Building Customer Reach

0:05Speaker 1:Apoche Production.

0:12Speaker 2:So here we are at hand Picked season six and what a variety of businesses we will be talking to. It's such a wonderful expose of Australian ingenuity. People are finding businesses, really successful businesses in places you would not believe. So let them ask the questions, maybe a little frazzled and try to come up with some answers, but they're great conversations on how to grow businesses in all sorts of ways. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hello, I'm Miami Simpson and welcome to hand Picked Season six and I'm looking forward to discussing some very interesting business topics with Kate Abraham's. Now, Kate, you and I were connected through a propeller, which is the Heads over Heells program.

1:11Speaker 2:Maybe tell me a little bit about that program and how you joined it.

1:16Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting. A Propeller or Head over Heels, it's been around for about sixteen years. What it does is identify female founders and helps them in an area where I think is the best way to help a startup company, and that is connecting them to buyers. They have a big network of senior executives from around Sydney, Melbourne and other parts of the country are now overseas and they coach the founders and they run these workshops or presentation nights where the founders pitch and then people in the audience commit to using their network to line them up with potential customers and sometimes potential bench capitalists as well.

1:59Speaker 2:Wow, that sounds great. And so where are you up to on your journey? Have you presented to this group of people and what happened I.

2:07Speaker 1:Have I didn't answer the second part of your first question. And how did I get involved in a propeller? And it's kind of interesting actually because when I worked at Deutsche Bank, I wrote the first check to Head over Heels as a sponsor. I did so some fifteen seventeen years ago, that's right, and was one of the women back then who was heavily involved. Marla Hella and I worked very closely together and she wanted us to support it. She didn't have a budget. I did so, and then I got involved a little bit early on. So it's gone phil circle now that I'm actually one of their presenting CEOs, which is a lot of fun. So as about a year ago, I presented to a room full of executives in Melbourne, and I think I've got something like sixty odd different leads out of that and sixty great conversations. And that doesn't stop there. I'm going humming back later in the year. We get involved in a whole part of other things too, So it's been very helpful to get the word out around what we're doing in an incredibility to track AI, which is my company.

3:08Speaker 2:So you've gone from corporate world to entrepreneurship. Tell us about your business before we get started on the questions.

3:17Speaker 1:So traffic AI predicts reputational risk events using workforce behavior data. It's a new category. No one else we know. I was doing this and I built it because of my long career in corporate affairs and in other roles in corporate I was often involved with managing reputational issues once they hit the public domain, and there was always this feeling at the end of the crisis period that the details of the crisis was known somewhere in the organization first, but the details have never reached the right leader, and so over many years have been frustrated by this. I decided I'm going to try and fix it, and so I left corporate with an eye to building this product I have and it's working.

4:04Speaker 2:So AI must rely therefore on input. So it's a platform that an organization will implement and then would be requiring data to go into it.

4:15Speaker 1:That's right, Yeah, that's exactly right. So what we do differently to many other organizations is we use workforce behavioral data to be able to identify where are the different problems in the organization. And I don't mean surveillance. This is more around how people are operating. And each organization has millions and millions of metadata around these issues, but they just don't use it for behavioral programs. So we've worked out how to tap into that securely in a private way. It's all anonymised. We don't know who the individuals are, but at a team and a group level, it still gives you enormous amounts of information to be able to identify how people are operating and where the blind spots are and where the signals around issues are.

5:00Speaker 1:We use external data as well to help guide it, and external data from a whole other sources as well.

5:06Speaker 2:So effective getting lead indicators based on people's behaviors. Maybe it's absenteeism or maybe it's difficult conversations that they have had with their manager or something, and that is giving you lead indicators less.

5:20Speaker 1:So that kind of thing, although that's something we're starting to work on. That's in our psychosocial risk work that we're doing at the moment. Reputational stuff is more around sentiment and also activity and particular activity around certain events or notices or public activity.

5:38Speaker 2:So your clients are large organizations or small organisms.

5:41Speaker 1:They are, Yeah, they're large. They're large enterprises publicly listed. Although I think it has a great opportunity for government departments as well. But we haven't broken into the government sector yet.

5:53Speaker 2:So what questions have you got for me today?

5:57Speaker 1:When you launched Red Balloon experiencing gifting, it wasn't a thing or experience. Gifting wasn't a thing you had to teach people to want something they didn't know existed. So you built a new category. And I'm in a similar spot with this enterprise risk, reputation risk prediction. So what did you learn about turning an interesting idea into a must have into the buyer's mind?

6:20Speaker 2:It actually came from my experience back in the day when I worked at Apple, because I worked in Apple when they weren't a trillion dollar business. I worked when they were a small business and we had our posts and we had to do what they called market development because people didn't know that a Mac could do publishing systems like these are all things that we take for granted. So our role was education and thought leadership. And in fact, back in the day, they had a role which was called evangelism. Now I know that sounds really odd, but their job was literally to seed ideas to people. And actually that's exact exactly what I did at Red Balloon.

7:07Speaker 2:First of all, was to brand, like have a really solid brand in terms of iconography and also just the emotional connection, the language, the tone of voice. Everything was consistent, consistent, consistent, and that obviously came from Apple as well. Because Apple, back in the day, they couldn't afford a double page Bread or big media campaign, so they would just buy one. They would buy a double page Bred, so they looked bigger than they were. So their Super Bowl ad, which is world famous, Yeah, but that was their marketing budget for the whole year, so you know, it was like one big thing to get attention, and the rest of the year it was all about education, speaking engagements, networking events like really grassroots, and what we used to do was be getting machines out there in front of schools and having these donations things. And it's worth thinking about what people can see and how they get it, because you've actually got a kind of sh show them because they like even the questions I'm asking you, going nah, it's not really that. So you've got to really help people on that journey of understanding exactly what it is.

8:15Speaker 2:So I learned that at Apple, and then when it started Red Balloon, I had two tenths of no money to launch my business, which was ironically I worked for Apple, I to think about eight years earlier, which was last century, and they had no money either, it sounds funny now, and so I did a corporate gift show and I had no money, but I took the biggest stand and I remember my husband at the time said, do you realize that this is ten thousand dollars. We're making about one thousand dollars a month. He goes, this is ten months, and I go, yeah, but it'll be amazing. And so I had to beg borrow steel to make sure it looked fabulous. So always looking bigger than you are, because nobody wants to be the first like everyone and talks about Oh I was a trail baser. I was an early adopter. Not everybody wants to sit in the middle.

9:12Speaker 2:I was fortunate I did. One of my old marketing consulting clients, Fuji Xerox, said, oh, we want you to come and do some marketing work. I said, oh, I'm too busy being missus red Balloon now and they said, oh, what are you doing? And I told them what they were and I said, that could solve a problem. That could be the sales incentive program which we're calling you about. And so I went to visit them and I said, look, yes, we could design this to be a sales incentive program Red Balloon. I said, would you be a case study and they said, only if you're any good. But it was the case studies that I got in the early days that showed people how you could use red Balloon in a business application, red Balloon for sales incentive, red Balloon for corporate gifting, red Balloon for recognition platforms. So therefore I wasn't the salesperson and my customers the salesperson.

10:08Speaker 2:And then my job was to amplify those stories. So it's really a market development strategy, which is education. We didn't have all the platforms either that we have now like LinkedIn, but we tend to use that. But the hardest thing is getting cut through. So therefore, how do you get authority, video, public speaking, interview your customer on the same stage. Content that's rich and interesting that people will happily engage in. That's great, but it's relentless, right you think, oh, everybody knows this now, No, they don't. Like, we still do market development. We still have to show people and demonstrate them our platform and how it can make the money. You know, we still have to do that.

10:55Speaker 2:So I think that's interesting. Now what else have you got for me?

10:59Speaker 1:Well, it's along the same theme, you know, as you're building this something new, and we've been very focused on the product side and building the right technology and getting the right AI team who are amazing to be able to build out what we're doing. They can see the opportunity clearly because they're so embedded into it, but a customers and the market haven't quite caught up with it yet. And that GAP's the exhausting gap, right that exactly of you just said. You need to be evangelical about the product and constantly the marketing. But how do you keep your team manergized during these years when you're still educating customers in the market rather than just selling to them.

11:38Speaker 1:And bear in mind these are tech heavy duty AI experts, tech who don't get the commercialization side of the product.

11:47Speaker 2:It is challenging and the important thing is to break things down into milestones and celebrate those milestones, whatever that is. You know, the first X the second why the release of this, whatever success looks like, is breaking it down and celebrating, And often the celebration isn't a big thing. And understanding what people want to do. Having worked with tech teams for a long time, whether it was on the Red bullon Platform Ready, our e com platform or whatever, they're quite often introverts, and so what they want to do to celebrate is not go to the pub and drink beer. In fact, I've found that most of the young people aren't drinking the way we're used to be.

12:30Speaker 2:The might some of the funnest things that we did. One was the escape room because we had this kind of theme that could we get through this journey and then the celebration was that and another really sex or silly one is just ax throwing because people get out a lot of stress. So we would always use our own product in terms of celebrating. But understanding that not everybody is an extrovert and wants to do really loud things I think is important. So that's one thing. The other thing for us as leaders is to say why it's important, over and over and over again. And I suspect that you have plenty of great case studies that have got nothing to do with your business and say, if our platform had a being there, this is what we could have told them, and this is how we could have protected them. So we have to say the why over and over again, and literally people's careers get ruined, their livelihoods get lost, Like this is dramatic stuff, like whole world shift if we don't get this right. I sit on a number of boards and I'm speaking with chief risk officers all the time, so I'm like, and they see the world differently. There is literally and how

13:44Speaker 2:grateful we are.

13:46Speaker 1:Yeah, that's definitely true. In fact, when we almost accidentally came across the fact that we can predict worker safety events, the AI team came to me and said, now we know we can do this, we have to do it properly because we'll be saving lives and save some people's injuries. So they're very focused on that is a lot of fun. And yes, I've learned through my long career in financial services risk people speak a different language and think differently.

14:14Speaker 2:What else have you got for me? Kay?

14:16Speaker 1:I guess it's along the same theme. I mean, you've built a number of businesses. You've also evaluated hundreds of founders as an investor, and so for a product like traffic that's genuinely new, what do investors actually need to hear to believe this can become a big category rather than just a niche tool. You know, what is it that separates the founders who nail that narrative from those who lose investors in the complexity?

14:43Speaker 2:Yeah, it is the narrative. I think one thing that people often forget is who am I talking to and how do I bring them on the journey? Always sitting in the other person's shoes, and so they would walk in and they might be talking about an anchor for a reef as an example. As an investor, if I don't know anything about marine biology. I don't know anything about voting, thing about that. Then you've lost me already because I've got no idea. So the first thing is to show people not just the problem, because people would come in and say, the problem I'm solving is X.

15:17Speaker 2:We've heard that a lot before. But there's a really great Harvard Business Review piece of work, which it's not about the problem we're solving. It's the job we're hired to do. Now, if you can articulate people pay us money to make this problem go away, right, and this is how we can demonstrate and save businesses money, reputation outcome, shareholder value, whatever. And you can prove that. That's the first thing. The second thing any investor wants to know is is it scalable? In other words, if I put money on this problem, So in other words, knowing the bottlenecks.

16:02Speaker 2:So the businesses that don't get invested are the ones that is kind of like one by one by one by one. And also old fashioned sales processes, enterprise sales teams, blah blah blah blah. People at the problem. You're an AI, so you get this more than anybody. So it's about how can it scale? But they want the proof point that it's happened before. I see less and less investment now in pre revenue businesses because people want to say, Okay, I get it. If I invest here, I can see that that's being invested in capital, not in operations. It's being invested in an asset that can scale. Too. Many people come and say, well if I just got more customers, Well, what are we doing handing over cash to Google and Facebook?

16:51Speaker 2:Is that how we're getting customers? Because that's not scalable, So you want to be building and that's what they want to see. The money is going to invest in the asset that allows this to scale.

17:03Speaker 1:And on that as a question, how are you seeing investors in Australia thinking about AI and do you think they understand it well enough to be able to know what's hype and what's not and what's good AI and what is likely not to work.

17:18Speaker 2:Yeah, there's not one presentation, one anything I go to that AI isn't the middle of the conversation, not one board meeting that I go to. But you're quite right, it's kind of given of oh, well now that we've got AI, well, what do we mean by that is that production support? Is it operational support? Have we got agents? What does it mean? Like it's such a big topic, but I think this is what we'll see this year as we'll begin to break down AI into its different levels of function. Are we talking about processing of data?

17:47Speaker 2:Are we talking about analytics? Are we talking about So? I think we will get better and better of understanding the different sorts of tool. We're kind of using it as the whole catch cry. It's like the early days of the internet. Oh, I've got a website. So now we never say that, you'd say, you know, I have an operation system, I have a customer interface, I have a whatever. So I think that we will come to a point of maturity. But on that journey, it's our job to show people where we sit, this is how we are using it, this is the place that we have it. But yes, investors are very interested, but I think it's a bit like the gold Rush, and I don't quite know which are those minds you're actually going to deliver. And our job, as per the previous question, is to demonstrate.

18:34Speaker 1:Why that's really good. So part of the education process we're seeing is and that we're doing is edgy, honey, people on AI as well? What's good AI? What's not?

18:43Speaker 2:Yeah? You know, give people. Here's the three questions you should ask yourself before even considering an AI application. Those sorts of handy tools really helpful for people. Excellent, that's great? Is that all you've got? Is there something else we need to know about you before we wrap up? Are you enjoying this entrepreneurial journey? Is it what you thought it was?

19:05Speaker 1:Absolutely?

19:06Speaker 2:Yeah? How long have you been doing this now?

19:09Speaker 1:We launched the business in twenty one, so coming up to four and a half years. At the moment, I am enjoying it. It's equally exciting and frustrating. You know, sometimes the balance goes less than fifty to fifty on those sides and their difficult moments or they're good moments. But I'm loving having all the time to solve the problem rather than in corporate. As you become more and more senior in corporate, so you just spend more and more of your time and admin and policy. So I am enjoying the hands on process of it. It's a lot of fun. I keep thinking, why didn't I do this sooner? I wish I'd started earlier, but I sort of waited until my kids were old enough, and I was absolutely sure that no one was solving this problem and didn't see the problem the way I did. And I thought, Okay, I've come up with something now that is difficult to replicate and could be a really exciting new tool for people. So I love it.

20:04Speaker 2:There is no time to start a business. The business has to come to you, and you have to know why you're doing that business really clearly. Many a young person have said who says you know, they say, oh, I want to be a business owner. I go, what in Well, I just want to make a lot of money. Well, get a job to learn more money early on. And I also think it's important to have experience because without all of that corporate experience, you actually, like actually wouldn't have even known exactly. Well, congratulations Kate on your business, like really terrific, Keep going, keep growing. You've got quite a significant team, so it's a big investment and I'm sure your clients and customers will be very very grateful.

20:48Speaker 2:Any drama that we can prevent is always a good one.

20:52Speaker 1:And that's right, that's right, Stitch in time, I say, it's a lot of fun.

20:56Speaker 2:That's probably your motto, is it. Thank you so much for coming on hand picked and thanks.

21:03Speaker 1:For the opportunity. Very nice to meet you, y