Note:
This transcript was auto-generated from “audio” it will have some typos and other mistakes 🙂
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
direct mail, business, software, people, building, email, customer, crm, mail, marketing, hubspot, friction, thought, data, spam, dennis, channel, open, sending, campaigns
SPEAKERS
Announcer, Dennis Kelly, Amr The Internet Guy
announcer
Online with Amr the internet guy stream it today on your favorite podcast platforms. This podcast focuses on entrepreneurs and business owners helping them become more successful and conducting their business on the web without being stuck with technology, getting a headache, pulling their hairs out or buying expensive software.
Amr The Internet Guy
Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new episode of online. Before we start, I’d like to wish you all happy new year. And I hope that you’ve had a great time over the holiday period. And I wish you all the best and all the success that you deserve in 2022. This is episode number 29. And is the first one of this year, I was contemplating whether I want to call, you know the 2022 episodes, series two, and then have it as one, the first one in series two, but I quickly realized that it will confuse everyone. And I would just keep the numbers in sequence. It makes everything easier. For everyone who’s listening to us. I also wanted to thank you for listening. And for listening to my podcast and for sending your great emails and other comments that you do please keep them coming. And I also would like to thank everyone who had suggested guests for me to interview. And my apologies for sometimes for not responding. Earlier, a just has been a crazy year to 2021 has been a crazy year. And I’m hoping to get more of a work life balance in 2020. So let’s talk about today’s episode, my guest today is a software entrepreneur. He’s the founder and CEO of a software company that is aiming to reduce the friction of performance marketing. And if you feel that this term is a bit strange and kind of new to you, it was to me too, but listen, you will enjoy this one very much. And you will learn a lot. We are also discussing why direct mail is still a very powerful business tool, and a very powerful tool and direct mail. What I mean is actually not email, mail as imposed as like snail mail, things that you can touch things that you get in your mailbox. And yes, we do get some spam there too. But also, it is a marketing tool that still works. So my guest today, Dennis will tell us how he was able to actually couple the old with the new and inject new digital life into a century old industry. So without further ado, let’s meet Dennis Dennis, how’s it going?
Dennis Kelly
Good. Amir, how are you today?
Amr The Internet Guy
Oh, good. Thank you. So you’re at the other end of the continent. So would you please tell our audience like where you are and what you do?
Dennis Kelly
Yeah, sure thing. So I’m the CEO of a software startup called postalytics. And I’m located in Rockland, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston.
Amr The Internet Guy
Tried to say Massachusetts 10 times, guys, like I don’t know, you said it really well. Like I can’t. It’s every time I do it, I make a mistake.
Dennis Kelly
Well, I try to say it without the local accent. Very strong. So those who know the Boston accent No, they’ll recognize it immediately.
Amr The Internet Guy
Massa mass, Oh, God, Massa ssut. I’ll train after the podcast. So you’ve been in software? It looks like for what the past 30 years? Yeah, roughly. Yeah, building software’s for 30 years. I mean, I can’t remember what software’s we were building 30 years ago? I mean,
Dennis Kelly
believe it or not, the software didn’t exist before the I
Amr The Internet Guy
know. I don’t know. I mean, I My first experience was software, I think was when I was in university, and or maybe school a little bit before University, and that was in the 80s. But it was so boring. And well, until the Internet became mainstream things were boring.
Dennis Kelly
Well, you know, I think the thing is that computing has become so inexpensive and accessible for everybody that, you know, and each each time there’s a major innovation in the hardware or the networking, you know, the cost of accessing software drops significantly. And, you know, I was very fortunate to have been around for the very beginning of the PC revolution. When when computing systems are moving out of big, they’re ironically called mini computers that were larger than my desk.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah, they pulled me. Yeah. Because the other guy took a whole room.
Dennis Kelly
That’s right. That’s right. And so, so in the beginning of my career, I was my first company, we were we transitioned into the PC environment. And that really helped that company explode because the cost of providing access to people in a business dropped dramatically.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah. So like, I, I’ve read a little bit about what you do. But you know, I don’t want to burn it or spoil it for people. But you’ve, it says that you’ve exited software companies four times. So I wanted to ask, like, I’ve had an interview with a gentleman who is not in tech. But he’s actually he’s a consultant that helps people exit. And we were joking, because we were saying that once you build, like, once you build the new business, you should plan your exit that early on. And, of course, I mean, that was a joke. But he says, nowadays is becoming this way, specifically with, you know, tech companies attracting venture capital, and what they want to do is just grow it to a certain extent and sell it. So from the beginning, the selling part is in, like, in the plan, and they’re working on it. And I thought that in, what used to happen was that you build grow you’re enjoying, but you just get an opportunity that you weren’t thinking about. And so I’m interested to know, what happened.
Dennis Kelly
Let’s Yeah. Well, you know, I think that it at least for my first startup that I was involved in, you know, it was certainly not built with a specific exit in mind. And, you know, I think it almost happened in a way that you that you just relate that it, you know, we were heads down, building a business and an opportunity came along, we’re deep pocketed larger player in healthcare software came in, you know, made an acquisition offer that they wanted to, sort of strategically change the direction their business and so. So, anyway, that one, the first one was, I was very young, and really had no idea what I was doing. But, but we had a, we had a nice outcome. And but you know, since then, I think that, for me, the right thing to do is think about a business that has several potential exits. And not not just one, right. But, you know, after you’ve done that, and you’ve chosen what you’re going to do, and you’ve chosen a business that could go in a lot of different directions, then I don’t think that it makes sense to overly focus on exit, I think that if you’re, if you’re in a space, that will have some competition for your business, then you really should focus on building a great business. And that will vastly outwork any planning that you can do around an exit. And so the stronger that your business is, the more people want to buy your stock. And sometimes you sell a little bit of stock. Sometimes you sell all your stock, depending upon what’s going on with a lot of different things. And so, you know, it’s it’s not that dissimilar to publicly traded companies, you know, great businesses attract lots of people that buy the stock and the price goes up. It’s the same with a private transaction. So, you know, if you focus on building a business with great customers who are happy, great employees that love what they do, and are excited to do their work with strong financials, you know, in a strong position where you don’t really need to do anything. That’s the position you want to be in. You want to be in a position where you don’t have to exit and so so you have to make the acquirer work for it.
Amr The Internet Guy
That’s that’s a good plan. Was it bootstrapped?
Dennis Kelly
So, So Mike, my current business postalytics Is bootstrapped? It? It is I’ve had other businesses that have been Angel funded, venture funded, as well as bootstrapped. And, you know, I think that as I’ve gone along, I’ve been able to move away from, from bringing in early stage investors, who you end up selling a lot of your stock to add value
Amr The Internet Guy
to your Yeah, yeah. So,
Dennis Kelly
you know, early on, that’s what we would do. And now, you know, it’s less that way, you know, the, the folks that I’ve got involved with, or we have some resources, we’re able to do this kind of on our own. And, you know, the longer you can go without bringing investors, you know, I think, the better off you are, I think that there is a point where you, in order to take advantage of the full opportunity, when everything is clear, and you’ve got your sales are growing faster than you can deal with. And, you know, you need bodies to deal with customer service and finance and, you know, things are just piling up and you can’t keep up with it. Sometimes it makes sense to bring investors at that point. But if you can engineer things to go very long time without external investors, you’re going to hang on to much more of the value that you create,
Amr The Internet Guy
in the end, you won’t be pushed to do things that may or may not make sense to you at the time.
Dennis Kelly
Yes, yes, it’s true. It’s true. And, you know, I’ve learned painful lessons along the way that, you know, you, you need to do what’s right, right for the business, not for the investors.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah, I mean, this is funny, because sometimes, when people like acquire a company or majority stake in a company, sometimes they want to make a change, just for the sake to be seen to be doing something different, rather than Is this necessary, like, is it going to give us a better return? Or is that going to make the customer happier? Or the employees happier? Like, what? There’s no point doing a change that has no goal?
Dennis Kelly
Right, right. You know, sometimes things can look obvious from the outside. But then after you spend some time with the business, then perspectives can change. And so yeah, no, I think it I think it always makes sense to in any type of acquisition in order to have success, to, you know, keep the team together, keep them focused on their short term goals for six months to the first year, and then start to layer in changes over time.
Amr The Internet Guy
That’s great advice, Dennis. I’m interested also, okay, I don’t want to, you know, dive into postalytics and make this seem like it’s an ad for postalytics. But I’m interested also, you know, you’ve been building software for sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong. You’ve been building software for like, 30 years. And I was in the software industry for some time, not 30 years, but I’ve been through reason tech, but it’s not necessarily in software. And usually people go build a solution, because something is missing. So something isn’t working or isn’t working, right, that there’s a problem that needs to be solved. And tech minds would say, you know, what, just go and build a solution for that. So I’m interested to know, what was the issue that triggered? Okay, let’s go let’s I just want to talk about the current solution, because that’s current, right. Yeah. So what happened? What did you see? And and what did you see that needed fixing?
Dennis Kelly
Well, it’s, it’s a very interesting story. And it really is an evolution. It was not sort of a brainstorm that we had on the blue or, you know, do too early market research. So So postalytics reduces friction in the creation and the integration and tracking of direct mail marketing campaigns. And so you know, direct mail is a form of, of marketing that peaked in terms of overall volume and size at around 2008. And, and has been in sort of slow decline ever since. But it still represents about a $40 billion industry in the United States alone. So big business, and it is it is suffered from a lack of technology and investment.
Amr The Internet Guy
Are we We talking about sorry, direct mail as in physical to your doorstep, right?
Dennis Kelly
Not he got it. All right. So
Amr The Internet Guy
we’re not talking email campaigns, guys. We’re just talking about. I mean, I because I’m, you know, I don’t want to say the word I’m old, but I’m all I’m sure. I’m from the era where we used to get phone books dropped at our doorsteps. So that’s yes, yeah. And catalogs and like, we didn’t have online shopping, we had phone shopping instead. So they’ll send the catalog to your house. And then if you’re interested to buy it call a number. That’s right. That’s right. That’s the industry we’re talking about.
Dennis Kelly
Yeah, postal mail, used for advertising and selling and, you know, is actually the first form of performance marketing, very data driven, analytical in its approach. And so, so, the company started several years ago, when my partner who’s a technologist, he and I reconnected, we’ve done a couple businesses together, kind of moved to some different areas, ended up moving near each other. And he showed me some software he was building as sort of a side gig. And, you know, he had a business, I just sold a business, and was looking for the next thing. And, you know, I enjoy working this guy, really smart, we have a good long term friendship and working relationships. So you know, his level of trust there. And, and, and so, he showed me the software, it was a marketing technology, it helped people in the direct mail business measure the way that people go online to respond when they get a piece of marketing mail. And, and, you know, he said, Hey, you know, we could, we could do some interesting things with this, put some email marketing with it, some text messaging marketing with it, we could sell it to people that are doing direct mail campaigns, and give them a digital element to this kind of older technology and an older way of doing marketing. And there’s a lot going on, you know, heavy investment in marketing technology, not a lot of investment in this space from venture capitalists or other investors. So I thought, you know, maybe there’s an opportunity here. So we jumped in, built out this first product, took it to market, and worked very, very hard to sell the software package to what I would today call the legacy direct mail industry, right? The folks that have been doing direct mail for a very long time. And it was hard, you know, sales were not easy. And, and, you know, we ended up to be successful, we built a services business. So we’d sell a package. And then we go in, and we do all the work for the client. And, you know, after a couple of years, we looked at each other and said, This isn’t what we wanted to build this, this is this is going, you know, sideways, it’s not really taking full advantage of what we could be doing. And and so, at the same time, we had people coming to us, and they said, hey, you know, I just invested a ton of money in Salesforce to centralize all of my CRM and, and marketing. And I’d love to do direct mail. You guys are kind of living between digital and direct mail, can you help us out. And we heard that a few times, Salesforce, HubSpot different CRMs. And, and then we thought, you know, what, a lot of what we built, we could do something very different with. And so we decided to stop. And we cut the cord on that old product. We took a year and rebuilt the software to come out as postalytics. And postalytics solves three fundamental problems with traditional direct mail. We call this direct mail automation. So automating direct mail solves a speed and time commitment problem. So a traditional direct mail campaign takes four to six weeks,
Amr The Internet Guy
with lots of people for you to know who is doing what
Dennis Kelly
to pull it together, get it out the door. And then typically 3060 90 days later, you’re pulling together data about what happened. And And if you compare that to email marketing, you know, it’s that’s insane, right, like email marketing, you press send, everything’s done for you. And you see results as they are. Yeah, you
Amr The Internet Guy
get your Yeah. Your open your clicks, whatever. Yeah.
Dennis Kelly
All that. So so. So postalytics has took the email marketing software that we built for our own product. Instead of sending out emails, we send out postcards and letters to a network of printers around the country. And so from a marketers perspective, they can drag and drop and click, press send, and it’s gone instantly. And they don’t have to worry about lining up contracts with printers negotiating, figuring out the postage
Amr The Internet Guy
rates, how you’ve done that already. All that’s done, and then the printers would print and post or somebody there will take it and post it.
Dennis Kelly
Exactly. And so So speed is the number one thing that we solve. Number two, is integration I’ve already mentioned. Yeah, all these businesses are building centralized marketing technology, in order to run everything from a single place with one set of customer data. And in direct mail has always been done by big spreadsheets.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah, it’s outside, the whole thing is like, you will not be able, generally you will not be able to bring it into CRM. Exactly, exactly.
Dennis Kelly
So so our cloud based software connects directly into those CRMs to pull data out and trigger individual pieces of mail to go pull this out, send a list. And it’s all done, you know, very quickly with a few clicks, as opposed to this whole other process of aggregating data in spreadsheets and sending it emailing it around in a very insecure way to all different people. Right. So So integration, number two, number three, is analytics and reporting. And so what we built into postalytics is an ability to track exactly where your mail is during the sending process. And we’ve integrated with the US Postal Service, who has an internal barcoding system to track where every single piece of mail is. And so similar to what you get from an email marketing tool, where it tells you, you know, the mail that’s been delivered, the mail that’s bounced, we give, we get the same data from the Postal Service. And we provide that data in a dashboard. We synchronize it back to the CRM. So you can trigger other things in an automated way when mail is delivered, or mail is Returned to sender. And, and then we have the tools that we built for our first product that measure the response to direct mail, we plug that in. So you get the whole thing, you get delivery and response data, all in a dashboard all synchronized back to your CRM. And so the three things we solve speed, integration, issue analytics, analytics.
Amr The Internet Guy
The interesting part is many people don’t think that the old style sending something by post works, but it actually does, like I, I was on a, I worked with a company here who sent around Christmas time just before Christmas time, a box of chocolates, all the clients. I don’t know, you know how much it cost. But the response we got like people would send thank you emails, people, when you it was a recruitment company. So you call them because you’re arranging an interview for one of your candidates. And the first two minutes of the call is like how good the chocolate was.
Dennis Kelly
That’s great. That’s awesome. In you know, what, I think there are a couple of things that that folks should consider when they think about this. So first, the data shows that in the last 10 years, the response rate to direct mail has doubled. And so, you know, the, the percentage of people that respond, on average, has gone from, like 2% to 4% for a cold list that is launched. And for for a house list or existing customer. Yeah,
Amr The Internet Guy
is something that you can get readily available from your city or you know, like it’s not, or there’s no spam low, they’re like, no, they don’t like it, they just chuck it in the bin. Like,
Dennis Kelly
it’s all public data, right? Every address is public. So it’s not like you’re exactly some unknown information. And and so so the response rates have doubled. And if you think about it, the amount of mail that everybody receives has declined. Right says yes,
Amr The Internet Guy
yeah. So now you kind of like it when you receive something like it’s
Dennis Kelly
different. It but you still have to get your mail and you have to handle you have to look at every single piece of mail out whether you whether you throw it away instantly or not, you hold it in your hands, you look at it, you make a decision. And it’s a different experience, psychologically, then the mass deleting out of your email box, right? So so the amount of physical mail that you receive is gone down, the number of emails you’re receiving and digital messages you’re seeing all day has been steeply increasing. So the impact of every piece of mail that you get is now greater. And so so it just makes sense that response rates would go up.
Amr The Internet Guy
What would be like? Some of the ideas that we can tell people who are not using direct mail, and maybe they will start thinking about it, once they listen to this episode. How do they how do I stand out? What do I do? Because I mean, I, I have some ideas in my head, like, you know, use a colorful card or whatever. But you’ve been in this the longer so?
Dennis Kelly
Sure, sure. Well, the number one use case of our customers is, is augmenting their existing email marketing efforts. And, and so customers that have invested a lot in email marketing, and marketing automation, are able to use direct mail to focus on those people who do not open their emails.
Amr The Internet Guy
Okay.
Dennis Kelly
And so your marketing automation software will automatically segment them. And you can plug postalytics In, automatically send them postcards and letters of different sizes, with different offers that are working together with your other channels, and resulting having consistency in the messaging consistency in the branding and the offers, from digital the email to physical.
Amr The Internet Guy
So you want to be top of mind anyway, if somebody is too busy to open their emails, you get to them via another channel.
Dennis Kelly
Exactly, exactly. And you and marketing automation lets it all happen. And so once that connection is created with postalytics, the campaigns are set up, they just run in the background as as emails don’t get opened, then the workflow kicks in sends mail off the postalytics that drives people back online, they respond, and then they can engage again through a less expensive channel.
Amr The Internet Guy
Is does it have like a lower cost of acquisition?
Dennis Kelly
Well, it really depends on from, from a lead generation standpoint, it is become very, very hard to acquire new customers via email. Right, for all the reasons we know it private,
Amr The Internet Guy
you’re competing with the world. Yeah.
Dennis Kelly
Yeah. So So I think, you know, there are certain industries that are able to be very, very effective with direct mail. Real estate is obviously one of them, right? And so anybody in residential or commercial real estate or a real estate investments, you know, they’re using a ton of direct mail. Financial Services, right. People are afraid to respond to the emails they get about investments
Amr The Internet Guy
about Yeah, I think about money. You don’t want to click anything. Yeah.
Dennis Kelly
I mean, how many? How many times? Have you seen these spoofing and phishing schemes that, you know, it’s every single day you get something? So it’s, you know, there’s certain direct mail is a very trusted channel. So because you’re holding this thing, and it can’t do anything.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah, it will not spy on you. Yeah.
Dennis Kelly
That’s right. That’s right. So so, you know, for, for certain industries, very effective for it. And now with automation, you can use direct mail to, like we said, augment your digital, augment your email. So you know, now you can send a single letter or a single postcard out at a time, and we take care of the rest, you don’t have to have a list of 5000 or 10,000. So, think about this. You sign up a new customer, you have a new onboarding workflow, right, you get so you sign up for this new service, you get an email from the client success representative, and and then trigger a letter from the CEO a physical letter from the CEO, thank goes
Amr The Internet Guy
hmm, yeah, that goes to the customer. Yeah, right.
Dennis Kelly
Right. So so in the funnel, in the sale process, post sale, loyalty retention Winback All of these scenarios that marketers are building campaigns around, now you can add direct mail and not have to worry about the fact you need a list of 5000. Or that it takes six weeks to get this thing done. Or that the data is not living inside of my CRM. So you can be far more creative with your use of direct mail than just treat it like another channel that you’re running from your software.
Amr The Internet Guy
Would you say you’d have two separate types of customers, because I’m thinking probably marketing agencies would be a customer, but also like, the traditional, as you mentioned, real estate. So real estate, financial services, and so and that most of them are kind of medium to large. But for the small business, who is not doing direct mail, that we think they wouldn’t just because they don’t have a CRM. So you know, usually they don’t have a CRM, they probably have like a MailChimp to do some email campaigns or something similar to that. And mostly, they would just go to a marketing agency when they want to do any sort of campaign. And agency would be like the broker. So with that, because I don’t think small business owners, let’s say someone who owns a bakery, for example, would know how to make all this work on their own. Right.
Dennis Kelly
Right. Yeah, yeah, I think it’s very hard for what we call very small business. Right? That, that were your primary focus as a business person is doing everything else other than marketing. Right? There are some very small businesses where, you know, you’re basically a marketing and salesperson. And you know, so yeah, we have, for example, we have a lot of people that are trying to buy real estate. And so, you know, that’s how they spend their day. And so getting lists is easy, kind of putting together their sales pitches easy. That’s what they do. But like you say, for the baker, you know, you’re way better off working with an agency.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah, it is an important part of the business to do, because like, there are so many things that I can think of so many scenarios, like, let’s say you have a Arano, you’re introducing a new big product to the market, you want people to come and sample it. Right? So on that specific day. And usually, when you’re a local business, you’re targeting your locality. So you actually want people who live around your bakery to come to you and where would you get their email anyway? Like, there’s no place where I mean, you can get a list of email with everybody in the country, but you wouldn’t know who’s exactly in your locality, or they’re not necessarily your target customer.
Dennis Kelly
Yeah, yeah. And there are a lot of agencies that have sprung up over the last 10 or 15 years that are focused on what we call the local services market. Right, where, where location is such a primary driver of the customer choice. And, and so, so we work, we have a version of postalytics that agencies can use to work with clients. And, and so they will work with local clients. And you know, let’s say I’m opening up a new restaurant, well, you want to, you want to get that information out, right, you need to you. So the agencies will know how to put together a list, they’ll know how to put together creative, that works with direct mail, and is out on Facebook and other channels, you know, to, to really focus on geography in a coordinated way. So that you, you can really create awareness in a geography.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah, and then you have your local papers as well, like some cities have a version of a very local paper that comes to you with a lot of inserts. And that part of it can be, you know, automated as well, like, I don’t think, like they look at the local newspaper, we just usually, if you’re, if you’re a business who wants to advertise, they’ll just give you the distribution numbers, but there’s nothing else beyond that. And you don’t know. So with with a solution like yours, it’s kind of, you know, it makes a lot of sense. Because now you know, if it’s delivered or not, and you know, if people have taken the action that you wanted them to take. Yeah, so you know,
Dennis Kelly
it’s true. It’s true, and, you know, and I’ll just make one final plug in and postalytics. You know, we, to date have been operating here in the States. We are very close to launching in Canada. Perfect. And so we will have Canadian print partners. We’ve partnered with Canada Post, and so our service will be available to marketers on both sides of the border and and they can, you know, have a list that’s combined with US and Canadian addresses, the software will split it up for you. And you can you can mail to both countries with just a few clicks of the mouse.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah, cuz you can’t cross the border right now on your own. But I mean, you can, but you have to do it. This bugs me a lot because Canada has insisted on a PCR test, even if you’re fully vaccinated. Yeah. And that’s about $200. Extra. So you know, it takes the joy out of driving across the border. Definitely. Like if you’re fully vaccinated, like, what else do you want? Guys? Just
Dennis Kelly
let people move around. Right, right. But yeah, but
Amr The Internet Guy
your letters will move around. It doesn’t need you to deliver them like,
Dennis Kelly
yeah, yeah, we can we use the internet to send the letters to a Canadian print partner so they can they can do.
Amr The Internet Guy
It’s an excellent idea. And I think you said it? Well, when you said we’re trying to reduce the friction, because I, number one, like, all of us, were getting so much spam in our email. And no matter how good your spam filters are, you still get a lot. I mean, it’s not necessarily as in spam, as in is classified by AI as spam. But certainly, it’s like a sales pitch from someone you’ve never met anyway, right? Like LinkedIn. You say accept, and then you know, the pitches coming in two seconds. But with with direct mail, this is the funny part. Direct Mail used to be the spammy option before, right now it’s not.
Dennis Kelly
It used to be junk mail in your mailbox was overflowing every
Amr The Internet Guy
day. Yeah. But now people because of the cost involved, because you have to print stuff, because you have to physically deliver stuff. When people compare this to a digital channel, they would almost certainly just do digital only. What they don’t realize is that the physical thing, especially if it’s well thought of, if it’s a card that’s like beautifully designed, has a nice texture, color, something that will stick in the person’s mind. A friend of mine is a marketer in Virginia is our designer and a marketer. And I think he created cardboard, like a 3d card, like you know, you open it, it kind of, and it looks like a box of tools. It’s all just like a cardboard thing, right? So it’s flat, shipped flat, but when you take it out, you can just stretch it, and it looks like a box, and it says we’ll fix your website. Right? It’s kind of like intuitive because you think if I’m getting this, and he’s targeting the local, you know, most of his clients are local. I think they’re in Virginia and Ohio. And he already has many of these businesses as clients, but some others are not. So it makes sense for him, to remind them with something that they never see anywhere else. It’s not a spam email, it’s not where everybody else is pitching, comes to your house, and then you open it, it looks Oh, what is this? And then? It’s like, a wrench and a hammer or whatever.
Dennis Kelly
Yeah, yeah, that is the key. It’s, it’s, it’s how do you stand out, you know, everything is competitive. And so if you can find ways to, to reach people in a way that is more creative, and is, you know, not the exact same way that everybody else is, is doing everything, you have a much better chance of standing out. And, you know, and I think, just generally, it relates to the friction idea, you know, that that’s what software does really well, software removes friction. And so, you know, if you’re thinking about starting any type of company, and you want to, you want to build a software company, you know, find some fine things that have a lot of friction, and are hard to do. And and so, you know, I think the physical world, which is kind of what, you know, we’re we’re really building software on top of the physical world, right, with printing presses and postage F fixing and like, our software is layering on top of that. I think the idea of, of adding software to physical processes is an area that is still kind of wide open. Right? Yeah, no, you think about it. It’s kind of like what Uber did. Right with with the app. Yeah, I mean, physically moving you from one place to another was hard to do. Right? If there’s not enough taxis, and
Amr The Internet Guy
I love this analogy, by the way, because in here in British Columbia, they didn’t allow Uber to ventilate, like I think over started sometime in 2013, unlicensed like it just sprung up. The software was there in years. People said yeah, I’ll drive for over And the government that the provincial government didn’t have any regulation in place. So they let them operate for a few months, and then they shut them down until they figured out the regulation, but it took them four or five years. And during that part, all what they were doing, they were trying to protect the taxi unions. So you know, because usually Uber goes somewhere else, somewhere, and the taxis, the taxi drivers complain that they’re gonna go out of business and whatever. And what I’ve seen before they finally allowed Uber even though the rules and regulations are quite more difficult than other cities, in Canada and around the world, but even before that, taxi companies thought that all they needed to do is to make like an app is just to create an app, they didn’t understand that there is a lot of friction points that you have to eliminate first. And one of them was actually customer service, like, okay, by the most expensive app in the world. But if the guy is rude, the guy’s rude, right? Because I can’t, you know what I mean, like with Uber, when that does happen, or we don’t like the driver, he’s not, or she’s not doing what you want them to do, like, you know, not just being rude, but maybe, I don’t know, they have loud music, and you don’t like it or whatever, right? You can read them on the app like, but if you go haphazardly, like I need to create an app in two months, because Uber is coming. All the way you’re going to do is just to waste your money on some app that, you know, doesn’t give the user what they want. Yes, they can book a cab. But
Dennis Kelly
yeah, yes, it’s, it’s, it doesn’t solve many problems with throw software on top of an existing process.
Amr The Internet Guy
Because there’s no process the exact you didn’t need to sort of
Dennis Kelly
think of the process from scratch and build that in software.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah, you can’t automate the process that does not exist. You got to write it down on a piece of paper, repeat it to yourself,
Dennis Kelly
first process. That process, you’re just making a bad process bad in software.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah, you’re accelerating. You’re accelerating a bad process. Oh, good. We can have a lot of fun with this, you know, all the acronyms we had and all the things garbage in, garbage out. That’s right here. You got it, the software will give you whatever you put in it. So that’s pretty much it. So before, before automation, with anything, even with your marketing, you know, even small businesses, for example, because I know, many people within my audience are owners of small businesses. And once they hear the word software, or CRM, many of them get scared. So we’re not talking about you having to learn something for six months in order to make it work. There are so many software’s out there that are very intuitive, a couple of clicks. And then if you watch two, three videos, less than 30 minutes, you kind of get the hang of it, right. And then as you go, and as you grow, you learn certain tricks and stuff. But the idea is, you want to eliminate the friction. And you want to have a better experience for you as a business owner. So you don’t spend as much time in something that doesn’t need as much time. And for your clients and customers, you know, that they feel that you’re really caring for them. You’re you remember, I mean, think about sending birthday cards to every single one of your customers, if you ever so if you have even the basic, you know, there are so many free CRMs out there, like okay, let’s advertise somebody. No kidding. HubSpot because I’m using HubSpot. I’ve had the paid version for about four years. I’ve had HubSpot CRM, while the sales, paid sales and paid marketing. And then at some point, you know, I felt like no, this is too much for me. I don’t need all these bells and whistles. So I scaled down. And now I have HubSpot free CRM and, you know, one of the sales licenses and that’s it. But the idea is I’ve got if I’ve got everybody’s birthday, every client’s birthday in there, I could pretty much send them a postcard on the birthday. Absolutely. You know, and it’s very easy to do. Yeah, and there would not be receiving this for many people know, they probably have Happy Birthday emails from everybody. But they wouldn’t receive a physical card they can touch they can put on the desk. You know, you’re not going to be sending like hordes of it. It’s just when somebody’s birthday comes your your your CRM knows it will just push that order to a printer. And it’s taking care of
Dennis Kelly
exactly that’s that’s the vision right there. It’s it’s you know, let let the Those centralized software tools like HubSpot and Pipedrive, and Zoho and campaign and
Amr The Internet Guy
forget somebody, Dennis. Okay, who else?
Dennis Kelly
Yeah, yeah, all of my friends, just so
Amr The Internet Guy
many of them. Yeah, we’re friends with all of
Dennis Kelly
them, we love them all. You know, but that’s really where all this intelligence needs to reside. And then, you know, and then use different channels to accomplish different objectives. And, you know, let let male be a part of that, for certain things that make sense, like you said, a birthday or, you know, an anniversary, since somebody signed up, you know, things that are worth celebrating, you can have an automated little sequence to send out a letter or postcard and, and you know, it, it will help you build your brand in the mind of your customer, and it will help you really feel like a different company than everybody else.
Amr The Internet Guy
Let’s spread the love. Exactly. Thank you very much, Dennis. That was insightful, interesting. And I hope we have presented a new idea of some of the people who are not doing direct mail. Well, thank
Dennis Kelly
you, Amir. This is great. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and your audience, and had a lot of fun.
Amr The Internet Guy
Have a great day. Thank you, you too. Hey, before you go out, I’d like to remind you that if you have a WordPress based website, you need to be really looking after its maintenance and security and having a professional looking after it. So if you feel overwhelmed, or if you feel that there’s back end and boring stuff, is something that you don’t want to do, please do hire someone, but get it done. Do not delay this. Do not leave your WordPress website, not updated. Do not leave your plugins not updated. This will open it up for hacking and malware and you don’t want that. If you’re unsure. Head to my website, human talents.ca That’s human talents, one word human talents.ca and click there you’ll be able to book a like a 30 minute consultation and we can discuss this together and see if we can help you Thank you and see you in the next episode.
