Rikin - CMO Soona

What's up, DTC pod? Today we're joined by Rikin Diwan, who is the CMO and chief growth officer at Soona. So Rick and I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, maybe some of the stuff you're working on before and kind of what you do on a day to day basis.

Yeah. Hey, Blaine and Ramon. Thanks for having me. Yeah. My name is Ricken. I am currently chief growth officer at Soona. I know you guys had Liz on the pod, so I won't go deep into Soona, but we're basically a content and creative studio for ecommerce brands. So ship us your products.

We capture it on photo, video or it gets sent to a UGC creator with friend as Ramon. And we're working with over 20,000 brands now, producing content. We've been around for about four years, so we can go a lot more into that. My career has been. I think of it as two phases. It's always been marketing, it's always been heavily digital. The first phase though, was like skill stacking. Marketing is extremely bifurcated and people talk about what is a chief growth officer versus a chief marketing officer.

There's awareness and brand and then there's performance in the data side. And I realize in my career you can never get that exposure all at once. You kind of have to. Or at least for me, I felt like every two, three years I feel comfortable. That's not good. That's not a good feeling. Let me move on. So I started in New York and it's been kind of a tale of be in media, be an agency side, stay in agency side for probably longer than I wanted.

You know, learn in that, you know, web traffic and things like that. Learn branding, learn social, learn content. And then I went into tech. When I went into tech, I was pretty much a product marketer. My first real stint in tech was at Foursquare. So the check in app. So I was there for about three years mainly doing product marketing. And Foursquare was going through quite a bit of a change, turning from kind of an inapp advertising supported social app to a data play that was going to power other apps and power advertising technology.

That was mostly what my focus was, was like, how does we work with product? What's coming out? Translate that mainly for a sales team and a bd team, no longer translate that for customers. At the end of that, I kind of look back and I'm like, all right, well, now I've done a little bit of everything. Pretty good at some stuff. I know what I enjoy the most and who's going to be kind of like dumb enough to take a bet and make me ahead of marketing. But I was really lucky in that I had known a guy named Ryan. He had founded a company in the bike share space, of all things. And he called me up and he's Rick, like, we're going to change everything. And I have this electric bike and I went to Brooklyn and I rode this electric bike and I'm like, this is amazing.

And I joined them as vp of marketing, started running marketing, but this is like 1000 shitty coffee pot and just me as the marketer, that's all. We had raised a series a, but about 90% of that money went to hardware producing bikes in China and very little leftover. But that company was called Social Bicycles when I joined. I rebranded it with the team to a company called Jump. We quickly launched pilot programs in Nessf and DC and we caught kind of the eyes of Uber. And then Uber ended up acquiring us just like six months later. So it was like quite a ride. And then I jumped into Uber where for the next or a little over a year, we just scaled insanely fast.

My team went from me to 40 marketers globally, kind of figuring out how do I navigate Uber. We were in 35 global markets now with our bikes. Then we launched scooters. And so if you've ever ridden the bright red one, that was a jump bike. We were in LA, I think we were in Miami. But now that company then got divested out of Uber and became line or joined line. And so now if you've ever seen the white and green line bikes and line scooters, that's the jump know. And it was a great experience for me because from joining a company, being the only person in marketing limited funding to getting acquired Uber ipoed in that time that I was there and our bike was like on Wall street, on the floor part of the story.

And then being told, we're divesting the business and all of you are out. Like everything we experienced in two years was what I think most startups think they might go through in 20 years. I got a lot of gray hairs and sleepless nights and had kids in that time period too. But yeah, I left. And then when I left, I knew I wanted to be a startup. And I felt like jump, it wasn't a startup for long enough for me. And I came back to early stage startups again. I've never been one to love an industry necessarily.

I found an insuretech. I went to that insuretech, learned a lot about insurance. Doesn't sound sexy, but actually as a marketer, there are some really interesting parts where insurance is a massive SEO play, it's a massive Google play. And I really learned that. And I think what I realized there is, I like this kind of marketing. I could pull this lever and show my impact on the business and be really close with finance and our budget and modeling and forecasting. And it is b to b. And it was SaaS.

And so I really enjoyed that. And then Soona came knocking and essentially Soona is still b to b. I like to say we're lowercase b to b in the sense that our end customers are awesome. They're merchants, they're brands, they're someone starting on Shopify or they're the big ones too. But it's just much more fun. It's not an enterprise product, so we get to have fun with it. And, yeah, been at Soona ever since and we got some exciting things in the works that we're announcing and building the team here. But that's me in a nutshell.

Well, that's awesome, Rick. And I'd love to kind of go a little bit deeper on the whole uber experience and that transition. What was it like in terms of what were the responsibilities? What were you trying to convey? What were the challenges of marketing the product and how did you kind of tackle and tell that story? Through content?

Yeah, well, content was a big part of it and one that we did really well. When you have a hardware product that is gorgeous and fun, like an electric bike, it's not hard to create good content around that. And so we actually built. Well, I'll talk about it in another way. When we joined Uber, it was just me. So now I have to figure out what kind of structure do I need? And I need to start thinking, well, what types of goals do we have and what are the objectives and the challenges that the business is facing. So where could marketing plug in? And there was kind of like two main areas. Now, as a marketing, like, as someone in marketing, responsible for marketing, the easy one is actually awareness, which is kind of funny because most brands have the hardest time gaining awareness.

We have bright red bicycles that we get to drop on the street and it's like you're out of home. Billboard, super easy. You know the next day that we're in town when you see everyone riding around on this bike with your logo. So awareness isn't my challenge, and I don't need to put most of my paid budget into awareness that there is a thing called the bike share program. What was the challenge is how do you figure out how to get an Uber rider in the Uber app to move out of the screen that shows cars and shows bikes instead, and present that in an exciting way and as an efficient mode of transportation. And then the unique one with bike share is the cities give you a permit to be in every city and they almost control your supply, too. You can't deploy more bikes or scooters if you want to. But the biggest thing at that time, and everyone listening to this knows is safety.

And these bikes and scooters are all over the sidewalk like almost like litter. We have to meet certain demands of the city to show people how to ride safely. And as a marketer you're like, but it's electric. And I want to talk about how fast they go, but you actually have to kind of build that behavior. So we use content a lot for both of those things. Like both educating the Uber rider, like why this bike is going to be awesome for you instead of a car or in different situations than a car. And then also just like meeting our guidance with the city to make sure that. And we would do events and bike rides and do a ton of content.

But yeah, content was a huge part. I had an in house team because content was so important. I knew the clip of content was going to be super fast. And so I had an in house team and they were amazing. And we would send them around the whole world shooting content.

This was before then. Hiring content creators was really a thing. Thing. Right. What year was this? What did content mean in that era?

Video. Lots of video and photography.

Was it paid marketing?

And then we'd push it with paid marketing. In fact, we worked with three six eight, which is Casey Neistat's company. We gave Casey a bike and had him ride it and keep it in his place in New York. And when he went to think it was Atlanta, at one point he rode our bike and captured a very Casey story. And then actually three six eight has a creator network as well. And so one of them produced our safety video because we're like, we don't want our safety video to be boring. So they did such a phenomenal job. But our in house team, yeah, it's rare.

It's a luxury a little bit to have an in house team and warrant that on your payroll, essentially. But we just knew it was super important to share this.

And what was the marketing strategy prior to joining Uber was this.

Oh, prior to ordering, because you're always dictated by winning a city permit. So that part was really tough. But really, the strategy, even at that time, was more on the pricing retention side of it. How can you get these guys to ride your bike once and then be sticky as a customer again? You have the bike on the street. In fact, the best way to push a promo in a B two B SaaS world is like email, right? Or like a modal window on a website. In this world, it's take a vinyl, hire an operations team and have the bike wrapped with the promo on the basket. That's your impression, right? It was a luxury too. Because we were like owning a movable billboard in that sense.

But we had to kind of think physical as well as digital. And then the digital takes over and it's like retention and loyalty. But honestly, that portion of it was so short lived because of Uber. And then the challenges or opportunity with Uber immediately kicked in.

Well, it worked. It worked too fast.

Yeah.

What's interesting is every business has unique dynamics and advantages for promotion that are probably nontraditional ways of marketing. Like you mentioned on the insurance, with the SEO, there are certain traits because a lot of marketers talk about playbooks, right? But often the marketing strategies with the biggest, outlier results are the ones that are not a playbook. And that your business has a unique sort of component to it that you can pull off this strategy that nobody else is really doing. I wonder, you probably look for those by instinct within all the businesses you operate.

Yeah, well, I think what I look for in a company, even in the interview phase, is like, is this product inherently disruptive? Because if it is, then that is the story that I just need to put impressions behind. I like very disruptive products personally. The challenge with that is you're taking a bet that that disruption, which normally is a different business model, is effective to the point where vcs want to put money behind it or it can scale in a way that makes sense, a path to profitability or path to just infinite kind of supply of vc money. So that's always the risk you take. And I mean, even with the insurance company, for example, they are the only company, it's called Thimble. It's still around. It's awesome. They are the only company that can do business insurance down to the hour.

So if you're like a wedding photographer, instead of buying an annual insurance policy, you can go in an app, buy 4 hours of insurance. You could actually charge your client to pay for the insurance because it's the venue that requires the insurance. And so I just love that they filed this regulatory filing and I'm like, it's weird, it's insurance. But I just thought that was super interesting. And as a, like, we had Red antler do the branding. It's not boring in any ways that challenge. And even at Soona, we're the only company that you could ship this product to and come on our site and build a. You know, I'd been on the other side of that.

I spent thousands of dollars for a photo shoot and now it's like kind of a simple pricing model that can scale globally because we have this virtual shoot. And so I'm kind of a masochist in that. I love that disruptive thing, but it is a hard challenge. But to your point then, okay, so that's kind of not a playbook, right? That's part of my thing. I still think, especially now that I've found a groove with B two B SaaS. There are definitely playbooks and you need to build those. But I think marketing teams every quarter if they can, but definitely every six months we need to take a swing. And typically that's like who is this brand? What do we stand for and what do we want to say that might have some type of unattributable, outsized kind of benefit? Those are hard, but I think you have to find time and your planning to fit those in.

You mentioned it's challenging, and it's challenging because sometimes these businesses require an education curve for the consumer. I'm curious. At the same time you can implement the playbook, but the way you integrate the strategies into the business themselves can be the differentiator. Right. Like people, marketers operate in different ways. So marketers want to implement four playbooks at the same time. One might want to sprint on a specific thing. When you come into a business, how do you assess or audit Thimble is SEO Asuna xx and how do you assess the best marketing opportunity for the business?

Well, I think now I'm better at it and now that I focus on B two B SaaS, I could speak to that. I've actually never been in an ecommerce company even though this is a d to c pod. And I mean to me the thing if I were to be in a d to c ecommerce company, it wouldn't be the marketing because it's mainly Facebook marketing typically at that point until you're retail, but would be like supply chain. I don't know how to market and scale that marketing up and down as your supply of product or when the new hardware product is coming, it's going to happen. That would be the challenge there. And I don't think I could do it or honestly would accept anything there in the future. In b to b and many other products, I actually think, and you guys kind of talked about in the beginning of what is it like being a cmO? I actually think you have to know your finance side of the business really well and you have to know how the product is priced and packaged and how that then impacts how you're going to acquire a customer. And honestly it just goes back to is this a product led motion or a sales led motion, or is it both or a mix of both? And then what kind of resources do you have? Because in a product led motion, where you're going to click a button, go through a funnel and transact at the end of that funnel, it's kind of closer to ecommerce, where it's a CAC, AOV, AfoV LTV thing.

And then in the sales led motion, it's like I got to get an MQL and I got to convert that to an SQL. And where do I get all these from? And do I have a CRM system and an SDR? And I've had some really good conversations recently with some other cmos of like, where do you put the SDR? Is the SDR in marketing or are they in sales? And is it an agency or the stack? That's always a challenge, but it sounds unsexy. But the right play for me is looking at the business itself and then being like, all right, where's growth going to happen? Because that changes the channel or that changes the team that you need. Yeah. Not the most glittery sparkly of answer, but I think that's fundamental.

Yeah, I was going to ask you, Rick, just to elaborate a little bit more there. I think one thing every marketer sort of thinks about or struggles with, it's like, where am I allocating my budget? Right? You've got limited budget. You've always want more. You're obviously going to understand the unit economics of the product and the type of motion that your business is running. But when you think about it, is it as simple as, let me just find the best performing channel and dumping in budget there, so long as it all checks out? Or is it more thinking in broader strokes and balancing a budget across multiple different areas of the business?

Yeah, I mean, most of your budget is going to be an acquisition budget. I think where I am earlier stage companies B two B SaaS. Performance is obviously the underpinning part. At Uber, the budget was something like $50 million. And a lot of it was like Brandon awareness. It's very different. Like we had out upon billboards and we were throwing events and we did paid. But it's very different now, though.

I believe performance dollars for our business is the awareness. Like you're going to gain awareness by being in Facebook and Google and out in the front. I think what happens is your acquisition mix at a certain point you start to feel like this isn't good enough. Right? And you're like, every dollar I'm putting into Facebook diminishing return. And luckily there are playbooks. Like, I don't know if ten years ago there were playbooks on this because it was so different, but now you're kind of like, wait a second, they have a cool agency program, or they have a partnership that's crushing it. And that part is actually really hard. That part is so relationship driven, and it's like bd at this point.

And why do they want to sell you? Right? Yeah, maybe you can give them some referral revenue, but what else is it? Adding value to their business. And so in the world I'm in right now, and even at symbol, because at symbol, the other challenge was there's these weird aggregators that basically arbitrage the SEO. So, for example, like, policy genius in the insurance space, it's like an expedia for insurance policies, but they're bidding on your word that you want to go after capturing the lead and then selling it back to you. And you're like, you assholes, you're bidding on the same word. I'm bidding. And when I give you money, you spend more money on the same word. So my CPCs are going up, and then with a way they give it back to you is over the phone. So now you need a sales team, and you're like, wait, I didn't have a sales team.

I just had a product funnel. But at a certain point, if you don't do it, they're going to do it, right? Somebody else is going to do it and take that lead away from you. So it's always about finding more tamp, basically. And at some point, I don't think Facebook and Google are it. And then I think in the d to c world, they've realized this recently as well. You just can't only scale a meta budget. You have to have some retail presence or be a broader distribution.

Which is where creators come into play, too, and being such a big distribution channel. And it's wild that the platforms themselves haven't never really nailed it. You think that, oh, the TikTok creator marketplace is there and they're going to own it.

But.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, I'm totally glad they haven't. And what's awesome is that there's a creator for every niche. Just the other day, I was like, who are the cfos in the d to C space on Twitter? And I got four, and I'm like, these are amazing people. This is ramp going to go make them an affiliate, probably, but I love that there's the creator space. I don't know if I've cracked it yet, to be honest though.

Yeah, well, it's like relationship based as well. Whether you're using something like trend, you are engaging one on one with that person and you are sort of building that relationship in a way where the creator has to like your product and they have to like working for your company as well or like repping it and they have to really understand the product to even extract a messaging that you might have not even thought of that will end up in a really successful campaign. So in a way that's also a marketing strategy that does. It sort of has a byproduct benefit of new copy angles, things you didn't think about being able to use a creative for performance. But how do you think about creators as from a performance basis? Like talking about this financial angle. How should brands be thinking about working with creators when budgeting it depends on stage.

I think at first you can tiptoe it into it with a performance mindset. You can set up like an affiliate kind of approach to it and only want to pay out when the referral, that's completely down to the click sent to you. But I think after a while you have to understand that some of this is awareness and some of this is performance based and take it from there. I don't think that it's going to scale with just performance. You're going to have to take some bets every once in a while on that. And then to your point too, you can't be transactional because it's a person, not a website or a platform on the other side of it. And so obviously they want to get paid out. So there's a transaction involved, but you have to figure out how to almost build a relationship with them, a rapport with them.

Gear your brand around that too. Yeah, I think that's not an easy thing and that's not necessarily something where it's going to come that transition, because you're going to hire this growth team, they're all going to be like data analysts and channel managers and then be like, you can't tell them to go build the relationship side with an affiliate thing. So I think that's kind of where it becomes difficult.

But from a content perspective is a no brainer as using creators for the content of your performance. The UGC and all of that content. I'm curious how you implement like not enough brands are doing it, not enough brands have a full UGC library constantly churning out content, different concepts, different ideas, different messagings, different seasons, targeting different demographics. How should brands be thinking about producing content? How do you even implement, you know, having trend and Soona, you guys use your own content for your performance marketing.

Yeah, but our best performing asset right now is one of our customers who tweeted something. And me taking that and putting that in a screenshot, it doesn't even have the product photography. We're selling product photography, but that tweet like screenshot of a tweet is doing better. And when it started to do better, we actually went deeper with them. Like they had a newsletter and they have their own channel and so we're in with them. And it's funny how d to C has done. It's a little bit unspoken, but a lot of these d to C operators are pretty tied to the stack in the company. On the other side, it feels pretty taboo to talk about how much that is happening right now.

But I think both sides, the b to b SaaS of ecommerce and the d to C side, have learned that there's a social proof game here to be played. And b, two b SaaS doesn't want to be boring anymore. And brand actually does help quite a lot. And so, yeah, I think in terms of quantity of content, it's actually interesting how soon is different. We take millions of photos, so we have lots of a big bank of photos. We have UGC creators that we could put out in front, but for most brands, they actually kind of only have a certain number of hero assets that they typically shoot for Amazon and Shopify. And then I think the quantity underneath that though, needs to be so much more and so much faster. Taylor holiday of common thread collective tweeted the other day, that volume of creative, that's your biggest leverage.

That's going to get you that outsized bet, because that creative was distinct and had a different message. And I actually think using the voice of somebody else, though, is a good way to do that for your brand versus you trying to say something different about your brand. And sometimes those creators, if you listen hard enough, the way they talk about your brand resonates better than what your value prop on your own site might even say, like, we need to learn from how are others talking about our brand? So yeah, I think creator content is probably even looking ahead where most of our budget is going. How do you turn this thing that was like a boring case study into something that can be used and spliced and cut and amplified?

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Rick. And I also want to ask about that because I think another problem that I've seen when I'm in the marketing seat, it's like I want to invest in content, right? And I want to be putting it out and I have all these different channels, but every campaign is a little bit different. Markets are changing, you're trying to figure out what to do. So how do you go from ideation of how much of budget you should be putting into working with creators to get new content and then reconciling that with like, okay, now that I have that content, where is it going? Because like you're saying, obviously you can put some of it on Facebook, Google, whatever, but I guess if you could just talk to us a little bit about that interplay between the creative direction in terms of saying, I'm buying this much content, but then also knowing on the back end where as a marketer, you're pushing it out to get the best ROI on that content that you produce.

Yeah, well, first I think you need a team that understands this so that when they are storyboarding this with a creator or by themselves or with a freelancer, they are thinking this through. They know that this one piece of content is going to be 30 seconds on the site, 7 seconds on TikTok, and spread out in many different ways. That's how you have to stretch your budget further than it can really go. I think somewhere there's a ratio of if this is your paid spend, this is how much you should be spending on that content underneath. And I probably would say it's somewhere between five and 10%. I think after a certain point you're going to say, I'm spending 10 million. I'm not spending 1 million on content. But I think it's probably healthy in that above the line, below the line mix.

And now if you're smart, that 5% is also helping SEO, right? Our word is product photography. Do a video and make that title product photography on YouTube and try to be in the video SEO game as well. I mean, I think think it through, but you need much stronger content strategists these days who kind of know how these channels are interplaying and then could think of a storyboard that can be, that's, and there's some really interesting tools out there these days that are cutting video in new ways. And I think video is the biggest thing. Right. Like at the end of the day, UGC and your own video, it's expensive. UGC cuts that and gets you volume in a way. And then if it works, what I would actually do is whitelist it and try to put the paid money further behind it and keep going.

Why don't we talk a little bit about whitelisting and SEO? They kind of sometimes go hand in hand. So you've got like, once you've concepted an idea, maybe there's a couple of ways to make that content go a little bit further. So do you want to just explain go a little bit deeper of what you were talking about, about how you bridge the gap between content strategy and turning that into materials that you can use for both SEO and potentially whitelisting?

Yeah, that would be a tough bridge. I wouldn't say there's a playbook around that one. I would say like in b, two B SaaS especially. You need to know SEO really well. I think where d to C is a little bit more Facebook and meta B, two B SaaS. You have to start on Google. If you're using Facebook, it probably means that the solution you've made, people aren't actively looking for. Right.

And so you've come up with something unique, which maybe is awesome for your business but probably very difficult. But on the SEO side, I think it's quite clear to see that YouTube is probably the stickiest of platforms. I think even just personally that rabbit hole you can go down and now with stories too. So I think that play of my long format video and then my short format video now can work together in the same kind of medium and then that short format can work on TikTok and Instagram. Now, obviously you're going to have to do a ton of SEO research first. And the SEO world doesn't even talk about video optimization as much as content. Or like nowadays, it's the whole AI game of SEO as well that everyone's trying to figure out. But yeah, I think they're blurring pretty.

Yeah, I think YouTube is insanely interesting for DTC brands. We had a dog company, dog food company called Sundays. Yeah, dog Food. They don't sell dogs Sundays on the podcast and their entire creator play is around YouTube and it's crushing for them. So I think the one thing Blaine was referring to, though, on the whitelisting and the SEO, I think, Blaine, you were referring more to listicles of like there's these publications and they do listicles and then you run ads behind those publications that seem more in the DTC space. I don't think b two B SaaS does that or b two B in general, but is that what you were referring to, Blaine?

Yeah, that's what I was referring to. I've seen it a bunch in d to c, whether you come up with a listicle or a different content piece, and then you can run it in collaboration with an influencer and link the CTA to run it from a blogs page in collaboration with the influencer. So you're kind of like the third party involved. I haven't seen it as much in b two B. I'm sure it could be applied to b two b. I obviously just haven't seen it as much. But I just feel like, I guess where I was talking about the overlap between SEO and whitelisting, it's like when you're coming up with a content idea and you're creating a piece of content that could rank for that intent or whatever, a lot of times these types of content end up on blogs as well, where you can also go ahead and whitelist them.

That's super smart on something. I mean, you're blurring the lines of like, are you whitelisting? Which is typically like putting paid behind a creator's content versus just sponsoring? Because them putting out something like if you designed it where you had somebody else put it out and make sure that their title description don't give them too much direction, but be like, look, I want this video to rank for something specific. If you put that research into the design and then they have that subscriber base because that's kind of where you're missing as a brand, you're just not going to have a massive subscriber base. I think that's where it's almost like in the SEO equivalent, it's like domain authority. They just have more domain authority but on a different platform because each video is going to get more reach and then make them optimize for an SEO term. Ozzy, that's probably an arbitrage play I just haven't done yet. But yeah, you probably got my mind kind of thinking we should probably think about some things there.

And one thing that you just mentioned that I think is applicable to direct to consumer brands as well as B two B. It's just in general, the state of SEO with all the AI content. Right. I know Google pushed out a massive update in October that really just changed how everyone's ranking. It's putting a lot more focus on authority and who wrote the content and it being real and authentic. So is that something that you've seen on your side? How are you thinking about SEO now with some of the updates that you've been seeing in a bunch of other people? Probably spamming Google for about a year now with a bunch of GPT?

Well, what's funny is I was talking to somebody yesterday, he's like, I got to be real. Like, I put a site out with all GPT content and it's doing fine. So I have heard that, luckily, Soona, we haven't seen anything. The sites I'm looking at haven't seen anything. I had a side project where I was like, creating everything in Koala writer, which does all the writing. Then your workflow is like, take all that content, put it in Surfer SEO, make sure it ranks at a certain score. Surfer has that proprietary score. That site, all the AI things went to shit.

Like it's just not picking up, but it's like domain authority zero. So I don't know. I think some people might be getting away with it, some people aren't. It's hard to see what Google's doing. What's cool though is AI definitely has a place here. If anything, Google's probably gone over on penalizing AI created content when they're looking. Was it created or not? I think there's some know, I was doing it myself on a guitar website. All things.

I was like, I'm going to put my money where my mouth is. I'm going to see if I can figure it out. Its first graph that it spits out inspired me to write a better article than I would have with a blank slate. That's how I kind of think about it. But if you don't add that human editing, I don't know, maybe it will rank temporarily. But I don't think you're going to build something awesome with it. And I think you're definitely not going to build something where you have a site, a newsletter, a community that follows it, social channels that are active. And I think that's the best way in the SEO game because anyone who just saw this tank realized they don't have any other sources of traffic.

They were just trying to play the Google game and it works for a while, but now you're too invested in one platform. So, yeah, I mean, I think there's some really cool tools. Even creating images for blog posts and things like that is going to be awesome. Or even thinking speech to text and all this fun stuff you could do. I think there's so much content, why not see it in different mediums quickly? So yeah, we'll see where that one all goes. But I will say what I don't think is happening is I don't think Chat GPT is killing search. I think a lot of people thought it would, but I don't think we've seen that at all.

And I think search, they're just different experiences, right? Because if you're asking for an answer from Chat GPT, it's almost like playing the I'm feeling lucky game with Google, right? You're probably going to get an answer, it's probably going to be good and a lot of times it'll probably be better than Google. But there's something about the browsing experience that people find nice. And actually I was thinking a lot about it recently in terms of SEO. It's like, I feel like Google pushed this update out, which might penalize some AI generated content, but I don't think they're done pushing updates in regards to how they're treating AI content. Because if you actually look and you're googling content, there's probably been a great improvement in general content that's out there. I just don't think Google is parsed through it yet has the data on how people are actually spending time on different pages, understanding what's going on. And even on the sites that I manage, I'm seeing massive swings all the time. I have pages that in one month will be doing like 2000 hits a month just on a single page.

And then the next month it'll go down to 100 and then the next month. So it just seems like in the background Google's just figuring out what to do.

I mean, maybe this is optimistic. What I hope Google is doing is like deranking you or ranking someone else up and seeing if that is better than what you had posted and then switching course correcting. That's what we're told it kind of does and that's what I hope it does and that's how they can measure value. So yeah, I think you will see this roller coaster. We've been seeing some really good stuff. We're building a lot of AI tools here at Soona and the search volume trend for AI tools is spiking. So yeah, I think we're pretty excited by that.

Part of I want to, I want to get into that too. I think one of the most important things you said is you can build a website with all this AI content, but you're not going to have a community. And from my own experience, I've grown Instagram accounts with a bunch of followers, hundreds of thousands, repurposing content, and you cannot develop those 1000 true fans. That cult following is just not possible. If we take this conversation to the visual content side of things, the golden question for companies like trend and Soona is like, well, is AI content going to replace the photographers and the content creators? And it's the same principle applies, right? Think of a brand whose content is entirely AI generated. You build a community based on sort of values and things that you relate with. And if it works, you can only get so far. There's the AI hype, everything is new kind of excitement.

But I'm curious on your thoughts on that and how are you thinking about that?

I mean, on one side of it, I think most of the AI tools right now are like glorified swap background, remove background tools. But when you think about that, the hype is nice, but you've been able to do that in Photoshop for decades now. The application of that use case has been around and it never took anything away from someone who was good at Photoshop. So the fact that these people have a different tool, these people being creatives have a different tool, I don't think it takes the application or that end use case in their role out of the equation. Hopefully they're producing more content like we just talked about, you need more content than ever before. How are you going to get it? It's still going to hopefully keep the job and we're not backing away. We have 30 photographers hired full time and they're very busy. But we're still in phase one and I think it's going to change.

I think what will also happen is you're going to want really high quality things of your product and then you're going to be inserted into different use cases, world scenes, things like that. That's not where AI is at yet. It typically takes like a 2d flat thing, cuts it out, puts it on something, but they're getting better and they've gotten so much better just in the past few months. I think we as a company at Soona, we have basically felt that we have a role in this space. Even though we started with real photographers, real videographers, we still have a role in this space to make you make or to help you make beautiful content. So we actually have a listing insights tool that looks at AI generated photography and it gives you a score and it basically says your composition is not great. It's just too AI at this point. And I think that's become really obvious.

People are looking at images and be like, that's AI. That's not the real thing. And when you're also talking about product quality, like the high def of the product in the image, that's super important. If that image doesn't look great or it's kind of manipulated and then you ship an actual product that looks completely different, your return rate is going to suck. So I think we're trying to build it that no matter what, it's beautiful and it's got integrity behind it. So are we building remove background tools, blur background tools, swap this thing out and we're trying to stay ahead of the cool curve. Absolutely. In fact, some of our top customers have access to these tools in a beta right now.

But we've just learned, like, you know what, our company was built by creatives, and creatives know what good creative looks like. The best ones never care about the tool. If the tool is a camera, if the tool is Photoshop, if the tool is something we build. And so that's kind of where I think it's all going to go. And like I said, the SEO thing, I don't know, I thought it was going to cut out. I thought my article production for a good SEO article was going to drop from like $400 an article to like $15 an article. But no, it's come down a little bit. But there's still so much to do to make it better.

So, yeah, I think it's going to be somewhere in between of what we think it will be and what it is today.

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point, especially around what you said with Soona and how you guys are thinking about photos and photographers and pairing it with AI as well. I know. It's like Netflix for, right? Like they cared about their end customer. They didn't care about the how or the mechanism of the delivery. They were just like, our customers want entertaining content. So whether that's a dvd in the mail or a streaming service, at the end of the day, they're delivering what the customer wants. So it's knowing your customer and understanding what it is that you do and what you provide to them and not necessarily being so stuck in the way. It's like, oh, they only like us because it's like a real photo or they only want us because it's an AI photo.

It's like. No, like you said, they want good creative. So one question that I'd have for you is, as a marketer, like you were alluding to earlier in our conversation, storytelling is such an important part of that. Right. So what is the story that you're telling at Soona? How do you navigate that story? Make sure you have consistency across your channels. And as we're navigating this sort of crazy time where you've got AI generated content moving so fast, and you guys were built originally as an in house studio production, how are you navigating telling that story? What does that look like over the next? Call it five years, ten years?

Yeah. We've changed our value props, because we're now introducing all these features. So now you can authenticate your galleries and everything with it, with your Amazon store, your shopify store. So now we're really understanding. Like, we're sitting on 4 million photos. That's pretty crazy. And that doesn't even include all the videos that we've done on the UGC side, right. In that kind of ecosystem that's floating everything outside of our studios.

And so we kind of have realized that we actually have a stronger position kind of in the middle of a workflow than we thought we did. Right. Or that we may have thought we're not just where you're going to make content, because now you're going to keep your content on Soona. And then we also want to help you make sure that that content works and it's effective. So actually, our new tagline is Soona is where you make, manage, and measure your content with confidence. And the confidence part is also really important to us because we want you to make content that we think has a high level of quality, not just for conversion rate, but also because our founders are creatives. They had a creative agency before this. They are photographers by trade.

Liz is never an arm's length away from a Leica camera and is obsessed with photography. And also, as my role, I told Liz, I'm like, our brands love you and they love your voice. No matter how big we get, you got to make sure, and we make sure, and she'll never shy away from it. She's outspoken and has a voice in it, which I love. As a marketer, I actually think I've worked at companies where the founder is a little bit shy and that's. It's personal. Um, but having someone who lives and breeds it is going to be, is.

What is the story? I can't think. I don't know if Liz. Oh, yeah, Liz. When she was here on the podcast, she mentioned Rick and pulled me the other day and said, hey, can you do the voiceover of this ad today or something like that? And she did it.

Yeah. I have her do voiceovers for our ads because I think she actually has a great narration to it. And one day we'll have a voiceover AI and I'll probably have a Liz AI bot in there. It'll be cool. She writes our monthly newsletter. There's never a promo, there's never a CTA. It's always our highest. Not only open rate, but click through the website and purchase.

Like, you have to be human, and I think you have to live that brand and what your value prop is. Now. Ultimately, it's basic. Our mission is to make the Internet beautiful, and we just don't want ugly stores and ugly photos out there in the world. And so whether that, again, was taken by a photographer or by someone who used AI quickly to whip it up together, we just want to make sure it's beautiful. And so I think five years from now, ten years from now, the tools are going to change. Everything's going to change. We just saw what is that video app that just raised a ton of money yesterday and announced it.

But it's just like Pica video Pika. Yeah. I mean, who knows what that's going to do for video? But the market for producing good creative is actually growing, right? The market is not shrinking or the money behind the volume of content is not shrinking. So I think there's a really exciting.

Opportunity that's a good position to be in. I think we recorded an episode with Ryan yesterday. His company was bought by a newspaper company. He got acquired, he joined, and he's like, I just knew that this was a dying industry, and it's so different when you're operating with those tailwinds.

My first job was at New York Post, and I left because I'm like, I'm working at a. Yeah.

So I think one of my last questions as we get towards the end here is, and I don't know if control is the right word here, but how do you keep that message consistent throughout the marketing teams you have, if you're through the team that's getting the creed, if the team that's editing and writing copy, the team that's doing SEO, posting on social media, especially as the team grows or the company grows, how do you keep that consistent?

Yeah, honestly, I actually think you give them a lot of wiggle room. It's not a tight, short leash by any means, but we're building this plane right now as we're flying it. So I don't have like a brand book that's like, you got to say this and not say that right now. And in any way, you should be testing new messaging and you should try it out and see if it's sticking. So, look, we're small enough where I get to see probably every piece of content before it goes out the door. And we're 130 odd creative people employed at Soona. So everyone's going to work with 30 photographers full time and also put out a paid ad and see if you don't get good feedback on whether that was good or not. Or put a new photo on your home page and try to get away with that not being something that all of our photographers think is an amazing composition and asset.

So we luckily get a lot of feedback, but we're always testing out new things and trying new things. But I do think it is very important to be grounded in kind of what your value props are, what your message is, what you want consumers to feel and be excited by. I know Soona as a brand, we just don't take ourselves seriously in the sense of like, we're super colorful, be in the culture and you'll hear things like, this isn't a rocket ship, it's a glitter trait and it's just part of who we are. And then our designers kind of have to really think through that a little bit more. But luckily, all of their design kind of hits that mark. I don't think it's that hard to be very honest. Sometimes you're serious, sometimes you're funny. The best brands are like Nike.

They just think about epic brand. The tone is completely different in a different campaign. That's cool. But at the same time, I don't know if we're big enough that we figured everything out and locked it down.

Yeah. Very few things can be a total pr disaster. Okay, so you've been teasing the brands with all the beta stuff, like brands that are listening that might want to beta this stuff out, see everything new that Soona is doing, that the evolution from the place you make the content to the place where you measure it confidently and just test everything you guys are doing new?

Yeah.

Where do they do that?

It's actually quite simple. Go to Soona Co. And we changed the nav and now it says studio and it says tools. So just click on tools and you'll learn kind of what we're doing and building on the platform. If you want access, it's actually not that hard either. You come join one of our preferred packages and all of our preferred customers are getting access to the platform right now. And so yeah, the tools are pretty awesome. And last week we just added blur background.

And it sounds simple, but we've put a lot of effort to make sure our edge detection is really good and better than what we think others are doing. And so there's a lot going on there. You can see listing insights, which is that score that we were talking about, and editing tools that we're bringing purposely built for brands, whereas a lot of tools are building these tools for family photos and whatever you want to throw up there. But these are really specifically like, our ML model is trained for products very specifically. So yeah, it's the best place to go.

And then trend. How has trend been?

Trend is amazing. It's just brought this other human level to the business and creativity. So sooner we acquired trend. If anyone is new to Ramon in this, yeah, I mean, trend the know, it's like we like, we just want content to be great. And I don't think we ever assumed that the only good content could be produced inside four walls inside a studio. And I'm actually really glad that we haven't gone to this mode, like, oh, we do outdoor photography now and we scout locations and do things like that. But with a professional team, I'm so glad that we just went straight to creators and are just having fun there. And we're actually adding more creators to the platform right now than I think we have in a long time.

So that's going to be a great opportunity for everybody.

Sweet. And then Rick and I know you have a newsletter and where can people want to keep up with all things marketing? Where can they hear more from you? What are the socials? Shout everything out.

Thanks for that. You could read my newsletter. It's just Ricken beehive.com. No, I didn't put it on a paid domain or just come at me on Twitter. Ricken three one one. Rikin three one one. Yeah, I'm not the best personal brander kind of dude, but I'll mouth some things off there once in a while, so it'll be good to have fun there.

Sweet. Well, thanks so much for coming on the pod, Rick, and we learned a lot and can't wait to see how you guys implement everything at Soona and continue taking care of trend and scaling.

That one up as, yeah, well, thanks for everything. Thanks for having me. It was a good chat.

Thank Rikin.