#23 Building a Market Leader: The ShopBack Story | with Angus Muffet

00:00:00: Welcome to the partner marketing podcast.

00:00:11: Hello again.

00:00:12: Welcome to the partner marketing podcast.

00:00:14: Today I'm joined by Andrews Moffitt, general manager of Shopback Australia and New Zealand.

00:00:20: Gus, you are a leader in the cash back and reward space who's grown the business from a free person Airbnb team to millions of shoppers and billions in transactional value.

00:00:31: Welcome to the show.

00:00:32: It's a pleasure to have you here today with me.

00:00:34: Thanks for including us in your show.

00:00:35: I'm really excited to share the journey that we've been on.

00:00:38: Great.

00:00:38: Great to have you.

00:00:40: Shall we start?

00:00:41: Maybe you introduce yourself a little bit about what you're up to, what you've done.

00:00:46: Just like that, we get a bit of an understanding of what you're doing.

00:00:50: Yeah, sure thing.

00:00:51: First of all, we can remove the formalities.

00:00:53: You can call me Gus.

00:00:56: Everyone aside from my grandmother calls me Gus, so I feel like that's appropriate for the show today.

00:01:04: Yeah.

00:01:04: I'm the general manager, as you said, for Australia and New Zealand, for the shop back.

00:01:10: I've been with shop back now for seven years, having spent time in other e-commerce giants like Groupon and Pryce.

00:01:18: I actually had a very non-linear track into e-commerce and then subsequently into affiliate marketing.

00:01:26: I spent four or five years working in hotels back in the day.

00:01:31: So straight out of school, my first job in Sydney was with a five-star hotel.

00:01:35: And it gave me a really good understanding of what customer service is like, working in amongst diverse teams, how fast hotels move and operate.

00:01:46: It gave me a really good flavor.

00:01:47: And I got the eCommerce bug after joining Groupon in about twenty, twenty, thirteen.

00:01:54: The fastest growing company at the time, leader in mobile commerce.

00:01:58: that gave me the step into where I am today at Shopback.

00:02:02: That's really funny.

00:02:03: When I went to university, when I studied, I earned my money with working in a restaurant.

00:02:08: And I always said later that everybody who works in client services should have been working in something like that, right?

00:02:14: Because then you really know about how to service people and what quality is, how you take care of them and all this kind of stuff.

00:02:22: It's very funny because that's kind of like where I kind of like started my kind of like first jobs during studies.

00:02:31: Great stuff.

00:02:33: So how did you how did you then come from Groupon to shop back itself?

00:02:39: Oh, this is a really interesting story.

00:02:40: So I've worked at Groupon for five years and I was running the national sales team and I was working across like quite a and their team were working across quite a big portfolio.

00:02:50: So anything from theme parks to cinema chains to national QSR brands, we were essentially bringing those brands to the group on audience, to the group on customers.

00:03:04: And so I had a real flavour for working with multinational corporations or enterprise-sized brands.

00:03:12: I've run sales teams before and I had a real interest in marketing on the marketing side and I used to work closely with.

00:03:19: our team, marketing team at Groupon to bring brand campaigns to life.

00:03:24: And I do vividly remember when Shopback must have been looking at Australia and there was a few LinkedIn DMs going around from the recruiters at Shopback.

00:03:34: And I remember looking at it and thinking, you know, I'm not sure what Shopback is.

00:03:39: I'm not aware of Cashback.

00:03:40: There was really like a very low presence of that particular value proposition in market at that point.

00:03:46: However, one of my team members, working at Groupon in my team, he joined Shotback and we had a conversation about him leaving Groupon and joining Shotback and I thought, oh wow, that's an interesting move.

00:03:59: and he then spent... good four or five months convincing me on the opportunity and where it's going.

00:04:06: And subsequently, I met the founders and really believed in their vision for shop back, not just across Southeast Asia, but their vision for what it could be in APAC and beyond.

00:04:18: And as I say, the rest is history.

00:04:20: It's been a good seven years.

00:04:23: Groupon was a big or still, of course, is.

00:04:26: But back in the days, I think even more was a big company at that time, right?

00:04:29: When you made this decision to change to something that was much, much smaller, maybe much, much more entrepreneurial back then.

00:04:38: Yeah, it was night and day.

00:04:39: And I mean, like if you go back to the GFC, the Global Financial Crisis when Groupon was born, it was really born at a time where customers needed to save money and wanted to make every dollar go further.

00:04:52: It also rode the mobile commerce wave, which was very interesting.

00:04:55: They were a pioneer in mobile app commerce.

00:04:59: And so the transition from a big organization, a global organization to more of a startup with a hundred and fifty people in presence in four or five markets was like, it was quite real.

00:05:11: And I had to kind of reset my mindset on how to operate.

00:05:15: And yeah, I think The team here are really ambitious and they want to make sure that the people that come in have great growth opportunities and that's been true since day one, hence the reason why I enjoy working here and I've grown over the last seven years.

00:05:33: So Shopback's coming from Singapore, right?

00:05:36: Now you said that it was already a hundred and fifty people when you joined, but when you joined that was kind of like the start then for Australia.

00:05:44: Yeah, yeah very near the start.

00:05:46: So we founded in Singapore in twenty fourteen.

00:05:49: We quickly scaled across the region so places where you would love to go on holidays places like Malaysia Indonesia Thailand Taiwan.

00:05:56: and then our first leap out of the Southeast Asian region was into Australia.

00:06:01: and at that time when I joined, you know, it was we had a an office not too dissimilar to the size of the room I'm in now.

00:06:07: it had no windows it had peach colored walls and we had four people in there that We can speak about the people in the early days, but those four people were really like mission focused on bringing Shopback out of an Airbnb in Piedmont into its first office and then into the hands of millions of Australians.

00:06:27: that it is today.

00:06:29: Okay.

00:06:29: Can you share a bit about Shopback itself, like what you're doing and what differentiates you from other cashback or affiliate platforms?

00:06:37: Yeah, so I mean in simple terms shop backs are a double-sided marketplace So I'm not dissimilar to an Amazon or an eBay.

00:06:44: We're on one side We have the supply which is the merchants that we work with so they're global brands that you know and love and then on the other side is our customers and our job is to bring those two together to introduce customers to to brands and to Really encourage them to shop through the brands that feature on shop back.

00:07:06: When it comes to the differentiation, I'd say there's a couple of things we really work hard Primarily on the supply side of our business to make sure that we have brands that you know and love, but also expanding into new categories, which I'm happy to share about today as well.

00:07:23: And introducing new use cases for customers to earn and save money when they're shopping, whether they're shopping online, they're playing games, they're answering surveys.

00:07:32: We hope that we can capture more of the customers' mind share and therefore create engagement for the brands on our platform.

00:07:40: And on the customer side, I think the real main differentiator is our app strength.

00:07:45: So go back a couple of minutes.

00:07:47: We were born in Southeast Asia, as I said.

00:07:50: And if you go around, like you probably know, like you go to the Philippines or you go to Indonesia, it's like customers, when they moved, when the econ boom happened, they skipped the desktop altogether and they primarily use app.

00:08:04: Mobile

00:08:04: first, all the markets, yeah.

00:08:07: Exactly, right?

00:08:08: So that's our home ground.

00:08:10: We need to be strong and have a very useful app.

00:08:15: One that has high engagement for customers and you know helps merchants to be discovered.

00:08:19: And so actually when we entered Australia that was kind of our secret weapon I'd say beyond the people and the product we had.

00:08:25: So you had the app already back down.

00:08:27: Yeah.

00:08:28: Yeah.

00:08:28: Yeah, so when we launched there was no other.

00:08:31: there was one other cashback Player in Australia that had no mobile app presence.

00:08:37: And so if you think about when people shop It can be on the bus or train on the way to work.

00:08:41: It can be when they're lying in bed and trying to go to sleep.

00:08:45: There's a number of different places.

00:08:47: that desktop just won't reach them.

00:08:50: About seventy percent of our transactions today happen on the app.

00:08:54: That's a really strong point of difference for us when you compare that to other affiliates in market.

00:09:02: Okay, I see when you started like you were really small in Australia and whenever kind of like when you start a business like that I think you always at one point run into this chicken and egg situation.

00:09:15: on the one hand you need to supply so you need the brands with their different offers.

00:09:19: And you need the customers obviously and the one you only get with the other.

00:09:23: How did you solve that situation?

00:09:25: Yeah, that's a really interesting problem to solve for anyone who is starting a marketplace or indeed like even Amazon today.

00:09:33: work on hard on both sides.

00:09:35: Amazon for example work on the widest range and the best prices which bring the customers in and the flow will spins.

00:09:42: How we approach that in Australia is quite interesting.

00:09:44: Tom Howard, who was running the business development function and still is today on day one, I've heard stories from affiliate networks or brands where he took them out for a coffee and said, look, you know, Tom from Shopback, Shopback's big in Southeast Asia.

00:09:58: We have zero customers in Australia.

00:09:59: But you've got to believe that we're on a mission to become Australia's leading rewards player.

00:10:05: You know, here's what it looks like in other markets so that brands could get a sense of how they'd be placed on the shop back and how we do our marketing.

00:10:15: Actually, the supply side was we had a bit of a leg up in the sense that we're a proven entity and we're done well in other markets.

00:10:22: Coming to Australia, the belief is that we could do well.

00:10:25: I think we're very thankful that a lot of brands made the jump.

00:10:29: That leap of faith, the early first leap of faith.

00:10:32: Of course, we have strong regional partnerships too, which help.

00:10:36: Then from there, it's just about just trying to figure out who your first customer is.

00:10:41: For us in Australia, it was more than likely a young female fashion buyer.

00:10:46: We just doubled down super hard on influencer marketing and tried to find those people coming out of the reality shows before they got big and we grew with them.

00:10:58: I think that gave us the fuel on the customer side once we'd had the supply side bedded down.

00:11:06: Super interesting.

00:11:07: On the brand side, did you acquire all these brands yourself and directly?

00:11:11: did you work with affiliate network or kind of like both?

00:11:16: How did that help you to scale?

00:11:18: A combination of both.

00:11:19: I would say the affiliate networks have been like really, really supportive or were really supportive of our move into Australia and in other regions that we operate in, the network landscape is quite small, I would say, and brands tend to often go direct.

00:11:37: Whereas in Australia, what we found was that there was a much, much larger affiliate network presence here.

00:11:43: We love to work with everyone in the space.

00:11:47: You know, of course, we were direct connected into each one of the networks, which then gives brands the opportunity to connect and to shop back quite quickly.

00:11:55: But there's still other brands out there like, you know, I think affiliate market, it's still growing and it's still like the awareness job.

00:12:01: We need to go out there and educate brands on what it is and how important it is in the funnel as a CMO when you're making budget decisions.

00:12:10: It's quite a powerful tool.

00:12:12: when you're looking at the ROAS that comes in through the affiliate channel and when you even consider the dominance that the Googles and the matters of the world have in the digital marketing spend.

00:12:23: It's like eighty four cents in every dollar in Australia goes to those two giants.

00:12:28: And they're only increasing the click in impression prices.

00:12:31: So the best thing I think the advice that I probably give is trying to diversify and going to channels that have safe and incremental ROAs.

00:12:40: And I really believe that affiliate is coming up and up and coming in that space.

00:12:47: And on the consumer side, then you focus on one kind of vertical or target group, or however you want to say.

00:12:54: You said fashion-oriented younger females.

00:13:00: And then you expanded from there.

00:13:01: Was that the acquisition campaign that you were taking?

00:13:05: Yeah, I'd love to say it was deliberate at the start, but I think you don't know what you don't know.

00:13:11: And when we first started in Australia, we were really interested.

00:13:17: We went to cafes, we spoke to users, we showed them the app and got real-time feedback.

00:13:22: And of course, when we started to see traction, we could tell it was the female fashion buyer, younger female fashion buyer.

00:13:30: And over time, it's certainly diversified.

00:13:34: We still have an audience that skews female.

00:13:40: Surprisingly, there's a good representation of parents.

00:13:43: And it's generally that kind of, you know, a twenty-four to thirty-five year old that we see using shop back on a frequent basis.

00:13:52: So to answer your question, like, I think we run specific campaigns to address specific audiences.

00:13:59: But looking at what we can offer, for example, my mum uses it to shop with David Jones, which is a large, well-known online and install marker place in Australia.

00:14:12: And I've got other friends from various walks of life and ages that use it as well.

00:14:16: So it's actually quite broad at this stage, I'd say.

00:14:19: How many users do you have now in Australia and in New Zealand?

00:14:23: Yeah, so Australia we've clicked over three million some time ago uses that.

00:14:27: have you know that?

00:14:29: that are that we call members today, which is We're super proud of that number.

00:14:34: Yeah from from an Airbnb.

00:14:36: million out of twenty million in total.

00:14:38: but that obviously includes children and everybody, right?

00:14:41: So that's a good share of the market.

00:14:44: It is.

00:14:46: I think population today is twenty-six million.

00:14:51: If you look at it on that standpoint, I think that the market penetration in Australia is okay, but it's still under-penetrated when you look at more mature markets like the US, where there's been some giants operating there for some time, the UK, which has a much more mature affiliate and cashback programs.

00:15:13: still believe there's a long way to grow.

00:15:15: New Zealand, though, is an interesting one.

00:15:16: It's our fastest growing market to date, fun fact.

00:15:20: We've clicked over, I don't know what the live number is, but it's well north of two hundred and fifty thousand customers out of a population of four and a half million.

00:15:30: And interestingly, it's quite greenfields as in.

00:15:33: there's no other cashback and rewards players over there.

00:15:36: So it's great because there's a lot of customers that are coming in and enjoying it.

00:15:41: On the other side, it's hard because you have to do the job of education, especially around life on the merchant side.

00:15:48: Yeah, help them understand the model.

00:15:49: Kind of like completely different game, so to say.

00:15:51: Totally

00:15:52: different game.

00:15:53: And it should be right.

00:15:53: They're two different countries.

00:15:54: I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that or treating New Zealand like it's a state of Australia.

00:16:00: Like, you know, it's just with its

00:16:03: own nuances.

00:16:05: No, and nor should they.

00:16:06: It's a totally different country.

00:16:08: So yeah, we're learning fast and hopefully we're being useful for the population over there.

00:16:14: Okay, great.

00:16:15: Can you describe a little bit on how it works?

00:16:17: So it goes through the app, the users go to the app, they find different offers, they acquire or they buy these offers through the app, or do they get forwarded to the shop and then they redeem their reward, their cashback.

00:16:32: Can you describe a bit on how that works?

00:16:35: Yeah, so our main business is a typical affiliate model, and we have three platforms.

00:16:40: We have a desktop site, we have a browser extension, and we have an app.

00:16:45: And as I said, the app is about north of seventy percent of where our transactions occur.

00:16:51: What we do is we showcase brands to our customers.

00:16:55: When they see a brand, they click through and we redirect them through to the brand's website to complete the transaction.

00:17:02: And only when the transaction is being made does the branded form us of a sale and we award cashback in a temporary basis.

00:17:09: It's called pending cashback.

00:17:12: the brand's return period has passed or in the case of travel, you've taken your travel.

00:17:17: Only then does the brand say to us, no returns, no refunds, no cancellations, you can award the cash back.

00:17:23: And then Shopback's paid a commission and we share that with the user's cash.

00:17:28: How many brands do you have connected to the platform now in Australia?

00:17:33: On our affiliate program, we have about four and a half thousand brands that are connected to Shopback, which is, yeah, it's a good number.

00:17:41: We also have a gift card program where we have about two hundred and fifty different brands that people can buy gift cards from.

00:17:47: And then we have our in-store proposition where we have closer to three thousand outlets across Australia where you can actually pay using your Shopback app.

00:17:57: Shopback is active, I think, in twelve countries now.

00:18:00: Is that correct?

00:18:02: Yes, twelve markets, yeah.

00:18:03: Twelve

00:18:04: markets.

00:18:04: Is there any particular differences between these markets on how consumers behave, how you work with brands?

00:18:13: Would be interesting if you could share a little bit about that.

00:18:16: Yeah, I'd love to.

00:18:16: There's so many differences.

00:18:18: And, you know, we were talking before like last week with your travels, you're going into different markets.

00:18:23: And I think that the key that I've found that you can kind of broadly bucket the markets we're in.

00:18:32: Southeast Asia, you can bucket Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Germany into loosely into the second bucket.

00:18:41: And I think that the couple of key points is one is the shopping behavior for the consumers is so different.

00:18:48: There's a sale day on like, you know, be what we call a mega sale day once a month in Southeast Asia, which is there, you know, eight, eight.

00:18:56: nine, nine, ten, ten, eleven, eleven, twelve, twelve campaigns, the date-based campaigns.

00:19:02: We're in Australia and in other parts of the region.

00:19:05: What we see is it kind of can follow the US marketing calendar a bit closer.

00:19:11: So, you know, key events like Brack Friday, Cyber Monday.

00:19:17: In Australia, we have an event called Boxing Day, which is the day after Christmas.

00:19:21: And there's emerging, it's interesting.

00:19:23: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:19:24: But what we're seeing is some of the Southeast Asian sale event dates coming into Australia.

00:19:30: So, eleven eleven, which is...

00:19:32: Single day.

00:19:34: Yeah, singles day.

00:19:34: It's not typically a sale day in Australia, but there's a lot of interest from global marketplaces operating in Australia to try and bring this one to life.

00:19:45: So yeah, I'd say the shopping behavior is like a real differentiator and then also platform bias, you know, app versus web versus extension is a big one as well.

00:19:54: And then probably the last one would be kind of merchant concentration.

00:19:59: So customer shop from a very large range of brands in Australia versus some markets, you know, you have a marketplaces that has done well to capture a lot of the customer share.

00:20:11: So you might see more orders going into the top ten versus in Australia it's more.

00:20:16: you know the top forty or fifty.

00:20:19: What does that mean when you operate now when you have like your campaigns for example when you have the app or like the web offer or the browser extension.

00:20:29: Does that mean you have different flavors or different versions for the different countries?

00:20:34: or does it not matter?

00:20:35: Because on the way how you work with the app or the consumers, how they use them is kind of like the same or with the marketing campaigns.

00:20:44: Is that then separate country by country?

00:20:46: How do you operate one large region within these different setups at Shopback?

00:20:53: How do you manage that?

00:20:55: Yeah, it's interesting because like I was in China the other day and we were experiencing going around and trying to get first-hand experience of some of the main apps over there.

00:21:05: So like Meituan, Alipay, WeChat, and of course that's a very dense experience from a customer standpoint.

00:21:13: There's a lot of information squeezed into the smaller screen versus in Western markets.

00:21:19: like cleaner experiences and simply UI is typically what's favorite, I think from a customer point of view.

00:21:27: So you will see some like whilst the app and the web and extension, they're all the same platform globally.

00:21:32: Each market can go and make its own decisions with respect to how we provide the best possible experience for users.

00:21:40: when it comes to the lay app, the richness of the app, the campaigns are very

00:21:45: different.

00:21:45: So you can change that in the app.

00:21:46: We

00:21:46: can change a lot of things in the app.

00:21:49: And I think the key one is the campaigns.

00:21:51: You can't have a cookie-catter approach across twelve markets.

00:21:56: Some markets you can bundle together, perhaps like Sapli Stasia, there's a lot of commonality versus the rest of the markets.

00:22:03: There's, whilst there's commonality, there's still a lot of differences.

00:22:06: So we tend to operate very much independent and just do what's best for the customers in that market.

00:22:15: And what about the offers themselves?

00:22:16: I could imagine that is quite different between, for example, Southeast Asian countries, Australia, then maybe Europe, Taiwan, maybe about the offers that are attractive for the consumers.

00:22:29: That's very different as well, right?

00:22:31: Isn't it?

00:22:32: Yeah, there's definitely nuances.

00:22:33: And I mean, aside from the brands looking different, there's also different realities for brands too, when it comes to what their margin profile looks like, how much they want to pay to acquire a customer.

00:22:44: At the end of the day, our job is to acquire customers and drive revenues.

00:22:47: So the cashback rate is dictated a lot by the category, the type of advertiser that we're working with as well.

00:23:01: I'd say that's one of the probably biggest differentiators, just starting with the brands themselves and then across markets, there's different nuances when it comes to customer acquisition costs.

00:23:13: Makes sense.

00:23:14: What about Australia itself?

00:23:16: Is there anything very unique or specific about consumer behavior in Australia or the whole market in Australia that you could share with us?

00:23:26: Yeah, I'd say like from trying to look in from the outside and just be You know try to try and understand what you might be different I'd say probably a couple of things that be I mentioned before.

00:23:40: the merchant density like.

00:23:41: we have a really thriving and diverse ecosystem of Brands right across categories.

00:23:48: I think supermarkets probably one of the outsiders where there's you know to keep brands that are quite quite big in the market versus fashion is quite diverse.

00:24:00: Let's say electronics and retail more broadly is quite diverse and the customers enjoy shopping.

00:24:06: It's actually quite interesting to see the shopper behavior and how that changes over time with respect to brand preference.

00:24:13: But what doesn't change is that they really do shop around for the best price, the best offers, the best postage off.

00:24:22: fulfillment office.

00:24:23: So like whether it's cheapest postage, the fastest postage and also looking at refund policies as well.

00:24:28: So I think that customers are willing to shop around quite a bit in Australia.

00:24:32: And the last one would be like.

00:24:35: what surprised me over the last six years is the Aussies are really willing to jump on like these new sale dates.

00:24:42: Like if you asked some friends at a barbecue say like six years ago what Black Friday is.

00:24:48: it'd be really hard pressed to say like maybe one in five would have heard about it and maybe you know maybe that person shopped.

00:24:54: but today I reckon all five have heard and probably four in the five shop on Black Friday and it's just amazing how quickly that those global shopping phenomena can

00:25:04: be picked

00:25:06: up.

00:25:07: You said in the beginning like cashback, that's your bread and butter business.

00:25:12: This is where you're coming from.

00:25:13: But you said as well that you're looking into other categories of business to do.

00:25:19: What is that?

00:25:21: Yeah.

00:25:22: So I can tell you what's live today.

00:25:23: So yes, like in terms of like online, like affiliate is where we started.

00:25:27: So it's online cashback.

00:25:29: Once we got that to scale, we then ventured into gift cards and vouchers.

00:25:33: So Imagine buying a gift card from your favorite brand and you can earn cash back for that too.

00:25:39: We took that from zero to close to a hundred and fifty million dollar business in two or three years.

00:25:46: That works really well.

00:25:47: Yeah, it's

00:25:48: all different approaches elsewhere and that did not really scale.

00:25:51: I had the feeling.

00:25:52: Okay, good.

00:25:54: It's a really yeah, it's actually.

00:25:57: it's something that we we looked at.

00:26:01: Just during COVID, where we were kind of like, you know, our business is pretty resilient in the sense that we've got diverse merchant categories.

00:26:10: So, you know, fashion travel, electronics, groceries, alcohol.

00:26:13: Yes, travel was affected during COVID.

00:26:15: The rest were going really well.

00:26:17: And they were kind of like, okay, what else can we do?

00:26:19: And we hadn't taken transactions on our platform, of course, because our job is just to redirect customers quickly to the merchants to shop.

00:26:28: So we introduced payments which then allowed us to sell gift cards and that scaled well beyond that.

00:26:33: we do install payments and I think just the really like surprising one recently was we introduced mobile gaming.

00:26:43: So today customers can come and see shop back play on our app and essentially we allow customers to earn cash back when they download a game.

00:26:53: It might be like Monopoly or Fruit Inja and as they progress through the game they earn cash back.

00:27:01: So it's just an interesting way.

00:27:03: You don't have to spend anything.

00:27:04: You can just like a lot of people do on the train play games and be rewarded for it.

00:27:09: It's going really

00:27:10: well.

00:27:11: You get paid for the time that you spend within the game.

00:27:15: That's right, exactly.

00:27:16: And as you progress through the game, and I've tried, I'm not a great gamer, but I still learned some meaningful cash back.

00:27:25: That's very interesting.

00:27:26: Since when do you have that?

00:27:29: That one launched, when was that?

00:27:31: That was like... late last year.

00:27:35: And I really think there's good examples of it working internationally.

00:27:42: And that's one thing we look at.

00:27:43: It's kind of like, what's happening internationally?

00:27:46: How might we think about that at shop back and bring that to our users?

00:27:51: And we saw that it was a booming industry.

00:27:54: And I've got to tell you, man, when I'm on the train on the way to work, there's people with gray hair like me.

00:28:00: playing games.

00:28:01: There's young people playing games.

00:28:03: I know, I see them.

00:28:04: You see them, right?

00:28:05: And now I think of

00:28:06: course it's big in Southeast Asia, but I think it will probably or it is big everywhere, right?

00:28:11: So that should be really good.

00:28:12: I have never heard about this kind of offer before, right?

00:28:16: So I think that could really be that could be something big.

00:28:19: Yeah,

00:28:20: it is.

00:28:20: And if you think about the flywheel of the business.

00:28:23: You know, people come in to play games, they see merchants that we have on our affiliate program, or they see the gift cards merchants and we're able to cross them quite easily through the different modes of our business.

00:28:33: Yeah.

00:28:35: Very good.

00:28:35: Very interesting.

00:28:37: What else is new or what else do you have in the plans for shop back in Australia and New Zealand, especially to roll out like new categories, integrations, product features.

00:28:50: What's your plans?

00:28:52: You mentioned before the cash back for attention, like the shop back play, the premise of that.

00:28:58: And so we're kind of doubling down on categories that are similar to that, especially if times are a bit tough, the interest rates just got dropped in Australia today, which is great news for people with home loans.

00:29:10: But I think it's still like we're not out of the woods.

00:29:13: So we want to try and give customers the opportunity to earn cash back beyond their shopping, you know, the everyday shopping.

00:29:21: So play is a good example of that.

00:29:23: The next one's surveys.

00:29:24: And so it's amazing.

00:29:27: The subculture of survey uses the hat the hair of people that are willing to give up their time and to surveys that give companies.

00:29:35: obviously the trade off, you know, is your information.

00:29:37: like you can tell a company your preferences in terms of certain products or services.

00:29:42: And then we can award cash back for those particular activities as well.

00:29:48: And the last one, I think it's probably on everyone's lips is AI and like, hey, what's our play?

00:29:55: I think beyond its internal tool adoption and everyone is really trying to really learn how AI can help them in their day to be more productive, to be a thought partner.

00:30:10: We're actually now deep in thought and close to a working model of something that we'd be able to put in front of customers.

00:30:17: And so customers now, like, seven hundred million global Chatcha BT users, they know that conversational search is an efficient way to browse, and so we want to position a product that can meet that need as well.

00:30:32: What's your general view on AI?

00:30:34: I have the feeling at the moment it's rather something that is helping us to accelerate everything.

00:30:39: On the publisher side as well, you have more content, you have more offers, it's speeding up things, everything is getting a little bit more efficient.

00:30:47: On the other hand, obviously you have the whole traffic acquisition where then many are dependent on acquiring traffic from Google, for example, which is changing fundamentally.

00:30:56: What do you think will be in the... maybe not even longer term, but now in the next one, two, three years, how that will impact our industry.

00:31:06: I think that's the biggest, that it's not a million dollar, it's a billion dollar question.

00:31:11: Like how fast will user behaviors shift from, let's say, Searching on Google for products and services and doing comparison on Google?

00:31:21: how fast will that shift into?

00:31:23: Conversational search through AI?

00:31:25: that one I'm actually not sure of but what I do know is that like with some certainty I believe that the the users will Will migrate across and so what it means for like even for us especially is you know, we need to make sure that we are in that conversational search response that whatever AI platform gives them.

00:31:46: And so, you know, the new age of SEO might back off?

00:31:50: and what AGO or AIO, I'm hearing a lot of different acronyms, but answering and optimization essentially, and just making sure your content is readily available for the for the AIs to pick up and surface to the users.

00:32:05: But I like I don't think this is overhyped like I genuinely you know I think that we're up for.

00:32:13: yeah I don't know.

00:32:14: how do you feel like what's your take on it?

00:32:17: I think it will be much much bigger than we even estimate today.

00:32:21: so when you say you don't think it's overplayed I think it's maybe still underplayed because many many people won't understand or still don't understand the impact it might have.

00:32:31: I started to play around a bit myself, like we have an AI team here where we do two things.

00:32:36: We do something on the product side, just like in our interfaces, publisher recommendations, the whole onboarding process and stuff like that, making that easier.

00:32:46: On the other hand, we have a team that works outside the product development itself, looking into the operational stuff.

00:32:55: Like sales processes, for example, so everything goes much much quicker like before.

00:32:59: a sales manager could maybe like on a day reach out to three four five brands with a qualitative researched outreach and Now you can automate all of that, right?

00:33:11: So the question is what?

00:33:13: what happens if everybody is doing that?

00:33:16: So so we're looking into that but then like we are a fully digital companies or everything we do is working on these computers, right?

00:33:25: So per se, I think everything could be optimized, streamlined, done differently.

00:33:33: So I think it will have a much, much bigger impact than we can imagine now, right?

00:33:39: I think about back in the days when the first iPhone came, nobody really understood what kind of impact it will have.

00:33:45: Now it's just there, right?

00:33:47: I think you sometimes realize how big of an impact it had in the last ten years on everybody's lives and I think it will be the same here.

00:33:58: And to use your like pick up on that like when the iPhone came out I don't know if you've seen the BlackBerry documentary on Netflix But the one the one thing in the back of our minds is you don't want to be the Kodak or the blockbuster or the BlackBerry.

00:34:11: That didn't move fast when when it's very clear the winds are changing You have to adopt or you'll be left behind.

00:34:19: and so therefore like okay, let's put a lot of thought into Making sure that our business is ready set for the next next stage, which I definitely I agree with you.

00:34:28: I think it's moving quickly.

00:34:30: I

00:34:30: think that's exactly the threat, what you say, because the blackberry was kind of like a little bit different tool to work in the same way as you did before.

00:34:39: And that's how like our brains work, right?

00:34:42: We still think in the same categories and processes while something underneath, I think, is fundamentally changing now.

00:34:49: Which is of course a threat.

00:34:50: then on the other hand like when like for example listening to you when you say what you do with shop bag what what you're up to the ideas you have.

00:34:59: This is something I think that characterizes our whole industry partner marketing which is so innovative.

00:35:06: with all the time new ideas are coming up.

00:35:11: ideas how to do things differently, new stuff, right?

00:35:14: We kind of like see that almost every day, which then again, makes me think that we are in a quite resilient environment, resilient industry, where I'm actually, it's me as a person, right?

00:35:27: So I need to be careful, but I'm quite optimistic actually, I would say.

00:35:32: That's awesome.

00:35:33: Yeah, and I think just to double down on that, I really think that Disruptions everywhere, you know, there's someone will come in with, whether it's AI or not, someone's going to come in with fresh perspectives or a different way of doing things.

00:35:49: And what we're hyper vigilant on is making sure as a business we're resilient to those, you know, new and interesting.

00:35:58: technologies or models that are coming out.

00:36:00: And at the same time, because we're so forthinking in that respect, we're actually serving our merchants and customers better.

00:36:06: We're building a more resilient business, more interesting business, something that gives them more utility.

00:36:12: And that's a byproduct, I think, of the mental model of being across what's happening when the winds are changing globally.

00:36:20: Yeah,

00:36:21: I agree.

00:36:21: I agree.

00:36:22: Gus, thank you so much for a good conversation.

00:36:25: Thank you about sharing, about Shopbag and about yourself.

00:36:28: Thank you for being my guest.

00:36:30: At the end, I have three questions to you that I ask all my guests.

00:36:36: It's a little bit more personal.

00:36:40: Would you mind sharing with us your favorite book as a recommendation for us and for the listeners?

00:36:48: Okay.

00:36:50: I read business or self-improvement books.

00:36:53: I'd say, can I give you two?

00:36:54: I'll give you two quick ones.

00:36:55: So one's a book I just read called Amped Up by Fred Schlutman, which is Amp It Up.

00:37:04: Yeah, it's as it says on the sticker, it's about introducing like intensity, pace and speed into your organization no matter what the size and how important it is to be intolerant of drag and mediocrity, mediocrity in your business.

00:37:21: I think that was, that was one.

00:37:22: The other one was maybe you've read as well, the hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz, which really just talks about his perspectives on what it takes to build an enduring business, the challenges.

00:37:36: Oh man, it was, it was like, you know, when you're, I was listening to the book and I was just taking notes the whole way through just like a lot of really interesting ideas.

00:37:44: Yeah.

00:37:44: So those two are probably my picks.

00:37:47: Very good.

00:37:47: I will put these on my list.

00:37:50: I get many now that it's really, really interesting.

00:37:53: Thank you.

00:37:54: Is there any kind of app or tool that you say you can't live without, that you're using daily, that is new?

00:38:02: Your favorite AI app, I guess.

00:38:05: But besides that?

00:38:06: I was going to say shop back.

00:38:08: that, you know,

00:38:11: no, beyond shot

00:38:12: back, I think there's granola, which I found is there's a million note taking apps out there.

00:38:18: But I really feel like granola, like, I even use it to brainstorm, I just, you know, talk to it.

00:38:23: And it's able to really synthesize the information and you can search across conversations.

00:38:29: It's actually still free.

00:38:31: It's a really good, good app.

00:38:33: What is it?

00:38:33: Is it an AI app?

00:38:36: Yeah, it's just an AI assistant.

00:38:38: So it's a note taking assistant.

00:38:39: I'm sure it does much more and hopefully the people at granola don't listen to this because I'm butchering what they do.

00:38:44: But I use it in in one-on-ones with team members or if I want to ideate on my own.

00:38:50: I just pop it on the table.

00:38:51: it listens, but then it does a really good job of just Articulating what the conversation was with different modes that you can select and it'll reformat it depending on the mode.

00:39:01: so one-on-one interview, board presentation, podcasts, like you could do all of these things in a row.

00:39:08: And you just like put it next to you and then you record it and then it gives you this kind of like summary afterwards.

00:39:13: It's awesome, yep, yep.

00:39:14: Okay,

00:39:16: granola.

00:39:17: Granola, yeah, like the cereal, I don't know, far.

00:39:19: Yeah,

00:39:20: yeah, exactly, yes, yeah.

00:39:21: Yeah,

00:39:22: okay, perfect.

00:39:22: I will try that as well.

00:39:23: Good.

00:39:24: And how should I phrase it?

00:39:27: Once you're done with shop back.

00:39:30: And when you're completely free, when you've done all the ideas, you realize everything and it's okay, there is nothing for me to do anymore.

00:39:36: And you're completely free.

00:39:38: What would you do?

00:39:39: Yes.

00:39:40: Do I have a budget or is the budget?

00:39:42: Free.

00:39:42: Full budget.

00:39:43: Free.

00:39:44: Okay.

00:39:45: I probably, when I, as I was doing my year twelve, this is like back in the year two thousand, I actually started doing, I was a student pilot and I learned how to fly plane and did my.

00:39:58: I did a couple of solos, so I was allowed to fly around the airport on my own.

00:40:01: And since then, I've always had this regret that I didn't continue it.

00:40:05: So if budget wasn't an issue, and of course, I didn't have the challenges that I have today at shot back, I'd probably look to go and restart that little fire that's still burning somewhere on flying around Australia, just to different remote parts of Australia.

00:40:23: That's good.

00:40:24: That's a good one.

00:40:25: Great.

00:40:26: Thank you, Gus.

00:40:27: Thank you for being my guest.

00:40:29: My pleasure.

00:40:29: Thanks.

00:40:29: Thank you for being here today.

00:40:31: And thanks so much for having us.

00:40:32: And, you know, hopefully the the shop back story or some part resonates with with the people that listen.

00:40:38: So thanks again, Matthias.

00:40:39: With a great talk.

00:40:40: Thank you.

00:40:40: Appreciate

00:40:44: it.

00:40:44: This podcast is produced by TLDR

00:40:47: Studios.