Outfoxed · Ep 10 · Emmet Gibney
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[00:00:00]
[00:00:17] Matt: Welcome to Outfoxed. Excited to talk to our guest this week, this today, whatever we're, whatever today is. So this is what, Wednesday? We're in September. I don't know about you Emmet, but, the first couple weeks of September are great 'cause the temperature drops and I much prefer 60 degrees to 80 degrees.
[00:00:38] Emmet: Yeah. Where are you based?
[00:00:40] Matt: I'm outside Boston. How about yourself?
[00:00:42] Emmet: Okay. I'm in, in Dublin, in Ireland. We almost have as many Irish people as you guys do, so.
[00:00:48] Matt: And similar weather, weirdly so.
[00:00:50] Emmet: Similar weather, yeah.
[00:00:51] Matt: Apparently we're all gluttons for punishment with the Irish backgrounds. Well, Emmet, so let's talk a little bit about, I'd love for you to, to [00:01:00] intro, oh, talk about why you're here.
[00:01:01] Matt: So, Emmet is CEO of Rewardful. Rewardful is a SaaS company that's really focused on affiliate and referral programs, which is how we got connected. Because Hunter is a reward for customer and enjoying it. We really like the platform and so one of the things that, you know, we talk about here on Outfoxed for just like different ways people are building companies and, you know, anytime we can use a product we get excited about, we wanna bring people on.
[00:01:30] Matt: So, Emmet welcome, really excited to have you on the podcast.
[00:01:34] Emmet: Good to be here.
[00:01:35] Matt: Why don't you, talk a little bit about your journey with Rewardful and, kinda give us an overview of that experience.
[00:01:42] Emmet: Sure. Well, the story actually goes back, quite a ways to kind of understand the connection, I guess.
[00:01:49] Emmet: Rewardful was founded in 2017, 2018, but actually the founders of Reward for Kyle Fox and Brady Cassidy, I [00:02:00] had known from the Edmonton Startup community. Edmonton Canada, from 2012 or something like that, 2012, 2013. Met those guys and became pretty good buddies with Kyle.
[00:02:16] Emmet: And we actually had founded a healthcare software startup in 2015. And worked on that together for a year or so. It didn't, the company didn't work out. FYI, anyone who wants to, you know, talk about gluttons for punishment, if you're glutton for punishment, go into healthcare in any shape or form, including healthcare software.
[00:02:40] Emmet: So that didn't work out. We shut down the company. I actually moved to Ireland. But then Kyle went and started working at Podia. Another SaaS company for those of you who don't know Podia. Then a couple years later, he then started Rewardful as a side project with Brady. They grew that company for a few [00:03:00] years.
[00:03:00] Emmet: And my first sort of exposure to working for Rewardful was briefly during the early days of COVID and they were kind of in the early-ish phases of Rewardful. I can't remember, I think there may be at like, you know, nine or 10,000 in MRR. So it was still pretty small business at the time.
[00:03:21] Matt: Okay, very early.
[00:03:22] Emmet: They were still working full-time jobs and I was working for a travel company and not a great industry to be in when a global pandemic hits company lays off pretty much everybody I got laid off and nobody was hiring 'cause everyone was terrified of like, what are we doing? So I was like, well, I'll just,
[00:03:43] Emmet: what am I gonna do? I started like, you know, teaching myself Ruby on Rails and getting ready for my first child to be born. And I was like, well, I need something to do. No one's hiring. And so I went to Colin Brady and I was like, hey, is there anything I can help out with? And they're like, sure, yeah, come and help us in support.
[00:03:59] Emmet: So [00:04:00] like, didn't charge him anything. Just went and started like, got into intercom and was just, you know, answering support tickets and helping people troubleshoot their installation. Did that for maybe two or three months. And then people started hiring again. I went and got another job, worked there for about a year, which I didn't really enjoy and got back in touch with Colin Brady and I was like, hey, you know, is there anything in here that I could kind of come in and help with?
[00:04:28] Emmet: And my background is kind of in sort of product. Professional most, my most recent professional, his, career sort of, history was more in sort of product type roles. And then previously had been in marketing. So they're like, oh, you come in and help us with some product and some marketing stuff, or whatever.
[00:04:44] Emmet: And, but then we put a pause on that because they started the process of talking to SaaS group about selling the company. And, you know, like, oh, you know, we'll hold off on hiring anybody because, it's like we're talking about an [00:05:00] acquisition. And so paused that for a few months. And then, so I joined, a few months post acquisition to SaaS group.
[00:05:09] Emmet: So maybe, I think it was 2018 was sort of like the first customer who was Podia by the way. Fast forward three years, they had sold the company. And it was like side project for most of it is existence. Super interesting, like how quickly they're able to do it and like on the side. And then I was just working in this sort of mixed role of product and marketing.
[00:05:31] Emmet: Mostly kind of marketing. After a year, Colin Brady left, they had, you know, finished their earnout sort of period, whatever, and then wanted to go and work on other projects. And SaaS group at that point was going and looking for, sort of a professional CEO to come in and take over for, you know, Brady who had left.
[00:05:50] Emmet: And, one of the existing developers took over as CTO and I kind of just took over doing the stuff that, that Brady had been doing, kind of marketing stuff, demos to customers, [00:06:00] and then a lot of the sort of admin stuff, basically everything that a CEO ostensibly would be doing. And one of the first board meetings we had with the board, I basically said, we're looking to hire a professional CEO.
[00:06:16] Emmet: I'm basically doing that now. Nothing's caught fire yet. Why don't you give me a few more months to try this out? If it works out, let me do it permanently. If it doesn't, then fine. You know, we can continue going to find a professional CEO. Full credit to them, they gave me the opportunity and fast forward a few months, things were going well.
[00:06:35] Emmet: The company was growing, growth had been accelerating and so they gave me the title on a full-time permanent basis. And that was a little bit more than two years ago, so it was maybe August, I think 2023. Since then I've been, CEO at Rewardful. So that's kind of more or less how I've gotten to this [00:07:00] role in this very kind of, yeah,
[00:07:01] Emmet: unusual sort of path.
[00:07:04] Matt: Yeah. It's a atypical, sort of circuitous route to,
[00:07:08] Emmet: Yeah.
[00:07:08] Matt: to that role. Interesting. I mean there's, wow, there's a lot to unpack with that, by the way. Lots of parallels. Because that's almost to the month, when I started as CEO at Hunter.
[00:07:20] Emmet: Oh, interesting.
[00:07:21] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. And kind of a similar thing, founders not, there wasn't an acquisition in the process, but founders were kind of looking to
[00:07:28] Matt: bring somebody in a CO and kind of get, kind of figure out how to get to the next, you know, the next growth phase of the business. Was there, if you think back to that time you're in this kind of interim phase, was there a particular activity or experience or like an awesome win or something that happened during that period of time where you felt like, oh yeah, this is gonna push it over?
[00:07:51] Matt: Like they have to know I'm the right guy now.
[00:07:55] Emmet: I think ultimately it just comes down to like numbers talk, right? you can try and give [00:08:00] any kind of, you know, qualitative or sort of soft and fuzzy type stuff, but ultimately it's gonna come down to numbers in that type of situation.
[00:08:06] Emmet: And basically, do you have that graph that looks that nice way in terms of sort of that sort of up and to the right? And that's essentially what it was in that period, right? Was that growth was accelerating in that period. Luckily with me, that was a particularly strong year for the business, helped by tailwinds from AI kind of just taking off and we very much caught that wave part of the mixed metaphors.
[00:08:35] Emmet: But, so certainly that, that helped. But, yeah, like, it really is just like, do you, can you make the numbers go in the right direction and we can talk a little bit about like, what are the different things that people can do and that we did to do that. So, but yeah, ultimately it's, that's how, you get the job if there's the board involved, is you make the numbers [00:09:00] go the right direction.
[00:09:00] Matt: Was it primarily just you focusing on it or did you start to build a team and increase the staff size and just like, you know, accelerate what you guys were doing as a business?
[00:09:12] Emmet: It was kind of an interesting time and then also interesting circumstances because of our sort of place within SaaS group.
[00:09:22] Emmet: Prior to that, Rewardful had been quite independent from the rest of SaaS group. And I don't know how much you or any of your audience might know about SaaS Group. I'll just give a very kind of brief spiel without going too much into it, but basically, SaaS Group is, effectively a company that buys SaaS companies and holds them.
[00:09:44] Emmet: So it's not buy and then try and flip or anything like that. It's just buy them and try and build out this platform of SaaS companies.
[00:09:50] Matt: Yeah.
[00:09:51] Emmet: They can be very disappointed at me for doing a poor job of explaining SaaS group. But basically, there's, I think 22 companies now in the portfolio, [00:10:00] including Rewardful.
[00:10:01] Emmet: I think Rewardful was something like the seventh acquisition, maybe slightly later than that. The team, when Kyle and Brady left, there was four of us after they left. One person in support and then two developers and then myself. So I was doing like marketing and then kind of everything else kind of.
[00:10:23] Emmet: And to that point, Rewardful hadn't really taken advantage of the resources that SaaS group was able to provide in terms of supports. And sort of marketing supports. And so SaaS group, at the time it was much smaller but still quite awesome. And now it's much more sort of sophisticated and more people involved.
[00:10:45] Emmet: But they had a central marketing team. And so one of the first things I did was. I reached out to a colleague in SaaS group. His name is Tim Hikes and he was one of the CMOs within SaaS group and said like, let's link [00:11:00] up, you know, Brady's leaving, let's, you know, figure out like a plan for Rewardful in our marketing.
[00:11:06] Emmet: And so they were super helpful in terms of like juicing the numbers basically. You know what I mean? Like, so, like the SEO within SaaS group is just like a very well old machine and, very sophisticated in terms of, so like that's, if you were to look at like, you know, any SEO geeks go and check out sort of, you know, Rewardful's SEO trajectory over the last two or three years, it's been quite impressive, optimizing in PPC and content, both sort of onsite as well as, you know, on social. So that was the big thing is to properly kind of embed and connect with the resources within SaaS group. And I think that had like an immediate effect in terms of accelerating and reaccelerating Rewardful's growth at that time.[00:12:00]
[00:12:00] Emmet: So that was the big thing, just taking advantage of that. And that's something like for people that are interested in selling their company and looking for a good home for it. And then trying to make sure like it's gonna maybe have an opportunity to grow. SaaS group or companies like it, you know, could be a good option that they can actually help to kind of bring your company.
[00:12:20] Emmet: to the next level. Particularly if you're in that phase where you're like, oh, we're a team of four to eight people, or whatever, and we're just a bunch of hackers, we don't really know how to kind of get to the next level, you know?
[00:12:29] Matt: Yeah.
[00:12:29] Emmet: Sometimes it's hire professional, CEO, like Hunter did with you, and then sometimes it's, we'll have the company and find it a more secure home.
[00:12:37] Emmet: And, that was I think, definitely the case with Rewardful.
[00:12:41] Matt: And if you're, you know, sub 5 million in ARR, like that's a pretty good option for people. If you're not just trying to get out from under the, you're not trying to just flip it, right? That's a, that seems like a pretty good path, especially for people who just like to build.
[00:12:57] Matt: And that there, or are those, especially if [00:13:00] you're kind of in that 2 million range where I think a lot of times founders are like, okay, I've got a thing here. This is interesting. I could build it. Maybe I'm not excited about that, turning it into a real company, but I, if there's a thing here, I can sell an asset.
[00:13:13] Matt: Something like a SaaS Group sounds like actually a really good alternative to a PE exit because at that size, some of those doors aren't really open to you.
[00:13:22] Emmet: Yeah, I don't know, sort of the m and a world as, as well as the guys here in SaaS group like Pavel, who's our head of M&A.
[00:13:32] Emmet: But my understanding is PE it's, yeah, until you get to like 10 million in ARR, that's just not an option. And I think SaaS Group they'll look, I think officially they'll say like, 1 million plus ARR is the floor that they'll start looking. But really it's probably closer to 2 million.
[00:13:49] Emmet: But like if people are in that space, if you're at 1 million or less, even still reach out to the people at SaaS Group and they like to talk to people earlier as well, so yeah. [00:14:00]
[00:14:00] Matt: You said something earlier I want to kind of call back to, you talked about PLG for, and you said that with almost a commitment.
[00:14:13] Matt: And so for people who don't know or people who are listening or they're thinking about PLG and they think, oh, you know, the traditional thing, like, I gotta hire as Chief Revenue Officer for my startup to make sure we're growing sales and marketing and all of this, and, yeah, we'll probably do freemium or PLG or something.
[00:14:28] Matt: They're just treating it like a playbook. What would you tell people about what that means to them? What making that decision about, I wanna do PLG, I really wanna do that right, that's how I wanna grow the business. For people that are treating that like it's just a playbook, what are some of the lessons that you would want to impart about maybe what they should know before they make that decision that they may not know today?
[00:14:52] Emmet: It, I'll do my best. It could be a difficult answer for me to give because it's like asking a fish [00:15:00] about the qualities of water, or I'm just so kind of in it that I don't,
[00:15:04] Matt: Sure.
[00:15:05] Emmet: I have kind of the outside perspective, but I'm kind of looking to go the other direction is learn more about growing and having an SLG component to our business.
[00:15:15] Emmet: And, but I even within PLG and when I hear PLG, what I really think that this is kind of trying to say is self-serve. And when you think about like the way that a customer onboards into your product and into your service, the less that they need to interact with someone within your team and take up that kind of resource,
[00:15:41] Emmet: the more, PLG you are. That's kind of the way I think about sort of the distinction between PLG and SLG. If I go to your website and I can self-serve and sign up, that's obviously a very kind of binary thing, but like, I, think really [00:16:00] it comes down to like how good is your onboarding is probably a, big piece of it.
[00:16:04] Emmet: Like, and it's something that we wrestle with and have a lot of room to improve on. Everyone probably does is how good can you make your onboarding so someone could get to that point where they can get value from your product without needing a solutions engineer or a sales person or somebody
[00:16:20] Emmet: to get you to understand. And it probably also starts like from your marketing and from your messaging and how you're talking about your product in a way that like gets people to understand like what the hell this thing does.
[00:16:36] Matt: Right.
[00:16:37] Emmet: That, one of, maybe the biggest exposure that I have to this sort of analysis and all the customers that I see sign up for Rewardful and you know, despite being
[00:16:48] Emmet: very PLG, we do demos.
[00:16:52] Emmet: And a big part of the reason I do them is for the education of just understanding the flow of people who are coming in the door and [00:17:00] seeing all the different businesses. But there's so many people who come in that like, they don't understand like, how to build a product that people actually want, or how to talk about their product to like, clarify like, what, does this do and how would you, use this?
[00:17:18] Emmet: And, this isn't necessarily like a distinction between PLG or SLG, but like, I keep quoting this and I never quote it properly 'cause I can never actually find the guy who did this quote. I found this quote on LinkedIn. This guy talked about his definition of what product market that was.
[00:17:40] Emmet: And I always think back to this 'cause I thought it was just like a great example. But I'm always bastardizing the explanation 'cause I don't have it to hand to the reference, but I'll do my best to summarize. Effectively, he said that, product market, that is, if you can basically develop like a scalable, repeatable case study [00:18:00] of a customer.
[00:18:01] Emmet: And so if you've got a really clear archetype or ICP of a customer that like you can just like repeatedly generate case studies. Someone who was this right, like their, small dental practice or whatever, like your ICP might be it, you can repeatedly show that they're using your product to solve a particular problem in a particular way, and you can acquire them in a certain way.
[00:18:26] Emmet: And I think that is so vital in thinking about PLG because you, have to be able to do that in this really repeatable cookie cutter kind of way. Whereas in sales life growth, you can kind of do mental gymnastics or kind of position something with someone about how the bill to use this particular problem to solve or particular solution to solve a problem.
[00:18:53] Matt: Right.
[00:18:55] Emmet: But in PLG, you don't have that opportunity. So the way you talk about it, the way you [00:19:00] position it, the way the product is development developed really needs to fit that like cookie cutter, like, you know, case study repeatedly that you're, you know, stamping out basically.
[00:19:09] Matt: Have you had an opportunity in your career to either be a part of an environment that was trying to balance PLG and SLG or like at scale, or have you
[00:19:22] Matt: either have you driven that motion yourself and tried to strike that balance? Because that's a really tricky thing. I think a lot of people underestimate adding sales to a PLG motion or vice versa.
[00:19:33] Emmet: I'm not gonna be able to bring too much wisdom to the conversation. We are right in that our ourselves right now.
[00:19:41] Matt: Yeah.
[00:19:41] Emmet: Trying to make that where, you know, Rewardful, when it started was very much going after the indie hacker, you know, entry level kind of price point. I think when they started it was like 19 bucks a month or something like that. I think the alternatives were like $500 a [00:20:00] month. They were like maybe the first one that like integrated properly with Stripe and so it was very much like, you know, low feature set and ease of use, indie hacker positioning, etc.,
[00:20:10] Emmet: right? And then now as we've been around for quite a while and when you get, you know, bigger customers starting to use you, then bigger customers still start to use you. 'cause they see, oh, using you then, I should be able to use you 'cause we're slightly bigger than them. And then someone's slightly bigger.
[00:20:27] Emmet: And then fast forward a few years, it's like, oh, you've got some very big companies who've raised hundreds of millions of dollars and they've kind of just organically grown with you, and then it's like, oh, okay, like we're supporting these companies who are quite large and substantial, pushing large amounts of money through their Affiliate programs. What would be great is if we could start to target and acquire more like that.
[00:20:53] Matt: Right.
[00:20:54] Emmet: So if you look at like your, and I think this is kind of like the, natural sort of healthy [00:21:00] evolution of a PLG company is you start, you know, with these smaller companies and then you slowly evolve and grow and those, some of those customers evolve and grow with you and faster than you.
[00:21:12] Emmet: And then you get to a point where it's like your feature starts to like slowly have to appeal to those guys, or you just let them churn out. But yeah, you're trying to figure out, okay, like if we could replicate our top 10 or top 20 best customers, like our biggest customer is worth 1400 of our entry level customers, right?
[00:21:36] Emmet: And you try to figure out, oh, how could you replicate those? That's sort of the mental math that I think that naturally goes on. But we haven't cracked the nut yet in terms of figuring out like, okay, how do you go and just get these people when they're already that big, right? Because you can show like, well, we can support people your size and do what people your size need.
[00:21:59] Emmet: But how do we get you when [00:22:00] you're big as opposed to, well, you were so small, you started with us and then you grew. So yeah, trying to, you know, trying to figure out like cold email and cold outreach, whether it's by email, or whether it's LinkedIn DMs or account-based marketing and all these new terms and acronyms that we didn't really know about before.
[00:22:19] Emmet: Trying to build that process for not just outreach, but then also the way people buy. The experience that they expect is different if they're used to buying things SLG as opposed to PLG. So the culture is a little bit different from like a procurement perspective, they might even use the term procurement, right?
[00:22:40] Emmet: As a like, as opposed to someone self-serve, indie hacker or whatever at the other end of the spectrum. They don't think about terms like procurement, but.
[00:22:48] Matt: They actively run away from it.
[00:22:51] Emmet: A hundred, yeah, a hundred percent. With good reason. Yeah.
[00:22:54] Matt: Yeah. See, this is something we learned or I learned at LogMeIn [00:23:00] that company did really well.
[00:23:01] Matt: And I think this is a, I saw that at a smaller scale at my first startup, BoldChat, which was very much freemium and PLG, very similar to the go-to-market strategy at Hunter. But we got to a point where as we tried to scale sales, it was harder. There was a friction there that wasn't obvious, now, this is many years ago.
[00:23:21] Matt: So then we get acquired, we go to LogMeIn. LogMeIn is now like, you know, one of the most well-known brands in the world when it came to PLG, and, you know, they were, I think, the first publicly traded company that was able to, you know, replicate freemium success across a lot of different things. So like, they were, you know, we gotta see this at scale.
[00:23:40] Matt: And one of the challenges was when you do have a big, healthy sales team, but you also have this conduit of free users, free signups, if you don't instrument your free signup process to surface enough information to feed your sales team, the ones they should focus [00:24:00] on, then what it ends up doing is there's a constant tension point in the company of sales saying.
[00:24:06] Matt: No, no, no, you, we need marketing to drive leads, not users. And then, you know, you know the product teams are like, why? Like why do we need to artificially and, you know, delay a sales, you know, delay the purchase process. And so what happened was, I got to see it scale. When you have a large sales team trying to hit a number, trying to grow their revenue, they're trying to figure out what piece of the pie is deflecting and it's self-serve.
[00:24:31] Matt: And so there ends up inevitably being a tipping point where. You have to decide, are you PLG or are you sales led?
[00:24:39] Emmet: Yeah.
[00:24:39] Matt: And one of them has to win. I don't think you can do 50/50. Like if you're not 60/40, you're, in the middle of a mess. I think I've seen it play out within a product group. I've seen it play out at a corporate level.
[00:24:51] Matt: I've seen it play out at small companies where they hit that inflection point, weirdly early. I've, I'm personally a big proponent of PLG. I'm not against sales. I just [00:25:00] find, I like the motion of making sure your customers can do what they need to do in a self-serve way.
[00:25:06] Emmet: Yeah.
[00:25:07] Matt: Keep the price points as low as possible to keep the flywheel moving and then find the right way to feather sales into that.
[00:25:14] Matt: And that is a harder way to do sales, but I think it's a better way to keep high velocity growth, not having to push your price points up. And, because once you start to have to feed your sales team, it forces changes and shifts in your business model that you probably didn't anticipate. Your dollar value has to go up in order to continue to justify the procurement processes and the BDRs and all of that.
[00:25:37] Matt: And it's, yeah, I think, I wish there was more material out here about this specific problem because I feel like a lot of people.
[00:25:45] Emmet: This transition kind of.
[00:25:46] Matt: Yeah. Well, and it's like make the conscious decision. Are you making a transition or are you, should you not give up your PLG motion in favor of adding more sales?
[00:25:59] Matt: Right. [00:26:00] At some point you just have to draw the line. It's a company culture decision. I'm not saying either choice is wrong, it's just.
[00:26:05] Emmet: Yeah.
[00:26:06] Matt: Who do you want to be? You can't make everybody happy.
[00:26:11] Emmet: Yeah.
[00:26:11] Matt: Yeah. It's a really interesting problem. It obviously at LogMeIn it happened way later because the sales team was, gosh, I think when we were dealing with this was like 300-500 people, so it was a big team.
[00:26:21] Matt: I've seen it also hit people at five people in a sales work.
[00:26:24] Emmet: Yeah.
[00:26:24] Matt: So it's like, it's not about scale. It's, there's something in the business model that changes that.
[00:26:30] Emmet: Yeah. Probably something to do with the nature of the customers that you're serving or something like that, like, there's certain industries I feel like probably don't
[00:26:37] Emmet: have many or as many, like indie hacker or solo solopreneur, small business type. And it maybe it lends itself more to larger, you know, deal sizes or I'm hypothesizing, but.
[00:26:50] Matt: Yeah, no, at some point, like especially if you're multi-product or if, you know, I think a lot of it comes down to if you decide you're gonna go after [00:27:00] enterprises and you're gonna support that customer base.
[00:27:04] Matt: You have to start to figure this out because I think you can't do both, well. If you try to go after enterprise, they almost don't trust you if your price point is PLG-oriented and then you end up having to add all of the infrastructure within your org to support the RFP process and all the stuff that they just can't say no to as an enterprise, they have to do it right?
[00:27:27] Matt: So yeah, it's all that type of stuff that just forces you to reevaluate your price points. And I think that's, to me, that's where the tension comes in. It's like, really, when it's forcing you to artificially raise prices, not because your SMB customer can justify that cost, but rather because if you don't do that, it's gonna mess up your enterprise deals.
[00:27:48] Emmet: The psychology of your enterprise customers will, yeah, they'll have an aversion to your low prices. Oh, that's not for me.
[00:27:55] Matt: Yeah. Well this is, so this is free. I don't want a free product. I want like, talk to [00:28:00] sales. I don't even wanna see the price if I can't just talk to sale. Yeah, there's, that's the other thing is like, getting enterprises to buy by themselves is not easy.
[00:28:08] Emmet: Yeah. One of the challenges that we've found is you'll have self-serve type customers using that as a means to talk to somebody to get help on something. I wanna talk to somebody and it's like, oh, but this funnel wasn't really meant for you. I mean, I'll talk to you because. I don't wanna say get lost, but, yeah,
[00:28:29] Emmet: if you have someone coming in and it's like, okay, very clearly you're gonna stay on our $49 a month plan, you're not gonna become the, you know, $5,000 a year kind of customer. But yeah, that's one of the challenges.
[00:28:40] Matt: This is exactly, yeah this is
[00:28:42] Matt: exactly one of those friction points we were dealing with the other day.
[00:28:44] Matt: People would submit our enterprise form and at the end of the month we'd review the number of those enterprise forms that actually generated an enterprise opportunity. It was like near zero every month. Just, yeah. They were just using it to try to stimulate conversations to sales, which was, [00:29:00] or support.
[00:29:00] Matt: They were trying to back, it was like, we've got the greatest support. You can talk to somebody who knows the product anytime you want, except like midnight. And, yeah, it just, I don't know, it just doesn't sometimes resonate with people.
[00:29:14] Emmet: Yeah.
[00:29:15] Matt: Alright, so you sound like you're a dyed in the wool product guy.
[00:29:18] Matt: What's a non-business product you're obsessed with right now?
[00:29:22] Emmet: A non-business product that I'm obsessed with right now. Almost everything is business oriented, but it's because like even the kind of like hobby stuff that I might play around with, it's like, I used to run a media production company, and it reminds me of back in the day when it was like, what would I like buy for myself or, you know, like my mom would be like, what do you want for your birthday this year?
[00:29:51] Emmet: And it's like, I don't really want anything except there's like this new camera that I'd love to get, but like, I'm not gonna, you're not gonna buy me a $5,000 camera or something like that, right? So [00:30:00] I'm still like that, where like, it's like, oh, what are the things that I'm like playing around with it?
[00:30:03] Emmet: It's like, oh, like, you know, there's these new AI tools for like creating video or image, or that I'm playing around with, or that's, you know, the kind of stuff I'm playing around with. And then like little hobby projects of my own that like I'm obsessed with, you know. But, I'm maybe a bit of context.
[00:30:20] Emmet: So I'm a father of three. My kids are five, three, and one. And so my world revolves
[00:30:26] Matt: Yeah.
[00:30:26] Emmet: around them and you know, the types of things that they're playing around with they're, or using or.
[00:30:32] Matt: I mean, that's your hobby. Yeah. Right. Having three children that it's, yeah. Under the age of 10 is just, is a handful, but, oh, what
[00:30:40] Matt: great ages too. Like you're, yeah. You're in the thick of some exciting times. Yeah. Well, okay, we'll check back in five years and we'll find out how your hobbies are going then.
[00:30:51] Emmet: Yeah, yeah. Well, I do, I mean, my hobbies are, like, I, so I'm not a coder, but like on a hobbyist basis, I am. And so like, [00:31:00] that's where I will spend my sort of late nights.
[00:31:03] Emmet: So after the kids go to bed, I'll pull out the laptop and I'll mostly kinda be playing around with AI and seeing the different things that, that I can build. And, one of the things, I'm working on right now is, and this is how crazy AI is. I had never like built a production application before, never built a mobile app before.
[00:31:23] Emmet: But I've built a mobile app that uses AI to generate audio stories for my kids for bedtime.
[00:31:31] Emmet: And so they can basically select like, so they can put their names in, they got their friends' names in it, so they can select the name of the characters that they want to be in the story. Select a genre. And then they submit it and then a couple minutes later it spits back an audio that they can listen to, kinda like a Calm or Audible story.
[00:31:53] Matt: Interesting.
[00:31:54] Emmet: And they're, they are the characters in this story with their friends or whoever else they want to have in the [00:32:00] story. So that's my hobby right now is
[00:32:02] Matt: Okay.
[00:32:03] Emmet: building this thing. But yeah, other than that, it's, yeah, my life is. Even my hobbies are somehow still related to my children, so.
[00:32:12] Matt: I, I've certainly been there, both mine are now grown and out of the house, and so I'm getting to like remember what that was like. But with the grownup paycheck, which is kind of nice.
[00:32:27] Emmet: Yeah. Awesome.
[00:32:28] Matt: Yeah, it's been fun. So, okay, so if I, so it's kid related or AI work related. So yeah, you're, have you tried doing local LLMs yet?
[00:32:42] Matt: Is that something you've played with?
[00:32:44] Emmet: Not extensively. I do remember, I can't remember what it was, but there was some sort of LLM that I did install on my MacBook and I was using it very briefly. I use it on a light [00:33:00] to, vibe code, not vibe code, might be the wrong word, but like to get coding, assistance or advice because I had no internet connection.
[00:33:10] Emmet: So, that's, but that was a while ago. That was before like when things still weren't quite as good. That was like precursor. So I haven't had any like, use case to really need to use anything like that. There is one other product that I have been using quite a bit. It's called AI Flow Chat.
[00:33:30] Matt: I haven't seen that.
[00:33:32] Emmet: It's a, I don't know how you would describe it. I think it's basically it's call it like a node or graph-based, so basically it's like you've got like a, almost like a graph paper and you can create nodes and allows you to connect different prompts together in like a user interface.
[00:33:52] Matt: Interesting.
[00:33:53] Emmet: And so you can basically like chain different prompts together. And I use it one for like, if I wanna work through [00:34:00] like what a prompt I want to have, be in an app that I'm in, the app that I'm building, or if one of the chain prompts together for whatever other purpose, content creation, text creation, whatever, or image generation.
[00:34:13] Emmet: And so for example, you could have a text prompt that then feeds into an image prompt that feeds into whatever you could, like, get two different images together and then, feed that into a prompt that will do like a Nano Banana, the new Google image thing. So like, I, so as an example, I made images of, again, of my kids,
[00:34:40] Emmet: but as Pixar characters. So I turn 'em into Pixar characters and then I'm able to, because of this Nano Banana thing, I can basically create, like, scenes. It's one of the things that Nano Banana does really well, so much better than like a lot of the other sort of, models out there is character [00:35:00] consistency and scene consistency.
[00:35:02] Emmet: And so you could have an image of these characters. So one of 'em is like these, my daughter and my niece as Pixar characters in a podcast studio. And then I could be like, change the camera angle. So like you've got like the wide shot and then you've got the closeup on one and then closeup on the other and then over the shoulder shot.
[00:35:24] Emmet: And it's crazy like the little, so basically then I can like create little cartoons of them, and add voiceovers to it so I could create little, you know, cartoon scenarios for them and things like that, so, but yeah, AI Flow Chat, is a tool that I've been playing around with to, to create all that stuff.
[00:35:43] Matt: I'll have to find family members with young children 'cause some of this sounds like a lot of fun actually.
[00:35:48] Emmet: Yeah.
[00:35:48] Matt: Cut personalized animation for your kids is,
[00:35:53] Emmet: But even also for marketing though, I think there is a business use case. You no longer [00:36:00] need to hire a model to do a photo shoot, to make a video or still photography or whatever.
[00:36:05] Emmet: You could create AI models. And then with this tool, what you could do is, for example. You could have one image of just a person, just, you know, their full body standing, right? That's one image. And then the other image could be just like a stick character in a pose. You combine those and then feed it to Nano Banana with this AI Flow Chat.
[00:36:27] Emmet: And then it'll put this character in this pose, or from this camera angle and it'll be consistent. And then you can feed that into tools like, I haven't used VO, but like Runway ML, for example. And then you could animate that. So like you imagine like, if you wanna make a car commercial even, or like, you know, it's something I'm trying to think about, like for Rewardful for ad creative or just like marketing, creative, social content, etc.
[00:36:59] Emmet: It's like, oh, [00:37:00] we could make like kind of a fun ad, like an actual, like video ad that might cost us 30 grand. If it was my media, my video production company doing it back in the day, maybe you would charge tens of thousand dollars for this video, but now actually you could do it for a couple hundred dollars in a bit of your time.
[00:37:20] Emmet: If that, you know what I mean? Like, so, yeah.
[00:37:21] Matt: Yeah. That's wild. That's, yeah. It really changes the way you think about video production for startups as commercials. Actually the self-serve tV advertising through streaming now, when you combine the power of what you just described in terms of creating commercials with the power of self-service, like we're really close to entrepreneurs being able to create their own TV commercials and then manage it like they do Google ads.
[00:37:52] Matt: Which is really fascinating to think that we're as a startup or an early stage company or a small business, that's actually something that's on [00:38:00] the table for the first time, really.
[00:38:02] Emmet: I just think when you think about the distribution that you have available now on YouTube, it's far exceeds anything that any TV, current TV channel has.
[00:38:13] Matt: Yeah.
[00:38:14] Emmet: If you can, you know, if you can make the creative that's gonna convert or get attention, like, so that's a whole different conversation in terms of, we've done a, we've experimented a little bit with YouTube ads, and it's difficult to like, a smaller scale business. You need to be, I think, pretty big to get to that kind of brand space.
[00:38:32] Emmet: But you could create very high quality content and with YouTube, the distribution that you potentially have is, you know, enormous. Like you could, if you could afford it, you could have a YouTube or a Super Bowl sized audience any day of the week if, you wanted to get access to that, if you had the budget for it.
[00:38:54] Matt: Right. Speaking of which, so let's talk a little bit about the zero to 100. Is this how you [00:39:00] would try to go about getting your first customers or do you prefer, because I know you said something about trying a little cold email, you're not doing a ton of cold email, which is fine. I'm not here to convince everybody they should do cold email, but like, is this, changing the way you think about getting those first customers?
[00:39:18] Emmet: Yes, but not, I probably wouldn't do YouTube ads if I was starting something. One thing that I've been, watch, on YouTube, I've, been watching a lot of videos about a lot of the, like what they call like UGC-type AI content, whatever that people are creating. And mostly this that seems to be, this is applied in
[00:39:45] Emmet: consumer space. So it could be consumer packaged goods or like mobile apps, but B2C type products and these different AI influencers that people are using to market these products. Actually a [00:40:00] customer of ours company called Arcads, Arcads.ai, I think they are, and they're one of the leading products in this space where like you can create these AI avatars and then they'll pitch a product view.
[00:40:11] Emmet: And that could be for ads, but also what people are doing is they're creating these AI influencers. And there's actually a YouTube video I watched today and it's very, it's kind of meta. So this guy was talking about how to use our ads and creating this type of content. And it, I was watching it and I was like, this guy's AI, the guy, I'm watching this video.
[00:40:32] Emmet: And, but he, so he's, so it's interesting he's talking about like using this content to create B2C content for, organic social, but then also paid social, but then the video he's doing is B2B. He's pitching a business product. And in this fashion, if I looked at his older videos, it was actually him, but his newer videos, it's, he's probably using HeyGen, [00:41:00] another customer of ours or one of these types of tools to create an avatar of themselves.
[00:41:05] Emmet: And then you, when you intersperse that with like B-roll footage. It's not as obvious because you're not on screen for as long and then you're switching to like the screencast of the product and whatever other B-roll that you have, right? And so that's where my head is going is like, I think the stuff that happens in B2C is probably precursor to what kind of finds its way over to B2B.
[00:41:28] Emmet: And so what's happening in, in social content on TikTok and things like this, it would probably find its way into YouTube and LinkedIn. It'll evolve in its own way that'll, that it works for those channels. But yeah, if I was looking to try and find my first hundred customers, I don't know if that's what I would necessarily do.
[00:41:49] Emmet: I think first hundred, it's probably pretty gritty. And because at that stage it's like you're just trying to figure out [00:42:00] like, have I built something that people even want right before you're trying to really like, scale up, like how to get the message out there, so it's, you know, your product, by the time you get to your hundreth customer, your product may have changed quite a bit from like your first 10 or something like that.
[00:42:16] Emmet: I think your first few customers, it really is just like grind networking. It could be within your existing personal network that, you know, people that have this particular problem, cold outreach. Hey, I built this thing. It does, you know, this kind of thing. Like really trying to have high touch
[00:42:34] Emmet: relationships. Like for example, the guy who, uses that tool I referenced, AI Flow Chat, like I'm talking to him on Twitter 'cause we engaged on Twitter. That's how I found out about it. And we've had like Google Meet calls and stuff like that. So I think that's your first few customers. You, basically, if this was like pre-COVID before everyone just lived on Zoom and Google Meet,
[00:42:57] Matt: Right.
[00:42:58] Emmet: What you would do is you'd actually [00:43:00] go out and talk to your ICP in person a lot, right? Like when Kyle and I were building Care Network, the healthcare software business, we talked to a lot of doctors, a lot of doctors. I think you need to be talking to your customer every single day.
[00:43:15] Emmet: You should be talking to a lot of them. And even before you're starting to get 'em as customers, just in that sort of product development, you should be just talking to 'em every single day. Not in your head pontificating about what they would think or do. It's like, no, what would they actually do?
[00:43:30] Emmet: Give them the product. Let them play around with it. And I think in that early stages, particularly if you are PLG, you, the product and the marketing are kind of inextricably linked. Because you need to understand how people are using the product and how they think about the product so you can understand how to position the product and talk about the product,
[00:43:52] Matt: Right.
[00:43:52] Emmet: in the market, right. So I think, yeah, that first phase, that, you know, first, maybe it's 10 or maybe it's a hundred customers. It's very like that [00:44:00] you're just talking to people. And then as I referenced before, this idea of this like scalable, repeatable case studies after your first hundred customers, you probably have identified like there's probably a lot of like bad fit customers that come in and then you're figuring out like, oh, here's an archetype, an ICP of a customer that like, I can talk to them.
[00:44:24] Emmet: I understand there's a particular workflow, for example, that they might have. That my product solves for them. Oh, I could, I can really clearly see, okay, this is how they could use this product to solve this particular problem. And then you build your kind of go-to-market machine around that, that it's like if you have this problem,
[00:44:43] Emmet: my product is the solution. It does this and this is the price point or whatever. Seth Godin's got a great line and it's something to the effect of like, people like us do things like this, and this is the, sort of way you want people to think about your product. Is that like, they want to [00:45:00] feel like, oh, I, yeah, I'm one of you and,
[00:45:04] Matt: Right.
[00:45:04] Emmet: I do things this way. So yeah, that's that kind of a, long winding answer, but I, think that's kind of the way you need to approach it in those early stages. It is a bit gritty and trying to scale it with, like, YouTube ads don't even bother, like, you need to figure out that sort of, you know, repeatable case study that keeps some, keeps seeing come in over and over again before you try and scale.
[00:45:28] Matt: Just changing gears a bit here, if you live on LinkedIn, as most people who are in B2B go-to-market. Do these days, you'd get the sense that you can't be successful without certain kinds of tech stacks in your go-to market. So what's your go-to-market tech stack? Let's talk tools.
[00:45:48] Emmet: So of course we use Rewardful for our own affiliate program, but then we actually also use it for tracking other channels that we're using so we, [00:46:00] not to get too technical, but we'll set up like a 0% commission campaign.
[00:46:03] Emmet: And then, so for like our Google ads, our Reddit ads, etc., we will use a Rewardful link so that we can track conversions and things like that.
[00:46:13] Matt: Interesting. So you're sort of hacking your own product to do attribution for you.
[00:46:17] Emmet: Yeah, and we have a lot of customers who use us for that purpose as well.
[00:46:22] Matt: Cool.
[00:46:23] Emmet: So Rewardful, obviously we have some, we have HubSpot for our CRM, which we're in this limbo phase of trying to figure out, like sales. So whether that stays as part of our stack, where that fits, it's still up sort of for consideration. The product, it's a pretty good product and, you know, lots of integrations and things like that.
[00:46:46] Emmet: We're changing the tool we were using for content posting. We were using Aware, I think it was called, but now I think we're switching to Tapio Intercom, obviously for [00:47:00] customer support. We've got two channels of customer support. We used Intercom for our chat support 'cause it's, you know, it's great product, but it does get expensive as you add contacts.
[00:47:12] Emmet: So, for affiliate support, we use Front because it's per-seat as opposed to per-contact. And affiliates like the, we're rolling out our managed payout service and our marketplace, and so the volume of affiliate contacts is gonna go up significantly. And that would get very expensive if we were priced on a per-contact.
[00:47:30] Emmet: So we use Front for that. That's email support. We use Intercom for, chat support. Calendly for scheduling calls with customers. Gmail for email. We have been experimenting with cold email. We've been using Instantly for that, Slack, not just for internal kind of team conversations, but we've got integrations with different products that
[00:47:57] Emmet: are reading notifications and things like in there. [00:48:00] So like Instantly, we'll, you know, send, some information into there and different sort of products. We're using a product called SiftIn for Social Listing.
[00:48:11] Matt: Okay.
[00:48:11] Emmet: So you can put like different keywords and different things you wanna monitor.
[00:48:14] Emmet: We wanna monitor Twitter, we wanna monitor Reddit, we want etc. And that feeds in, again, that feeds into Slack. So we'll get notifications and there's a social mention about us. We can kind of go in and engage with customers. Jiminy is our call tracker, but I think we're probably, gonna switch to something else.
[00:48:32] Emmet: No, nothing against 'em. Just for our needs it's probably over-kill. I'm trying to think here if there's any other.
[00:48:38] Matt: I love hearing you go through it though, because like, this is one of the things that, if you can tune out some of the noise on LinkedIn for a minute, what you'd find is that most people's, you know, quote unquote tech stack,
[00:48:52] Matt: is generally very lightweight. It's a couple of tools. It's, you know, something for email sending, maybe something for list [00:49:00] building, and it's not the key thing that's holding you back. And I think that's like the tone that gets sometimes set that it, that's the secret sauce. And I just am constantly pointing out, it's really not actually.
[00:49:14] Emmet: It's like a tennis player who's like, I, they always get like the new $300 rocket or something like that.
[00:49:20] Emmet: I don't think your racket is the problem. I think it's, yeah, you need to work on your server or whatever the case might be.
[00:49:26] Matt: I've used a Wilson racket. I am not Roger Federer and I'm pretty confident he would beat me no matter what racket he was using, including the badminton one. So, yeah, I'd, to keep your metaphor,
[00:49:36] Matt: I totally agree. Any parting words of wisdom, things that, you feel like you wanna make sure our audience takes away from your experience or from something about Rewardful that you wanna mention as we close it out?
[00:49:53] Emmet: Well this, I think in terms of the timing, my understanding of when, this will actually go live, maybe just a [00:50:00] plug for, for Rewardful obviously.
[00:50:03] Matt: Please.
[00:50:03] Emmet: And we're in the process right now as we're recording this, of rolling out our managed payouts service.
[00:50:08] Matt: Okay.
[00:50:09] Emmet: And then shortly after this we'll be rolling out the reward for marketplace. So basically if you've got an affiliate program and you want to expose it to a larger audience of affiliates, you could advertise it on the reward for marketplace.
[00:50:24] Emmet: And then the managed payout service just is gonna make it a lot easier for people to pay their affiliates. So instead of having to figure out PayPal or Wise or whatever sort of methods to pay people out yourself, you'll just pay Rewardful at whenever you wanna pay your affiliates. You just pay Rewardful one invoice and then we handle the payment to your affiliates for you.
[00:50:43] Emmet: You get one invoice from Rewardful, and then we handle the invoicing relationship with the affiliates. So from sort of tax compliance and bookkeeping, it's just a much more simplified approach, so.
[00:50:56] Matt: That's a good feature.
[00:50:58] Emmet: Yeah, exactly, so.
[00:50:59] Matt: I'll [00:51:00] reduce the number of emails I see, which is always, that's kind of become my new mission, is how do I help reduce the number, which seems a little bit odd given our answer.
[00:51:09] Emmet: Counterintuitive.
[00:51:10] Matt: Yeah. But I think, quality over quantity is always the right way to go in everything so, it definitely, it's logically consistent if you look past the obvious stuff. Well, it's great to talk with you, Emmet. I'm glad we finally got a chance to connect.