TOP CMO: Neil Stephenson, Fanfinders

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  0:00  

So we had to be absolutely ruthless and relentless when it came to creating ads to start off with.

Ben Kaplan  0:05  

Today on top CMO, we're chatting with Neil Stevens, CMO of finders and your baby, and ask on growing Asian communities at viral creativity is viral, great ideas packaged a certain way want to spread, they want to be told to someone else positioning, branding execution to spread your message, what our products our brands to spread, it can be simple, surprising, and significant. This is top cmo with me, Ben Kaplan. This is the podcast where we go around the globe to interview marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, fastest growing companies and most disruptive startups. Today on top CMO, we're chatting with Neil Stevenson, cmo and co founder of fan finders, in your baby club, a platform that connects brands to 5 million parents in the US and UK is growing at a rate of 150,000 new members per month. Neil, a great way to start out here on top CMO is to ask you, what is your superpower?

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  1:08  

Well, I've always feel my superpower is is I guess, just the ability to look at an online ads platform, figure out how to use it, figure out what the ways you can exploit it to your advantage and generate a high number of cost effective customers, which is how we got started with how we got fanzine just started.

Ben Kaplan  1:34  

So take me through the beginning of fan and fan finders, right? You have a kernel of an idea you have a targeted niche audience, which is a fanatical audience, right parents that are going to be you know, I have a newborn. So I've we ate my myself, my wife are fanatical about our newborn? And how did you start leveraging your expertise in online ad platforms to start kind of building that community and building that audience? Sure.

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  2:01  

So we had had the idea, which was basically one of our co founders and the CEO, Alec, his wife had a couple of kids and the procedure they went through was horrible in terms of like the when they would be accosted in hospitals and the way they were marketed to was terrible. So Alec thought there must be a better way. So we designed this kind of value exchange website where moms could sign up for and get free days and offers discounts and competitions from brands who want to market their products or services to mums.

Ben Kaplan  2:33  

Sure. So you have this target niche audience, how they sort of enter your particular spaces is not great. And and you're talking about, I guess, in the UK, that sort of you have a you have a newborn, you're in the hospital, and you're just like forced to sign up for all these things where you kind of feel like you're compelled to do it. And so that was a pain point. Because that offered some distaste for people in the process. And they you know, weren't focused on signing up for things when they just have a new baby. And so So how did you then for your baby club? What was kind of steps one, two, and three to start building the audience, you have the kernel of the idea you need to grow, then like, what do you do next.

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  3:10  

So once we have the first few, because obviously, it's the classic chicken and egg situation where you have a two sided marketplace that you need to build up. But you can't get companies on board to get these offers if you don't have the users to put them in front of. And you can't get users on the platform unless you've got offers to give them. So once we got a few brands signed up quite early on, we just turned to trying to ramp up the user volume as much as possible. So we started off simply just really basic, like get some Google ads, set up some search ads, you know, just bidding on terms like free baby stuff, get free products, baby offers, discounts, etc. And that that trickled along for a little while. But we started when we went to really scale up then we looked at Facebook ads, and an expanded from there. So we just did a lot of a lot of testing on creatives, messaging CTAs on the Facebook ad system, and found we're able to generate extremely high volumes of users, despite putting our products in front of them.

Ben Kaplan  4:16  

So how did you do that? When I mean, this is early on, maybe it's not monetized as much you don't have a lot of brands, you know, as your partners, how did you start to figure out the balance of like, we need to grow, we need to acquire users. But we have to do this in a cost effective way. And particularly when you know, it's easy to spend a lot and not get a return. So how do you approach like sort of like making sure there's an ROI from what you're doing, but like investing a little bit and learning through this process? Yeah.

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  4:41  

So we're, I mean, first off, we were ruthless with cutting ads. But every every ad was was scrutinized to Penny. So the cost per user if every single app was looked at on like a daily basis, and I spent, I spent my entire life at that point inside Facebook ads and manager 24 hours a day, like, just in short, we because we knew we knew roughly what our kind of target CPA was to make money to be able to break even on these on these users. And as a case of just getting as many as we could break even or, or better. And it was just a relentless testing and optimizing routine that we went through.

Ben Kaplan  5:20  

So take me through, like, what's the timeline for that, like, when you're doing this, you're in this 24 hours a day? In your words, you're ruthless, you're relentless? What is the timeline that you expect to invest? Where you're not gonna see maybe great results at the beginning, you're gonna experiment a lot, but you're trying to find that insight or that sort of message and targeting fit that's going to allow you to scale this, what does that process like, from from just like, you got a wide net, and you've got to narrow it down to find that right audience and right message that's going to work?

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  5:56  

Well, to be honest, luckily, for us, our because we were just UK focused at this point, we now operate in UK and US, but we're just UK focused at this point. And we started off targeting actually very targeting wise, going very broad, because our addressable market is effectively, you know, millions of people in the case, it's mostly females between the ages of say, early 20s, and mid mid to late 40s. So that's, that's over like 10 million people. So we started off targeting very broad, and we just focused on the messaging, and the imagery around what are the benefits of our service. So obviously, the benefits of our service are, you sign up with us and you, you can claim some free products, so you can get discounts, you can enter competitions to win things, all those kind of things, we put all these benefits on, on ads in various forms. And it was just, it didn't take us very long to get to very profitable results from our Facebook ads.

Ben Kaplan  6:56  

What was like, what were you discarding? What kind of error are we talking about? And what was sort of not working and what was working?

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  7:02  

This is 2013. So it's a nice, a nice time to be able to post it on Facebook. Okay, we cost fees. I mean, we were getting cost. We were getting users for at times, like 30 pounds per person, that user.

Ben Kaplan  7:19  

Okay, so it's inexpensive, and how much was that user potentially, like worth the How did you value that user your email for that,

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  7:27  

we're a bit lucky in that sense that we can get, we can get very fast feedback on how much that customer is worth to us. Because when someone signs up with us, they go through a path, like a welcome path, which takes them through all the all the benefits, and we make our money buy, when when a user decides that they want to claim one of our offers, they take it they tick the box that says I agree to share my details with this company in exchange for this offer. And that information then goes to the company through an API, and it triggers a VPS, where a customer results service. So they pay us per per lead, who's who's signed up to claim that that offer so we can get a very instant in the even in the first 510 minutes of a lifetime of the user, we've got a very fast feedback cycle on it.

Ben Kaplan  8:14  

So you're having that because people are signing up, part of the core benefit is to get offers that benefit that they're getting an offer is actually monetized as a lead. So it's on the individual offer. And is this still your business model to this day has it has it kind of persisted as so these aren't companies that are like paying an advertising fee to access or being a branded thing. I mean, it's monetized directly on the lead generated.

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  8:39  

Yeah, so we still primarily monetize on the on the lead generation path, because we build all the tech in house. So our platform is built on custom software, which is built to facilitate all this stuff. And we're almost ready with our latest iteration of the website, which will be much more focused on we're about 18 months ago, we we want to really introduce we've switched from being just a purely like basically offer wall with just lead gen stuff. And then we want to add in a lot of high quality content. So we've heard a whole content team and got a lot of people to write for us. And we've tried to design the site around a much more sticky, like high quality content driven stuff, and will then start to add things like you know, ad revenue, responsive sections, etc.

Ben Kaplan  9:26  

How big is the business now? Like like what what has like in terms of like community size in terms of like number of leads, you're supplying in terms of revenue, give us a sense of like 2013 to now with this kind of laser focus, what have you been able to grow?

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  9:40  

So back in 2013, we're like, this is the tail end of 2013 when we really started to scale up so we're probably doing just just just in the UK and we're doing probably a few 1000 a month in terms of leads. So we're looking at like 20,000 Maybe Maybe if A few, maybe a few 1000 a month, so 20,000 a year 2020.

Ben Kaplan  10:05  

At that point, what is a typical lead? You know worth you understand that for offers? What is it? What is the ballpark of what is that worth

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  10:13  

it, folks. So they cost us probably between like 30 Pence and 50 pence. And our revenue we made off that was probably not a great deal more than that it was much it was just the growth, every everything we made, we reinvested back into growth growing user base, because we knew that having a large user base is what can attract the large clients who want to work with us.

Ben Kaplan  10:32  

But here's the thing about building a business. What works at the beginning is what makes you great, but it doesn't necessarily last forever. To grow, you need to find new ways to scale. And in the case of fan finders and your baby club, that meant finding new partners who can handle the scale,

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  10:50  

the ones that take 612 months to really to negotiate and get some of our bigger partners. And that's when we had more uncapped upside where we could really scale up on the acquisition side and still make revenue off of them have more users, by 2015, we are probably at that, towards that maximum amount for the UK. So it was around maybe 40 35,000 users 30,000 users a month, which is around but food and 50,000 a year.

Ben Kaplan  11:17  

So you're acquiring it that way. And acquisition is still primarily through Facebook ads. Yeah, a combination

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  11:21  

of Facebook, Facebook ads, and Google ads and a few other like smaller, like, you know, Bing search ads, which are like, you know, 2% or whatever. Things like interest. But yeah, most primarily media, you know, Facebook and Google are the two, the two monster networks where you get all the volume from

Ben Kaplan  11:37  

how much is a lead worth? At this point? Is it still the 30 Pence to 50 pence? Or is it as it changed because you've got bigger deals,

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  11:43  

it started selling, it's starting to get more expensive. Like, luckily, they tend to go up in terms of you know, like, leads start to get more expensive, but as they did, our revenue is growing on the back end. So we've always been always able to stay like profitable, just, we're getting

Ben Kaplan  11:59  

more expensive, just because Facebook's getting more expensive, more people are coming in, there's more kind of players. It's the it's the growth of Facebook.

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  12:06  

It's that and also the fact that as we were scaling, we, the more you scale, and when you start to ramp up spending then cost naturally tend to go up as well.

Ben Kaplan  12:15  

Okay? To find new audiences other stuff, you can't get your low hanging fruit audiences as much. Yeah, what's the next milestone where you hit, when you start to get I don't know when to like the million plus users when is your windows, your windows that kind of grow.

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  12:30  

So when we launched into the because like said, us, this, or the UK probably has a maximum capacity, because there's only so many new pregnancies a month, like in the UK, but there's like 60,000 a month. And when you start to get over like 40,000 a month signing up, we're standing up two thirds of the market starts to really squeeze the available pool of users that you can attract, so prices tend to go up. So we found a sweet spot around 35,000 40,000 A month mark. So that's what we now maintain as our as our upper bound. So the waiter scale after that was then to geographically different markets were launched in the US and been scaled them gradually, I think was 2016, we first launched in the US, then we did a proper, it takes a long time to start to get these deals in place. So we had a proper relaunch again in 2018. For the US, and we built because the ceiling is higher in the US. So we started to we started to generate similar numbers in the UK earlier on. So we're doing another like 40,000 a month in the US as well.

Ben Kaplan  13:30  

As it did everything you do in the UK translate over and just worked as well. Or did you have to make adjustments?

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  13:36  

Yeah, it's really good question. It was broadly the same, the most things generally worked. But you know, the same principles apply as in like, people like to see, you know, the kind of people using the products they can possibly get for free, or discounted in general and very similar messaging, but there's little, little subtleties. So obviously, I mean, for one thing to say, Mom, not mom, as we would say.

Ben Kaplan  14:00  

I've been saying mom, I didn't know you've been saying well, okay.

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  14:04  

And diapers instead of nappies, you know, the same simple things like that. And also, just like some sort of, I mean, the US audience has tended to on the content side of things that they tend to, they tend to have like a different style of writing as well. Like slightly less, I don't know, tongue in cheek approach or whatever I don't know how to describe

Ben Kaplan  14:26  

what would be like a tongue in cheek version for this. I don't know people say British dry says something like that. Versus the American version. What is like the two version like I get you're not using nappy and you're saying diaper? Yeah. Hey, Mom, are you saying mom what is the what is the tongue in cheek version and the non

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  14:45  

example that I could say it's probably we it's actually less on the ads and more on the content side of things. As we've been producing content the last two years, we put the same article. We had an article written for the UK by a UK mom, and then we had it like a no mechanised by changing mom to mom and diapers and happy etc. And just put it in the same format on the American version of site. And we got a lot of negative comments from, like us moms saying things like, you don't seem to like your kid very much. And in fact, there was, there was a very negative because the the UK was written from a very much like, Oh, I hate my kids. Joking, obviously. But some of the US moms seem to appropriate at face value.

Ben Kaplan  15:28  

Okay, so one difference was just like a kind of a sense of sarcasm about this ever saying, like, Ah, I hate my kids, I can't stand them. That you're obviously don't mean that. And there was context for that. And yet in the US that would take it as like, wow, that person really does not like there. Yeah. I said, Okay, well, interesting. So we're at 2018, you've launched in the US, or you launched in 2016. Had to work out some kinks. It sounds like launch again in 2018. Now you're up to 40,000 users a month. And and acquisition as the same acquisition cost is the same is that keep

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  16:05  

keep going up every single year. Okay. Always, always going up slightly. No, now, it's now it's just kind of like we see it like 10% Every year basically going up. And in terms of Facebook costs, we have to it's a it's an ongoing struggle to because we're not, because we're trying to scale any more volume. So US has now 100,000 A month plus, okay. And that's where we are, that's our sweet spot for us. So around 100 120,000 a month in the US at about 35,000 in the UK. And that's our sweet spots. So as we're not trying to scale up anymore, the the challenge, the main challenge is just keeping those costs down as low as possible. So we can continue to operate and keep growing our profit margins as as our revenue gets higher.

Ben Kaplan  16:46  

So where are you at now? So you're doing you're doing 100 to 120,000 per month in the US? You're doing 60,000 per month? I think you said in the in the UK? And what is the acquisition cost now to add an additional user now that you're really at scale, and in some ways you've like saturated? What is what you think is your addressable market?

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  17:05  

Yeah, it's certainly increased, probably like, at least, fivefold since the early days.

Ben Kaplan  17:11  

I see. I see. So it's increased fivefold. And so you've had the strike more deals to to keep that even bigger deals, monetize it more, are you able to monetize the leads with multiple partners, so you're not just selling one offs as you can get your diaper brand, and you can get your formula brand, and you can get your clothes brand and manage that process. So it's mostly trying

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  17:36  

to make more money out of the same amount of users as well. So let me say more deals have work on like on the conversion, optimization side of things. So we're, we're taking users down the right down the right path, which optimizes them to be able to be exposed to more deals and claim more deals that they're genuinely interested in. And then it's adding further revenue streams, such as, obviously, the ad revenue, and sponsored sponsored posts and sections, things like that

Ben Kaplan  18:07  

your baby Club was at a new stage of growth, they had been successful by focusing on one primary lead acquisition channel that they knew extremely well. But to sustain the growth and solidify the value of their brand, they needed to diversify to other marketing channels, namely, content marketing, maybe through this, this the strategy shift. And, and maybe like what you did to pivot to become more of a content site? Why was that important? Why, why would you do that? And in some ways, it's a total shift in mentality, right? Because suddenly, you have editorial calendars, there's different people, there's different processes. I don't know if you can be as ruthless as you are an ads as you are on content. So how, why do you do that? Why is that important? And what shifted those is that cause within your marketing department.

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  18:58  

So it definitely requires hiring a few people to really manage it. So we couple years ago, we hired Sam, Jasmine, who's my like Head of Content, and social, she manages the whole content side of things, all that editorial calendar, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, it's in place that you can't really be as ruthless. You can't really be as ruthless you can't spend all this time creating a copy of content and then put out it doesn't work. You don't just don't delete it. It's just it's just there. So, you know, it's, we, the reason we pivoted was because we we didn't want to see a lot of our partners were saying things like it made the sales process a lot harder because people tended to see us as Oh, they're just another freebie site like a fly by night offer wall no value is just, you know, I guess advertising arbitrage buying users and then selling us the users effectively. But by we wanted to create a much more like added value proposition for the for the user. So they had they had access to not just the offers but also have really, genuinely helpful articles. And we our mission is to become ultimately like the de facto place to go. If you're having a, if you're having a child in the UK or US, we want our site to be the first place you'd come to like, it's just thing that you do, because that's where you get the best. Everything the best offers the best value, the best advice the best, possibly, ultimately, community. That's what we've asked. That's our dream. So the content beside it was one one step on the way to that ultimate goal,

Ben Kaplan  20:31  

as you're doing that, how do you balance like the needs for content and providing value with lead generation? On top of that, like, how are you integrating the two? I mean, are people coming to your site, they're reading an article, they might not be signed up with your site yet? And you need to get them signed up? How do you balance those things and try to like, you know, become a great source for information about your baby. But yet still drive to how the site is monetized, even though you might be getting some ad revenue or some other things.

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  21:00  

Yeah, so tricky one. So we try and keep the two separate vote, because we see ultimately, the content is a nice additional thing for our users. But also, it's a longtime play, I mean, over the course of several years, we want to get more customers organically and started gradually replaced some of the paid advertising we have to do. So it kind of reduces our reliance on certain ad networks to get our users. But obviously, that's a long term play, in terms of, you know, in terms of SEO and getting more organic traffic, that takes a while. So that's so that's kind of a long term play. So we have to keep the, the lead generation side of things up as well, they, they're completely separate. In my head, they run as two separate projects, which don't really touch on each other yet. They're not quite there in terms of ultimately, you know, a few years down the line, we might be doing paid traffic, not just to our conversion, lead pages, but to our to our content, which, which then has a more intricate funnel, which you know, the to become more integrated. But at the moment, it's important that we don't let our lead generation drop.

Ben Kaplan  22:13  

So when you have, you have multiple marketing channels now, at one channel before, although many platforms within that channel, now you've diversified How does for a growing business, you're you're a bootstrap business cracked, you don't you don't have outside investment? How do you maximize your marketing budget and your marketing opportunity and attention across these channels, we spend our

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  22:37  

money on the on the advertising channel, which generates more users for the same amount of cost relatedness. When it comes to the paid advertising, the pain advertising channels, it's as simple as that, like, we will, we will spend advertising money, whatever can get us the best bang for our buck. And in in that context. And you can assign a very hard value to that, that investment that we invested 10 pounds and paid out, somebody got 15 pounds back in revenue, you can assign very easily hard numbers to those, when it comes to assigning budget to the content side of things, which is a much longer term play, we have to almost, you have to come up with the best guests like assign some kind of value to it. But it's a bit more of a soft value that's not really directly monetizable yet, but you can't, but you can't just call it no value because it hasn't generated revenue straightaway. So you have to, you have to just give it your best guess and say right, investing this much in a content side of things at the moment will bring a good return in the future. So yeah, it's quite a bit of guesswork on that side of things.

Ben Kaplan  23:44  

You've had a very clear value proposition to your audience value killer value proposition to moms, what have you learned about which ads work best?

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  23:54  

It's very clear that product led imagery works works best when people can physically see, they can imagine product that they could get, for instance, by joining.

Ben Kaplan  24:05  

Well absolutely ask what type of products would you lead with what works best in this space? What are people excited about?

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  24:10  

necessities that are well known brands, so things like bottles, you know, like Tommee Tippee bottles or like nappy bins or type of you know, things think things like that, really, and it's just being very, very clear. Like it's, it's just saying, you know, effectively just saying, Do this and you can get this, you know, like, join your baby Club today. And you can claim this.

Ben Kaplan  24:36  

Has that changed at all during the pandemic? What have you noticed both on AD conversion also just like the behavior habits of of moms and parents and families during the pandemic?

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  24:47  

We've done quite a lot of surveys during the during the pandemic, while trying to answer your question. It hasn't changed too much in terms of our advertising and during the pandemic because our users still ultimately want the same things they want free or cheaper be the product It's and offers discounts etc. So they also want the same thing. But we have done a bit of research on we used our because we have like 5 million users now. And that's a large network, it's quite powerful network to be able to utilize to get some really useful stats about behavior during the pandemic, in general. So we did a really big survey of our members seeing what their buying habits were, during the pandemic, drought and like if they were still buying toys, for instance, or if they were, how they were, how much time they were spending with their, with their kids, etc. And we put that together in a, in a nice, like, b2b report for brands that we that we send to our brand partners to help advise them how they could better market to their users, throw them throughout the pandemic,

Ben Kaplan  25:51  

right. And so in some of the key findings of that, which I think is interesting is that toys in particular are things that like, basically, moms being concerned about lack of social interaction, are being prioritized more, and you saw gains in those kinds of things, saying, like, Hey, I can't, it's not as easy for me to take my kids to the park all the time, or do all of this or interact with other kids. We've got to ramp up interaction in some way. Right? That's some of what you've seen. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  26:19  

mean, I don't have the all the stats top my head, but like, there was definitely was a lot, there's a lot of trends towards people, moms trying to put more focus on physical interactivity and activities with our kids.

Ben Kaplan  26:33  

Although CMOS make hundreds of marketing decisions every month, only a few of those decisions really shift the growth path of a brand. Sometimes a key tactical pivot, like making it easier for your audience to make a decision that leads to revenue can make all of the difference. What is the top marketing decisions you made over the course of this journey for the past seven, eight years? And what and what is the marketing decisions that you would do over again, and you would change?

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  27:02  

The best decision, maybe the best decision we made was, was to remain very hyper focused on performance in our paid advertising. Because if we didn't have that, we would have run out of money. It was more of a necessity. There's one, there was one point about four years in three years, and maybe when we really tried to maximize the value of our users coming down as they come into our site. And we changed, we changed the user flow, we introduced an extra page, which was basically effectively a highlights reel of like the BEST OFFERS and put them in front of them on the past. And I had an easy way for them to claim them quickly. So I like to care for this. And that's the that's, that was that overnight, massive impact on our revenue generated off its users. And that that's still in place today. But that was the biggest gear change thing that we really encountered over the last seven years. Simple. So yeah,

Ben Kaplan  28:02  

so what what was the changes? Like sometimes I think, especially with online marketing, like small changes, and a small experiment can have big results. And so what was what do you think the issue, what was the issue that this solved,

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  28:15  

the main thing was that the offers were, there's too much trying because we have like, anything between 30 and 60 offers on site at once. So we used to it used to be that these, do our fill out a quick form. And then they just get this whole list of offers. And they weren't really curated enough. And they weren't, they weren't the best ones weren't highlighted enough. And also, it wasn't as easy to claim them quickly and have to go into each one individually. The first form you have to fill in when we actually increase that, to include all the key questions that someone has to we'd have to submit to claim an offer. And once that is done, the second page, which highlights all the BEST OFFERS, it's just a case of ticking a box easily for them. So they can just claim five, six things in one go without having to go through six individual forms and fill out more and more things. Again, I'd like to a slight increase in the initial friction, but a huge decrease in the the friction on the second stage, which is where people claim all the offers.

Ben Kaplan  29:14  

I see. So So really, the Insight was let's decrease the friction to claim all the offers is the goal and claim the BEST OFFERS. But it might take a little bit more friction at the beginning because you have to satisfy these questionnaires for the ever so can we get through that quickly in a way that streamlines it but ultimately decrease the friction of claiming offers. And that's a single

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  29:38  

difference. So actually, our cost per user went up, say 20% 25%, because of this change because of the initial form, but then our revenue went up. At least double that because of the change as well. So more than paid for itself.

Ben Kaplan  29:53  

I see Well, what's interesting as I think that's, you know, anyone who's like a growth marketer, it means you think in terms of expense remits, we do a ton of work and growth marketing. But what's interesting, I think about your example is that if you looked at those two things as silos, right, let's just work on our, you know, our initial form. And then let's work separately on on the claims, you would have actually missed out on this insight, because you would have said, Yeah, we just want to optimize that initial form. There's no way we want to add more questions to this thing, right? We just increased our cost by 20%, I presume because people are dropping off in the process, right, they're not completing it. And you knew that. But by doing that, you had a higher value user, that did actually complete it. And it could be monetized better. So I think that is one of the interesting things is that sometimes, it's not just about running experiments. It's also like framing the experience, experiment correctly, and realizing that the interactions happen between multiple things at once.

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  30:50  

But you can't just look at one thing and ignore all the other variables. Yes, it's like things, actions have consequences, places you might not even consider until you look at the whole thing holistically, and make sure that overall, everything is working better, not just this one thing that you focused on,

Ben Kaplan  31:07  

what is the biggest thing that you would do differently? What would you change over the past seven, eight years?

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  31:12  

So good question, we probably introduce the content side of things a bit earlier, because we feel like now we're at the stage, we're seven years in, we're probably two years into our content side of things, we could have probably started the process earlier, even even on a simple basis, and which intuitive develops, we'd be in a much better place. Now. The reason we did it was because obviously was gonna be quite a big investment. But I think we could have found a way to do it for a smaller investment earlier, and and started doing that in the background.

Ben Kaplan  31:49  

Sure, well, and certainly, content is one of those things that, like you said, can take some time to get up to scale. Also, for things like SEO can take some time as well. So starting earlier, can can help. What is your advice for anyone else that says, I have a market? It we have a we can provide a clear benefit to that and clear service. But we're starting from scratch, and maybe we're a two sided marketplace like you were when you started and in our now and how do we get going when we have that same chicken and egg or catch 22 problem of which side of the marketplace to grow first?

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  32:22  

Yeah, it's such a it's the hardest, hardest place to start and two sided marketplace, I think you have to just accept that you're going to the first users that you sign up, you're going to lose money on because you have to have something for the other side's to get going. So I would just make sure you have, make sure you can afford to sign up a lot of users and assume that you will generate practically no revenue from them in a two sided marketplace, and then use those users very quickly. To get the other side of things going to get get the deals on board from the from the brand partners, for instance. I mean, you can you can definitely you. But before you do any of that, I mean, you probably want to make sure that there's definitely, definitely a market for what for what you want, like make sure the brands actually want it. Because no point in getting a few 1000 users on this side, and then go into the brands and saying, Oh, we've got 2000 users now it's like, well, we don't want that. So make sure make sure that there's there's definitely demand for what you're what you're building.

Ben Kaplan  33:22  

Okay, sure. Neil Stevenson, thank you so much for being on top cmo and congratulations on all the growth and success this board and let's get the 10 million users the next milestone perhaps. Okay, thanks

Neil Stephenson - Fanfinders  33:35  

a lot, Dan. It's been a pleasure. So remember,

Ben Kaplan  33:37  

to grow a niche audience or community. You've got to stay laser focused on the value you create for that community and the tiny obstacles that stand in the way of that value creation. But another way, think small to grow big. Until the next time. This is top CMOS.

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