A Conversation With Aaron Smith of Sageflo
At 50 years, is email itself 'too old to learn?' Not even close, as this in-depth conversation with Aaron Smith reveals. Aaron and his company Sageflo are helping distributed brands get eye-popping results from email and SMS marketing by unleashing the power of local.
Sageflo should be a Harvard Business School case study; as they pushed on from incubation within a top email-marketing agency to spinout to pivot, Aaron and his colleagues found traction in unlikely places. Aaron even shares a bit about the emotional side of shutting down a product — not an easy decision for a team!
Sageflo is helping email learn a couple of unexpected new tricks. The core product helps distributed teams handle the tricky job of balancing centralized branding and localized email and SMS marketing — with eye-popping ROI. Sageflo's Archiver service complements that by saving every single email sent to every single customer — a lifesaver for call centers.
Entrepreneurship is "hot" these days; this conversation is a great glimpse into the entrepreneurial journey. HBS, give Aaron Smith a call.
TRANSCRIPT
A Conversation With Aaron Smith of Sageflo
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[00:00:00]
[00:00:09] Matthew Dunn: Good morning. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the Future of Email. My guest today, I, I, I'd say, I'd say friend and acquaintance, Aaron Smith, CEO of Sageflo. Aaron, terrific to reunite with you. Nice to see you again. Yeah, great to see you, Matt. Yeah, we've, we've, we've met at live conferences back when people did that, , and I believe you were still at running the lab within Shaw, Scott, at that point in time, a few years ago.
Yeah.
[00:00:36] Aaron Smith: Yeah, that's right. So yeah, our, our business, what is Sageflo today? Started out as a company called Lift Science in 2015. Myself and my other two co-founders. That's right. Coming out of both the agency world and the the e p space, we basically wanted to build. Company that filled in solutions that the big players really don't do.
So that's like what our focus was. And [00:01:00] we joined forces with ShawScott 2017, which was really great for us. I think really great for ShawScott as well. And essentially Sha Scott was like an incubator for our business, which was really like, just a really wonderful yeah, really, really, really great time.
I'm super grateful to both Melissa and Julian for kind of giving us that opportunity.
[00:01:20] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. ShawScott, if if someone's listening and, and, and doesn't spend as much time in this space, is maybe we do one of the, one of the better known bigger email focus. Agencies in Seattle based,
[00:01:32] Aaron Smith: right? Yeah, that's right.
Yep. That's correct.
[00:01:34] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. And then you guys spun out, I guess that's the correct phrase, you spun out I, Sageflo was starting to become a product on its own within ShawScott, when I, when I think I first encounter you and then, And then Yeah. Like, where's Aaron? Oh, well, they're, they're now a standalone company and.
Rocking by everything I can see, fill, fill, fill me in a bit on,
[00:01:56] Aaron Smith: Yeah. So that, that is a very, Yeah, [00:02:00] it's, it's very interesting. So we are rocking now, I would say we hit some really major speed bumps, right? We went out on our own. And it's that, that happens to lots of, Startup businesses. So January, here's the situation or the let's set the stage.
January, 2020. We've built a really cool workflow automation tool for marketers based on you know, our work. At the agency and noticing that there really isn't anything like Asana for marketers in the marketplace right there. There are some really great tools out there that I think a lot of folks in the industry have used because there's nothing better.
But there wasn't anything that solved for the kind of really rapid, high volume of campaigns that email marketers. Digital marketers in general, you know, folks that are doing ad displays, social mark, social media marketers, they all have the same challenge of we've got 20 or 30 campaigns a week that we're creating.
So we, we built something that we thought was really, really cool for that space, [00:03:00] and we spun our business out to go to market in January, 2020. And then Covid. And it just really forced us to reflect on our, our go to market strategy. So we didn't have funding, we were a profitable business, but we didn't really have a big war chest And for that type of product, you really need to kind of go to market with more of a freemium model.
And it's more about, let's go. You know, 10,000, 20,000 signups and then start to build our business, and we just weren't positioned in 2020 to do that. We're not a gigantic team. We don't have, you know, 200 engineers or anything like that. Yeah. So we essentially I wouldn't quite say mothballed, but we, we.
Took our attention off of the workflow product altogether. And that's funny because the name of the company was originally that product name Sageflo. Yeah. And that's not the case today. You know, today the company name is Sageflo and we are sort of slowly pivoting another one of our products that we had in place [00:04:00] in 2020 to be our flagship product.
And eventually we'll probably just call that Sage float today. It's. Sageflo radiate. And that's a tool for large enterprise businesses or medium size businesses that have distributed teams like quick serve restaurants, franchise retail businesses, and it allows those local marketing teams, somebody who maybe is a franchise owner and doesn't know the first thing about marketing.
Mm-hmm. gives them the ability to send. Like world class, enterprise level email marketing campaigns through the ESP that the corporate team, the national marketing team is using. So we've got this really nice UI that's more of a consumer focus that sits on top of that. And and then our other product is Archiver and that's that's been around since we started back in 2015.
And that's continued to gain traction with call center users. And also just helping marketers get a better sense of how to audit their own program so that essentially [00:05:00] we save all the emails or sms Yeah. Messages, direct mail. It's a really cool archiving tool. Yeah. Yeah. What we've found with that as, as we've kind of gone deeper with customers in that space as well, is that it saves a big enterprise business with a large call center could be saving like more than a million dollars a year in how fast they're able to address calls that are related to marketing inquiries.
And that, that was a big shock to us. We've, we started doing this work last year to really understand the value of our tool because customers never leave, which is great. Makes me really happy. . You know, as a kind of the product owner and, and the business owner of the solution. But we wanted to understand really, like, okay, what is the value to the org here?
And it's that it's, it just makes life really easy. And then those call center people are not bothering the marketing teams and saying like, you know, Aaron called in because he was upset about this offer that we sent him. What, what was that? You know the marketing team can just focus on doing execution and strategy without having to[00:06:00] you know, essentially address what they could do without a tool like this is maybe address a few dozen issues a week.
And what we see our customers doing is that they literally will use the tool. Thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of times a week if they're at big enough scale. Yes.
[00:06:14] Matthew Dunn: I want, I wanted to, I wanted to delve into archiver a a little bit more and then go and then go back to radio cuz they're both kind of fascinating.
Ar archiver customer that puts that in has their outbound marketing communications captured, archived, searchable, accessible to their, you know, frontline customer service call center folks. Is that reason? Absolutely. Yep. Yeah. And is that everything to every
[00:06:41] Aaron Smith: person, every single unique message? That's right.
Yeah. So it's a lot, it's a lot of yeah. Data that we're storing and yeah, to, to us. I mean, we, we originally built that In partnership with one of the [00:07:00] big ESP that had a lot of customers that had this need and they weren't gonna build it themselves. So essentially we're like, That makes sense.
Yeah. Hey guys, like we keep having these deals where customers ask us for this. It's part of the RFP process. We don't have a solution. Like, could you build something? And we were like, Yeah, that'd be great. We'd love to, you know build a product where your sales team can refer for us into opportunities and.
How it got legs under it in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. And Yeah. Like we were just saying, the, the scale of what we store is really interesting because there, there are all kinds of use cases that come up within that, beyond just the someone's calling in because they've got a question about an email.
Litigation comes in sometimes. Yeah. Audit compliance thing. So again, like when the legal team comes to the marketing team, and, and we hear this a lot from our. Existing customers and then new prospects too. This happens pretty frequently where the legal team will say, Aaron , I'm just using myself as example.
I'm not, you know, I [00:08:00] never called to the contact center or sue people , but Aaron is threatening to sue us. Yeah. You know, we sent him some type of email that he found offensive or whatever. You know, the, the. Cause might be, or we gave him an offer that, you know, felt like it wasn't right. Whatever it might be.
We wanna see everything that was sent to him in the last Oh, I see. 180 days. Yeah. Can you give that to us? And without a tool like Archiver marketing team is actually gonna have to like Yeah. Hire a consultant. Yeah. To, you know, spend weeks pulling that data out, trying to. Yeah. Construct what the set of data was at the time of Senate.
They're, they're probably not gonna get a real picture anyhow. Yeah. But we've, we've kind of saved everything as a snapshot in time. It's really cool there. And it's also really great for some folks in call centers now are also tasked with generating new business. It's, it's u you know, It's more of the customer experience side of things.
So if, like, if you're in travel sector, for [00:09:00] example, like cruise ships and airlines for VIPs, actually we'll have people that reach out to customers to try to you know, essentially help book travel and things like that. Okay. And so they'll go into Archiver and just look at the email journey where we will have this really nice view where you can visually kind of see the thumbnails of all the message.
That particular customer that you're calling has recently. Nice. Nice. Wow. Wow. Yeah. What, what, this is like, the picture tells the story better than, you know, a thousand words thing is. Yeah, absolutely. It's like the way the human mind works is we're all pattern matching, pattern recognition engines essentially.
And so that person in. Call center that is reaching out to a customer. When they look at that, they kind of immediately know without having to read notes or a lot of text. They understand the customer that they're talking to. Yeah. Like this person gets a lot of messages and look, they're always getting offers to go on a cruise to [00:10:00] Alaska or whatever.
Yeah. So I'm gonna calibrate my conversation to Yeah.
[00:10:04] Matthew Dunn: See it's literally see it through their eyes. Yeah, that's now of course being , being a major geek , I've got a couple of questions. That's a lot of storage. It is a lot of, a lot of organization. Yeah. Broad strokes is the, was the search problem or the storage problem the, the biggest hairball, or was it something else?
Oh,
[00:10:26] Aaron Smith: I think the, the. Search probably. I am blessed to work with one of, like, probably the best architect I've ever known. He's also my friend who was my best man at my wedding. Thomas Wescott, he's our cto and he's a genius. I, I really can't claim credit for anything. I'm a decent product person and a good UX person, but when it comes to.
Enterprise scale. Yeah. Thomas is the man, we both started our careers on Wall Street building different types of trading [00:11:00] settlements and foreign exchange systems. So we were both really familiar with the concept of big data before it was called big data. Mm-hmm. . . And both of us have really strong data backgrounds, database backgrounds as well.
So I would say our, our biggest challenge was just designing a system that could handle all of that. The, you know, these days, massive storage is, is not a hard thing to solve for, but for us, you know, typically a search comes back within two seconds. When a customer, you. Customer care person is looking up a customer's record.
Wow. And, and that's important, like being able to pull that stuff up. So yeah, we were very intentional in kind of making sure we knew that that would be the use case out of the bat. And we started off by working with an enterprise esp. So we kind of had the advantage of. Working with customers that already were in that scale of data.
So we, Yeah, thankfully we didn't have to [00:12:00] like, build it one time and then go back and like, fix things because we were, you know, getting bigger and bigger customers.
[00:12:05] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Nice, nice. And, and not a trivial data problem like you're, you're describing is. As if it were easy and
[00:12:14] Aaron Smith: yeah. It, it's there, There's a lot to it because yeah, sometimes people want to Yeah, get, we've built a kind of flexible tagging system so that people can also look up things beyond just, you know, buy a customer id.
Yeah. Order numbers and things like that. So, you
[00:12:30] Matthew Dunn: know, spring promotion or whatever. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Wow. Wow. Fa fast. Fascinating. And I'm really not surprised about the stick. That you're describing, right? No customers leaving. I'm also not surprised by the, the, the, the lawyers getting onto, It's a complete sidebar, but you, you know, the internet the way back machine, right?
Yeah. Business project, like, I, I spent a couple years as a technical IP expert working with litigation firms, and I thought like the way back machine could fund itself [00:13:00] just by charging lawyers.
[00:13:03] Aaron Smith: You're right. Yeah, absolutely. Looking for that.
[00:13:06] Matthew Dunn: What's that one random email that you sent at three in a, I don't know where it is, Right?
Come on. But there's a, there's a requirement and there's value to it. Yeah, I
[00:13:15] Aaron Smith: like that. I've got, I'm gonna, I'm gonna use that. So lately you know, we've been kind of gearing up our go to market and trying to get our name out there in the world and, Currently we're calling Archiver the ultimate search engine for your marketing messages, which is, that's a nice tag.
But I like, Yeah. I don't know. You know, the way back . Yeah. Way back machine for all of your marketing messages as well.
[00:13:38] Matthew Dunn: Something and like, Well, and, and, and Archiver. I mean, we could pro product rat hole that you didn't ask for. Like, it, it's, it's a description, but it's not all the.
[00:13:49] Aaron Smith: Exactly. Yeah. It says what it does.
Yeah. So we, we, we joke all of our you know, over the years when we started those lift science to where we are today, we [00:14:00] built I think nine products over the years. Wow. And now, you know, we're focusing primarily on two. We've got one other one that comes up relatively frequently, which is coupons.
And that's essentially, Just a bridge that makes it very easy for folks who are using something like Shopify or Magento, whatever their econ platform might be. Mm-hmm. , where they're generating coupon codes. We make it easy to leverage those in your ESP without having to have data team do that stuff.
Yeah. And that, that still comes up. We. Probably pick up four or five customers a year on that without, like, we're not making a big push for that, but it's a need for folks. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Yeah. But everything else we've built is more or less sunsetted or shut down at this point. Including workflow tool.
Was that hard? Yeah. .
[00:14:44] Matthew Dunn: Yeah, I'm with you, man. .
[00:14:46] Aaron Smith: Yes. . Yeah. For, for anybody listening to this that is more on I would say the product engineering Yeah. Or company leadership side. Yeah. You know, killing you know, it's a terrible phrase. Kill your babies. [00:15:00] Kill your
[00:15:00] Matthew Dunn: babies, . But,
[00:15:01] Aaron Smith: It's, it's, you know, we, we just have really heated debates about that all the time over the years when it comes up to a point of looking at something and saying, Should we shut this off or not?
Yeah. But it. . It has been so great for our business because we've been able to just really narrow our focus, and like I said, really from our go to market strategy these days, we're just focusing on those two products because we think that they. They have the most value. Pretty much any company in the world can use Archiver.
It, it benefits them. And then the distributed marketing tool, Radiate is today it's valuable to franchise businesses, particularly QSRs or could be folks. It's kind of all, all kinds of interesting sectors. Learning centers, you know tutorial type businesses health and beauty services like spas.
So there's like, we're finding a really interesting world as we've gone into that space of different types of businesses beyond what we, I guess, historically focused on was kind of [00:16:00] retail and financial services. QSR means quick serve restaurant. Sorry. Okay. Okay.
[00:16:06] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. . Okay. So, so radiate. Yeah. You, you went where I was gonna.
Next to ask about that. So pick a, without naming names, pick a, pick a sort of tip, like tell the story of someone using Radiate at a local level and how that relates to the, I guess probably national or chain level.
[00:16:25] Aaron Smith: Yeah. So yeah, we, without naming names, I'll mention one of our QSR customers, they're, they're based in the Midwest in Wisconsin, and Their, like burgers and custard is, is their specialties.
Really, really awesome folks, and they actually had tried this a few times before working with us. Some of the really really old legacy established esp, kind of the first wave from the late nineties, early two thousands have some very, I would say like bare bones [00:17:00] basic capabilities for distributed teams.
Okay. Yeah. And, and so they had tried that with, with their folks. So their challenge, essentially when we started the conversation with them was, we've got. Let's just say, you know, more than 500 restaurants and those folks today don't really have a good tool to use. So a lot of them are using something like Emma or Constant Contact or Mail Channel.
Mm-hmm. And that's awful for us as the national marketing team because it's disjointed. The people sending, these are not professional marketers. Yeah. They have a different list there. There are so many things wrong with that. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, at the same time, they're not offering a choice for those folks who really want to drive people to come into their restaurants in their stores.
Right. So it was basically a lose lose situation where nobody was happy. Yeah. And they got introduced to us and we worked with them. Build our solution on top of [00:18:00] their existing esp. Okay. So basically it connects through APIs. That's how our tool works. It's gonna ask. Yeah. And, and now today we're on many different esp.
We sit on top of them. And essentially the, the beauty of it is the local marketer and you know, they're not a local marketer, the local business owner. Right. Maybe some, some guy or gal who owns. Five or 10 restaurants in one state or a couple states. You know, they're focused on inventory management and staffing and You know, some of them might even be behind a cash registered, like during the daytime.
Marketing is the last thing that they're, they're gonna be good at. And so what we've done is we've built this really nice, I would call it kind of more of a consumer type of interface. Okay. So it's more like, you know, Constant contact meets your enterprise, ESP. And we give them guardrails and templates that the national Marketing team puts [00:19:00] together for them.
And so they can send out, personalize their messages using, you know, brand approved guidelines. There's a whole approval system for customers that want to use that. And, and that's also a really interesting Kind of use case there. Some of our customers trust their franchisees or their local marketing teams enough where they don't need the approval module or they only turn it on for some owners.
Wow. . Yeah. Yeah, because they're like, Yeah, this, this guy, you know, he, he goes off script, so we need to look at what he's doing before he sends it out. , but you know, we don't want to do that for all 800 or whatever, you know, the number might be. Mm-hmm. of of our d. Franchise owners that are out there.
And then the cool thing about it actually going out through the ESP is the more sophisticated capabilities that a modern day ESP gives you, like audience segmentation you know, personalized product recommendations where you can have other include files or, you know, Real time data, like what you guys [00:20:00] do that can be included in the templates as well.
And without that local marketing, they don't even know anything about how to put those tags in. It's just part of the template.
[00:20:08] Matthew Dunn: Nice. Right. Yeah, yeah. So the, the, the more technically anesthetically sophisticated part can theoretically at least be handled by, by headquarters. That's right.
[00:20:19] Aaron Smith: Yeah. Yep. And, and you
[00:20:22] Matthew Dunn: were saying that, you were saying the results, like the local results.
[00:20:26] Aaron Smith: Unbelievable. They are. Yeah. So that's what has been really . I'm just laughing because I feel like you know, I've been in the space about two decades now. I don't know if I should be proud of that or embarrassed or,
but You know, I, I think I know a thing or two. You know, about particularly email marketing, and I've worked with so many amazing teams at many of the world's largest companies. You know, seeing them set up their, their email marketing programs and, you know, [00:21:00] basically the day to day execution of really good copy and, and messaging that leads to, you know, effective campaigns and.
The, the ironic thing is these folks who don't have any of that training or legacy behind them are creating campaigns that perform so much better than what the national marketing team is doing. And it's because this has always been like a mantra in our industry. It's relevant. It's that word relevance that comes into play here and somebody, you know, At the local juice shop down the street from me that sends an email out maybe saying like, We're doing a sale this Sunday when the farmer's market is, is happening at the same time that that's interest.
Like, then you're tying it into something that I can connect with. Yeah, and it also, what we're seeing with this, and this is why I believe 10 years from now, local marketing will be huge for [00:22:00] every business is we've, we've made so many stride. You know, future of email. The future of email currently is automation, automation, ai you know, so much really cool stuff that we can do with software, but what we lose with all of that, I think is more of a personal touch.
And what Radiate gives companies is the ability to have team members create a, a more personalized touch. Again, social media obviously does that, but it's at scale, right? It's not local and My cro para corro always uses this example, which I love of, you know, if you're in the south to say, y'all like just rolls off the tongue, it's supernatural.
It's a normal thing. I've been trying to add it to my vernacular cuz it's a, you know, it's a nice way of addressing folks. It's gender neutral. But it, it sounds weird and tilted coming outta my mouth. And it, it would look really weird. If [00:23:00] Sageflo was like, Hey, y'all, like, you know, this is what we're doing.
But again, like if, if you are in Atlanta, Florida, right? Carolina, Alabama, it doesn't look weird to get an email with that. So like, that's another thing where local marketers can use Lang. Like they're just gonna naturally use, you know, terminology that makes sense to them and it, it resonates with the audience that's receiving it too.
So there's, there's, I think there's a lot at play there, but yeah, the. The engagement rate of those campaigns is much higher. Yeah. And we've done some studies with some of our customers also on the revenue side as well, where they've tested it like using coupons so we can track you know, which campaigns they came from and then go back and look at their data with their BI team from the in-store purchases and see that the campaigns that the local marketers send out also tend to have.
Something like a 30% higher basket size average revenue, So, Wow. [00:24:00] Yeah. And the, the engagement stuff is like, it's 200% higher. So that's where, you know, like the national team might be getting 15% open rates. The local marketers are getting like 30, 35% open rates. Wow. Wow. Or, or, or, you know, rates and things like that.
Yeah. Wow.
[00:24:22] Matthew Dunn: Wow, that's gotta be kind
[00:24:24] Aaron Smith: of fun. It's really fun. Yeah.
[00:24:26] Matthew Dunn: And maybe a little, not unexpected cuz you built a thing, but pleasant surprise that it's that much of, Right. That much of an improvement.
[00:24:33] Aaron Smith: Yeah. Yeah. I would say it's been a pleasant surprise and like a pleasant. Not quite a shock, but as, as we've, you know, as we've gotten more customers in, as we've started to, you know, do more of this, like unpacking the ROI of what you're getting out of it type Yeah.
Type exercise. You know, when you're building a business, you always want to get case studies so that you can use those to talk to new prospects. Sure, sure. And yeah, like we, we had this moment. I think it. [00:25:00] You know, four or five months ago where we saw with one of our customers that they made $8 million in revenue from, from this tool.
And like that was flabbergasting. Yeah, because it, it isn't cannibalizing. Anything else that they're doing. It's basically like a complete new revenue stream. And in a way, this is why I really do think this will be a, a big part of, you know, the future of marketing programs and campaigns is those sorts of numbers.
Are things that we haven't really seen in our industry in like 10 or 15 years since everybody was like abandoned cart or browse based behavior. And that became a big thing. So this is like another thing that I think people will start to build programs for over the next five plus years and see that
[00:25:49] Matthew Dunn: you're, you're putting the human, you know, the human de human back.
In the equation, right? Like your farmer's market, farmer's market example. Just coincidence. But it really [00:26:00] resonates cuz the town I live in has one of the best farmer's markets in the country. And if you make a, you know, at the market on Saturday reference here, it's a very meaningful thing. Like yeah, it's a, it's a rare, rare Saturday that my wife is not going to the, to the farmer's market and a campaign like, Oh yeah, hey, we're gonna be at the market.
Like she'd know what that. and it means a lot. Yeah, absolutely. And the national guy sitting in whatever would have no idea.
[00:26:28] Aaron Smith: Yeah. Yeah. That the, the quick serve restaurant I was talking about for them they're in a lot of rural areas. Yeah. And it's kind of the place to go after the Friday night.
Football game. Yeah. Yeah. And, and they do a lot of local marketing like that. Basically like, you know, come in after the game and get like a free Sunday or something like that. Right, right. Yeah. Get two burgers or whatever it might be. Well
[00:26:51] Matthew Dunn: we happen to be having this conversation the morning after hurricane in pasted Florida and my brain is going to you.
You really don't want to [00:27:00] have a tone deaf campaign. Going out of your Florida franchise this morning, Like you really, really don't. Why? Cause cause it's underwater.
[00:27:09] Aaron Smith: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so again, yeah, it allows you to communicate more effectively. And we've got some stuff in there too that allows the local team to see the national marketing team's calendar so they don't step on each other's toes.
That has Yeah, that makes sense. They can be more aligned. Makes sense. Yeah, the last kind of interesting data point I'll, I. Kind of share on that is typically what we see is from the local side. You know, our customers are sending 2,500 to 4,500 messages out campaigns you know, that are touching many, many millions of people a year.
And the national team is never like, that's impossible to scale that see, to get to that. Yeah.
[00:27:52] Matthew Dunn: Yeah, yeah. Well, and, and to have. Not only the, the, the cadence at all those endpoints, but the right cadence. [00:28:00] Right. Cuz here the, the big game is Friday night and there you can't
[00:28:03] Aaron Smith: automate that. Yeah. Yeah. You can
[00:28:05] Matthew Dunn: never know.
Yeah. You'd, you'd never know how you'd, you'd trip on yourself or you'd have, you know, a thousand, thousand people at headquarters trying to keep up with a local news of which there isn't any . Yeah. Like that's a whole, like, that's an over the beer topic, right. Where marketing, moving back into a local space that journalism used to occupy argu.
Fascinating. Wow. Very cool. On a technical side, you said sits on top at an API level with multiple esp. Having worked with email service provider APIs more than a bit. That's you said that as if it were easy.
[00:28:43] Aaron Smith: Yeah, again, I think that I owe a great debt of gratitude to Thomas our CTO for coming up with a good model for that. Nice. You know, we. Every time we do a new integration with a new esp, it is a, a relatively, you know, it's a big lift. And every [00:29:00] platform is different. It's different. Yeah.
It's d they, they're, they're totally different, you know, , can you, you know, can you create a campaign via the api, schedule a campaign? How do you get assets in and out of the platform? Yeah. You know, as far as like email templates and images go, all of that the, the, probably the bigger challenge all.
every ESP has, has that worked out to some degree. But then where it gets a little bit more challenging is on the the audience capability side. So for us, what we need to do ultimately is if you are a franchise owner that has five stores, You can only, you only ever can see, you know, target people within that, that realm.
Right. I see. And how we set the audiences and the filters up. Oh yeah. That, that itself is a little bit of manual work on, on each s esp to get to that level of sophistication. Yeah. Yeah. We can't get around that. So that's part of our onboarding and it's not quite as [00:30:00] much effort as standing up in ESP itself.
So for us, It's maybe six to eight weeks of work you know, to, to get everything in place. Okay. When we're working with a client on a new platform if it's an existing platform, it's three or four weeks cuz no matter what, we're gonna have to sit down with them and say like, what's your data model?
And what do you want to make available beyond just limiting You know Frankie Franchiser. , Yeah. Yeah. To to his or her five locations in two states. Yeah. What else do you wanna make available to them? Do you wanna let them do any sort of RFM targeting and really typically, It will be something like that where they do want to be able to do the same type of targeting that a good email marketer would be, which is like, I want this email to go out to, you know, highly engaged customers or lapse because like, maybe we're doing a sale, but we don't want everybody, we know that our highly engaged folks will, you know, come in anyway, so we don't need to use a promo for them.
Yeah. [00:31:00] Yeah. Things like that. And then Product categories. So in, in the case of like a quick serve restaurant product categories more like a a like what the customer, when do they come in? Are they a lunchtime customer? Are they, you know, a dinner customer? Do they like Sundays? Are they a dessert or a burger person?
Things like that. Wow. ,
[00:31:21] Matthew Dunn: Wow. Wow. That's that's not necessarily what esp ESPs were designed to. Out of the gate. So I, I imagine, Yeah.
[00:31:31] Aaron Smith: Well, it's, it's not that, that, that I think is, that's kind of more, it's, it's always different for every business, but I do think every modern e s p these days makes, makes it relatively easy to get down to that level.
But it is still, you know, it's work cuz it's, it's customized and it, it, it is that we live in a golden age of you know, It's an old timey phrase. But it, it is a wondrous time and I think we[00:32:00] As, you know, marketing and marketing technologists, we should stop every once in a while and kind of pinch ourselves and, and be grateful for everything that we have.
I know that we're always complaining and, you know, my vendor doesn't support X, Y, Z or whatever, right? But the capabilities that we have you know, available are, are just really they're amazing and what people can do today. With a team of 10 used to take a team of like 40 or 50. Yeah. And you can be five to 10 times as productive with that team of 10 today, as you could have been 10 years ago with 20 or 30 people.
Yeah.
[00:32:35] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. That's a good note to close on cuz I like what you just said. Wow. Wow. What, what a, what a fascinating, what a fascinating trip and I think a lot of growth ahead for you guys in Sageflo. How, how big is a team right now in terms of.
[00:32:51] Aaron Smith: We're still really small, so Yeah. We're, we're maybe get bigger
Yeah, we will, we will get bigger. When we get to 40 or 50 people, that's like, [00:33:00] Yeah. That, that's when I'll feel like, Okay. Like we're, yeah, we're really like getting some traction now. Whoa.
[00:33:05] Matthew Dunn: Cool. Let's hit stop so I can let you get on with your day, but Aaron, what a, what a pleasure to catch up and we got to do it in public, which is kind of fun.
I love it.
[00:33:14] Aaron Smith: Yeah, it's awesome. It's great to see you, Matt. Thanks so much for having me on. My guest
[00:33:18] Matthew Dunn: has. Aaron Smith, CEO of Sageflo.