August 26, 2025 • 29 mins
Fred Schebesta is the co-founder of Finder - the comparison website that aims to help people make better decisions.
Fred started it with a friend back in 2006. It’s now used by millions of people here and around the world - but there’s a fascinating story behind it.
A story about creativity, passion and drive, success and wealth - and moments where it nearly all came undone.
Michael Thompson sits down with Fred Schebesta for a very candid conversation about success, the risk of failure, and Fred's run-ins with Google and ASIC.
Find out more: https://fearandgreed.com.au/
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to One on one by Fear and Greed. I'm
Michael Thompson. My guest today is Fred Schabster. Now everybody
has heard of Finder. That's the comparison website that aims
to help people make better decisions. Fred started it with
a friend back in two thousand and six. It is
now used by millions of people here and around the world.
But there is a fascinating story behind it. It's a
(00:26):
story about creativity, about passion, about drive, about success, about wealth,
and moments as well where it nearly all came undone.
Fred Schabester, Welcome to one on one.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Thanks very much.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Finder. When I said that two thousand and six, find
us nearly twenty years old. When you look back on it,
do you have a sense of pride at what you've built?
Speaker 2 (00:49):
It kind of goes in phases, you know, like it's
a bit like a marriage. Really. I think it's like,
you know, seven years I think is the number when
you sort of reset in their relationship. I will, it's
like you have a certain relationship with the company, and
over time, eventually I think it just turns into a
bit of a blur. Like I think if you were
to go back sort of and ask me that, Like,
(01:10):
I don't know, ten years ago, I'd be like, wow,
this is crazy, And now I feel like this is evolution,
Like a company grows from like, you know, a little
little baby to a toddler to a teenager, and now
it's kind of like in its twenties. You know, it's
like and so it's it doesn't It's not as much
awe for me. It's more like, you know, this is solid.
(01:31):
This is where we've been.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Well, when you think about it, it predates kind of
a lot of things that we almost take for granted
now in terms of kind of Instagram came around after
Finder started, You're around the same time as kind of
Facebook and others all started. So you have been around
for a long time and established yourself so well now
in the market. Do you have a sense of perspective then,
on what the value and the purpose of Finder is
(01:54):
in your words, kind of what exactly is at the
heart of what you do.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
I think I speak to a lot of customers, you know,
and we spend a lot of time doing that to
try and unpack exactly what's going on here. And if
I was to like boil it down very simply and
I've heard this is direct from a customer. Is they
want to find a better deal, and that deal is
(02:22):
the one that you know, you could go and Google search,
you could go and go on forums, but it's all
aggregated into one place, and you're looking for that, you know,
like at a swap meet, and you you know, I
don't know if they do this anymore. People used to
drive up and open their boots and like sell stuff
out of them and you'd rummage around and find a
little gem that's worth a lot and you'd pay a
(02:43):
lot less. And that idea that there exists some deal
in the market. Some curiosity is what people come to
find before and obviously there's time saving and there's all
those other things, but at the end of the day,
they're looking for that little edge, that little bump, and
(03:04):
that that curiosity, that that idea that there's something, the
treasure that exists. I think that's the that's the mystery
that the finder has.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
It's such an interesting take on it because for me,
the value that I see is that there is such
a sense of overwhelm at the moment. There are so
many decisions to be made in life that the mental
load is huge and the idea of having to go
around and do it all yourself and find all that
information yourself is almost just overwhelming, And that to me
(03:34):
is kind of where I can see such a clear
value for a starte like Finder. I want to talk
to you more about the purpose and the value, but
I want to go back to the start if we can,
because it is such a great story of how it
came to be. But it wasn't actually your first business, though,
was it. It was your second business. Tell me about
the first one was at Freestyle Media.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Yeah, I started building websites in my college room at university,
and like everyone was coding sort of Java, and I
was coding like PHP, which is sort of one of
the early Internet languages, and like I couldn't you know?
It didn't didn't really help accepted. The very last year
there was a course that started in PHP and I
(04:16):
just walked in, coded the assignment in the classroom, handed
it in and then everyone was like in the classes
like whoa, this is crazy, Like how could you possibly
know that? And I went to the exam, didn't study.
I just filled in the whole exam and like I
was just so forward in what I was doing and
(04:37):
I realized that that's that's a key edge, and I
just pushed that, built websites for people, sold them, and
then we needed to get traffic, so we needed to
market them. And really I never studied marketing, and I
started my you know, learning myself, which I've done obviously
throughout time, and I came from the school of sort
(04:57):
of direct marketing very David Ogilvy. A guy called Michael
Kylie was my mentor, taught me copywriting and really started
to understand how to build traffic at attention, bring people in,
create content, and you know, educate your customer to then
go and buy something. And and we started selling these
(05:18):
services right to all our customers. And I was, as
I'm saying that you can hear it, sort of the
gems of Finder and and and and it's.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Pillars were really built out of that.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
They were they were natural. And I think while I
was doing that, I was just we're building all these websites,
and I was like, Wow, these companies are making so
much money. It's early Internet, you know, they're just crushing
it because it's doesn't exist right. Everyone wants to go
on the Internet and find a service. And I was
thinking to myself, why don't we go and build some
of these? And so during my spare time, we would
(05:49):
just put up little websites. And I did a lot
of zany experiments.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Let's put it that way.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Some of them I can talk about. Some of them
I can't.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Some of them are legal by an h some of
them I don't know. Twenty years have passed. It's fun,
it's actually the limitations as expired.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
So from those experiments, we really I sort of honed
my like, I took it that next step of building
actual businesses, and I really discovered a whole series of things.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
You know.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
We had a sudukus site, we had a Christmas Day
dot com, the U website, we had a Mother's Day presence.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
There's a very seasonal website, not the best. They didn't
turn out to maybe not year round.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
A poker site. We were shipping like huge poker tables
around Australia, which is a terrible idea because it's five
hundred dollars of shipping per table, so it's just not
a good ideas. A whole series of like face plants,
and then one of them was credit card Finder, and
that one just every month just tended to got better
and better and better, and that's something we really focused on.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
At what point did you realize that that was the
one out of all of these ideas sending poker tables
around Christmas Day dot com, Mother's Day dot com? Did
you know as soon as you started credit card Finder
that it was the one that had the potential to
keep on going.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Not at all. They looked all the same, Really, they
all looked the same. Just to give you context, I
remember there was a an octagon table we had in
the agency and every idea was an a four piece
of paper written with like three dot points of why
we should do it and you know, basically explanation of
the domain name. And they were just all scattered on
(07:29):
the table and we literally just got like our pant
and said, okay, we'll launch this one, this one, and
we got you know, a couple of ticks on it.
Then we put it live and just experiment and see
what would happen, and some immediately did well, some didn't.
I tell you, it was any story. So I discovered
the people would lose their super and this is the
(07:50):
thing that still happens. You know, you have a job
when you you know and then you lose, you know,
you forget where it is, you know. So I built
this website called fine loss super dot com Are you?
And I just put up a page should a blog
it was, it was just a page and I said, hey,
send me fifty dollars to my bank account and I'll
find your super. And after as been a count number
(08:10):
on there and people, I woke up one morning and
I was like, you know, and I just went like,
what's the fifty dollars in here? I don't know what
that is. And then I remembered, oh, I'd put this
on this website, and all these customers had started sending
me fifty dollars to go and find their lost super.
And you know, I obviously wrote back to them and
(08:31):
helped them actually find their super. A bunch of them
had genuine money they could get and everyone was happy.
And I realized, like, I probably should have, you know,
checked up on that idea. But you know, that's just
a nice example of my mindset in I think you
need to do a lot of repetitions with any idea,
with any business, with any skill, you have to find
(08:53):
the right thing that works really well. And it's those
number of repetitions, how many times you prepared to fail,
how many times you prepared to go, repeat, repeat, repeat,
repeede and refine your craft. And that that was my mindset.
Just keep going, keep going and find it.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
It's such a great image of you with all of
these ideas on this paper and just going yet, we'll
try this one. We'll try this one, We'll try this one.
Do you think that that spirit of just having a go,
of having a crack is still there now? Because you
do a lot of work with startups and trying to
help other people as well, Is there still that same
mentality around you, know what, We're just going to have
(09:31):
a go and see if this works, and if not,
we've got idea B, an idea, c an idea D.
Or Is it become more sanitized and refined now?
Speaker 2 (09:40):
I think raw entrepreneurship is the same. I think there
are a lot more failures than there are successes, and
that's probably the natural course of evolution of any particular thing,
and startups and know that are not any particularly different.
I don't think there's been a large amount of refining.
It's not even possible, right, So you're literally trying to
(10:03):
calculate a whole series of uncalculable thoughts about how customer
will react, what they'll think of the brand, you know, price,
and you can test that as much as you like,
but there's a certain point where you just sort of
got to launch the button. And I'm probably a little
bit earlier in the launch button than in the test.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
And to the name of your book, which is go live, Yeah,
it's just true. Just get it out there and see
if it works.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
I there's a there's a really cool cafe called Lime
Espresso's just down the road from me, and I'll shout
out to Costa here. He said. He bought the book
because you know, I get a you know, a bacon
and egg and a coffee in the morning. He bought
the book and he read it, literally said, I read
(10:47):
your book. I've got this line of Chili's sources I've
been looking to launch. He called up the Easter show.
Booked booked a thing. Now, this was this was about
three months ago. He showed me his production line of
chili sauces that he is now making and shipping out
the door to all these delis. Like he just he said,
(11:09):
and if it wasn't for you just telling me to
go live that idea that chili sauce would never have
gone out there.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
How does that make you feel, knowing that that you
have had that impact on someone's career and their life.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
I suppos to make a small dent in the universe.
You know, it's not it's not, I guess, I just yeah.
I think it's me giving back and me inspiring the
next generation of entrepreneurs, and hopefully in some small way.
The way I think of that is, as an entrepreneur,
you're contributing something new to humanity. You are you are,
(11:46):
you are on the precipice, You're on the forefront of invention.
You you add to the consciousness of what is. You
take ideas that are already out there and you turn
them into reality, and and that adds to humanity. It
drives us forward, It gives us new experiences, It continues
our existence. And I think that you know, this obviously
(12:08):
just is a range of chili sources. But to some extent,
where does that lead and what does that go to?
And you know, there's a whole series of serendipity I
think that will come from that.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
I mean, even it just at its most practical level,
it's had an impact on Costa's life and family, and
potentially a generational impact, and so those things can flow on.
I want to talk to you about Google, a rather
infamous incident involving Google. We're going to take a very
quick break and come back in a second. I'm speaking
(12:45):
with Fred Schebesta, the founder of Finder. Before the break,
I mentioned Google. Is it fair to say that you
have almost a love hate relationship with Google because you
figured out when you had credit card Finder which is
now Finder, figured out how to use Google so effectively
to maximize your SEO and really get your name and
(13:07):
your brand out there, to the extent that Google actually
stopped you from doing that. Take us through what happened, Well.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
You go back to two thousand and seven, two thousand
and eight. SEO back then was sort of a dark science,
and largely the most practices were you figured out the algorithm,
you figured out what was needed to go and change it,
and you did those things. And you know, to be fair,
(13:40):
there was not a lot of transparency about what you
can and can't do. We you know, a lot of
people and pretty much everyone was doing let's say fairly
gray too darker. You know, I don't know it was
a sense of inferi and green. We've got black and white,
but maybe maybe it's not so gray. We could go
(14:01):
a little bit blacker than gray.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Activities.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
And they were, you know, doing things like buying links
essentially on other people's websites and pointing them back to Finder.
Google back then primarily worked not from AI and not
from user testing and all the Chrome data it has today,
but from literally how many links pointed at your website.
(14:27):
And that was calculated by a thing called page Rank
and named after Larry Page, who invented Google, and with
so Jay Brinn and they called Patran. Basically, it was
the number of links to pointed to your site, and
it was based upon the university research papers, which cited
(14:47):
other research papers. And they thought, oh, I'll take that
same idea, and whoever got sited the most, they just
put up to the top of the site. And that's
what made Google so good and it did work. And
so I thought, oh, well, I'll just get the most
authoritative websites I can possibly find, and yeah, just advertise
on them and get them to link to Finder, and
(15:09):
the just.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
For the the benefit of anybody listening, advertised just then
did have air quotation marks around us. Just then.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
It was an avid, it was an advertisement, just just
was very blue link, you know. So I called up universities,
I call up governments, agencies, I called up anyone who
wanted to be sponsored, any organizations, nonprofits. And I donated
like tens of thousands of dollars to removed out to these,
(15:40):
you know, and and and I remember calling up one
sort of university guy and I said like, Hey, I
can see you're the marketing person of this you know,
industry of this body, you know, inside the inside the university. Hey,
what's your target? He's like, oh, I got it, you know,
five grand every quarter. I'm like, hey, how about I'll
give you five right now if you could just send
(16:01):
me an invoice and you can just put this link
on the website. That's all you need to do and
I'll hit your quarter for you. He's like, sure, sends
me an email next minute. I send the money links
on the site and immediately we go boom to the
top of Google and it is like overnight, and the
traffic is insane. Right, It's this Back then, there was
(16:22):
no as many sponsored ads. This was basically.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Call it.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
I'm trying to think about a politically correct word. This
is black and white show, but I guess so's it's
money printing, right. It was literally do this activity and
like the traffic and revenue went through the roof. And
you know, we ranked number one in Australia for credit
card that as a keyword. And back then that was
(16:51):
a big deal because it just wasn't as much activity.
Right these days things have changed and you know it's
all sort of much more bilurry and Google didn't like
that at all. And so two weeks or three weeks later,
you know, I was super happy, woke up and the
site was penalized and sent back like twenty five pages
(17:12):
in Google basically the graveyard of Google where no one
goes and they know this.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Right, Yeah, so I was well off the So you
were number one and now you are not just at
the bottom of the first page. You have got to
click through twenty five pages just to find.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
You correct, And that basically killed the websites trafficked by
like nine overnight.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
How did that feel? I felt shocked and.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Like attacked, And you know then you get a bit angry,
like what like I was just doing everyone else is doing.
You get a bit of victimness in it, and then
I was like, all right, what are we going to do.
I immediately snapped into there must be something we can
do here, Let's get started, and I just started working
at it.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Was there ever any sense while you were at number
one that it could come to an end that hey,
this is this is almost too good to be true?
Or did this just completely come out of the blue?
Speaker 2 (18:04):
When out of the blue For me, I didn't know
that was possible. I know, you're at the top of
the mountain and you're like, I have climbed out of
the primemordule soup to evolve this business, to find this
angle and immediately just get shut down.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
How close did it come to killing the business altogether?
Speaker 2 (18:22):
It was basically killed like it was. You know, I'd say,
if you imagined a hospital patient that just had a
car crash, you were you know, a good five percent
chance of survival.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
So how did you bring it back?
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Well, the first thing I did, I started just deep
diving into this problem, found out that other people had
experienced this, and I really started to understand Google even
more and went into its patents, started trying to speak
to their team, went to speak to experts, paid a
lot of people and just started digging and unwinding the
(18:59):
things you've done, resubmitting it to Google, and then luckily
one morning woke up and it was back, not number one,
but it was in the top ten.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
The penalty had been lifted.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
The penalty had been lifted, And that that moment I realized, Okay,
maybe you know you don't want to put the foot
on the accelerator that hard. Sometimes it's good like in business,
but I think just a gradual increase in speed until
you're going really fast.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
I've read a lot of interviews with you, I've watched
a lot of interviews and seen a lot of what
you've said in the past, and one kind of recurring
theme is that when you're building a business, you need
to break the rules. You need to disrupt. If you're
going to go in to actually make a difference in business,
then you need to do things differently and break rules.
How do you know when to break the rules and
(19:52):
how do you know when to work within the rules
that are there? And perhaps this was an example of that.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Yeah, I think every business is built like I'd say them,
they're always on the line or close to the line
or in a zone that no one has ever been
and so there are less rules. And I think that
if I was to comment about in general any countries
right now, regulation is killing businesses, like killing it. Yeah,
(20:21):
it's burdensome and it's just stifling innovation.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
It's brutal you work internationally. How does Australia stack up
compared to We've got operations in the US and dozens
of other countries. How does Australia stack up in terms
of the amount of red tape that is on business?
Speaker 2 (20:39):
I think as much as you know, America has still
a lot of regulation and rules and stuff that you
need to follow, like particularly with the States, it's there's
a lot of litigiousness as well, So it does. I
think it's comparable in that way. But the part that's
not comparable is where it's new. Anywhere there's new initative here,
(20:59):
it's just pulled down, shut down letters, send as fast
as you possibly can. Obviously we experienced this with you know,
we built Finder Earn and had the same at that
issue with Asik, which we've defended twice in court.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yeah, because ASIK appealed it and the Federal Court found
once again in Finders favor.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Right, and like, how is a business supposed to innovate
when a regulator is enforcing something where they are in
this case wrong, Like how's a business supposed to grow
when there's no clarity, Like they're going to go and
sue us, get us to spend money. They're using taxpayer
(21:40):
money to spend to us. We defend with our money.
And it just crushed, crushed that entire part of our
business which has not been the best. And I think
it's obviously really stifled crypto in Australia and making it
a safe place for people in Australia. Going back, I
think regulation and when to follow the rules, I don't
(22:02):
think you should follow the rules. Rules are written by
people who want to like there are suggestions to me,
and there are some rules that like, yes, you want
to like be very mindful of and be considerate of.
And it's about being tactical and going okay, yes, this
(22:25):
is a suggestion. And the universe rewards people who challenge
what is the status quo or the understood thing? Because
no one's looking there, And because no one's looking there,
you can go and get white space and go and win.
And that's literally where innovation happens. That's when people go
(22:45):
like the Wright brothers didn't have a pilot's license. Australian
government didn't give a fine to Burke and Wills for
going and finding new real estate, you know, but in
our case they did, you know, which that's just that attitude,
that that that mindset I think needs to change. That's
not what Australia used to be. Like Australia was a
(23:05):
country of opportunity, of taking chances, you know, having a
fair go, a fair go, not being pulled down. And
I think that's one of the issues, you know, I
take I take extreme issue with that in this country.
And I think America was going that way and they
were that way. And now look at the one eighty
(23:26):
they've done in crypto and look at the explosion of productivity,
of wealth building, of job creation. They will become again
just like they did with the Internet. They will dominate crypto.
They're going to do it again. And we're like it's
happening in real time in front of us.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Speaking to you about this. It sounds as though this
battle with our Sikh Overfinder Earn has really rattled you.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Definitely. I think, I think, I think every entrepreneur should
be rattled by it in Australia, and I think it
has rattled them and people have just left. I know
most crypto entrepreneurs leave Australia most like if you want
to go and do something, you wouldn't do it here
like this. There are no laws written about crypto in Australia.
(24:11):
There is only enforcement cases. Like that's like saying, hey,
I think you're wrong. I'm going to go and sue
you just to check if you're wrong. But you're wrong
right now, and I'm going to go and threaten you
and put to put you in jail because you're unlicensed
and you're doing these things. When the activities we've done,
no one lost any money, and there are literally cases
(24:32):
of people who are getting scammed and people's money getting stolen.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Go and focus on those, you know.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
I think that that to me is I take I
do take issue with that, and I think the big
the toughest part for me is that I went spent
my own money on time to go and I counseled
the government on policy. I gave testimony in the Senate
about what policy. I wrote all these documents, and then
that was turned around in I don't think that's that's
(25:01):
not in the spirit of what giving a fair go is.
That's not what Bob Hawk talked about. That's not that's
not what Australia is all about. And I think it's
un Australian to do that.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Talk then about the opportunities within kind of new to
rain and unregulated to rain AI. Is this kind of
the next the next step? And how does that fit
in with what you were doing, with what you've built
with Finder and where you could be going next. Is
this where the next kind of Fred Schevester will emerge
(25:34):
in Australia building something out of AI because the rules
aren't yet set in place.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yeah, I think if I was to make a comparable
two thousand and one Jeff Bezos, you know, the Internet
bubble just burst. Amazon was still around and someone asked them, oh,
is this internet thing of fad? Like pretty interesting question, right,
we haven't had a bubble burst with AI yet. But
(26:02):
his response was the Internet is like an electric company.
Like electricity, it will be in everything. And I think
that's the same thing. Right if you go back to
the initial days of electricity, like we look at this
and we plug stuff into walls, there were no wall sockets,
there were no appliances, you know, toasters. No, it was
like this weird thing was in your house and it
was for lights that it was the whole purpose. And
(26:24):
when you had early appliances used to go and literally
plug your appliance into your light. That's how you got
you know, you literally why Jerry rigged the cable in
and turn it on. Right. It's a pretty wild thing,
but you know, and that's that's it. I think AI
is the same thing, right, it's electric company. It's going
to be in everything. A AI will be in everything,
just like the Internet. It'll be the exact same thing.
(26:46):
A little bit of AI in this and that, you know,
it just corrects ads, nudges, advisors, smoothed the interface of
the in the experience. And I think that we're just
going through another cycle, another loop of of when the
Internet came out, and I loved, you know, I loved
the hitting and getting into new technologies, new things. Early
(27:07):
AI is just the same finder. Then what's next?
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Is it? Is it AI? Is it turbo charging what
you were doing already? What's the future? Hold an ipo?
Perhaps we like.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
We you can't really see it, but find it is
already using AI. It's just it's like it's it's you know,
how people search on our site, how we do things internally,
how we provide the answers that people want. There's a
whole series of internal processes, external process to customers, and
I think that'll keep getting bigger and bigger and smoothing
(27:39):
out and automating processes for customers. I think is to
me is where there is a real beauty in an edge,
and we will be obviously rolling that and revealing that
as as we finished these products. We've been rolling like
a bunch of stuff out internally again normally really see it,
but it's it's sort of the beginning points of what
will come. I think the next phase of Finder is
(28:01):
one of efficiency, so really making it very efficient for
our customers and internally. I think, you know, one of
the biggest challenges around economies and humanity has been productivity.
Like we just haven't had a big bump in productivity. AI,
I think is one of those complete unlocks. If you
(28:21):
if you're writing an email, you know, you're writing a document,
researching something, you know, a whole series of activities that
now can be done in a maybe a fiftieth of
the time. You're going to spend more time creating. You're
going to spend more time with like deeper thoughts, You're
going to spend more time actually moving the needle of
what is productive. So it's instead of just the mish mash,
(28:42):
you're actually going to move humanity forward. That's what I
think AI will unlock.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
It's a time shift, Fred, thanks for speaking to one
on one today.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
Thanks very much.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
That was Fred schebesta entrepreneur and co founder of Finder.
I'm Michael Thompson and this is one on one by
Fear and Great
Welcome to One on one by Fear and Greed. I'm
Michael Thompson. My guest today is Fred Schabster. Now everybody
has heard of Finder. That's the comparison website that aims
to help people make better decisions. Fred started it with
a friend back in two thousand and six. It is
now used by millions of people here and around the world.
But there is a fascinating story behind it. It's a
(00:26):
story about creativity, about passion, about drive, about success, about wealth,
and moments as well where it nearly all came undone.
Fred Schabester, Welcome to one on one.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Thanks very much.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Finder. When I said that two thousand and six, find
us nearly twenty years old. When you look back on it,
do you have a sense of pride at what you've built?
Speaker 2 (00:49):
It kind of goes in phases, you know, like it's
a bit like a marriage. Really. I think it's like,
you know, seven years I think is the number when
you sort of reset in their relationship. I will, it's
like you have a certain relationship with the company, and
over time, eventually I think it just turns into a
bit of a blur. Like I think if you were
to go back sort of and ask me that, Like,
(01:10):
I don't know, ten years ago, I'd be like, wow,
this is crazy, And now I feel like this is evolution,
Like a company grows from like, you know, a little
little baby to a toddler to a teenager, and now
it's kind of like in its twenties. You know, it's
like and so it's it doesn't It's not as much
awe for me. It's more like, you know, this is solid.
(01:31):
This is where we've been.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Well, when you think about it, it predates kind of
a lot of things that we almost take for granted
now in terms of kind of Instagram came around after
Finder started, You're around the same time as kind of
Facebook and others all started. So you have been around
for a long time and established yourself so well now
in the market. Do you have a sense of perspective then,
on what the value and the purpose of Finder is
(01:54):
in your words, kind of what exactly is at the
heart of what you do.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
I think I speak to a lot of customers, you know,
and we spend a lot of time doing that to
try and unpack exactly what's going on here. And if
I was to like boil it down very simply and
I've heard this is direct from a customer. Is they
want to find a better deal, and that deal is
(02:22):
the one that you know, you could go and Google search,
you could go and go on forums, but it's all
aggregated into one place, and you're looking for that, you know,
like at a swap meet, and you you know, I
don't know if they do this anymore. People used to
drive up and open their boots and like sell stuff
out of them and you'd rummage around and find a
little gem that's worth a lot and you'd pay a
(02:43):
lot less. And that idea that there exists some deal
in the market. Some curiosity is what people come to
find before and obviously there's time saving and there's all
those other things, but at the end of the day,
they're looking for that little edge, that little bump, and
(03:04):
that that curiosity, that that idea that there's something, the
treasure that exists. I think that's the that's the mystery
that the finder has.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
It's such an interesting take on it because for me,
the value that I see is that there is such
a sense of overwhelm at the moment. There are so
many decisions to be made in life that the mental
load is huge and the idea of having to go
around and do it all yourself and find all that
information yourself is almost just overwhelming, And that to me
(03:34):
is kind of where I can see such a clear
value for a starte like Finder. I want to talk
to you more about the purpose and the value, but
I want to go back to the start if we can,
because it is such a great story of how it
came to be. But it wasn't actually your first business, though,
was it. It was your second business. Tell me about
the first one was at Freestyle Media.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Yeah, I started building websites in my college room at university,
and like everyone was coding sort of Java, and I
was coding like PHP, which is sort of one of
the early Internet languages, and like I couldn't you know?
It didn't didn't really help accepted. The very last year
there was a course that started in PHP and I
(04:16):
just walked in, coded the assignment in the classroom, handed
it in and then everyone was like in the classes
like whoa, this is crazy, Like how could you possibly
know that? And I went to the exam, didn't study.
I just filled in the whole exam and like I
was just so forward in what I was doing and
(04:37):
I realized that that's that's a key edge, and I
just pushed that, built websites for people, sold them, and
then we needed to get traffic, so we needed to
market them. And really I never studied marketing, and I
started my you know, learning myself, which I've done obviously
throughout time, and I came from the school of sort
(04:57):
of direct marketing very David Ogilvy. A guy called Michael
Kylie was my mentor, taught me copywriting and really started
to understand how to build traffic at attention, bring people in,
create content, and you know, educate your customer to then
go and buy something. And and we started selling these
(05:18):
services right to all our customers. And I was, as
I'm saying that you can hear it, sort of the
gems of Finder and and and and it's.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Pillars were really built out of that.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
They were they were natural. And I think while I
was doing that, I was just we're building all these websites,
and I was like, Wow, these companies are making so
much money. It's early Internet, you know, they're just crushing
it because it's doesn't exist right. Everyone wants to go
on the Internet and find a service. And I was
thinking to myself, why don't we go and build some
of these? And so during my spare time, we would
(05:49):
just put up little websites. And I did a lot
of zany experiments.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Let's put it that way.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Some of them I can talk about. Some of them
I can't.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Some of them are legal by an h some of
them I don't know. Twenty years have passed. It's fun,
it's actually the limitations as expired.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
So from those experiments, we really I sort of honed
my like, I took it that next step of building
actual businesses, and I really discovered a whole series of things.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
You know.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
We had a sudukus site, we had a Christmas Day
dot com, the U website, we had a Mother's Day presence.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
There's a very seasonal website, not the best. They didn't
turn out to maybe not year round.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
A poker site. We were shipping like huge poker tables
around Australia, which is a terrible idea because it's five
hundred dollars of shipping per table, so it's just not
a good ideas. A whole series of like face plants,
and then one of them was credit card Finder, and
that one just every month just tended to got better
and better and better, and that's something we really focused on.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
At what point did you realize that that was the
one out of all of these ideas sending poker tables
around Christmas Day dot com, Mother's Day dot com? Did
you know as soon as you started credit card Finder
that it was the one that had the potential to
keep on going.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Not at all. They looked all the same, Really, they
all looked the same. Just to give you context, I
remember there was a an octagon table we had in
the agency and every idea was an a four piece
of paper written with like three dot points of why
we should do it and you know, basically explanation of
the domain name. And they were just all scattered on
(07:29):
the table and we literally just got like our pant
and said, okay, we'll launch this one, this one, and
we got you know, a couple of ticks on it.
Then we put it live and just experiment and see
what would happen, and some immediately did well, some didn't.
I tell you, it was any story. So I discovered
the people would lose their super and this is the
(07:50):
thing that still happens. You know, you have a job
when you you know and then you lose, you know,
you forget where it is, you know. So I built
this website called fine loss super dot com Are you?
And I just put up a page should a blog
it was, it was just a page and I said, hey,
send me fifty dollars to my bank account and I'll
find your super. And after as been a count number
(08:10):
on there and people, I woke up one morning and
I was like, you know, and I just went like,
what's the fifty dollars in here? I don't know what
that is. And then I remembered, oh, I'd put this
on this website, and all these customers had started sending
me fifty dollars to go and find their lost super.
And you know, I obviously wrote back to them and
(08:31):
helped them actually find their super. A bunch of them
had genuine money they could get and everyone was happy.
And I realized, like, I probably should have, you know,
checked up on that idea. But you know, that's just
a nice example of my mindset in I think you
need to do a lot of repetitions with any idea,
with any business, with any skill, you have to find
(08:53):
the right thing that works really well. And it's those
number of repetitions, how many times you prepared to fail,
how many times you prepared to go, repeat, repeat, repeat,
repeede and refine your craft. And that that was my mindset.
Just keep going, keep going and find it.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
It's such a great image of you with all of
these ideas on this paper and just going yet, we'll
try this one. We'll try this one, We'll try this one.
Do you think that that spirit of just having a go,
of having a crack is still there now? Because you
do a lot of work with startups and trying to
help other people as well, Is there still that same
mentality around you, know what, We're just going to have
(09:31):
a go and see if this works, and if not,
we've got idea B, an idea, c an idea D.
Or Is it become more sanitized and refined now?
Speaker 2 (09:40):
I think raw entrepreneurship is the same. I think there
are a lot more failures than there are successes, and
that's probably the natural course of evolution of any particular thing,
and startups and know that are not any particularly different.
I don't think there's been a large amount of refining.
It's not even possible, right, So you're literally trying to
(10:03):
calculate a whole series of uncalculable thoughts about how customer
will react, what they'll think of the brand, you know, price,
and you can test that as much as you like,
but there's a certain point where you just sort of
got to launch the button. And I'm probably a little
bit earlier in the launch button than in the test.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
And to the name of your book, which is go live, Yeah,
it's just true. Just get it out there and see
if it works.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
I there's a there's a really cool cafe called Lime
Espresso's just down the road from me, and I'll shout
out to Costa here. He said. He bought the book
because you know, I get a you know, a bacon
and egg and a coffee in the morning. He bought
the book and he read it, literally said, I read
(10:47):
your book. I've got this line of Chili's sources I've
been looking to launch. He called up the Easter show.
Booked booked a thing. Now, this was this was about
three months ago. He showed me his production line of
chili sauces that he is now making and shipping out
the door to all these delis. Like he just he said,
(11:09):
and if it wasn't for you just telling me to
go live that idea that chili sauce would never have
gone out there.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
How does that make you feel, knowing that that you
have had that impact on someone's career and their life.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
I suppos to make a small dent in the universe.
You know, it's not it's not, I guess, I just yeah.
I think it's me giving back and me inspiring the
next generation of entrepreneurs, and hopefully in some small way.
The way I think of that is, as an entrepreneur,
you're contributing something new to humanity. You are you are,
(11:46):
you are on the precipice, You're on the forefront of invention.
You you add to the consciousness of what is. You
take ideas that are already out there and you turn
them into reality, and and that adds to humanity. It
drives us forward, It gives us new experiences, It continues
our existence. And I think that you know, this obviously
(12:08):
just is a range of chili sources. But to some extent,
where does that lead and what does that go to?
And you know, there's a whole series of serendipity I
think that will come from that.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
I mean, even it just at its most practical level,
it's had an impact on Costa's life and family, and
potentially a generational impact, and so those things can flow on.
I want to talk to you about Google, a rather
infamous incident involving Google. We're going to take a very
quick break and come back in a second. I'm speaking
(12:45):
with Fred Schebesta, the founder of Finder. Before the break,
I mentioned Google. Is it fair to say that you
have almost a love hate relationship with Google because you
figured out when you had credit card Finder which is
now Finder, figured out how to use Google so effectively
to maximize your SEO and really get your name and
(13:07):
your brand out there, to the extent that Google actually
stopped you from doing that. Take us through what happened, Well.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
You go back to two thousand and seven, two thousand
and eight. SEO back then was sort of a dark science,
and largely the most practices were you figured out the algorithm,
you figured out what was needed to go and change it,
and you did those things. And you know, to be fair,
(13:40):
there was not a lot of transparency about what you
can and can't do. We you know, a lot of
people and pretty much everyone was doing let's say fairly
gray too darker. You know, I don't know it was
a sense of inferi and green. We've got black and white,
but maybe maybe it's not so gray. We could go
(14:01):
a little bit blacker than gray.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Activities.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
And they were, you know, doing things like buying links
essentially on other people's websites and pointing them back to Finder.
Google back then primarily worked not from AI and not
from user testing and all the Chrome data it has today,
but from literally how many links pointed at your website.
(14:27):
And that was calculated by a thing called page Rank
and named after Larry Page, who invented Google, and with
so Jay Brinn and they called Patran. Basically, it was
the number of links to pointed to your site, and
it was based upon the university research papers, which cited
(14:47):
other research papers. And they thought, oh, I'll take that
same idea, and whoever got sited the most, they just
put up to the top of the site. And that's
what made Google so good and it did work. And
so I thought, oh, well, I'll just get the most
authoritative websites I can possibly find, and yeah, just advertise
on them and get them to link to Finder, and
(15:09):
the just.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
For the the benefit of anybody listening, advertised just then
did have air quotation marks around us. Just then.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
It was an avid, it was an advertisement, just just
was very blue link, you know. So I called up universities,
I call up governments, agencies, I called up anyone who
wanted to be sponsored, any organizations, nonprofits. And I donated
like tens of thousands of dollars to removed out to these,
(15:40):
you know, and and and I remember calling up one
sort of university guy and I said like, Hey, I
can see you're the marketing person of this you know,
industry of this body, you know, inside the inside the university. Hey,
what's your target? He's like, oh, I got it, you know,
five grand every quarter. I'm like, hey, how about I'll
give you five right now if you could just send
(16:01):
me an invoice and you can just put this link
on the website. That's all you need to do and
I'll hit your quarter for you. He's like, sure, sends
me an email next minute. I send the money links
on the site and immediately we go boom to the
top of Google and it is like overnight, and the
traffic is insane. Right, It's this Back then, there was
(16:22):
no as many sponsored ads. This was basically.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Call it.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
I'm trying to think about a politically correct word. This
is black and white show, but I guess so's it's
money printing, right. It was literally do this activity and
like the traffic and revenue went through the roof. And
you know, we ranked number one in Australia for credit
card that as a keyword. And back then that was
(16:51):
a big deal because it just wasn't as much activity.
Right these days things have changed and you know it's
all sort of much more bilurry and Google didn't like
that at all. And so two weeks or three weeks later,
you know, I was super happy, woke up and the
site was penalized and sent back like twenty five pages
(17:12):
in Google basically the graveyard of Google where no one
goes and they know this.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Right, Yeah, so I was well off the So you
were number one and now you are not just at
the bottom of the first page. You have got to
click through twenty five pages just to find.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
You correct, And that basically killed the websites trafficked by
like nine overnight.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
How did that feel? I felt shocked and.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Like attacked, And you know then you get a bit angry,
like what like I was just doing everyone else is doing.
You get a bit of victimness in it, and then
I was like, all right, what are we going to do.
I immediately snapped into there must be something we can
do here, Let's get started, and I just started working
at it.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Was there ever any sense while you were at number
one that it could come to an end that hey,
this is this is almost too good to be true?
Or did this just completely come out of the blue?
Speaker 2 (18:04):
When out of the blue For me, I didn't know
that was possible. I know, you're at the top of
the mountain and you're like, I have climbed out of
the primemordule soup to evolve this business, to find this
angle and immediately just get shut down.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
How close did it come to killing the business altogether?
Speaker 2 (18:22):
It was basically killed like it was. You know, I'd say,
if you imagined a hospital patient that just had a
car crash, you were you know, a good five percent
chance of survival.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
So how did you bring it back?
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Well, the first thing I did, I started just deep
diving into this problem, found out that other people had
experienced this, and I really started to understand Google even
more and went into its patents, started trying to speak
to their team, went to speak to experts, paid a
lot of people and just started digging and unwinding the
(18:59):
things you've done, resubmitting it to Google, and then luckily
one morning woke up and it was back, not number one,
but it was in the top ten.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
The penalty had been lifted.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
The penalty had been lifted, And that that moment I realized, Okay,
maybe you know you don't want to put the foot
on the accelerator that hard. Sometimes it's good like in business,
but I think just a gradual increase in speed until
you're going really fast.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
I've read a lot of interviews with you, I've watched
a lot of interviews and seen a lot of what
you've said in the past, and one kind of recurring
theme is that when you're building a business, you need
to break the rules. You need to disrupt. If you're
going to go in to actually make a difference in business,
then you need to do things differently and break rules.
How do you know when to break the rules and
(19:52):
how do you know when to work within the rules
that are there? And perhaps this was an example of that.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Yeah, I think every business is built like I'd say them,
they're always on the line or close to the line
or in a zone that no one has ever been
and so there are less rules. And I think that
if I was to comment about in general any countries
right now, regulation is killing businesses, like killing it. Yeah,
(20:21):
it's burdensome and it's just stifling innovation.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
It's brutal you work internationally. How does Australia stack up
compared to We've got operations in the US and dozens
of other countries. How does Australia stack up in terms
of the amount of red tape that is on business?
Speaker 2 (20:39):
I think as much as you know, America has still
a lot of regulation and rules and stuff that you
need to follow, like particularly with the States, it's there's
a lot of litigiousness as well, So it does. I
think it's comparable in that way. But the part that's
not comparable is where it's new. Anywhere there's new initative here,
(20:59):
it's just pulled down, shut down letters, send as fast
as you possibly can. Obviously we experienced this with you know,
we built Finder Earn and had the same at that
issue with Asik, which we've defended twice in court.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yeah, because ASIK appealed it and the Federal Court found
once again in Finders favor.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Right, and like, how is a business supposed to innovate
when a regulator is enforcing something where they are in
this case wrong, Like how's a business supposed to grow
when there's no clarity, Like they're going to go and
sue us, get us to spend money. They're using taxpayer
(21:40):
money to spend to us. We defend with our money.
And it just crushed, crushed that entire part of our
business which has not been the best. And I think
it's obviously really stifled crypto in Australia and making it
a safe place for people in Australia. Going back, I
think regulation and when to follow the rules, I don't
(22:02):
think you should follow the rules. Rules are written by
people who want to like there are suggestions to me,
and there are some rules that like, yes, you want
to like be very mindful of and be considerate of.
And it's about being tactical and going okay, yes, this
(22:25):
is a suggestion. And the universe rewards people who challenge
what is the status quo or the understood thing? Because
no one's looking there, And because no one's looking there,
you can go and get white space and go and win.
And that's literally where innovation happens. That's when people go
(22:45):
like the Wright brothers didn't have a pilot's license. Australian
government didn't give a fine to Burke and Wills for
going and finding new real estate, you know, but in
our case they did, you know, which that's just that attitude,
that that that mindset I think needs to change. That's
not what Australia used to be. Like Australia was a
(23:05):
country of opportunity, of taking chances, you know, having a
fair go, a fair go, not being pulled down. And
I think that's one of the issues, you know, I
take I take extreme issue with that in this country.
And I think America was going that way and they
were that way. And now look at the one eighty
(23:26):
they've done in crypto and look at the explosion of productivity,
of wealth building, of job creation. They will become again
just like they did with the Internet. They will dominate crypto.
They're going to do it again. And we're like it's
happening in real time in front of us.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Speaking to you about this. It sounds as though this
battle with our Sikh Overfinder Earn has really rattled you.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Definitely. I think, I think, I think every entrepreneur should
be rattled by it in Australia, and I think it
has rattled them and people have just left. I know
most crypto entrepreneurs leave Australia most like if you want
to go and do something, you wouldn't do it here
like this. There are no laws written about crypto in Australia.
(24:11):
There is only enforcement cases. Like that's like saying, hey,
I think you're wrong. I'm going to go and sue
you just to check if you're wrong. But you're wrong
right now, and I'm going to go and threaten you
and put to put you in jail because you're unlicensed
and you're doing these things. When the activities we've done,
no one lost any money, and there are literally cases
(24:32):
of people who are getting scammed and people's money getting stolen.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Go and focus on those, you know.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
I think that that to me is I take I
do take issue with that, and I think the big
the toughest part for me is that I went spent
my own money on time to go and I counseled
the government on policy. I gave testimony in the Senate
about what policy. I wrote all these documents, and then
that was turned around in I don't think that's that's
(25:01):
not in the spirit of what giving a fair go is.
That's not what Bob Hawk talked about. That's not that's
not what Australia is all about. And I think it's
un Australian to do that.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Talk then about the opportunities within kind of new to
rain and unregulated to rain AI. Is this kind of
the next the next step? And how does that fit
in with what you were doing, with what you've built
with Finder and where you could be going next. Is
this where the next kind of Fred Schevester will emerge
(25:34):
in Australia building something out of AI because the rules
aren't yet set in place.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yeah, I think if I was to make a comparable
two thousand and one Jeff Bezos, you know, the Internet
bubble just burst. Amazon was still around and someone asked them, oh,
is this internet thing of fad? Like pretty interesting question, right,
we haven't had a bubble burst with AI yet. But
(26:02):
his response was the Internet is like an electric company.
Like electricity, it will be in everything. And I think
that's the same thing. Right if you go back to
the initial days of electricity, like we look at this
and we plug stuff into walls, there were no wall sockets,
there were no appliances, you know, toasters. No, it was
like this weird thing was in your house and it
was for lights that it was the whole purpose. And
(26:24):
when you had early appliances used to go and literally
plug your appliance into your light. That's how you got
you know, you literally why Jerry rigged the cable in
and turn it on. Right. It's a pretty wild thing,
but you know, and that's that's it. I think AI
is the same thing, right, it's electric company. It's going
to be in everything. A AI will be in everything,
just like the Internet. It'll be the exact same thing.
(26:46):
A little bit of AI in this and that, you know,
it just corrects ads, nudges, advisors, smoothed the interface of
the in the experience. And I think that we're just
going through another cycle, another loop of of when the
Internet came out, and I loved, you know, I loved
the hitting and getting into new technologies, new things. Early
(27:07):
AI is just the same finder. Then what's next?
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Is it? Is it AI? Is it turbo charging what
you were doing already? What's the future? Hold an ipo?
Perhaps we like.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
We you can't really see it, but find it is
already using AI. It's just it's like it's it's you know,
how people search on our site, how we do things internally,
how we provide the answers that people want. There's a
whole series of internal processes, external process to customers, and
I think that'll keep getting bigger and bigger and smoothing
(27:39):
out and automating processes for customers. I think is to
me is where there is a real beauty in an edge,
and we will be obviously rolling that and revealing that
as as we finished these products. We've been rolling like
a bunch of stuff out internally again normally really see it,
but it's it's sort of the beginning points of what
will come. I think the next phase of Finder is
(28:01):
one of efficiency, so really making it very efficient for
our customers and internally. I think, you know, one of
the biggest challenges around economies and humanity has been productivity.
Like we just haven't had a big bump in productivity. AI,
I think is one of those complete unlocks. If you
(28:21):
if you're writing an email, you know, you're writing a document,
researching something, you know, a whole series of activities that
now can be done in a maybe a fiftieth of
the time. You're going to spend more time creating. You're
going to spend more time with like deeper thoughts, You're
going to spend more time actually moving the needle of
what is productive. So it's instead of just the mish mash,
(28:42):
you're actually going to move humanity forward. That's what I
think AI will unlock.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
It's a time shift, Fred, thanks for speaking to one
on one today.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
Thanks very much.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
That was Fred schebesta entrepreneur and co founder of Finder.
I'm Michael Thompson and this is one on one by
Fear and Great
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