about Web 3 on LinkedIn
(33:02):
than somebody else's.
So I think that's a a keyopportunity to sort of break
through the noise that exists oncrypto Twitter as via LinkedIn.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Okay, great answer and I agree.
Next question what do you thinkis the main lesson that Web 2
growth leaders could take fromWeb 3 community building
strategies, and do you thinkit's even applicable to Web 2
marketing?
Speaker 2 (33:28):
I think it's totally applicable personally.
I mean fundamentally what I'mtalking about.
That we did with the communitythat I was building of those
developers doing mock interviewsback in 2018 is very similar to
Safari today in terms of thefunction of that community.
But I think what any Web 2growth leaders should be
(33:49):
listening to right now when itcomes to community is that alpha
, in my opinion, is fundamentalto any community, and by that I
basically mean there needs to besome benefit to join one
community over another communityand a way that that community
makes you, as an individual,joining it better.
And so for us, with Safari, theway that we think about our
community is how can weaccelerate the careers of our
(34:10):
members?
And that's done through onemeeting other people that are
great in your industry.
That's two learning Web 3growth tactics that you wouldn't
be able to find anywhere else.
That comes from having thosehigh quality members within the
community.
And then three, it's aboutusing the best tools, and that's
where our platform comes in.
Versus.
I think that a lot of people,both in Web 2 and in Web 3, have
(34:34):
made the mistake in terms ofthinking about their community
only in terms of like what canour community do for us as a
company when it comes to growthor monetization, and it's
obviously important to thinkabout those things.
But I believe that by thinkingabout how to help our community
first and foremost, it'll helpour brand in the end.
And so you can think aboutcommunity like a brand, like a
(34:58):
long term brand strategy, orlike SEO or anything else.
But if we're on being honest,like there aren't too many short
term strategies that work for along time, so I think that you
have to approach community withthat intent of knowing that this
is a a long term brand buildingstrategy, more than like a
short term, like extracting fromyour community strategy.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Absolutely agreed with that.
So, Justin, where can peoplefind out more about Safari?
Where can they go sign up for ademo of the platform?
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yeah, you can go sign up on our website, safariclub,
and that's safarily, soS-A-F-A-R-Y.
Our platform is free andself-serve, so you can just go
onto our website, explore theplatform yourself and, if you're
interested, you can integrateit all on your own.
And in terms of where you canlearn more about us, you can
(35:51):
find us on Twitter, at Twitter,at hashtag safariclub.
That's a great place to exploreour content and the other web.
Three growth resources that weprovide Awesome.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
Yeah, it was a pleasure having you on here.
It was great listening to youbasically go deep into community
led growth.
I think this is going to be thenext product.
You know, right now, productlike growth is the big buzzword.
Community led growth is goingto be the next big buzzword and
I think you're absolutely at theforefront of that.
So thanks again for being onthe podcast and for listeners.
(36:24):
If you're on iTunes, if you'reon Spotify, give us a like, give
us a review and I'll see you onthe next podcast.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
Thanks, this is great .
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