Kunle: Hello guys, welcome to today’s episode. Today I have with me Bryan Eisenberg. He’s the founder and CMO of IdealSpot. It’s a commercial real estate marketplace that matches buyers or renters and landlords by applying machine learning predictive algorithms and big data. So it’s kind of like finding locations for retail space 2.0 in this day and age with big data. He’s a recognised authority and pioneer in e-commerce, user experience, and conversion rate optimisation. Brian has worked with companies such as HP and Intel, and he is in the advisory board of so many successful start-ups, I’ll just start with a few. There’s Monetate, there’s OneSpot, there’s UserTesting, there’s Boost, there’s Nomi… I mean his LinkedIn profile is packed up with a list of companies. Commerce Sciences, actually, I think they’ve been here on the show, on a webinar. It’s just been packed full with loads of start-ups that trust his advice. He’s also a two-time bestselling author, New York Times and Wall Street Journal, for books Call To Action and Waiting For Your Cat To Bark. He is a global respected digital marketing expert and I will like to welcome Brian to the show. Welcome to the show, Brian.

Bryan: Thank you so much, excited to be here.

Kunle: Brilliant, good stuff. Could you take a minute or two to just introduce yourself to the audience, please?

Bryan: Oh, after all you’ve told about me? You know, basically I started looking at the digital space as a business in 1995. I was working as a consultant for somebody who had an e-commerce site and I was doing little bit of a SEO work. And then start applying some of my conversion ideas to it and it started working and by 1998 my brother and I turned that into the first ever agency focused in on conversion optimization. And we left that about seven years ago, and you know we’ve got consulted to a handful of companies. Till then, I still do a lot of speaking, as you said, a lot of advising. And over this past year I’ve been involved in a new start-up looking to take what we’ve learned over the last 20 years of digital retailing and bring it to the brick-and-mortar world, because it’s starting to take the other way around.

Kunle: Absolutely, absolutely. So you’ve been around since 1995, that’s phenomenal. That’s over 20 years, as long as Amazon has been around. And yes, we’re here to talk about IdealSpot, but you’re inspiring, your LinkedIn profile just says a lot about you and the kind of companies that trust you. So let’s talk about IdealSpot. How did you conceive the idea and where are you guys now?

Bryan: Well, you know like all good start-up, you know it starts off in one way and it takes a couple different directions and morphs and tweaks. You mentioned a couple of the start-ups I’ve been advising, companies like Nomi and stuff like that and there’s been a few others that have approached me over the last I’d say three years that started showing me this trend of people trying to bring this technology to the brick-and-mortar world. You know, stuff like beacons and Google analytics and for retail and all that. So you know when you start thinking about all the possibilities, I start saying, ‘Okay, what is it that we as digital workers take for granted that brick-and-mortar retailers haven’t even seen yet?’ And so one of the first things that occurred to me is look, if… you know, I grew up in Brooklyn New York where probably there are more commercial properties there than just about anywhere in the country. Just store after store after store. You know, it’s one of the largest cities, it’s not a big surprise, right? But you know, I said, ‘How would the average restaurant or retailer go about finding and making sure that the location they picked really was a right location for them?.’ Because since the 1800s we’ve heard the phrase ‘location, location, location’, right? And we realized that there really wasn’t anything like that. And while there was Zillow for residential real estate, and you can get things like your ‘Zestimate’ of what a house is worth and the ‘Zrent’, right, and all that, there really wasn’t that level of details of the walkability score, all that, for brick-and-mortar retail. And I said, ‘Okay, what if we created this idea of a Zillow for commercial real estate?’ And I met with two great entrepreneurs here in Austin, Texas. I moved down here almost 4 years to the day, actually.

Kunle: Wow, okay. It’s a New Year thing… four years ago. [laughs]

Bryan: Yeah. Yeah and I met with Marc Smookler and then he brought in together his friend Andrew Hunter and the we started about the idea and we started testing out and we started seeing, ‘Could we get leads? Could we get interest? Could we get businesses excited by this?’ And we certainly started to and Andrew went away, his dad was actually a professor of GIS, which is all the mapping infrastructure that’s out there up at the University of North Texas. And he came back and he developed this first version of an algorithm that looked at around 5,000 variables and gave us a score as to whether a location was good or bad for that particular business. And we started with that and then eventually we brought in data scientist who’s had just about 20 years of data science experience modelling consumer credit, whether they’re going to pay back things, real estate as well. And so we found truly a unicorn in the data science perspective who lived here in Austin and who’s available.

Kunle: Okay, co-incidental.

Bryan: Yeah and we built out now a full suite of tools for these retailers.

Kunle: Okay, okay. There are lots of points you’ve touched on with regards to your last answer and I would like to go into one point you touched on data points. They’re really important. So what were the glaring data points you found missing in the way say a pizza or restaurant will…on the criteria a restaurant owner or a restaurant chain will put in to select a location?

Bryan: Sure and there’s a bunch of fun stories I can share with you, but I’ll a couple starting in our alpha that we kind of knew this is where we had an opportunity. So one of my son’s friends, one of his parents, so obviously a friend of mine as well, he was the COO of a small chain of do-it-yourself sushi restaurants based here out of Austin. They had locations in Dallas and Florida as well. And they were working with a more traditional, as you would say a version 1.0, of a location selection service and that service suggested a location for them in Northwest Austin that from a demographic point of view looked great, you know, families had a pretty decent income, big families, busy shopping centre, it was next to one of the biggest supermarkets, there were two other restaurants in there, both of them were doing well, one of them was a, of course we’re in Austin here so we had tacos. That one was Torchy’s Tacos, was doing exceptionally well. And then we had a German kebab place next to it. This restaurant ended up doing less than 20% of their expected revenue.

Kunle: Ouch. Okay. That’s significant.

Bryan: And essentially it was one of the factors that led to this chain eventually going bankrupt. Okay. When we were still talking he was still in business but we had ran an analysis for that location for him as well with our alpha algorithm and it came back with one of the worst scores we’ve ever seen for location. We said there’s something very wrong here. And so as we started to take a look at what it was, we realized that that neighbourhood didn’t really have any appreciation for Asian food for the most part. And so you know it was a real meat and potatoes, it was barbecue, Tex-Mex type of food. That’s what was doing well in that neighbourhood, nothing else. Now, by the way, that we’ve released a whole new suite of products, one of them actually maps all of search and social interest and demands.

Kunle: Ah. So you tap into Open Graph, into Facebook’s Open Graph data?

Bryan: Correct. And we were able to actually see that there is zero interest for sushi specifically even, in that part of town.

Kunle: Wow.

Bryan: Right, it’s moderate in the rest of Austin, right, it’s not a huge thing and it’s extreme by the airport. So you know when you start looking and start saying, ‘Wow, there’s all kinds of other data points that people aren’t looking at, especially behavioural data points, that they haven’t really expected.’ Which is again this is… it’s like people are advertising on the web when the web first started where I’d go and, by the way this is one of the ways I got started online, I was working for a company that would put banners up on like AltaVista and Yahoo and we’d go into the sports section, right, and then hope that people would buy baseball bats. Now just because your following sports does not really mean that you’re in the market for baseball bat, right, but it was a broad stroke marketing approach. That’s the same way we’ve done models for locations forever, right. Are there enough people who are 30+ with kids above this income that drive by this place? And if that’s good enough then we’ll open a business. Who cares if you know that all them are all bald and you’re opening up a hair salon.

Kunle: Right. [laughs] Exactly.

Bryan: But we found some other interesting ones. One of my favourite stories that we’re just about to start going out there to tell to the media is we’ve analysed literally thousands pizzeria locations across the country. And are you a fan of pizza?

Kunle: I do like my pizzas.

Bryan: Okay, great. So we have found for several chains there’s a secret ingredient that is actually correlated to either success or failure, depending on which way it goes, that nobody would ever. So take a guess, what do you think would be the secret ingredient that can predict success or failure for a pizzeria chain?

Kunle: Umm, pepperoni? No?

Bryan: No.

Kunle: Umm, definitely not cheese. Let’s see…I’m lost [laughs]

Bryan: Some people will say the dough, right. Some people will say the sauce, some people will say the cheese, actually there is a pizzeria in Brooklyn if we ever can meet up there at some point, I’m in Austin not but if we ever find a way to meet up there I’ll take you to L & B Spumoni Gardens, they do something with cheese and nobody else does, it makes their pizza just, it’s a whole other level. It’s a Sicilian slice but it’s just amazing.

Kunle: Okay, wow.

Bryan: They actually cook the cheese on top of the dough first and then add the sauce and then more cheese.

Kunle: Ah. Okay, okay.

Bryan: And yeah, it just does things that’s just incredible. Anyway, the secret ingredient for success for these huge chains of pizzeria locations was the consumption of motor oil.

Kunle: Right. Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

Bryan: Aha. Motor oil. Is that right, don’t you sprinkle it on top of your pizza once a…

Kunle: Absolutely. Yes, I do. Complementary, really.

Bryan: But what we found was a very strong correlation between if people purchase 7+ quarts of motor oil. For one chain it was an absolute predictor of success. For this other chain it was an absolute predictor failure and it’s not every pizzeria but it’s more than those two chains as well. So we’ve seen it keep popping up, so obviously motor oil is a secret ingredient in pizza. Who knew?

Kunle: [laughs] Absolutely.

Bryan: But again, this is the types of things that you would never find out unless you’re using machine learning and big data. It is just not available. Because the typical retailer that’s sophisticated, okay, will look at a spreadsheet that’ll take into account about 20 to 25 variables for a location. We’re looking at over 15,000.

Kunle: And then you’re letting algorithms start to actually crunch the data for you and then alert you when certain trends are picked up from all the data points.

Bryan: Exactly. Exactly.

Kunle: Okay, very, very interesting. Okay, let’s take it a notch down, and could we talk about online retail. So there’s been a trend. Amazon, actually for the first time I think it was November, they set up their first retail store. Prior to that, I think sometime earlier in the year, it was like a pick of store in a University somewhere in the States. What’s your view on traditional online retailers moving to brick-and-mortar retail? And do you think it’s going to be a trend in 2016?

Bryan: Ah, big trend. And this is why I headed in this direction. So let’s put together why the trends are occurring and what’s happening.

Kunle: Gotcha, okay.

Bryan: Okay. First of all, why has Amazon dominated when everyone else is getting/buying e-commerce? Amazon, the holiday season had, I think the number was 42%, of e-commerce dollars. It used to be 30%, now it’s up to 42%. How come? Let’s just start real simple. Their website is not 22 times better designed than every other retail. What’s the main thing that drove their success?

Kunle: Prime.

Bryan: Prime. And the logistics behind Prime, right. It’s their customer service and logistics that really have made it work. The reason we’re going to start seeing a lot more e-commerce players being able to compete off-line is twofold. Number one, their backend is in the cloud, right. Which enables you to scale and react differently than when you have to batch process things and… there are still some systems out there that are 30+ years old and don’t allow retailers to compete. Secondly, online is everywhere today. Right, we’re all walking with an online device everywhere we go, at every moment of every day. And so we’ll have opportunities where, yes, we want to explore things. My prediction is Amazon will launch a bunch of niche stores. It won’t just be bookstores, right. In some cities it’s going to be a sporting goods store, in other cities it’s going to be… based on

Kunle: Data… [laughs]

Bryan: The data they have of what’s going to work where. And different things need different types of treatment and they understand that and they can provide a completely different experience far superior than anyone else. Let me give you one more very tactical example of how powerful a trend this is. Bonobos, Warby Parker, Blue Nile, right. All of these traditional e-commerce-only players have opened up brick-and-mortars. But I want to give you an example of Blue Nile, right, because I think everybody in the world has walked into a jeweller before at least once, right. The typical jewellery store is a few thousand square feet, okay. And the average jeweller will generate around $1 million in sales. There’s some who do a lot, lot more but the average jewellers about $1 million in sales

Kunle: Per month or per annum?

Bryan: Per year.

Kunle: All right, okay.

Bryan: I can’t give you exact numbers on the Blue Nile store but let me just say this, you know, it has beyond in any way fashionable exceeded their expectations of what a store can do. And the storefront is 490 ft². It’s tiny. Tiny.

Kunle: Okay. All right. This is half the size of the standard 1,000.

Bryan: Quarter. I would even say a quarter.

Kunle: A quarter, okay. So, why?

Bryan: Because they’ve transformed the experience, they’ve made it inviting to come in. I mean think about you know, I don’t know what town, I think I saw you were from Oxford?

Kunle: Yes.

Bryan: Okay. I could imagine there are jewellery stores that have been there for well over 100 years.

Kunle: Ages, yes.

Bryan: Okay, that other than maybe their window, nothing else has changed and it feels intimidating to even feel like you can walk in there, it feels like you’re walking to the library, right.

Kunle: I agree, yes.

Bryan: And here is their store, it’s completely open, it’s lit up, there’s no traditional U-shape that you know, with the stuff inside of counters. None of that. It’s almost like the Apple Store, right, which was one of the beacons that changed traditional retailers, the first store that really started to rethink what the experience should be like. And most stores have not evolved in the same way. Amazon introduced how e-commerce should be played, okay. Apple started telling people, and giving the playbook essentially, ‘Hey, this is what e-commerce needs to look like.’ By the way, on the restaurant front, Starbucks has been playing that game for a long time well.

Kunle: Yes.

Bryan: Right, so you need to understand how all of these trends are coming together and this ability to shop in a store, have a great experience, and not worry about taking the product home because I can have it to you the next day anyway because my logistics are so good. That re-creates the need for not having endless space in a store for stocking shelves and products.

Kunle: Okay. Okay. And with regards to this experience, what comes first: user experience on the web or user experience…are they trying to mimic user experience on the web in retail spaces? Or are they trying to even deliver a better experience in their retail outlets?

Bryan: Yeah, it’s a step up from it, right, like Bonobos, right, you know it’s clothes, you want to be able to try it and see what the size and fit is for things. And then you can order more things online. And so they don’t need as many stores. Warby Parker, right, they’re selling glasses and so obviously yes, you can kind of get a proxy for it online and, you know again, what they’ve done with their supply chain has changed a lot what the glasses industry has done. But you want to see on your face and try it on and see what different lenses… And so they obviously saw this opportunity and same thing with jewellery, right. I don’t need to try every single store, I can kind of get a sense of what it is, what it’s going to look like, start pricing it, and I can get all that information partially through an online experience and being able to size them on in the store and do different things and get a sense of what it would look like. So it’s an enhancement of the e-commerce experience.

Kunle: In one of your articles, you describe this as an immersive, 3-D advertisement, basically.

Bryan: Correct, correct. I don’t necessarily need to complete the sale in the store either, you know, they can go home and finish it.

Kunle: What about virtual reality? Do you think VR would make big strides in 2016 or if it’s still a few years for it to mature?

Bryan: You know, there’s a couple of companies experimenting with it in the retail space right now, a couple of showrooms and stuff like that. I think it’s just beginning still. I think for it really to have traction the prices need to come down a little bit more. But you know, it’s probably 2 – 3 years out and but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be experimenting with it. In fact, you know, it’s one of things I went ahead and just said, okay you know, I need to immerse myself in it. And when I’m not working on my regular job, I’m also the coaching baseball and there is a VR application that teaches you the strike zone better and lets you recognize what the pitcher’s pitching. So I said you know, I’m going to get that, one, because obviously I can relate to that space very clearly. But two, also obviously I can train my 10-year-old son with it.
And I think it’s just going to be a natural way to extend the experience. It won’t be all of the experience because for some people it’s actual a little overwhelming from what I’m seeing in the data. But I think it’s definitely a way to extend the experience. One of examples I like to give people, golf stores are another great example of this. You know, I live here Texas, there’s some big stores and I think Golfsmith is located out of here. And they have some really large, you know, it’s 20 – 30,000 ft.² stores with all shelves and shelves of balls and shelves and shelves of clubs and all this, right. But what if you opened up a smaller location, like a Blue Nile, for 500 ft², you had a few different types of clubs, you will be able to size people there on really just a virtual reality hitting simulation, right. And so you can see how you swing, ‘Oh, well based on this swing let’s see if we could try you on with these clubs and what you do and with this type of ball.’ And you can change the whole experience by not being about selling just products but by really helping them improve their game which is ultimately what they wanted to anyway.

Kunle: And a hybrid of experiences and the products which would optimise your conversion, which is what you’re looking to achieve.

Bryan: Exactly, exactly.

Kunle: Really interesting. So you a statement just now, which is the fact that VR might be an extension to the experience. Do you think it’s going to be an extension to the online and mobile experience, or do you think it’s going to be an extension to real estate, to actual brick-and-mortar?

Bryan: You know, I think it’ll be to both. We love screens, let’s leave it there. I mean there’s no questions, we have addictions to screens. I think if we look at what New York Times did by sending out 2 million of the cardboard glasses and Google’s doing it. And of course Facebook’s invested in an innocuous riff, they’ve just started releasing their products and they’re doing these 3-D ads. There’s no question that we’re going to head in that way, the same way we’ve gone from black-and-white TVs to colour, to flat screens to 4K to now 8K. You know, we want that immersion. It’s got to feel right, it’s got to be natural, it’s got to be intuitive. It is not going to work if we have to put on these silly looking goggles to experience it. So the technology’s going to have to evolve. This will work for the alpha people who want to try it out. It’s not going to be the everyday experience; we’re going to need something much more like your Star Trek’s holograms until we’re all bled in.

Kunle: [laughs] True, true, true. Okay, so in today’s mobile driven world, how should a retail space, retail store, be determined? My question I suppose would be to online retailers listening to the show today considering say a pop-up store, for instance. So can they go into IdealSpot to find the ideal pop-up store? And would you tap into their data, so look into their customer data in order to get more data points to understand how well they sell, in order to predict an ideal location?

Bryan: Yeah, so some of that pulling in more of their data is coming this year. We decided to launch with some of the tools that we can make it easier just for everybody to engage with us as opposed to those who did or didn’t have data and only depend on those. But yes, you can go into IdealSpot today and you can access all these demographic filters that most people charge for, actually, and we give it away for free. So you could start narrowing down on cities that you think would fit your most basic demographics, right. And look to see where there’s pockets there. And then what we’ve done is we’ve built essentially map layers on top of that to help you help make that decision. So we have what we call the Customer Location Targeting where we’re pulling in all of these sources of search and social data that we can pull in based on your category of business, what interest it’s in. So if you sell fitness type products, well, you want to be in the area where there’s the highest concentration of people who have an interest in fitness, obviously, right. Then you go ahead and you know we have something that helps you model the traffic as well, we’re pulling in one of the best data sources for traffic out there. We also have a tool that can help predict revenue via location. And then we have what we started off with which is our Location Score, which analyses the 15,000+ variables and so before you sign the lease, let’s make sure we look at everything so there’s nothing surprising in there. And then lastly we have analysis called Spot On, which looks at your business and your competitors and starts looking for those secret ingredients like motor oil that stand out, of things that you should be looking for that wouldn’t look for otherwise.

Kunle: Seems really, really comprehensive. And given the fact that there’s so much data out there and it’s aggregated and filtered, layered out to match your requirement and your business type, it’s a no-brainer.

Bryan: Right, and we also wanted to build it in a way so that anybody could go there right away and build out their personalized map. And they’ll be able to add notes and share things with their teams, stuff like that. Because most the platforms out there, you have to fill in a form on a website, you have to pay a pretty expensive subscription model. And we built it out so you can either do with the subscription model, which is a little more affordable also, but also a pay-as-you-go model. So if you’re only going to open up one place, hey, just pay for the one report and you’re done. Because it’s data on demand, it’s not the same way as the traditional players in the space have been doing it.

Kunle: And are there going to be APIs available to third-party apps to plug into IdealSpot?

Bryan: Ah, I can’t say it yet.

Kunle: Okay, no worries. Right, so let’s move on to… is there any other thing, any other points you think listeners looking to set up a pop-up store especially… because a lot of retailers want to test the off-line, test bricks-and-mortar first. So are there any tips you have for setting up, or necessary steps, fool-proof steps for the setting up a pop-up store for first timers?

Bryan: Yeah, I think it’s really critical to make sure that whatever you do, you don’t think of it as a temporary experience, right. It still needs to feel like a full experience. It can’t feel like a partial experience. You need to provide them an incredible experience. And there’s some great technologies out there in order to be to do it, so that you can get off the shelf, that people are building out. As well as other solutions, in the words, simple things like we don’t want to wait on long lines to check out on things, right. Go look at the Apple Store, go see how they’re handling these things. It’s interesting, IBM and the National Retail Federation have their big event in New York in the middle of January, I don’t know when you’re airing this, but one of the things that they’ve done is they’ve actually gone ahead and they’ve created a social media contest for you to visit all of the innovations in all of these different stores throughout New York City. And even if you’re not going to be there, go ahead and get that map, okay and get those stores and understand what it is about those stores and innovations. And so just think, ‘Wow, what can I do that would help my customer have a greater experience that I can use an innovative way in my pop-up store?’

Kunle: That makes sense, that makes a lot of sense. And what about your plans to moving to the UK and Europe, eventually.

Bryan: First thing we’ll do is move to our neighbours to the north, you know, the Canadians have been waiting very patiently for us. The challenge is aggregating all the different data sets. The good thing is none of what we’re doing is personally identifiable information. We’re definitely keeping away from all that so we shouldn’t run into any challenges as we move across the globe. But it’s identifying who and where those data sets are to provide similar results that we’re able to do here in the United States.

Kunle: I’ve had conversations with loads of online retailers and physical store retailers and this is a service they certainly, certainly need, you know, there’s an itch here in the UK. [laughs]

Bryan: Oh yeah. The wrong location could cost you you know hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars depending on your build out.

Kunle: You’re so spot on. I have a friend who has a shop here in Oxford and the difference between locating it half a kilometre from it’s current location is about £200,000 a year.

Bryan: We worked with a jeweller who is deciding on a location. There were two open vacancies along the same block. Neither one was a corner but the difference was 150 feet, right, I mean tiny. And it was the difference between going out of business and being extremely profitable.

Kunle: Wow.

Bryan: And it was because of where across the street, essentially which side of the street they were on had a huge impact in terms of the drive time models of whether people would actually make it there or not.

Kunle: You know, that footfall intent is so important. You could say, oh, there’s lots of footfall here, but the quality and the intent, they might just be commuters and you’re selling you know stock products in the few hundreds or the few thousands, and you know, there’s no way they’re going to think about stopping by. But if you’re in a heavily commercial area with intent, attracts intent, then that’s a different story, analysis story, really. It’s an expensive lesson to learn.

Bryan: Well, it’s also why we went ahead and one of the first things we did as we launched the company is we wrote up an e-book on how to choose a location today.

Kunle: I’ll definitely link up to that in the show notes. And that’s why your article actually attracted me and we’re having this interview, because location, location, location, as the saying goes, is really important to everything.

Bryan: It really is important and like you said, as much as I love e-commerce and it’s in my blood, you know I’ve been online, I sold my own bulletin board in 1983, okay. So I’ve been online a long time. And you know, what we’re seeing obviously is there’s change and it’s evolving but we’re not going to see a revolution of it. It’s now evolution time for e-commerce. The revolution is happening to brick-and-mortar and this is an opportunity where we’re going to start seeing you know, I have a good friend of mine who’s a fellow influencer and in the retail space and she lives in Chicago and she lives in the Montgomery Ward building, right. It’s a beautiful condominium today, right. But to her it’s a constant reminder of you know, they are generations, these businesses come and go. Some of them have lasted a long time, some of them can do that, but for the most part there are these revolutions and there are these drastic transformations of the retail landscape, and we’re right in the middle of one because of where mobile has come and where e-commerce is and who’s trying to play in the space and new business models. And now we’re starting to see a trend where people are spending a little bit less on things and they want more experiences, so, it’s changing things. So you know, I think it’s an amazing time to start thinking about, if I were to start selling in a brick-and-mortar what would I want this to look like and how can I be different than everyone else in the space and really provide my customers experience they deserve and want, not what we give them?

Kunle: Absolutely, I agree with you in every…but speaking about revolution in retail space, IdealSpot is handling finding the right location. Do you have any examples of revolutions occurring in the retail environment itself, that experience, and what companies are spearheading innovations in retail space? Particularly at the enterprise level and trickling down to mid-tier?

Bryan: You know I think they’re all experimenting with stuff. Everyone from the Walmarts to the Targets to, you know, everybody’s trying to. Nordstrom’s is one of the early ones to start working on mobile checkout, you know. There are people playing out with virtual fitting rooms. There’s no shortage of seeing the innovation and I’ve seen videos of Adidas, right, who created this magic wall for their football shoes, right, and you can see Messi and what shoe he’s wearing. It’s some really incredible things. The innovation is endless. And what I always say is there’s three main factors or triggers that change the consumer experience. Number one is communications technology and that’s obviously what the Internet has brought such a revolution on. And it continues to make changes, and the fact that mobile’s coming around has certainly changed a significant amount with the social platforms and how we all communicate with one another, okay, I don’t have to spend a lot of time on that one. But the other two big ones are financial technologies, right. And so we still haven’t seen the end of mobile payments and peer-to-peer payments and seamless checkouts, not having to have a cash register at the supermarkets and an aisle where you’re scanning things, just walking right through. There’s going to be tremendous opportunities still there. In fact, even one of the supermarkets right near my house, they basically have a machine that, it’s no longer scanning, you just basically put all the items on and it takes pictures and recognizes everything and runs it through and you’re done. And then lastly is the logistics technology. And things like 3-D printing and drones, they’re going to change the scope of where and how we can sell. And I think that it’s going to be fascinating to see what becomes of that over the next few years. Again, we’re still, in virtual realities, another one of those, right, that we’re so early on in this, that it will change behaviour, but it’s something that we have to keep a very close eye on, sort like a retail anthropologist, where is man going with this stuff?

Kunle: It’s all down to convenience, I suppose, just so long as we can continue driving in convenience for the end-user.

Bryan: Actually, let me change the word. Not convenience. The reduction of friction.

Kunle: The reduction of friction, exactly.

Bryan: Right, and there’s one challenge and if you’ve ever studied a little bit of physics you know that if you remove friction from one part of the equation, it doesn’t disappear. It always has to go somewhere else, and you know where it always goes?

Kunle: Where?

Bryan: In retail…back to the retailer.

Kunle: [laughs] In margins?

Bryan: In everything, right. It makes their job harder. Retail is a extremely hard business to do everything right, okay. Really hard. And the more and more the customers’ in control, the more technologies out there, again it removes the friction from their side, the choice that they can choose from anybody, anywhere across the globe at any time because of something that sitting in their pocket, it is just mind-blowing today, right. I’m about to do it up a presentation for my daughter’s high school entrepreneur club, 800 students coming from around Central Texas.

Kunle: Great.

Bryan: And as I was talking to her about the this, I realized my daughter’s born in 2001 and she’s a freshman in high school. And the oldest students are born in 1997. I said, you know, that’s when Amazon was basically just really starting out. That’s when all of, you know, there was no Facebook. Google launched in 1998. When you start fathoming that you know in my kid’s lifetime the world has transformed, what will be as they get to my age, you know, it is hard to to really imagine the amount of of transformation. But if you understand these key factors that drive it, it’s fairly simple to keep up with customers. And I think is the lesson I’ve learned from from Jeff Bezos more than anything is where he says he never worries about competition, he only worries about keeping up with customers.

Kunle: Yes, indeed, just keep your eye on the customers. If you can keep them happy then you have a business, really, a running business.

Bryan: Exactly.

Kunle: Okay, it’s been a very, very, very interesting conversation I’ve had with you, Brian. I’m going to wrap up with than my standard evergreen lightning round. I’m going to ask you questions and if you use are sentenced or a maximum two sentences to answer that would be fantastic, and then we’ll wrap up. How do you hire people?

Bryan: I look for certain characteristics. I hire for curiosity.

Kunle: Okay. What are your three indispensable tools for managing IdealSpot?

Bryan: Wow. I think number one would be my phone. I think you know the biggest part of how we grow in the business is really talking to people, talking to influencers, talking to press. Really developing relationships with people. So I think you the phone and meeting people in person are always invaluable. We take those for granted. But from tools, certainly things BuzzSumo have helped me identify what other influencers I should be talking about and what other content is circulating among the community that I’m interested in and getting to know. That was kind of interesting, right, because I’d never really spent a lot of time in the world of restaurateurs and now I spend a lot of time there. And then, you know, having Analytics and WordPress powering the site you know is priceless.

Kunle: Okay, okay. Pretty good. Okay, what one piece of advice can you give to mid-tier e-tailers keen to 2Xing or 3Xing their e-commerce ventures?

Bryan: Wow, that’s asking for a lot. The two pieces of advice I would focus on is, and you know this something we still do, is help e-tailers develop a culture of what I call Amazon’s Four Pillars of Success… the reason Amazon has been so successful is because they focused in on obsessing over the customer experience, right, they’re customer-centric. They’re data-driven, right, they’re focused in on continuous optimization, not just of the website and marketing, but of everything about the business. Logistics, using the robots that, everything, right. They’re obsessing over it. A culture of innovation, they are always testing things, right. And in fact, even in Jeff Bezos letter to shareholders, I didn’t read it this year but two years ago, he talked…they test over 1900 things during the year, right. And it’s important enough for him to mention it in his shareholder letter. How come most C-level executives don’t even know how many tester teams are performing? Okay. And then lastly, a culture of agility. Being able to react and execute. Not just mentally masturbate about things, to use that word, right. But to really get down and say, hey, here’s a plan, let’s get it done, doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect, we can always refine it later because we’re continuously optimizing and continuously working. And when you develop that kind of a culture, you develop success.

Kunle: Wow. That’s one of the best answers I’ve had. Customer experience, data driven, innovation, testing, agility. Interesting. Okay, if you could choose a single book or resource that’s made the highest impact on how you view building businesses, retail in general, and growth, which would it be?

Bryan: Hmm. Other than one that I’ve written?

Kunle: Yes, we’ll link to yours for sure.

Bryan: There’s been so many great books, I think it would be hard to limit to one. But as somebody who is just naturally very intuitive, very big picture oriented, and I realize that that’s the minority of the world, that I have to communicate with people who are of much more, from a Myers-Briggs perspective, more sensing type, they’re more tangible thinkers. Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath. Their formula for thinking about how to produce stories and create content and communicate with people is a guideline for those big intuitive marketers to speak the language everyone else has so those other people can share your stories.

Kunle:Brilliant. Made to Stick. Okay, good stuff. Finally, could you let our audience know how to find you and reach out to you?

Bryan: Well number one, I’m very easy to google so you can find me, once you go and google you’ll find me from my website, BryanEisenberg.com. You can find me at IdealSpot.com, I blog in there as well. You can find me on LinkedIn. If you send me an intelligent connection request, I’m happy to connect with just about anybody. Don’t just send me a generic one, just something of how you’ve heard of me.

Kunle: I’m not sure how I connected with you but we’re connected. [laughs]

Bryan: Right. No I think you sent a more than average one. But you can also follow me on LinkedIn as well, you don’t have to connect with me if you don’t want to. And then obviously on Twitter, I’m there as well. I also speak at probably about 30 – 40 conferences a year so hopefully we can connect in person and actually do a face-to-face meeting and create a real relationship.

Kunle: Absolutely, absolutely. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show, Bryan. And it’s just given me an insight and kind of like your journey from online to now off-line, to retail, and that’s where revolution is actually occurring right now and you’re at the fore. It’s really, really interesting, it’s really given me stuff to think about something from my perspective as to if you really want to make an impact. Because it seems like Amazon has made the impact in e-commerce already and they’ve disrupted that space, so you’re the second person actually saying it, actually, on the fact that off-line retail is ready for disruption.

Bryan: Yeah. We’re definitely starting to see the early warning signals happening and it was the same thing as we saw in e-commerce and it’s why my brother and I started our agency in 1998. We’ve traditionally been many, way too many years ahead of the curve. This time I think we’re just about there, where the market really is ready. But there still aren’t tens of thousands of e-commerce players getting ready to open up their store yet. That will happen the next three years though.

Kunle: Yeah, I think the model should be bit more flexible for retailers so they could experiment. Or if they have data points from platforms like IdealSpot. And there’s the availability of retail space on a short-term basis, then… you know, kind of like how the proliferation of stores from when Shopify emerged as a platform, I suppose the somewhat bigger stores would want to experiment and engage with their customers, really, based on this data.

Bryan: So my big prediction for stores like Macy’s and Sears and stuff like that is they will become huge mini-shops. We see that with, you know, Target just did it with SoulCycle. This is going to be… like their brand won’t be enough because, hey, I can get it from Amazon. But if I’ve got all these little interesting, and they’re changing, they’re evolving and they’re moving, there’s always something of interest and new to see in there. And I think we’re going to see a lot more of that, almost a mall within a mall, essentially, of psycho-graphically targeted other brands inside of these larger department stores.

Kunle: Very interesting. So you suppose there’ll be extensions to the existing department stores, or would these stores shrink more or less…

Bryan: Well, they’re going to shrink… in other words, when I realize I don’t have to have 10,000 pairs of jeans sitting in there but I can have you know 50 of every colour and just every size so someone can try it on and they get it delivered to their home the next day, right. No one cares, right. So what do I do with all that space? Well, why don’t I bring in someone who does, you know, custom 3-D running shoes? And have a little outlet there in the same spot.

Kunle: Yes indeed.

Bryan: Right, it’ll just make a lot more sense for the businesses to leverage their space that way because we have way too much space, that’s the problem, there’s a lot of retail space already available out there. And millions and millions and millions of square feet just underutilized for the most part.

Kunle: There’s going to be certainly a lot of innovation in the retail space and the beauty about it, it would be ever-changing just to peak the interest of shoppers, really, and get them coming more often and hopefully buying more.

Bryan: Exactly.

Kunle: I would love to see you in Europe and the UK, so please consider us with the tech. [laughs]

Bryan: Oh yeah, no, no. It is definitely on the radar, we are just having to get our ducks in place here first and then and then working our way across the ocean.

Kunle: Okay, all right, thank you so much, Bryan. It’s been a pleasure again. For our listeners, thank you for sticking to the very end of today’s episode and hope you’ve found Bryan’s insights into online retail and bricks-and-mortar inspiring, actionable, and helpful. Just head over to IdealSpot.com to find out more about finding the ideal location for your retail space. To download today’s show notes and read the full transcript, just head over to 2XeCommerce.com and for updates and tips to growing your store, be sure to sign up to our email list on 2XeCommerce.com. Until the next show everybody, do have a fantastic one. Bye now.