This is the Digital Strategy Call with host Brent Lollis and special guest John Biggs, author, entrepreneur, and long time columnist and editor at the AOL owned technology blog TechCrunch.
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Announcer:
This is the Digital Strategy Call with your host Brent Lollis, an award winning digital strategist of Fortune 500 CEOs and super stars like Garth Brooks, Taylor Swift, and American Idol mentor and Big Machine Records founder, Scott Borchetta. Our mission is simple, to help you navigate the warp speed changes in the digital world, and make you the undeniable leader in your industry.
Today's guest is John Biggs, author, entrepreneur, and long time columnist and editor at the AOL owned technology blog TechCrunch. The Digital Strategy Call is made possible by Creative State, helping you conquer your competition with world class responsive websites, video production, branding, search engine optimization, and social media. Go to CreativeState.com or call 866-658-7423.
Brent:
John Biggs, welcome to the Digital Strategy Call.
John:
Howdy, howdy.
Brent:
You're a New Yorker now. Tell us a little about your background and where you grew up and how you got into what you're doing today.
John:
Sure, I grew up in Columbus, Ohio. I spent Summers in Wheeling, West Virginia, or Martins Ferry, across the river from Wheeling and went to Carnegie Mellon for information systems, back when information systems was, I guess, pretty hot. That was the dot com boom, so that was about 2000. I've always been into computers and programming and everything, so I think a lot of my, I guess our generation came up in that era, and you got a computer early on, so I was always into programming, and I thought I'd be a programmer for the rest of my life.
Brent:
When did you actually discover that, for lack of a better term, and I'm one too, but when did you discover that you were a computer nerd?
John:
I don't know. I guess third grade. I got my Atari 800XL in third grade, so I guess I was probably about eight, and the best thing about those computers is that you actually had to, you had to figure something out, because when you got them they didn't do anything really. You just had this thing in front of you, and it had a blank screen with a prompt, and you're like, "Oh, what do I have to do?" so you write your first programs, and you do a couple other things, and then if you really got into it, then you got deep into the code, and you got deep into the chips onboard, and you could figure out how to make music and all kinds of other cool stuff, but if you're like me, then you just play a bunch of games and let it be.
Brent:
You said you thought you'd be a programmer forever. Obviously that didn't happen. You spend a lot of time writing also, so how did the transition from programmer to writer happen?
John:
Mmhmm. After CMU, I got a job at American Management Systems, and it was a consulting company. Now it's CGI or GCI or whatever, so they changed the names, and they're the guys that did Obamacare. When I heard that they had done Obamacare, I realized why Obamacare was such a mess. AMS was a good job at that point. It was one of the many consulting companies that was out there, and they just, they were a force multiplier, I guess. They would throw these young bodies at a project, and it didn't really matter how many young bodies you threw or how intelligent they were or what they knew, so you're basically in a situation where you're just like, it's like you fire all your cannons at once and then you have to reload those cannons, and you just see where you hit. It doesn't really matter how often or how fast you do it, you just do it. I'm in this job. I'm being a consultant. I'm in D.C. for a little while. I would go from my apartment to the Tower Records, to the grocery store, to work, and I'd just do this little circle, because the apartment was so close to the headquarters, so I could just do this pretty interesting circle. It was boring, so I picked out that I wanted to fly out to Poland and work at their Polish headquarters, work on a project out there. I got onto a telecom project that was doing code. I was doing scripts. I was doing all kinds of good stuff, and that got boring for some reason. I just didn't like it, so I was trying to do some writing in Poland. I was trying to do some writing in general, and then I went back to, I said, "All right, fine. "I'm going to go to graduate school," so I went to NYU for Master's in Business Economic Journalism, and I guess the rest is history. I was, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king so I knew slightly about tech.
I knew enough about tech to be dangerous at a journalism program where nobody knew anything about tech, because traditionally, journalism, especially back then, was an art as opposed to a craft, I guess you could say.
I knew enough about tech to be dangerous at a journalism program where nobody knew anything about tech, because traditionally, journalism, especially back then, was an art as opposed to a craft, I guess you could say. Slowly but surely, the business section of every single newspaper around the world became a tech section, and slowly but surely, tech took over almost everything. There's tech stories on the front page. There's tech stories on the sports page. There's tech stories everywhere, and to know that early on, was actually very, very valuable. I ran Gizmodo for about a year and a half, two years, and then I started CrunchGear which was a gadget site for TechCrunch. I hung out with whatchamacalit, hung out with TechCrunch for a long time, about nine years, and then I wanted to branch out and try something else, and I'm doing a few other things.
Brent:
We'll get into those few other things here in a minute, but a lot of our listeners obviously, probably do know you from your work at TechCrunch, and I read somewhere that you said when you transitioned into other things, you referred to TechCrunch as the best job you ever had. How did you get that job, and why was it such a good job?
John:
I got a call from Mike Arrington. He just called me, and he said, "I want to start a blog," because he knew I ran Gizmodo, and he and Om, Om Malik were fighting over me for a little bit, trying to figure out who could use me the best. How did I get that job? I got that job because back when I started, there were no blogs, and then all of a sudden there were blogs everywhere. I got into a ... I got into a place where I had complete control over my career, which was very, very rare. I could basically say if I want to do this, "I want to do this," and I got lucky, because TechCrunch kept going, and it's still going. It's a going concern, and it's an opportunity that's always there, which is great.
Brent:
You mentioned Mike Arrington. How different is TechCrunch today than it was back in the Arrington days?
John:
I don't know. The primary problem with blogging is that it's become the de facto, it's become the de facto way of getting information across. You could even argue that someone like CNN is a blog at this point. There's news the way it was previously presented is gone. This idea that you can have a news cycle, you can have a slow news story that you can wait a week before you get the story out. It just seems ridiculous to people now, and people expect news to be free. Back when we started, we did two things. First off, the news was free, so you got business news for free, whereas traditionally it would go to Bloomberg or whatever. If you're an investor, you need to go to Bloomberg. You had to buy an expensive terminal. You had to sit there and watch this terminal all day. on an interface that was, quite literally, garbage. That was the only way you could get your business news. Then all of a sudden, these start up blogs and tech business blogs come along, and say, "Oh don't worry about that stuff. "Here's every single thing that you need to know about the world in a river, in a long list. In a way, just hang out and read this, and you'll be just fine," and that's pretty amazing. That changed the way people treated news. It changed the way people treated information, and it in the process it helped, it ruined the news, because it made people think that news was free, and that everybody who did it was essentially cheap, so we've sincerely cheapened news gathering. We've cheapened the process of news, and I think it's swinging the other way now, because people understand that they can't exist in this way.
Brent:
Now you talked about some of the other things you're involved in. You're now, among other things, the CEO at Freemit. Tell us about that company, and more specifically why you decided to enter a very crowded fintech space.
John:
Well, we wanted to give it a try. We're pivoting with Freemit right now in terms of in terms of how things are going to work. The fintech space, I think is broken. The banks are about to take over all of bitcoin anyway, so there's really not opportunity for the small company anymore, and we got there just as that was happening. In that respect, we were a little unlucky. Then the new version that we're doing, we're trying to do something a little bit more down to Earth, and I think it's going to work out, but we're not ready to talk about that that much, but in terms of what I saw when I looked at bitcoin for the first time, I saw a wide open space, and the problem with wide open space is somebody builds a mall there. The folks who were there before, the little guys, they're easily pushed out by the big companies, so we're trying to figure out a way to end run around that, I guess, right?
Brent:
You say you said you're pivoting with Freemit. Does that mean you're pivoting away from cryptocurrency, bitcoin, the original thought with Freemit into something else? I know you say you're not ready to talk about all the details, but are you pivoting away from that in general?
John:
No, I think we're pivoting away from the idea of remittance. Sending money overseas is done once or twice by most richer countries. You send money overseas once or twice in your life if you're from America. Unless you really have a burning need to send $500 overseas every month, you'd never do it, ever. You're in a situation where the incumbents, the people who are around right now, have really sewn up this market of people who send money every month. They have a window that you go up to. You push your cash into the window. Somebody takes the money, gives you a receipt, and you feel good about that process, whereas our mission was to put it onto was to put it onto a phone and make it a lot easier for people, but when you put it onto a phone, you basically run into a problem that the people who have those phones don't send that much money, and further, you're in a situation where the people who have those phones might be sending too much money, and you can't support them, given all the regulations and all this other garbage, so it's a mess.
Brent:
Got you. Do you have a timeline for announcing any new details for Freemit?
John:
Over the next couple of months, I think. We've got something happening right now, and we'll have a demo we'll have a demo app out shortly.
Brent:
Great. We'll shift to something completely different here. You're also the host of a podcast called the Hourtime Podcast. You describe it as a podcast for watch geeks by watch geeks. How long have you had a passion for, or obsession with watches?
John:
I've liked watches since I was a kid. My dad had a really nice Seiko, and he also had an Omega that he wore, and I didn't know it at the time, but they are really nice watches, and over time he stopped wearing them, and I picked them up. I remember I got my first watch, my first personal watch in, I think it was probably about 2000. I got it in a Swiss duty-free shop, and it was an automatic Seiko, or automatic Swatch actually. I wore that thing around for years, and it became my lucky watch, and after awhile I realized that watches are pretty cool, because a watch is a thing that you could put inside a safety deposit box today and a hundred years from now, you can take it out and it will still run, and you could never do that with a you could never do that with a cell phone. You wouldn't be able to do that with almost anything that exists right now.
Brent:
What's your favorite watch that you own right now?
John:
I don't know. I have an Omega Mark II, which is based on a 70s era Omega Speedmaster, which I really like.
Brent:
Obviously watches can get ridiculously expensive. If you could own any watch out there today that's available, do you have one that's the holy grail?
John:
Not really. I've left that side of collecting. There's, once you're really, really into collecting, you have these grail watches and things that you really worry about, but I've been doing this for about 16 years, so it's not, the impetus isn't there. I know what I want, and I'll get it eventually, but it's not that I'm actively looking for it right now.
Brent:
What do you think of Apple Watch? Will it still be around and relevant in four, five years?
John:
Oh sure. It's going to destroy the Swiss watch industry, and it already is.
Brent:
What makes it, for those people who really like the, you can put it in a safety deposit box and it will be running a hundred years from now, that doesn't really apply to Apple Watch. You put it in there, and it's going to be like putting a small cell phone in there. It's not going to be running in a hundred years. What makes it so appealing to the mass market?
John:
Because it does everything that you want your phone to do, but in a smaller package, and it's obviously a luxury, just like any watch is a luxury, but it's far more than an accessory, and it's actually very usable. The, "Why would I go out of my way to spend $2000 to buy an acceptably fancy watch" in terms of entry level, when I can just get an Apple watch, which is going to be acceptable in almost any situation, because it's more of a piece of technology than a watch, and I can do far more things than I can do with a classic Omega or a classic Seiko.
Brent:
Interesting. Moving on to your next project that you're involved in, you've recently launched a somewhat new project called Typewriter, which provides editing on demand. What brought you into that space, and what need did you see that you thought you could bring an interesting solution to?
John:
Well, I've realized that over the past decade and a half, I've done about 11,000 posts. That means I've done, probably seen 11,000 pitches, and you can immediately tell when a pitch is just no good, and I got tired. I saw so many ridiculous pitches, because there's a dumbing down, and there's a race to the bottom in terms of services that people will accept. You're in a situation where ... We're in a situation where start ups aren't making a lot of money, and they know that they can use services like Fiverr, or even cheaper services to get things done, so they do this and they get garbage results, and one of the keystones, one of the cornerstones of getting start up off the ground is to have good collateral, good information, well written, well designed, nice, just make it look good, because what is a start up pitch but dating. If you come into your date wearing muddy shoes and a ripped shirt and cut off shorts, you're probably not going to win. I don't think. I haven't dated in awhile so it's hard to tell, but I would argue that if you don't treat it like dating, and if you don't put your best foot forward, you fail, and you will fail consistently.
Brent:
How does the process and the pricing compare to other options that might be available to people whether they're a start up or any other business who wants to put good, well written content out there to the public and to their customers and prospects?
John:
Well for us, we basically have professional writers who are actually writing for big sites, who are actually published authors, and we charge a lot more than Fiverr. We charge a lot more, simply because it's not worth it for me to even try to do these things for five cents a word, or whatever these services charge. I don't want to create a service where we're racing to the bottom, basically. I want to create a service where people are going to use it and understand that they get value, you get value for the money, and a luxury editorial service sounds pretty goofy and sounds pretty let's see, egotistical, I guess, but hey, who cares. I think it has to happen, and I think people who don't pay for good stuff get garbage consistently.
Brent:
Mmhmmm. What's the, you're still early days obviously, but what's the response been so far?
John:
Pretty well. The response has been pretty good. We've had a few hundred people who want stuff done. They're waiting to send me stuff when they're ready to write stuff. We're also moving into actual writing. I didn't put that on the website, because it seemed a little bit much, but I think there's going to be, I think there's going to be a possibility for us to actually start doing some writing for and blog posts and books and things, and I really think that there's a, a way forward there, because people have ideas, but they don't know how to write, and people write, and they don't know how to write well, so we can fulfill both those needs.
Brent:
Hmm. Shifting to the actual focus of the Digital Strategy Call, our goal is to help everyday businesses, not just start ups or just tech companies, but all kinds of businesses, navigate this ever changing digital landscape and give them information that can help them become leaders, digital leaders, in their specific industry, so you mentioned how many pitches you've seen over the years, and you've been involved in a lot of start ups. From your perspective, what do you think separates the businesses that somehow manage to become clear leaders in their industry and those that aren't able to make that happen?
John:
Well, what's the specific question? What kind of businesses are we talking about?
Brent:
Businesses in general, our specific focus, our mid-sized B2B focused businesses that aren't start ups, that aren't specifically tech related, but let's take a manufacturing firm, for example, that they have 500 employees, and they do $50 million in revenue, and it's a somewhat crowded space, and they make the determination, "Hey, we really want to be seen as a leader when people are researching these multi-million dollar projects. We want them, when they're doing that research, to see us as a leader," whether that means they're seeing white papers and blog posts or books and websites and all those things that now encompass the digital space, they say, "We want to be a leader in that area. We want to be seen as a leader." What's your thought on how do they make that happen?
John:
Hmm, all right. There are a few ways to think about that, and I can appreciate the problem that a manufacturer like that has, because you're in an industry where you've basically hit a ceiling. You feel like you've hit a ceiling. You're going to do well. You're going to do you your 500 million, you're going to do you 50 million. You have 500 employees. You have people making stuff. You're doing well, but you feel that there's still, you can pop a ceiling and you can come out the other end and make a little bit more, or become a more viable target for an acquisition. Those are essentially your two missions, I would assume. The issue with listening to so called digital evangelists is that they don't know your business. They don't know what you're doing. You're in a position where you're listening to somebody who doesn't quite know what you're up to and is trying to tell you how to do things the way they would do them, but they don't quite work. I think personally, and I realize that by even saying this I turn into one of those digital evangelists and then we get into a big feedback loop and it becomes a mess. I think the best way for a manufacturing company, for example, to become a thought leader is to do one of two things. You either have somebody who's deep in the company and knows the company and give them a certain amount of time to tell the story of the company in ways that are unusual, in blog posts, in outreach, in emails and PR, et cetera. You pull a guy, a smart guy off the line, and make him do something else, and this isn't going to happen, because I think there's an intrinsic feeling that that sort of marketing is wasteful, and if you have that feeling than you just have to live with it, and it's never going to work for you, but you have to have the guy who's really interesting and who knows the space and will write about the space, and then not to plug my own thing, but you basically hire somebody to edit that and put it up and put it in the right places. In a very specific way, PR doesn't help you with that, because PR is is public relations/press relations I would actually say, whereas the guy who sits there and writes, "Here are the amazing new materials that we just invented that are going to change the world," is the guy who does something a lot more interesting for folks. If you can't afford that, if you can't spend that money to get that guy off the line for a little while, to actually share with the world, then you're not going to be able to pull it off. You can't hire somebody into that position, because that position, the person who would be hired in that position, unless they'd been on the line for ten years, doesn't know that position. They don't know the stories to tell. The person who is in that position does know the stories to tell, and they also know who to tell it to, so that person can say, "Hey Frank over at Carnegie Mellon University's the College of Material Science, Look at this cool thing that we just did. Do you know anybody who could use this?" It's an outreach specialist, and that's a very specific thing, and it's an internal evangelist, somebody who knows the story and can tell it well, and obviously you need help with telling that story, and there are people out there who could help you, but the primary goal of this whole mission is to get somebody who knows the business to tell the story of the business, and that's exactly how all these guys do all this digital outreach, and the guys who are most successful are the guys who are in the thick of it and can tell the story immediately.
Brent:
Yeah, you and I are totally on the same page on that. In fact, at this very moment, we're working with a manufacturing company. They were the ones that I had in mind when I mentioned that, that for 15 years, all of their marketing and outreach and websites and brochures and everything that they've done has been focused on product lines and lists of expertise and equipment lists and here are all the great things we have and can do, and we're working with them to say rather than focusing on divisions and equipment lists, why don't we focus on stories of things that you have done for your clients that involve all of these things. Let's tell those stories so that when somebody who might want to hire you down the road, they see that story, they can tell that you have all that expertise and all of that equipment and all of those things, just by watching a story, that is in and of itself compelling, and it's a hard thing to help people get their head around and believe that there's value in that, but I agree with you that people respond to stories more than they do, like you said, a digital evangelist saying, Hey, let's do it the same way for this big manufacturing company as we would for a record label or a tech start up.
John:
Yeah, let's get the word out by putting out a press release and then a twitter, a twitter, a tweet. I think the most interesting thing that I've ever seen, and this is actually kind of cool. Think about something like, have you seen the hydraulic press channel?
Brent:
Where they crush everything?
John:
Where they crush everything. The same thing goes for the Will It Blend? guy.
John:
Yeah, he was that had a really nice run, and now unfortunately, my point wasn't helped by the fact that I can't remember what the blender company was. Who was it?
Brent:
Right, it's like the
John:
Blend Tech.
Brent:
You remember the ad, but you don't remember what it was for.
John:
In this case, it was a couple years ago, so give me a break here. This was Blend Tech, Blend Tech line of blenders. This guy did a blend, will it blend? He put the thing in the thing and it blended, and you also have the hydraulic press channel, which for me, I have no idea who makes it, but I'll watch it anyway.
Brent:
Yeah, you're going to throw a car or piano in a thing and --
John:
Yeah.
Brent:
Sure, I'm going to watch it.
John:
I could imagine a kiln channel where you put a cue ball inside of a --
Brent:
Will it melt?
John:
Will it melt inside a multi-thousand Kelvin oven and see what happens? Any number of these things, that's viral content. That shows that A, you know what you're doing, because you have the wherewithal and the intelligence not to destroy your eyes when you burn a cue ball inside this kiln, and B, it gets the word out to an entirely new market, so if I'm in the hydraulic press market, and I'm absolutely sure that's a fairly rare search for people to do, I'm going to end up at the hydraulic press channel before I'm going to end up at Joe's Hydraulic Presses in Oklahoma.
Brent:
Right.
John:
And that's bad for Joe, but that's good for the Hydraulic Press Channel guys.
Brent:
Yup. A couple more questions, about a year ago, the marketing firm Marketo did a study that found that the tried and true company website was still, by a very large margin, the most effective way to generate leads and sales for a business, more effective than email marketing, telemarketing, social media, direct mail, print advertising, all these other things. Does that surprise you at all, that just the website that we've had for years and years is still the most effective way to generate sales and leads?
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John:
I think that makes perfect sense, because the website is your public face, and if you go to some of these websites, and you see that they're no good, then you're turned away, but if it's a really good website, if it looks good and works well, than that's your first step, let's say. There's not always a opportunity for you to make that first impression, but that's your first impression.
Brent:
I was, having done this for 15 years, I'm always surprised to see the staying power that the website still is the central hub, the public face, like you said, that's still the most effective, even when we hear, "You've got to put it all on Instagram, "You've got to put everything on Twitter all of the time," which might be true.
John:
No, no yeah, well that's all garbage. I think what we really have to think about here is we have to understand ... We have to understand what a website is versus what a social media site service is. A website is your front, the front of the restaurant. You go into a restaurant, either because you're familiar with the product, you've seen it before. You go in an Olive Garden because you know you're going to get sick. You go into a nice place, because you know it's going to be it looks fancy from the outside, and once you get inside, then all the little details, the attitude of the host, the server, the way the menu looks, et cetera, that becomes important, but your website is still the front, and there's no, you can't get the one of the hardest things for a restaurant to do is to get some waiter outside and just drag people in. It just never works, and it's actually really annoying if you walk through a touristy section, like Little Italy in New York for example, they have these guys out there and just like, "Hey, come on in. "Let's have some spaghetti," and it's like that's what kind of the thing that makes you decide about a restaurant is whether or not there are lots of people in it, whether or not the front of the restaurant looks good, whether or not the steps are swept, the windows are clean, et cetera, et cetera, and that's all very important, and that's exactly your website. All the other stuff, all the Instagram, all the outreach, all that other garbage is ancillary to that goal, and to a degree it's important, but it's not nearly as important as the front.
Brent:
Absolutely. Well, I appreciate your time, and if our listeners want more information about you and your projects, where can they go to find it?
John:
They can go to. You can send them to BigWideLogic.com B-I-G-W-I-D-E-L-O-G-I-C dot com. That has a lot of links to my other stuff. I'm also on TechCrunch a lot, and I have all my books at JohnBiggsBooks.com.
Brent:
John Biggs, thanks for joining us on the Digital Strategy Call.
John:
Thank you.
Announcer:
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