I think one of the things that you did a really good job of as a marketing team at TravelPony early on was this idea of word of mouth. For those of you at home who maybe aren't as familiar with this concept, it's this idea that if you're going to get people to try your product, they need to know about it and they need to hear about it from their friends, their family members or even their colleagues at work. TravelPony always knew that this was important even from day one. They had many different strategies in which to seed word of mouth. There were a bunch of things that you tried. What were some of the things that you tried that maybe weren't as successful as now? I think, first of all, at the most fundamental level, TravelPony was about giving special hotel rates to consumers that would then actually transact with us, tell all their friends about us on their social networks. What's really interesting about that was that inherently is driving some credibility by how your customers talk about you. So with that theme, we also tried a bunch of different things. We really worked pretty closely trying to get travel bloggers to know about us, trying to get some more established YouTubers to check out our website and go through it a transaction process. We used a lot of these social media networks to get our message out. But I think that like anything else, starting from nothing, you really need to get some momentum going and that was a challenge for us regardless of our approach. So in the early days, I'll agree, I think TravelPony had an awareness problem. I think that was something that you guys really struggled with. Let's start a little bit more about those social media referrals, were they effective at all? Did they solve that problem? So they were definitely effective, but I don't know about you Chris, but I'm not a celebrity and my social network is only so limited and I probably have a total of maybe a few hundred, maybe 1,000 people out there. So getting my influence out there isn't going to do a whole lot as far as moving the needle. So when you have a number of influencers, the idea is that that'd to be very impactful. But from the very beginning, that is very challenging and I don't think that we really got any kind of the motion that we really needed to to take off as quickly as we needed to. In the early days, how did people even find out about TravelPony? Yes. I mean you mentioned word-of-mouth earlier and a lot of it was just the team itself telling their friends and family, "Hey, check this out. Please help us. Go tell your friends." We spent a little bit of money on an advertising. We knew that was going to be part of it, trying to get some of the stuff moving forward. But I think on social media platforms especially, it was slow-going. I think it really is a matter of just what we call a cascade effect, where at each iteration more and more people became loyal to the product and as a result this problem got easier as time went on. But the earliest days were probably the most challenging to get people to try the platform and actually get them to do something? That's absolutely right. I think we talk about native, we talk about how that impacted us later down the line. Once we had a few hundred thousand users and tens of thousands of transactions and customers, that got a lot easier. It's really interesting. When I think about the native approach, one thing that I think is really interesting is this idea of consumer intent. So if a consumer is already looking at travel articles or has expressed some type of interests in travel just through the websites they're visiting, these sponsor content articles work really well because they had intent there.They know people who are already in market or considering this. Is that maybe why social media didn't fell flat for you guys when you are trying to promote these same types of articles via social media? I think so. I think that what was great about native advertising, was that you're putting them upfront and saying, "Hey, if you're going to click on this, you're probably interested in travel, you're probably interested in hotels, you're probably interested in getting some sort of good deal, and you're interested in learning about a new platform that will help you do that." So it's very much active where I think with Facebook and Twitter, they weren't as effective in getting us the audience that was was really interested in travel at the right time. I think that a really good counter example is Google AdWords or just search engine advertising. The reason for this is because, and there's a reason why Google is one of the most valuable companies in the world and it's because, they're advertising to people that basically tell them what they're looking for. They're basically saying, "Hey I want a new iPhone case." Then all of a sudden they're like, "Oh, we just need to give you a bunch of advertisements that are referring new iPhone cases." It's really brilliant but it's extremely expensive for that reason. The big hotel companies, Expedia and even that the brand names, Marriott, etc, they're paying upwards of $10, even $20 sometimes for one single click from Google for a search, and it's really hard if you're not converting it at a very effective rate, it's very hard to make that work, especially for our business where we were trying to give away a bunch of our margin to our customer base. You were already being left with a really small margin to begin with and so that CPA amount can never go above whatever that margin was on the hotel. That's right. Though that's fascinating. Were there any strategies that you did before this to try to give reviewers to write the reviews and maybe didn't work as well? Any failures you want to share with us? Yeah. I don't know that there were any big failures, lets say like when the website was first getting up and running, there were some structure that we had put in place to offer hotels and very specific areas, and some bloggers would either not be in that area, or not be traveling to that area and so just how relatable are you to some of these players? We were working through what all start-ups do and technical and things like that, and it's actually really nice to get some reviews from bloggers because they can tell us a lot about some of our features that we would then put into our development road map. I think that outside of just advertising itself they were extremely, extremely valuable. That's great. Well, before we go, are there any other tips that you would give folks looking to start this seeding process. Yes. I'd say that, "Look you're going to have to be extremely diligent about defining what are the key features, the key objectives for your campaign?" From there you're going to have to just reach out to a lot of people and knock on doors, if you will, and so finding the right partner in this, is going to be really important and making sure that partner is aligned with what you're trying to do, and what you're trying to accomplish. Then that way when you're actually going and pushing some native advertising towards that blog, it's giving you the result that you're after. Well, thanks so much for joining us today, John, and for all the content that you contributed to this module, we really appreciate it. Yes. Very excited about this look, I think that when we were getting started with native advertising, we were really in the infancy of other platform type, and I'd say that, it was an incredible asset to us and it continues to be for a lot of companies. So it's very important that the next generation of advertisers out there really understand the ins and outs, and how impactful that it can be for their organizations. Thanks John.
