The Exchanges

Q build, because I've read before a piece that you wrote brilliantly well, and when we chatted before, you said to me, build a website and not an app. So I want to start with that, because that almost seems contradictory in today's kind of app-driven world that it seems. So why would you say build a website and not an app, and what are the benefits to that in 2019?

A Yeah, and the reason that I have written about this topic and that I care about it is because I think a lot of entrepreneurs sort of think about apps as startups or like as software that they should dive right into and don't think of websites first, even though I think it's wiser to build a website first. And I'll copy out this by saying, of course, there are exceptions to every rule, um, but in general, I strongly encourage entrepreneurs to build a website first when they're in the early stages of product development. There's four reasons for why that's, or why I think that websites have an advantage over apps for early stage startups. The first is that getting users is easier when you have a website. Users don't want to download apps anymore, and users are more willing to discover new publishers when they're browsing the web versus when they're browsing the app store. Users browse the web a lot more often than they browse the app store. We've acquired a Kapwing. We've acquired most of our users for free through Google search, which is a super accessible distribution channel, even for bootstrapping founders. The second reason is it's easier to make money with websites over apps. First of all, Apple or Google takes a significant piece of any transaction that goes through a native app. So that reduces the margins on your payments. And people are just more willing to use their co…

AI assessment note: “There's four reasons for why that's, or why I think that websites have an advantage”

Q build, because I've read before a piece that you wrote brilliantly well, and when we chatted before, you said to me, build a website and not an app. So I want to start with that, because that almost seems contradictory in today's kind of app-driven world that it seems. So why would you say build a website and not an app, and what are the benefits to that in 2019?

A Yeah, and the reason that I have written about this topic and that I care about it is because I think a lot of entrepreneurs sort of think about apps as startups or like as software that they should dive right into and don't think of websites first, even though I think it's wiser to build a website first. And I'll copy out this by saying, of course, there are exceptions to every rule, um, but in general, I strongly encourage entrepreneurs to build a website first when they're in the early stages of product development. There's four reasons for why that's, or why I think that websites have an advantage over apps for early stage startups. The first is that getting users is easier when you have a website. Users don't want to download apps anymore, and users are more willing to discover new publishers when they're browsing the web versus when they're browsing the app store. Users browse the web a lot more often than they browse the app store. We've acquired a Kapwing. We've acquired most of our users for free through Google search, which is a super accessible distribution channel, even for bootstrapping founders. The second reason is it's easier to make money with websites over apps. First of all, Apple or Google takes a significant piece of any transaction that goes through a native app. So that reduces the margins on your payments. And people are just more willing to use their co…

AI assessment note: “There's four reasons for why that's, or why I think that websites have an advantage”

Q you know how to flatten my ego, including me alongside those names, but I like that a lot. I do want to ask it because you mentioned that building that almost consumer brand-like feel, and it was something that I discussed with Mamoun when we had a chat before, and he said, ask about the movement from prosumer to enterprise. How do you think about making that transition today, Julia?

A Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of bottoms up SaaS companies or companies that aspire to become bottoms up SaaS companies that face a similar kind of transition. You know, we are really, we've had success with the individual tools that we've built for individuals, but we are moving now towards thinking about how can we add value, not just at the individual level, but also at the team and also at the team level. So there's kind of three things I would say, I think about in sort of this crossing this quote unquote enterprise chasm. The first is that you need to create a product that's really integrated into professional workflows. So that works well with a SAML off that works well with the different products that are adjacent to your product and And that is something that just adds a lot of value at its step in a professional workflow. The second is you need to build team features, like I mentioned. So you need to build time saving has to increase as more people come onto the product so that there's an incentive for the product to be shared within a company rather than just used by one individual. And the third for us is that we're building a two layer value proposition so that we add value not only for individual creators and But also for their managers or for their clients who want visibility into what's happening and want to understand how they can collaborate and review c…

AI assessment note: “So there's kind of three things I would say, I think about”

Q huge fan of the product as well, which I actually haven't had a chance to tell you, but I do want to kick off today with a little bit about you and some context. So before we dive into that, how did you make your way into the world of Startups and come to change the way that we think about editing today with Catwing. What was that aha moment?

A Yeah, absolutely. So my dad was an entrepreneur when I was young, and I always admired him a lot and wanted to have my own business or dreamed of that when I was writing that when I was older. But I didn't really know what industry that would be in until I came to Stanford in and started studying CS, took a CS class my sophomore year and just fell in love with the pace and the radical impact that tech has on So I studied computer science, and then after school, I decided to join Google as an associate product manager, which is their training program, basically, for entry-level PMs. And I happened to be randomly assigned to the same team as my now co-founder, who had graduated the year before me. So we were co-workers at Google for two years, and that serendipitous assignment, obviously, led us to develop a super important working relationship. So that made this jump into Startups a lot easier. In terms of the aha moment, it didn't come until after I had left Google. Eric and I were both working on Google image search together in our second year. So while we were there, we'd learned a lot about products related to multimedia, like videos and gifts, images, music on Google search. And we were witnessing just how much the market demand was growing for that sort of content. So that kind of gave us a context for our thinking around the product. But once we left Google in the summer …

AI assessment note: “In terms of the aha moment, it didn't come until after I had left Google.”

Q touch on the element of, as you said there about building the initial team, because it's when I spoke to Mamoun, something that he very much picked up on. He said, the team that you've assembled is amazing. And he asked, how did you think about the initial team build out and what's been some big lessons for you on what it takes to really get the best talent early?

A Yeah. So have learned a huge amount about this issue. I would say that we were patient with hiring and at the time it felt scary. I mean, we just closed a seed round and, you know, two months later, we still hadn't had anyone joy enough After we closed the seat, even though we were spending a huge amount of our own time on recruiting and getting coffees with people and things like that. So I would say, you know, don't be afraid to be patient. It matters so much who your very first five hires are because they're the people that are going to carry the culture and carry who you're hiring down the road. So I would say in San Francisco, at least there's absolutely no silver bullet to hiring. Lots of companies are building distributed workforces or remote workforces. Which I think is great for some companies, but for us, you know, we've always been local and we knew we wanted to build a local team. I won't go into that here, but we approach hiring the same way that we approach everything else, which is with a huge amount of experimentation and hustle, just trying a lot of different things, trying to do things that are non-traditional and see what sticks. For example, we recorded a video of Eric and I, just like a single take video with subtitles and posted it as a Facebook ad targeting software engineers, basically just telling people Here's who we are. Here's what a company does. Li…

AI assessment note: “I would say, you know, don't be afraid to be patient.”

Q What moves the needle for you in terms of your marketing innovation? Because you decided on obviously the structure being the site over the app in the early days. What really worked for you in terms of the marketing innovation to really acquire those early customers?

A Yep. So the first thing was we were lucky and that we knew a lot about search and we knew how SEO works. And so just from the very early days, we understood that we needed to create, have a domain name. We needed to be able to drive backlinks to that domain and we needed to have pages that were Rank for large queries. So we came into it already understanding the importance of SEO and the kind of volume and quality that that could get you if you did it right. And then to drive backlinks, to get people on the internet, to start talking about Kupuang and to get people to start building brand awareness. We did so many things. We were super experimental in the beginning, and most of those things didn't work. And I think that's always been sort of fundamental to how we approach marketing innovation is to be really experimental and to throw a lot of The wall and sort of learn a lot as you go, rather than trying to be super strategic about each channel and sort of like invest a lot in a channel before you've proven it out. It's kind of like the saying, like you want to build it in a lab before you built it in a factory. The same thing applies to marketing innovation for sure. We had a few channels that have been great for us. Although I'll caveat this by saying the channels that worked for us probably won't work for other entrepreneurs because there are decreasing marginal returns afte…

AI assessment note: “we knew how SEO works... we were really successful with Product Hunt.”

Q Can I ask, in terms of the audiences and the split between the two, do you segment the teams into prosumer versus anti Or do you think actually there's beauty in the blending of the two in terms of both product and sales and marketing disciplines?

A Oh, absolutely. Blending of the two. I mean, I think every modern SaaS product understands that the experience has to be good for the end user nowadays, or else a startup just like us could come in and disrupt your access to the end user and ultimately reduce the value that your product adds. So I think that definitely we think about how can we add value for the end user and also for the person above them if they're inside of The second thing I would say is that there are many prosumer media entrepreneurs. Even a huge company like Adobe still makes a lot of money from the individual creators who subscribe to the creative cloud. So even though Kapwing is moving up market, trying to serve teams and creative professionals, it will not lose its loyalty to helping creative people get things done because that's still so important for the business and for the product value proposition.

AI assessment note: “Oh, absolutely. Blending of the two.”

Q huge fan of the product as well, which I actually haven't had a chance to tell you, but I do want to kick off today with a little bit about you and some context. So before we dive into that, how did you make your way into the world of Startups and come to change the way that we think about editing today with Catwing. What was that aha moment?

A Yeah, absolutely. So my dad was an entrepreneur when I was young, and I always admired him a lot and wanted to have my own business or dreamed of that when I was writing that when I was older. But I didn't really know what industry that would be in until I came to Stanford in and started studying CS, took a CS class my sophomore year and just fell in love with the pace and the radical impact that tech has on So I studied computer science, and then after school, I decided to join Google as an associate product manager, which is their training program, basically, for entry-level PMs. And I happened to be randomly assigned to the same team as my now co-founder, who had graduated the year before me. So we were co-workers at Google for two years, and that serendipitous assignment, obviously, led us to develop a super important working relationship. So that made this jump into Startups a lot easier. In terms of the aha moment, it didn't come until after I had left Google. Eric and I were both working on Google image search together in our second year. So while we were there, we'd learned a lot about products related to multimedia, like videos and gifts, images, music on Google search. And we were witnessing just how much the market demand was growing for that sort of content. So that kind of gave us a context for our thinking around the product. But once we left Google in the summer …

AI assessment note: “In terms of the aha moment, it didn't come until after I had left Google.”

Q touch on the element of, as you said there about building the initial team, because it's when I spoke to Mamoun, something that he very much picked up on. He said, the team that you've assembled is amazing. And he asked, how did you think about the initial team build out and what's been some big lessons for you on what it takes to really get the best talent early?

A Yeah. So have learned a huge amount about this issue. I would say that we were patient with hiring and at the time it felt scary. I mean, we just closed a seed round and, you know, two months later, we still hadn't had anyone joy enough After we closed the seat, even though we were spending a huge amount of our own time on recruiting and getting coffees with people and things like that. So I would say, you know, don't be afraid to be patient. It matters so much who your very first five hires are because they're the people that are going to carry the culture and carry who you're hiring down the road. So I would say in San Francisco, at least there's absolutely no silver bullet to hiring. Lots of companies are building distributed workforces or remote workforces. Which I think is great for some companies, but for us, you know, we've always been local and we knew we wanted to build a local team. I won't go into that here, but we approach hiring the same way that we approach everything else, which is with a huge amount of experimentation and hustle, just trying a lot of different things, trying to do things that are non-traditional and see what sticks. For example, we recorded a video of Eric and I, just like a single take video with subtitles and posted it as a Facebook ad targeting software engineers, basically just telling people Here's who we are. Here's what a company does. Li…

AI assessment note: “we approach hiring the same way... with a huge amount of experimentation and hustle”

Q to touch on the first, let's start on actually the last one there. You mentioned the ease of iteration and deployment on web versus delayed deployment cycles with app publishers. When I spoke to Nicola Shasta, one of your investors, he said that you're constantly launching new products and features, as you just mentioned. And his question to you was, what enables you to move so quickly on building product?

A So in the beginning, it was just me, my co-founder working on our own. And we were bootstrapping with limited savings. So we were forced to be highly iterative and super responsive to needs that we could directly solve. And in some ways that was our advantage because we built things really quickly and we built things, some of which, you know, didn't work, but most of which did. And those directly solve people's problems rather than having like feature creep into the products. After we raised the seed round, we were really patient with hiring. We brought on a really excellent engineer as our first and Who has experience as a manager. So he's helped increase our cadence by introducing a sprint process for our engineering team as it grew, helping with hiring and people management, all sorts of other things that Eric and I had less experience with. So that's helped us keep up our engineering velocity over the last year. And then I would say that also this approach has been great for solving some problems and it's good for getting early traction, but other problems just take longer to solve. So I do think that like we have Uh, refined our iterative approach to product development, and in some ways, we've started to move slowly in places where it makes sense to move slowly, like making sure we're investing in quality, performance, scale, and a deeper competitive vote without losing t…

AI assessment note: “he's helped increase our cadence by introducing a sprint process”

Q of your business model, so to speak, because when I chatted to Nikhil in particular, he mentioned this and the striking element, which is why did you take the approach of bootstrapping and monetizing from day one, which actually is very contrarian today compared to many people who immediately go out and raise with the pre-seed round. Why did you choose this route? And what were the benefits for you?

A Yeah, absolutely. I could speak about this for days. You know, we wanted validation before we raised money in the beginning. So for example, Eric and I worked on a different idea first for like two and a half months before we started working on Kapueng, and we really liked the idea. I think it still is a great idea and could exist one day, but we just couldn't get traction for it in the early days, and we realized that quickly and could sunset it rather than needing to sort of, you know, we didn't have like six figures in the bank that we needed to To figure out how to spend or investors that had put trust in us around that idea who, who didn't want us to kill it. So I think that there's a lot of incentive for the VCs to put money into a lot of different ideas with the hope that a one or two of them truly become businesses. But for the founder, you don't want to spend your time working on a bad business idea. And so you really want to make sure that you have a thing that has potential before you go out and raise. And my advice to founders around that is that you do not really know if your idea has potential until you start trying to get some traction. Until you have some real business validation. So for us, I would say, was it the right decision for us to bootstrap versus, versus raising at the beginning? I will caveat all of that by saying, you know, it definitely depends. We'…

AI assessment note: “we wanted validation before we raised money in the beginning.”

Q What moves the needle for you in terms of your marketing innovation? Because you decided on obviously the structure being the site over the app in the early days. What really worked for you in terms of the marketing innovation to really acquire those early customers?

A Yep. So the first thing was we were lucky and that we knew a lot about search and we knew how SEO works. And so just from the very early days, we understood that we needed to create, have a domain name. We needed to be able to drive backlinks to that domain and we needed to have pages that were Rank for large queries. So we came into it already understanding the importance of SEO and the kind of volume and quality that that could get you if you did it right. And then to drive backlinks, to get people on the internet, to start talking about Kupuang and to get people to start building brand awareness. We did so many things. We were super experimental in the beginning, and most of those things didn't work. And I think that's always been sort of fundamental to how we approach marketing innovation is to be really experimental and to throw a lot of The wall and sort of learn a lot as you go, rather than trying to be super strategic about each channel and sort of like invest a lot in a channel before you've proven it out. It's kind of like the saying, like you want to build it in a lab before you built it in a factory. The same thing applies to marketing innovation for sure. We had a few channels that have been great for us. Although I'll caveat this by saying the channels that worked for us probably won't work for other entrepreneurs because there are decreasing marginal returns afte…

AI assessment note: “We were really successful with Product Hunt. We put out a lot of design collections”

Q foundational elements in terms of the product and what a product it is, and in terms of the next element, you said about ease of gaining users and how that differs versus apps, and I want to discuss that because you said to me, marketing innovation is just as important as Product innovation. So I can't not pick this. Why did you think this, and what means your thinking there?

A Yeah, absolutely. So the reason I feel this so strongly is because it was such a learning of mine, something I didn't expect when I left Google. At Google, product is king. You know, if you build great products, people will come. The organization does a lot to shield its product managers from marketing or sales or any other function outside of product development and engineering. But when you're not a huge company with an existing brand following, when you're New company, a new brand, and you're just trying to get your very first users. You need really like radical tactics to get attention. Otherwise, you're not going to sort of rise above the noise. And that was something I did not anticipate when I left Google because I was sort of so bought into this product myth. And I think it's extremely important for early entrepreneurs to think about how they innovate in marketing and distribution rather than just think about how they innovate in product and kind of be discouraged when people ask them, how will you get people to use it?

AI assessment note: “it was such a learning of mine, something I didn't expect when I left Google”

Q Can I ask, in terms of the audiences and the split between the two, do you segment the teams into prosumer versus anti Or do you think actually there's beauty in the blending of the two in terms of both product and sales and marketing disciplines?

A Oh, absolutely. Blending of the two. I mean, I think every modern SaaS product understands that the experience has to be good for the end user nowadays, or else a startup just like us could come in and disrupt your access to the end user and ultimately reduce the value that your product adds. So I think that definitely we think about how can we add value for the end user and also for the person above them if they're inside of The second thing I would say is that there are many prosumer media entrepreneurs. Even a huge company like Adobe still makes a lot of money from the individual creators who subscribe to the creative cloud. So even though Kapwing is moving up market, trying to serve teams and creative professionals, it will not lose its loyalty to helping creative people get things done because that's still so important for the business and for the product value proposition.

AI assessment note: “Oh, absolutely. Blending of the two.”

Q you know how to flatten my ego, including me alongside those names, but I like that a lot. I do want to ask it because you mentioned that building that almost consumer brand-like feel, and it was something that I discussed with Mamoun when we had a chat before, and he said, ask about the movement from prosumer to enterprise. How do you think about making that transition today, Julia?

A Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of bottoms up SaaS companies or companies that aspire to become bottoms up SaaS companies that face a similar kind of transition. You know, we are really, we've had success with the individual tools that we've built for individuals, but we are moving now towards thinking about how can we add value, not just at the individual level, but also at the team and also at the team level. So there's kind of three things I would say, I think about in sort of this crossing this quote unquote enterprise chasm. The first is that you need to create a product that's really integrated into professional workflows. So that works well with a SAML off that works well with the different products that are adjacent to your product and And that is something that just adds a lot of value at its step in a professional workflow. The second is you need to build team features, like I mentioned. So you need to build time saving has to increase as more people come onto the product so that there's an incentive for the product to be shared within a company rather than just used by one individual. And the third for us is that we're building a two layer value proposition so that we add value not only for individual creators and But also for their managers or for their clients who want visibility into what's happening and want to understand how they can collaborate and review c…

AI assessment note: “three things I would say, I think about in sort of this crossing this”

Q foundational elements in terms of the product and what a product it is, and in terms of the next element, you said about ease of gaining users and how that differs versus apps, and I want to discuss that because you said to me, marketing innovation is just as important as Product innovation. So I can't not pick this. Why did you think this, and what means your thinking there?

A Yeah, absolutely. So the reason I feel this so strongly is because it was such a learning of mine, something I didn't expect when I left Google. At Google, product is king. You know, if you build great products, people will come. The organization does a lot to shield its product managers from marketing or sales or any other function outside of product development and engineering. But when you're not a huge company with an existing brand following, when you're New company, a new brand, and you're just trying to get your very first users. You need really like radical tactics to get attention. Otherwise, you're not going to sort of rise above the noise. And that was something I did not anticipate when I left Google because I was sort of so bought into this product myth. And I think it's extremely important for early entrepreneurs to think about how they innovate in marketing and distribution rather than just think about how they innovate in product and kind of be discouraged when people ask them, how will you get people to use it?

AI assessment note: “The reason I feel this so strongly is because it was such a learning”

Q getting to that point of validation in terms of the product itself and the traction that you see. You did decide, obviously, to raise in the end from our friends Mamoun and then Nikhil, obviously, and Shasta, and then obviously with the Series A. So I do want to ask, what was that inflection moment for you, which changed your mindset as to now's the right time to raise venture?

A Yeah. So there's two elements of this. So the first is, you know, to be totally honest with you, like we thought a lot about it in the early days. And when we saw that we had the opportunity to work on building, you know, a big business rather than just a smaller, like lifestyle business, you know, we wanted to move on it because we want to build something that has a huge amount of impact in the world. So the first time that we thought about raising money was when we basically had someone write us a term sheet and tell us like we should and that we could. The second thing I would say here is that we got lucky, and that happened when it did, because it's a highly competitive space, and I think now, in retrospect, I see that we have advantages in certain ways because of our timing, and we knew we needed to move quickly so that we didn't lose out on those advantages, and I think that capital helps you just move faster and capture the market in the speedier way, and for this market in particular, I think there's the competitive dynamics require that.

AI assessment note: “when we basically had someone write us a term sheet”

Q to touch on the first, let's start on actually the last one there. You mentioned the ease of iteration and deployment on web versus delayed deployment cycles with app publishers. When I spoke to Nicola Shasta, one of your investors, he said that you're constantly launching new products and features, as you just mentioned. And his question to you was, what enables you to move so quickly on building product?

A So in the beginning, it was just me, my co-founder working on our own. And we were bootstrapping with limited savings. So we were forced to be highly iterative and super responsive to needs that we could directly solve. And in some ways that was our advantage because we built things really quickly and we built things, some of which, you know, didn't work, but most of which did. And those directly solve people's problems rather than having like feature creep into the products. After we raised the seed round, we were really patient with hiring. We brought on a really excellent engineer as our first and Who has experience as a manager. So he's helped increase our cadence by introducing a sprint process for our engineering team as it grew, helping with hiring and people management, all sorts of other things that Eric and I had less experience with. So that's helped us keep up our engineering velocity over the last year. And then I would say that also this approach has been great for solving some problems and it's good for getting early traction, but other problems just take longer to solve. So I do think that like we have Uh, refined our iterative approach to product development, and in some ways, we've started to move slowly in places where it makes sense to move slowly, like making sure we're investing in quality, performance, scale, and a deeper competitive vote without losing t…

AI assessment note: “he's helped increase our cadence by introducing a sprint process for our engineering team”

Q of your business model, so to speak, because when I chatted to Nikhil in particular, he mentioned this and the striking element, which is why did you take the approach of bootstrapping and monetizing from day one, which actually is very contrarian today compared to many people who immediately go out and raise with the pre-seed round. Why did you choose this route? And what were the benefits for you?

A Yeah, absolutely. I could speak about this for days. You know, we wanted validation before we raised money in the beginning. So for example, Eric and I worked on a different idea first for like two and a half months before we started working on Kapueng, and we really liked the idea. I think it still is a great idea and could exist one day, but we just couldn't get traction for it in the early days, and we realized that quickly and could sunset it rather than needing to sort of, you know, we didn't have like six figures in the bank that we needed to To figure out how to spend or investors that had put trust in us around that idea who, who didn't want us to kill it. So I think that there's a lot of incentive for the VCs to put money into a lot of different ideas with the hope that a one or two of them truly become businesses. But for the founder, you don't want to spend your time working on a bad business idea. And so you really want to make sure that you have a thing that has potential before you go out and raise. And my advice to founders around that is that you do not really know if your idea has potential until you start trying to get some traction. Until you have some real business validation. So for us, I would say, was it the right decision for us to bootstrap versus, versus raising at the beginning? I will caveat all of that by saying, you know, it definitely depends. We'…

AI assessment note: “we wanted validation before we raised money in the beginning.”

Q getting to that point of validation in terms of the product itself and the traction that you see. You did decide, obviously, to raise in the end from our friends Mamoun and then Nikhil, obviously, and Shasta, and then obviously with the Series A. So I do want to ask, what was that inflection moment for you, which changed your mindset as to now's the right time to raise venture?

A Yeah. So there's two elements of this. So the first is, you know, to be totally honest with you, like we thought a lot about it in the early days. And when we saw that we had the opportunity to work on building, you know, a big business rather than just a smaller, like lifestyle business, you know, we wanted to move on it because we want to build something that has a huge amount of impact in the world. So the first time that we thought about raising money was when we basically had someone write us a term sheet and tell us like we should and that we could. The second thing I would say here is that we got lucky, and that happened when it did, because it's a highly competitive space, and I think now, in retrospect, I see that we have advantages in certain ways because of our timing, and we knew we needed to move quickly so that we didn't lose out on those advantages, and I think that capital helps you just move faster and capture the market in the speedier way, and for this market in particular, I think there's the competitive dynamics require that.

AI assessment note: “when we basically had someone write us a term sheet and tell us”

Q hear about the consumer brand preference and outlook that we need to adopt in this world today. I do want to ask another one, and it's another statement that you said that intrigued me, and it's every company is becoming a media company. What did you mean by this transition to media being that so centric piece, and maybe kind of how does that correlate to brand marketing moving forward?

A Yeah, there's a few pieces of this. So first of all, I think it relates to what I was just saying about controlling your own audience or having your own audience that you can distribute to. If you can develop your own audience and Carve out your own following. Then you have people that could be buyers who you're distributing content to and building a relationship with over time. So I think in that way, every company is sort of in buyers and wants to develop that and have some function around that. But at a higher level, I think people are great storytellers. It's something that we do a lot better than computers do. So I think that over the next It's sort of storytelling and media, and so I think there's a lot of sort of modern media entrepreneurs that we, that you can look at, like Glossier, in some ways, like Dollar Shave Club, HIMS, Kylie Cosmetics, Gary Vee. This podcast, being an entrepreneur and a storyteller has enormous business value, and I think more and more companies recognize that that's the case in every domain and every vertical, so there's many, many more people exploring how they can share stories digitally on the internet, which is part of the basis, of course, the hypothesis for a

AI assessment note: “being an entrepreneur and a storyteller has enormous business value”

Q hear about the consumer brand preference and outlook that we need to adopt in this world today. I do want to ask another one, and it's another statement that you said that intrigued me, and it's every company is becoming a media company. What did you mean by this transition to media being that so centric piece, and maybe kind of how does that correlate to brand marketing moving forward?

A Yeah, there's a few pieces of this. So first of all, I think it relates to what I was just saying about controlling your own audience or having your own audience that you can distribute to. If you can develop your own audience and Carve out your own following. Then you have people that could be buyers who you're distributing content to and building a relationship with over time. So I think in that way, every company is sort of in buyers and wants to develop that and have some function around that. But at a higher level, I think people are great storytellers. It's something that we do a lot better than computers do. So I think that over the next It's sort of storytelling and media, and so I think there's a lot of sort of modern media entrepreneurs that we, that you can look at, like Glossier, in some ways, like Dollar Shave Club, HIMS, Kylie Cosmetics, Gary Vee. This podcast, being an entrepreneur and a storyteller has enormous business value, and I think more and more companies recognize that that's the case in every domain and every vertical, so there's many, many more people exploring how they can share stories digitally on the internet, which is part of the basis, of course, the hypothesis for a

AI assessment note: “controlling your own audience or having your own audience that you can distribute to”

Q to be an interesting one in terms of the success And failures. I do have to ask, and this is off schedule, but I'm too intrigued. How do you think about channel mortality today? And when you're riding the wave high on one, that transitionary moment of when you have to jump to the subsequent one and always have the next in your mind, how do you think about that?

A Yeah, so I think about it as you sort of have two different pieces when you're thinking about marketing strategy. The first is you have to be just a radical brainstormer coming up with a lot of ideas, being really plugged into what things are happening in the world and on the internet. One of our like fundamental values at Quang actually is get people talking. So we even just as a team cultural tenant, we talk about what things in the world are trending, what fads are happening, and why. The second is the more analytical side, which is that you have to take those ideas and prioritize them in some way to try the right things. And we're building our discipline around this, but basically it comes from just keeping an eye on like, what is the revenue impact of every new channel or new idea? How might it over time affect Uh, revenue impact, and just setting up a way that we can sort of try the most impactful ideas first. And like I said, I mean, I think unlike product development, when you are exploring new marketing channels, a lot of them don't go well, and that has to be something you expect at the beginning.

AI assessment note: “you sort of have two different pieces when you're thinking about marketing strategy”

Q to be an interesting one in terms of the success And failures. I do have to ask, and this is off schedule, but I'm too intrigued. How do you think about channel mortality today? And when you're riding the wave high on one, that transitionary moment of when you have to jump to the subsequent one and always have the next in your mind, how do you think about that?

A Yeah, so I think about it as you sort of have two different pieces when you're thinking about marketing strategy. The first is you have to be just a radical brainstormer coming up with a lot of ideas, being really plugged into what things are happening in the world and on the internet. One of our like fundamental values at Quang actually is get people talking. So we even just as a team cultural tenant, we talk about what things in the world are trending, what fads are happening, and why. The second is the more analytical side, which is that you have to take those ideas and prioritize them in some way to try the right things. And we're building our discipline around this, but basically it comes from just keeping an eye on like, what is the revenue impact of every new channel or new idea? How might it over time affect Uh, revenue impact, and just setting up a way that we can sort of try the most impactful ideas first. And like I said, I mean, I think unlike product development, when you are exploring new marketing channels, a lot of them don't go well, and that has to be something you expect at the beginning.

AI assessment note: “you sort of have two different pieces when you're thinking about marketing strategy”