Tuesday, December 11, 2018
Interview with Jordan Glazier, Wildfire Systems
Anyone knows that word-of-mouth recommendations--whether from friends, family, or influencers--carries a huge amount of weight when you're making purchasing decisions. So, if you're a marketer, how do you track and encourage those word-of-mouth recommendations? And, if you're a social platform, is there a way to monetize all that activity happening on your service? San Diego-based Wildfire Systems, led by startup veteran Jordan Glazier, has developed software which product referrals and automatically transform them into trackable links across email, text messaging, chat, and social messaging. Glazier--who is was most recently CEO of Eventful, but has a long history in San Diego's tech industry--sat down with us to talk about the new startup. Wildlink is backed by Mucker Capital.
How does this work?
Jordan Glazier: Wildfire has developed a platform for monetizing social messaging. When you look at social messaging, and talk about social messaging, we're talking about social media, text messaging, email, and chat applications. The majority of our time is now spent online. Yet, the ways that enterprises and businesses are monetizing that user interaction is sort of archaic, compared to the evolution of the technology. Right now, when people are communicating using Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and others, those businesses are principally using display advertising and sponsored listings to monetize those users. We're taking a different approach. Our platform is on all devices and all those communications channels, and is able to detect when consumers are referencing products, services, brand, and merchants in their communications among themselves. We look at what people are communicating in that content, and what we see is the value is in what people are referencing, mentioning, and recommending as products to their friends and family. They're doing that billions of times a day. Those references drive trillions of dollars of commerce.
All of the data shows that recommendations from a friend is the most trusted recommendation. We're really latching onto the growing trend of building products that detect product references in social messaging. We automatically add tracking and point those product references to e-commerce merchants.
What does that look like?
Jordan Glazier: For example, say you have a friend coming to San Diego, and they ask you where they should stay. If I write back, and tell them to stay at the Marriott in Del Mar, we would detect the Marriott Del Mar in your message, whether that's on Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, in a text message, in an email, or whatever, and convert that into a link to one of our merchants who are part of the Wildfire network. Using travel as an example, we already are partners with all of the travel partners you could imagine, such as Hotels.com, Booking.com, Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Priceline, etc. So when I say stay at the Marriott Del Mar, our technology turns that into a link that points to one of those travel partners, based on some proprietary algorithms. We have standing agreements to drive revenue share from all of those merchants in our network. The driving force for our merchant partners, is incremental sales, and harnessing those product recommendation and mentions in peer-to-peer communications. Our software just has to be on a user's device, and we have lots of ways to get there. We have our own suite of applications for Android, iOS, Mac, and Pac, and so forth, but our primary go to market is working with the existing channels, carriers, device OEMs, as well as social media and chat applications. Once we get on a device, we're able to embed these features. It's almost like native advertising, which recognizes an article mention is a hotel and turning it into a link. What we're essentially doing, is enabling communications channels, on any social media or chat app, and detecting product references to add tracking, and turning mentions of those products within peer-to-peer communications into native monetization.
How did you run into this opportunity?
Jordan Glazier: Throughout my digital career, from eBay in 2000, to a few successful exits, I kept bumping into the elephant in the room for all e-commerce businesses, which is peer-to-peer recommendations are the most potent influence on a purchase decision, but there is no platform to harness it. If you are a merchant, say you are Home Depot, or Ticketmaster, or Nordstrom, or Walmart, or Hotels.com, prior to Wildfire, there was no way for them to efficiently motivate and reward people for recommending their products. There were a lot of at-bats for that, things like promo codes, affiliate marketing, but those were really built for professional content creators. Those are so cumbersome, you really have to have a big following for them to make sense. Nothing like this sort of tapped into existing user behavior, so that they didn't have to do anything different, or work any harder. What we do is draft over the existing product mentions that happen a billion times a day, and point that into commerce. On the consumer side, and with merchants getting on board, it's been very straightforward for us. They all recognize that word of mouth is the most potent influencer for consumers.
Who is providing the funding and backing for the company?
Jordan Glazier: We did a seed round in July of 2017, led by Mucker Capital, out of Santa Monica. We are just beginning to raise our next round of financing this quarter. That's where I'm spending most of my time, unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it.
As a serial entrepreneur, what are you doing differently this time based on what you learned from your prior ventures?
Jordon Glazier: There's a couple of things. One, is we have a very small, amazing team, and I'd like to keep it that way. One of the things I like about this business, is it doesn't require a big organization. There are seven of us, plus some contractors for specific things. Those are also people I have worked together with in the past, and we've known each other for a decade or more. It's a very well-oiled machine. Everyone hit the ground running, and we've been able to get the band back together from Eventful, running product and engineering, and also guys who had worked at MP3.com, which has a very strong alumni base. Part of a small team, is it's much easier to keep people abreast of the strategy and vision of the business. There is something magical that happens when everyone understand the strategy, what we are thinking, and on an ongoing basis, pitching in and helping, especially early on in the business when you're still learning about market reaction and the right product market fit. It's been great to have everyone part of that process. It's fun being small, and I want to keep it that way. The second thing I laerned, in terms of business model, is I've built business all kinds of different ways online. Eventful, in particular, was very heavy on the advertising side, and I now see that any ad-based business is swimming upstream to trends in the market, including things like programmatic buying, and the juggernauts of Google, Facebook, and so forth. I harken back to my eBay days. While that is much more transaction based, and I like transaction-based businesses, they were not buying and selling products, what they were doing uses technology to enables services, without having to own inventory, and without having to be part of the transaction itself, but getting a slice of the deal.
You mentioned you were at eBay in Silicon Valley. How was it you ended up in San Diego?
Jordan Glazier: I was based in Chicago, originally. eBay brought me out to California in Q2 of 2000, and I spent four and a half years there. After leaving eBay, my wife and I decided to become Californians. We were not wed to the Bay Area, and we literally drove up and down the coast in mind to figure out where to go next. We were most excited about Santa Barbara and San Diego. We picked San Diego fourteen years ago, and haven't looked back since.
As some who has now built multiple businesses in San Diego, talk about how that has worked for you?
Jordan Glazier: That's a fantastic question. I have found a few things. It's relatively easy to find great engineering talent in San Diego. That's both because of the schools that are here, and the companies that have been out here with some great alumni. At the same time, there's not that intensity of competition for engineers as in Silicon Valley. At Eventful, our tenure for employees was six to seven years. We had very little turnover, and there was a lot of loyalty and buy-into the business. The ones who did leave were being poached by Google and Amazon, and moving North. But, for the most part, we had long tenured, great engineers. I found I like building technology businesses outside of the Bay Area. That's not to be derogatory to the Bay Area. But, I find, it helps not to be in the first-adopter echo chamber in search of problems. I find that building a business out of the Bay Area, makes it easier to tap into mainstream America, and to build businesses that have mass appeal, more broadly. Obviously, businesses in Silicon Valley have been successful in spades, but I do think for many businesses, who get all that built-in-feedback from early adopters in that market, have trouble breaking through into the mainstream and less tech-savvy users. I find San Diego is very good for that.
Finally, where are you now, and what should we be watching?
Jordan Glazier: Now that the platform is completely built, and we applications across all platforms, we are on the cusp of additional applications, including a Chrome Extension. That will happen within the next month or so. We also will be soft launching more broadly, plus we are fundraising right now. One of the things we are really excited about is getting our merchant network in place. We have over 20,000 merchants who are part of our network, basically everyone you have heard of plus 10,000 more. We're also focused on business development, including distribution partners to get Wildfire embedded within communications platforms. If you look at ad tech from across the web, that technology is now embedded within all types of platforms, and we hope to do the same. We also have three patents file, one approached, and we are puerly focused on helping our partners monetize the communications that is already taking place on their platforms.
Thanks!