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12 episodes with helpshift
3 episodes with helpshift
2 episodes with helpshift
2 episodes with helpshift
2 episodes with helpshift
2 episodes with helpshift
2 episodes with helpshift
Episode SummaryOn this episode of the Player Driven, Greg sits down with Christine Dart, the global head of marketing at Helpshift and a driving force behind the podcast itself. Christine shares her journey from aerospace engineering to marketing leadership, how she successfully bridges B2B and B2C strategies, and her knack for crafting initiatives that boost engagement and revenue.Get ready to explore the multifaceted world of marketing, from building grassroots campaigns to running enterprise-level account-based marketing (ABM) strategies. Whether you're a budding marketer or a seasoned pro, this episode is packed with actionable advice and industry insights.Key Takeaways1. Adapting Marketing to a Changing Landscape Christine highlights the rapidly evolving nature of marketing roles, from demand generation to customer marketing. She emphasizes the importance of staying ahead of trends and understanding how new strategies like ABM are reshaping the way companies engage their audience.2. Lessons from a Non-Traditional Path Christine's journey from aerospace engineering to marketing leadership underscores the power of adaptability. Her early entrepreneurial efforts, including running a ballroom dance business, taught her valuable lessons in grassroots marketing and creative problem-solving.3. Leadership in Marketing As a marketing leader, Christine discusses the importance of aligning with company goals, understanding team dynamics, and hiring people whose strengths complement her own. Delegation, she says, is a critical skill for any leader who wants to maximize their team's potential.4. The Value of Networking and Mentorship Christine advises budding marketers to learn from others by reaching out to professionals, attending networking events, and joining industry groups. She shares her own experiences at events like the SPRYNG conference, where exchanging ideas with peers offered deeper insights than reading online articles.5. Measuring Success with OKRs Christine explains how Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) help align individual and departmental goals with broader company objectives. She illustrates how clear metrics and collaboration across teams drive impactful marketing campaigns.Timestamps [02:30] – Christine's journey from aerospace engineering to marketing. [10:15] – The many roles in marketing: From product marketing to event marketing. [22:45] – The importance of delegation and hiring for strengths. [30:50] – How OKRs align teams and drive measurable success. [45:15] – Advice for indie studios starting with limited marketing budgets.Featured Guest: Christine Dart Expertise: B2B marketing, customer engagement, and grassroots strategies. Background: Transitioned from aerospace engineering to marketing leadership, with experience in startups and enterprise organizations.Memorable Quotes “Marketing is all about listening—to your customers, your team, and the market.” “Don't be afraid to fail fast. Pivoting quickly is part of finding what works.” “OKRs help us align big-picture goals with the day-to-day work that drives results.”
In the first of the 14th series of CX Superheroes podcasts, we welcome CEO of Helpshift, Eric Vermillion. In conversation with series host, Christopher Brooks from Lexden, the focus is on how effective tech can improve customer outcomes. Eric's experience goes back to the start of the modern CX movement, having worked with vendors who pioneered the landscape we know today. From working with everyone from local retailers to global enterprises, Eric has one of the most informed perspectives on how to optimise technology to both improve the experiences customers encounter, but also the outcomes they are left with. We deep dive into the advancement of the gaming sector when it comes to CX, and Eric showcases some great examples others can learn from. Here's a link to their case studies on their website too. https://www.helpshift.com/customers/. Both Christopher and Eric have worked with gaming companies and share their hands on experiences of how different the 'player' is when it comes to dealing with companies. And he explains how AI isn't a magic wand, it's about creating the best outcomes and then employing the tech to achieve this, rather than the other way around. And leaving the humans to deepen the relationship - a perfect mix. A really insightful podcast rich with ideas and tips for those looking to create better outcomes.
Discover how AI is reshaping customer support and transforming business operations with Eric Vermillion, CEO of Helpshift. On this episode of The Customer Service Revolution, Eric walks us through Helpshift's evolution from a Bay Area startup to a key player in the gaming industry, highlighting how AI is revolutionizing contact centers. By automating tedious tasks and enhancing customer interactions, AI is improving efficiency and forging more relational connections between businesses and their customers. Address your fears and doubts about AI integration with insights straight from Eric. We tackle the common concerns about job loss and potential sabotage within contact centers, explaining how AI can enhance human roles by making jobs more engaging and reducing turnover. From automating repetitive tasks to personalizing customer interactions, AI makes customer support more rewarding for agents and customers. Learn how Helpshift addresses these concerns and the importance of having a solid operational plan for AI implementation. Peek into the future of customer experience and understand the criticality of effective customer service on vital performance indicators like customer satisfaction, NPS, and retention. Eric shares a compelling case study with SYBO, the maker of Subway Surfers, demonstrating AI's impact. We also emphasize the blend of technology and human skills needed to create superhuman agents, build long-term customer relationships, and improve employee morale. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the future of customer service and AI's transformative potential. Here are just a few takeaways: Helpshift's evolution from a Bay Area startup to a major player in the gaming industry An examination of AI's role in automating tedious tasks and enhancing customer interactions to boost efficiency and build stronger customer relationships Addressing common fears about AI integration, like job loss and potential sabotage Explaining how AI can enhance human roles Insights on the importance of a solid operational plan for effective AI implementation Case study on SYBO, maker of Subway Surfers, showcasing AI's impact on customer experience and business growth Blending technology with human skills to create superhuman agents, improving both customer satisfaction and employee morale Exploring AI's future in customer service, including its potential to personalize interactions and drive long-term customer loyalty Resources mentioned: https://thedijuliusgroup.com/the-customer-service-revolution-podcast/ https://thedijuliusgroup.com/project/cx-executive-academy/ https://thedijuliusgroup.com/project/exea/ https://thedijuliusgroup.com/blog/ Get The Employee Experience Revolution book: thedijuliusgroup.com/product/the-employee-experience-revolution-pre-sale https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericjvermillion/ gethelpshift.com www.thedijuliusgroup.com Follow and Review: We'd love for you to follow us if you haven't yet. Click that purple '+' in the top right corner of your Apple Podcasts app. We'd love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast. *** EPISODE CREDITS: If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com. Let them know I sent you.
In this episode of the Player: Engage Podcast, host Greg is joined by Christine Dart, the Global Head of Marketing at Helpshift and a Marketing Leader at Keywords Player Engagement. Christine shares her extensive experience in B2B marketing within the video game industry, discussing her dynamic strategies that have led to significant growth in revenues and leads. She also delves into her personal journey from mechanical designer to marketing maven, highlighting her transition through various roles and the importance of adaptability and continuous learning in marketing.Key takeaways from this episode include: The nuances between B2B and B2C marketing and how foundational marketing principles apply across both. Insights into the evolving roles within marketing departments, such as the integration of customer marketing and the shift of business development roles under marketing umbrellas. Christine's approach to leadership in marketing, emphasizing the importance of alignment with company goals, understanding team dynamics, and the power of effective delegation.For a deeper dive into how marketing strategies can drive business success and the importance of aligning marketing efforts with broader business objectives, tune into this episode of the Player: Engage Podcast. Discover Christine Dart's expert strategies and learn how to apply them to your own marketing efforts for measurable success.
In this episode of the Player Engage podcast, host Greg Posner and guest Erik Ashby, Senior Director and Head of Product Research at Helpshift, delve into the evolving landscape of gaming technology and player experiences. They kick off the discussion with the buzz around GDC, sharing their excitement for the event and the latest trends in the gaming industry. Erik, with his extensive background at Microsoft and Helpshift, brings a wealth of knowledge to the table, particularly in the realm of AI and its integration into customer service, as highlighted by the recent developments at Klarna.The conversation then shifts to the future of gaming, exploring the dynamics of games as a service, the impact of subscription models, and the potential shift in gaming experiences with the rise of personal screens within homes. They also tackle the contentious issue of walled gardens in the tech industry, focusing on the Epic vs. Apple lawsuit and its implications for app marketplaces and consumer choice.Key takeaways from this episode include: The transformative role of AI in customer service and its potential to redefine the industry. The shifting trends in gaming consumption, from big screens to personal devices. The ongoing battle between open ecosystems and walled gardens, with a spotlight on the Epic vs. Apple case.
In this episode, Oscar Clark (he/him) is joined by Greg Posner (he/him) of Helpshift to discuss all things customer service within the mobile and console games industry. You can find the full audio version of this episode by visiting: https://anchor.fm/game-dev-london Visit Our Website - https://www.gamedev.london/ - for meet ups, game jams, competitions and more! Join Our Discord - https://discord.gg/Mx7Sh2G Follow Us On Twitch - https://www.twitch.tv/gamedevlondon
We all like it when things go smoothly and prefer it to stay that way but the Universe is messy so people's experience with mobile apps and mobile games can be too. As much as app developers do their best to deliver the best experience to the users, they are just human beings, even if the code is perfect - which is extremely rarely the case if ever, there are maybe issues with how people interact with the app. The solution? A support system that will help you to resolve all those issues for your mobile game users. Today, Eric will tell us about the challenges of mobile game player support. Today's Topics Include: Eric Vermillion's background What is Helpshift The challenges and requirements of mobile game support What it takes to provide support for non-mobile game platforms The role of Generative AI in a video game player support Can Generative AI impact programmatic ad campaigns' costs Generative AI impact on jobs in the programmatic ad sector AR and VR games player support What Eric would like to change about the programmatic tech sector the most Android or iOS? Eric's first mobile phone Leaving his smartphone at home, what features would Eric miss most? What features he would like to see added to his smartphone? Links and Resources: Eric Vermillion on LinkedIn Helpshift company Business Of Apps - connecting the app industry Quotes from Eric Vermillion: “I find mobile games incredibly interesting because having a nice chunk of my career working in a broader cross-vertical support environment where I've done banks, insurance companies, some legacy brands and sort of have this preconceived notion of how the support is delivered - you put a bunch of people in the building and you call them, you send out physical mail and that sort of stuff. Gaming moves faster than that!" “For consoles, you aren't in the game, you aren't in the environment and so you have to depart and go engage and support in a different way." Follow the Business Of Apps podcast Linkedin | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube
Join us for a comprehensive dialogue with Erik Ashby, the innovative Head of Product at Helpshift. We'll be discussing the captivating landscape of generative AI, examining its current standing and future growth potential. We'll dissect how progressive businesses are effectively utilizing these revolutionary tools to make substantial impacts within their respective fields. Moreover, we'll explore Helpshift's strategic approach towards AI and their aspiration to utilize its potential to create unparalleled user experiences. It's a thought-provoking conversation that provides a unique insight into the promising realm of AI.
Tushar Makhija has over 10 years of experience spanning revenue & growth leadership, product, and customer success. He was the founding Sales leader at two SaaS companies, Helpshift and Airbase, and helped them grow ARR to eight figures, respectively. In 2021, he co-founded TeamOhana with a vision to empower growing companies to unify around their most important and expensive asset: people. TeamOhana brings collaboration, visibility, and control of headcount to all key stakeholders in a single integrated platform, ensuring that you build a team in the best way possible: as a team. Connect with Behind Company Lines and HireOtter Website Facebook Twitter LinkedIn:Behind Company LinesHireOtter Instagram Buzzsprout
AB Periasamy, Co-Founder and CEO of MinIO, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss what it means to be truly open source and the current and future state of multi-cloud. AB explains how MinIO was born from the idea that the world was going to produce a massive amount of data, and what it's been like to see that come true and continue to be the future outlook. AB and Corey explore why some companies are hesitant to move to cloud, and AB describes why he feels the move is inevitable regardless of cost. AB also reveals how he has helped create a truly free open-source software, and how his partnership with Amazon has been beneficial. About ABAB Periasamy is the co-founder and CEO of MinIO, an open source provider of high performance, object storage software. In addition to this role, AB is an active investor and advisor to a wide range of technology companies, from H2O.ai and Manetu where he serves on the board to advisor or investor roles with Humio, Isovalent, Starburst, Yugabyte, Tetrate, Postman, Storj, Procurify, and Helpshift. Successful exits include Gitter.im (Gitlab), Treasure Data (ARM) and Fastor (SMART).AB co-founded Gluster in 2005 to commoditize scalable storage systems. As CTO, he was the primary architect and strategist for the development of the Gluster file system, a pioneer in software defined storage. After the company was acquired by Red Hat in 2011, AB joined Red Hat's Office of the CTO. Prior to Gluster, AB was CTO of California Digital Corporation, where his work led to scaling of the commodity cluster computing to supercomputing class performance. His work there resulted in the development of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's “Thunder” code, which, at the time was the second fastest in the world. AB holds a Computer Science Engineering degree from Annamalai University, Tamil Nadu, India.AB is one of the leading proponents and thinkers on the subject of open source software - articulating the difference between the philosophy and business model. An active contributor to a number of open source projects, he is a board member of India's Free Software Foundation.Links Referenced: MinIO: https://min.io/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/abperiasamy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abperiasamy/ Email: mailto:ab@min.io TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Chronosphere. When it costs more money and time to observe your environment than it does to build it, there's a problem. With Chronosphere, you can shape and transform observability data based on need, context and utility. Learn how to only store the useful data you need to see in order to reduce costs and improve performance at chronosphere.io/corey-quinn. That's chronosphere.io/corey-quinn. And my thanks to them for sponsor ing my ridiculous nonsense. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn, and I have taken a somewhat strong stance over the years on the relative merits of multi-cloud, and when it makes sense and when it doesn't. And it's time for me to start modifying some of those. To have that conversation and several others as well, with me today on this promoted guest episode is AB Periasamy, CEO and co-founder of MinIO. AB, it's great to have you back.AB: Yes, it's wonderful to be here again, Corey.Corey: So, one thing that I want to start with is defining terms. Because when we talk about multi-cloud, there are—to my mind at least—smart ways to do it and ways that are frankly ignorant. The thing that I've never quite seen is, it's greenfield, day one. Time to build something. Let's make sure we can build and deploy it to every cloud provider we might ever want to use.And that is usually not the right path. Whereas different workloads in different providers, that starts to make a lot more sense. When you do mergers and acquisitions, as big companies tend to do in lieu of doing anything interesting, it seems like they find it oh, we're suddenly in multiple cloud providers, should we move this acquisition to a new cloud? No. No, you should not.One of the challenges, of course, is that there's a lot of differentiation between the baseline offerings that cloud providers have. MinIO is interesting in that it starts and stops with an object store that is mostly S3 API compatible. Have I nailed the basic premise of what it is you folks do?AB: Yeah, it's basically an object store. Amazon S3 versus us, it's actually—that's the comparable, right? Amazon S3 is a hosted cloud storage as a service, but underneath the underlying technology is called object-store. MinIO is a software and it's also open-source and it's the software that you can deploy on the cloud, deploy on the edge, deploy anywhere, and both Amazon S3 and MinIO are exactly S3 API compatible. It's a drop-in replacement. You can write applications on MinIO and take it to AWS S3, and do the reverse. Amazon made S3 API a standard inside AWS, we made S3 API standard across the whole cloud, all the cloud edge, everywhere, rest of the world.Corey: I want to clarify two points because otherwise I know I'm going to get nibbled to death by ducks on the internet. When you say open-source, it is actually open-source; you're AGPL, not source available, or, “We've decided now we're going to change our model for licensing because oh, some people are using this without paying us money,” as so many companies seem to fall into that trap. You are actually open-source and no one reasonable is going to be able to disagree with that definition.The other pedantic part of it is when something says that it's S3 compatible on an API basis, like, the question is always does that include the weird bugs that we wish it wouldn't have, or some of the more esoteric stuff that seems to be a constant source of innovation? To be clear, I don't think that you need to be particularly compatible with those very corner and vertex cases. For me, it's always been the basic CRUD operations: can you store an object? Can you give it back to me? Can you delete the thing? And maybe an update, although generally object stores tend to be atomic. How far do you go down that path of being, I guess, a faithful implementation of what the S3 API does, and at which point you decide that something is just, honestly, lunacy and you feel no need to wind up supporting that?AB: Yeah, the unfortunate part of it is we have to be very, very deep. It only takes one API to break. And it's not even, like, one API we did not implement; one API under a particular circumstance, right? Like even if you see, like, AWS SDK is, right, Java SDK, different versions of Java SDK will interpret the same API differently. And AWS S3 is an API, it's not a standard.And Amazon has published the REST specifications, API specs, but they are more like religious text. You can interpret it in many ways. Amazon's own SDK has interpreted, like, this in several ways, right? The only way to get it right is, like, you have to have a massive ecosystem around your application. And if one thing breaks—today, if I commit a code and it introduced a regression, I will immediately hear from a whole bunch of community what I broke.There's no certification process here. There is no industry consortium to control the standard, but then there is an accepted standard. Like, if the application works, they need works. And one way to get it right is, like, Amazon SDKs, all of those language SDKs, to be cleaner, simpler, but applications can even use MinIO SDK to talk to Amazon and Amazon SDK to talk to MinIO. Now, there is a clear, cooperative model.And I actually have tremendous respect for Amazon engineers. They have only been kind and meaningful, like, reasonable partnership. Like, if our community reports a bug that Amazon rolled out a new update in one of the region and the S3 API broke, they will actually go fix it. They will never argue, “Why are you using MinIO SDK?” Their engineers, they do everything by reason. That's the reason why they gained credibility.Corey: I think, on some level, that we can trust that the API is not going to meaningfully shift, just because so much has been built on top of it over the last 15, almost 16 years now that even slight changes require massive coordination. I remember there was a little bit of a kerfuffle when they announced that they were going to be disabling the BitTorrent endpoint in S3 and it was no longer going to be supported in new regions, and eventually they were turning it off. There were still people pushing back on that. I'm still annoyed by some of the documentation around the API that says that it may not return a legitimate error code when it errors with certain XML interpretations. It's… it's kind of become very much its own thing.AB: [unintelligible 00:06:22] a problem, like, we have seen, like, even stupid errors similar to that, right? Like, HTTP headers are supposed to be case insensitive, but then there are some language SDKs will send us in certain type of casing and they expect the case to be—the response to be same way. And that's not HTTP standard. If we have to accept that bug and respond in the same way, then we are asking a whole bunch of community to go fix that application. And Amazon's problem are our problems too. We have to carry that baggage.But some places where we actually take a hard stance is, like, Amazon introduced that initially, the bucket policies, like access control list, then finally came IAM, then we actually, for us, like, the best way to teach the community is make best practices the standard. The only way to do it. We have been, like, educating them that we actually implemented ACLs, but we removed it. So, the customers will no longer use it. The scale at which we are growing, if I keep it, then I can never force them to remove.So, we have been pedantic about, like, how, like, certain things that if it's a good advice, force them to do it. That approach has paid off, but the problem is still quite real. Amazon also admits that S3 API is no longer simple, but at least it's not like POSIX, right? POSIX is a rich set of API, but doesn't do useful things that we need to do. So, Amazon's APIs are built on top of simple primitive foundations that got the storage architecture correct, and then doing sophisticated functionalities on top of the simple primitives, these atomic RESTful APIs, you can finally do it right and you can take it to great lengths and still not break the storage system.So, I'm not so concerned. I think it's time for both of us to slow down and then make sure that the ease of operation and adoption is the goal, then trying to create an API Bible.Corey: Well, one differentiation that you have that frankly I wish S3 would wind up implementing is this idea of bucket quotas. I would give a lot in certain circumstances to be able to say that this S3 bucket should be able to hold five gigabytes of storage and no more. Like, you could fix a lot of free tier problems, for example, by doing something like that. But there's also the problem that you'll see in data centers where, okay, we've now filled up whatever storage system we're using. We need to either expand it at significant cost and it's going to take a while or it's time to go and maybe delete some of the stuff we don't necessarily need to keep in perpetuity.There is no moment of reckoning in traditional S3 in that sense because, oh, you can just always add one more gigabyte at 2.3 or however many cents it happens to be, and you wind up with an unbounded growth problem that you're never really forced to wrestle with. Because it's infinite storage. They can add drives faster than you can fill them in most cases. So, it's it just feels like there's an economic story, if nothing else, just from a governance control and make sure this doesn't run away from me, and alert me before we get into the multi-petabyte style of storage for my Hello World WordPress website.AB: Mm-hm. Yeah, so I always thought that Amazon did not do this—it's not just Amazon, the cloud players, right—they did not do this because they want—is good for their business; they want all the customers' data, like unrestricted growth of data. Certainly it is beneficial for their business, but there is an operational challenge. When you set quota—this is why we grudgingly introduced this feature. We did not have quotas and we didn't want to because Amazon S3 API doesn't talk about quota, but the enterprise community wanted this so badly.And eventually we [unintelligible 00:09:54] it and we gave. But there is one issue to be aware of, right? The problem with quota is that you as an object storage administrator, you set a quota, let's say this bucket, this application, I don't see more than 20TB; I'm going to set 100TB quota. And then you forget it. And then you think in six months, they will reach 20TB. The reality is, in six months they reach 100TB.And then when nobody expected—everybody has forgotten that there was a code a certain place—suddenly application start failing. And when it fails, it doesn't—even though the S3 API responds back saying that insufficient space, but then the application doesn't really pass that error all the way up. When applications fail, they fail in unpredictable ways. By the time the application developer realizes that it's actually object storage ran out of space, the lost time and it's a downtime. So, as long as they have proper observability—because I mean, I've will also asked observability, that it can alert you that you are only going to run out of space soon. If you have those system in place, then go for quota. If not, I would agree with the S3 API standard that is not about cost. It's about operational, unexpected accidents.Corey: Yeah, on some level, we wound up having to deal with the exact same problem with disk volumes, where my default for most things was, at 70%, I want to start getting pings on it and at 90%, I want to be woken up for it. So, for small volumes, you wind up with a runaway log or whatnot, you have a chance to catch it and whatnot, and for the giant multi-petabyte things, okay, well, why would you alert at 70% on that? Well, because procurement takes a while when we're talking about buying that much disk for that much money. It was a roughly good baseline for these things. The problem, of course, is when you have none of that, and well it got full so oops-a-doozy.On some level, I wonder if there's a story around soft quotas that just scream at you, but let you keep adding to it. But that turns into implementation details, and you can build something like that on top of any existing object store if you don't need the hard limit aspect.AB: Actually, that is the right way to do. That's what I would recommend customers to do. Even though there is hard quota, I will tell, don't use it, but use soft quota. And the soft quota, instead of even soft quota, you monitor them. On the cloud, at least you have some kind of restriction that the more you use, the more you pay; eventually the month end bills, it shows up.On MinIO, when it's deployed on these large data centers, that it's unrestricted access, quickly you can use a lot of space, no one knows what data to delete, and no one will tell you what data to delete. The way to do this is there has to be some kind of accountability.j, the way to do it is—actually [unintelligible 00:12:27] have some chargeback mechanism based on the bucket growth. And the business units have to pay for it, right? That IT doesn't run for free, right? IT has to have a budget and it has to be sponsored by the applications team.And you measure, instead of setting a hard limit, you actually charge them that based on the usage of your bucket, you're going to pay for it. And this is a observability problem. And you can call it soft quotas, but it hasn't been to trigger an alert in observability. It's observability problem. But it actually is interesting to hear that as soft quotas, which makes a lot of sense.Corey: It's one of those problems that I think people only figure out after they've experienced it once. And then they look like wizards from the future who, “Oh, yeah, you're going to run into a quota storage problem.” Yeah, we all find that out because the first time we smack into something and live to regret it. Now, we can talk a lot about the nuances and implementation and low level detail of this stuff, but let's zoom out of it. What are you folks up to these days? What is the bigger picture that you're seeing of object storage and the ecosystem?AB: Yeah. So, when we started, right, our idea was that world is going to produce incredible amount of data. In ten years from now, we are going to drown in data. We've been saying that today and it will be true. Every year, you say ten years from now and it will still be valid, right?That was the reason for us to play this game. And we saw that every one of these cloud players were incompatible with each other. It's like early Unix days, right? Like a bunch of operating systems, everything was incompatible and applications were beginning to adopt this new standard, but they were stuck. And then the cloud storage players, whatever they had, like, GCS can only run inside Google Cloud, S3 can only run inside AWS, and the cloud player's game was bring all the world's data into the cloud.And that actually requires enormous amount of bandwidth. And moving data into the cloud at that scale, if you look at the amount of data the world is producing, if the data is produced inside the cloud, it's a different game, but the data is produced everywhere else. MinIO's idea was that instead of introducing yet another API standard, Amazon got the architecture right and that's the right way to build large-scale infrastructure. If we stick to Amazon S3 API instead of introducing it another standard, [unintelligible 00:14:40] API, and then go after the world's data. When we started in 2014 November—it's really 2015, we started, it was laughable. People thought that there won't be a need for MinIO because the whole world will basically go to AWS S3 and they will be the world's data store. Amazon is capable of doing that; the race is not over, right?Corey: And it still couldn't be done now. The thing is that they would need to fundamentally rethink their, frankly, you serious data egress charges. The problem is not that it's expensive to store data in AWS; it's that it's expensive to store data and then move it anywhere else for analysis or use on something else. So, there are entire classes of workload that people should not consider the big three cloud providers as the place where that data should live because you're never getting it back.AB: Spot on, right? Even if network is free, right, Amazon makes, like, okay, zero egress-ingress charge, the data we're talking about, like, most of MinIO deployments, they start at petabytes. Like, one to ten petabyte, feels like 100 terabyte. For even if network is free, try moving a ten-petabyte infrastructure into the cloud. How are you going to move it?Even with FedEx and UPS giving you a lot of bandwidth in their trucks, it is not possible, right? I think the data will continue to be produced everywhere else. So, our bet was there we will be [unintelligible 00:15:56]—instead of you moving the data, you can run MinIO where there is data, and then the whole world will look like AWS's S3 compatible object store. We took a very different path. But now, when I say the same story that when what we started with day one, it is no longer laughable, right?People believe that yes, MinIO is there because our market footprint is now larger than Amazon S3. And as it goes to production, customers are now realizing it's basically growing inside a shadow IT and eventually businesses realize the bulk of their business-critical data is sitting on MinIO and that's how it's surfacing up. So now, what we are seeing, this year particularly, all of these customers are hugely concerned about cost optimization. And as part of the journey, there is also multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud initiatives. They want to make sure that their application can run on any cloud or on the same software can run on their colos like Equinix, or like bunch of, like, Digital Reality, anywhere.And MinIO's software, this is what we set out to do. MinIO can run anywhere inside the cloud, all the way to the edge, even on Raspberry Pi. It's now—whatever we started with is now has become reality; the timing is perfect for us.Corey: One of the challenges I've always had with the idea of building an application with the idea to run it anywhere is you can make explicit technology choices around that, and for example, object store is a great example because most places you go now will or can have an object store available for your use. But there seem to be implementation details that get lost. And for example, even load balancers wind up being implemented in different ways with different scaling times and whatnot in various environments. And past a certain point, it's okay, we're just going to have to run it ourselves on top of HAproxy or Nginx, or something like it, running in containers themselves; you're reinventing the wheel. Where is that boundary between, we're going to build this in a way that we can run anywhere and the reality that I keep running into, which is we tried to do that but we implicitly without realizing it built in a lot of assumptions that everything would look just like this environment that we started off in.AB: The good part is that if you look at the S3 API, every request has the site name, the endpoint, bucket name, the path, and the object name. Every request is completely self-contained. It's literally a HTTP call away. And this means that whether your application is running on Android, iOS, inside a browser, JavaScript engine, anywhere across the world, they don't really care whether the bucket is served from EU or us-east or us-west. It doesn't matter at all, so it actually allows you by API, you can build a globally unified data infrastructure, some buckets here, some buckets there.That's actually not the problem. The problem comes when you have multiple clouds. Different teams, like, part M&A, the part—like they—even if you don't do M&A, different teams, no two data engineer will would agree on the same software stack. Then where they will all end up with different cloud players and some is still running on old legacy environment.When you combine them, the problem is, like, let's take just the cloud, right? How do I even apply a policy, that access control policy, how do I establish unified identity? Because I want to know this application is the only one who is allowed to access this bucket. Can I have that same policy on Google Cloud or Azure, even though they are different teams? Like if that employer, that project, or that admin, if he or she leaves the job, how do I make sure that that's all protected?You want unified identity, you want unified access control policies. Where are the encryption key store? And then the load balancer itself, the load, its—load balancer is not the problem. But then unless you adopt S3 API as your standard, the definition of what a bucket is different from Microsoft to Google to Amazon.Corey: Yeah, the idea of an of the PUTS and retrieving of actual data is one thing, but then you have how do you manage it the control plane layer of the object store and how do you rationalize that? What are the naming conventions? How do you address it? I even ran into something similar somewhat recently when I was doing an experiment with one of the Amazon Snowball edge devices to move some data into S3 on a lark. And the thing shows up and presents itself on the local network as an S3 endpoint, but none of their tooling can accept a different endpoint built into the configuration files; you have to explicitly use it as an environment variable or as a parameter on every invocation of something that talks to it, which is incredibly annoying.I would give a lot for just to be able to say, oh, when you're talking in this profile, that's always going to be your S3 endpoint. Go. But no, of course not. Because that would make it easier to use something that wasn't them, so why would they ever be incentivized to bake that in?AB: Yeah. Snowball is an important element to move data, right? That's the UPS and FedEx way of moving data, but what I find customers doing is they actually use the tools that we built for MinIO because the Snowball appliance also looks like S3 API-compatible object store. And in fact, like, I've been told that, like, when you want to ship multiple Snowball appliances, they actually put MinIO to make it look like one unit because MinIO can erase your code objects across multiple Snowball appliances. And the MC tool, unlike AWS CLI, which is really meant for developers, like low-level calls, MC gives you unique [scoring 00:21:08] tools, like lscp, rsync-like tools, and it's easy to move and copy and migrate data. Actually, that's how people deal with it.Corey: Oh, God. I hadn't even considered the problem of having a fleet of Snowball edges here that you're trying to do a mass data migration on, which is basically how you move petabyte-scale data, is a whole bunch of parallelism. But having to figure that out on a case-by-case basis would be nightmarish. That's right, there is no good way to wind up doing that natively.AB: Yeah. In fact, Western Digital and a few other players, too, now the Western Digital created a Snowball-like appliance and they put MinIO on it. And they are actually working with some system integrators to help customers move lots of data. But Snowball-like functionality is important and more and more customers who need it.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. I'm not going to dance around the problem. Your. Engineers. Are. Burned. Out. They're tired from pagers waking them up at 2 am for something that could have waited until after their morning coffee. Ring Ring, Who's There? It's Nagios, the original call of duty! They're fed up with relying on two or three different “monitoring tools” that still require them to manually trudge through logs to decipher what might be wrong. Simply put, there's a better way. Observability tools like Honeycomb (and very little else because they do admittedly set the bar) show you the patterns and outliers of how users experience your code in complex and unpredictable environments so you can spend less time firefighting and more time innovating. It's great for your business, great for your engineers, and, most importantly, great for your customers. Try FREE today at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. That's honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud.Corey: Increasingly, it felt like, back in the on-prem days, that you'd have a file server somewhere that was either a SAN or it was going to be a NAS. The question was only whether it presented it to various things as a volume or as a file share. And then in cloud, the default storage mechanism, unquestionably, was object store. And now we're starting to see it come back again. So, it started to increasingly feel, in a lot of ways, like Cloud is no longer so much a place that is somewhere else, but instead much more of an operating model for how you wind up addressing things.I'm wondering when the generation of prosumer networking equipment, for example, is going to say, “Oh, and send these logs over to what object store?” Because right now, it's still write a file and SFTP it somewhere else, at least the good ones; some of the crap ones still want old unencrypted FTP, which is neither here nor there. But I feel like it's coming back around again. Like, when do even home users wind up instead of where do you save this file to having the cloud abstraction, which hopefully, you'll never have to deal with an S3-style endpoint, but that can underpin an awful lot of things. It feels like it's coming back and that's cloud is the de facto way of thinking about things. Is that what you're seeing? Does that align with your belief on this?AB: I actually, fundamentally believe in the long run, right, applications will go SaaS, right? Like, if you remember the days that you used to install QuickBooks and ACT and stuff, like, on your data center, you used to run your own Exchange servers, like, those days are gone. I think these applications will become SaaS. But then the infrastructure building blocks for these SaaS, whether they are cloud or their own colo, I think that in the long run, it will be multi-cloud and colo all combined and all of them will look alike.But what I find from the customer's journey, the Old World and the New World is incompatible. When they shifted from bare metal to virtualization, they didn't have to rewrite their application. But this time, you have—it as a tectonic shift. Every single application, you have to rewrite. If you retrofit your application into the cloud, bad idea, right? It's going to cost you more and I would rather not do it.Even though cloud players are trying to make, like, the file and block, like, file system services [unintelligible 00:24:01] and stuff, they make it available ten times more expensive than object, but it's just to [integrate 00:24:07] some legacy applications, but it's still a bad idea to just move legacy applications there. But what I'm finding is that the cost, if you still run your infrastructure with enterprise IT mindset, you're out of luck. It's going to be super expensive and you're going to be left out modern infrastructure, because of the scale, it has to be treated as code. You have to run infrastructure with software engineers. And this cultural shift has to happen.And that's why cloud, in the long run, everyone will look like AWS and we always said that and it's now being becoming true. Like, Kubernetes and MinIO basically is leveling the ground everywhere. It's giving ECS and S3-like infrastructure inside AWS or outside AWS, everywhere. But what I find the challenging part is the cultural mindset. If they still have the old cultural mindset and if they want to adopt cloud, it's not going to work.You have to change the DNA, the culture, the mindset, everything. The best way to do it is go to the cloud-first. Adopt it, modernize your application, learn how to run and manage infrastructure, then ask economics question, the unit economics. Then you will find the answers yourself.Corey: On some level, that is the path forward. I feel like there's just a very long tail of systems that have been working and have been meeting the business objective. And well, we should go and refactor this because, I don't know, a couple of folks on a podcast said we should isn't the most compelling business case for doing a lot of it. It feels like these things sort of sit there until there is more upside than just cost-cutting to changing the way these things are built and run. That's the reason that people have been talking about getting off of mainframe since the '90s in some companies, and the mainframe is very much still there. It is so ingrained in the way that they do business, they have to rethink a lot of the architectural things that have sprung up around it.I'm not trying to shame anyone for the [laugh] state that their environment is in. I've never yet met a company that was super proud of its internal infrastructure. Everyone's always apologizing because it's a fire. But they think someone else has figured this out somewhere and it all runs perfectly. I don't think it exists.AB: What I am finding is that if you are running it the enterprise IT style, you are the one telling the application developers, here you go, you have this many VMs and then you have, like, a VMware license and, like, Jboss, like WebLogic, and like a SQL Server license, now you go build your application, you won't be able to do it. Because application developers talk about Kafka and Redis and like Kubernetes, they don't speak the same language. And that's when these developers go to the cloud and then finish their application, take it live from zero lines of code before it can procure infrastructure and provision it to these guys. The change that has to happen is how can you give what the developers want now that reverse journey is also starting. In the long run, everything will look alike, but what I'm finding is if you're running enterprise IT infrastructure, traditional infrastructure, they are ashamed of talking about it.But then you go to the cloud and then at scale, some parts of it, you want to move for—now you really know why you want to move. For economic reasons, like, particularly the data-intensive workloads becomes very expensive. And at that part, they go to a colo, but leave the applications on the cloud. So, it's the multi-cloud model, I think, is inevitable. The expensive pieces that where you can—if you are looking at yourself as hyperscaler and if your data is growing, if your business focus is data-centric business, parts of the data and data analytics, ML workloads will actually go out, if you're looking at unit economics. If all you are focused on productivity, stick to the cloud and you're still better off.Corey: I think that's a divide that gets lost sometimes. When people say, “Oh, we're going to move to the cloud to save money.” It's, “No you're not.” At a five-year time horizon, I would be astonished if that juice were worth the squeeze in almost any scenario. The reason you go for therefore is for a capability story when it's right for you.That also means that steady-state workloads that are well understood can often be run more economically in a place that is not the cloud. Everyone thinks for some reason that I tend to be its cloud or it's trash. No, I'm a big fan of doing things that are sensible and cloud is not the right answer for every workload under the sun. Conversely, when someone says, “Oh, I'm building a new e-commerce store,” or whatnot, “And I've decided cloud is not for me.” It's, “Ehh, you sure about that?”That sounds like you are smack-dab in the middle of the cloud use case. But all these things wind up acting as constraints and strategic objectives. And technology and single-vendor answers are rarely going to be a panacea the way that their sales teams say that they will.AB: Yeah. And I find, like, organizations that have SREs, DevOps, and software engineers running the infrastructure, they actually are ready to go multi-cloud or go to colo because they have the—exactly know. They have the containers and Kubernetes microservices expertise. If you are still on a traditional SAN, NAS, and VM architecture, go to cloud, rewrite your application.Corey: I think there's a misunderstanding in the ecosystem around what cloud repatriation actually looks like. Everyone claims it doesn't exist because there's basically no companies out there worth mentioning that are, “Yep, we've decided the cloud is terrible, we're taking everything out and we are going to data centers. The end.” In practice, it's individual workloads that do not make sense in the cloud. Sometimes just the back-of-the-envelope analysis means it's not going to work out, other times during proof of concepts, and other times, as things have hit a certain point of scale, we're in an individual workload being pulled back makes an awful lot of sense. But everything else is probably going to stay in the cloud and these companies don't want to wind up antagonizing the cloud providers by talking about it in public. But that model is very real.AB: Absolutely. Actually, what we are finding with the application side, like, parts of their overall ecosystem, right, within the company, they run on the cloud, but the data side, some of the examples, like, these are in the range of 100 to 500 petabytes. The 500-petabyte customer actually started at 500 petabytes and their plan is to go at exascale. And they are actually doing repatriation because for them, their customers, it's consumer-facing and it's extremely price sensitive, but when you're a consumer-facing, every dollar you spend counts. And if you don't do it at scale, it matters a lot, right? It will kill the business.Particularly last two years, the cost part became an important element in their infrastructure, they knew exactly what they want. They are thinking of themselves as hyperscalers. They get commodity—the same hardware, right, just a server with a bunch of [unintelligible 00:30:35] and network and put it on colo or even lease these boxes, they know what their demand is. Even at ten petabytes, the economics starts impacting. If you're processing it, the data side, we have several customers now moving to colo from cloud and this is the range we are talking about.They don't talk about it publicly because sometimes, like, you don't want to be anti-cloud, but I think for them, they're also not anti-cloud. They don't want to leave the cloud. The completely leaving the cloud, it's a different story. That's not the case. Applications stay there. Data lakes, data infrastructure, object store, particularly if it goes to a colo.Now, your applications from all the clouds can access this centralized—centralized, meaning that one object store you run on colo and the colos themselves have worldwide data centers. So, you can keep the data infrastructure in a colo, but applications can run on any cloud, some of them, surprisingly, that they have global customer base. And not all of them are cloud. Sometimes like some applications itself, if you ask what type of edge devices they are running, edge data centers, they said, it's a mix of everything. What really matters is not the infrastructure. Infrastructure in the end is CPU, network, and drive. It's a commodity. It's really the software stack, you want to make sure that it's containerized and easy to deploy, roll out updates, you have to learn the Facebook-Google style running SaaS business. That change is coming.Corey: It's a matter of time and it's a matter of inevitability. Now, nothing ever stays the same. Everything always inherently changes in the full sweep of things, but I'm pretty happy with where I see the industry going these days. I want to start seeing a little bit less centralization around one or two big companies, but I am confident that we're starting to see an awareness of doing these things for the right reason more broadly permeating.AB: Right. Like, the competition is always great for customers. They get to benefit from it. So, the decentralization is a path to bringing—like, commoditizing the infrastructure. I think the bigger picture for me, what I'm particularly happy is, for a long time we carried industry baggage in the infrastructure space.If no one wants to change, no one wants to rewrite application. As part of the equation, we carried the, like, POSIX baggage, like SAN and NAS. You can't even do [unintelligible 00:32:48] as a Service, NFS as a Service. It's too much of a baggage. All of that is getting thrown out. Like, the cloud players be helped the customers start with a clean slate. I think to me, that's the biggest advantage. And that now we have a clean slate, we can now go on a whole new evolution of the stack, keeping it simpler and everyone can benefit from this change.Corey: Before we wind up calling this an episode, I do have one last question for you. As I mentioned at the start, you're very much open-source, as in legitimate open-source, which means that anyone who wants to can grab an implementation and start running it. How do you, I guess make peace with the fact that the majority of your user base is not paying you? And I guess how do you get people to decide, “You know what? We like the cut of his jib. Let's give him some money.”AB: Mm-hm. Yeah, if I looked at it that way, right, I have both the [unintelligible 00:33:38], right, on the open-source side as well as the business. But I don't see them to be conflicting. If I run as a charity, right, like, I take donation. If you love the product, here is the donation box, then that doesn't work at all, right?I shouldn't take investor money and I shouldn't have a team because I have a job to pay their bills, too. But I actually find open-source to be incredibly beneficial. For me, it's about delivering value to the customer. If you pay me $5, I ought to make you feel $50 worth of value. The same software you would buy from a proprietary vendor, why would—if I'm a customer, same software equal in functionality, if its proprietary, I would actually prefer open-source and pay even more.But why are, really, customers paying me now and what's our view on open-source? I'm actually the free software guy. Free software and open-source are actually not exactly equal, right? We are the purest of the open-source community and we have strong views on what open-source means, right. That's why we call it free software. And free here means freedom, right? Free does not mean gratis, that free of cost. It's actually about freedom and I deeply care about it.For me it's a philosophy and it's a way of life. That's why I don't believe in open core and other models that holding—giving crippleware is not open-source, right? I give you some freedom but not all, right, like, it's it breaks the spirit. So, MinIO is a hundred percent open-source, but it's open-source for the open-source community. We did not take some community-developed code and then added commercial support on top.We built the product, we believed in open-source, we still believe and we will always believe. Because of that, we open-sourced our work. And it's open-source for the open-source community. And as you build applications that—like the AGPL license on the derivative works, they have to be compatible with AGPL because we are the creator. If you cannot open-source, you open-source your application derivative works, you can buy a commercial license from us. We are the creator, we can give you a dual license. That's how the business model works.That way, the open-source community completely benefits. And it's about the software freedom. There are customers, for them, open-source is good thing and they want to pay because it's open-source. There are some customers that they want to pay because they can't open-source their application and derivative works, so they pay. It's a happy medium; that way I actually find open-source to be incredibly beneficial.Open-source gave us that trust, like, more than adoption rate. It's not like free to download and use. More than that, the customers that matter, the community that matters because they can see the code and they can see everything we did, it's not because I said so, marketing and sales, you believe them, whatever they say. You download the product, experience it and fall in love with it, and then when it becomes an important part of your business, that's when they engage with us because they talk about license compatibility and data loss or a data breach, all that becomes important. Open-source isn't—I don't see that to be conflicting for business. It actually is incredibly helpful. And customers see that value in the end.Corey: I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time. If people want to learn more, where should they go?AB: I was on Twitter and now I think I'm spending more time on, maybe, LinkedIn. I think if they—they can send me a request and then we can chat. And I'm always, like, spending time with other entrepreneurs, architects, and engineers, sharing what I learned, what I know, and learning from them. There is also a [community open channel 00:37:04]. And just send me a mail at ab@min.io and I'm always interested in talking to our user base.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:37:12]. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.AB: It's wonderful to be here.Corey: AB Periasamy, CEO and co-founder of MinIO. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this has been a promoted guest episode of Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice that presumably will also include an angry, loud comment that we can access from anywhere because of shared APIs.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.
In a fast-paced and wide-ranging discussion, co-hosts Brian Baglow and Peggy Anne Salz speak to the companies which are helping developers offer a flawless user experience from start to finish, with a focus on keeping players happy (and playing the game). Brian is joined by Eric Vermillion, the CEO of Helpshift, Peter Gerson, a Senior Manager with Keyword Studios, KatanaAI's Technology and Sales Director Dominick Kelly and Oz Syed, a Game Development Evangelist from Backtrace. This crack team explores how to do more with less, exploring the ways in which technology and automation can bring speed and efficiency to areas such as player support, localisation, quality assurance (QA) and more. As the role of artificial intelligence in game development and publishing becomes an ever more contentious topic, we dive into the reality of AI and machine learning in the player journey, looking for examples, case studies and best practice to help every studio without breaking the bank. ** Let's Connect **
As apps grow and users rely on apps for their daily activities the more necessity there is for customer support and improved customer experience. Helpshift is a mobile-first customer service platform. It delivers a great in-app help experience for many of the world's top mobile apps and mobile games. Having established their brand within specific industry verticals, The Global Head of Marketing, Christine Dart, dives into future shifts and their expansion into supporting the Metaverse. With this complex space and growing demand supporting the buying journey is critical to the success of operating within the Metaverse. Christine gives us insight into Helpshift's efforts to provide this customer support.
S2 | E6: Why In-App Support Is Key To Boosting User Engagement and Loyalty. Hey, App Growth Community! Welcome back to the App Growth Show, where we host mobile experts to provide valuable and actionable insights on how you can grow your app. No matter where you are in your app growth journey, we are able to help you achieve your mobile growth goals. Today we are thrilled to be joined by Eric Vermillion, the CEO of Helpshift. Eric is a veteran within the software and tech industry; before joining Helpshift, he played a major role in the growth of both BlueCat and Nice Ltd. Helpshift is a mobile-first customer service platform that delivers a revolutionary in-app help experience for many of the world's top mobile apps and games. Whenever users need help, they can get it right in the app with an always-on help experience that delivers immediate, automated solutions to many issues. Get ready for an interesting conversation around the importance of providing today's users with a slick and easy-to-use customer service option right inside the app and the many benefits a platform like Helpshift can have on your overall growth journey! The App Growth Show is sponsored by the App Growth Network, we are an award-winning North American app marketing agency. If you are interested to learn more about how you can grow with us, book a free call with us here to start supercharging your mobile growth today! Chat More With Our Speakers From Today: • Eric Vermillion (CEO @ Helpshift) https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericjvermillion/ Jennifer Sansone (Content Head @ App Growth Network) https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-sansone-143bba4/ Feel free to browse through our episodes and have a listen to one (or all!) of our talks about the many facets of what it takes to achieve mobile app success, from user acquisition to retention strategies and beyond. Subscribe now to AGN Podcast to gain insight on the latest app growth strategies and secrets at your preferred podcast directory: Spotify, Apple, Google. Want to chat with our team of experts today to supercharge your app growth? Book a call with us here!
App Masters - App Marketing & App Store Optimization with Steve P. Young
Discover how to monetize your mobile games. You will discover: - How game genres make sense for each ad type - Best practices for your monetization stack - The opportunity for brands in mobile gaming apps Eado Hofstetter is the Director of Publishing Account Management at Fyber - a Digital Turbine company. Eado has been a business leader in the app monetization sphere for over 5 years. He leads a team focusing on monetization for Gaming app publishers. Fyber was acquired by Digital Turbine in 2021, alongside AdColony, and is part of Digital Turbine's independent Mobile Growth Platform for advertisers, publishers, carriers and OEMS. ou can watch this video: https://youtu.be/FzdpDmNp6CI Get our greatest growth hacks to increase downloads & revenue: http://www.appmasters.com/training SPONSORS SocialPeta is the world's leading advertisement analysis platform, dedicated to offering top ad creatives and marketing strategies for both advertisers and publishers. Serving as an essential ad and marketing intelligence platform, SocialPeta covers advertising data from 80+ global ad networks across 70 countries and regions. Now they have more than 300 enterprise clients including Google, Tencent Games, NetEase Games, Garena, Gismart, Mobvista and etc. Learn more by visiting SocialPeta.com. Helpshift offers the easiest way to collect user feedback, report bugs, and more without users ever having to leave your app. You can even have a customizable Help Center and unlimited FAQs. Get Started for FREE: https://www.helpshift.com/appmasters/ Tired of overpaying for App Store Optimization? Get unlimited ASO and app marketing support to increase your keyword rankings, downloads, and revenue. Learn more at ASO Masters. *************** Follow us: YouTube: AppMasters.com/YouTube Instagram: @stevepyoung Twitter: @stevepyoung Facebook: App Masters *************** --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/app-marketing-podcast/message
App Masters - App Marketing & App Store Optimization with Steve P. Young
Are NFTs the future of mobile gaming? Social Peta provides us with insights on how mobile games are starting to use NFTs and crypto. You will also discover the most popular ad creatives that are winning in mobile gaming. SocialPeta covers 80+ global ad networks across 70 countries and regions, including Unity, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Tik Tok. They have accumulated 1B ad creatives, updating 1.2 M+ ad creatives on a daily basis. With SocialPeta, you can gain insight into your competitors' advertising data. Also, you will be informed of and inspired by advertising data of different dimensions from global networks, media and advertisers. Links: https://socialpeta.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/cguvenkaya/ You can watch this video: https://youtu.be/cQ3tmnvEGqM Get your app audited: http://www.appmasters.com/audit SPONSORS SocialPeta is the world's leading advertisement analysis platform, dedicated to offering top ad creatives and marketing strategies for both advertisers and publishers. Serving as an essential ad and marketing intelligence platform, SocialPeta covers advertising data from 80+ global ad networks across 70 countries and regions. Now they have more than 300 enterprise clients including Google, Tencent Games, NetEase Games, Garena, Gismart, Mobvista and etc. Learn more by visiting SocialPeta.com. Helpshift offers the easiest way to collect user feedback, report bugs, and more without users ever having to leave your app. You can even have a customizable Help Center and unlimited FAQs. Get Started for FREE: https://www.helpshift.com/appmasters/ Tired of overpaying for App Store Optimization? Get unlimited ASO and app marketing support to increase your keyword rankings, downloads, and revenue. Learn more at ASO Masters. *************** Follow us: YouTube: AppMasters.com/YouTube Instagram: @stevepyoung Twitter: @stevepyoung Facebook: App Masters *************** --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/app-marketing-podcast/message
App Masters - App Marketing & App Store Optimization with Steve P. Young
Steve's been kidnapped! And his ransom is $1M! So Steve contacted his friend, Alon Waller, from Bluethrone and asked him to host an EMERGENCY App Masters show in which you guys and he will grow an app valuation to $1M Get your app audited: http://www.appmasters.com/audit SPONSORS SocialPeta is the world's leading advertisement analysis platform, dedicated to offering top ad creatives and marketing strategies for both advertisers and publishers. Serving as an essential ad and marketing intelligence platform, SocialPeta covers advertising data from 80+ global ad networks across 70 countries and regions. Now they have more than 300 enterprise clients including Google, Tencent Games, NetEase Games, Garena, Gismart, Mobvista and etc. Learn more by visiting SocialPeta.com. Helpshift offers the easiest way to collect user feedback, report bugs, and more without users ever having to leave your app. You can even have a customizable Help Center and unlimited FAQs. Get Started for FREE: https://www.helpshift.com/appmasters/ Tired of overpaying for App Store Optimization? Get unlimited ASO and app marketing support to increase your keyword rankings, downloads, and revenue. Learn more at ASO Masters. *************** Follow us: YouTube: AppMasters.com/YouTube Instagram: @stevepyoung Twitter: @stevepyoung Facebook: App Masters *************** --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/app-marketing-podcast/message
App Masters - App Marketing & App Store Optimization with Steve P. Young
Have over a million downloads for your apps? You will discover how to increase your AdMob eCPM for mature apps. You will discover: - Why mediation plays a more important role in mature apps - Why you should be optimizing for formats, devices and GEOs - Waterfall vs bidding strategies Get our greatest growth hacks to increase downloads & revenue: http://www.appmasters.com/training Get your app audited: http://www.appmasters.com/audit SPONSORS SocialPeta is the world's leading advertisement analysis platform, dedicated to offering top ad creatives and marketing strategies for both advertisers and publishers. Serving as an essential ad and marketing intelligence platform, SocialPeta covers advertising data from 80+ global ad networks across 70 countries and regions. Now they have more than 300 enterprise clients including Google, Tencent Games, NetEase Games, Garena, Gismart, Mobvista and etc. Learn more by visiting SocialPeta.com. Helpshift offers the easiest way to collect user feedback, report bugs, and more without users ever having to leave your app. You can even have a customizable Help Center and unlimited FAQs. Get Started for FREE: https://www.helpshift.com/appmasters/ Tired of overpaying for App Store Optimization? Get unlimited ASO and app marketing support to increase your keyword rankings, downloads, and revenue. Learn more at ASO Masters. *************** Follow us: YouTube: AppMasters.com/YouTube Instagram: @stevepyoung Twitter: @stevepyoung Facebook: App Masters *************** --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/app-marketing-podcast/message
App Masters - App Marketing & App Store Optimization with Steve P. Young
Discover the best ways to optimize your app's paywall to increase your subscription rate. You will discover... - Average subscription price - Free trials analytics and benchmarks - Subscription retention - LTV benchmarks - Billing issues benchmarks Learn More: https://adapty.io/ https://adapty.io/resources/state-of-ios-in-app-purchases-2021 https://ru.linkedin.com/in/iwitaly Get your app audited: http://www.appmasters.com/audit SPONSORS SocialPeta is the world's leading advertisement analysis platform, dedicated to offering top ad creatives and marketing strategies for both advertisers and publishers. Serving as an essential ad and marketing intelligence platform, SocialPeta covers advertising data from 80+ global ad networks across 70 countries and regions. Now they have more than 300 enterprise clients including Google, Tencent Games, NetEase Games, Garena, Gismart, Mobvista and etc. Learn more by visiting SocialPeta.com. Helpshift offers the easiest way to collect user feedback, report bugs, and more without users ever having to leave your app. You can even have a customizable Help Center and unlimited FAQs. Get Started for FREE: https://www.helpshift.com/appmasters/ Tired of overpaying for App Store Optimization? Get unlimited ASO and app marketing support to increase your keyword rankings, downloads, and revenue. Learn more at ASO Masters. *************** Follow us: YouTube: AppMasters.com/YouTube Instagram: @stevepyoung Twitter: @stevepyoung Facebook: App Masters *************** --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/app-marketing-podcast/message
App Masters - App Marketing & App Store Optimization with Steve P. Young
In part 2 of our live stream with Vitaly Davydov, you will discover the lifetime value (LTV) and average retention rate of subscription plans (weekly, monthly, yearly, etc). You will also discover the difference between RevenueCat and Adapty and we audit a PDF scanner and meal planner app. Download Adapty's State of iOS Subscriptions Report: https://adapty.io/resources/state-of-ios-in-app-purchases-2021 Get your app audited: http://www.appmasters.com/audit SPONSORS SocialPeta is the world's leading advertisement analysis platform, dedicated to offering top ad creatives and marketing strategies for both advertisers and publishers. Serving as an essential ad and marketing intelligence platform, SocialPeta covers advertising data from 80+ global ad networks across 70 countries and regions. Now they have more than 300 enterprise clients including Google, Tencent Games, NetEase Games, Garena, Gismart, Mobvista and etc. Learn more by visiting SocialPeta.com. Helpshift offers the easiest way to collect user feedback, report bugs, and more without users ever having to leave your app. You can even have a customizable Help Center and unlimited FAQs. Get Started for FREE: https://www.helpshift.com/appmasters/ Tired of overpaying for App Store Optimization? Get unlimited ASO and app marketing support to increase your keyword rankings, downloads, and revenue. Learn more at ASO Masters. *************** Follow us: YouTube: AppMasters.com/YouTube Instagram: @stevepyoung Twitter: @stevepyoung Facebook: App Masters *************** --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/app-marketing-podcast/message
App Masters - App Marketing & App Store Optimization with Steve P. Young
Discover how to increase your AdMob eCPM for apps in the growth stage. In this video, we cover: - Why you should enable competitors' ads - Make sure your show rate is above 60% - Should you choose waterfall vs bidding during mediation? Earn more from AdMob with AppBroda: https://www.appbroda.com/ Get your app audited: http://www.appmasters.com/audit SPONSORS SocialPeta is the world's leading advertisement analysis platform, dedicated to offering top ad creatives and marketing strategies for both advertisers and publishers. Serving as an essential ad and marketing intelligence platform, SocialPeta covers advertising data from 80+ global ad networks across 70 countries and regions. Now they have more than 300 enterprise clients including Google, Tencent Games, NetEase Games, Garena, Gismart, Mobvista and etc. Learn more by visiting SocialPeta.com. Helpshift offers the easiest way to collect user feedback, report bugs, and more without users ever having to leave your app. You can even have a customizable Help Center and unlimited FAQs. Get Started for FREE: https://www.helpshift.com/appmasters/ Tired of overpaying for App Store Optimization? Get unlimited ASO and app marketing support to increase your keyword rankings, downloads, and revenue. Learn more at ASO Masters. *************** Follow us: YouTube: AppMasters.com/YouTube Instagram: @stevepyoung Twitter: @stevepyoung Facebook: App Masters *************** --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/app-marketing-podcast/message
App Masters - App Marketing & App Store Optimization with Steve P. Young
Todays live stream is a solo episode where you will discover Google's most recent UI change that is causing a big impact on branded downloads. Also, you'll discover how to optimize your ASO for mobile search SEO. App Audits: https://apps.apple.com/mx/app/waiorkids-world/id1510444185 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kassisgaming.barrelrider Get your app audited: http://www.appmasters.com/audit SPONSORS SocialPeta is the world's leading advertisement analysis platform, dedicated to offering top ad creatives and marketing strategies for both advertisers and publishers. Serving as an essential ad and marketing intelligence platform, SocialPeta covers advertising data from 80+ global ad networks across 70 countries and regions. Now they have more than 300 enterprise clients including Google, Tencent Games, NetEase Games, Garena, Gismart, Mobvista and etc. Learn more by visiting SocialPeta.com. Helpshift offers the easiest way to collect user feedback, report bugs, and more without users ever having to leave your app. You can even have a customizable Help Center and unlimited FAQs. Get Started for FREE: https://www.helpshift.com/appmasters/ Tired of overpaying for App Store Optimization? Get unlimited ASO and app marketing support to increase your keyword rankings, downloads, and revenue. Learn more at ASO Masters. *************** Follow us: YouTube: AppMasters.com/YouTube Instagram: @stevepyoung Twitter: @stevepyoung Facebook: App Masters *************** --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/app-marketing-podcast/message
App Masters - App Marketing & App Store Optimization with Steve P. Young
Discover how to grow on Instagram in 2022 - the fast and organic way! You will also discover why it's important to grow on Instagram and how to automatically turn these followers into customers. HOW IT WORKS Simplygram grows Instagram accounts using the mother-child method. In summary, they spin up lots of organic accounts that they work with to send out mass DMs using their special AI learning system, their experts then manage your account to grow it organically, all within Instagram's T&C's, promoting your IG page in order to generate followers, likes and comments. Get 10% off when you sign up: https://simplygram.com/?discount=10-percent-lifetime&a_aid=va&chan=appmasters2022 Get your app audited: http://www.appmasters.com/audit SPONSORS SocialPeta is the world's leading advertisement analysis platform, dedicated to offering top ad creatives and marketing strategies for both advertisers and publishers. Serving as an essential ad and marketing intelligence platform, SocialPeta covers advertising data from 80+ global ad networks across 70 countries and regions. Now they have more than 300 enterprise clients including Google, Tencent Games, NetEase Games, Garena, Gismart, Mobvista and etc. Learn more by visiting SocialPeta.com. Helpshift offers the easiest way to collect user feedback, report bugs, and more without users ever having to leave your app. You can even have a customizable Help Center and unlimited FAQs. Get Started for FREE: https://www.helpshift.com/appmasters/ Tired of overpaying for App Store Optimization? Get unlimited ASO and app marketing support to increase your keyword rankings, downloads, and revenue. Learn more at ASO Masters. *************** Follow us: YouTube: AppMasters.com/YouTube Instagram: @stevepyoung Twitter: @stevepyoung Facebook: App Masters *************** --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/app-marketing-podcast/message
App Masters - App Marketing & App Store Optimization with Steve P. Young
In part two of our live stream with Taylor Gobar, Head of Growth at Bloom, we talk about whether marketing is ethical or just persuasive tactics to get people to buy things they don't need. Also, you'll discover how Taylor has uses her past experiences in affiliate marketing into the mobile app space. Lastly, you don't want to miss our app audits because you will discover some monetization tricks and important UI lessons. https://apps.apple.com/app/id1458930889 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mindgarden-smiling-mind/id1588582890 Get your app audited: http://www.appmasters.com/audit SPONSORS SocialPeta is the world's leading advertisement analysis platform, dedicated to offering top ad creatives and marketing strategies for both advertisers and publishers. Serving as an essential ad and marketing intelligence platform, SocialPeta covers advertising data from 80+ global ad networks across 70 countries and regions. Now they have more than 300 enterprise clients including Google, Tencent Games, NetEase Games, Garena, Gismart, Mobvista and etc. Learn more by visiting SocialPeta.com. Helpshift offers the easiest way to collect user feedback, report bugs, and more without users ever having to leave your app. You can even have a customizable Help Center and unlimited FAQs. Get Started for FREE: https://www.helpshift.com/appmasters/ Tired of overpaying for App Store Optimization? Get unlimited ASO and app marketing support to increase your keyword rankings, downloads, and revenue. Learn more at ASO Masters. *************** Follow us: YouTube: AppMasters.com/YouTube Instagram: @stevepyoung Twitter: @stevepyoung Facebook: App Masters *************** --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/app-marketing-podcast/message
App Masters - App Marketing & App Store Optimization with Steve P. Young
Today's guest is Taylor Gobar, Head of Growth at Bloom. You will discover her playbook for effectively managing user acquisition channels for Bloom. You will also discover Facebook advertising tricks in a post IDFA world and the positive impact mobile apps are making on mental health. Get your app audited: http://www.appmasters.com/audit SPONSORS SocialPeta is the world's leading advertisement analysis platform, dedicated to offering top ad creatives and marketing strategies for both advertisers and publishers. Serving as an essential ad and marketing intelligence platform, SocialPeta covers advertising data from 80+ global ad networks across 70 countries and regions. Now they have more than 300 enterprise clients including Google, Tencent Games, NetEase Games, Garena, Gismart, Mobvista and etc. Learn more by visiting SocialPeta.com. Helpshift offers the easiest way to collect user feedback, report bugs, and more without users ever having to leave your app. You can even have a customizable Help Center and unlimited FAQs. Get Started for FREE: https://www.helpshift.com/appmasters/ Tired of overpaying for App Store Optimization? Get unlimited ASO and app marketing support to increase your keyword rankings, downloads, and revenue. Learn more at ASO Masters. *************** Follow us: YouTube: AppMasters.com/YouTube Instagram: @stevepyoung Twitter: @stevepyoung Facebook: App Masters *************** --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/app-marketing-podcast/message
App Masters - App Marketing & App Store Optimization with Steve P. Young
Discover why user feedback and great customer support lead to revenue growth. While app creators know that downloads and cost per install are important, they often leave some critical components on the table in the design process. In fact, we have many case studies where apps have 4-17X revenues without increasing downloads. Discover: - How to collect and analyze feedback so you can continually improve our app - How a great customer support experience can be pivotal for user retention - Why do feedback capabilities and great customer support lead to revenue growth About Today's Guest Eric Vermillion, Helpshift leader and CEO, spends his days driving strategy and growth plans, developing high-performance teams, and producing oversized results—globally. No big deal. Before Helpshift, he was instrumental in advancing BlueCat to one of Canada's most notable software exits and also helped grow revenue at NICE Systems to over $1B. When he's not leading business transformation, this Purdue University graduate is traveling with his wife and two daughters, forever in search of a great view and an even better glass of red wine. Get your app audited: http://www.appmasters.com/audit SPONSORS SocialPeta is the world's leading advertisement analysis platform, dedicated to offering top ad creatives and marketing strategies for both advertisers and publishers. Serving as an essential ad and marketing intelligence platform, SocialPeta covers advertising data from 80+ global ad networks across 70 countries and regions. Now they have more than 300 enterprise clients including Google, Tencent Games, NetEase Games, Garena, Gismart, Mobvista and etc. Learn more by visiting SocialPeta.com. Do you want to increase your Ad Revenue? AppBroda has provided its clients with 40-150% increase in Ad revenue by giving them access to premium advertisers on Google Ad exchange. Click here to book a free consultation with Appbroda. Tired of overpaying for App Store Optimization? Get unlimited ASO and app marketing support to increase your keyword rankings, downloads, and revenue. Learn more at ASO Masters. *************** Follow us: YouTube: AppMasters.com/YouTube Instagram: @stevepyoung Twitter: @stevepyoung Facebook: App Masters *************** --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/app-marketing-podcast/message
Eric Vermillion is the CEO of Helpshift, a San Francisco based company that develops mobile customer support software that helps companies provide better customer support in mobile apps. Before Helpshift, Eric was instrumental in advancing BlueCat to one of Canada's most notable software exits, and also helped grow revenue at NICE Systems to over $1 Billion. He has also held sales and leadership roles at PTC, Tecnomatix and Triad Systems Corporation. Eric holds a Bachelor's degree in management from Purdue University. Questions We like to give our guest an opportunity to do their own introduction in their own words, can you just tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are today? Can you tell us a little bit about what Helpshift does? Do you see mobile applications advancing even more in the whole development of customer experience on a global level? Or do you find people are looking for more opportunities where they can have more face-to-face interactions and less interaction with the digital or the technological side of things? Metaverse, there are a lot of people who still have a little bit of apprehension in relation to that whole emergence of that, what it represents, how to interface with it. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think it's something that will become the norm? How do you think people can adjust to it feeling more comfortable because it's so different and generally speaking, human beings just don't adjust to change very readily. Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website, or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business? Could you also share with our audience, maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could be a book that you read recently, or even one that you read a long time ago, but it still has impacted you in a very great way. We have a lot of listeners who are business owners and managers, who feel they have great products and services, but they lack the constantly motivated human capital. If you were sitting across the table from that person, what's the one piece of advice that you would give them to have a successful business? What's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about - either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people. Where can listeners find you online? Do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get you back on track if for any reason you got derailed or just kind of helps to get you back refocused. Highlights Eric's Journey Eric shared that he spent his entire career in the world of software, pretty good chunk of it on the sales end of things. He kind of got lucky coming out of Purdue University, when all his friends were taking jobs at places like John Deere and Caterpillar and Anderson Consulting, I found the Bay area software company to join and kind of fell in love with technology and software. So, he's spent his career helping people use technology to create value. And he's spent a big chunk of it in the world of customer service, he was at NICE for 8 years and got to be a part of things when kind of this whole omni channel trend happened. After he left NICE, he did a couple of other software plays in the world of identity management and IT security with blue cat, he found his way back and spent the last 3 years in Helpshift trying to really redefine what good customer service looks like for mobile apps and using more mobile devices more effectively. What Does Helpshift do? When asked about what Helpshift does, Eric shared that if you think of the your mobile phone, you probably engage with a lot of mobile apps on a day to day basis. Most people do and that's a trend that is rapidly increasing. They help brands use that mobile app to create essentially an orchestration tool for consumers to drive a very elegant customer experience. So, when you're in the mobile app you got typically it's the mobile app knows who you are, there's some context to the situation. And so, their customers are able to really provide their consumers with a much more elegant logical flow within the mobile app, allowing them to really self-serve much more effectively and by the time they actually get to an agent or human if they need to, because it's a more complex problem, or they're a blue-chip customer. A lot of the problems already been solved, the context is there for the agents, so they can become a bit more like a concierge or a personal assistant than then the traditional view of what we would think of as a customer service agent. Mobile Applications Advancing to Develop Customer Experience Me: Do you see mobile applications advancing even more in the whole development of customer experience on a global level? Or do you find people are looking for more opportunities where they can have more face-to-face interactions and less interaction with the digital or the technological side of things? Eric stated that those are two separate interesting questions. He thinks after what we've all been through in the last couple of years with COVID, he'd be surprised if there's anyone in the world that isn't craving a little bit more face-to-face interaction. So, he does think people want that, but he's not sure that customer service is the place where they're striving for more kind of face to face, human to human interaction. People are busy, people's schedules have changed and evolved a lot over the last couple of years, people tend to do a lot more working remotely, they tend to have schedules that are not very standard and typical, so they want to be able to find resolution to their problems whenever they want, wherever they want, at whatever time of day they want and that's something that he thinks companies are going to have to continue to adapt to. And one thing that we know is true is that there were 2 million mobile apps that were created last year and there'll be more than that that are created this year. People tend to carry their mobile device with them, all the time 24/7, for most of us it's sitting next to our bed even at night. And so, it is this tool that's on our person 24 hours a day and when used properly, it can be an incredibly powerful tool for accessing support and creating a support engagement that really fits your needs and your schedule as a consumer, whenever and wherever you want. He also thinks that when you think about some of the other trends that are going on in the world, like the emergence of this thing, everyone's calling the metaverse, other kind of distributed commerce technologies, like blockchain and web3, and other digital commerce trends that are happening in the world, most of those actually are accessed through mobile devices and through mobile apps as well. So, it's a trend that he thinks would be hard to find any reason that it's not going to continue to grow and kind of grow exponentially. Metaverse, How Can People Adjust to it Feeling More Comfortable Because It's So Different Me: I'm glad you mentioned the metaverse, because there are a lot of people who still have a little bit of apprehension in relation to that whole emergence of that, what it represents, how to interface with it. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think it's something that will become the norm? How do you think people can adjust to it feeling more comfortable because it's so different and generally speaking, human beings just don't adjust to change very readily. Eric stated that all very good and fair points. He thinks that a lot of people's view of the metaverse is driven by the images, or the headlines that they see about broken virtual reality experiences, they think the metaverse as kind of a 3D VR kind of gaming environment and to a certain extent, it largely is in 2022, but the evolution of it is happening very, very fast. And for him, he envision this world, not so many years from now, the technology is there to make this happen right now, where maybe he has a meeting with someone who is sitting in Japan, speaks only Japanese, someone who's in Brazil that speaks only Portuguese, someone in France who speaks only French, and himself in a room having a meeting, in a virtual environment in real time collaborating on some project where they all understand each other, and they can effectively communicate and collaborate in a way, that's just not possible today, and kind of a purely physical world. And so, he thinks there's just so many applications for it like that really impacted us in a positive way, in a professional environment, in an educational environment, from a healthcare perspective that gets taken granted a lot today when people just think of the metaverse is kind of this scary 3D video game. And all of those things that he just described, of course, are also going to have commerce that comes alongside of them and ownership and digital rights that around and a lot of that is being handled today or will likely be handled through blockchain technology. And so, you have this kind of parallel digital existence that happens with all of this commerce, would be naive to think that that's not going to create a lot of support issues and a lot of support challenges. And jumping from that world, out into the more physical world to pick up the phone and make a phone call or send someone an email is highly impractical when you think about it. So, he thinks support tools are going to have to evolve as well to be able to handle some of those changes. App, Website or Tool that Eric Absolutely Can't Live Without in His Business When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Eric stated that it's probably pretty boring, but he spent a big chunk of his day in G Suite, from kind of managing the calendar to all the collaboration that happens over the tools. So that's a pretty boring one because they spend a lot of time talking about mobile apps, he would maybe add a bonus that he travels a lot and he'd really struggle if he didn't have his American Airlines app, that's kind of how he gets from place to place anymore. So that's one that he tends to use a great deal as well. Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Eric When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Eric stated that he's a big fan of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't by Jim Collins, that's just that's one of those timeless books, the concept of the whole hedgehog principle and really having that one thing that you're laser focused on, and the whole organization is laser focused on, that you want to be known for. As well as the concept of having the right people on the bus, even if you don't know where they will sit. Those are just concepts that resonates with him very well with him, and philosophies that he tends to use and in his own management style. On a more kind of non-business level, he's a big fan of Bob Goff as well. He's got a very fascinating story. His first book, which is called Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World, is still his favourite of the ones that he's written. He's written a few since that he thinks that was probably 10 years old at this point. But he tends to really love experiences, he thinks Bob does a great job sharing interesting experiences and the lessons you can take from each one in an extremely interesting way. Advice for Business Owners and Managers to Have a Successful Business Me: We have a lot of listeners who are business owners and managers, who feel they have great products and services, but they lack the constantly motivated human capital. If you were sitting across the table from that person, what's the one piece of advice that you would give them to have a successful business? Eric stated that you know that you're a coach, you're not just a manager. He saw this clip in the last few days of Nick Saban, the Alabama football coach that's highly regarded and very well known. He stepped in and prevented a player from sharing a piece of cake with another player. So, they have this spring game every year, where they play against their own teammates, and the losing team gets beans and franks and the winning team gets a steak dinner with chocolate cake. And the winning teammate wanted to share a piece of cake with his really good friend that was on the losing team and Saban saw it and shut it down. And he just loves that because losing hurts, and it should hurt and that's how you know you don't want to do it anymore. And he thinks people sometimes need to realize that they have an obligation as a leader, as a manager, to also be a coach and not just a manager. His job is really to help everyone who works for him to perform at a high level, and to help prepare them for their next job or even help them get their next job. And he thinks too many managers forget that often. And you can't buy your way out of that responsibility no matter how much you're paying for someone. And then in this world where human capital and good human capital is very hard to come by, and often very expensive, losing sight of that responsibility to really coach and help a person be prepared for whatever's next, it's one of those things you take for granted if you're just trying to sometimes pay top dollar for people because you think that'll automatically make them the best at things, which is not the case. Me: I totally agree. One of the things that we talk about a lot as well as a customer service trainer is that the most important role of the leader is to grow and develop people because as you mentioned before, you want to have people around you who are robust, who are efficient, who are intrinsically motivated to do what they're employed to do, but at the same time, they feel like they have some purpose and for them to feel like they have some purpose, they have to feel like they're a part of a bigger goal other than collecting a salary. So, I do quite agree with you that leaders are coaches even though a lot of them may not look at themselves as a coach, I like that phrase that you put it as. What Eric is Really Excited About Now! Eric shared that from a people perspective, the pandemic has created a lot of confusion around what work looks like and you hear a lot of companies talking about they're going to be remote only or they're going to be office only or they're going to be hybrid or like lots of different things that people are calling this thing. He spent most of his career as a remote employee and it's hard, it is not something that there's a kind of a playbook or a handbook out there to do. And it was harder before Zoom and messaging and always available internet, but it's still hard. And he believes very strongly that companies need to have a framework for expectations and that's something that they've been continuing to work on a lot as a company. Expectations on what's expected of you as an employee, and that is independent of physical location, that is just what's expected of you as an employee, he doesn't really care where you sit, if you're doing those things, he doesn't care where you sit. He doesn't care if you're physically in an office or remote. If you're following those guidelines and principles of what they stand for as an organization and using the technology to do that, if you're doing it like that, he doesn't really care where you work from. He thinks a lot of companies think that they can kind of hand you a bag of cool technology and software, and it will make you a great remote worker but it just unfortunately doesn't always work that way, you have to teach people what's expected, inspect it regularly and then drag them back into the office when it's too hard or people are just not able to kind of cope with that very unstructured environment that you have at home, not everyone can do it. And frankly, not everyone wants to and so that's professionally. On a personal level, he did get a Peloton a few months ago so he's been loving that and trying to take off his own COVID-19. Where Can We Find Eric Online Website - www.helpshift.com/ LinkedIn – Helpshift LinkedIn – Eric Vermillion Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Eric Uses When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Eric shared that his favourite quote is the Wayne Gretzky quote, or at least he thinks it's widely attributed to Wayne Gretzky, which is “You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.” Me: All right. And that's a good one. How do you think people can apply that in this whole environment that we're operating in? As you mentioned, we're emerging out of this global pandemic, even though we're not fully emerged out of it, people are trying to just kind of get their life back into some form of semblance. So, with all of that in play and there's also I think a lot of people are still experiencing a lot of fear and anxiety because they don't know what to expect. How do you think that quote can help people to really raise the bar? Eric stated that he thinks it can be a motivating factor for you. He's definitely a person that's fairly easily amused and he's very much an experience person, he doesn't particularly care about stuff and things, and he thinks for a lot of people over the last couple of years, they've had to figure out more interesting ways to entertain themselves versus going out and kind of buying stuff and looking more for satisfaction through material things. Every day is really a new opportunity to learn something, pain tends to create intelligence, practice creates perfection and that kind of galvanizes you. He thinks that every person that he meets is a new lesson, every person that he has had an opportunity to help in some way is literally currency for him, it makes him feel wealthy, even if it doesn't add a penny to his own bank account. And every time he gets a chance to experience a new city or a new restaurant, or make a new friend, it makes him feel wealthier than the day before. And he think that's one of those things that every one of us can remember, every one of us that's above ground and breathing has all those opportunities every single day to like add those experiences, add those things that do make you wealthier in a non-monetary way, and never miss a chance to take one of those shots and being aware of that he thinks is an incredibly motivating thing. Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners Links Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't by Jim Collins Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World by Bob Goff The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience.” The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. 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About ABAB Periasamy is the co-founder and CEO of MinIO, an open source provider of high performance, object storage software. In addition to this role, AB is an active investor and advisor to a wide range of technology companies, from H2O.ai and Manetu where he serves on the board to advisor or investor roles with Humio, Isovalent, Starburst, Yugabyte, Tetrate, Postman, Storj, Procurify, and Helpshift. Successful exits include Gitter.im (Gitlab), Treasure Data (ARM) and Fastor (SMART).AB co-founded Gluster in 2005 to commoditize scalable storage systems. As CTO, he was the primary architect and strategist for the development of the Gluster file system, a pioneer in software defined storage. After the company was acquired by Red Hat in 2011, AB joined Red Hat's Office of the CTO. Prior to Gluster, AB was CTO of California Digital Corporation, where his work led to scaling of the commodity cluster computing to supercomputing class performance. His work there resulted in the development of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's “Thunder” code, which, at the time was the second fastest in the world. AB holds a Computer Science Engineering degree from Annamalai University, Tamil Nadu, India.AB is one of the leading proponents and thinkers on the subject of open source software - articulating the difference between the philosophy and business model. An active contributor to a number of open source projects, he is a board member of India's Free Software Foundation.Links: MinIO: https://min.io/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/abperiasamy MinIO Slack channel: https://minio.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-11qsphhj7-HpmNOaIh14LHGrmndrhocA LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abperiasamy/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig is the solution for securing DevOps. They have a blog post that went up recently about how an insecure AWS Lambda function could be used as a pivot point to get access into your environment. They've also gone deep in-depth with a bunch of other approaches to how DevOps and security are inextricably linked. To learn more, visit sysdig.com and tell them I sent you. That's S-Y-S-D-I-G dot com. My thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Rising Cloud, which I hadn't heard of before, but they're doing something vaguely interesting here. They are using AI, which is usually where my eyes glaze over and I lose attention, but they're using it to help developers be more efficient by reducing repetitive tasks. So, the idea being that you can run stateless things without having to worry about scaling, placement, et cetera, and the rest. They claim significant cost savings, and they're able to wind up taking what you're running as it is, in AWS, with no changes, and run it inside of their data centers that span multiple regions. I'm somewhat skeptical, but their customers seem to really like them, so that's one of those areas where I really have a hard time being too snarky about it because when you solve a customer's problem, and they get out there in public and say, “We're solving a problem,” it's very hard to snark about that. Multus Medical, Construx.ai, and Stax have seen significant results by using them, and it's worth exploring. So, if you're looking for a smarter, faster, cheaper alternative to EC2, Lambda, or batch, consider checking them out. Visit risingcloud.com/benefits. That's risingcloud.com/benefits, and be sure to tell them that I said you because watching people wince when you mention my name is one of the guilty pleasures of listening to this podcast.in a siloCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by someone who's doing something a bit off the beaten path when we talk about cloud. I've often said that S3 is sort of a modern wonder of the world. It was the first AWS service brought into general availability. Today's promoted guest is the co-founder and CEO of MinIO, Anand Babu Periasamy, or AB as he often goes, depending upon who's talking to him. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.AB: It's wonderful to be here, Corey. Thank you for having me.Corey: So, I want to start with the obvious thing, where you take a look at what is the cloud and you can talk about AWS's ridiculous high-level managed services, like Amazon Chime. Great, we all see how that plays out. And those are the higher-level offerings, ideally aimed at problems customers have, but then they also have the baseline building blocks services, and it's hard to think of a more baseline building block than an object store. That's something every cloud provider has, regardless of how many scare quotes there are around the word cloud; everyone offers the object store. And your solution is to look at this and say, “Ah, that's a market ripe for disruption. We're going to build through an open-source community software that emulates an object store.” I would be sitting here, more or less poking fun at the idea except for the fact that you're a billion-dollar company now.AB: Yeah.Corey: How did you get here?AB: So, when we started, right, we did not actually think about cloud that way, right? “Cloud, it's a hot trend, and let's go disrupt is like that. It will lead to a lot of opportunity.” Certainly, it's true, it lead to the M&S, right, but that's not how we looked at it, right? It's a bad idea to build startups for M&A.When we looked at the problem, when we got back into this—my previous background, some may not know that it's actually a distributed file system background in the open-source space.Corey: Yeah, you were one of the co-founders of Gluster—AB: Yeah.Corey: —which I have only begrudgingly forgiven you. But please continue.AB: [laugh]. And back then we got the idea right, but the timing was wrong. And I had—while the data was beginning to grow at a crazy rate, end of the day, GlusterFS has to still look like an FS, it has to look like a file system like NetApp or EMC, and it was hugely limiting what we can do with it. The biggest problem for me was legacy systems. I have to build a modern system that is compatible with a legacy architecture, you cannot innovate.And that is where when Amazon introduced S3, back then, like, when S3 came, cloud was not big at all, right? When I look at it, the most important message of the cloud was Amazon basically threw everything that is legacy. It's not [iSCSI 00:03:21] as a Service; it's not even FTP as a Service, right? They came up with a simple, RESTful API to store your blobs, whether it's JavaScript, Android, iOS, or [AAML 00:03:30] application, or even Snowflake-type application.Corey: Oh, we spent ten years rewriting our apps to speak object store, and then they released EFS, which is NFS in the cloud. It's—AB: Yeah.Corey: —I didn't realize I could have just been stubborn and waited, and the whole problem would solve itself. But here we are. You're quite right.AB: Yeah. And even EFS and EBS are more for legacy stock can come in, buy some time, but that's not how you should stay on AWS, right? When Amazon did that, for me, that was the opportunity. I saw that… while world is going to continue to produce lots and lots of data, if I built a brand around that, I'm not going to go wrong.The problem is data at scale. And what do I do there? The opportunity I saw was, Amazon solved one of the largest problems for a long time. All the legacy systems, legacy protocols, they convinced the industry, throw them away and then start all over from scratch with the new API. While it's not compatible, it's not standard, it is ridiculously simple compared to anything else.No fstabs, no [unintelligible 00:04:27], no [root 00:04:28], nothing, right? From any application anywhere you can access was a big deal. When I saw that, I was like, “Thank you Amazon.” And I also knew Amazon would convince the industry that rewriting their application is going to be better and faster and cheaper than retrofitting legacy applications.Corey: I wonder how much that's retconned because talking to some of the people involved in the early days, they were not at all convinced they [laugh] would be able to convince the industry to do this.AB: Actually, if you talk to the analyst reporters, the IDC's, Gartner's of the world to the enterprise IT, the VMware community, they would say, “Hell no.” But if you talk to the actual application developers, data infrastructure, data architects, the actual consumers of data, for them, it was so obvious. They actually did not know how to write an fstab. The iSCSI and NFS, you can't even access across the internet, and the modern applications, they ran across the globe, in JavaScript, and all kinds of apps on the device. From [Snap 00:05:21] to Snowflake, today is built on object store. It was more natural for the applications team, but not from the infrastructure team. So, who you asked that mattered.But nevertheless, Amazon convinced the rest of the world, and our bet was that if this is going to be the future, then this is also our opportunity. S3 is going to be limited because it only runs inside AWS. Bulk of the world's data is produced everywhere and only a tiny fraction will go to AWS. And where will the rest of the data go? Not SAN, NAS, HDFS, or other blob store, Azure Blob, or GCS; it's not going to be fragmented. And if we built a better object store, lightweight, faster, simpler, but fully compatible with S3 API, we can sweep and consolidate the market. And that's what happened.Corey: And there is a lot of validity to that. We take a look across the industry, when we look at various standards—I mean, one of the big problems with multi-cloud in many respects is the APIs are not quite similar enough. And worse, the failure patterns are very different, of I don't just need to know how the load balancer works, I need to know how it breaks so I can detect and plan for that. And then you've got the whole identity problem as well, where you're trying to manage across different frames of reference as you go between providers, and leads to a bit of a mess. What is it that makes MinIO something that has been not just something that has endured since it was created, but clearly been thriving?AB: The real reason, actually is not the multi-cloud compatibility, all that, right? Like, while today, it is a big deal for the users because the deployments have grown into 10-plus petabytes, and now the infrastructure team is taking it over and consolidating across the enterprise, so now they are talking about which key management server for storing the encrypted keys, which key management server should I talk to? Look at AWS, Google, or Azure, everyone has their own proprietary API. Outside they, have [YAML2 00:07:18], HashiCorp Vault, and, like, there is no standard here. It is supposed to be a [KMIP 00:07:23] standard, but in reality, it is not. Even different versions of Vault, there are incompatibilities for us.That is where—like from Key Management Server, Identity Management Server, right, like, everything that you speak around, how do you talk to different ecosystem? That, actually, MinIO provides connectors; having the large ecosystem support and large community, we are able to address all that. Once you bring MinIO into your application stack like you would bring Elasticsearch or MongoDB or anything else as a container, your application stack is just a Kubernetes YAML file, and you roll it out on any cloud, it becomes easier for them, they're able to go to any cloud they want. But the real reason why it succeeded was not that. They actually wrote their applications as containers on Minikube, then they will push it on a CI/CD environment.They never wrote code on EC2 or ECS writing objects on S3, and they don't like the idea of [past 00:08:15], where someone is telling you just—like you saw Google App Engine never took off, right? They liked the idea, here are my building blocks. And then I would stitch them together and build my application. We were part of their application development since early days, and when the application matured, it was hard to remove. It is very much like Microsoft Windows when it grew, even though the desktop was Microsoft Windows Server was NetWare, NetWare lost the game, right?We got the ecosystem, and it was actually developer productivity, convenience, that really helped. The simplicity of MinIO, today, they are arguing that deploying MinIO inside AWS is easier through their YAML and containers than going to AWS Console and figuring out how to do it.Corey: As you take a look at how customers are adopting this, it's clear that there is some shift in this because I could see the story for something like MinIO making an awful lot of sense in a data center environment because otherwise, it's, “Great. I need to make this app work with my SAN as well as an object store.” And that's sort of a non-starter for obvious reasons. But now you're available through cloud marketplaces directly.AB: Yeah.Corey: How are you seeing adoption patterns and interactions from customers changing as the industry continues to evolve?AB: Yeah, actually, that is how my thinking was when I started. If you are inside AWS, I would myself tell them that why don't use AWS S3? And it made a lot of sense if it's on a colo or your own infrastructure, then there is an object store. It even made a lot of sense if you are deploying on Google Cloud, Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle Cloud, it made a lot of sense because you wanted an S3 compatible object store. Inside AWS, why would you do it, if there is AWS S3?Nowadays, I hear funny arguments, too. They like, “Oh, I didn't know that I could use S3. Is S3 MinIO compatible?” Because they will be like, “It came along with the GitLab or GitHub Enterprise, a part of the application stack.” They didn't even know that they could actually switch it over.And otherwise, most of the time, they developed it on MinIO, now they are too lazy to switch over. That also happens. But the real reason that why it became serious for me—I ignored that the public cloud commercialization; I encouraged the community adoption. And it grew to more than a million instances, like across the cloud, like small and large, but when they start talking about paying us serious dollars, then I took it seriously. And then when I start asking them, why would you guys do it, then I got to know the real reason why they wanted to do was they want to be detached from the cloud infrastructure provider.They want to look at cloud as CPU network and drive as a service. And running their own enterprise IT was more expensive than adopting public cloud, it was productivity for them, reducing the infrastructure, people cost was a lot. It made economic sense.Corey: Oh, people always cost more the infrastructure itself does.AB: Exactly right. 70, 80%, like, goes into people, right? And enterprise IT is too slow. They cannot innovate fast, and all of those problems. But what I found was for us, while we actually build the community and customers, if you're on AWS, if you're running MinIO on EBS, EBS is three times more expensive than S3.Corey: Or a single copy of it, too, where if you're trying to go multi-AZ and you have the replication traffic, and not to mention you have to over-provision it, which is a bit of a different story as well. So, like, it winds up being something on the order of 30 times more expensive, in many cases, to do it right. So, I'm looking at this going, the economics of running this purely by itself in AWS don't make sense to me—long experience teaches me the next question of, “What am I missing?” Not, “That's ridiculous and you're doing it wrong.” There's clearly something I'm not getting. What am I missing?AB: I was telling them until we made some changes, right—because we saw a couple of things happen. I was initially like, [unintelligible 00:12:00] does not make 30 copies. It makes, like, 1.4x, 1.6x.But still, the underlying block storage is not only three times more expensive than S3, it's also slow. It's a network storage. Trying to put an object store on top of it, another, like, software-defined SAN, like EBS made no sense to me. Smaller deployments, it's okay, but you should never scale that on EBS. So, it did not make economic sense. I would never take it seriously because it would never help them grow to scale.But what changed in recent times? Amazon saw that this was not only a problem for MinIO-type players. Every database out there today, every modern database, even the message queues like Kafka, they all have gone scale-out. And they all depend on local block store and putting a scale-out distributed database, data processing engines on top of EBS would not scale. And Amazon introduced storage optimized instances. Essentially, that reduced to bet—the data infrastructure guy, data engineer, or application developer asking IT, “I want a SuperMicro, or Dell server, or even virtual machines.” That's too slow, too inefficient.They can provision these storage machines on demand, and then I can do it through Kubernetes. These two changes, all the public cloud players now adopted Kubernetes as the standard, and they have to stick to the Kubernetes API standard. If they are incompatible, they won't get adopted. And storage optimized that is local drives, these are machines, like, [I3 EN 00:13:23], like, 24 drives, they have SSDs, and fast network—like, 25-gigabit 200-gigabit type network—availability of these machines, like, what typically would run any database, HDFS cluster, MinIO, all of them, those machines are now available just like any other EC2 instance.They are efficient. You can actually put MinIO side by side to S3 and still be price competitive. And Amazon wants to—like, just like their retail marketplace, they want to compete and be open. They have enabled it. In that sense, Amazon is actually helping us. And it turned out that now I can help customers build multiple petabyte infrastructure on Amazon and still stay efficient, still stay price competitive.Corey: I would have said for a long time that if you were to ask me to build out the lingua franca of all the different cloud providers into a common API, the S3 API would be one of them. Now, you are building this out, multi-cloud, you're in all three of the major cloud marketplaces, and the way that you do that and do those deployments seems like it is the modern multi-cloud API of Kubernetes. When you first started building this, Kubernetes was very early on. What was the evolution of getting there? Or were you one of the first early-adoption customers in a Kubernetes space?AB: So, when we started, there was no Kubernetes. But we saw the problem was very clear. And there was containers, and then came Docker Compose and Swarm. Then there was Mesos, Cloud Foundry, you name it, right? Like, there was many solutions all the way up to even VMware trying to get into that space.And what did we do? Early on, I couldn't choose. I couldn't—it's not in our hands, right, who is going to be the winner, so we just simply embrace everybody. It was also tiring that to allow implement native connectors to all of them different orchestration, like Pivotal Cloud Foundry alone, they have their own standard open service broker that's only popular inside their system. Go outside elsewhere, everybody was incompatible.And outside that, even, Chef Ansible Puppet scripts, too. We just simply embraced everybody until the dust settle down. When it settled down, clearly a declarative model of Kubernetes became easier. Also Kubernetes developers understood the community well. And coming from Borg, I think they understood the right architecture. And also written in Go, unlike Java, right?It actually matters, these minute new details resonating with the infrastructure community. It took off, and then that helped us immensely. Now, it's not only Kubernetes is popular, it has become the standard, from VMware to OpenShift to all the public cloud providers, GKS, AKS, EKS, whatever, right—GKE. All of them now are basically Kubernetes standard. It made not only our life easier, it made every other [ISV 00:16:11], other open-source project, everybody now can finally write one code that can be operated portably.It is a big shift. It is not because we chose; we just watched all this, we were riding along the way. And then because we resonated with the infrastructure community, modern infrastructure is dominated by open-source. We were also the leading open-source object store, and as Kubernetes community adopted us, we were naturally embraced by the community.Corey: Back when AWS first launched with S3 as its first offering, there were a bunch of folks who were super excited, but object stores didn't make a lot of sense to them intrinsically, so they looked into this and, “Ah, I can build a file system and users base on top of S3.” And the reaction was, “Holy God don't do that.” And the way that AWS decided to discourage that behavior is a per request charge, which for most workloads is fine, whatever, but there are some that causes a significant burden. With running something like MinIO in a self-hosted way, suddenly that costing doesn't exist in the same way. Does that open the door again to so now I can use it as a file system again, in which case that just seems like using the local file system, only with extra steps?AB: Yeah.Corey: Do you see patterns that are emerging with customers' use of MinIO that you would not see with the quote-unquote, “Provider's” quote-unquote, “Native” object storage option, or do the patterns mostly look the same?AB: Yeah, if you took an application that ran on file and block and brought it over to object storage, that makes sense. But something that is competing with object store or a layer below object store, that is—end of the day that drives our block devices, you have a block interface, right—trying to bring SAN or NAS on top of object store is actually a step backwards. They completely missed the message that Amazon told that if you brought a file system interface on top of object store, you missed the point, that you are now bringing the legacy things that Amazon intentionally removed from the infrastructure. Trying to bring them on top doesn't make it any better. If you are arguing from a compatibility some legacy applications, sure, but writing a file system on top of object store will never be better than NetApp, EMC, like EMC Isilon, or anything else. Or even GlusterFS, right?But if you want a file system, I always tell the community, they ask us, “Why don't you add an FS option and do a multi-protocol system?” I tell them that the whole point of S3 is to remove all those legacy APIs. If I added POSIX, then I'll be a mediocre object storage and a terrible file system. I would never do that. But why not write a FUSE file system, right? Like, S3Fs is there.In fact, initially, for legacy compatibility, we wrote MinFS and I had to hide it. We actually archived the repository because immediately people started using it. Even simple things like end of the day, can I use Unix [Coreutils 00:19:03] like [cp, ls 00:19:04], like, all these tools I'm familiar with? If it's not file system object storage that S3 [CMD 00:19:08] or AWS CLI is, like, to bloatware. And it's not really Unix-like feeling.Then what I told them, “I'll give you a BusyBox like a single static binary, and it will give you all the Unix tools that works for local filesystem as well as object store.” That's where the [MC tool 00:19:23] came; it gives you all the Unix-like programmability, all the core tool that's object storage compatible, speaks native object store. But if I have to make object store look like a file system so UNIX tools would run, it would not only be inefficient, Unix tools never scaled for this kind of capacity.So, it would be a bad idea to take step backwards and bring legacy stuff back inside. For some very small case, if there are simple POSIX calls using [ObjectiveFs 00:19:49], S3Fs, and few, for legacy compatibility reasons makes sense, but in general, I would tell the community don't bring file and block. If you want file and block, leave those on virtual machines and leave that infrastructure in a silo and gradually phase them out.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: So, my big problem, when I look at what S3 has done is in it's name because of course, naming is hard. It's, “Simple Storage Service.” The problem I have is with the word simple because over time, S3 has gotten more and more complex under the hood. It automatically tiers data the way that customers want. And integrated with things like Athena, you can now query it directly, whenever of an object appears, you can wind up automatically firing off Lambda functions and the rest.And this is increasingly looking a lot less like a place to just dump my unstructured data, and increasingly, a lot like this is sort of a database, in some respects. Now, understand my favorite database is Route 53; I have a long and storied history of misusing services as databases. Is this one of those scenarios, or is there some legitimacy to the idea of turning this into a database?AB: Actually, there is now S3 Select API that if you're storing unstructured data like CSV, JSON, Parquet, without downloading even a compressed CSV, you can actually send a SQL query into the system. IN MinIO particularly the S3 Select is [CMD 00:21:16] optimized. We can load, like, every 64k worth of CSV lines into registers and do CMD operations. It's the fastest SQL filter out there. Now, bringing these kinds of capabilities, we are just a little bit away from a database; should we do database? I would tell definitely no.The very strength of S3 API is to actually limit all the mutations, right? Particularly if you look at database, they're dealing with metadata, and querying; the biggest value they bring is indexing the metadata. But if I'm dealing with that, then I'm dealing with really small block lots of mutations, the separation of objects storage should be dealing with persistence and not mutations. Mutations are [AWS 00:21:57] problem. Separation of database work function and persistence function is where object storage got the storage right.Otherwise, it will, they will make the mistake of doing POSIX-like behavior, and then not only bringing back all those capabilities, doing IOPS intensive workloads across the HTTP, it wouldn't make sense, right? So, object storage got the API right. But now should it be a database? So, it definitely should not be a database. In fact, I actually hate the idea of Amazon yielding to the file system developers and giving a [file three 00:22:29] hierarchical namespace so they can write nice file managers.That was a terrible idea. Writing a hierarchical namespace that's also sorted, now puts tax on how the metadata is indexed and organized. The Amazon should have left the core API very simple and told them to solve these problems outside the object store. Many application developers don't need. Amazon was trying to satisfy everybody's need. Saying no to some of these file system-type, file manager-type users, what should have been the right way.But nevertheless, adding those capabilities, eventually, now you can see, S3 is no longer simple. And we had to keep that compatibility, and I hate that part. I actually don't mind compatibility, but then doing all the wrong things that Amazon is adding, now I have to add because it's compatible. I kind of hate that, right?But now going to a database would be pushing it to the whole new level. Here is the simple reason why that's a bad idea. The right way to do database—in fact, the database industry is already going in the right direction. Unstructured data, the key-value or graph, different types of data, you cannot possibly solve all that even in a single database. They are trying to be multimodal database; even they are struggling with it.You can never be a Redis, Cassandra, like, a SQL all-in-one. They tried to say that but in reality, that you will never be better than any one of those focused database solutions out there. Trying to bring that into object store will be a mistake. Instead, let the databases focus on query language implementation and query computation, and leave the persistence to object store. So, object store can still focus on storing your database segments, the table segments, but the index is still in the memory of the database.Even the index can be snapshotted once in a while to object store, but use objects store for persistence and database for query is the right architecture. And almost all the modern databases now, from Elasticsearch to [unintelligible 00:24:21] to even Kafka, like, message queue. They all have gone that route. Even Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata, Vertica, name it, Splunk, they all have gone object storage route, too. Snowflake itself is a prime example, BigQuery and all of them.That's the right way. Databases can never be consolidated. There will be many different kinds of databases. Let them specialize on GraphQL or Graph API, or key-value, or SQL. Let them handle the indexing and persistence, they cannot handle petabytes of data. That [unintelligible 00:24:51] to object store is how the industry is shaping up, and it is going in the right direction.Corey: One of the ways I learned the most about various services is by talking to customers. Every time I think I've seen something, this is amazing. This service is something I completely understand. All I have to do is talk to one more customer. And when I was doing a bill analysis project a couple of years ago, I looked into a customer's account and saw a bucket with okay, that has 280 billion objects in it—and wait was that billion with a B?And I asked them, “So, what's going on over there?” And there's, “Well, we built our own columnar database on top of S3. This may not have been the best approach.” It's, “I'm going to stop you there. With no further context, it was not, but please continue.”It's the sort of thing that would never have occurred to me to even try, do you tend to see similar—I would say they're anti-patterns, except somehow they're made to work—in some of your customer environments, as they are using the service in ways that are very different than ways encouraged or even allowed by the native object store options?AB: Yeah, when I first started seeing the database-type workloads coming on to MinIO, I was surprised, too. That was exactly my reaction. In fact, they were storing these 256k, sometimes 64k table segments because they need to index it, right, and the table segments were anywhere between 64k to 2MB. And when they started writing table segments, it was more often [IOPS-type 00:26:22] I/O pattern, then a throughput-type pattern. Throughput is an easier problem to solve, and MinIO always saturated these 100-gigabyte NVMe-type drives, they were I/O intensive, throughput optimized.When I started seeing the database workloads, I had to optimize for small-object workloads, too. We actually did all that because eventually I got convinced the right way to build a database was to actually leave the persistence out of database; they made actually a compelling argument. If historically, I thought metadata and data, data to be very big and coming to object store make sense. Metadata should be stored in a database, and that's only index page. Take any book, the index pages are only few, database can continue to run adjacent to object store, it's a clean architecture.But why would you put database itself on object store? When I saw a transactional database like MySQL, changing the [InnoDB 00:27:14] to [RocksDB 00:27:15], and making changes at that layer to write the SS tables [unintelligible 00:27:19] to MinIO, and then I was like, where do you store the memory, the journal? They said, “That will go to Kafka.” And I was like—I thought that was insane when it started. But it continued to grow and grow.Nowadays, I see most of the databases have gone to object store, but their argument is, the databases also saw explosive growth in data. And they couldn't scale the persistence part. That is where they realized that they still got very good at the indexing part that object storage would never give. There is no API to do sophisticated query of the data. You cannot peek inside the data, you can just do streaming read and write.And that is where the databases were still necessary. But databases were also growing in data. One thing that triggered this was the use case moved from data that was generated by people to now data generated by machines. Machines means applications, all kinds of devices. Now, it's like between seven billion people to a trillion devices is how the industry is changing. And this led to lots of machine-generated, semi-structured, structured data at giant scale, coming into database. The databases need to handle scale. There was no other way to solve this problem other than leaving the—[unintelligible 00:28:31] if you looking at columnar data, most of them are machine-generated data, where else would you store? If they tried to build their own object storage embedded into the database, it would make database mentally complicated. Let them focus on what they are good at: Indexing and mutations. Pull the data table segments which are immutable, mutate in memory, and then commit them back give the right mix. What you saw what's the fastest step that happened, we saw that consistently across. Now, it is actually the standard.Corey: So, you started working on this in 2014, and here we are—what is it—eight years later now, and you've just announced a Series B of $100 million dollars on a billion-dollar valuation. So, it turns out this is not just one of those things people are using for test labs; there is significant momentum behind using this. How did you get there from—because everything you're saying makes an awful lot of sense, but it feels, at least from where I sit, to be a little bit of a niche. It's a bit of an edge case that is not the common case. Obviously, I missing something because your investors are not the types of sophisticated investors who see something ridiculous and, “Yep. That's the thing we're going to go for.” There right more than they're not.AB: Yeah. The reason for that was the saw what we were set to do. In fact, these are—if you see the lead investor, Intel, they watched us grow. They came into Series A and they saw, everyday, how we operated and grew. They believed in our message.And it was actually not about object store, right? Object storage was a means for us to get into the market. When we started, our idea was, ten years from now, what will be a big problem? A lot of times, it's hard to see the future, but if you zoom out, it's hidden in plain sight.These are simple trends. Every major trend pointed to world producing more data. No one would argue with that. If I solved one important problem that everybody is suffering, I won't go wrong. And when you solve the problem, it's about building a product with fine craftsmanship, attention to details, connecting with the user, all of that standard stuff.But I picked object storage as the problem because the industry was fragmented across many different data stores, and I knew that won't be the case ten years from now. Applications are not going to adopt different APIs across different clouds, S3 to GCS to Azure Blob to HDFS to everything is incompatible. I saw that if I built a data store for persistence, industry will consolidate around S3 API. Amazon S3, when we started, it looked like they were the giant, there was only one cloud industry, it believed mono-cloud. Almost everyone was talking to me like AWS will be the world's data center.I certainly see that possibility, Amazon is capable of doing it, but my bet was the other way, that AWS S3 will be one of many solutions, but not—if it's all incompatible, it's not going to work, industry will consolidate. Our bet was, if world is producing so much data, if you build an object store that is S3 compatible, but ended up as the leading data store of the world and owned the application ecosystem, you cannot go wrong. We kept our heads low and focused on the first six years on massive adoption, build the ecosystem to a scale where we can say now our ecosystem is equal or larger than Amazon, then we are in business. We didn't focus on commercialization; we focused on convincing the industry that this is the right technology for them to use. Once they are convinced, once you solve business problems, making money is not hard because they are already sold, they are in love with the product, then convincing them to pay is not a big deal because data is so critical, central part of their business.We didn't worry about commercialization, we worried about adoption. And once we got the adoption, now customers are coming to us and they're like, “I don't want open-source license violation. I don't want data breach or data loss.” They are trying to sell to me, and it's an easy relationship game. And it's about long-term partnership with customers.And so the business started growing, accelerating. That was the reason that now is the time to fill up the gas tank and investors were quite excited about the commercial traction as well. And all the intangible, right, how big we grew in the last few years.Corey: It really is an interesting segment, that has always been something that I've mostly ignored, like, “Oh, you want to run your own? Okay, great.” I get it; some people want to cosplay as cloud providers themselves. Awesome. There's clearly a lot more to it than that, and I'm really interested to see what the future holds for you folks.AB: Yeah, I'm excited. I think end of the day, if I solve real problems, every organization is moving from compute technology-centric to data-centric, and they're all looking at data warehouse, data lake, and whatever name they give data infrastructure. Data is now the centerpiece. Software is a commodity. That's how they are looking at it. And it is translating to each of these large organizations—actually, even the mid, even startups nowadays have petabytes of data—and I see a huge potential here. The timing is perfect for us.Corey: I'm really excited to see this continue to grow. And I want to thank you for taking so much time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?AB: I'm always on the community, right. Twitter and, like, I think the Slack channel, it's quite easy to reach out to me. LinkedIn. I'm always excited to talk to our users or community.Corey: And we will of course put links to this in the [show notes 00:33:58]. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.AB: Again, wonderful to be here, Corey.Corey: Anand Babu Periasamy, CEO and co-founder of MinIO. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with what starts out as an angry comment but eventually turns into you, in your position on the S3 product team, writing a thank you note to MinIO for helping validate your market.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
This week we dive into what is often viewed as arcane science by the development community, pricing. Pricing can make or break any product. Everyone in the value chain has to have a good understanding of how pricing decisions are made and how they can impact what should be built and when. One critical part of the conversation focuses on whether there is an ideal pattern for product and development to work together? If not, what are the consequences? Our conversation just skims the surface of Ajit Ghuman's new book Priced to Scale which hit the book stands in April. Ajit is currently Head of Product Marketing at Narvar, an enterprise-grade customer engagement platform that helps retailers inspire loyalty beyond reason by enabling seamless post-purchase experiences. A SaaS Product Marketing veteran, he has helped companies such as Medallia, Helpshift, and Feedzai differentiate their products, grow revenue, and win. Ajit is an expert in software pricing and his upcoming book, Price to Scale, covers an end-to-end approach to packaging and pricing for high-growth technology companies. He is an avid writer and routinely shares his insights as a member of the Forbes Communication Council, the Bizjournals Leadership Trust, and at Sharebird.com. He is an executive member at Revenue Collective, the leading network of commercial leaders working in the fastest-growing companies worldwide. Web https://ajitghuman.com/pricing-book/ LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/ajitpalghuman Twitter apghuman Re-Read Saturday News This week we tack the introduction to Monotasking by Staffan Nöteberg. The introduction is titled The Five Axioms of Monotasking.; Staffan takes us directly into the deep end. As I noted last week, I will take at least one concept/idea for the charter we are reading forward and try to apply it in my life. As I re-read the introduction, I identified two potential behavior changes based on the five axioms. They are: Resume doing daily retrospectives (focused on Axiom 5) Quiesce Teams and Slack (focused on Axiom 2) I am going to resume daily retrospectives which I stopped doing early last year as I adjusted my work life after I stopped leaving the house on a daily basis. Option 3 would have the biggest impact but will require more groundwork given expectations of instant availability. Has anyone experimented with quiescing chats in Team and Slack (or other similar tools)? Week 1 - Logistics, Game Plan, and Preface - https://bit.ly/3x1oVap Week 2 - Introduction - https://bit.ly/2TXVfwt Upcoming Events! ISMA 18 Virtual Conference, June 24th, 2021 8 AM EDT to 11:15 EDT I will host the event. The event will have a host of great speakers on great topics! ISMA 18 will be free for both IFPUG members and non-members. IFPUG members are eligible for 1 credit at the CFPS Extension Program (CEP) and also attract 3 Technical PDUs in the PMI Talent Triangle®, both by attending the full conference! Register: https://www.ifpug.org/isma18/ Real Value of TMMi (SPaMCAST is a Friend of TMMi America) Free webinar from TMMi America featuring Mark Summers June 25th, 2 to 3 PM EDT This webinar will explore the common usages of the TMMi Test Process Improvement framework. We will dive into how: You can leverage this framework to transform the way your organization delivers software. The model can transform your career. Next steps to take on your journey to becoming a Test Process Improvement superhero. The real value of the TMMi is to help you dramatically change the frequency and quality of your software delivery. Register at https://bit.ly/2RtoGpy Next SPaMCAST In the next Software Process and Measurement Cast, we stay with an agile product theme with a conversation the Rahul Aggarwal. We discussed building products to support the gig economy and entrepreneurship. Anyone thinking about a side hustle or starting a business will want to listen to Rahul's sage advice.
Ajit Ghuman joins Sarah Hicks on this episode of the Predictable Revenue Podcast. Ajit is the author of Price To Scale and is a SaaS Product Marketing veteran who has helped firms such as Narvar, Medallia, Helpshift, and Feedzai differentiate their products, grow revenue, and win. Highlights include: the common misconceptions leaders have about pricing a saas product (2:18), the most common questions leaders ask Ajit about pricing (4:59), setting pricing from the ground up (9:38), building the right packages (13:50), setting pricing (18:30), finding the right unit metric (21:38), and whether or not you should publish pricing on your website (22:45). SHOW NOTES ProfitWell's Patrick Campbell on the nuances of pricing and why salespeople aren't more involved Cost vs Yield in Outbound Sales Might Be the Most Important Concept You're Missing
Ajit Ghuman is the Product Marketing Head at Narvar, a customer engagement platform that helps retailers inspire loyalty by enabling post-purchase experiences at an enterprise-grade. Ajit is known as a SaaS Product and Pricing Veteran, helping many companies such as Medallia, Helpshift & Feedzai differentiate their competitive products, to grow their revenue. During this interview we cover: 00:00 Contentfy, Your On-Demand Content Team (Sponsor) 01:58 - Ajit's Background, Past Positions & Ventures 03:29 - How to be Effective as a Product & Marketing Professional in the SaaS Space? 05:12 - What Software Companies get Wrong About Pricing 08:44 - How to Think Logically & Systematically About SaaS Pricing 13:21 - How to Effectively Adjust & Increase their Pricing & Based on What Key Points or Metrics? 16:59 - Segment-Centric vs Offer-Centric Thinking 19:47 - Different offer for Segments & Allocating on a MRR Model 22:54 - Most Common Mistakes SaaS Startups Make on Positioning & Messaging 26:02 - Borrowing Lessons from Politics to Software 30:18 - Advice Ajit Would Give His 25 Years Old Self 31:35 - Biggest Challenges Ajit is Facing Right now 33:19 - Instrumental Resources for Ajit's Success 36:25 - What does Success Mean to Michael Today 37:21 - Get in Touch With Michael Mentions: https://ajitghuman.com/ (Ajit Ghuman) https://www.revenuecollective.com/ (Revenue Collective) People: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasztunguz/ (Tom Tunguz) https://www.linkedin.com/in/keninger/ (Sam Keninger) Get In Touch With Ajit: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajitpalghuman/ (Ajit's Linkedin) Tag us & follow: https://www.facebook.com/HorizenCapitalOfficial/ (Facebook) https://www.facebook.com/HorizenCapitalOfficial/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/horizen-capital (LinkedIn) https://www.linkedin.com/company/horizen-capital https://www.instagram.com/saasdistrict/ (Instagram) https://www.instagram.com/saasdistrict/ (https://www.instagram.com/saasdistrict/) More about Akeel: Twitter - https://twitter.com/AkeelJabber (https://twitter.com/AkeelJabber) LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/in/akeel-jabbar (https://linkedin.com/in/akeel-jabbar) More Podcast Sessions - https://horizencapital.com/saas-podcast (https://horizencapital.com/saas-podcast)
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Ajit Ghuman runs Product Marketing at Narvar and is a SaaS Product Marketing veteran. He has helped companies such as Medallia, Helpshift and Feedzai differentiate their products, grow revenue and win. On this episode of the Sales Leadership Show Ajit explains how to price B2B products and services and how sales leadership can make pricing […] The post How To PRICE B2B Products Or Services With Ajit Ghuman | Sales Leadership Show appeared first on Salesman.org.
Pricing can make or break any product. Set it too high, and even best-fit customers will take a pass. Too low and you're devaluing the product, stunting growth and possibly starving it for cash. But how do you craft a pricing structure that is just right—and be confident it is? And then how do you package your product offerings to attract specific buyer types, without alienating others? Pricing is a science, and those who do it effectively seldom fall into that success. Ajit Gjuman has led enterprise software product teams through the pricing process, and has interviewed a multitude of tech product leaders in writing his new book, "Price to Scale." He's also the head of product marketing at Narvar, a customer engagement platform that helps brands like Yeti, Levi's and Dyson drive long-term customer loyalty by unifying shipping and returns.Ajit's ultimate goal for the book was for any product manager or entrepreneur to be able to read it over a weekend, then methodically assemble end-to-end pricing in just 30 days. Ajit Ghuman joins Graphos Product Principal Laurier Mandin to explain how that is possible, and offer advice to listeners challenged with setting or resetting product pricing in order to profitably scale their business. Here are some key-takeaways from this power-packed episode: What team member is best-suited to implement your pricing structure (1:45) Ajit's definition of “Positioning” (3:00) What is “Packaging” for a tech product, and what does it look like done right? (4:32) Identifying market segments for a brand new product (6:17) Where do “freemium” products work, and where are they a bad idea? (8:36) Understanding “Product-Led” strategy (11:32) How pricing and your margins relate to going to IPO or being acquired (13:44) How to lead a team in pricing implementation, and influence the CEO (17:06) The alignment hack Helpshift used to 10X revenue from a key account (21:27) Using value metrics to optimize pricing and revenue (22:31) Why your cost to produce has nothing to do with what the customer will pay (24:55) Price to Scale book: AjitGhuman.comThe Product Launch & Marketing Agency: GraphosProduct.com
Returning today is Abinash Tripathy, CEO & Founder of Helpshift. The AI-powered support platform has raised $50+ million in venture funding since 2011. It is now installed on more than two billion devices worldwide, serving giants like Microsoft, Xfinity, and Zynga. In this episode, Abinash opens up about: where conversational AI is getting the most fruitful traction, the most natural fits between customers and NLP technology, and where AI investments are trending. Want to discover more NLP use cases? Get Emerj's free PDF Brief: "Unlocking the Business Value of NLP" at emerj.com/nlp1
Dynamic conversation with Product Leaders on how 2020 has and will impact customer experience and consumer expectations. The Moderator of the discussion is Mahesh Thakur, VP of Product at GoDaddy and panelists are Daniel Chu, CPO at Waymo, Janice Le, CPO at Helpshift, and Shailesh Nalawadi, Head of Product at SendBird.Get the FREE Product Book here
Today's guest is the great and brilliant Abinash Tripathy, CEO and Founder of HelpShift, an AI-powered support platform installed on more than two billion devices worldwide. HelpShift has raised $50+ million in venture funding since its founding in 2011, and its customers include giants like Microsoft, Xfinity, and Zynga. Dan's last interview with Abinash covered the challenges of AI deployment in the enterprise. This episode's topics include: chatbot capabilities, best/worst AI deployment approaches, lessons learned, and which problems are solvable with AI. Want to learn more about chatbots and other NLP use cases? Download Emerj's guide: emerj.com/nlp1
Today's interview is with Rohit Bhargava, a trend curator, founder of the Non-Obvious Company, and the author of six best selling business books including the Wall Street Journal best seller Non-Obvious. Rohit joins me today to talk about his new book: Non Obvious Megatrends: How to See What Others Miss and Predict the Future, what he's learnt about trends over the last ten years and what we should be focusing in the coming years if we want to improve the service and experience that we deliver. This interview follows on from my recent interview – 2019 was the year of hype and snake oil when it came to chatbots. 2020 will be a year of pragmatism and real results – Interview with Abinash Tripathy of Helpshift – and is number 329 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.
Today's interview is with Abinash Tripathy, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Helpshift, which provides an AI-powered conversational platform that companies use to resolve service issues more efficiently, boosting customer satisfaction in the process. Abinash joins me today to talk messaging, the gaming industry, chatbots, snake-oil, hype, getting pragmatic and delivering real results. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Fanocracy and building a true human connection – Interview with David Meerman Scott – and is number 328 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.
Consumers today have a strong preference for messaging as their primary mode of communication. Helpshift has designed an intelligent customer service platform around providing B2C brands with the most seamless digital messaging experience on web and mobile. Linda Crawford, CEO of Helpshift, joins host Doug Collom to discuss her leadership of Helpshift and in other prior customer-service based companies on Bay Area Ventures. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode of AroundStartups interviews we bring to you Sameer Brij Verma [Twitter, LinkedIn], Director & Junior Partner at Nexus Ventures. Sameer has over 8 years of experience in investment domain. Sameer was the founding team member at Reliance Ventures. Sameer is a graduate from Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago with a BS - Computer Engineering Sameer wholeheartedly accepted our interview request and shared his perspective on a range of topics about India's startup ecosystem including: Challenges faced by Indian VC What makes Nexus different from the rest Investors dilemma Scaling startup Indian market compared to silicon valley Books Recommended: Elon Musk: Biography of the Mastermind Behind Paypal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors [Amazon] The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance [Amazon] Website, Service, Technology, People & Startups mentioned: roadrunnr, Amazon Web Services, Open Source, Helpshift, Postman, Druva, Indix Credits: Background Music LA Montage by Rockit Maxx Audio Editing, Mixing & mastering at Mediaforart studios, Gurgaon Graphics by Jugal Mody Your suggestions and feedback are most welcome to make this project the best of its kind. You can write to me at atul@aroundstartups.com or connect via Twitter or Facebook. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/aroundstartups/message
Welcome to the latest episode of Customer Driven with Chad McDaniel! In this podcast, Chad sits down with Linda Crawford, the CEO of Helpshift. Helpshift bridges the disconnect between conventional customer service channels like email andphone support and a growing consumer base that does more on mobile phones and has a strong preference for messaging as the primary mode of communication. In this episode, Chad and Linda discuss: - Outlook of automation trends in 2019 - Difficulties automation may face going forward - The best place to start with integrating automation into your business - How to best prepare for your customers many preferences in handling customer service issues Please be sure to rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify!
Abinash Tripathy is the Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Helpshift, Inc., a SaaS company bridging the disconnect between conventional customer service channels, like email and phone support, and a growing consumer base with a strong preference for messaging. Tripathy has more than 20 years of experience in artificial intelligence, internet, mobile and enterprise software. Prior to founding Helpshift, he was the managing director at Yahoo as a part of the acquisition of Zimbra, a leading open source email platform. He has also created and run a number of early and growth stage companies and held several product and technology leadership roles at Openwave Systems. He began his career at Oracle.
In episode 2 of Startups of the Week, we talk about a company that's trying to make it easier for you to send GIFs back and forth to your friends—a business that has surprisingly attracted a lot of funding. Then, we'll tell you about three more startups you likely haven't heard of yet. Theme music is "Bot Fest" by Alex Vaan. Opening signature by Leah Garchik. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It seems every venture-funded startup wants to be an enterprise software company. Yet, selling to the enterprise is challenging and requires special skills and experience. This episode explores the challenges and solutions with someone who has successfully built a software startup with large enterprise customers.Abinash Tripathy is co-founder and CEO of Helpshift, the world’s leading customer support platform for mobile. Abinash brings more than 17 years of experience within technology, Internet and mobile, having created and run a number of early and growth stage companies.
It seems every venture-funded startup wants to be an enterprise software company. Yet, selling to the enterprise is challenging and requires special skills and experience. This episode explores the challenges and solutions with someone who has successfully built a software startup with large enterprise customers.Abinash Tripathy is co-founder and CEO of Helpshift, the world’s leading customer support platform for mobile. Abinash brings more than 17 years of experience within technology, Internet and mobile, having created and run a number of early and growth stage companies.
Pressure is building on brands and businesses to deliver the same level of customer service in-app as consumers have come to expect on the premises of a store or business. Our hosts discuss the issues and the answers with Abinash Tripathy, co-founder and CEO of Helpshift, a leading customer support platform for engaging, supporting and expanding your mobile user base by enabling mobile apps to improve customer experience, drive higher ratings, reduce churn and increase retention.
Today on Mobile Presence Shahab Zargari and Peggy Anne Salz are joined by Abinash Tripathy, co-founder and CEO of Helpshift. Helpshift is a customer support platform for engaging, supporting and expanding your mobile user base by enabling mobile apps to improve customer experience, drive higher ratings, reduce churn and increase retention. Smart brands and businesses that have […]
Welcome to the newest episode of Buildcast, Episode 4. This week, we explore social media marketing through Instagram and a variety of customer satisfaction service options to integrate into our app. We also tackle a challenging conversation about how Fei is taking Core15 full-time and Alex is staying part–time. How can we evaluate each individual’s contribution without hurting our professional and personal relationship? We also reminisce about our first jobs and question the quality of Subway’s seafood meat option. Products we mention in the show: SupportKit - now known as Smooch (smooch.io), Apptentive (apptentive.com), Intercom (intercom.io), Mixpanel (mixpanel.com), Helpshift (helpshift.com) and Hipmob (hipmob.com). - - - Check out our past episodes at buildcast.fm. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review in iTunes and share your thoughts on Twitter @ buildcastfm (twitter.com/buildcastfm).
As we discovered last month, marketers are building mobile marketing platforms out of smartphones to tap into how much time we spend looking at them. That is why mobile devices also make a great mobile customer service platform, providing opportunities to answer questions right where customers are looking — without making them jump around. Tushar Makhija, Vice President of Business Development for customer support/engagement platform provider Helpshift shares with us how offering customer support assistance right from within your mobile app can craft the kind of experiences that create loyal customers.
Scotty and John talks about implementing support conversations in your app using Helpshift. Internationalization using Tethras and Syncing using Data Abstract from RemObjects.
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