A Conversation with Josh Francia of Blueshift
Josh is Chief Growth Officer at Blueshift, the visionary CDP (Customer Data Platform.) He shares the journey from Blueshift customer to Blueshift team member, and his insights from a diverse marketing career in multiple industries. Connecting customer knowledge across silos, in a real-time platform, gets him excited. You'll feel the same.
TRANSCRIPT
Matthew Dunn
Good morning. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the future of email marketing. And my guest this morning is Josh Francia, Chief growth officer at Blueshift. Josh, welcome. Thank you for taking the invitation. I'm so glad we could connect and talk.
Josh Francia
Yeah, really happy to be here. Thank you for having me on. And I'm excited to chat,
Matthew Dunn
Blueshift. Blueshift is growing like a rocket, but some listeners may not be familiar with it. Could you outline a bit about the company? For starters?
Josh Francia
Sure, absolutely. So you know, Blueshift was founded in 2014. And it was founded out of a couple needs that our founders, our three founders had when they were working at companies like Groupon and Walmart. And they realize as marketers and product and engineers themselves, they realized, there's so much customer data at all these companies. But it's really, really hard to access it really hard to access, especially if you're in the market, your product team, it was you know, it's fragmented out to millions of different data silos and data structures and data lakes. And, and those are great, but they're not, you can't figure out who is doing what, and, and it frustrated them. Because like, man, we just if we just knew more about each customer, we can make our customer experience our marketing, so much more relevant. But we can't, because it's not in one spot. And it's really managed by it. And they've they've kind of put it in different silos for ad hoc analysis and auditing and compliance, but it's not accessible. And so they said, Well, what if we change that? And this was right, this time? We're no SQL databases started to get some attention, right? Okay. Yeah, like MongoDB and Redis. And Elastic Search, which they've changed the paradigm where relational tables were the standard, like the oracles and my sequels and whatnot. Yeah. And those are great. But those are great when you want to do analysis on stuff. Yeah. But they don't do a very good job of saying, Well, I have Matthew Dunn here, show me everything about Matthews like, well, they don't really do it for your job. You have literally 1000s of columns. And so these new databases came up at the same time vj and Rahul Amman and our co founders said, Well, what if we put a platform on top of these types of data structures, so that marketers and business facing business users could actually access this data, and then make sense of it. And so that's kind of the genesis of what kind of created the the CVP which blue ship is the customer data platform, which is the very core essence is taking that customer data, unifying it, and then making it accessible to business users inside the company
Matthew Dunn
accessible and and I read a bunch of background on the company and your journey into the company, which I will ask you about in a minute, but accessible not in the just not just in the analytical sense, but also in the in the transactional interactional sense. If you've you know, send a one off email to Josh Franzia that's shaped around his interactions, his interests, his priorities, it's feasible with Blueshift.
Josh Francia
That's right, not only feasible, it's purpose built for that. Yeah. So the whole idea was it's not just access, but it's also activation. Yeah. Right. Because we we knew and they knew when they started this, marketers have a million great ideas, challenge the challenges, they can't, they can't execute all those ideas, because they get stuck is that Oh, we don't have this data. We don't know about this piece of information. And so they can't make those decisions. They can't make those triggered campaigns. They can't make that personalization come to life. And so they're hindered mostly by their own tech stacks internally. And so he said, Well, there's a there's a better way of doing that. And that was the rise of customer data platforms. Now they're all the rage, of course, and blueshift kind of thought of that problem, not only just unifying data, which was most customer data platforms stop and unify data. It's mostly for analytics. And then you have a kind of pipe it somewhere else. They actually yeah, you Yeah, the mark. Right. Yeah. Lucia Wait, wait a second. That's another hop, right? marketers don't want that customers don't want that. So they created everything in one place. So unify, segment, analyze, but also execute and orchestrate right? So
Matthew Dunn
your Bernie's all there in one spot? You use your your, your website uses the word omni channel, what? What it? What are the key channels so far? I'm sure there's others too.
Josh Francia
So I mean, it started with email and mobile push were the main two channels. And those still are some of the biggest channels, right? Because that's where a lot of consumers consume media, right? your mail is, you know, people thought email is gonna die when when mobile phones came out, and not only did not die, it actually accelerated, right? Because email is one of the top use apps on mobile phones. Yeah, so emails never going away. And then mobile push, obviously, as more people got apps, mobile push became a very important thing. But then there's a lot of other channels out there that you know, spend from marketing things such as paid media, and you're pushing audiences to your Google or Facebook or accounts, okay, or you're doing like direct mail, programmatically through through other places, SMS is popular as well. And then it actually connects to other parts of the customer experience. Because, you know, the thought that a lot of people have is customers want a unified experience with the brand, right? They want to be able to say, hey, when I'm talking to Apple, I don't think I'm talking to this division versus this division, or this, this versus this division. I'm just talking to Apple. And I want to make sure that they know who I am. They know what I've done recently. And I know what I like, wherever I chat with them. So whether that's a chat on their customer success, or customer service page, or I call them or I go to their store, if they can identify me, they should treat me in a really good way. And so with that we connect to like Zendesk and Salesforce. Oh, whoa, okay,
cool. So
Josh Francia
yeah, your your Yeah, your website, you can do recommended content on your website, really any endpoint? Can you connect the journey to a lot of our customers? Like, that's the aha moment? Yeah, they realize, Oh, wait, this is more than just email and mobile and true marketing channels. This is a unified customer journey across any touchpoint POS systems, all of that can be integrated. I have
Matthew Dunn
to laugh when you bring up Apple's example, because I'm surrounded by Apple hardware, multiple generations. So and I'm thinking, I wonder if they know. They know how much of their gear actually been. So when you stack the family in there, well, that that is a bold vision. And you're right, it is CDP. That is the rage now, but I looked at the you know, looked at the roots of the company and your team started doing this before people were slapping a label and Forrester and Gartner reports on on a sector. Now, your journey into this was from customer to exec and I want to quote you back to yourself in a minute. But but but describe that a little bit how you ended up okay, how you know, it's,
Josh Francia
it's definitely a interesting path to where I am today. I don't think it's a very common path, where, you know, a b2c marketer like myself, who spent 10 years and travel at booking holdings, and priceline.com. And then a couple years over lending tree converted into a b2b marketer at a SaaS company. And it's nothing I would ever think I would ever do either. And it's really all around blueshift in particular, not anything, okay. Yeah, the reason the reason how I got there was, you know, when I was at when I was in the travel world, we had the same problems, right, but this is back in, you know, 2010. And there were no solutions. And so, like, we had to, like cobble up this concept of like, how do we do this better, and the customer data platform that Borden even exists? And what we figured out the tenants of like unified profile, ai algorithms, relevant content, the right Time to people makes an enormous impact on their response, which then in turn makes a huge impact on your business. And so when I got to lending tree, it was almost like we were around the clock a little bit I remember coming in, and they said, Hey, we believe that we have a lot of revenue that's locked up in our in our customer base, or customers that we're not, we're not really tapping into it. We're just scratching the surface. We feel like we do a lot more. Can you help? I'm like, Yeah, no problem. Let's go in and dig in. And I realized they have the same problems everyone else had, right. They were, they were tons of data. They have 20 year old company had tons and tons of data, but they could almost use none of it beyond like, first name, you know, location. Yeah, yeah, that was it. And I was like, well, this is not very relevant to people, we keep telling people to get a mortgage, they just got a mortgage, like, great, great, great, great, they're not gonna get another one. And so I remember architecting out on a whiteboard with our CTO at the time, I said, here's what we need to do. And I essentially architect a single view of the customer and AI and he looked at me and he said, sounds great. Please don't make me build this. And, and I always remember one thing he said that was so poignant, was Josh, we in lending tree need to focus on our, our, all of our internal technology ever seen it focus on our core differentiators? This won't be a core differentiator, we can buy something like does this, you know, I was like, that's really smart. And so I went did an RFP process and said, Alright, who can do these five things, right? unify the customer, do AI push to every channel and make it really accessible and really fast and do it at velocity, which I think velocity is the nexus of scale and speed. And I can go we can go in that in a little bit more. But so I went through that I found 30 companies that said they could do this. I was flabbergasted. Because in six years from when I did it, and Lenny, or Priceline, I'm thinking about it. No one had done, I know what I'm doing. Right? Yes, 30 companies that they don't like, Oh, my gosh, this is amazing. And they all kind of brand themselves little bit differently. I went through all 30. And sure enough, like 25 really couldn't do anything. Okay, or just smoking mirrors. And then the other five, you know, the other four did okay, but they missed some. And they were mostly point solutions that we're trying to do a little bit more, right. There were like, a good mobile marketing platform. And there Oh, yeah, we do SEO customer view, really. But you really don't. Okay, because some of these have a phone number. And that's not a single customer view. What if I don't have a phone number, right, I can't have a profile and, and those issues kind of popped up. blueshift stood out, honestly, when a very beginning never heard of them. At that point. They were relatively new. And I went I went in very detailed with them. And what won me over was not only did they think about the problem the right way, they architected the solution the right way. So they had infinite scale. And having broken many ESPN, many marketing platforms previously, I realized that they all work really well at low volume. Hmm, once you start to do high volume, high complexity, many of them are not built for that. And so instead of sending emails out in two hours, you're sending emails out in three days, right? And all of a sudden, you're like, Whoa, that's not gonna work for me, like that sale was a 24 hour sale, I can't send it, you know, 48 hours after the sale ends. And so those issues start to pop up. And a lot of spots I have a Blueshift really won me over with the way they architected the way they designed it the way they thought about the problem, real problem with a future problem, not just email, or motivated customer engagement, needs to get a home a mission control that you can do all the decisioning all the orchestration, all the analytics, and that's super important for businesses. So anyway, we got them in, within three months, it just took off. And I remember internally, I had to, like I put my neck out a little bit because they're like, are you sure about this company? No one's ever heard of it before. I'm like, trust me, this is gonna work. And And sure enough, it did. Right, did it the revenue skyrocketed so much. So you know, our cmo The time is like, yeah, after we got Blueshift, it drove our revenue 40x but we were before 400 Well, anything, it literally became an a risk to the business if things weren't operating well from that platform. Okay, because it was such a huge contract contribution. The revenue was after two years of running at a lending train seeing that growth. I said, I had I had an opportunity to kind of expand, you know, new roles and thinking about new ideas. And I remember talking to BJ, our co founder and CEO and he said, Hey, I'm looking at new opportunities. What do you Is there anything a Blueshift? And he got really exciting said yeah, like, Come be our cmo CTO and you know, we would love to have you and so we're able to make it work and what's been great now I've been a bush it for over two years. It's been great to see See the other side of the coin? Yeah. And other companies that ledger was not the the, the oddity, the exception, almost all the company's evolution works with sees that same growth sees that same inflection point when that happens. And and I've really enjoyed working with them, talking with them going with your strategies, talking to our prospects going through strategies and say, everyone's going to get to the point that Lenny tree already got to, it just depends where you are in the maturity curve. But more when you get there, you need a platform like blueshift, or you won't be able to, to actually like seize the opportunity, you'll be left behind,
you'll be
Matthew Dunn
out there, you'll be running SQL reports. I remember I read I read the the article that you posted a while back about this, about this voyage into, you know, from from customer to, from customer to company, and you mentioned that you'd be broken any number of vsps at previous company. So yeah, firsthand experience. Like, I know that you can't turn this thing into the engine for the business just because it wants to be there. How do you I'm trying to figure out how to articulate this question. Well,
I'm
Matthew Dunn
not it's it's experience. It's instinct. But when you said what you said a minute ago about you knew it would scale on How'd you know?
Josh Francia
Yeah, it's a good question. And it's mostly boat, mostly based on my experience of working with other platforms, and trying to do complex things at high scale, high velocity, okay, that just doesn't work. I remember back in my travel days, we're trying to pull in, you know, real time deals, by real time hotel prices, and hotel things for each person, every single person would get an individual one, we said, Hey, we have this algorithm that goes through figures out where you live people like they live, where you live, like to go these places and where you traveled historically, and kind of like build this, this module to say, like, here, here's the hotel cities, for Matthew. And it would not just magically for me, like every one in 10 million customers. And so very easy to do that if you have 100,000 customers, very hard to do that. And we also buy what By the way, we wanted to send it out in about two to three hours wholesale, right. And that's where the challenge happens. It's like that complexity of like getting very personalized content in your outbound message. Anyone can do that. If you have 100,000 customers, like that's not hard at all. But when you have a 10 million customers, and you still want to do it within a two hour period, that is very hard. Because architecturally, there's a lot of computation that goes into all of that. Right? Right. If you didn't, if the company or the platform you're using didn't think about that velocity challenge, which is speed at scale, right? So very fast, at a high number. They just stop, they literally stopped, they get to a certain point. And they're like, oh, you're breaking down our systems. Yeah. And you're not the only one using them, right. So like, there's other people using these systems at the same time. And now you've created a problem, not just for yourself, but for everyone else. Right, right. And I remember, you know, sans would literally just stop, they just wouldn't go out. We get like a million million through the sand and it would just stop. And we'd be like, well, what happened? And like, yeah, this database went down as cluster went down over here, and we have to restart them. It's and take two hours, like, whoa, whoa, we need to send this now. Like, this is not valuable. Two days later, or eight hours later, it's not valuable anymore. Yeah. And, and we had to re architect things they were over to add more support for you and more systems, but the other day is foundationally. The architecture would never scale. Right? at that level. Yeah, it just we don't ever do it. And and until like, no SQL databases came around and other like more modern technology, like they were built to handle those types of use cases. Like these legacy platforms are always going to struggle with it. Like they can't change, like you can't change your foundational structure, right? It's just too hard. And so I think that's like the big difference between kind of legacy marketing platforms and these new age platforms are, it's a total paradigm shift for the technology they're using to accomplish their goals. Well,
Matthew Dunn
you've got you got, you know, you've got changed, you got changes in let's call it a more more appropriate data, data technology underneath there. No SQL versus SQL being the now classic example. You've also got on scaled infrastructure that didn't exist. Right, right. You know, 10 years ago, it wasn't. Well, we'll keep spinning up VMs in the cloud to deal with your sand. It was it was oh crap we need we need two years and 10 million bucks. To build a data center to do this, right, so, so that that helps. But I think there are solutions. I know there are solutions that are that are mis architected sitting on cloud resources, who will suffer that same scale challenge that you talked to?
Josh Francia
Yeah, and exactly right. So technology is only good if you know how to use it. Right. And so that really comes back to your foundational setup. Yeah, we've found and what I found in my research was a lot of even New Age companies, you know, new arrivals on the marketing platform, seen the last, you know, several years, they their Genesis was not what they're trying to position themselves as now, their Genesis was generally like, oh, we're gonna make a better version of email marketing. And so everything. So when that's your Genesis, and there's an opportunity to do that, right? So we're gonna make a better email marketing platform, they go out there, they make a good one, it is better, it's better by all accounts than the old legacy ones. But it's still oriented only around maybe email. And so they make very foundational decisions, like you need to have an email address, or unique, you know, you don't use this in email use cases. But when you start to say, when customers like, Well, yeah, but I also want to do pay media. And I also want to do mobile push, all of a sudden, those foundational decisions they made start to limit how successful they can be in other areas, because they didn't think about those areas. And now they're saying, well, we'll just create, like a fake email address here. And then we'll convert you over here. And all these kind of like, yeah, you know, all these like, you know, hacks to kind of get where the customer is, so they can still sell to the customers. They don't don't worry about this behind the scenes, this works fine. But the problem is this customers eventually hit the limits, hit the ceilings and say, Yeah, no, it works great for email, but doesn't work good for this, this and this, right. And I mean, those ceilings, and so I think that's like, when you're looking at stacks and evaluation of stacks, you have to think about like, what was the what was their Genesis? How do they really started? How are they thinking about the future and how they architect their technology stack to handle that? And if they thought about it as completely omni channel, right, like, what email is just as, as a first class citizen as mobile as Zendesk, you know, support tickets, then you're like, oh, okay, then they're not going to have these limiting problems when I try to add a new channel that doesn't exist yet. And no one even knows about, right? They're not have those limiting problems, but they're like, Oh, I'm only a mobile marketing platform, you're like, oh, they're gonna have issues. Yeah. Right. They're gonna have some challenges if they go beyond if we try to use them beyond that.
Matthew Dunn
I'm, I'm curious to delve into some, some slightly more technical and esoteric bits about Blueshift just based on what you said, on and if it's, if your market early don't care about the tech in the podcast, that it's sorry, we're gonna geek out. But you've mentioned, you've mentioned some other platforms and solutions for particular things. Let's let's say Zendesk, for example. That that help address, one of the ways you're interacting with customers, and you guys talk, talk to that. plug into that on, you're not trying to provide the UI and the outbound and inbound for every possible function on the planet.
Josh Francia
Right, right. Exactly. Right. Yeah, go ahead.
Matthew Dunn
Well, I was gonna ask on so let's take mobile messaging on you didn't rebuild, you didn't rebuild What what? You know, Twilio or someone like that does in terms of message, send. Email outbound, you sit on top of various MTA is you didn't try and duplicate that? Okay. Okay.
Josh Francia
Yes, exactly. Right. Oh, so, you know, we really, you know, we brand ourselves as a Smart Hub CDP and the hub components really important. It's a hub and spoke model, you know, where, where's the decision making the creativity, that is the Mission Control need to live when he's live on one platform, and that's Blueshift, but then the actual and the directions to execute, right what to do with those templates you've created? That can be in the best of breed delivery platforms, like sparkpost or sendgrid or mailgun for email, like a Twilio or attentive or for SMS like Zendesk or slack or Salesforce, okay, and there's gonna be a I mean, we have a literally a litany of, you know, customer facing endpoints, right that that we would never want to replace the Oh, you do everything here, because the value is creating the template creating the message and creating the personalization saying, I now send that to Zendesk. Now send that to slack. Now send that to Salesforce, and now our reps gonna log in to Salesforce. They may never, you know, blue shipping. Is this right? They log into Salesforce that oh my gosh, here's all this relevant information, okay? They said I need to act on an IVR system like the IVR system, they pull up, they say all these the last emails this last person time this person was the website, well, that data is coming from Blue chef being pushed into the IVR versus not using Blueshift, you're using the IVR. The IVR is only getting data from Blueshift. And then once they have that call, and they say, Oh, yeah, they want to talk to somebody, they're ready, you know, wherever that call disposition is, it can then go back into Blueshift and the marketing, you know, journey and the orchestration, these customer engagement, marketers say, hey, great. We got one person is ready to talk to somebody. Yeah, let's move them through this flow. Yeah. Right. So it's kind of like you're the mission control of everything, you're using best of breed delivery applications that manage the MTA they manage deliverability, they manage all that stuff. Yeah. And you're tapping into that.
Matthew Dunn
Well, and you're not. You're You're a hub and spoke. But it's not one way, if I'm understanding the architecture correctly, it's like Zendesk knows more about me when I when I call or email, but what I do, via Zendesk is also going to come back into the mix, which is critical difference.
Josh Francia
critical, because if you don't have that unified view, consistent, unified view of the customer, yeah. Then you're making decisions on incomplete data. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. And you're back. Yeah. And you're back to that.
Josh Francia
Back to this siloed, or islands of engagement. Yeah, constantly, like, Oh, I know what the customer has done. As long as they talk to me through the one channel, I talked to them through. Yeah, what if they talk to me through some other channels that I don't manage? Don't know? Well, I can be actually giving them what I consider relevant information that's completely irrelevant to them, because they've moved on, they've done something different. So everything can flow back into blue ship in a variety of ways very easily, which gives you that complete continuous view of the customer at every stage of their of their journey, which is critical, critical for us to do for customers do that, that you know, continuous engagement.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Wow. Well, that's a it's a bold vision. I can I can see why you got excited and eventually jumped in move over there. I'm struck by the differences between the industries you came from before doing this? I mean, travel and you know, in incredibly volatile, you know, inventory driven a hotel room not sold tonight is, you know, zero. That's one clock cycle kind of industry, mortgage, most mortgage companies, very different, stodgy, stuck, slow, all that other stuff, probably not, you know, probably not landing crew when you were there. But, um, like, those are really different backgrounds. It's got to that's got to help put some context to your conversations with customers now.
Josh Francia
Yeah, it's interesting, you know, the thing that I was very fortunate to kind of grow up and travel, I first, I spent my first 10 years@priceline.com, then then acquired booking calm and kayak and Open Table and so and became the leading, you know, online, you know, travel agency, that world. Yeah. And I was there through all of it. Right? Well, I learned a lot at the seeds of very, very smart and forward thinking individuals. And you're right, travel is very interesting. The whole model of travel is distressed inventory, right, like you have dates. And if that room didn't sell, well, guess what, it's can't sell anymore. If a plane flew and didn't have full seats, like it's gone, so. So it's very much that last minute concept is embedded in travel, right, and specifically in otas. And so we don't travel because of that, I think you get faster onto that customer engagement maturity than maybe other companies because you have to
Matthew Dunn
a degree you have to
Josh Francia
hit people when it's relevant for them. Yeah. And travel, you know, contrary to popular belief, travels, not as frequent as people think. I mean, obviously, the pandemic has definitely dampened or the pandemic leisure travel, which is primarily what otas focus on, you know, average person took two trips a year, okay? Now, you know, that's average, right? You know, these once in a lifetime. Big vacations, like those really do happen once in a lifetime. They don't happen every year. And a lot of travelers utility base, like go into someone's wedding, you're going to, you know, you know, baby's blessing or whatever it is. And, and so those things, we realized, like, you can't just say, well, this person travels a lot. We just use what they've done before, you had to think through a bunch of different things. And so it helped get us in travel, I think, especially online travel. It was further along maturity was one of the first ones to adopt the internet back in the mid 90s. And it was just like you're faster on that maturity curve than maybe other other industries. And what excited me about lending tree when I moved over there was it was just like, Travel, but just in a different vertical, right? lemon trees, an aggregator of loans. They're not a mortgage provider. They're an aggregator. They say, hey, you're searching for what type of finance do you need? Yeah, let's help you, I'll give you all the options. And then you go ahead and get your loan from, you know, this company, very similar travel, travel doesn't own like otas. They don't own the hotels and the airlines, they say, we're looking to go and hear your options and go ahead and book. And so we're excited about learning she was, they're very similar to travel in that aggregator space, but they were a little bit further behind and the maturity curve of using personalization using that engagement model to really juice their their best their their output. And the really, the amazing thing was, they have so much more data than travel company. Yeah, yeah, well, companies have very little amount of data. It's only really to like travel only, where finance companies have a lot of data about you as a customer, because they need it right to be able to make the right decisions for you. And so I got very excited about that. When I got to lending trees, like oh, my gosh, like you guys are sitting on so much if I had that in travel, ma'am. So I was very excited that really, they weren't using it like they were using that data to actually help the customer. One joke that, that we've we talked about a lot of blue ship is first party data, customer data. Most companies only serves the company. It doesn't serve the customer customer. Yeah, yeah, that's the problem. Customers want it. They want the Hey, I'm giving you all this data, make sure my experience is better. Yes. You know, don't make me tell you who I am 20 times. Yeah, you know who I am? Yeah, like this? Is this move on? You know? Yes. So that. So that helped me and Lenny tree, I think is an interesting model with this, you know, they are further along the maturity curve than maybe traditional banks, and in the finance world, right. And so I think each industry has their own maturity curve. And you'll see these challenger type brands that are pushing the envelope faster on how do we bring less distance between the customer and the experience, right? Like, how do we make that company and customer and like, you see all these challenger brands and a lot of different verticals. So like in finances, like the lending trees, and nerd wallets, and, you know, in retail, it's like, the stitch fixes, right? where, you know, they're, they're not the traditional brick and mortar companies are challenging that, right. And they're, and they're having success there. And anyway, so it's, it's we love working with those types of challenger brands, because they're much further along and the maturity curve, but we've noticed with the pandemic is the maturity curve has shortened for everybody, and people that people that, you know, maybe we're gonna get there in five years, or trying to get there now. Yeah, because they realize, Oh, my gosh, digital, you know, online marketing, online commerce, it can't be a second, third or fourth priority for us, it has to be number one priority, or we're going to be out, right, because this pandemic told them like, it will happen to don't come to your stores anymore. The distribution is all shut down. What then, and that has definitely had an inflection point of all of these, maybe companies industries that were further behind in the industry, the maturity curve of getting to where they need a platform, like a Blueshift has accelerated dramatically.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, well, yeah, it's I mean, it's certainly it certainly has changed everything, but it's been, you've been, you've been in the digital space a long time. So if I is like, Oh, you guys get a, you're gonna have to play in my sandbox now, like, you just don't have a choice, because we're going to go for at least a year where that's your primary interface on and we're not going to go back to, we're not going to go back to competing just on on the street or on the store experience or something like that. And I think reconciling those, figuring out what the, what the brand website has to do with the store in the town, and how those two serve each other and make the customer experience better, is going to be the trick shot on. And I think some of these, some of these entrants, you're talking about some of the, you know, more cutting edge, they'll probably grow like a rock. And I think some of the established guys are going to kind of get their butts handed to them unless they unless they catch up. Right? Yeah, like, sorry, wait, sorry, just got turned upside down. And it's going to have to work that way. On. It's got to be challenging, both for Blueshift and your customers to to make that adaptation and say this is now the hub.
Josh Francia
Yeah, yeah. Like,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, that's a lot of data to reconcile. It's a lot. No, no, no, you don't own the record anymore. We on the record and that kind of stuff. Can you talk to that a little bit?
Josh Francia
Sure. Well, they always they always own the record. So the customers always own their data. ablution never owns any of their day they put in their system or wouldn't work. Right. So so it's just more of a paradigm shift of how do you access the data?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Okay. How
Josh Francia
do you use the data to make informed marketing decisions and a lot of customers will say, What data do you need in the platform? They need that is that needs to be used to make parking decisions. Okay, we'll put that data in there. We may not put every single piece of data in there because there's some compliance or privacy concerns they may have. Yeah, it coming from the finance world, we definitely had that lending tree, we're like, okay, we're gonna put data in, we need this data, we're going to obfuscate it. So no one really knows what this data means except for the user of the platform. Okay, yeah. To do that, and there's a lot of encryption that goes on to like, make sure privacy is and compliances are comfortable, right, because they have to be comfortable or marketing can do their job. And I think the other piece is, a lot of times it starts with, you know, maybe half a dozen use cases the customer wants to do. And the nice thing about the blueshift platform, it's very modular. So we say, Hey, here's your use case, and they all end up, they all all seem to be revolving around triggered email messaging. Great. Let's start there. But what data do you need in the platform to trigger stuff off of Yeah, oh, we know, these types of events. Okay, well, where are those events come from? Well, they come from our website and our mobile app. Great. Here, put this, you know, put this, you know, JavaScript code on your website. Now, this SDK in your app. And now we can stream it all into the blue ship platform. And look how easy is to say, Okay, this event happened. Here's what you know, the template you want to create, here's the messaging you want. And they're creating profiles in that process. And that works really well it Oh, my gosh, this is great. And then what ends up happening is you see that aha moment with them. They say, wait a second, we can do this. We can we also do this other part because like, we love to be able to talk to our customer service center. And tell them something like, yeah, sure, let's add that in. And so it kind of snowballs. But they can get great success with limited use cases, which means it's limited amount of data they have to put in, okay, and then as the use cases expand the data needed to support those use cases also expand. And then all of a sudden, they Oh, my gosh, I'll paid media team would love to be able to use this and not have to download CSV files and bug our SQL developers to give them files every month. Yeah, guys help us? Uh, yeah, no problem. They can log in, they can do segments, they can push them to, you know, a bunch of different paid media places, and have them automatically synced and then either paid add media platforms and go and bid on those audiences, like, Oh, my gosh, and so all of a sudden, starts snowballing. Yeah, but they get value with simple use cases, right. And then they can continue to expand. And although many of our customers will start with us with fairly simple use cases, we make sure we cover them. And then two or three years later, they're using every single feature of the platform, maybe only five people would use the platform, the beginning now hundreds of people in the company are using that platform on a daily basis. And so it has that ability to really shift and I think part of that's that's the maturity of the company, thinking about how they use this and getting comfortable with using this customer data in a platform that we haven't seen before.
Matthew Dunn
You know, it's a Yeah, that it actually makes a ton of sense. And you get the you get the guy in customer service, who actually realizes he benefits from the guys over in I don't know, sales, right? being plugged into the same thing. Like he can do a better job of service, they can do a better job of sales, like if you start to get a win win, compounding effect, and I'm guessing that's the snowball. Exactly. You're talking about, you know, that some of the tech sector is is is arguing over acronyms and labels and which ones Ascendant? Much of what you described would have been what a CRM company said they were all about a decade or so ago. Right, right, man. No, I just work. It probably for probably a ton of reasons, but I've yet to meet a CRM that. Oh,
Josh Francia
yeah. Yeah. Well, it's funny like we hear that a lot like what's known as a CRM and a CDP. Yeah. CMP, or DSD? np cdgmp. Yeah, we have one blog post about this, but CRM and CDP, you're right like CRM, like Well, that's what CRM is like, Well, no, it's not a CRM is purely built to be manually adjusted and entered all the time. Right. So it's, it's mostly a sales focus tool, yes, to manage very standard processes within a sales cycle lead to a opportunity to a contact to an account. And as long as you play within that standardized structure,
Matthew Dunn
fine. It works. Yeah,
Josh Francia
it works great, right? And most almost every sales orc has CRM, but marketers don't think that way. Marketers thinks in campaigns, they think in predictions, they think in a bunch of different terms that aren't related to leads, contacts and accounts. Yeah, as an opportunity. That's a sales function. And most of the things that we noticed is cdp's. Work on systems of data, high velocity of data, we're seeing rhymes are actually working on low volume of data and mostly manual intervention. Yeah, and you know, build up all these rules and, and use cases to make sure the manual manual inputs follow a pattern. So your CRM data is still clean. But it's very different, right? It's just a very different mindset. And because of that, the CRMs are not built to handle the things that cdp's handle. It just doesn't it doesn't work. They're not the architecture is completely different. And the use case is completely different. And so we do see people like they sometimes because a CRM term has been used in a variety of different content contexts. You know, you hear like, Oh, I'm in charge of CRM at a consumer brand. And what they're really saying is, I'm in charge of really customer engagement, marketing, not really customer relationship marketing, but they don't really have that monitor correctly. And so they look for b2c CRM is a term that we see a lot. And we say, yeah, we'll play on that term, we'll educate you. This is what that is, like, yeah, that what you're thinking is really a CDP. But you're calling it a CRM, because you don't really know. And you don't want to be to be CRM, because then you'll just use Salesforce and you realize that's not going to work for you. Right. And so like, that's what we need. And so like, there's some education, the market, I think, in the last few years, it's gotten much better with like, CDD, becoming much more standard of return. But there's still a lot of education on what you really need. Yes. And what they mean when people say like, Oh, my charter CRM or lifecycle marking, what do they really mean? And what the platform, what you mean is they're in charge of customer engagement. That's what they really mean, across all channels, and cdp's have the platform to help them with that.
Matthew Dunn
Right. Right. Yeah. And the going back a little bit to what you said about CRM, usually, here's a funny way to get at it. I was at a panel or a conference caller zoom call or something like that. Maybe a month ago, when Salesforce acquisition of slack, yeah, was announced. And we were battling back and forth and partially instinct, but I said, you know, you're taking the one of the most structured systems in the world, and one of the least, right, and trying to cram them together. That's gonna be fun to watch, right? slack is topsy turvy, you don't know what's gonna happen. Oh, add another channel, and it'll all be reconciled by search. It's a mess. Right? Yeah. Structurally. And Salesforce, by contrast, God, that's a lot of fields. Oh, man, I hate that interface. Right. There. Very, very, very different. Yeah. And and, you know, you're the philosophy of blue ship sounds like yeah, we know, you can't quite predict in advance what details are going to come out of, you know, Zendesk, and service and what details are going to come out of it, or the booking engine or whatever else, our job is to continue to make them coherent around that thing called the customer.
Josh Francia
Right? That's exactly right, is exactly where you need to be flexible. And, and, you know, like, Salesforce is a great example. It's, it's, it's rigid, flexibility, if that makes sense.
Oh, yeah. Thanks.
Josh Francia
It's very rigid. And as long as you follow their construct, you're fine. But there's a limit to that construct. And it works well within their their world of sales when you start to add in different pieces. And what we've seen a lot in the world is in the industry is marketing clouds out there all started from one core Genesis product, right? Like if you look at Salesforce, they started as a sales CRM, Salesforce, right? Yeah, they're still really really good at that. That's like their core. Yep. But because they got really big, you can generally grow easier through acquisition, right? So they start acquiring, yes, tons of other peripherals rebrand them. And and, you know, the, the, the message they put out there publicly is all it all works together. But we all know it doesn't right? Because it's very foreign technologies trying to merge and mixes doesn't work. Like you can't do that, like the amount of architectural debt that they would have to do yes, it would like outweigh the value of the acquisition. So no one does these kind of rebranded puts a nice slides and some maybe some nice gooey things like where am a it's kind of like say, Hey, this is our new this our new offering, right? Yeah, it will be an Oracle doesn't Salesforce does it. And the problem is the customer suffers, right? Because the customer says Oh, I love your product, you know that you're really good at like, you're gonna love your databases or Adobe, I love you know, you know, your whatever is omniture, which I mean, they were essentially bought everything but yeah, viewers, I guess I will have everything you do. And the harsh reality is know what they've really invested their money in and their technology is their core product. And when they're trying to upsell everyone that buys that core product, they get the whole suite, the monolithic tear. Yeah, they'll work really well and so many companies Customers come to us and say I can't stand. Yeah. x x x. Yes, yes. All one of these clouds. Yeah, well, I love this because it's not really x is something from 25 years ago that all the people that built it are long gone, and no one's really updated it. Yeah, at some point, you're just probably going to turn it off, right? Because it's not really doing well. And so you're gonna be caught, you know, holding the bag. You want to move to a platform that was purpose built for what you need, you know, and integrate with the good parts of the clouds that you're using. But don't you know, don't buy the don't buy the the fallacy of like, this monolithic structure makes all your problems go away. Like that's not true. Yeah, it's not true at all.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, I I'm not going to pick on him too much. But I you I don't know if you were, if you don't rabbit hole in, in email marketing might not hit your radar screen. But Oracle had acquired bronto. Yes, I'll bet right now they're shuttering. They're shuttering that and there's a whole bunch of folks and end of life. Yeah, life. They're, they're suffering exactly what you just outlined, like, yeah, last guys are gone. We're gonna, we're gonna shut this off. Right, feel free to move over if you like, you know, if not, but by and like, we've got a campaign genius. We've got a we've got a customer. I sent them that announcement. I saw it. And I went, Oh, man. Hey, did you know that this is about to happen? Like, in a year is not that much time to make that shift? Yeah. Yeah, and it's the the nature as well as the digital sector matures, at least a bit. If you've got a strong foothold, you know, if you are the CRM in a company, and you think there's a chance to help them do more and better by bolting on these other pieces, it sounds like a good proposition. But I tend to agree with with your thesis that it's not necessarily gonna work. Just because you say it's bolted together.
Josh Francia
Yeah. And the other thing that I've noticed and having lived through some of it is they, they, they almost hit you twice, they go out, they hit you first and say, Hey, this all works super well all on one system to control them all, you're already using some of our products. let's let's let's you know, use more you'll get the full suite will give you a good discount. And they say, Don't worry, we'll make sure it all works. We have all these service hours, you can buy all these consultants that can help you all these agencies have done it before. And they bring in this external agency or two as we specialize in this type of thing. And now you're like, wait, I had to pay for the platform. And I had to pay for another consulting firm to come in and teach me how to integrate and use the platform. Yeah, yeah. Hold on. Now, this has got really complicated and I'm really sure it's even going to work. Yeah. And I, we've heard from so many companies like, yeah, we went through that, like, we went through it, we got it, we got the platform, we got the whole thing we locked us in. Then we got this consulting firm, they came in, they charged us an arm and a leg. And guess what, eight months later, we still haven't launched? Yeah, we're still sitting here. Yeah. And now we're super frustrated, you know, and now our executive teams really pissed and they're saying why are we spending all this money on this on these companies and, and it really comes from like, don't buy that, that that thesis don't don't buy into it. If you're if you're an up and coming marketer up and coming brand, you don't want to buy the car that's 50 years old that has a new paint job. This is not going to run as well, as a brand new car, it may look similar, but it's not going to run as well. And you won't know it until your to your to delta until it's too late. And so we deal with that all the time. I mean, all the time, we have people coming to us and saying like, I you know, cannot stand such and such, you know, Marketing Cloud. Yeah. All right. Yep. Which one? Which one did you buy? Right? Let's go through it. And they're like, yeah, just doesn't scale and doesn't work. And we spent all this time resources and ticket campaigns out the door. And, and, and we empathize with them and say, Hey, well, let's, let's show you a different option like that. Someday, we could work a lot easier for you like, Oh, this is amazing. This is so
Matthew Dunn
much better. So nice. Nice. Well, for sure. But you know, back to the pandemic for a second. As, as we've, as we move more and more interactions and conversations into some digital channel, on the notion that we could purpose build a system that's going to cover all those unanticipated interactions and bring them back and reconcile them and make sense of them. So that, you know, as a business, I know my customer better. I'm talking to them better. That's that's the that's a tough thesis. It's, it's it's a tough lift. I mean, we never imagined how much stuff we'd be collating already. Right,
Josh Francia
right. Yeah. And that's the thing, right, like, one of the thesis is that that our founders had was the amount of data that customers produce is grown. exponentially and will continue to grow. Yeah, exponentially. Yeah. Right. And so they thought about that and like, the amount of customer data that customers are giving or producing to companies will continue to grow. And there's going to hit a point where they customers expectations will also rise with the amount of customer data they're providing. And if companies don't take that customer data, and reciprocate the the expectations and provide the better, easier, simpler experience, then customers will not be loyal anymore. And they'll start to go and find companies that do that. And so they thought about that promises, you need to build a truly agnostic omni channel hub that surrounds around that customer data. And companies will either adhere to that policy, or they're going to be left behind. And we've had legislation and privacy issues happening, right? Yeah, it's almost says customer data is okay. If you give people the options to manage it correctly. Well, a lot of companies don't have even the ability to give them that option. Right? Yeah. So customers are not opposed to giving data to companies, they just want to make sure it's secure. It's handled the way they want it to be handled. And it's used to benefit them and not the company, right. And the biggest thing, we always talk about the single view of the customer, but it needs to be the single view for the customer, the customer has to think about, well, every time I talk to this company, they know who I am, like they talk to me, they know who I am, they know what I've done, they know what I like, and they know me better than I know myself. And they're using AI in the right way to make my experience with them better, easier, simpler. And those companies are catapulting the competition, just leapfrog them. Yeah. And more and more companies, the big companies that have tons of data, they have the biggest opportunity, the biggest risk, if they don't adopt this type of mindset, they're gonna be left behind.
Matthew Dunn
Well, you touched on a point I was hoping we'd get to just because it seems so germane to Blueshift, you know, as as we're starting to recognize that data and, and privacy are one of the things that we have to revisit, as the as the digital ecosystem matures. And I would say one of the value props that you could walk into a into a prospective customer with is we can actually help you do a better job staying on top of that, like the the regulatory exposure, the risk that companies with a zillion silos have is kind of scary.
Josh Francia
is super scary, right? Because now there's there's fine there's there's little risk. Yeah, yeah. And he's just being email that used to be where the big risk was with can spam and all that stuff. And he said, Hey, listen, email, if I opt out, and you keep sending to me, yeah, that news, like you're not respecting my opt in preferences. Yeah. And honestly, you can be fined by can spam, right? And that law was a long time ago, but never applied to like advertising or display or personalization. But now it does, right. And cookies. Yeah. So you know, email systems and customer want to worry about is one flag and you know what, the ESP will handle that for us? No problem. Well, yeah, but what about all these other flags you have to worry about? And what about someone who says I don't want you use my data at all? Like, forget me completely forget me completely. Yeah, well, forget me. Like, I don't want not taught not to stop tracking me from now on. Forget everything you ever knew about me? Yeah. Right. How you do that in the system that you have, like, Well, I have data pieces all over you everywhere. Yeah, right. Well, blue ship is literally one call he's no problem. Forget, forget the user. They're forgotten. Why just like that. Yeah, you know, and and they have all of these privacy abilities now that actually help are compliant the compliance teams that these various companies say Oh, thank goodness, we have one place to manage this. That's we don't manage this in a variety of silos, because the risk is pretty high. Yeah, right. The wrist is pretty high. And you know, that these legislation they're looking for scapegoats are looking for people to say, hey, these people are not following only takes one or two. Yeah. And then was like, oh, shoot, we make sure we get our ducks in a row. Yeah. And, and so it does help a lot with that, to your point, it makes it so much easier for the compliance side of the house to say, here's our system, here's how we do it. Here's how we manage it. Here's the history here's all the audits like so easy for them to do it and then and then say Hey, no, we've we're compliant. Here's all the evidence.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Well, that that old fashioned phrase system of record, a beat it actually really, it really does apply here. Yeah, the customer system of record is gonna sit in blue ship for your for your customers, which is which is a big deal. You know, the that recent The recent dance between Reddit and stock markets over over GameStop I'm waiting for someone to realize that they could they could tie a large company in some pretty serious not just by saying forget me. Yeah, like the cost of a forget me operation just got to be pretty darn high,
Josh Francia
pretty high and you don't
Matthew Dunn
have you know, from a legal regulatory perspective, you actually don't have an option to say no, we're not going to do that. So you have to say Yes,
Josh Francia
right. Wow. Right.
Matthew Dunn
If the whole Bank of consumers gets ticked off at company x and says that's it, we're all gonna write in and say, forget me. Yeah, it's gonna stop, isn't it?
Josh Francia
Right. And I think I think that's the secret is, how do you get customers that don't want you to forget them? Right? Yeah. Can you ever write the experiences? Like No, no, I don't want you to forget, like Netflix. Please never forget me Netflix, like my life would be very hard. Amazon, please. Never. Yeah, absolutely. Please never forget me. In fact, no more about me. Right? Like, make things easier for me. And the reason we say Netflix or Amazon, like, Don't ever forget me is because my life will be so much harder. Yeah, if you forgot me, right? If you forgot me all those in my life, we really hard things. They made things very easy, very simple, very friction free. And a lot of companies just don't do it. So the companies will say, yeah, forget me or other people, like, continue to provide poor experiences to their customers. Yeah. Even though they have tons of options and data to make that experience so much better than these don't do it. Yeah, those the companies are gonna be like, you know, I'm done with you guys. I'm done with like, trying to introduce myself a million times, I'm done with like, standing on hold forever and not getting resolutions. I'm done with like, not finding that, like, the products I want, like, I'm done. I'm gonna take my business to a different company that sells the same things as you guys, but treats me like a real customer and real human and knows who I am. Yeah. And like, that's the risk, right? So it's not like, Well, how do I make sure I can make all the compliance like, Well, how do you make sure that you don't want customers to forget you? Yeah, they don't
Matthew Dunn
want to be forgotten. That's very, it's very, it's very well put it by the way, you you hold you hold the record. Now I've got this little internal measuring stick, which is how long into a conversation before Amazon comes up. You went so far, because you realize it I just tied up a whole hour of your time learning about Blueshift, but we didn't actually talk about Amazon until until. And, you know, I've always delighted when Amazon comes up. I mean, I'm in the northwest, I've watched Amazon just goes up on my Amazon account is from 1997. And it's Yeah. And I don't want them to forget me, to your point, right. I really don't want them to forget me. But they they've they've they've pioneered, you know, in so many good ways. That it's fun when when Amazon pops up, because you go wow, they do that well. And while they do that really well. And it's, you know, it's hard to throw a rock and say they don't do that very well. I'm not I think they're, I think their email game could use some improvement personally. But, you know, we'll knock on their door and help them with help with that content.
Josh Francia
It's not their point.
Matthew Dunn
I should wrap up, though, and respect your time because I'd said let's talk for half an hour. And here we are an hour in and it's actually fascinating on whose I'm sure you spend a ton of industries but who are the you know, someone's listening, listening? Wow, I need to learn more about that company. Like, who's the real sweet spot in terms of companies that become blue chip customers?
Josh Francia
Yeah, that's the that's one of the great things about blue chip is we didn't we didn't focus on a specific vertical Yeah, but you'll find that a lot of platforms are like hey, we're the retail marketing platform. And every customers retail all their use cases are retail and again, they've made architectural decisions platform decisions for only that vertical which means there's a ceiling on what they can really do. Blue ship didn't do that. Lucia is very agnostic on vertical so we have deep deep experience with retail companies like Stitch Fix and e commerce like slick deals and others that use our platform. Yes like deals is one of our customers Stitch Fix the customer of ours. Also more retail like James Allen are tough to needle that are more kind of like consider purchase jewelry and you know, mattresses and you know, the whole serta Simmons beauty companies are part of our part of that. So retail is a big focus of ours. Media is a big focus. So streaming media like Discovery Channel. Yeah, and all of their subsidiaries like HGTV and animal planet and all those guys are part of MDN discovery plus now are all part of blue ship.
Yeah. And so
Josh Francia
they use us in a variety of media forums, as well as BBC and others. And then finance is very For us, so like lending tree nerdwallet makes an asset clear score in the UK and a lot of really big financial companies. And then e learning is another big vertical of ours Udacity and Skillshare, and brainly, and brainpop, and class dojo, you know, are all customers and those those span the gamut of, you know, you know, elearning from a, let me, you know, self educate myself and you know, get Nanodegree on Udacity, or something to education management inside, you know, K through 12 schools like brainware, like class dojo and brainpop. Do Wow. And so we run the gamut, and that's B to C, as well as B to C to B, or B to B to C, where we work with businesses as well as consumers. Yeah, on, on all those industries. So I would say those are some of our biggest ones that we work with. So retail, media, finance, e learning, but really, and then healthcare, we know Kaiser Permanente is gonna really help us Wow, comms a customer. And so Amen. Health is a cost. So there's a lot of a lot of a lot of companies in healthcare, how also start with the same issues that finance struggles, highly regulated. And so it's great, it's great to see the platform, be able to adjust whatever the use cases are from the customer. The platform can use can work super well, with those use cases, just like it works well with, you know, typical, you know, maybe ecommerce use cases or more maybe standard. Yeah, there's no standard. You know, it's very complicated. Well, it worked well with those companies as your you you.
Matthew Dunn
You're very delete pal. On your HIPAA compliant, you just implied that compliant. Wow, that's a big deal. Right? That's a really big deal to talk about. You really need to keep track of and take care of the customer record. That's right. You know, that's my gallbladder in there. I don't want to lose track of that. Wow. Wow. Fascinating. Okay, one more minute. Okay.
Josh Francia
Yep,
Matthew Dunn
we did speed round. speed round. Let's do it. Okay, dogs, cats, both or neither.
Josh Francia
No dogs, no cats. I have five children, which I think grants me an MSD from me on pet
your
Matthew Dunn
five kids and they haven't been lobbying for a dog.
Josh Francia
They've been lobbying constantly. Dog. We tell them we have five children. And they're all very close in age. So we have five kids 10, eight, H 10. And under. Oh, wow. And so our last two are twins. And so we said hey, you know, once you're 18 you can get a dog. And that's been our standard with our kids like when you're 18 you can have a pet and you can take care of it. But until then mommy daddy choose if we have pets or not. And we've chosen no pets, because we've over indexed on on the human pets that were there run the run around our house constantly.
Matthew Dunn
That's enough. That's enough siblings where you might not miss the dog. Right? That's right. Thank you, my sister out for a walk. Wow. That's That's wonderful. I got big family like that is a treat. I get my wife's from a big family on last speed round question. Favorite or, or current favorite book or author?
Josh Francia
Oh, man, that's a good one. Um, I'm currently reading snowball the biography about Warren Buffett. So I find that pretty fascinating. I'm a big fan of Warren Buffett and just kind of his philosophies on life and his philosophies in business. I'm a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell bet glad glad books, I read almost all of his books. The last one talking to strangers I found a very be very insightful window. And that's a good one. I came out maybe a couple years ago. very insightful. Very cool. Very interesting. So but I'm a I'm a sucker for nonfiction. So I love kind of nonfiction, you know, business psychology, marketing type books, I tend to read, you know, several of those, you know, every year just to kind of, you know, stimulate my mind say what those are, those are something that I like quite a bit.
Matthew Dunn
The the the book and author is turned out to be a real gem in in the speed round questions that we sort of made up when we were putting this together, because people really, people really engage that question. Yeah. And they almost almost looks up, looks up and laughed and goes, and then they come up with this, and then they add this and then they add this and, and I've been jotting notes. I'm getting one heck of a reading list from these conversations with. Yes. Great. Well, terrific. Well, my guest for this wonderful hour has been Josh Francia, Chief Growth Officer at Blueshift, you can find Blueshift at Blueshift.com. And Josh, thanks so much for the time. Absolutely.
Josh Francia
Thank you, Matthew. great talking