Tuesday, July 28, 2020
Interview with Nick Hedges, MomentFeed
Our interview today is with Nick Hedges, the CEO of Santa Monica-based MomentFeed. We caught up with Nick--who is a veteran of the area's high tech industry, most recently serving as CEO of Velocify--to get the latest on MomentFeed, which provides services to multi-location businesses. Nick filled us in on the company's business, his move to head up the company in the last year, as well as some lessons learned running a company in the time of a pandemic.
What is MomentFeed doing now?
Nick Hedges: MomentFeed is in the proximity search optimization space. For us, large to very large multi location brands use our platform to ensure they get discovered online. Multi location brands, often restaurants and QSR (quick service restaurants) brands. Some of the biggest brands are our clients, including the world's largest coffee brand with multiple locations, are our clients. Car rental companies, retail, all of the big chains have a need to be discovered locally. Today's consumer is making a decision regarding what to do, and where to buy things, where to get services through proximity-based services on their mobile phone. Those are proximity-based searches. If I'm a consumer and I'm hungry, I'll probably go onto my mobile phone and search for the food I'm hungry for at the moment, whether that's burgers, pizza, a sandwich. Oftentimes that search will be on Google, sometimes it will be Apple, or another discovery network. When I put that unbranded term into my phone, it will come back, usually with three options, sometimes a few more, depending on who is returning those results. What our software does, is optimizes every signal the discovery algorithms look at when they decide to show results for those terms. For example, everything from the quality of the information about that location online, to online reputation, to social profile on Facebook for that location. We're basically about helping multi location businesses get discovered, locally.
We're familiar with your history as CEO at Velocify, how long have you been involved now with MomentFeed?
Nick Hedges: It was almost exactly a year ago that I came on board. The board decided this category was exploding, and consumers were turning more and more towards their phones to make decisions. They felt MomentFeed had huge potential, and was doing well, but it had the potential to grow even faster, which is why they hired me to take it to IPO scale. So July of last year, I swapped in as new CEO.
Remind us who is backing MomentFeed?
Nick Hedges: Level Equity led the most recent round, have Sigia Ventures in Menlo Park, and we have DFJ Frontier, those are the main investors, but we do have a variety of other investors.
Since you've come on, the world has changed significantly, and it seems like people might not be out using their phones as much. How have you handled that so far?
Nick Hedges: It’s counterintuitive really. You'd think that a business like ours, where we're all about physical location businesses, brick-and-mortar, and everyone knows in this era of COVID, those businesses have been massively impacted. Interestingly, we've seen an explosion in usage of our platform. The reason is because we ensure that the information about a local business is completely accurate and visible. For a multi-location business -- and let’s say you run a burger chain -- you need up-to-date information everywhere anyone might look online. That includes whether you're open, offering dine in and take out, and cleaning practices. All that has to be correct and up to date. With COVID, a lot of brands looked at what software to get rid of and what software to keep and every single one of our customers put us on the essential software list. We didn't get negatively impacted. We saw quite a bit of increase in usage and quite a few growth opportunities. We also started offering up some aspects of our software for free to help our customers thrive in COVID.
How many places online do you need to update that data -- is that just Google and Apple, or are there really that many other places?
Nick Hedges: It's a lot of different places, but for different reasons. Yes, there are core networks, where it's critical to get it right. So we manage that and have really deep partnerships with Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. But there are also hundreds of other listing locations across the Internet, which have some impact on those core networks. Even though ABClistings.com -- which doesn't really exist -- although it might not have much traffic, Google uses those listings to make sure the information ABClistings.com has is the same as theirs. Google is looking for discrepancies about the validity of a business. It's a pretty complex exercise. And information changes a lot, even on those core networks, particularly with COVID. Google triangulates a lot of information. They're looking at what the listings network is saying. They're definitely looking at what a brand's websites are saying. But they're also listening to consumers. And if a consumer says this door wasn't open when they said it was, Google might change that information inadvertently. So we're constantly looking at all that information to make sure it's brand verified and what the source of truth is telling. It's a pretty big exercise. Some of our clients have over 15,000 locations in their network. That's almost impossible to do without software.
On a different topic, you, as well as a lot of other executives, have been trying to run a company in a pandemic. How is that working out for you?
Nick Hedges: It's working out really well, and I was really surprised when it happened. I have always been a stickler for staff presence in a company, and I have invested a lot of time in the physical infrastructure of the office because there are so many good things that happen when people are together. I was pretty concerned that we would be physically apart from one another for an extended period of time. I never thought it would be as long as it has been. What I found is that our company has really, really thrived. That's because A.) we felt we were doing really, really important work for our clients, helping them to stay in business. And B.) it's because of the mindset of people at MomentFeed. Collaborating online comes naturally. Everyone has been on Slack since before COVID. With Zoom it's actually been a bit easier to have productive meetings and to ideate. We've enjoyed it so much. It's added another element to people's lifestyles to not have to commute, so we are moving to a remote-centric business. We used to have a really big office in Santa Monica down on the beach but we're going to relinquish that. Instead, we’ll take a smaller footprint, which is designed around collaboration, and not require everyone come in every day. If people have a need to come in, they can have a desk. But if not, they can come in to use a meeting room and other shared spaces. COVID has shown that is possible.
What is your big push now and what are your next steps?
Nick Hedges: We are in a pretty competitive space with a number of players and one that is quite a bit bigger than us. We want to be number one. That's where we have our sights set. We feel we have the best platform in this space, but we recognize it's in a space where there is still a huge amount of innovation possible. One of the things I am doing this year is doubling the size of our R&D team to really focus on product. We want things no one else has and want to innovate. We see there is so much more we can do to help brick-and-mortar businesses. We have a number of unique ideas to elevate our product beyond anything else anyone has. We believe that if you put the customer at the center it works and everything else takes care of itself.
Thanks, and good luck!