Tag: #businesses

From the Archives: What is Big Data?

January 7, 2020 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 108 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re digging in our archives to bring back one of our most popular podcasts – “Big Data.” We’re talking about what it is and how it can help your business!

Sections

Introduction
Introduction to Big Data
Metadata and Targeted Ads
Utilizing Big Data
What Small Business Owners & Entrepreneurs Need To Understand About Big Data
User Advantages of Understanding Big Data
Small Businesses and Big Data
How Can You Use Big Data on Your Websites?
The Holy Grail of Big Data
Long Term Leads
What Can You Do For Big Data in Your Business?
Show Notes

From the Archives: What is Big Data?

Introduction

Paul: This is the Edge of Innovation, Hacking the Future of Business. I’m your host, Paul Parisi.

Jacob: And I’m Jacob Young.

Paul: On the Edge of Innovation, we talk about the intersection between technology and business, what’s going on in technology and what’s possible for business.

Introduction to Big Data

Jacob: Today we’re going to be talking about big data, a category that seems rather big and large and has a lot of parts to it.

Paul: Hence the word big.

Jacob: Yeah.

Paul: It’s like a big wheel.

Jacob: So, Paul, I’ve heard this term. Can you kind of fill it out for me, because it’s been related to Google and Facebook, which seems rather intimidating. Can you help us understand what exactly big data is and what it’s used for?

Paul: Well, it’s big and it’s data. That brings us to the close of our show for today.

Jacob: Thank you for listening, everybody.

Paul: Okay. So, big data has really happened in the past 10 or 15 years, where we realized that there are lots of little pieces of data out there. When you click on a website, you open that website and you type in your name, that’s all producing data. If I gather those all up, it starts to get really unwieldy, almost. The amount of clicks that you do, the articles that you read, the time at which you did that, what you spent at that store. All of these are attributes of big data.

Metadata and Targeted Ads

Paul: Before we get into that, there’s something that we need to talk about called metadata. Meta means information about the data. So, metadata is the fact that…Let’s say I go to Google. So, I open the website, and I type in, I want to find the best hat within 20 miles, a hat store.

So, a lot of things just happened. I did it at a certain time. That’s a piece of metadata. I typed in some words, and I clicked enter. And I have an IP address. So, Google makes a note of that that says this IP address just searched for the word “hats” and it did it at 1:15 in the afternoon, for example. All of those things are metadata. Google then displays to me the answer to the query “hats,” and I then click on that. And I click on the first one that says, “red hats.” In a perfect world, somebody might conjecture that I like red as opposed to the green hats that were second.

So that whole concept of tracking all of those little bits of data make it very, very much big data. It’s lots of little bits. So, what does that mean? If you were over my shoulder, you could have asked me the questions, “Why are you clicking on red hats? Do you like red?”

“No. It was just the first link, so I clicked on it.”

Okay. Well, that’s sort of a false positive. But if I find out that you went to the store and bought a red shirt with your credit card, now I have another data point, and I can start to correlate this. Oh, and you bought a car, and it’s a red car. I can now start to begin to make a judgement that you might like the color red.

So, now I find out that you’re shopping for boats, and I’m Google. I’m going to put a picture of a red boat in the right hand side for the ads. And why wouldn’t you? Because you know that I like red. Why would you show me green ones when you know I don’t like green, maybe? It’s the same thing where you meet somebody and learn that this person really likes Star Trek, but doesn’t like Battlestar Galactica. Boy, am I geeky here. Or you go to somebody who doesn’t like fish. The number of people I can tell you… We live in New England. “I don’t like fish.” You try to invite them over to have swordfish because it tastes like steak, and they’re like, “Wait a minute. Is this fish?”

Jacob: I was thinking recently about this whole idea of, “I like fish but I don’t like the taste of fish.”

Paul: Fish are people too?

Jacob: It’s like, “I like to eat fish, but I don’t like the taste.”

Paul: You like the idea of eating fish.

Jacob: Yeah. Or I like fish that doesn’t taste like fish.

Paul: Then you should try swordfish. We did that with a friend, a very good friend. We had swordfish, and he’s like, “Is this fish?”

Well, it is. We knew that, and we were sort of pulling a fast one on him, but Google, if you don’t like fish, shouldn’t show you fish recipes, because that’s not a good thing. So, big data takes all of those verbal and nonverbal cues that we as humans do, and you might have seen somebody reading Sports Illustrated. They’re probably interested in sports. And aggregates them and helps marketing people deliver information that’s valuable to you.

So, I have a good friend who loves boats. And he’s like, “I don’t care that they know it. In fact, I’m glad. I want to see things that are relevant to boating on my Facebook feed, because I’m interested in boats. So, that would give him the sense that, “This is cool. This is new in boating.” Or a new law has passed. I need to know this. That’s a benefit.

Utilizing Big Data

Paul: So, we’re in this very infantile beginning of big data and utilizing it. And then, you have to think about the actors involved in big data. What does Google do with it? They sell ads. That’s all that Google does is sell ads. They say that we can show your ad to people that love red boats. And you’re sitting there saying, “We make red boats, and I really need to sell some red boats. So, Google, if you can show this to somebody, I’ll pay you a dime.” If you can show this to somebody and they click on it, I’ll pay you a dollar. And that’s how Google makes its money. That’s all they do.

As Tim Cook said, “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” They are selling the fact that you are interested in red boats. And they say they do it anonymously. They don’t tell who it is, because they don’t. And frankly, Red Boat Company doesn’t care who is looking at their ads until they want to connect to them. And then it’s I’ve clicked. I’m on the Red Boat Company page. I can then give my information, and then they can contact me, or I can contact them. Everything we’ve talked about up till now is dealing with good actors or sort of passively not bad actors. And the real crisis comes in when we have all this history of data. What is a bad actor potentially going to do with it?

We have historical precedence for the suppression of certain views. If there was a military regime to take over and, as absurd as this sounds, anybody who likes red boats, we’re going to put them in prison. Well, now, that data is out there about me that I like red boats. How do I control that? It’s insidious. How can I control it? I can’t, because it’s in so many different places, and it’s not set up there. Of course, the government says, “We would never do that.” Same thing with health care. The minute they find out your sibling or parent dealt with this, that’s big data. Can we correlate to them having that issue? So, we’re going to change them more for their health insurance rate because there was a problem with a sibling.

Jacob: I imagine specifically with that health insurance situation, there’s big data associated with things…for example, if somebody had a genetic disposition to have a condition, there are big data elements that go into realizing that person has that condition, even before they’re diagnosed with it that would factor into how that insurance now interacts with that person.

Paul: Right. Requiring us potentially to now make laws that say you can’t use that big data in setting your rates. Well, then what good is the big data, except for the fact that it might help you avoid the outcome.

So, all sorts of questions start to come about with the big data. In a good actor society, it’s all beneficial. It’s all good things. Because if you don’t like sports, don’t show me articles on sports. Don’t send me, “Do you want to subscribe to Sports Illustrated?” because it might cost them $0.50 to send you that card in the mail to say, “Why don’t you subscribe?” Well, that was wasted money on their part, and it was annoyance for you because you had to throw it out. Big data helps us conquer that, but it also does very much so, expose us to who-knows-what.

What Small Business Owners & Entrepreneurs Need To Understand About Big Data

Jacob: This seems rather large. And it seems like the more you begin to poke on this, the big data category seems a bit monumental. What are the important things for small business owners? For entrepreneurs to understand about big data? And how can they use that?

Paul: It’s vastly different. You can manipulate some of the big data engines out there. And if you go and search for… Let’s say you want to buy a new stereo system. And you search for it on certain websites, you will magically see stereo systems ads to appear in the next two days.

Now, what’s interesting about that to me is that they’re smart enough to do that, but they’re stupid enough to show you an ad for a stereo system, but you already bought one. So, obviously there’s some holes in the system. And frankly, it’s annoying. I just made the commitment. I spent that.

Jacob: They should be trying to sell you CDs at this point.

Paul: CDs or a warranty or something like that. “Hey, you just bought that.” But you can see how that loop is enclosed. So, that’s some of the advantage to it. But to get back to your question, what are some of the advantages to small business?

The big businesses are doing that, retargeting, saying, “Hey. You just browsed a stereo. Let me show you ads for stereos.” And they might even… You might have gone to the stereo shop, and you’ll see ads from the stereo shop. And that’s Google tying that together.

User Advantages of Understanding Big Data

Paul: When it gets really interesting is, we can go to Bob’s Stereo Shop. We see an ad competing with that. That would be an advantage to me. And there are some certain ways that people have observed is if you search for something, even like airline flights, you can get a better deal by doing it in a certain way.

So, if you search for this and then don’t look for it for a day, and then go back, your rates will be a little bit different. And nobody knows what those are. They’re very opportunistic. But they are manipulating the pricing of that. You could actually do this, which was… Let’s say you go… In a perfect world, you go to amazon.com. You see that the price of something is $100. Or you call up somebody in California that you pick out of the phone book. “Go to amazon.com, and search for product x, y, z.” And they say, “It’s $100.” You then go to jet.com and search for product x, y, z, and it says it’s $100. Then you go to amazon.com, and it’s $95.

Jacob: Oh, wow. Right.

Paul: They will respond in that way using big data, because they want to beat jet, and they’re willing to pay for it.

Jacob: So, there’s even the possibility while you, of course are being monitored by big data, to manipulate it for your own advantage.

Paul: Absolutely. Those are very hard to discover, those things. And usually you discover it in the midst of things. The other thing can be that let’s say you went to amazon first, saw it at $100. You go to jet; you see it at $100. You go back to amazon, they have no advantage of dropping the price, because they’re already said, “It’s $100.” That would look weird to you. So, they don’t drop the price, hoping you’ll buy through amazon. Which, they have advantages because you know who they are, etc.

Small Businesses and Big Data

Now, bringing it down to a smaller business. We recently had a client who said they wanted to add some text in the front of their webpage. And I really was struck by why didn’t they look at the – I didn’t use the term big data – but the analytics that they had. Because a homepage is basically like a hurdle to get over. It really doesn’t do too much, but it’s really the test on whether somebody is committed and really interested in what you’re saying, or is not interested. It’s the ultimate, walking by a store. You think of walking by a physical store, and you see in the window, and you see something. Why didn’t you stop? Well, the reason you stopped is because you saw something interesting there. And you went to the next step.

So, they didn’t ask that question. They just said, we want to put something new on the front of our website. They should have at least said, “What’s our current metrics on our website? We’re going to change this, whether it be from red to green, or put a new text up there that says, ‘today only,’ or whatever and see if that changes.” That’s a wise thing to do.

But more so, it might have been better to say, “Where are people ending up?” They come to our website. They engage. They make that commitment to come in. Let’s put the new information that’s really important there. So, that’s one very simple type of big data.

Paul: Another one. We have a client who has a service firm that does services for pregnant women and asked, “Where do your people come from? Are they coming from mobile devices or from desktops?” They really didn’t know. With Google Analytics… And by the way, Google Analytics is a brilliant product. It’s free. So, what’s the rule here? Who’s the product? Who’s the… You’re giving away, when you use Google Analytics on your site. You’re giving away information about the people that are coming to your website.

So, if you have an ice cream store, and you put Google Analytics on it, and they click on it, and they go in and click on an article and read that, Google now knows “you do to” that the person with this IP address, likely in this area, in this town, with this browser, that uses a Mac, came to this site and read about ice cream. So, now Google can now show you ice cream ads. And so, that’s big data. Google is making…every dollar they make is based on big data.

So, all I think is that small businesses should be using that same thing. If they have a lot of people that are coming to their site, and they look at the people that convert, and they find out that everybody that converts is using a Mac, what does that mean? Why is that? We’d have to take a sort of use case and deconstruct it to really understand what that meant. We could do that, even in a future show.

How Can You Use Big Data on Your Websites?

Jacob: So, what are two or three things that small business owners and entrepreneurs can do to start using big data on their websites?

Paul: I think the bottom line is they really need to become intimately familiar with their analytics. Google analytics is great and easy to put in. You do need to make that emotional judgement; you need to make that philosophical judgement of whether you want to give away your data. There are other analytic packages, which don’t give data to Google, so you could use those as well.

But the point is you need to look at it, and you need to say, “What am I trying to get people to do?” The big trend right now is one-page websites. And they’re great. And we can do some fancy JavaScript stuff to see what parts of the pages were viewed or displayed on the screen. We don’t know whether they were read. But it really changes our analytics information, the depth of the information from an analytics point of view.

So, whereas on an older-type website, if they clicked on more information, or what colors are available, to keep our color idea running, I’d know they were interested in colors. Whereas in the scrollable website, I could see that they scrolled past colors. I might even be able to see that they scrolled, stopped, five seconds later kept going. But it’s much harder.

So, becoming intimate with your analytics, understanding what people are doing, and then starting to think about how do I – I’ll use the bad word – manipulate them into doing what I want them to do. That might be as my other friend that likes boats saying, “Give me the information about boats up sooner.” And I can do that by understanding where they ultimately get to.

Now, having said that, it’s really complicated to understand these things. So, there’s people like me out there, we do that. We help you understand what it is that you’re seeing. We also ask you why in the world do you want to do that.

The Holy Grail of Big Data

Paul: One of the holy grails that hasn’t happened yet. There are people that are working night and day to try to figure out how to figure out to get a list of what you bought on your credit card. So, right now the credit card industry is based on 40-yr old, 50-yr old technology. And it has to do with how much was it and did you have the money, and did you get the transfer of the funds working. That’s clearing house really. They just never had the comprehension to say, “Wait a minute. If I could get the fact that you bought Twizzlers and beer and bread, and you do that every Friday, that’s going to give me opportunity to market to you.” And that is the holy grail, is to figure out what you spent the money on.

There’s two ways to do that. One is to get the store to give that to them. There’s a whole bunch of privacy issues there. AT&T Universal card, when you register a purchase, they will tell you if it’s cheaper for 90 days. Why are they doing that? Because they want a list of everything you buy. Now, they aren’t effectively using that, because I just bought a new television. I said, let me do that. It was actually more of an experiment. So, I registered the product, put in the model number and all that stuff, and I got a beautiful email the next day. “We’re hunting for a better price for you.” It was $760 is what I bought it for. I entered that, let’s say on Tuesday. Wednesday I get the thing, “We’re hunting for it.”

I want to Amazon to look. It was $740. So, that’s $20, and they never came back and said, “Hey…” They didn’t catch it. Now, they may say, “We can’t scan amazon,” or whatever excuse they’re going to say, but they’re fundamentally doing that.

So, if they were to have done it, they would have refunded me $20. And now, after the 90 days is up, they’re like, “Sorry we didn’t find a better price for you. Do it again.” I don’t think it’s a scam, but I do think the incentive for them is certainly client retention. That’s a neat feature. But it’s also to profile me, and say, “Well, he bought a television. So, maybe in three to four years when technology has changed enough, we’ll start telling him about TVs.”

That’s heavy lifting to do all that. Do I send him a flyer? Do I send him an email? What do I do with that? But that’s the holy grail.

Long Term Leads

Paul: One client we’re working with, they are consultants. They have long-term lead nurturing. A client doesn’t come in and decide, “I’m going to buy from you today.” They’ve heard about that company. They come to the website. They want to feel good about that company. They want it to be reinforced that this is a competent company in this market. So, all of those things are there.

Well, it would be nice to know that they’re looking, to be able to measure that, to say, “Jack, I saw you were looking at our website.” Or even if you meet them at a conference, reinforce the things. “We’ve got a great article up there about your market,” knowing full well that he’s read it. But start a conversation that way. So, that kind of thing.

What Can You Do For Big Data in Your Business?

Jacob: You mentioned one thing we can do for big data. Is there anything else?

Paul: Sure. As a small business, or as a not-a-Google, what you can do… One of the things that allows you to use big data to your advantage is Facebook. Because you can target people in a certain town that are interested in a certain thing. And that’s why Facebook is worth what it’s worth. Because I now have a description of the person that they’ve provided to say, “I am interested in boating. In fact, I’m interested in red boats.” This is a little bit of a silly example, because that’s not one of the segments in there. Boats is, certainly. But if I make red boats, I can say, “Anybody in Boston that likes red boats, show them my ad.”

Jacob: Well, you could do that even to say anybody that lives in Boston within this zip code, that works on a Mac, that lives within x-radius of the Apple Store and blah, blah, blah. You target an ad down exactly to that person.

Paul: Right. Now, this is called business to consumer, B2C. Now, LinkedIn is trying to be that for the B2B. But they haven’t really gotten it there yet. So, if I want to basically find people who are executives and they’re interested in buying life insurance for their employees, that’s not really an attribute out there. I certainly could go and send things to C-level executives in my town and have that show up in LinkedIn. But again, there’s not as much of that drive. People go to Facebook to see what their friends are doing. A CEO doesn’t go to LinkedIn necessarily every day to keep up on things.

So, that is, if you’re business to consumer, you can definitely target your ads with Facebook. It’s a wonderful platform to do that. You can also do the same thing with Google AdWords, where basically they will show ads based on the words that people type into the query. What you’re going to see over time is I want to be able to show my ads to people that are 18-24 and own their own car or have a lease. That kind of stuff will be coming for AdWords.

Jacob: The Edge of Innovation is brought to you in partnership with SaviorLabs. SaviorLabs exists to help businesses mature and strategize for the future. Learn more about SaviorLabs at saviorlabs.com.

Show Notes:

From the Archives: Introduction to Cryptocurrency

December 24, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 107 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re digging in our archives to bring back our most popular podcast – “Introduction to Cryptocurrency.”

Sections

Introduction
Intro to Cryptocurrency
The Exchange of Currency
How Do You Convert Cryptocurrency?
Agreeing on a Number
How Much is Bitcoin Worth?
Cryptographic Math
Is Cryptocurrency Hard to Hack?
Why Cryptocurrency is Not Secret or Private
What is the Advantage of Cryptocurrency?
Bitcoin and Banks
Ways Entrepreneurs & Startups Can Engage Cryptocurrency in Their Business Model
Is Cryptocurrency Advantageous to Businesses?
Cryptocurrency For Your Business: Risky or Worthwhile?
Arbitrage Opportunities
Show Notes

From the Archives: Introduction to Cryptocurrency

Introduction

Paul: This is the Edge of Innovation, Hacking the Future of Business. I’m your host, Paul Parisi.

Jacob: And I’m Jacob Young.

Paul: On the Edge of Innovation, we talk about the intersection between technology and business, what’s going on in technology and what’s possible for business.

Intro to Cryptocurrency

Jacob: So, Paul, I’ve heard a lot about this idea of cryptocurrencies. It seems like a lot of people have brought that category up, especially as it relates to Bitcoin. I’d be curious to know, what exactly is cryptocurrency. Can you explain what it is? What does it do?

Paul: Sure. First of all, I think it’s important to take a step back and drop the word crypto and look at what currency is. If you go into your pocket and get some change or a dollar bill out, that’s currency. I’m speaking from the United States. If you’re in Europe, you might have euros or another type of currency.

But if I give you a piece of currency from another country, it sort of looks like a toy. You don’t understand what it is. You don’t understand its value. If I give you a yen, a bill, it it’s 1000 yen, you don’t know if that’s $1000; you don’t know if it’s $10. You don’t know if it’s a penny. And same thing: The dollar has a bigger penetration globally, and people tend to want to trade in it. So, we understand, certainly as Americans, the intrinsic value of a dollar.

The Exchange of Currency

Paul: Now, one thing that’s very difficult in currency as I just alluded to is the exchange of currency. You’ve been to an airport, and you can exchange your dollars for euros, and you’re sort of, “What does that mean?” Or dollars for Canadian dollars, or dollars for Australian dollars. I’m going to give you one euro for every $1.50 you give me. So, if I wanted to go buy a can of coke that’s $2 here in America, let’s say, that’s sort of like one and a half euros in Europe.

We’re not used to doing that translation in our head. And so that’s why it’s very difficult for anybody to be sitting there and saying I do that translation. Any new type of currency, whether it’s crypto, euros, whatever it might be is going to face the problem of how do you convert.

How Do You Convert Cryptocurrency?

Paul: The reason why we convert is because the institutions that back those currencies put a value on them. And the world’s view of those institutions puts a value on them. It used to be that the United States had a currency that was based on the amount of gold it had in storage. And that was done away with. So, now we’re working on what’s called the full faith and credit of the United States. And the same thing with the euro zone. They back it, and they have a certain tie-in to value.

As we’ve heard in different discussions of late, different countries can change the value of their currency. And change how much goods are worth to the outside world so that they can make a trade advantage or disadvantage. So now, when we come to cryptocurrency, you say, “I want to buy a bitcoin.” Well, what’s it worth? There is no coin.

Cryptocurrency is based on the idea that is it a string of bits, ones and zeros, that is a large number that represents something. That basically represents a share of the amount of cryptocurrency that’s out there.

Well, why can’t I just make a new set of numbers? And write down a new random string of numbers? And that’s where the bitcoin or the cryptocurrency comes in, because there’s some strong math that has to be done to create those valid strings of numbers. When they’re issued, they’re recorded in a ledger. And they’re recorded in that ledger by more than one person, or really computer. And so, what you have is it’s very difficult to get the needed numbers of people that are out there to agree that this number has been issued. It’s a little bit esoteric as I’m saying it. And it is esoteric.

Agreeing on a Number

Jacob: Yeah. You sort of lost me. So, you have to get people to agree to that number?

Paul: Yes. Exactly. So, if I go and write something in the ledger and say that Paul has $10. The people who control that ledger, because it’s a public ledger, all have to agree that yes, Paul has $10. Now, that sentence is easy for us as humans to understand. But it’s cryptographically significant. And what that means is that we use both private and public key encryption, a way to encrypt something that only the person that has the key can decrypt it.

These journal records are stored in something called the blockchain. The blockchain is really one of the coolest inventions of the past five or ten years, and is ways to record these and have everybody do the cryptographic work on these signings, and record them in the blockchain and say, “Yes, I agree with that.” “Yes, I agree with that.”

So, Paul said something in there with his cryptographic signature and then the other people calculate that and say, “Yes, I confirm that.” And you have to have a majority of people saying, “I confirm that.”

Now, if you’re thinking about that and we’re going at this very surface level because it gets very complicated very quickly… If I could convince more than 50% of the people that are verifying that blockchain to lie and literally take “Paul has $10” and say, “Yep, that’s valid,” I have effectively broken the trust of the blockchain. It other words, I’ve manipulated it. So, I didn’t have $10. I just said I had $10. And you could do that. There’s a thing in computers, never say never. There’s always ways to hack things. It would be hard, but it’s certainly not impossible.

It would be very hard because you’ve got them distributed all across the world and they’re all doing this work. And that’s what a bitcoin miner does. It validates those blockchain entries, among other things.

But the key thing is a person in business looking at bitcoin is to really start to think of it as a different currency. Now, if you’re in America, you probably don’t accept euros on your website. You may not accept Mexican pesos on your website. So, you say, “Why would I? Because the majority of the people that are coming here don’t use those currencies and they wouldn’t know what they are.”

How Much is Bitcoin Worth?

And it’s important to note that our credit card system is not designed to deal with multiple currencies, because there has never been a motivation to do it. If you go down to the restaurant and you want to buy a bowl of soup, and it’s four dollars, you know what $4 of value is. The minute I say that’s one bitcoin, you’re like, “I don’t know. What is one bitcoin worth?”

And coupled with that, bitcoin has been relatively volatile. So, you have indications… Zimbabwe over the past couple of decades has had rampant inflation. So, a loaf of bread could have been a thousand bits of their currency, whereas yesterday it was at one unit of their currency. So, you understand that when you’re going through it, and it’s constrained.

In the whole Greece scenario… I have a friend who’s a developer there and sells his software internationally, and if he sells it with the Greek currency, there’s all sorts of problems. If he sells it in American dollars, that’s relatively stable. But you can check every day with the currencies, the conversion rates between Canadian dollars and US dollars and euros, and they fluctuate.

What’s that fluctuation caused by? That’s caused by the banks saying how much it’s worth and controlling that, and the governments make statements and the Federal Reserve, etc.

So, what controls bitcoin’s value? Well, it’s what anybody is willing to give you. That’s the ultimate judge of value. So, if you have a house you want to sell and you put it on the market for $10 million, and somebody comes along and says, “I’ll give you a dollar for it,” well, it’s worth a dollar. If somebody comes along and says, “I’ll give you $100,000,” well, now it’s worth $100,000. But that is the ultimate definition of what value is.

Cryptographic Math

Paul: So, in the bitcoin world, what they’ve done is there’s a limited number of bitcoins that can be created through this cryptographic math. In the early days, the cryptographic math was very easy, because it was sort of like low-hanging fruit, the easy problems to solve. But as we’ve progressed, it becomes more and more difficult. It’s at the point now, where if you’re generating cryptographic bitcoins, the amount of electricity that you need to do it is very close to the amount of bitcoin value you would get out. So, if you run a computer for a year, and you say it costs me $10 to run that computer in electricity, you may get about $10 worth of bitcoins out.

So, all of these things coalesce to say what is bitcoin worth. Well, if you look at it, they’re about $450. Who knows what day they were recording this or what day you’re listening to this, and it changes wildly. We’ve seen fluctuations anywhere from…just huge fluctuations. That is fundamentally a problem with cryptocurrency, is that people don’t have a sense, or will not have a sense when they take it out of their pocket, or use their phone, of how much they’re actually spending.

If I could convince you to give me one bitcoin for this cup of soup, that doesn’t sound like a lot. Well, it’s worth about $450. So, now it’s like, “Wait a minute. How do I deal with micro-payments? I have to give you 0.0002 bitcoins.” Well, of course, we do this all on our phones or computers. So they handle all of that, sort of chopping it up into bits. But you still don’t know what 0.0002 bitcoin is. You have no concept of that. Well, you say, “I’ll compare it to dollars.” So, that’s an intrinsic problem with cryptocurrency, is it doesn’t have any tie to the real world. And people…we’ve got thousands of years of dealing in the real world.

So, you could have the typical scenario where your kid goes on Amazon and buys all these things, thinking they’re all free, and it’s going on your credit card. They didn’t have a comprehension of how clicking the button changed to money. So, you look at it and say, “It’s only $2. Go ahead and do that.” The whole iPhone and iTunes store is spend a dollar. It’s no big deal. It really prevents you from putting that filter in to say, “Wait. That’s $10. I’m not going to spend that.” You don’t do the value calculation. But now when we present it as a bitcoin or as other cryptocurrency, you’re going to be like, what does that actually mean? So, there are some intrinsic things for it to overcome.

Is Cryptocurrency Hard to Hack?

Paul: One of the reasons people have felt that cryptocurrency would be good is because it’s hard to hack. I don’t know that it is hard to hack. There has been a lot of high-profile people, examples where there have been hacks of people who owned bitcoin on behalf of other people. They broke in a stole it, the digital signatures that represent your bitcoin.

So, if you take an external hard drive or a memory stick and put this big, long cryptographic key on it in a text file and you put that through the wash and it gets destroyed, that’s gone. It can never be returned. Just like if it were a dollar bill and you shredded it, it’s gone. You can’t go back to the US government and say, “Well, I had a dollar bill. Here’s its serial number.” They’re going to say, “Tough.”

So, it has those same attributes. So, there’s no advantage there. But I will say, it’s probably more difficult for me to get your wallet out of your pocket and take the dollar bills out of it than it is for me to potentially hack in and get a file on your computer and copy that off and use those cryptographic keys.

So, there’s a lot to be figured out there. One of the use cases is “it’s really cool” you say, I have a phone. It has a fingerprint reader and I can spend bitcoins. Well, the only way it will let you spend the bitcoin is because you scan your fingerprint. Well, that’s good. I’d have to cut off your finger in order to steal the bitcoin or the cryptographic currency, which isn’t terrible. I could also take a scan of your thumbprint and maybe work around that. It’s got to be worth it. If you only have $10 is bitcoin, why waste my time? So, there’s all of these challenges swirling around cryptocurrency.

Why Cryptocurrency is Not Secret or Private

One of the other advantages that has been extolled is that it’s secret or private. That’s just patently false. The Silk Road prosecutions by the FBI used the blockchain to figure out who spent the money and traced it back. And the blockchain is basically a chain of blocks of information and you can follow them through to figure out who originated the money.

And if you go out and try to say, “I want to buy some bitcoin…” This is one of the things I try and play with is trying to figure out how to be anonymous. You cannot anonymously buy bitcoin. There is no way to do it. They want a credit card number. They want your social security number. They want everything you can. These are government mandated, or at least done in acceptance of government saying something like this needs to be done. Because they want to be able to come in and audit and say, “Who did you sell bitcoin to?”

So, if I go out there and go to anybody, I’ve got to prove who I am. I’ve got to send them a bunch of signatures. I have to send them a phone bill, something that’s got my address on it, that has my name on it… This is really things that I have to do. I can’t just take a credit card and buy some bitcoin.

In the future, we should have a talk about how to be anonymous and different options in there, because it’s a cool thought experiment.

What is the Advantage of Cryptocurrency?

Paul: What’s the advantage? Well, it is a one-world currency. I don’t know if that’s an advantage. There’s talk that the end of the world will be… Part of a one-world currency will be one of the things. Well, are we seeing that happen? I don’t know. But it is the idea that one bitcoin is worth $450 today, for example, here in the United States. And in Australia, at that some moment, it’s worth $450. Whereas, the minute I have to convert a currency, it’s the matter of how much somebody will give you for it.

Bitcoin and Banks

Jacob: In some ways, what you’re describing sounds a bit like the Wild West of currency, which I find interesting. I don’t know if that’s a correct application or analogy, but it does interesting to me that in light of all of those concerns and some of the positives of it, that you recently recommended an article about Bank of America and other large financial industry entities getting into cryptocurrency and trying to get into the blockchain dynamics of that. Can you talk a little bit about why they’re trying to do that and what advantages there are for big banks in doing that?

Paul: Sure. Well, all of these flaws…and there are other flaws which we haven’t talked about, about the scalability and the programming and all kinds of things like that, sort of the soft underbelly. Forget about all those. There’s a lot of money to be made in any new currency. So, any of those entities are going to want to invest and get their pieces of the pie. So, Bank of America… It was Bank of America, right?

Yeah, so they’re out there saying, “Somebody is going to make money on this. We want to have patents that say when you…” Let’s make up a silly patent. Every time you convert bitcoins to dollars, you have to do this lookup on the exchange, and you have to compare it with this exchange, and you may arbitrage some of those exchanges. Well, we’ll write a patent on that. And all the patent is, is a specific way of doing things, a methodology that isn’t generally obvious by just looking at. Like a door, it would be difficult to patent a door now, or a hinge that uses a door. But the first guy who figured out the hinge could have patented it because it wasn’t necessarily obvious by just looking at it.

So, as we develop patents, those things become obvious, and they want to stake their claim, and they certainly have the resources to do that. And this is sort of staking their claim, like the Old West, the gold claim. They’re going to go out there and do everything they can because they have armies of engineers who can think up idiosyncratic ways of doing things and then patent that.

Now, what will happen is they’ll patent things and they will get those patents awarded. And what will happen is people will then come back and say, “No. That’s an obvious application and shouldn’t have been awarded a patent.” So, our patent system is relatively broken in that way. But, of course, they would be doing that. And every big company is doing that.

So, one of the examples I’ve seen being around is it’s so difficult to buy bitcoins. Why don’t you have somebody buy them for you? Well, there’s some regulatory problems there, but I could start an offshore organization that says I’m going to buy bitcoins for you and hold them for you. So, I’m never going to transfer them to you. So, I’m going to put a ledger together that I own that says, “This bitcoin belongs to Jacob. He has one bitcoin.” And I keep them in my bank.

And this is one of the problems that has happened is people have broken into those banks because they didn’t have good security and stole that ledger. And then I have some bad news for you Jacob. I know you have five bitcoins stored here, but I lost the money. I literally lost the bills. So, you can sue me, but usually these organizations don’t have a lot of assets.

Ways Entrepreneurs & Startups Can Engage Cryptocurrency in Their Business Model

Jacob: What are the ways in which you’ve seen entrepreneurs and startups engage cryptocurrency in their business model?

Paul: Well, right now, given it’s such an early stage, very Wild West, you have people that are primarily saying, “How do I get cryptocurrency? How do I take it? How do I accept bitcoin? How do I do that?” That’s where all the innovation is about right now. It’s nothing really sexy. It’s just a matter of…

Here’s the thing. You open a bookstore on the internet, Jacob’s Books, and you go out and find used books and rare books all over, and you list them on your site, and you say, “Here’s a first edition of this book. It’s $500 or 1.1 bitcoins.” If you got a check for $500, or you got $500 on your credit card, you’d feel fine. If you got 1.1 bitcoins, you would feel, “I better go cash it in right now.”

You see, you have a decision now. You can now be a currency trader. You can decide to be the arbitrage person that says, “Based on the indicators, I think bitcoin is going up this week.”

Jacob: Right. So, I can get that and say, “This 1.5 bitcoin does, for today, equate to $500. But I could hold onto this and this book that you would have sold for 500 USD, it could have make $1000, depending on how bitcoin goes up in two years.”

Paul: Yes. Or it could go down. So, you have a huge thing to think about. A whole mind share that you’re not designed, you’re not used to thinking about. You don’t arbitrage currency. You could do the same thing with the Canadian dollar or euros, is say, “Pay me in euros.” Because they’re going up. If you pay me Chinese currency, they’re devaluing their currency. So, if I gave you 100… I don’t even know what the Chinese currency is, but if I gave you one hundred of their pieces of currency, and it was worth ten dollars today, there’s a good chance in six months it might be worth eight dollars.

Well, you would feel bad about that, a 20% loss on it. What in the world am I doing here?

Is Cryptocurrency Advantageous to Businesses?

Jacob: So, is it advantageous for businesses to transition their primary currency over to cryptocurrency, where it’s not just static money, but it could in effect be a bit of a stock option/currency as well?

Paul: You could do that. I think that’s ill-advised because the forces that control the fluctuation in that are very Wild West. There could be a break-in on somebody that steals a bunch, and they’re very volatile. It could go down ridiculously.

Jacob: So then, what are the entrepreneurial future ideas for using cryptocurrency?

Paul: Well, just because it’s not a great idea to use it doesn’t mean people will be smart enough to not use it. It has a lot of pizzazz and appeal right now, and gee-whiz. So, I think building tools and allowing people to use cryptocurrency on your website are good ideas.

Now, if you have a website that sells to children, they’re probably not going to use cryptocurrency. So, you do have to evaluate that, and say where does it make sense. So, if you look at TigerDirect, it accepts bitcoin. Well, their clients are nerds. So, I buy from TigerDirect and I’m a nerd, so I can understand that.

Amazon doesn’t accept it yet. So, it hasn’t really moved into the mainstream. But that leading edge…it’s cool to do. I don’t think most of the people that are running websites or commerce websites out there are going to see a big uptick in conversion because they have added cryptocurrency to their website. But I could be wrong. It’s sort of an underwhelming situation.

Jacob: And would it be advantageous for organizations or companies that are more international, per se, rather than ones that are just domestic?

Paul: Well, it’s not a substitute for accepting local currencies. Because if you go and you say, “I’m going to expand to Mexico. I’m an American. I’m going to expand to Mexico. We only offer bitcoins and dollars.” That’s not a big market. That’s not a lot of people that are carrying bitcoins around or dollars. So, in order for me to do that, I really need to still reach out.

Now, if you fast-forward thirty or fifty years, that may be different. And it more than likely will be somewhat different. The biggest thing with the cryptocurrencies and a proper iteration would be that they couldn’t be manipulated.

So, the scarcity of cryptocurrency is real. There is only a certain number of coins or cryptocurrency that’s available. And it is very much limited to that. Whereas, dollars are largely fictional. There is nothing stopping the US government from printing. If we had a million dollars in circulation, they could print another million dollars tomorrow. There’s nothing stopping them from doing that. What does that do? Does it change the price of a cup of soup from $3 to $6 because we just diluted the money supply? It doesn’t because we’re not programmed that way as people. We interface with money and say, “It’s $3.” Inflation has to happen. That’s a different thing where the costs change and expenses and values change. But when it’s dealing with just currency, I can print as much money as I want.

With a cryptocurrency, you can’t do that. So, I can’t manipulate the value of the currency relative to the world market. And that’s one big advantage to cryptocurrency. It can’t be manipulated as easily , I won’t say it can’t, as easily as a government backed…

Cryptocurrency For Your Business: Risky or Worthwhile?

Jacob: So, for businesses, it would seem to me that potentially for established businesses, it would be risky but worthwhile to explore the idea of cryptocurrency right now. Would it be better to wait for cryptocurrency to develop further?

Paul: No. I think you’re going to have to have some… This is the time where you start to look at it and say, “Do we want to do that?” The real question for a business is when you actually get a customer spending cryptocurrency, do you convert that to your local currency. Do you convert to dollars? That’s the crisis.

Now, you may say, “We’ve got one customer who has a subscription website, and it’s a few thousand dollars.” So, if somebody comes in and buys that in bitcoin, let’s say it’s 10 bitcoin, $4500. That’s what it’s worth today. Tomorrow it goes up to $500. They feel good. Let’s cash out. But tomorrow it goes down to $350. They’ve just lost $1000. We’re not wired that way in our heads. So, you do need to make those decisions as when do you take and convert that money into fungible assets in your currency.

Jacob: So, it would be helpful for CFOs within a company to have a handle on how that stuff works

Paul: Absolutely.

Arbitrage Opportunities

Paul: I do think there’s a huge business opportunity there, is to be the arbitrage organization. And if you offer that with the proper insurances… So, you go and you get an insurance policy from Lloyd’s of London or one of the big insurance companies like that that says, “We will arbitrage. We’re buying currency, using dollars, and we’re buying bitcoin. Today we bought them at $450. Oh, we see it going down.” And they do their magic, and they know it’s going to go down the $350 tomorrow. Well, they would go out and buy a lot of it, because they also know that the next day it’s going to go back up.

Now, they make mistakes, but they do it in such volume that those mistakes are leveled out. Offering that arbitrage service to a small business or a business is a huge advantage. That doesn’t seem to exist right now.

Jacob: And it seems like another advantage for an entrepreneur asset in this area would be basically training and consulting for CFOs and the financial industry in ways that they don’t understand cryptocurrency.

Paul: Absolutely. I think there is an opportunity for that. But I think even more so, there’s an opportunity for these…somebody to offer. We’ll take that offer.

Jacob: I see. Not just consulting but just to take it away.

Paul: We’ll just do it for you. Because arbitraging only works when you have vast amounts of investments. So, if you’re good at that, why not offer that, broker that arbitrage?

Jacob: The Edge of Innovation is brought to you in partnership with SaviorLabs. SaviorLabs exists to help businesses mature and strategize for the future. Learn more about SaviorLabs at saviorlabs.com.

Show Notes:

Business Advice From An SEO Expert

April 30, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 90 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with SEO expert Jeremiah Smith. He’s Founder & CEO of Simple Tiger and he’s sharing his business and entrepreneurial advice with us!

Sections

How Jeremiah Got Into SEO
Jeremiah Smith: “Living My Dream”
How Jeremiah Started His Own Business
Jeremiah’s Business Lessons Learned
Advice For Starting Your Own Business
Jeremiah’s Business Book Recommendations
What’s With The Name “Simple Tiger?”
Closing Advice
More Episodes
Show Notes

Business Advice From An SEO Expert

How Jeremiah Got Into SEO

Paul: Welcome to another edition of The Edge of Innovation. Today we’re talking with Jeremiah Smith with Simple Tiger. He’s the founder and CEO. So, you’re an SEO company.

Alright, let’s shift gears a little bit here. This is The Edge of Innovation. While we’ve been spending a lot of time talking about – and I think very useful time – talking about how to do this incredible, important aspect of our web presence in SEO. We’d like to talk to people about why did they start a business? What in the world led them to do this? I’ve likened starting and running your own business as one of the hardest things you will ever do in your life. So, you told us a little bit about the mom and pop that you were working for and you learned SEO. Did you have an aha moment there and say, “I’m going to do this for the rest of my life?”

Jeremiah: Absolutely! It’s so funny that you asked me that because that’s exactly what happened actually. So, my mother was doing the book keeping for that company and she actually was the one that connected me with the company to begin with. They saw a website that she was showing them that I built, and they loved it. They wanted my web design ability, so I did that for them. Then I did the SEO thing because they asked for it.

And when I kind of got this little hunch that I’d seen the leads coming through the site ever since I built it and then did the SEO for the site and was actively working on it every day and I got really curious. I’m looking at the analytics and I see these big names that have come through. That these are guys that I’ve actually met out in our show room and shook their hands. And I generated them on my effort, playing on this little laptop in my office over there. And I was like holy cow its really cool! Something hit me that this is very, very real. This is, at the gut, at the core of a business and these guys are standing out in the showroom with a semitruck out in the loading bay area getting loaded up with twenty ATVs.

I was like, there’s so much value in what I’m doing here, and I got curious at the end of six months and I went and had my mother pull a report for me out of QuickBooks and I said, “Look. Here are the leads that we’ve generated from the SEO effort so far. I’m able to track those because again, this was about 12 years ago, so this was the early days of SEO. Google Analytics data was so wide open. You could get anything you wanted out of it. And so, I knew all these leads came in, out of all these different keywords and so I said I need to look at the books and see what kind of revenue these kinds of people gave us.

And so, she showed me. She generated a report, handed it over to me, I saw that two million dollar increase in revenue and my jaw hit the floor because I knew what they were paying me, which was peanuts compared to that but it was a good living for me at the time. I didn’t care and there’s no hate there at all. I was totally happy and blessed with it. But I saw the value. The proportion of what they paid me to what I was able to deliver through that effort and that was when I said, “I am on to something. I’m on to something that I think I can help a lot of other businesses with and this is what I want to do.”

So I put it on my resume and I said I do SEO full time and stuck my resume out there on Career Builder and it got picked up a couple weeks later by an agency in Atlanta called 360i and 360i – I didn’t know who they were at the time – but when I went in for my first interview, I walked down this long hallway with all these plaques on the wall that said MBC, MTV, E*TRADE, LG Electronics, Sports Illustrated, and I was like, oh my god, this is the big league. So those were my clients when I went on to work there and I took everything that I knew from helping that small mom and pop shop in to working at that agency and noticed that the difference was not that big between what I was doing before and what I learned there. It was just scaled up dramatically based on the budget that these clients had. So that was really the only difference.

Paul: Wow!

Jeremiah: And after that, I realized not only is this valuable but the playing field is level and it’s based on your pace – What can you do? What resources do you have at your disposal? You could leverage all those for SEO and you can see equal sized results.

Jeremiah Smith: “Living My Dream”

Paul: Interesting. So, when you were growing up, did you think you’d own your own business? What was your vision for your future?

Jeremiah: Thanks for asking that. So, it’s funny, when I was a little kid I liked to take this little kitchen set thing that I had. It was like a little kids Fisher Price thing. A little plastic stove and refrigerator, sink and everything. And I’d drag it out to the edge of the street where my parents lived, and I’d take some of my toys that I didn’t want anymore and write some prices on them and stand out there all day and wait for someone to stop and buy one of my toys. No one ever bought anything from me except Mom and Dad. They’d come through and give me a quarter for a plastic dinosaur or something. I loved that and so did my brother. He did the exact same thing. We both did that all the time. Didn’t get much for it but we loved doing it.

Traveling around with mom, she was doing bookkeeping for different clients. I’d go to all these different businesses that she worked for and I loved the variety of going into these different businesses as a kid. Just getting to see them, you know. And she would talk to me about how the business worked. I would watch her balance her checkbook and keep her gas receipts and charge those to her clients and things like that. I just learned a lot about business by kind of watching that happen. And then my father being an actor, he was the self-starter and he had to really sell himself for roles. He had to put everything he had into making his roles something that he could win. And so, I was really just kind of a self-starting, business motivated person.

When I was about to graduate high school though, I was deeply interested in robotics and I thought that I was going to go to school for robotic engineering after high school. But my math grades were terrible. All of my grades were terrible. I had a terrible time in school so my prospects looking at Georgia Tech, robotic engineering degree was just shot. They weren’t going to happen. So right after high school, I did a semester of college, maybe a semester and a half, before I discovered SEO. Then I just dropped out of college and did SEO and it wasn’t until a few years later, that I realized, wait a second, I’m doing robotic engineering on the largest robot in the world! And I didn’t even think about it at the time!

And then fairly recently, about three years ago, I got pulled into the University of South Florida to do some honorary guest lecturing on search engine optimization to senior level marketing students in the marketing program there. And so, it really hit me that I came full circle from failing school pretty much and dropping out of college, to actually teaching college at a very high level on robotic engineering and so now I’m living my dream, knowing that I’ve accomplished that.

But I have to say that I don’t look backwards and see a lot of my personal efforts that led up to that. Based on my faith, I kind of see God’s hand at work and so a whole lot of divinity in that case.

How Jeremiah Started His Own Business

Paul: Very cool. So, you made the crazy decision at some point to start your own business. You were sort of doing it as one person, but there’s a big difference when you hire your first employer, your second employer and you actually realize you’ve started a business. Tell me a little bit about that because you were working at this… you made it to the big leagues and you were working for somebody else. But now you own your own business so how did that happen?

Jeremiah: Yeah, so while I was working for the agency that I mentioned earlier. I really loved it. I gained a lot of intelligence working for that agency. A lot of corporate expertise and understanding and got to dive really deep into working with large brands and playing the corporate brand. But after a very short period of time, I knew I did not fit that corporate model. It just wasn’t for me. And this was around the time that the four hour work week came out and I read that and it totally just shattered everything that I was doing at that agency and so I decided to start trying to shift things a little bit. I approached the agency with some ideas for doing allowing remote work and some other stuff. And my ideas kept getting shot down and so I got demotivated.

I was building this consulting practice on the side, and I was helping clients on nights and weekends. And eventually just decided, “I’ve got to grow my consulting practice into my own agency.” I had Simple Tiger then, but it was still just a little consulting business. It wasn’t until I brought on my brother Shawn, and he and I really joined forces and decided to actually start hiring a team and kind of adding more clients and offering a service that included implementation and production of content, links and things like that – Beyond just the consulting that I had been doing so far. So, when we decided to do that, we opened a whole new can of worms which was building a marketing agency and that was really fun. But I never expected to be here, to be honest. I didn’t plan to be here, but I would not want to be anywhere else. I absolutely adore what we’ve been able to create together and what we’ve been handed.

Jeremiah’s Business Lessons Learned

Paul: So, what would be… Well, I’ll ask that in just a moment. But what’s your business lesson learned or unanticipated event or “Oh my gosh! I didn’t realize that part of business!” Or staring your own business?

Jeremiah: Hmmm. That’s a good question. I think that being the somewhat visionary entrepreneur that I am, where I have these little ideas in my mind of what I’d like to create, having those get shot down so many times by the harsh realities of the world, was at times, demotivating. But it has, over time, educated me to realize that the world wants a thing and will pay for it, so you build it and you win money and sometimes that may not be as enjoyable to do because it may not be as enjoyable as the big grand grandiose idea that you originally had. But in doing it and in building it, on the way to delivering it, once you start to see it work and once you start to see people happy with what you’ve created, it suddenly can become much more enjoyable, especially given that the great idea that you had was just getting shot down. It was not getting validated.

So for me, I think you know, I started Simple Tiger as an agency that did everything. It was web design, logos, business cards, it was awful. I was doing way too much. When I narrowed it down to SEO, that helped me a whole ton. Simple Tiger actually started growing. And then we narrowed it down from just SEO to just software companies, Saas companies specifically. It got super narrow and I was able to have basically almost the exact same conversation on every call with clients and deliver better results, deliver a deeper product, a more innovative solution on everything, every time, for each new client to the point now, our customer success is so high and so strong that I am just elated every time I sign on a new client because I know I’m about to have a new best friend or a new happy customer. Whereas before there was a lot of heartbreak in everything because I was kind of managing a mess that I created and not really delivering happiness to my clients as much. So, I think for me, to answer your question, the challenge and the “ah ha” moment was, for me, to develop something the world wanted versus something I wanted to develop. If that makes sense.

Advice For Starting Your Own Business

Paul: Yep. I get it. What would be your best piece of advice for somebody out there saying, “I want to do that?”

Jeremiah: If by “that” they mean start a marketing agency?

Paul: No, I mean more general than that. There are all sorts of specifics in every different vertical and people are probably listening and saying, “No, no, tell us that.” No I mean, really everybody has their own ideas for businesses or those that have them, have them. What would be your advice, warning, caution, whatever it might be?

Jeremiah: So, for me, from my angle, my last name is Smith and I often times think of myself as what you would consider kind of an old-fashioned smith. A trade person who works with their hands to create something. A technician to a degree. And so, I think of myself as a technician often times. And sometimes, if I really want to get into a groove with my agency, I just jump in at the technician level and do some technical work and I’m like, “Ahhh!” I feel like I belong. It just works for me. I think that’s just in my blood, so my recommendation is probably going to come from that angle.

If you find yourself doing some level of technical work, whether you’re with a company or you’re an employee of a company or an organization or you volunteer in some area of your life. Maybe you’re not doing some technical work for your professional trade or anything like that but you’re doing technical work in some volunteer area or you’re consistently helping family or friends or something like that. And it’s something that you actually, when you get into it, you just know that you’re good at it. I recommend crafting something around that.

It’s something like, there’s this Venn diagram but it’s made of three circles, if you can kind of envision this with me for a moment. One circle is something that you’re good at. Another circle is something that you enjoy doing and then the third circle is something that the market itself wants. Alright. Now the market wanting it doesn’t mean there’s no competition there. A lot of people hear that and think, “ohhh, no competition.” No, you want competition, trust me, because if there’s no competition there, you’ve either struck gold which is highly rare or there’s no money there. No body wants it. So that third circle has to be a good market.

In the middle of these three circles – what you’re good at, what you love doing, and what the market wants – is what I think you ought to build a business around. And if that business is just you, doing freelance consulting work for a while, do just that. And don’t build anything else out of that unless, at some point, you feel compelled to move on to the next step and grow up from a consulting company into something else. But for me, actually, I got to be honest, while I love running my agency as it is right now, my second favorite job I ever had was when I just did consulting and Simple Tiger was not producing content, not implementing things. I was just consulting companies. I really, really enjoyed doing that.

Now during those days, I was the technician and I was the only guy so if anything was wrong, it was one hundred percent my fault. Nowadays, I run my agency and I try to remain humble where I can, so if something does go wrong at my agency, I still take responsibility for it. And I’m still to blame for it but in those days there was not a system there was just me. So, it was a little stressful and if I didn’t go out and do sales, I didn’t have sales. And so that was really hard too. But yeah that’s what I would do. I would look at that tri-circle Venn diagram I came up with there and find out what’s in the middle and then build a business around that.

Jeremiah’s Business Book Recommendations

Pual: Now, good business books or books that you would recommend reading, one or two?

Jeremiah: One or two? That’s tough. Well, coming from the marketing angle, one would definitely be, “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek, which if you want to, you could just watch the Ted Talk. Its eighteen minutes. Look up “Simon Sinek Ted Talk Start With Why.” Then the second one is probably, “Tribes” by Seth Godin, where he talks about knowing your tribe and appealing to your tribe. Your audience basically is what he means. So those are my two favorite business books from a marketing perspective.

From a business perspective, I’m just going to leave “The 4-Hour Workweek” and its hall of fameness. That would be one of them, but I don’t want to recommend that one because everyone would probably say that. Something by Peter F. Drucker. “The Effective Executive” most likely would be one of my number one business books. Absolutely incredible and eye opening and some simple things about business.

And then actually some of the writings by Edward Deming as highlighted by Tony Robbins in his book “Awaken the Giant Within.” I recommend that book personally. I think it’s a fantastic book but in that book, he goes into Edward Deming and defining some business principals and Edward Deming’s business principles were just stellar and they’re so awesome and they’re still completely applicable today. I think they’re elegant. I think they’ll probably apply for the next fifty to a hundred years potentially, so I’d highly recommend people study that.

Just a quick highlight and a reason why you should study Edward Deming. He went to the big three auto manufactures in the 60s and said, “Hey, here are some things that you guys should do instead of what you’re doing right now, that are going to make you behemoths in the automotive industry forever.” And this was the 60s. The automotive industry was booming. We just came out of the 50s, where we had this kind of credit thing being created and people were buying cars on credit now and they couldn’t manufacture cars fast enough in the US. So, the three auto manufactures laughed him out of the room. So, he went to Japan, and he talked to Honda, Toyota and Nissan, who nowadays are eating our lunch. They listened to him. They paid him, and they implemented what he said. So, I think you should listen to Edward Deming. He’s incredible. He will teach you things that apply to your tiny small business all the way up to Toyota sized companies.

Paul: Excellent. Yeah, I’ve had a lot of experience with Deming and he definitely has some insight. Some amazing insight.

What’s With The Name “Simple Tiger?”

Paul: Okay, final question. Maybe. We’ll see. What’s with the name Simple Tiger?

Jeremiah: Ah. Good question and I like it. My father always used to call me “Tiger” growing up. And when I was thinking about starting a marketing agency or consultancy, I wanted a name that would stick in someone’s mind. And so, one of the key things or components you could have in marketing is something that’s not conceptual but is concrete. So, think “Apple.” Right? That sticks in your mind. You see it visually. Tiger was that for me. I wanted to carry with it a differentiator that applied to business that wasn’t so esoteric as tiger. How do you apply “tiger” to business? I wanted to take something complex, like search engine optimization, and simplify it and make it simple. And I wanted to apply the 80/20 principle, the Pareto Principle to everything. And I saw that as simplicity. And I saw simplicity as this art form where if I can master simplicity in what we do, then that would make me happy and so Simple Tiger thus was born. “Tiger” kind of carrying the effective component of our brand and “simple” kind of carrying the, I guess, the simplicity element of our brand.

Paul: Cool. Very cool.

Closing Advice

Paul: Well, we’ve been speaking with Jeremiah Smith of Simple Tiger and he’s an SEO expert and they’re an SEO agency and as you can tell there’s a lot of value here, in what he said. So, as you’ve been listening, we’ve been throwing out book names and different things you should go and look at. All of that will be in the shownotes so I encourage you to look there. You’ll find links to Simple Tiger and a way to actually contact Jeremiah. So, Jeremiah, thank you very much! Is there anything you want to close out and say as we sort of wind down here?

Jeremiah: I guess, if I could just leave everybody with one marketing maxim, it’s something I really like. I think the CMO of Ammex said this about branding specifically. So, if you’re dealing with your brand messaging right now and everything right now, this is just a really cool piece of advice. It’s really simple. “Be clear, not clever, be different, not better.”

And I love that because the idea there is that a lot of brands try to come up with some clever name or clever lingo or clever brand messaging and end up confusing people and not actually connecting. So, instead of being clever, just be clear. Be very clear about what it is that you do and who you are. And then, don’t be better, be different because better is completely subjective but different is very objective and you can speak directly to a person’s concerns if you can differentiate yourself into their category. And then, that’s how you can appeal to people. So that my favorite marketing kind of maxim.

Paul: Very cool. Well, I want to thank you. Thank you for spending the time with us. And who knows, maybe we’ll have you back soon.

Jeremiah: That would be awesome. I’d be happy to come back. Thank you so much for everything, Paul. It was an honor to be here.

Paul: Alright, thank you.

More Episodes:

This is the Part 5, the final episode of our podcast with Jeremiah Smith!

If you missed any of the previous episodes from our conversation with him, you can listen to them here:
Part 1: An Introduction to SEO With Jeremiah Smith
Part 2: SEO: Google & Artificial Intelligence
Part 3: SEO: How To Create Content For Your Business
Part 4: Is SEO Always Worth It?

Show Notes:

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