A Conversation With Baris Ergin of DirectIQ

Email is a global channel, so a conversation with the CEO of a global email platform — DirectIQ – makes sense, right? Baris Ergin, founder of DirectIQ, is a global phenomenon himself, with roots in Turkey, moves from New York to Portugal, and a team distributed around the world. If you wonder how that software you use for almost anything came to be, this conversation will give you a glimpse. Baris and his team redesigned and rebuilt DirectIQ from scratch, while continuing to run the platform! The conversation also delves into the market structure of email. There are hundreds of companies in the space, but like many digital niches, a handful have dominant market share. Baris also has wise advice for digital entrepreneurs grappling with the influence of the big boys.

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00]

[00:00:09] Matthew Dunn: Good morning or good evening and afternoon where my guest is. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn hosted the future of email marketing. My guest today, I'm delighted to have a repeat conversation with Baris Ergon founder and CEO of among other things. Direct IQ Baris.

[00:00:26] Baris Ergin: Thank you

[00:00:26] Matthew Dunn: so much. Thanks. And, and, and we were chatting just before I hit the record button here.

[00:00:31] You're uh, you're rebased. And now based in, in Portugal, um, how long

[00:00:36] there?

[00:00:38] Baris Ergin: Oh, I moved here in July with the families, so it's been like five months, six months.

[00:00:44] Matthew Dunn: And you're you're you seem to be enjoying it from what you were saying earlier. Yeah.

[00:00:50] Baris Ergin: The climate. I like the people here. I like the cost of living, especially after in New York.

[00:00:59] For me. The difference. Yeah. I like it. I like it so far. And the times on it's, as I mentioned, this GMT, I have, I mean, it's a global business. The team is all around the world and the customer is also around the world. So being in a GMT exactly the center time zone.

[00:01:16] Matthew Dunn: Amazing. That's w that's great. Yeah. At times notes or times, those are becoming one of the key coordination people or coordination points for businesses.

[00:01:25] Yeah. I

[00:01:26] Baris Ergin: mean, especially calculating the, even the meeting.

[00:01:30] Matthew Dunn: Yeah, you're right, right. I, I tweaked my, uh, I tweaked my calendar view, so it shows an extra time zone because you'd think you'd get it the tip of your tongue. But no, I I'm still like, that's going to be what time for them, time is a mess. Um, give, if you don't mind, especially since someone might be listening and not watching, uh, give people a snapshot of direct IQ.

[00:01:55] Baris Ergin: Yeah. Uh, I still did the direct IQ probably in 2002. Actually it was, I was running a digital agency at that time. And this agency's customers, the bigger customers, enterprise customers, looking for an email marketing solution. And 2002, we were talking about there's no MailChimp or crabby or others. So there were some, yeah, there was it software.

[00:02:17] I remember. Which allows you to send the bulk emails from your PC? Maybe there was constant contact. Maybe they were in the market at that time, but so they came to us and asking, we do everything for them digital. So they said, we need to send emails about to send bulk. We send it from our own mail servers and you're bumping the blocks.

[00:02:39] So, okay. Meet there. We'll have them. And email sending software without any guidance to see like what there's no competitor to copy. So we came up with this because half of our customers at that time were international. We built the software as a service without even knowing that concept as well. And we labeled it because we were an agency, we labeled it, we made a nice corporate identity and we ran, right, like you for 10 years, from 2002 to 2012.

[00:03:10] White glow and enterprise software for our agencies. Customers never becoming a public product in 2012, we closed the agency, but the email tool was eclipsing in terms of the revenue, the agency. So we kept the email too, and we decided that why keep it as an enterprise tool? It's a harder market and something really fun to work with enterprise customers.

[00:03:34] Offer this product to SMBs small businesses, but not to the product, not downgrade the product from enterprise let's offer an enterprise level product to small businesses. It's worked well. It never became a success story that I can stand behind and telly over drinks someday because 2012 was a little bit too late in the game to start the SMB businesses.

[00:03:59] Uh, it's. Already becoming one of the biggest players and there were so many other competitors. So from 2012 to 2020, I guess since the beginning of pandemic, I ran the business, but it was like never growing to significant success, but never dying as well. It's like this and it's, I find it very annoying, like not buying, so you're not moving on to the new venture, but it's also making you a millionaire.

[00:04:29] Lifestyle and business. She got to keep working. Yeah. I just, I lost my motivation around the beginning of aura and of the past pandemic period, 2019, 2020. And I was about to like, get a higher too. Like I did, I took six months off, traveled their arm. And at that time I met some people who motivated me towards continuing this business.

[00:04:55] So I came back from that. With the strong motivation that I felt 10 years ago, starting another business, like the startup startup spirit. Wow. So I started the business, I came back with motivation and I said, okay, I'm hiring a brand new. And I'm going to read up this product because its product lost its competitiveness.

[00:05:16] The technologist is all the feature set is old. There's no reason to try to catch up. Let's look at the market with my 20 years of email experience and rebuild a new email tool. So that's what we did is I hired the kick-ass team global because at the time the pandemic started, so it was time to work from home.

[00:05:35] So. Focused on lung geography. I hired people from Ukraine, Albania, Spain, Turkey. So I collected that gather the big team and that team started focusing on a rebuilding the software. So we built a brand new direct IQ. While the Alteryx old customers are using the old version, the new one, it took us a one year to finish it and.

[00:06:02] It's became a really, I'm so proud of it. Like, I never felt proud of the product in the last 20 years, like with the new direct, and as of July, we launched it and we started marketing as of January. We did the, like, it was a soft launch between July and the new year. The kinks. And now, as of January, we're doing a strong marketing campaign.

[00:06:26] We are running with six different tools, six different marketing channels right now, and I'm getting really good feedback. And the team is growing. We hired two new people around the new year and I'm back in the game. I rediscovered. Tool in the SAS marketing tool with a competitor. Like we have probably a hundred competitors in the market right now, but the product is like, I can be, I can see ourselves into the top.

[00:06:58] Matthew Dunn: Can I Gratz. Wow. And, and you and I spoke, I want to say over a year ago, I believe you were in Ukraine at the time. And I think you were in, in the middle of the, in the middle of the dev process. Um, I'm, I'm, I'm intrigued by and, and salute the, developed a new, rather than try and upgrade the old wallet's still running.

[00:07:22] Are you, are you content that that was the right strategy and the Riverview.

[00:07:27] Baris Ergin: Yeah, it was, I mean, I am getting the friction from the customers who migrated from the old version of the new. It's like switching from windows to Mac, like it's for them. Yes. It's a nicer thing new, but you got used to the old one that it's different.

[00:07:42] It's difficult transition. So I'm getting a friction from the customers from the old version, but the new versions customers on half of the old version customers migrated are giving us really good feedback, which motivates us. People are happy in general with what they see and I didn't lose. Instead of shutting down the old version to launch the new version.

[00:08:03] So I think keeping them side by side was a little bit expensive for us because we had to support both infrastructure as well as customer base. But I think it ended up being a good decision for us.

[00:08:13] Matthew Dunn: And you, you were, um, I'm assuming, but I'm curious to hear Abe able to change the, the, the infrastructure as well.

[00:08:21] I mean, development 22,000 to development, you know, 20, 20. Night day in terms of platforms to build on, um, plumbing and pipes to use clouds available like that. Yeah. And definitely

[00:08:37] Baris Ergin: to be honest, yeah. They tell them is especially critical because people are lucky. I mean, I get to call it lucky, but the pandemic.

[00:08:46] Yeah. Everybody was working from home. No social life, no traveling. So it's like, I hired people to work from nine to six, but they were working in evenings and weekends as well, because there's nothing else to do in them. Especially the first year of the pandemic,

[00:09:00] Matthew Dunn: like lockdowns

[00:09:00] Baris Ergin: and everything I hired, they were on just in the beginning of the time they make me downloading dependent.

[00:09:05] It gets coming and it ended up. More hardworking then

[00:09:10] Matthew Dunn: I would expect. Nice, nice. And you were coordinating that those dev teams, as you mentioned, different countries, uh, different time zones and, and in a way it probably. Most of the globe was kind of locked down. So if you needed to get everybody at time X, it wasn't necessarily a conflict with their evening social activities.

[00:09:32] Baris Ergin: And even for me as the owner of the business that I didn't pay, like not settling oftentimes that much not going out at night. So therefore it gives you more time to focus on your

[00:09:43] Matthew Dunn: well, I mean, let's, let's delve into that side of it for a second. Um, the no conference center. It's like that sucks a lot of time, particularly from marketing teams.

[00:09:55] And I think it, you know, executives, like if you've got conference X coming up, it just blows big old hole in your hours and availability, and then there's to chase and the follow-up and yeah, it's like the, the, the, the Devin engineering side of businesses. I'm wondering if we're going to see this sort of spike in quality because we had this two years ago.

[00:10:19] Where, if you chose to harness it, you could say let's buckle down and do the hard concentration work that wasn't wasn't easy. Thank you. Like thank you, pandemic.

[00:10:31] Baris Ergin: And I'm hearing from the people who are working from the office that funky. Have a hard time adapting to the work from home. But because we started work from home, this new team, we didn't have this adaptation process.

[00:10:45] Everybody was happy working from home, doing this site. It was also lucky about that. Very weird statement. I don't want to say publicly, not on recording,

[00:10:55] Matthew Dunn: but we have to look, you know, we have, we have to look for the unexpected gain. Out of, out of, uh, uh, you know, a tragic sequence of events and let's put blame where blame lies.

[00:11:06] The microorganism. None of us asked for, um, you know, we got kicked multiple years into the digital future. Um, we changed, we've changed the definition of work, uh, and work and place, and we're not going to go back. Completely to, you got to live in town X because the office is, is, is, you know, however, close in town.

[00:11:27] Why? I mean, you're a living example of it, like, okay, Portugal sounds good. Let's go there and run a global enterprise. Why not? That was science fiction 20 years ago. No one got to do that.

[00:11:40] Baris Ergin: That's true. That's true. But on the other hand, I mean, we've seen some businesses excelling. And they make it back.

[00:11:47] Amazon probably became two times more rich from this room became the common tool like Skype, Mr. Train, for example, seeing that now, like zoom was there and then so some companies and some people, I mean, I've met so many. Digital nomads who got stuck in whatever country they were in during this nomad lifestyle.

[00:12:09] But they ended up being more hippy in general because when the economy stopped and the world stops, if you're in the tech business and your business is doing okay, then suddenly you improve your

[00:12:21] Matthew Dunn: life quality. Yeah. To keep going. I was, I was chatting with a friend yesterday. I hadn't seen her in a few months and she's, you know, how are things that?

[00:12:28] And I said, well, when someone says, what was your experience of the pandemic legacy? I dunno, I was working. It was like, it felt very, it felt very normal from that perspective, like in office doing, doing stuff, uh, as before. So yeah, it's a, it's a, it's an interesting shift. Hey, backtrack. If you don't mind, without, you know, without giving away, uh, uh, strategic secrets, you are in a competitive space, direct IQ, you aren't a competitor.

[00:12:58] There's a lot of people. The guy in the street, S someone running an SMB doesn't necessarily realize that there are a hundred possible choices at least of, of, of email platform. I mean, many, many healthy companies with the volume of email. There's, there's a lot of pie to slice up, but it is competitive nonetheless.

[00:13:21] Baris Ergin: Well, there's one big company almost taking the majority of the pie. MailChimp is literally the. Yeah, behind the email marketing, like ask a hundred people and probably 95 of them will say MailChimp. They ask about email marketing. So they dominate the market. But the market is so huge that there can be a hundred other players there at each of the players can grow into a certain size with a, probably one in 10th, one in 1000 sheriffs to the markets.

[00:13:52] So

[00:13:53] Matthew Dunn: it is a huge markets where you have. Were you happy to see the Intuit acquisition of, of, of MailChimpers that a bummer from your perspective?

[00:14:04] Baris Ergin: Uh, no. I mean, I could, all the conditions help our industry in general. They're either removing one player because corporate acquisitions kill, usually the creativity and most of the time that doesn't work well for.

[00:14:22] The competitor. So most of the acquisitions in the past didn't help that company pretty moved that company from that. So I wasn't complaining about that. And to be honest, after that acquisition, I received at least 10. Acquisition offers as well, because certainly other companies also like, oh, we should also grab it from this market.

[00:14:46] It's pushing us into the highlights for sure.

[00:14:48] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was, you know, emails, emails, this kind of constant thing as other, as other channels, uh, come and go. But back to pandemic for a second, with everyone more locked down and, and with an end out put of work is much more digital, right? The, the, the, the most common channel email is, is only going to be more viable, I think.

[00:15:16] Yeah. And when

[00:15:17] Baris Ergin: you look at position side, uh, we were talking about competitors. It's a very crowded market. For any marketing related tool, it doesn't have to be email, but if you have a social marketing, social media marketing tool, and you're big, you have to add email to your arsenal for shopping. Then suddenly that hundred option is not like it's a small market.

[00:15:40] That's true. It's more of a sellers market than buyer's markets.

[00:15:43] Matthew Dunn: It's true. Yeah. That's, that's, that's very true. I mean, give given the scale of the market a hundred is actually not that many.

[00:15:52] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Good observation. Um, did, are you focusing on particular niches? I know small SMBs, small, medium business have been, have been focused for direct IQ for quite a stretch. Is, is there anything more narrow than that? Of the kind of SMB?

[00:16:12] Baris Ergin: Definitely. I mean, we see that it's one, 200. And please small-time and we see that we are more successful in companies where either the owner or one marketing person is running all the marketing efforts, not a specific email marketing person or the big marketing team where they, everybody knows everything.

[00:16:33] But yes, like one people trying to juggle all the marketing efforts combined, they are more ideal. For us. That's what I'm saying. Maybe because we are easier to use than most of the tools. So if you're not an experienced marketer, you're looking for, when you're an experienced marketer, you're looking for more shinier features, more obscure feature that you may utilize when you're at your regular marketer, then you just need your emails.

[00:16:59] I'll turn, you don't worry about the complications. So that's what we see. And we also see health. Maybe half of our growth is.

[00:17:10] Matthew Dunn: Interesting marketing is picking up outside of the U S you

[00:17:14] Baris Ergin: think that, and I think the competitors are too much focused in the U S because after all, it's like, I can tell you easily 90% of the market in terms of the revenue you can generate, but the time for us and the still, when you're looking at the market size, 10% is still a big pie outside of the us.

[00:17:33] And it's significantly easier. I can give you a simple example, email. The keyboard in Google ads costs more than $50. Whoa, it's crazy per click. It's not commercial to bring a visitor to our website. It's $50. And I think MailChimp is dominating. Get MailChimp. I heard that spending a hundred million dollars on Google just to dominate that space, just to keep that, keep the competitors off the mark.

[00:18:01] Yeah. So $50 per click, then you go to, let's say Mexico, just down the border and. Dominates the email marketing space for email marketing and the Spanish version of that keyword for like a thousand dollars a month. I can be the number one or two in the markets outside the U S is that still a big market, easier to dominate.

[00:18:24] That's what I'm

[00:18:24] Matthew Dunn: seeing. Yeah. And the, and the, and the, you know, the cost of acquisition attention and brand is, as you're saying, is, is substantially better. Um, okay.

[00:18:34] Baris Ergin: The need for email is everywhere. Same people in China needs to send email to people in the dress emails. So it's truly same for everyone.

[00:18:43] Matthew Dunn: Is, is the U S.

[00:18:45] Such a lion's share of email marketing pie because of the money us companies spend on it. It's not 90% of emails sent or received the U S market, but it still seems to be disproportionately where, where money is spent on email marketing. You could get. Yeah,

[00:19:05] Baris Ergin: but the economy is like a hundred times larger than even the European combined European economy.

[00:19:11] So it's like the money in the market is so big. The marketing is so much, so much larger. So email gets a big share from that marketing as well.

[00:19:21] Matthew Dunn: Kudos

[00:19:21] Baris Ergin: to there's also a small, there's also a small difference even though U S is also catching up with that game. But the privacy and the anti-spam laws in the Europe for example, is significantly stronger than us now, California.

[00:19:35] The rest of the U S polo Canada already did that first, but it's easier to spend kind of like send bulk emails in us without worrying about complications. But in Europe it's very.

[00:19:47] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah, it is. And it makes it, it makes it more expensive. Makes it more expensive to do. Legitimately right. Because you don't have to pay attention to records, permissions.

[00:19:59] Opt-outs all.

[00:20:01] Baris Ergin: Yeah. So somebody will send a button and send out your list like that anymore.

[00:20:06] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. That's true. But at the same time, you're still, you're saying there's still like a rising tide in terms of email Mo as a marketing discipline in other countries outside of the.

[00:20:18] Baris Ergin: Yeah. And the pandemic also, again, thank you pandemic, but it's kind of helped it because lots of businesses move to online only, or online, heavily increase their email budgets.

[00:20:31] E-commerce commerce move to e-commerce and e-commerce uses email as their primary tool. And suddenly that gives the market's bigger.

[00:20:39] Matthew Dunn: Grow the market bigger. Yeah. Yeah. I just had a thought and he just went right out of my, uh, out of my head. Oh, I know it thought was my observation about emails, um, fit in relation to other digital channels is that there's still not really a gatekeeper exacting a toll.

[00:21:01] I mean, governments is one gatekeeper, but Facebook can change Facebook's ad rates, right. Google complaint, or, or let the market. Um, uh, uh, their ad rates, their, their, um, add, uh, cost of sending an email doesn't necessarily get dictated and it's, and it's not, there's not one party. If your ESP came along and said, well, sorry, we're going to have to charge a 10 times as much to send you'd switch to this.

[00:21:31] Baris Ergin: Yeah. And there was no, yeah, there's no cost of it. Cost the team is at cost, but there's no cost of the email itself. Yeah. Email is still free, free tool for everyone to use. There's always a free or very cheap option that you can

[00:21:46] Matthew Dunn: switch to that you can switch. Now, you, you work in other markets as well on is, is, is texting and other messaging channel.

[00:21:56] Part of what you're trying to tackle with direct IQ. Where do you, where do you stand on the whole text as a marketing channel? Um, we don't see

[00:22:03] Baris Ergin: a single, uh, other marketing channel that works hand to hand with email. Some countries use WhatsApp more, some countries use text messaging more. Yeah. We tried to implant text messaging many years back, and the regulations are different for each country.

[00:22:21] That email is almost same university yesterday. Anti-spam laws. What email sending the same, but

[00:22:27] Matthew Dunn: technically the same text messages

[00:22:29] Baris Ergin: is based on the recipients operator or recipient country. The cost is to be on different that you pay for email or text message. So it's much harder to tackle. We didn't really see the benefits.

[00:22:41] Yes. There are some companies actively using text messages in their day-to-day operation, mostly for notifications, of course. But, uh, I don't see any, I don't think we are leaving money on the table for not doing text messaging.

[00:22:56] Matthew Dunn: I heard a friend who runs a pretty well-known email marketing agency commented that if you want to grow your email marketing, Spend a little bit of time testing text messaging first because you'll look at the cost and go, oh my God, let's go back to email show.

[00:23:15] Baris Ergin: Yeah. I mean, once you ask people for paper message costs, your customers, they will switch back to email. Of course you were worried about, I mean, maybe media created the hype that's maybe a 10 years ago that we were worried that social media will kill. I never really believed the hype and it didn't happen.

[00:23:36] So social media doesn't kill email. Social media also uses the email and social media is dying from tanks, blame, but email lives. So it's really hard to beat email with any other channels

[00:23:48] Matthew Dunn: that you can use. There's a, there's a open standard, common protocol. Nature to email that is really not at play in any of those other channels.

[00:24:00] Right? Texting is texting is a historical technical accident that carriers jumped on. Um, and they exert control and they're collecting a fee. As you said, you know, if you pay per text message, it adds up really fast. Uh, what we call social media is the channels of a collection of companies. You know, apps, websites, et cetera, but there's not a social media ETF protocol.

[00:24:26] There's no such thing by

[00:24:28] Baris Ergin: email or email.

[00:24:30] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, and it's not like, well, it's interesting. You said not like web, um, I've thought about this and I still wrap my head around it. You know, I, I, I cut my teeth on, on, on web early, early, early days. And actually before the web. The dominance that Google has in the role, a website can play for the marketing function of a business, kind of it baffles me.

[00:24:56] And it frustrates me a little bit. I mean, people spend as much or more on their SEO as they do on their website because the site itself doesn't matter if it's not getting found in.

[00:25:07] Baris Ergin: Yeah, my, you know, the numbers as well, being in the first result or even in the first page for any permit that you're looking for is the money.

[00:25:17] Second base drops into list whole much that nobody goes into the second page. So that money you're spending on SEO is bringing back more. Yeah,

[00:25:26] Matthew Dunn: no, it is, but there's, but there's my point is there's a gatekeeper on this. Whether it's email and, and pretty much one, one gatekeeper, you know, I'm, I'm a huge, I, I admire many things that Google's accomplished, but

[00:25:42] Baris Ergin: there is a kind of a gatekeeper in email too.

[00:25:45] If you're talking about consumer emails because significant percentage of the recipients are. Yes. So Google kind of keeps traffic there too. Like it's very hard to pass Google standard filters or not ending up in the promotions folder, which people hate. So Google kind of gatekeeper there too.

[00:26:04] Matthew Dunn: Unfortunately, we've got, I mean, it's funny. We stumbled into this turf. Um, I'm I'm I'm doing a talk at a. Conference around that very issue. The, the, the inbox bottleneck, for lack of a better label, uh, in the email space, I would argue that right now, we've got to, we're lucky that we've got a bit of a dynamic tension between Google and apple inbox.

[00:26:29] If iOS didn't have substantial market share for their native email client. Google would be in a darn near monopoly position on the inbox and they're there. They're not, but it's really those two companies that, you know, apple Apple's mail, privacy protection, uh, launched in September, it's turned a whole bunch of aspects.

[00:26:52] And we can talk about that a whole bunch of aspects of email marketing and metrics and feedback kind of upside down. But it's interesting that it was apple that did that. Not. And what Google will

[00:27:05] Baris Ergin: try to monetize that Google will try to monetize it more work for the privacy part of it, because in my Gmail, I'm seeing ads on like on top of my mails.

[00:27:15] So Google is making a different approach, but it's keeping me away from the spam. So it's. Helping me as well. Otherwise I was switched to another provider anyway, I'm happy with Gmail, but I didn't know how big I didn't notice that how big Apple's influencing the industry until they launched this male privacy,

[00:27:37] the open rates when it's not because of the Apple's privacy policy approach. And I didn't know that apple that has that much

[00:27:44] Matthew Dunn: email world. I'm glad to hear you say open rates and that say I've been in this long running guard. We, we launched a second. Uh, we campaign genius lunch to service, um, a couple months ago, uh, we can provide accurate open rate metrics, including MPP.

[00:28:01] Um, but the, the email marketing space seems torn between, oh, well, open rates are dead dumb. I, my opinion or my open rates haven't really changed, which I don't believe. I just don't believe it like bologna. They went up and you're happy and that's not the same thing as they didn't change. There's no. Th that apple iOS footprint on email has not actually affected the accuracy of what you're looking at Scott to have, maybe if you're

[00:28:29] Baris Ergin: only B2B to the corporate domains, but in the past, blackberries are now whatever the phone they use, but not apple phones, maybe, but it's very small percentage, most impacted.

[00:28:43] Blindly because their numbers are higher on the tables, but the monetary it's not converting to money because it's just a balloon is apple creates. Suddenly some people are focusing on more on the clicks. Clicks is the new metric that we should follow, but not every email as call to action. It doesn't have to be like emails.

[00:29:03] Don't have to have call to action. So clicks is not. Uh, topic to look at. So it is a very hard thing. We are also looking into it. Some are trying to filter the apple related opens. There is a way to do it because the agent is a identifiable, but it's not also a real metric because some apple users are actually opening the email.

[00:29:26] So I don't know. It's really complicated. And I don't think the email has a consensus on how.

[00:29:33] Matthew Dunn: No, no, they don't. They, they don't. Um, and selfishly w where, where we had to look for a solution to that, because as a realtime content provider, like delivering the images delivered matter a bunch. Um, and so we had to say, how are we going to grapple with this problem?

[00:29:53] Um, it, I think it's partially because that, that accidental measure of open. Was in place for so long that there still seems to be a bit of shock about what, uh, what do we do now that it's not reliable in the way we thought it was. And I realized it wasn't a hundred percent reliable ever, but it's like the ground went out from under people's feet in the email marketing space and they're there.

[00:30:19] They're trying to figure out whether to deny it, run away from it, do something completely else. And I don't think any of those are an answer, honestly,

[00:30:25] Baris Ergin: I wasn't even sure. At least for three months, I just silently watched if apple is going to make any changes to their policy because it broke so many marketing automation systems.

[00:30:36] Yeah. Yeah. Like if I'm sending emails to my opener is automated series of emails, whoever opens my previous email, then suddenly people are receiving emails back to back without even opening the emails like apple is triggering those filters. I'm not even sure what apple did is the.

[00:30:54] Matthew Dunn: Sure. No, probably agree.

[00:30:56] Yeah. Yeah. I agree.

[00:30:58] Baris Ergin: But I think we're not on that. We're not at the finals. I think apple you'll change some things. Not saying that they're going to take it back, but maybe they may fine tune it, optimize it a longer

[00:31:10] Matthew Dunn: Google to be fair. Historically when Google launched their image product. Gosh, I want to say circa 20 12, 20 14, they got some industry pushback because initially they were, they were more aggressive about caching and they got some industry feedback, email industry feedback, like, Hey, you're killing us here.

[00:31:30] And to their credit, Google kind of backed off on how aggressively they were caching stuff, apple, my read on it. I would love to have someone listening, you know, chime in or connected. So my read on it is. Doesn't know, doesn't particularly care that the, that the MPP adjustment, uh, kneecapped email marketers.

[00:31:53] I don't think they care.

[00:31:55] Baris Ergin: Well, they listened feedback. Made major changes in their releases in the past about how, how apps collect data or not collect data. You

[00:32:08] Matthew Dunn: think that's based on you think that's based on in, you know, industry and middlemen or consumers and, and government, cause I'd argue it's consumers and government apple has such a strong privacy brand and is only continuing to grow.

[00:32:22] Um, you know, their business that I, that I think whatever makes them look better at privacy is what they're going to keep doing. Yeah. Maybe

[00:32:29] Baris Ergin: they can find a compromise, cause I'm not sure if the current, everyone opening every email, showing them as an opening is the

[00:32:38] Matthew Dunn: perfect solution is a good solution.

[00:32:39] Yeah. Yeah. Well, enemy to be fair. Apple is trying to grapple with this weird historical artifact problem. We were all misusing sort of misusing the HTTP. Uh, uh, bits that are accidentally built into email and apples. Like, what do we do about this? You know, is, do we do our customers want marketer X knowing whether or not they opened an email?

[00:33:04] Uh, we think, no, we'll, we'll say it's a spy pixel issue. As soon as you say spy pixels, you win. Right. You win the argument. As soon as you say, do you want email privacy? The answer is yes. Regardless of how complicated the issue. So, yeah, I don't think, I don't think we're done with this either. I am concerned.

[00:33:23] However, you mentioned the mechanism, user agent string, and boy, we're way down the geek rabbit hole here. Um, apple could change, uh, apple could change the, the, the sort of precarious hold that, that companies in ESPN. On on coordinating out, uh, recognizing their traffic, it would take, I mean, I hate to pay to trivialize it, but it's like, it's like two lines of code to randomize the user agent string, and then guessing what's an apple open gets even.

[00:33:55] Baris Ergin: Yeah. I mean, for Google, it's easy because we suddenly started seeing opens from mountain view, California, and it was easy and it's all email addresses. It's totally easy. But with apple, it's all over the email. This is not about the email address about it's the device that opens the email. So it's, it's make it difficult.

[00:34:16] Yeah. I don't know. I, I preferred to wait for the dust to settle down a little bit before taking a major action. Right now I'm watching what people are talking about, what people are trying to do next

[00:34:30] Matthew Dunn: as well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, and to have companies not, uh, countries in, in, in S in these quasi policy positions is, I mean, it's, it's, it's kind of the reality of now, but it's also a little bit vexing, you know, if, if.

[00:34:51] You know, if a country changes, uh, a law that affects how something works. In theory, at least you got a mechanism to go and say, wait, hang on a second. You're killing our industry. You know, if you say, you know, coffee cups have to be a standard size and you're a coffee cup manufacturer, you go back and say, wait a minute, you're putting us out of business.

[00:35:08] Do you really want to do that with apple, with Google, with the, with the companies that have achieved that level of influence? Uh, it's not it's, there's no linear path. To stick up your hand and say, we want to say in this decision, the PR promotions tab is a very good example. Like how do you get out of the promotions tab answer.

[00:35:30] It's going to be a different answer tomorrow. That's all I know. Yeah.

[00:35:34] Baris Ergin: There's no golden rule

[00:35:35] Matthew Dunn: that you can do. There's not like, how do you, how do you, how do you optimize your website for search results? Answer. It's going to be different tomorrow. Black art constantly moving towards. There's there's no, uh, there's no published standard that says here's how to get out of the promotions, tablets,

[00:35:53] Baris Ergin: the gaming for the spam spam folder as well.

[00:35:56] The most question received daily is all to avoid spam folders. There is no answer to it's the same exact email from the same exist. So it may end up in your inbox and my spam folder, Gmail. Yeah. Without any rules, like based on my previous history, I guess, but there's no

[00:36:13] Matthew Dunn: rule for it. Right. And. We're way down the rabbit hole, but I like it.

[00:36:19] Um, the notion that that's not damaging to both sides of the equation involved in that email, the sender and the recipient is bologna, right? Cause if I land in the spam folder or if I land in the promotions tab, if I sent you a message saying, Hey, let's coordinate a time to have this conversation. And it landed in the spam folder.

[00:36:37] You probably wouldn't see it, which means I didn't actually send you.

[00:36:44] Baris Ergin: Yeah, I have two daily check emails. One is my personal email and my other, and I have to check my work email spam folder at least once a week to see if I'm missing anything, anything that I'm reading from my Metro, send me an email and I missed it.

[00:36:59] Maybe I need to check the folder, but I'm not even looking at my Gmail. So yeah. Going away because of the spam folder placement, for sure. On the other hand about the privacy policy, what I feel like I hate websites and apps tracking what I'm doing. I watch all the documentaries about how we are the product, not the customer.

[00:37:21] And yeah, but on the other hand, when I turn off the customer checking of the cookies, suddenly I'm seeing irrelevant ads on the apps or websites. Like they were actually helping them. Like I was seeing more relevant content on these apps and websites, and now I'm not thinking, so there's a trade-off for your privacy.

[00:37:41] You're also losing some of the Bennett. That's taking is giving

[00:37:45] Matthew Dunn: the advertisers. Yeah, no, I agree. I don't want, I don't want to see ads for, you know, pick something I'm not interested in, why are you bothering me with this, right. Yeah. And then that, that, that convenience, you know, uh, confidence like that set of factors, those are really going to be shaping decisions.

[00:38:03] You already mentioned the difference between EU and the U S for example, and us playing some catch up there. We're not done with pre. Regulation yet. Um, what do you think about, um, I mean, this is us playing, this is us playing art critics sitting up in the balcony, but Facebook shed $250 billion in market cap in a day last week.

[00:38:27] Thanks to apple fundamentally. It was apple app privacy protection that just needed. Facebook's advertising revenue. And my, my view from the sidelines is, wow. That had to hurt too bad. What do you,

[00:38:42] Baris Ergin: I think they were over greedy in general. They became too greedy to, I mean, they attack too much attention with their greed because if you think about it, Is there a huge mega tech company, but nobody considers evil company about Facebook is evil.

[00:39:02] Microsoft is evil, but Google is not. For example, it's about. They are things, even though they do the same things, they do the same tracking. They do same trying to manipulate you and everything. I think that approach the Facebook's approach with a little bit sugary, then now they're getting punished for it.

[00:39:20] Matthew Dunn: I

[00:39:20] Baris Ergin: don't think that probably is the last group that we're going to see. I think they're going to shed a little bit more. They'll downsize a little bit in terms of the girls

[00:39:29] Matthew Dunn: push back and pick an argument with you though, as a, as an alum on. I think Microsoft has made a remarkable pivot. Oh man, I just lost Baris.

[00:39:43] We're going to pause. Yeah. There we go. We're back we're back. Um, I was just gonna, I was going, gonna say, pick an argument with Baris about Microsoft is evil because I worked at Microsoft, um, in the nineties and I was sick of the company, discussed it with it when I left, because it was mean and kind of, kind of dumb.

[00:40:04] But now the behavior from Microsoft as a company seems like night and day from 10 years. If it is

[00:40:12] Baris Ergin: the CEO change changed a lot in the company,

[00:40:15] Matthew Dunn: astonishing, astonishing the way they work with, uh, yeah, the way they work across the board, you know, we're way off, way off the track. But, uh, but I think such an Adela, uh, goes down in the history books as, as, uh, as, uh, a CEO that made a company make an astonishing turn in, not just in business, but in culture.

[00:40:37] And that's not easy to do with that. And I'm talking

[00:40:40] Baris Ergin: about, we're talking about the companies seem to do similar things, similar sizes, apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, but you can name two of them as evil, or at least one of them definitely evil right now, but the others are not, but they changed because of the, maybe the management because of simple decisions here and there.

[00:40:59] And we like Facebook what's happening to Facebook is completely because. How they see us, the consumers.

[00:41:06] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and I would argue structurally Facebook overreached in this respect that when Facebook launched their API APIs and said, you know, we're basically going to be everywhere and we're not Facebook, the website.

[00:41:22] We want to be connected into anything and everything that they sort of got lucky. Smart phones and mobile came along and exploded. Cause many, many apps where we're already writing to the Facebook API APIs and Facebook has this explosive growth, but they never had control of the device. Yeah. And apple just showed the cost of not having control of the device.

[00:41:45] They said, we're going to change the privacy policy and we don't care if you like it or not. And I

[00:41:51] Baris Ergin: think that that's why Microsoft spent a fortune, trying to make the windows mobile in windows, phones, the team, it didn't happen, but they

[00:41:58] Matthew Dunn: tried harder. They tried hard. Well, they bought Nokia and then dumped it like, oops, that's an expensive hobby.

[00:42:06] Right. And you've got Google and playing, you know, playing in a, in a really interesting back and forth. Like they have influence, but not complete control over. A lot of influence, but not complete control because they pursued the open source ish, Android. Um, so they can't make the unilateral moves that apple can, and that wouldn't necessarily like Google makes their money on advertising.

[00:42:33] Let's be blunt. So it'll be interesting to watch that one play out from the, from the I'm not even making

[00:42:39] Baris Ergin: your Google as a default search on all the devices is more than enough money. They don't have to control the. The

[00:42:47] Matthew Dunn: platform. Yeah. They don't have the control platform. And, you know, I say all this and I'm surrounded by flipping apple devices here.

[00:42:54] So, you know, like I, like, I like their privacy policy, even though anybody I'm PP. Well, Baris, we've got just a few minutes left. Tell me, tell me what you'd like to see direct IQ. If we have this followup conversation in about a year, where would you like to see things go for your company?

[00:43:16] Baris Ergin: I think we caught a very nice trend right now in terms of the growth, the product, the new product is very competitive and it's growing super fast as well. Now we have a backend that is so solid that we can add more features like weekly cycle. So I think the product will be 10 times more. Powerful a year from now and the grill.

[00:43:41] Truly. I am, I can easily write my name on sign under it that I'll have 10 X more revenue this time, next year as well. And of this year, actually, I end of December, let's say so I am very hopeful, but I'm also a little bit tired from the email space, just because maybe I'm running this business for too long.

[00:44:01] And also because of all the changes that we're discussing as well, like it's, it's a very difficult. Because you have to deal with spammers. You have to deal with phishing and spam is there and you have to fight with those people all the time. They're coming to you all the time. So another bit tired. So I don't know maybe a potential exit next year, or maybe stepping back, being a chairman instead of the active CEO and hire someone else feel.

[00:44:27] Yeah, I don't see myself. That's it two years from now. I don't see myself in this.

[00:44:33] Matthew Dunn: Okay. Okay. Well, wow. I love, I love a guy who puts an actual stake in the ground. I am going to put a note in my calendar. Chase Baris down in 2020. See how, how things are going if we haven't talked before before then. Well, thank you so much for, for spending the time and connecting with me from what it's evening.

[00:44:53] Right? So evening time in Portuguese six 20, I was watching the sun change a little bit in the course of our conversation with light, with sharks. Well, cool. My, uh, my guest today has been embarrassed. Ergon founder and CEO of direct IQ. You can find directly. Direct iq.com. Baris. Thanks so much.

[00:45:14] Baris Ergin: Take care.

[00:45:16]