Marcus Whitney, CTO and Cofounder of MoonToast, talks about creating a product centric company. Marcus explains the importance of aligning customer’s needs with what you are creating. He also explains the difference between social marketing and social commerce.
Links referenced in the show:
The music in the show, Have Mercy — Big Walter Horton, was provided by Mevio’s Music Alley.
Transcription
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MW: So hi. This is Marcus Whitney. I’m CTO and co-founder of Moontoast and happy to be on the Cloud Plumbing show to talk about product vision.
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Ryan 00:00:30 Very cool. I think that’s going to be an interesting topic for people, especially I think when you can speak to why, as a guy with a technical background, why product is really important to you, right? Because I think, oftentimes, you know, developers like solving puzzles and it isn’t necessarily the "why" puzzle as much as the "how" puzzle, right?
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Marcus 00:00:51 Yeah. I mean, look; today, product is going to win. There’s really no question about that. The question is how do you create, you know, a 21st century innovation-focused, product-centric company. There are a lot of different kind of schools of thought on that. I’ve learned to kind of have a lot of respect for the concept of product vision because, you know, ultimately, there’s this marriage between, you know, what the market needs and what the innovator brings. And, you know, a lot of it is taking clues from things that are already there in the infrastructure and in the ether and obvious holes and complaints from consumers or different market segments about, you know, “If only things enabled me to do this.” But it’s very rare that, you know, the market is going to tell you exactly what that product needs to be. And so that’s really where that vision piece comes in and I think it’s very much the thing that we celebrate the life of people like Steve Jobs for is the ability to kind of see that people wanted, you know, a much better user experience, much more kind of capability but packaged up in a way that just was so approachable and so intuitive. He had a vision for what that actually looked like and how it would work. So if you take, for instance, the iPad, right? Everybody was judging the iPad’s success. I mean, a bunch of my technology friends and I would talk about it and, you know, we constantly would kind of refer back to other tablets and how they entered the market, right, which was this whole stylus approach and the actual form factor of the user experience was very much like a traditional PC. So it really wasn’t that innovative except for the form factor of the hardware, but the user experience was not, you know, radically different. You know, so you think about the product vision that went into the iPad and what’s made it such a breakaway success and then has created all these follow-ons on the market. But that’s the kind of stuff that I believe really makes up product vision. You know, the ability to be creative, but also do it with a heavy dose of market validation and be able to put the flag in the ground that the whole company can kind of rally around and create a great product that’s going to win in the market. So I spend a lot of my time doing that and it’s a huge joy of my day-to-day.
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Ryan 00:03:12
Yeah. It’s been a theme in a couple of podcasts recently is sort of the difference between a project and a product, right? Or at least a successful product and just something neat that you’ve solved. And yeah, that’s a great example. I mean without kind of -- I think the news has been saturated with Steve Jobs, but he is an excellent case study for this in saying many of the things that Apple’s kind of known for doing extremely well, they weren’t the first to do any of those, but they were the first to kind of scope it in a way that the technology became a product that people actually wanted to pony up and spend time with.
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Marcus 00:03:46
Right. That’s exactly right. I mean, people always talk about there’s nothing new under the sun, you know. And I think to a large degree that’s true. I mean, I struggle to kind of think of an idea that has never been thought of before, right? But how you actually bring that to life in the form of a product is an entirely different thing. And it actually requires a pretty deep level of thinking, right? Because when you’re working on product vision, you have to be able to create the nomenclature that you’re going to use to communicate to your sales team, to your marketing team, to your product management team, to your engineers, to your executives, to your board, right? You know, and ultimately, to the market, to your customers, to the people who are actually going to interact with this product. And so you’re thinking about it in a very holistic way. And so it is high level, but it’s extremely concrete and it finds its way, you know, down into the, you know, the bowels of the code and into, you know, every line of copy and into, you know, the way that the logo mark is presented on the product. I mean, truly, the product vision is kind of the blood.
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Ryan 00:04:56
Yeah. I couldn’t agree more, especially as, you know, being the Creative Director over here that’s right in my wheelhouse. So let’s take a step back. Let’s actually dive into Moontoast a little bit more and then actually see how, you know, some of these big vision ideas are actually coming into play there. So social commerce platform. I think that social commerce is a thing that people talk about and it’s probably young enough that not everyone has really agreed on what we mean when we say that. There is social media, there is kind of social marketing which is I’m not really sure how those are separate. Now you’ve got social commerce, which is even -- I mean, you are leveraging things like Facebook except how is it different than maybe just adding “like” and “+1” buttons everywhere?
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Marcus 00:05:43
Yeah. So for us it’s very different. You know, we think about social commerce as the intersection between the ascension of social networking and the dominance of e-commerce, you know. And we really look at those two things as trending nothing but up and we are placing our product to be the leading product to enable commerce in and through social networks. And we often use the term “distributed.” You know, our product is the distributed store. We often talk about that, but what we really mean is commerce everywhere and commerce where your customer already is, right? So what we’ve seen over the last five years is this incredible shift where before, you know, it used to be all about, you know, a brand would have their Website and they’d do a bunch of work to try and optimize search and do e-mail marketing to try and communicate with their fans and with their customers to drive them to spend time with them on their Website, where they had to kind of create this entire experience. And frankly, it was like a big challenge. I mean, you’d need to have a lot of resources to kind of create the type of engaging Website that would enable conversations; you know, conversations that your brand could have with your market. And social networks have created this utility platform to totally change that. Where now, you know, through a Twitter account and through a Facebook brand page, it’s all turnkey, right? You know, people have an easy one-click method to opt-in to listen to you, you’ve got fantastic capability to push out all different types of messages to them and to engage in conversations with them. I mean, and truly, these are conversations. You may initiate them, but they’re conversations through the comments and then they go viral, even beyond kind of that initial conversation. They splinter into other conversations just as a real conversation would in the real world. You know, you and I will have this conversation, it will be recorded, pushed out, other people will listen to it, and then have subsequent conversations about it, right? So that real-world social dynamic has now been enabled through the utility of social networks, but commerce has not yet been, you know, in a broad, mainstream way adapted to be facilitated in that environment. And so that’s what we do, right? We focus on making commerce that is very much part of the conversation. It fits inside of the social media marketing mix and so, you know, you push out a video, you push out a couple of photos, you ask your fans some questions, and you push out an offer to them. And that offer is, you know, presented as exclusive to them, it’s a benefit to them as having been somebody who actually liked or followed them, and hopefully, it’s something they like. They’ve liked your brand and, you know, at the end of the day, you know, a brand is not a person; it’s a, you know, commercial entity, right? So commerce is a natural part of that relationship as well as every other piece of connection is. And so adding commerce into that conversation and making that a key part of the relationship kind of closes the loop on the promise of social networking for brands and answers that question about what is the ROI for social networks for brands. And so that’s what we do, you know. We enable you to easily deploy commerce opportunities (you know, offers) directly to your fans inside of social networks and really anywhere where the fan is celebrating the brand. That may be Facebook, it may be the Facebook news feed, it may be Twitter, it may be, you know, a blog where, you know, people are going to learn information about your brand, right? Why aren’t commerce opportunities available right there? They’re already spending a ton of time engaging in and around your brand in that particular blog or that particular content site. Why doesn’t your brand have, you know, a commerce opportunity there as well? So it’s making this commerce contextually relevant and it’s creating a better experience for the consumer because, you know, consumers have become very numb to ads because it takes them away from the experience they wanted to have, you know. They’re there, they’re reading something or they’re having a conversation or they’re watching some video. You know, the best thing in the world would be for them to get a timely offer that is very relevant and for them to be able to transact quickly and get right back to doing what they were already doing, right? And that’s what we enable. So for us, social commerce is truly, you know, a whole new era and it’s happening right now. There are, you know, lots of leading brands that we work with that are taking advantage of it in the retail space and the music space, in the publishing space, celebrities are using it right now and, you know, it’s our belief that meeting customers where they are and enabling them to transact whenever they want to is definitely the next era of commerce.
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Ryan 00:10:43
Yeah. So, I mean, that definitely makes sense to me. I think all kinds of -- I feel like oftentimes I solve problems through buying things and then I want to brag about that to people. Like, maybe I find a piece of software that does exactly what I need. Like, actually just earlier today I was posting about that on Twitter. You know, I found a piece of software that was like, “Finally, I don’t have to keep worrying about this anymore.” And it was more of a -- I was glad that I no longer had this problem and also if anyone else had a similar problem that they need to look no more; here’s this. It wasn’t anything about actually trying to sell this product, it wasn’t really an ad, but why not? Now that happens without using Moontoast. How does Moontoast come into it and how does it change that interaction between me just kind of linking to a product or blogging about using a tool and linking to the product. Like, specifically, what are the extra tools that you offer and who uses that? Is that the happy consumer uses that? Is that the store trying to upconversion? Is it both, I assume, if it’s social, right?
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Marcus 00:11:45
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, you know, the main difference is that there’s a turnkey aspect to Moontoast that enables you to create a store as fast as you would create an e-mail marketing campaign. Literally ten minutes your store is live and out in the wild, so that’s a big difference. The fact that you are pushing a piece of content out through social network (social channels) and that content is transactional in nature (it’s secure and transactional). So literally, someone can open it up and, you know, either using PayPal or their credit card buy something from you right then and there. There’s no clicking off to your Website, you know, where you now have to kind of convert them at a whole different level, right? They see it, they’re engaged; give them the opportunity to buy right now, right? And then it is enabled by the consumer. It can become a tool that the consumer uses in their conversation. They can literally share the entire shopping experience with all of their friends, right, leveraging social networks; leveraging things they already know how to do. If they know how to share a photo, if they know how to share a YouTube video, they know how to share a Moontoast store already. And then we enable you to sell things like digital goods, physical goods, combinations of those, do those with a group buy or a flash sale where, you know, there’s a certain level of urgency that’s presented there. We enable you to have multimedia experiences so you can enable video, so there’s a little commercial that happens before the offer appears, people can play music. So it’s a very engaging and just naturally social commerce tool. But at the end of the day, it does actually transact and in a very enterprise-level way. You know, we’re PCI Level 1 compliant. All of our partners have a merchant ID that’s registered with our system so if a consumer buys from them through Facebook, when they look at their bank account it’ll say that brand’s name, you know, on the line item. So it’s, you know, it’s a true enterprise-level e-commerce platform designed specifically for the way that social works.
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Ryan 00:13:56
That’s interesting that the actual message is more directly the transaction. I think, you know, tracking things like conversion from sources, in the past, it seems almost rather separate; at least the way that I’ve done it, right? It’s this is the campaign and then it dumps into here and then there’s some sort of numbers game that you assume; like X percent’s actually going to follow through with the transaction.
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MW: Right.
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Ryan 00:14:22
But you’ve actually, I mean, it seems like you’ve just taken lots of layers out of that funneling process, right? So with that, do you have any interesting metrics to show? Like, you know, once we’ve got rid of, you know, the checkout process is the hardest and we’ve, you know, replaced that here or using us instead of maybe other commerce solutions tends to be this much more effective?
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Marcus 00:14:49
We actually have enjoyed some really great conversion rates. We actually had a press release and case study go live today with one of our partner brands (Tretorn) where they’ve increased their conversion using Moontoast and social from just north of 3% to north of 9%, which is extremely, extremely high for e-commerce. And, you know, it’s through better positioning (better storytelling) inside of social, taking advantage of all of our best practices, and it also really proves that people will buy from a brand that they trust and love inside of social networks, you know, without question.
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Ryan 00:15:30
That’s interesting. Yeah, I guess the thing is there’s almost, like, these brands that you trust have this persona inside the social network world. And it isn’t necessarily that they have to give up a lot of brand clout because it’s Target under Facebook, right? Like, the consumers are kind of just seeing that as wherever it is, this is Target and I’m not really as maybe as skeptical as I once was that anybody could pose as, you know, someone else under certain circumstances, right?
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MW: Well, one of the things that I think has been really, really powerful about Facebook in particular is that Facebook is a true identity platform, right?
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RP: Right. Yeah.
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MW: You know, there is absolutely this undeniable level of trust in terms of how much people are willing to kind of give themselves to Facebook.
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RP: Right.
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Marcus 00:16:14
Because they know when they see someone’s name there, like, that’s their name; that’s who they are. And the brands, you know, are very much the same thing. People know that Facebook’s not going to allow, you know, anyone to kind of fake a brand. They’ll shut that down. And so people believe that they have the most authentic online relationship they possibly can have with a brand through Facebook, right? And I think that that’s a big deal; that’s a really big deal. It enables social commerce, frankly, in a significant way because you’ve got to have trust and security are paramount in commerce online, you know, no matter what, right? So when you can combine something like Facebook with a very trustworthy brand with a trusted payment model like PayPal, you know, you start to overcome a lot of these things that people would think would be a challenge.
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Ryan 00:17:20
It seems like the combination of these elements have to pose some degree of threat to AdSense that maybe Google didn’t see before. Like, this idea that -- like, canonical brand not being kind of what it was, right?
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Marcus 00:17:39
You know, what I would say is it’s clear that Google understands that social is a disruptive force to all kind of advertising online by, you know, how much effort and energy they’re putting behind Google+. They just this week announced that they’ve pushed brand pages live and, you know, I think that it’s pretty clear that they take social very, very seriously. So, you know, all things get disrupted. AdSense was an extremely disruptive thing. And so the disruptor is very aware of kind of the opportunity for someone else to come in and disrupt them. And I think, you know, Google, it’s definitely not lost on them that Facebook poses, you know, a significant threat to some of their more established lines of business.
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Ryan 00:18:30
Yeah. I think it just goes to show we may not have even imagined what the right solution to a lot of these problems are, right? Because just the sheer nature of, like, commerce is different when you change the context. Like, one thing -- the volatility of a message, right? Like, that’s very different than the way that ad campaigns work, right? Like, the idea of going through, designing postcards, actually putting them in the mail, making sure they get there, like, a week before. All of that goes away, right (most of it)?
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Marcus 00:19:04
Totally. Totally. I mean, look; it’s just a different world now, you know? I mean, think about how much content we consume every day now, right? The rate at which we consume that content. It’s short bursts, right? So, I mean, to me, this kind of gets back to the product vision thing, right? E-commerce in terms of, like, you know, e-commerce platforms; I can’t imagine why you would want to create yet another e-commerce store-front platform. Like, there’s just very little, kind of, innovation you can do around that basic business. But social commerce is a space that is just so right for innovation, right? Because the model is turned on its head. Everything is different, right? In social commerce, SEO doesn’t really matter at all, right? That’s completely different from the way that e-commerce, you know, has worked for the last ten years; completely different. SEO’s been paramount in e-commerce. In social commerce, it doesn’t matter at all, right? In e-commerce, e-mail has been, you know, critical. In social commerce, it’s marginal, right? Understanding that commerce needs to be driven in campaigns. The user experience is fundamentally different. In the way that e-commerce has worked, it’s been all about the catalog. Social commerce is all about simplicity; presenting simple offers that can actually break through the clutter of content that people are getting hit with every single day and actually make an impact and engage them and drive them to transact with it. And then do it again and again and again, right? If what you’re presenting is too complex or them to understand, forget about it. Like, that’s a bigger threat to your conversion rate than, you know, kind of, how well your cart functions, right? It’s literally just so different and I think that that’s where, kind of, product vision is so critical for us because we have to constantly remind ourselves that what equals success in our world is so very different that we can’t really compare ourselves other than we need to be able to compare ourselves to the market to show them that this is a worthwhile investment. So, you know, that’s why I say we focus on things like conversion rates, you know. Achieving conversion rates of 9.5% inside of Facebook is very meaningful. A: it means people are actually converting inside of Facebook. B: it means they’re converting at a rate that is, you know, superior to the average conversion rates in the e-commerce world. That’s important; that’s an important message.
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Ryan 00:21:37
Yeah. It’s got to be tough because I think that despite the fact that I completely believe that there’s a lot of value in, you know, like, the social media/social marketing realm, it’s also in the same way that SEO went where you hear a lot of the negative stories and I think a lot of people would see it as sort of a snake oil type situation, right? Like, they were having a hard time trusting and then a lot of the returns were kind of, they’re measured in very fuzzy ways, right? Like, “Well, you’ve got this and you really can’t see how it maps to anything, but just trust me this is good because, well, just trust me,” right?
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MW: Right.
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Ryan 00:22:15
But what’s awesome about your solution is, again, you’re bringing it all the way in, you’re doing metrics, and it’s not necessarily something that couldn’t be done without this kind of platform. But the fact that it’s core to yours I think is really interesting. Where it’s, you know, you’ve got your numbers right there, you show that this is beneficial to people, and, I mean, that just seems like an excellent way to sell it as well, right? To actually be able to stand behind your numbers and say, “This is the value that we bring.”
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Marcus 00:22:45
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think to your point we’re dealing with, you know, some pretty significant challenges, you know, in terms of communicating the value of what we do. It’s an early market, right?
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RP: Right.
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Marcus 00:22:57
So, you know, one of the biggest challenges is actually getting the market off the ground. And, you know, we’re doing a lot of work in that respect. You know, having said that, our numbers are pretty compelling. And, you know, the other reality is that, look: more and more retailers every day are looking at Facebook and they’re saying, “I know commerce is going to go here, right? I just don’t know how I’m going to use it, right? I just don’t know how I’m going to be successful with it.” So they know where they are, they know where they want to be. The big question is, “How do I get there?” And that’s what Moontoast’s job is to basically say, “Yes, you’re here. You know you want to get there; here’s how, right? Our products, plus our best practices, plus the power of your brand equals social commerce success.”
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Ryan 00:23:47
It’s interesting to compare your offering to sort of the past vision of the future where it seemed like interactive TV was sort of the future of commerce. And the way that you bring the storefront into someone’s home and you could look on there and you could see what a certain star is wearing in a certain movie and then you can interact with it and buy it, right? And that seemed plausible and it just never got realized. And then what you’ve done is kind of skipped that and you’ve gone to where we’re really at now; I spend far more time looking at a computer screen than I do a television screen and I don’t think I’m that unique in that. And I’m probably more likely to purchase things based off of people that I know’s recommendations than some sort of star-powered recommendation, right? So in a way, this is a very similar kind of thing except the fact that since it’s more around conversations than it is about a broadcast media, it actually is, you know, realized in a way that means something more to me personally.
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Marcus 00:24:49
Yeah. I mean, well, that’s the hope. The hope is that what we do really strikes a nerve with people, right? And people are like, “Yeah. Like, this is actually tangible, right? I can wrap my head around this. I can see how, if not me, maybe my clients would use something like this.” And, you know, we’re seeing increased interest and more and more, you know, people coming to us with partnership opportunities and more and more brands, you know. And to them, they’re saying, “It’s really a combination of your product and the knowledge that you’ve gained over the last year doing this.” You know, frankly, that is very, very valuable. And so we’re very, very focused on kind of keeping those in lockstep. I mean, to us, our knowledge -- we work a lot on thought leadership and it’s one of our products, frankly. You know, we’ve got two e-books that we’ve put out now in infographic and they’ve been very, very well-received. And we spend a lot of time and energy on that stuff because it’s necessary. If we don’t write the rules of social commerce, then there’s a big danger that someone will write the wrong rules and blow the whole industry up, right? So there’s a necessity for us and, you know, and for any other, you know, product team out there who thinks they’ve got it right and can actually prove it with real numbers to get out there and share the good word because, you know, if we can develop an industry here then it’s going to be successful for everybody. There’ll be a couple of different players who will benefit from it but, you know, ultimately, the brands and the consumers will ultimately win.
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MW: Absolutely.
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RP: Awesome. Well, thanks a lot.
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MW: It’s been fun. Thank you.