A Conversation with Paul Shriner of AudiencePoint
When is the best time to send an email? How often should I send email? What email should I send?
Paul Shriner and his colleagues at AudiencePoint have provided billions of answers to these questions. Paul and Matthew have way too much fun getting technical, speculating about the leading edge of email.
TRANSCRIPT
Matthew Dunn
Hey, everybody, welcome. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the Future of Email Marketing podcast. And I'm delighted to have as my guest today after a whole bunch of silly logistics, getting him aboard. Paul Shriner, who is co founder and chief evangelist at AudiencePoint, Paul, welcome. So happy to have you on.
Paul Shriner
Yeah, thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to this one, your reputation precedes you.
Matthew Dunn
That’s my nose. Tell us a bit about you know, tell us a bit about you. I've got some I've got some speed round questions in a second. But how did you end up doing what you're doing? Because you've got quite a diverse background.
Paul Shriner
That is true. And I come back to my way into email a little bit, I don't want to say accidentally, because it really does sound like I'm stumbling and bumbling. But sometimes the you pick the industry, and sometimes it picks you and in this case, it was one where it picked me. Yeah. Of all things I was on staff with young life, I was the area director, or young life on the Olympic Peninsula. So port towns in Port Angeles and forks. And the things that are true about that, which makes it kind of interesting, or the story kind of interesting is rural poverty, small towns. So low population bases, and you have to raise your money, your budget from those areas, at least that's the model that young lot uses you would raise from within your own community. A challenge was these are people that didn't have money, the driving school bus or driving truck, that's how they paid their bills. And, and while you know, every every any amount that was given felt like an incredible gift. And it did. It was also very difficult. It was difficult to raise money there. Because well, while your $100 check, I know the impact that had on your family to give. It didn't pay the bills the way bigger checks would if that made sense. And so I sort of early on what to the conclusion, okay, I need to raise from outside my community to sort of pay for this effort. And so I was sending out emails and things. I've always been a pretty good writer storyteller. I waved my hands, you know, like, this is always who by been. And so started sending emails out. What I found was, there's people I was missing, are you?
Matthew Dunn
When was this? Like, just historically?
Paul Shriner
Yeah. So this would have been so I started on staff 2004 and left staff 2016 2015 I want to say, Okay, and so it's, I would say we're talking like 2005 2006. Okay, so emails, it was mostly newsletters, hey, here's what's going on. And there was always an ask at the end, that was sort of a gentle ask if you want to be part of this, let me know, right. I was sending emails out and what was happening was I would follow up with phone calls for the important people and say, Hey, I don't know if you've got that email. We'd love you do participate. And And what was interesting was there's a lot of people will be like, No, I didn't get your email. Oh, and and so like, my current business partner, I sent him an email, send it out. 11 o'clock at night. Port Townsend time, dude, sand, right. And so I called him He's like, I didn't get the email. I don't know what you're talking about. And I was like, I sent it to you. Check your email. I sent it 11 o'clock. So he goes to 11 o'clock, and he's like, I don't see anything. And I was like, well, you're Eastern time. So that's gonna be 2am your time. And he said, You sent me an email at 2am. I said, No, I sent you an email at 11 o'clock. He's like, but it says it's here at 2am and I was like timezones, ma'am, that's the same time he was representative of this bigger problem, right, which, at least at the time, which was one size does not fit all. I can't just blast in email out and hope that everyone hits it. So and he's like, I don't know what to tell you, you're a nerd solve this problem. And so, you know, because my solution is never let me just google a bunch of solutions. It's like, I, I'm a programmer, I bet I can figure this out, right? So he hits me, I was like, Okay, what if? What if we kept track of when people open email, right? And then send it at that point? And so did that saw pretty meaningful lift? And where does this fit? How does it fit? It was it was an email, right? At first, I thought it was probably much more social. No, it was email. And then the more time I've spent in the industry, the more just kind of how my brain works, where here's a problem, here's a solution has kind of fit in. And this is an industry that sort of, I want to say begging for innovation, but it's certainly, you know, I think that's part of the the interest of your of your show here, right? Like how do we how do we focus on innovation? Because it's an industry that's, I want to say usually a couple years behind the rest of technology. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. And Paul's, Paul's being posed being modest if you're listening, because he, he just he just kind of skated from Port Townsend, which is a small town on the tip of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington to what did you tell me to over 2 billion, sort of meaningful core records inside AudiencePoint?
Paul Shriner
That's really Yeah, yeah. and a half billion,
Matthew Dunn
but who's counting? Let's,
Paul Shriner
let's talk about that. Because, you know, like, the the whole set time optimization thing now, it's a household name. Right? Right. Right. When when we, when we kind of first built it, it was like, hey, I've got this idea, right? And what should we call this thing? I don't know. Like, we've got send in time. And we're optimizing. There it is, boom.
Matthew Dunn
Really? Right. Right.
Paul Shriner
And, and sort of backing our way into it, it was right at the same time. silverpop was releasing kind of their, their, their version of the same thing. Okay. And it just without talking to each other, we all kind of landed on this is what it's going to be called? Oh, now early on. Yeah, early on. And we're kind of victims of our own naivete, and ignorance, right? Early on, we were like, We need to store as much data as we possibly can. Because that's going to allow us to arrive at better conclusions and better decisions. Were at the time, silverpop was just kind of taking the last 10 touches and just sort of doing a count. And saying, Alright, looks like 4pm because there's two touches there. Four o'clock, where we were like, No, no, let's store everything anyone's ever done with anyone. Right, right? Nope. Everything from the beginning from this perspective of we've got this data pool. Okay. And, and with that data pool, it was it was like, Okay, if we're taking this data on, early, early on, we sort of arrived at this conclusion of like, a security by design model, right? If we're going to take people's data, we need to secure it and protect it.
Matthew Dunn
Okay,
Paul Shriner
so that was where we started. So as these new legislative instruments ccpa GDPR. And there's a bunch more coming. Yep. We were prepared for those so that we would be ready. So what do we do we take that sort of email address, D identify it. And then we hang a bunch of sort of what you'd call maybe not all that interesting data on its own when someone opens or clicks an email. And we arrive at a lot of interesting conclusions from that. Gotcha. When do they open? How often do they open? When should we target them? Um, not to mention sort of the implications of like, well, they're engaging with you, but they're not engaging with anyone else in the world, or they're engaging with all of these other brands, but you can't get a pulse. You're missing it. So there's a lot of just like telling, as a brand telling your brand story, because you have better information. Right? That's kind of what we're doing now. And so, yeah, we went from like, hey, I've got this idea. We're doing it with young life, you know, a couple 100 people on my list. Our first customer? Yeah, first customer was Sony. Me. Well, Sony Europe, right? They call her like, Hello, this is Sony. Right? No, it's not but you do have an English accent. So that's kind of interesting. Maybe you are who you say you are.
Matthew Dunn
So so you guys found some you guys found some product market fit kind of snapped? Right company that
Paul Shriner
we did. And that's I think probably what drove a lot of our innovation early. Right. But um, we weren't we weren't ready for that kind of scale or volume. Let me go order orders of magnitude. We'll have you know, that's what that does. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Let me let me let me pause and rewind and because I tried to keep in mind that someone may be listening and not not getting a chance to see both of our hands up in the air to a point so so if you're an email marketer, and you're you're listening to this and say you're where Paul was a few years back, like get her you're just you're sending emails to help keep your business working. is connected to your market your customers. The AudiencePoint proposition correct me if I don't have this accurate is that you can connect better by having some intel about their own preferences and things that drive them to read your email. And then your your, your your you're doing some degree of making, making that knowledge of that anonymized de identified person better, because you may see some patterns about them from someone else who's also an email or who's also connected to AudiencePoint somehow. Fair,
Paul Shriner
right? That's exactly right. That is the value proposition. Okay, fascinating. And I think the deeper we dive into this domain, there's two things that have kind of come to the surface, because you're talking about that that person that's emailing. Part of it is, I think, learning to be patient with the data, because the data has a story unto itself. And so we're at first it was just like, well, we got to figure out when people are engaging, right? The more we sat with that, the more we're like, well, it's not just when they're engaging, but how old is it? Right? How, how far away from now, now,
Matthew Dunn
you go back here? Yeah, right.
Paul Shriner
What's it? What about proximity? So like, if you want to sort of take your, you know, a calendar, you know, you'd say, you've got sort of weeks and, and you have days, right? And I'm drawing a, you know, what looks like a really poorly drawn, I have an art art degree from Seattle Pacific. It
Matthew Dunn
asked you about that? Yes.
Paul Shriner
Yeah, you can tell that's definitely well worth money spent. Right. So you know, your, your vertical rows, vertical rows, that's going to be your sort of day of week, and you've got your horizontal rows, which would be sort of your, your week at a time, right? Yeah. And so if you start to look and start to see is there are there are there patterns to that sort of, I know, because I'm, we're all marketers here, and we put our marketing hat on, you know, quickly, early on, I coined those micro patterns, because micro patterns sells tickets better. We also could call them quick densities or open densities. You know, there's ways to sort of frame that, but, but the idea is, are there are they're sort of these little patterns that live in this bigger story. Right? Okay. So we got to be patient to find those. Is there patterns from like, Are there times when you open more, Are there times when you click More, and depending on what you're trying to accomplish as a marketer, you might use your algorithm to target that accordingly. Right? The devil becomes a little bit in the details. How do you align your goals? With your technology spend and your effort and and all of that?
Matthew Dunn
I'm curious, I'm going to throw something at you because the worlds intersected a little bit here. In terms of in terms of campaign genius in real time content? Right, guys? AudiencePoint have data about, about the content of the message, you've mentioned time, you've mentioned, sender. Do you know whether it's, you know, words or pictures, repeat message, not
Paul Shriner
repeat message, anything like that? We don't know, we we have just we and part of That's right, like you choose to know what you want to know. Because and you say I'm going to ignore these other pieces, because and early on, I did some stuff around
sort of
Paul Shriner
querying the raw headers coming into the of the message. Yeah, as as a Chrome extension, right to and and the value exchange here was, you know, let's say you install this Chrome extension on your computer. And, and the idea was, hey, marketer, we're going to tell you who sent this email to you. In exchange, we'll get to know that that you open that email at that time. Right? Right, right. It's the equivalent of like, if we put a quarter in every slot machine in Las Vegas, you know, we're eventually going to make enough money from that. And so it was really interesting. So I built this really cool Chrome extension and, and I'm using this JavaScript library called gmail dot j. s, yo and allowed me to walk through your entire inbox and I could steal all of your timestamps, right, steal is the right word. Right. And so I sit down with our attorney and I say, hey, I've got this cool thing. It's amazing. And he was like, we cannot do that. You cannot do this. Like what are you talking about as a rule like we can get this this and this and I was like, I built the filter levels in so it prevents me from getting access to PII and pH i right. And he's like, how do you know, he's like, what if there's a subject line that says, hey, Paul, yeah, how's that shot going? Right? Like, oh, yeah, like you just can't, we can't can't walk people Those inboxes. And so, lesson learned. I don't even know how we got to that particularly discussion here.
Matthew Dunn
I asked you about content,
Paul Shriner
right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we my our attorney said, No, you're not allowed to get into the content game at all and interesting and honestly, probably wise. Right?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Yeah. But it's, there's a, there's an interesting boundary condition there on not just not just not just the privacy considerations, which are obviously becoming more and more a real, live cultural, civic, governmental issue. Um, but but the content issue as well, like, if you're, if you're, if you're blind to what someone's blind in a, you know, technical sense, I guess, if you have to stay blind to what it is they're reading what it is, they're seeing how it's formatted or any of those things. The the causal spark for their behavior isn't being factored in to the Intel because you because you can't you can't if you can't know what and if there's no if there's no taxonomy from the marketer, this is this was this kind of message that was that kind of content? Yeah, that's a that's a that's an interesting opportunity. It does point us in a direction that I wanted to go with you as well. Because while while I'm really interested in talking about the innovative edge of things that are happening with email, it's what you guys doing with with, with send time optimization, it strikes me that where innovation for the last Oh, call it 20 plus years as digital as exploded, it's all been about doing new stuff and doing more stuff, right. There's a developer who says I a wedding do more with that. Innovation is also about increasingly about doing the right things are better things. Right. It's more thoughts, right? Yeah.
Paul Shriner
I mean, yes, like, and this is something we early on, thought, well, goodness, we can do all of this with data, but part of the innovation was, are we doing it in a way that honors subscriber intent? Are we doing it in a way that honors legislative instruments that live out there? Right, yeah. And so, I mean, we've tried to be very, very cognizant, right. of intent. What is the what is the subscriber expecting you to do with this data? Mm hmm. I think, yes. It's right here. There you go. That's one of the five children. I said. Yes, five. Yeah, I know. I know. We're gluttons for punishment. So but that, you know, the idea of, yes, innovation certainly is that I think this, this has been a conversation we've been having lately, internally, right? As we grow up a little bit and grow from just sort of a send time optimization model, into how often should I email? What are the signals that exist? How do we, how do we, how do we package this? There is a there's a cost to that, right? There's a cost there that free wheeling cowboy, I can do this. You know, where you shoot your your six guns in the air? The Old West, we have to grow up. And with that, there's a cost to it. Right? So what about ISO to 701? What about sock to compliance? How do we how do we both innovate, which is free wheeling, and yes, we can do that stuff, and still adhere to some of those things that are a lot more expensive to, to cover.
Matthew Dunn
So here's a here's a, here's a funny, maybe maybe a slightly pointed way to ask the question, but have you had has AudiencePoint, algorithmically or whatever ever said to an AudiencePoint customer, what you really should be doing is not mailing this guy or mailing him less?
Paul Shriner
Yeah, absolutely. We will do that all the time. That's, that's in our wheelhouse, usually, but I've also heard from our partners and email service providers and and people that fit they're like, yeah, we can't do that because we make money when they email them more.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, no, it does it although that's an argument I've got with you. I think you've been I've touched on this in past conversations with sometimes it seems like the playbook for email marketing, it lags even further behind the technology on you know, I look at myself in my inbox and think, you know, if I heard from you less, but every time it was more on private or more valuable or more whatever on my relationship, view as a company would probably go up, would I be likely to buy more? No, I don't know, separate conversation, right? But my attention is the commodity here. My interest is the commodity here. And if you think you make more money by by emailing me more, that's true, until your list starts going, go pound sand, unsubscribe, subscribe right there.
Paul Shriner
And I would say that's a little weird to answer that. There's, there's propensity modeling, right, and that's a little bit of what we're doing is saying, like, okay, so you do open more you do click More, you have a propensity to handle more. So we should email you more, right? You email, you open less, you click less. So if we send more email to you, you're not going to open more of it, it's just gonna sit in it. And there's gonna be a point where you reach where you're just like, I just can't handle you anymore. You know, love you, Matthew. But I just
Matthew Dunn
yeah, unsubscribe, subscribe writer bozo filter, and you never know.
Paul Shriner
Right? And right now, I'd like to do some of that deeper dive analysis to say, if we send you less email, are we or are we are we getting fewer? unsubscribes? I think so. Yeah. I haven't done that deep dive. And yes, yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Well, one of the things. And again, I'm thinking in terms of, you know, terms of a listener, who's like digesting features that email for marketing, and you start to realize what a what an enormous picture, wraps wraps around that, that June, every day, I just hit send, and it magically goes to the other side of the planet, and you get it right. He's like, wow, this is a lot more sophisticated than I thought,
Paul Shriner
well, right. And I'll throw one of those things out there, because I had a conversation with an agency yesterday was really, really fascinating. They the the story is this, they they gotta they're working with this brand. And the brand, you know, they're they click Send. Now what's happening is they're seeing their open rates go down, go down, go down, go down, okay. And I'll even give you numbers. They said, we were when we inherited this customer, they were clicking along at about a 30%. open rate. They said right now today, we've made no changes. It is now at a 7% open rate. What is going on? What's the problem here? And I said, well, email is small ball, right? And if you take everything from the perspective that like, just all you have to do is click Send. Yeah, there's a whole lot that goes into the simplicity of a single button that says, Do this send, right? And I said, let me tell you what, probably what's happened. They're like, okay, you you inherited this list, and you're starting to see open rates, click rates go down. And so someone said, we should create a CA name for this mail.brand.com. That's exactly what we did. I was like, good. That's part of the playbook. Right? And then I said, so then what happens is any sort of domain sender reputation that you had is gone. Right? So you're having to sort of rewarm these IP addresses. Did you do that, though? Yes, we did warm our IPS. Tell me about how you did that? Well, you know, we did small chunks, and we grew that grew that grew that and I was like, okay, or these small chunks that you warned, based off of engagement data? Did you do any sort of modeling around sending your best subscribers first so that these IP addresses? No, we didn't do that. Okay. Okay. And so so now, you're gonna see this go down, down, down, down further till you're now at 7%? And the brand that you're working with his saying, Is this even worth the program anymore? So the simplicity thing is, yes, there's just a button. But I said, here's the thing, order, you're in terms of your IP warming order, from the most engaged to the least engaged and drop the least engaged in your warming, you're going to see that reputation pop up really quickly. But the other thing that I think is super interesting is even on your regular deployments, if you order your subscribers based off of the most engaged to the least engaged, your mailbox providers, the emails the Yahoo's the Microsoft's in the world, say, Okay, this is a hot list, they're good. Let them all through.
Matthew Dunn
Right, right.
Paul Shriner
And it's really, really fascinating. So even to like that, like how you order your list that gets deployed, when you click Send, has a substantial impact on all of those downstream metrics. Yeah, liver,
Matthew Dunn
Boy, that's open, quit soluble branches. that's invaluable advice, because you the, the tool doesn't necessarily what you think is the tool, right? Your readiness p doesn't necessarily tell you to do that first, right, like, I've used a few dozen 100, whatever ESP is, and
Paul Shriner
we don't need to date ourselves here. spring chicken.
Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Well, no, it's just, um, that that that layers of complexity beyond just the send button, right, you know, we're paying a gazillion dollars for this, you know, fancy cloud platform. And it's like, yeah, you can use me badly or you can use me well, but there's a whole bunch of what what smarts and and it's, you know, experience distilled into practice. Are you bringing to that? Send? It's not all baked into the tool set automatically.
Paul Shriner
Right. Right. Well, it'd
Matthew Dunn
be ideal if it were, is that a potential? Is that a potential? You know, AudiencePoint as it grows, but you know, part of your business to, to auto sort, for example, for an ISP?
Paul Shriner
Yeah. I mean, yes, certainly, certainly, we are talking with email service providers, and MTA is to say, how can we help get more of your emails through, right, because at the end of the day, it is in both of our best interests to get more email delivered, right. And because that gives the email service provider a competitive advantage over everyone else. And it gives the the brand that's doing the sending, so they're more likely to buy from that can take your email service provider. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a value proposition all around that says, Yes, more email getting through. Yeah. Wins wins the day wins the day. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Let's take this in a slightly different direction on just because we get to right on right. One, one of the one of the one of the many things that opens up, the opportunity for innovation in a field like email, is that it's not it's not sitting still, with with nothing else changing around it. Talk to me a bit without, you know, without stopping on. trade secret, like talk to me a bit about that. Some of the technical components involved in handling two and a half billion anything, right? No, you're right. And that wouldn't have been easy a decade ago.
Paul Shriner
It's not it's never been easy. And I would say it's still not right now. Especially when you're talking about sort of being the inclusion of sort of data governance on top of it, because we're not just talking about like, Hey, can we can we do this in a way? So like, what I mean, is, could you spin up a bunch of instances on AWS and be off to the races? Yeah, yeah, probably, like, you know, back in the day. sharding, you know, just shard your database. That's all you got to do just shard it, which I always thought was the worst name is a horrible. Right, right, this shard your database? I don't I don't know who invented that name. is probably not a good point. Here's the deal done, we got the perfect plan for you, then you know, that thing where you're talking about splitting your database into different data, the name sharding go with it. It's gonna be huge charted.
Matthew Dunn
Right. And you're like, dead didn't use that in the last three years. Thanks for bringing it right.
Paul Shriner
back up to the top. Right. So sharding. So like that, that that was the model how we do it. It did it. And you can still do that, of course. But what what I think is, you know, some of these newer data repository tools, tools like Cassandra tools like Elastic Search. Yeah. MongoDB, things that are really sort of how do we stitch big data sets together, that are quick to access quick to retrieve that are bulletproof. These are new tools. And they have opened the door to being able to answer a lot more question. Big table. Yep. Google has that, you know? Yeah. Because it's not just can we store it? Can we retrieve it? Right? And I think, you know, I don't know if you remember, what was it? 20 2012 2013. The big hot, hot thing then was big data, right? We all got big data, we got to get big data, big data, big data, right? Yeah. on everyone's poster. And, and I don't know who the kid was in the crowd that said, The Emperor's not wearing clothes. But we're where we all went. Okay, so what? Yeah, you've got a lot of data, a big mess. What does that mean? What do you have? Do you just are you just storing ones and zeros? Or, or do you have something that you can do from it? And and and, you know, what was that one with the elephant? Hadoop, Hadoop, get your Hadoop, right. So let's pre process everything. And so we've tried to figure it out. And I feel like we're finally at this place where the tool set has caught up with some of the thinking, you know, on the topic of innovation, I think this is really it's been interesting the number of times, I kind of land in these types of calls and conversations. Because I, I do I am, I think I am pretty passionate about it, and enjoy for this thing, I'll tell you what, at every if you look back sort of over history, when the majority of the innovation takes place, is what is not when there's the most money on the table. Like, hey, like emails hot right now, right? Because we're seeing lots of acquisitions and all that, yes, that that is, the innovation that comes out there I don't necessarily believe is need based. That innovation is like, hey, you're spending money, I built your magical thing that's maybe marketing driven, as opposed to, I need this tool, because if I don't have this tool, I cannot function, my business ends, right, it's when your back is against the wall, when you're facing, like, these really clamped down GDPR or ccpa, this is our business cannot continue doing what we're doing. Because we we are hitting this wall, that is when those creative solutions are sort of bubbled to the surface that say, I can solve this problem in a way that no one's ever done before. Right? Because there's one, there is only one solution that will work here. And, and, you know, roll the dice. And and and it's it's those moments, like, when did AudiencePoint happened when did send time optimization grow out, which was innovation, which is now almost 20 years old, right? Or I guess 15 years old? It was staring at the housing crisis, right? Yeah, it's going, man, I can't find any, I can't find any non young live work, like I was doing young, like when I couldn't raise money, it was super, super hard. And we were we were, you know, I couldn't pick up any programming work. And I had to raise a budget or like, Hey, hey, wife and family, we just, we won't be able to eat. Right, right, right back. And so it's when your back is against the wall there that you're like, I don't have another option. My option is innovation period. Mm hmm. And so, you know, as we're staring at sort of post COVID times When, when, you know, people have lost their jobs, our economy has tanked. When we are staring now, yes, email is the hot thing right now. But next week, it will not be right, when we're staring at post COVID. And we're staring at Well, we've got all of these new data protections in place that feel very constraining our entire industry that is based off of information and understanding people will be hamstrung. And it is in those moments that we will see the greatest innovations come out.
Matthew Dunn
Right, because there'll be a because they'll be in need and necessity. Yeah, right. Yeah, we don't do this. We're out of business. Yeah, that that is that is a powerful motivator. It's also struck me watching, you know, watching the digital space, which is most of my career time watching it evolve on, you know, the thing that's got a label and you know, trade name, like shard, like, there was some guy who was just like, you know, you know what, let me try this. I think I could do this, or I've got an idea.
Paul Shriner
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
And, and one of the things that I quite enjoy about now versus five, especially 10 years ago, is we've taken many of the capital cost constraints out of the way. Heck, let me give this a try. But as you Right, well, let's spin it let me spin up an AWS is yet don't forget, turn it off. By the way, it's expensive, but let me spin up you know, 60 things and see if we can do yada yada yada the No one's ever done before. On, we're starting to be able to, to experiment more quickly, more freely without you need 5 million bucks from a VC to even turn the lights on. Yep. Hopefully, there's some really positive outcomes on the other on the other side of that with that affordance for experimentation.
Paul Shriner
I think you're right there too. Right. Like, you know, if you have an idea and some basic understanding, you can roll minimally proof of concept, minimum viable product. Yeah, right. Yeah, I got this idea. I think I can knock it out. It used to be just like, let me pull in my laptop and show you, you know,
Matthew Dunn
right. It's a VB demo, but no, it's really gonna be cool.
Paul Shriner
Right, right.
Matthew Dunn
I love it.
Paul Shriner
It's amazing.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Yeah. It is amazing. You were you're you live now in Chattanooga, Tennessee, correct.
Paul Shriner
That is correct. Yeah. Signal mountain specifically.
Matthew Dunn
that's a that's a that's a city that's got an innovation brand on its own because of the fiber infrastruc fiber
Paul Shriner
optic? Yeah, yeah, that
Matthew Dunn
is right. Definitely rolling landing there.
Paul Shriner
I'm kinda, I mean, the folks that are I'm sure watching from Chattanooga. out? Yes, 100%? No, I mean, the story is my business partner web tier. And they the community was looking for some wins. And we offered something they thought was, so we were able to raise some seed money to get started here. And they've been very, very supportive of sort of helping us sort of, through some slow times, right. Like, how come we're not selling more?
Matthew Dunn
I don't know. Right? If you're, if you're listening, you're not familiar with the backstory, Chattanooga made a really bold leap and put in a city or mute
Paul Shriner
mean, this fiber,
Matthew Dunn
fiber infrastructure, like the available bandwidth to a small business that's going to grow into a multi billion record business is no good in Chattanooga, and it seems like that's paid off for the area has it?
Paul Shriner
I think so. You know, it's been interesting. We've seen some startups successes, we have had some of those. None of them are from the outside monumental like, oh, household name. They really, really? Oh, yeah. eBay started there. No, wasn't that right. We've had some successes. We have, we have a couple of interesting ones right now that are sort of growth industries. Logistics is a big one. So we should see, you know, it's possible, we could see some big stuff coming out of logistics within Chattanooga. But the thing that surprised me, and I think we will also see relatively soon here is where Chattanooga what has historically been maybe a little more blue collar, you know, logistics transportation related stuff, where technology wasn't necessarily, you know, again, 70s 80s wasn't even really on the radar. Chattanooga Choo, choo. And with the investment, you now had a workforce catch up with the infrastructure that's here. Yeah. And so the I do believe we will get a big, brand, big technology brand, come to town and suck up all the talent, right? Where are you?
Matthew Dunn
Are you seeing an influx of people there? You know, pandemic movers for lack of a better level?
Paul Shriner
I'll be honest, I haven't left the house in like a year and a half. You read the news, man. Yeah, no, that's true. Yeah, there are people that are moving here. The The interesting thing about the pandemic has been, there's a lot of organizations, businesses, people that have said, I am no longer tied to a geographic area, I can live where I want to live. Yeah. And what was cool for us, I mean, we got to do that about 10 years before everyone else living in Port Townsend, that was a fantastic opportunity to live, you know, within a mile of the water in every direction at the foot of the Olympic Mountains. I mean, there is not like, the Northwest is we've talked about this before, it's a beautiful place to live. And so, you know, our story has changed where we're now living here on single mountain, which is also gorgeous, but it's, it's different. And so I think what's interesting is, the pandemic has made it so that that same story that we sort of, or that question that we asked in 2004 could we live in Port Townsend and have a good life? And the answer was yes. No other folks are asking that same question now and so they're starting to move places like Chattanooga and Bellingham you know what I mean?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And Austin Well, what what struck me is we're Chattanooga might might be on the radar screen where another town of the same size that hadn't made the same innovative shift early is that implicit in the I can live anywhere is anywhere there's a good net connection.
Paul Shriner
That is true, right? We have we have you know, we have a full gig coming into our house right? Wow, nice. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Which you have to get work done. Right, right.
Paul Shriner
I think I'm gonna stream seven movies. Y'all working just because I can I'm not gonna watch
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, no, is every site science fiction I I was a teller I was a telecommuter. In 97. I moved from Seattle to Bellingham. Microsoft paid to run a T one to my wow house. And the big deal you were one was a huge pile. I bet a bison just wanted a bit of stick around. We had a good relationship. But you know, what was it like a meg Meg and a half. But
Paul Shriner
yeah, it was
Matthew Dunn
huge. At the time.
Paul Shriner
I remember we had a we had a I mean, we had a T one line coming into our whole organization. I worked at a company called isolated in Bellevue, Washington. Yeah, we had a T one line coming in.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. The phone companies good teaching, not realizing they're about to get sideswiped by that by that cable running down a ditch. Right well I'll be interested to watch what what does shape up for Chattanooga. I lived in Austin many moons ago. And I've got I've got friends and relatives there and in Austin is 150 people a day, right now. Moving. Oh, is
Paul Shriner
it really?
Matthew Dunn
It's ridiculous. Yeah.
Paul Shriner
Yeah. And Austin is a cool, that's a cool town to write. I mean, anytime anytime you have the moniker keep, you know town name here we're you're no it's gonna be a good one.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. And they've actually I have to, you know go there maybe once a year or not lately and they've managed to keep it weird although that there's a skyscraper of above the you know, right, right? He's a goofy little whatever on the music scene too.
Paul Shriner
How do you grow while still maintaining your signature sort of culture?
Matthew Dunn
Well, you know, we both we both get time in the northwest and watching how Seattle, you know, exploded into a city while Portland kind of intentionally kept some clamps on and didn't get as big. I'm not sure that I don't think Portland got on the winning side of that equation, at least from a quality of life perspective.
Paul Shriner
Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
I don't I don't. I like Seattle in the rearview mirror these days. Thanks. Not?
Paul Shriner
Yeah, yeah,
Matthew Dunn
sure. place to be. But anyway, it's, and it's same time. Seattle is accidentally maybe. But it's, it's become like cloud Central, which is quite astonishing to watch.
Paul Shriner
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Matthew Dunn
Amazon plays a big role, obviously. But you got Amazon and Microsoft, both, like headquarters there. Wow. And there's so
Paul Shriner
much talent in that. In that sort of metropolitan area. As we've grown as a business, the need for technical prowess, I mean, the stuff that we do, there's only like three people in the world that know how to do it. Right. And so if you don't have one of those people, you have to either become that, or train it. Right. Right. And so how do you how do you like, like the, the need to be in a place where you can find those people? Quickly? That's where that's where someplace like Seattle is so appealing, right? Which is why you get someone like Google moving in and all of these other brands, because it's like, Facebook, I bet. I bet if we move there, we can find the senior engineers that can scale Cassandra in a way that no one else can. Yeah, you know, they can make it bleed data out. And, and I mean, it's out. I mean, the number one, is it the 10x developer? I don't know if you remember that concept book. Yeah. You know, that idea. Like, you know, if you hire the right person, or maybe it's 100x 1,000x I don't remember what it was. But the whole concept was, there's that one person that can do so much work. Yeah. Compared to everyone else? Yeah. It just can't make up make it off.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. And and artist systems. At the same time, maybe this is my maybe this is most, you know, guy who prefers small towns talking. I wonder if we'll start to say, you know, what, talents getting more geographically distributed? Right? You lose the hard part. But you look like open sources, a Innovation Network all its own, you can't always tell where the next right, yes, open source libraries get right from maybe anywhere in the planet, which is exceptionally cool.
Paul Shriner
Yeah, and you're right, you're absolutely right about that.
Matthew Dunn
The the the the notion of you read, there's a great book called The social life of information. JOHN Seely Brown and Paul do good. written before Facebook existed, interestingly enough, on and the essential thesis of that book is the way people actually transfer information is by talking to each other and telling stories. Oh, no kidding, really. But now we're all telling stories on zoom, right? It's not you can't necessarily have that coffee shop or the coffee and breakfast spot that they studied in that book for Xerox repairman if I recall, right, so Right, right. Maybe we're distributing the conversation a bit more. I don't know. I don't know. Okay, so we got to wrap it up set on top your entire day. We're gonna close to the speed round.
Paul Shriner
Okay, I love the speed round. you're preparing. I've stretched out for the speed round. Yeah, I'm ready. I'm ready.
Matthew Dunn
We'll we'll try not to blow Blow mental hamstring here. Dogs cats both are neither.
Paul Shriner
Probably dogs. But I do like the cats too. I'm not I'm not a I'm not a neither. I'm definitely close to a bull.
Matthew Dunn
I know the answer to this already from from the wonderful podcast that you do with Chris Marriott, but wine, beer cocktail water or other
Paul Shriner
coffee, coffee. I mean, that is probably true. Yeah. But all of the extraction methods. There's so much to it that you can do. Yeah, I like I like to nuance there.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, the side reference there. If you're listening is go look for a podcast called email, drink. Gmail geeks drinking coffee. That's Yeah, we actually got talked to the host here. Last one name a favorite book or author.
Paul Shriner
favorite author is probably Kurt Vonnegut. I've always always always loved reading his stuff. It's always it just it always has a. I want to say the twist before m Night Shyamalan was the twist guy. Yeah. You know, it's creative. It's clever. It's ironic. Usually, it's pretty intelligent read.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Very intelligent point of view. Yeah. And quite a craftsman like you can almost miss that. Unless you read a good bit of Vonnegut. You're like, this
Paul Shriner
guy's really good at what he does. And from Indianapolis, Indiana. Did you know that?
Matthew Dunn
I did not know that. Wow.
Paul Shriner
Yeah. They have like, they have a like a museum there for him. It's like a one room Museum, but it's still it's still a Kurt Vonnegut museum. Welcome to the monkey house.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. Now he's living still. No,
Paul Shriner
no, he passed away. Probably in the last 10 years or so. I mean, he was one of those sort of iconic, like, please just live forever. Can we talk about cloning? You know,
Matthew Dunn
we just lost Christopher Plummer today. I'm so bummed.
Paul Shriner
I didn't know that
Matthew Dunn
just this morning. Like, maybe an hour or two ago.
Paul Shriner
Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
well, 91 Yeah, I mean, and he will he watched it watch the film he was in that was more than a no more than a year or two old like dude was still on it and, and working on Sure. Well into his 80s. So salute. Right.
Paul Shriner
Right. Right, right.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, very good. Well, we will have to have another one of these. I want to thank you for coming on. I'm delighted we finally got some time and yeah, it's been a terrific learning experience already for me.
Paul Shriner
Well, I think so. Again, I'd like that to you find the people in the industry that you like that you
Matthew Dunn
connect with that you trust and you you spend time with them? Yeah, I spent time and then we figure out how to build more innovative stuff together.
Paul Shriner
Let's do it.
Matthew Dunn
Well, signing off with Paul Shriner from AudiencePoint you can find about their biz more about their business and AudiencePoint com for the future of email marketing. This is Matthew Dunn, signing off. Does