A Conversation with Thomas Fairey of Stakester
An entrepreneur who raised $400K in funding through cold email can speak with authority about the value of email — and Thomas Fairey does.
Thomas' company Stakester lives on the digital edge, and is currently seeing double-digit growth.
We caught up with Thomas long enough to hear his thoughts on the core value of email marketing in growing a company.
TRANSCRIPT
Matthew Dunn
Good morning and good afternoon in London. My guest today is Thomas Fairey, CEO of Stakester. Thanks for connecting and talking about email. I know it's not in the mainstream for Stakester. But welcome. Well,
Thomas Fairey
Thanks so much for inviting me on. Again. It's been a pleasure to be here. It is at the core of what we do. But yeah, it is. It is yes. So whatever you say, so like, I have a bit of background, I man, I've been a fan of email marketing for the whole of my career. So I started off working in investment banking, and then I was in sales. And when I was in sales, I'd always say to people, like the power of cold email, change your life, and certainly really well. And then there's going on from there. When I was involved, my last company I start helped start there was email marketing, to gust, the point where we'd sold to every major bank, within two years really, now we're Stakester it's probably our most cost efficient acquisition channel by a margin. So um, and also, my big thing about is I raised $400,000, with cold emails with cold emails. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, I think that's, I haven't used that story.
Thomas Fairey
Well, I will, I will bang email marketing drama.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And, and, and I love hearing that for, like, such a cutting edge on cutting edge thing is what you, you know, you and the team have built in Stakester there, you know, yeah. Out on the edge of EA games and digital relationships. And it's this this relatively old channel, it's been around a long time, it's still integral to it.
Thomas Fairey
Absolutely. It's right. I think it's so people always looking for the newest way to do something. Okay. And then I'll give my team all the time is that people use dating apps all the time. Yeah, to try and get a date. But ultimately, like, just being nice to people is going to get you more decks than anything else. Right. fashion. Yeah. Just being a good guy. Right. Oh, girl. And that's, that's what's gonna work make people feel special. Yeah. And the medium used to do it as matter, right. So there are so many things that we do. That's just, there's still perfectly formed and work incredibly well. And the fact of the matter is that I said to my team, I'm on email more than anything else during the day every day. Right. Right. Interesting. Interesting. Like, people talk about how much time you spend on Facebook or Instagram. Yes, no, yeah. It's nothing in comparison to how much time I spend sat on my desk right now. Okay. Also, when an email pops up on your phone, you read it?
Matthew Dunn
Well, I was I was late for that. I was late because I had a computer crash. And I thought, this guy will actually be on his email. So I'm going to email him real quick, cuz he's already got to reboot. I'll be right there.
Thomas Fairey
And if you send me if you send me an ad on Facebook, I probably wouldn't read it.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, Yeah, probably. Right. Yeah. So So emails got that sort of constant presence thing that almost very few, if any other channels have. What do you think about text and mobile on how do you compare that? Yeah,
Thomas Fairey
request is not something we've tested. Now we do we do push notification. Yeah. Okay. It sounds like Texas, that we haven't tested it loans. Yeah, and it's not something we really pushed. Pun intended, but it's something that we should we should look into. But I think because we get such great results with email. You know, we're we're working with it. But the other great thing about email that people don't seem to appreciate is how cheapness? Yeah, yeah, like sending an email question. Yeah, okay. Yeah. And if you if you use a great product, I for my email campaign to raise money, I use g mass, which is, I know, a nice native product within Gmail, which allows you to send an email which looks like it's come from from you, you individually rather than from Gmail. And what was great about that was that it It just cost me nothing. It saved me so much time. I genuinely spent, I think, in total, the amount of time I spent doing outreach, including writing email, getting the list crowdsource to build the list. Well, took me four hours.
Matthew Dunn
Wow, that's now $100 an hour I hourly rate on.
Thomas Fairey
What? That doesn't include the pinching, but like the actual initial outreach to start the conversation.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, that was it. It would have gotten nowhere without the initial outreach and how recently was how recently did you close that? That that round?
Thomas Fairey
Because that in June last year, okay. Yeah, I was out in June last year, just just coming out for a year since I closed that deal. It,
Matthew Dunn
I feel like I skip past the punch line, would you? Would you do at least the elevator version of Stakester? You know what you do? Who uses it? So someone listening goes, Oh, I can find out more about that.
Thomas Fairey
Yeah, short, easy. So what we do is we, if you think you're good at something, particularly in game, if you think you're good at FIFA, or Madden, or you're good at like NHL, then pay money where your mouth is play me and we'll play to something. Okay. So you know, like, back in the day when you might be playing a bit of porn, and all you are, are putting up charts, or whatever, you know, like, if you're racing like me, my buddy's, like, you know, if we're, if we're having a running race on the Y sub, and I'm fasting, you may put down 10 bucks, and we're gonna win this, you know, and we were in the entertainment business, not in the gambling business. So you're gambling is putting money on an outcome you can't control? Yeah, right. Well, we'd like that stupid to me. Yeah. Well, we're in we're in the business of, you know, raising the Stakesterand making a bit more entertaining. And the fact is, like, if you play for something, it's more exciting. science fact. Right. Okay. Yeah, we there's something on the line, it means something a bit more. So that's how we play together. And so we we had a bit of spice. That's what we do. Yeah. Nice. Dude. Where's
Matthew Dunn
the pandemic been good for business? I it's really awkward. Because
Thomas Fairey
Yeah, a lot of people have died and really suffered from lockdown. But damn, it's been good for us. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just been like, as you can imagine, people are home gaming. Gaming. Yeah, I
Matthew Dunn
was. I was thinking when I was when I was, you know, just reading up on the business a bit going. Oh, that's cool. And I love that and agree with a psychological insight. This sort of
Thomas Fairey
goes to sex. My daughter's just wrong. my doorbell. My dog, go. Go for it. Yeah. Yeah, no worries.
Matthew Dunn
We got to get bit out, can't we? Yes, we can. Okay.
Thomas Fairey
Okay, sorry. That's the that's the problem with Amazon. You never know when they come in. Right.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Speaking of speaking of pandemic, good for business, and I agree with you, it's like, you don't want to be light hearted about the the suffering that's still going on with this. But it's definitely kicked us at least five years into the future. Oh, 100%. And I think,
Thomas Fairey
again, that's why even Moxie has been great, because we've had a more captive audience. Right? Yeah. By emails coming in, you've got an awesome like, you know, it's one of those things where most things well, this the other thing is what I always think, when people are migrating away from a form of communication. People are like, Oh, no, I need to move over into trying to find ways to advertise through slack or whatever. Yeah. My mantra on that is that says, the desk needs is quieter. Where you're coming in? Yeah. No, fewer emails are being sent because it's more being sent by slack. That means when my email comes through, it's going to get noticed. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
I never I have never bought the slacks gonna. slacks gonna replace email, and I don't think they buy it anymore. Either themselves. It's like, the day I see, oh, you need a password reset. You know, put your blah blah, blah. Well, we'll send you a message the day I see that I'll start buying it. It's not gonna happen. Right? My Yeah, I don't. My home address on on the net is my email address. It's not that complicated, right? Yes. There it says. And as you said, Nobody controls it. You don't have to ask a gatekeeper for permission. No one's changing the rate. Yeah, it's it's cheap because it's like it's a set of standards. And if you want to switch DSPs go from G mash to whatever you're using it you know, larger scale now, like, okie dokie, you're free to do that. You don't have to ask for permission. Right? You're in control of it. Haha. Yeah. And and you're, you know, you're there's I'm sure there's a huge range to the customers at stake stir, but you can reasonably assume that's one of the things they have in common. You want to be a customer, you probably have an email address, don't you?
Thomas Fairey
Well, they sign up with it. So yes, that's they go. That's it. Yeah. I think is that in some ways has been what I was wondering about kind of showing you to when the force the future of normality, how's it gonna change over time? Yeah. And it's really, uh, I tried to consider that because I am. I look back, I was thinking, Okay, so let me look this and see how my emails have changed over the past year. I've been working for 15 years. And, and I look back and I looked at the first email I sent to JPMorgan in 2005, asking them for a job, right. Okay. I looked at that. And I looked at the email that I sent to someone in Getty 1019, asking them for money to invest in my business.
Matthew Dunn
No, no, no.
Thomas Fairey
He like is especially like, establish credibility, gain interest call to action. That is, right. So what it is, and I look at it this far, and I'm like, asking you want it's a feature of email marketing. I'll tell you what it is. It's the same. People if it can pick the way people communicate change, if the way that we have a conversation is different? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Then maybe one thing I have noticed over the course of time is a decrease in formality.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. concurred. Yeah.
Thomas Fairey
So you know, back then it was dead now is hey, yeah. You know, it was kind regards. Now. It's like players. Yeah, it's like it's very, it's a very different style of signature, right, you know, it's a different tone is different. And that's what happens with some becomes more commonplace, it becomes more relaxed than language. But other than that, there's no difference genuinely 15 years are no different at all.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, it's a it's a conversational media to a considerable extent, how we write an email is not how we write. Not who writes memos anymore. But it's it's increasingly informal, fragmented, conversational. If you write someone an email this long, they're not going to read it. They don't read it. I said all the time.
Thomas Fairey
Yeah. Is that long before Lyons probably know what sending. The other thing that was about it. Is that interesting about email? Is that how it has evolved slightly is that and I love what you said there about the nature of it being like a memo. If someone starts the second email in a chain with Hi, Tom. Yeah, if you send that the same day, you don't need to say that. Yeah, you like, do you like, Oh, hey, hey, Matthew. When you send the follow up, you don't say, Hi, Tom, again, you say? Yeah, I'll be there in five minutes. Right. Right. So it becomes conversation that's changed over time, as
Matthew Dunn
well. And it stays partially in that, in that, in that ubiquity, right? We know we've got an email address. We know we've got like, 62 clients to get to that same email address. It's like, it's it becomes a long running conversation, if you will. And and you're right, you don't say yeah, I don't say hi to my wife. You know, two minutes after I said, Good morning to her. She'd be like, smack, right? Why? Yeah, we're already having this conversation. You don't need to greet me again. Thanks. Very much done. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, the the one of the reasons, one of the reasons you have this podcast is, you know, our company campaign genius is coming in saying, we can actually innovate inside email. Like we can, we can change the content that's in your inbox in real time, which is, which is a bit of a jaw dropper for people technologically, the underpinnings have been there for a long time. But it's a bit of a jaw dropper, because it doesn't fit the mental model of email at all. You'd like what I can change an email after I've sent it. Yeah, yeah, write it. And, and I concluded that one of the reasons it's been slow going, getting engagement with this is because we're so used to how it works, we've got such a clear mental model of how email works, that the notion of using a differently is, is like, why would you bother? Well, there's a bunch of reasons, right? Do I want to get an email showing the current score of the game? I'm in the middle of with someone. Right on stakes, rather than what the score was when the email was sent. That's just an example. That's cool. We could do that. Yeah, yeah. But then put them in a model of email very well.
Thomas Fairey
Yes, true. Doesn't. Once you read it, you don't go back to them. Right. Right.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Yeah. And that's yet that's the other the other thing or thesis I'm curious to hear your reaction to, I look at other digital channels, other media, and we're in this big, long, slow shift to more and more, more and more media, you know, the native line. your native language the printing press was was taxed. I don't know that the native language digital is taxed. I think that's part of it. But I think you look at what people do with chips, you look at what people do with screenshots, you look at what people do with, you know, game scores, and taking that moment, a game where you kept some guy, like, it's visual, it's rich, it's not all writing anymore, because we've now got the communication tool to I can send you a picture as easily as I can send you, you know, written text. And you'll actually process that faster and differently than the written text. reactions.
Thomas Fairey
Yeah, so my, my theory on this is that communication is Oh, is basically directly proportional the methods or it's already proportional to the amount of effort necessary to do it. Okay. So the reason that we say if you look, Twitter was the fastest growing platform over the course of lockdown with the exclusion of clubhouse was only for like, 25 minutes. So I didn't work. Yeah. But the reason that it was is because the effort level is so low with Twitter, you just have to just put out, you don't have to get yourself looking good. Before we take that photo, it's really easy to do. And so that's why I think it went it did so well, because we want to do things quickly left, because there's little evidence possible. Initially, the printing press is a great example. Because Initially, it was done purely text, because to print a photo was very complicated. Over time, people added more photos, because it was easier to do. So yeah. So as long as said, that's what it comes down to ship proportional to that. And because of that, I don't think tax will ever become below 70% of content. Interesting, because it is always going to be the one that is easiest for you to do. Okay, so wait, hold
Matthew Dunn
me for a second. Let me let's let's have a, let's have a healthy argument. On here's my concern about that. The economy of production, what's easy for me to do to put your like to create to put out on doesn't do a whole lot for the economy of consumption, it's easy for me to you know, blather something off on the keyboard and send it to 1000 people, but I just typed up 1000 people with blather on and and or if I say I'm going to write this really long thing, and they're not going to read it, waste it waste of time as well. And frankly, we don't read we don't process read scan view. This stuff we're getting already. Yeah, like cuz there's too much of it. And it's telling you to copy and duplicate and now you got frickin AI's writing email seriously. Yeah, email documents, etc. And I'm like, boy, wow, holy cow, you know, how do what do we what do we what do we do that gets gets the point across so that it's, it's, you know, so that it's read, not as easy to write? Is it easy to read? And I don't mean, read in the literal sense. I mean, reading the information transferred. Communication made sense?
Thomas Fairey
Yeah, thanks. Good question. I think if you think about human psyche, you can only consume so much information that they consume a lot, because only consume so much. And so that's why, you know, when you walk down the road, you one day, you might know somebody for the first time and you've walked down the road 30,000 times. Yeah, that's just natural. You're just not taking on that information. Yeah. And so at the other end, the consumption of that information is always going to be a product of the quality of the information that comes through and how easy it is to consume. Yes, but then again, it has to have that balance between there needs to be easy to create. Reason, I think the tax will, will move will continue to be the predominant factor as well is carrying on from that is that I can refine it much more easily than then I can refine a photo. Yeah, yeah. Or video. Yeah. So this video now if we record this again, if I want to if we get down to this, like oh my god, that guy cast, like 20 times that guy, like it was awful. That takes a lot longer to do. Yeah, the median, a controller for a document and just taking out the F's in there. Yes, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, get to see easy to redo. Yes, that's easy to do. And you can change your argument, you can restructure it much easier. Yeah. And also, when I consume that information, it's very re listening to something is a greater amount of effort than re reading something. That's true. Okay. So you know, when you're on a podcast, how many times you rewind something on podcast, you're listening to never never having to rewrite a sentence.
Matthew Dunn
Right? Or how many, or how many times to your same point, actually, you know, what are the virtues, the virtues of text, if you will, is the skim scan. You know, I were experimenting with a system that's going to take this recording of the two of us talking, and like 10 minutes after we're done. It'll have the transcript tied to the video. Which is cool. Yeah, perfect week, I'm gonna give her a plug. Perfect recall is the name of the app. She's the entrepreneur behind a heck of a job. And I was like, This is awesome. Why? Because I can laser in on That part of the conversation with Thomas here, we're getting really meta on that part of the conversation with Thomas, where he said,
Thomas Fairey
Yeah, you know, it's
Matthew Dunn
so much easier to control F and and get rid of all I'll be able to scan through visually and go, there it is right there listening for that would be mind numbing, right be like,
Thomas Fairey
oh, oh six and now no technology might make that easier. You might be able to say like find the section. Yeah. And like probably ask Alexa now we find the right content.
Matthew Dunn
But the treat of it at the moment. And over time that might change. It might change as it but I think Yeah, as long as it is he the easiest form of communication will always be the greatest communicator well put, which may be one of the reasons emails, you know, emails still so ubiquitous. It's like if we, you know, me emailing you to say, you know, computer crash wasn't it was it was effortless, you know, since it done. And I don't think I think it was just a subject line.
Thomas Fairey
I don't think I even put anything in the body of that. Yeah, yeah. Is that a Yeah. As an as an investor, I'm particularly interested in why called regression tech, the things that we'll be doing that go back to initial models. So like, we did analysis within our company over how many video calls we're doing in the beginning lockdown, and how many went to audio at the end of London? Yeah, and audio is the biggest rising one by far because people will just like to walk and talk. So we have a policy now to get people moving. We're like, if you don't need to look at someone just go for a walk and call them Yeah, yeah, and what's that technology? That's 1920s Alexander Bell technology. I mean, it's like yeah, it's like and I love that I like give me some just made the sound quality better make it easy for me to make it easy for me to switch between the two. Yeah, those kind of things are really interesting to me. Yeah. Give me a way that when I'm having this conversation it's like for example, I was saying something the other day I when I was writing content for my blog, I was like God I wish I just had like a dictaphone or something I could play into it but like well regression tech is now someone does it for you so I just talk and then they write it up Yeah, he does that kind of thing right so those kind of things I think is where again we're just we're gonna we're gonna Mike i don't i don't think the email and text and so forth will ever die out as long as he's because you know it also is so non intrusive. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
that's true.
Thomas Fairey
I can write an email an article in my pants Yeah, yeah. College of podcasting my pants yeah
Matthew Dunn
well go back to the audio thing for a second I want to I want to intersect this back the Stakesterthere a little bit on I was intrigued I know they abandoned it but I was intrigued that at least on a rumor basis, Microsoft was was poking around discord a couple of weeks ago, like
Thomas Fairey
it's an audio channel
Matthew Dunn
What are you guys doing looking at? Well, because people talk and it's an effortless way to communicate and it's an important one
Thomas Fairey
what this call is a text mainly but then people do call on it now since growing but yeah, they are I can see where the sniffing around because it's just a really high growth area but the reason it's so interesting is because again, you don't do on video you just do on you just start talking to me. That's why I think clubhouse is so well so short lived, but unfortunately like it was just I don't think it's gonna do very well.
Matthew Dunn
I don't I don't know how you put a moat around clubhouse. Like you know
Thomas Fairey
I don't know why it's different it's just like it's just radio yeah it's just there's no there's no vetted it's like people say to me, you should make your podcast live. No, I should do a radio show on same freakin thing. Yeah. Yeah, be like the clubhouse. Yeah, I just don't think that I think the problem is the quality of content curation will always be king when it comes to content. If you can't find the best stuff easily. The product the platform will die.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Because in that and that casual drop in casual thing at clubhouse it's, it's an odd intersect with quality. Right? Because I mean, yeah, maybe great that so and so is going to show up and talk. But did they spend any time really planning out thinking through what they're going to say? Are they just going to show up and Yammer and when I listen to recording here later is gonna be like, Well, that was crap. I don't want to listen to that again. Right. It's hard to get quality. By contrast, you got Netflix pouring, you know, zillions into creating quality content. As a moat. I'm we're looking at the clock. I think you've got to drop right and I've got
Thomas Fairey
I've been like this has been really great. I really enjoyed it. I think it's a really important area. I think if you want me to share some of my top email marketing tips,
Matthew Dunn
I was delightful. It was delightful. Thanks so much for making the time. Thanks.
Thomas Fairey
so much played by me on I enjoyed it.
Matthew Dunn
I'll send you the recording. We got to wrap it up.
Thomas Fairey
Fantastic. Thanks so much.
Matthew Dunn
Thomas ferry, founder of Stakester. Thanks, Thomas.