Friday's by the Fire: Issue 5

Welcome back…

My weekly roundup of updates on what I’m up to, the pulse of the business, and new trends in the digital marketing world.

If you’re new, here’s what to expect…

1. Kindling - a tool or technology worth putting into the spotlight.

2. Spark - a big-picture question I’ve been asking myself.

3. Flame - a share on something I’ve been excited about throughout the week.

4. Fireside - an update on the business and related events I’ll be attending.

5. S’More - something fun and whimsical to end the week off on.

Sit back and relax…

Let me share what’s been happening.

Kindling

In this week’s spotlight: Eight Sleep. I’ve been traveling for the last 6 months, and the thing I miss the most is my Eight Sleep mattress. I’ve had it for a few years and noticeably saw the quality of my sleep improve. My fiancé tends to run cold and I run warm, so having the mattress's temperature controlled by an app so we can have something unique to us has been amazing. I still use and go by my Whoop to track sleep quality, as it’s a bit more sophisticated than the Eight Sleep, but you can be sure when we fully move into our apartment in August, we will be getting our mattress from storage. 

Spark

How important is community for a brand?

We’ve been very fortunate to work with a wide variety of organizations that have built a large customer/fanbase, from the LA Chargers to Dr. Joe Dispenza to MUD/WTR and we are starting to develop a framework on what it means to best unlock these communities for brands to drive growth. We can’t take any credit for developing any of these in the first place, but what’s always fun to us is how we can drive deeper engagement by leveraging data + technology + communication to connect more fundamentally with our clients' users. The short answer to the question is community is an incredibly competitive differentiator, but all of the clients I mentioned earlier wanted to build first-class experiences for their customers and didn’t sweat what the expenses of it would be or how much it would scale. Dr. Joe has a waiting list for every single one of his events. I remember asking him why not do larger events since the demand is obviously there and he responded by saying “I lose touch with the people and energy of the room and I think that’s a disservice to those attending.” In our industry, so many people focus on the numbers around the cost of acquisition, customer lifetime value etc, but how do you build a world-class experience for your customers that may be expensive and might not scale allows you to acquire customers more effectively in the first place is the more important question. 

Flame

Tim Ferriss has built one of the most downloaded podcasts on the internet with all types of guests ranging from Jerry Seinfeld to Arnold Schwarzenegger, but in this episode the script is flipped with Colin and Samir interviewing Tim. It was a wide-ranging episode talking about how he built his podcast and a lot of economics behind it, life lessons, and investing strategy. Give it a listen when you get a chance.

Fireside

CRO March Madness in June? Sure why not.

8 CRO experts all competed within a 3 minute slot to provide actionable insights to a brand’s website. They then went head to head in a single elimination match with the attendees voting for whose insight was most valuable. Fun format and was great to participate in, even though I only made it to the final four. 

S’More

It’s been pretty amazing to see how much the science fiction and fantasy genre has taken off over the years. I still remember reading Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones in high school and being embarrassed bringing some of my fantasy books to class, (to be fair the dragon fighting off the elvish maiden did look a little weird on the cover). So whenever anyone asks what book should I read to get started in sci-fi, I always recommend Red Rising by Pierce Brown. He’s an incredible writer and you have to love a protagonist coming from nothing and taking on the ruling class across galaxies (or is that just me and my teenage self getting excited again?). His 6th book in the series is coming out in a month, so you have plenty of time to read the 5 books which are each 500+ pages before then ;). 

Until next time,

Drew