Barefoot Business
Barefoot Business conversations with event professionals and segments from the Club Ichi Telethon Membership Drive, held December 12th, 2024!
Barefoot Business
Kill the Badge Scanner: The Future of In-Person Leads with Bryce Alsten
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What if your biggest event headache, lead capture, didn’t have to be a headache at all? In this episode of Barefoot Business, Liz talks with Bryce from Popl to unpack how AI is reshaping in-person go-to-market, from ditching outdated badge scanners to turning real conversations into real pipeline. They get into the messy reality of event data, the rise of “in-person GTM” as a category, and the tension between automation and human connection.
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Welcome to Barefoot Business, the podcast where we kick off our shoes and dive into real, unfiltered conversations about the business of events. I'm your host, Liz Lathan, co-founder of Club Ichi. And together with our insider members, we'll explore strategic event marketing topics that matter most to our community. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. This is Liz. We have our Fairfoot Business Podcast. This is where we get to talk to our insider members about their Genesis story or whatever they want to talk about. And Bryce and I met for the first time at our spontaneous think tank just this past weekend. I'm so glad you got to come.
SPEAKER_01Yes, we had the best time. Thank you for having us. And it was lovely meeting you in person. Excited to be here on the podcast. And I think uh lots of fun conversations to come in our future.
SPEAKER_03I think so. Okay, so Popul, I just want to start with Popul because, you know, when we talk about the event industry, we all know badge scanning software and things like that. Like I grew up doing trade shows where you have to buy it from the show, and then it's like weeks before you ever get your lead list, and then things got better. We would bring in our own stuff as we deployed globally, and we'd be able to get our stuff. It still took a while to kind of download and get all the things, and now things have evolved and a lot of stuff is happening instantaneously. But what is your background that made you get into this and go, this is a problem and I need to solve it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. So it's been quite the journey, very organic. None of this was planned. Uh, so I think some important context. I'm part of the founding team here at Popel. We've been around for going on six years now.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01And none of our founding team came from the events world, event marketing, um, even like marketing operations. We were all first-time founders, um, more or less. We had all had some experiences launching our own little things before, but uh nothing to the scale of what Popel is today. And so we've really had to navigate this this B2B world and and go to market and learn all these things on our own. But it's it's been a super fun journey. And it goes back to um our CEO Jason and um his co-founder at UCLA in 2019. They went to a party in uh in the LA Hills, and someone had this card that they pulled out of their wallet, and they tapped this card to Jason's phone, and their information showed up on his phone. Similar to like Apple Pay when you go to the to the store and you pay with your credit card with a tap. Um and it kind of blew his mind. And and Jason is uh one of the smartest people I've ever met. He went to school for computer software engineering, and so he can build anything. And that night he went home and just the gears were turning, the rockets were firing, and he built a prototype of something that would be able to share your social media info because he was a UCLA student at the time, and he saw an opportunity for students on campus to want to be able to share their info with each other quickly. Um and so that went viral on TikTok because now we're like March 2020, the peak of COVID, the peak of TikTok, and these videos are getting posted of uh UCLA students tapping devices to each other's phones and sharing their Instagram, sharing their TikTok, and just going absolutely viral. Um, that's where I came into the picture. I saw one of these, and I was selling phone accessories at the time, and I was thinking about incorporating this technology into my products. So, how do we get this chip into my phone grips, my phone cases, et cetera? And so I reached out and started a conversation. One thing led to another, and within a year, I had quit my nine to five and joined the Popel team. And in this time span, um, we adopted the term digital business card. We applied and got accepted into Y Combinator, which is um generally regarded as the world's most prestigious tech accelerator program. Um took a little seed round of funding to allow us to grow even faster. And we built this digital business card company uh for both individual consumers, um so selling B2C. And then we had these individuals saying, Hey, I'm like the head of uh HR, head of marketing at my company. I'm tired of buying paper business cards. Can you help me out with a solution to set up cards for everyone in bulk? And so that's where Pople Teams was born, and we created this dashboard that an admin could log into and they could integrate it with both their um their people platform, so like Microsoft Dynamics or Workday, things like that, where you have everyone at your company and in one click they show up, and now you have digital business cards created for them. And then on the other side is CRM. So when they're sharing their digital business card, the people that they meet become leads that are captured. And how do you get those into to speak with the rest of your company's tech stack? That's through your CRM. So we connected the digital business card platform at both ends. And from there, we just kept learning and kept talking to our customers. And what we found is that the customers who are actually getting true value, and when I say value, I mean uh like tying our service to revenue or solving a really painful problem that they didn't have a solution for previously. Um, the the companies that were finding true value for the ones that were going to conferences and trade shows.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um and they wanted ultimately the ability to capture other people's info at these trade shows. And so this now brings us to you mentioned at the beginning, the badge scanners that trade shows have historically provided to their exhibitors, um, oftentimes for an additional fee. And we found that these badge scanners have been around for decades like way longer than you think, and the technology hasn't really evolved much. Um, and it's really just a logistical headache for event marketers and marketing operations folks, because for the most part, their goal is to put on a an event, an experience that creates a lasting memory in your prospects and your customers' minds. Um, and all the other operational stuff is things they have to do, but it's not necessarily what they their specialty is. And so every time they'd go to a different trade show, they got to reach out, they have to ask what's your badge scanning situation? Do you have lead retrieval? How much does it cost? How many licenses do I need? Oh, okay, do I really need to get a license for every person, or can they share the badge scanner? And then after the show, you wait sometimes it's pretty soon, could be the same day, but oftentimes it's days or even up to a week later, you get a very basic CSV spreadsheet. And now, as the event marketer, one of your other jobs oftentimes is figure out how to get those leads into the CRM so that your sales team can take action on them. And so what we found is that it was this very broken and disjointed process that um, like one of my favorite quotes, um, I was talking to my friend Katie McCabe. Shout out, Katie, one of our favorite customers. She said, When it's time for uh when they get back from the show, she puts on her big Apple headphones, locks herself in a room, and says, No one talk to me for the next six hours as I clean this spreadsheet, I enrich it with like a tool like Zoom Info, I add a column for notes, and then on Monday I'm gonna have to meet with all my sales reps and say, Hey, what did you talk to this person about? And it's just this whole process that really doesn't need to be that complex. So that's the problem we identified. And we've always been pretty fortunate uh with timing. Um, you could call it lucky, but one of my favorite quotes is that lady luck favors men and women of action, right? And um, so you create your own luck, and timing has always been good for us with TikTok making us go viral, and now with AI. Um, so we solved this problem right when AI was becoming really actually useful and applicable. And so we said, what if we could just take a picture of any badge, any business card, and uh like we did at the spontaneous think tank, we had the club Ichi members write their name and company name on sleep masks and scan each other's sleep masks, um, which was super fun. We had a great time doing that. That was awesome.
SPEAKER_03But essentially the scrolling each other's foreheads is the best thing ever.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, that was that was too funny. I can't wait to see the video from that. Um but at the end of the day, really all you need is their name and their company. And from there, there's so much information on professionals in the B2B world out there that we just needed to be able to aggregate it in real time, um, bring all that information together into a nice little profile for you, click save and sync that all to your CRM. Um, and that's the problem that we've solved. And and we're really getting to know event marketers and what they what they do and how they operate. So it's been super exciting, and that's kind of the story in a in a long-winded form there. So I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_03No, that's awesome. And I think one of the things you and I talked about in Chicago was the um something I hadn't actually thought about, but is absolutely rampant. So Katie's example of going through and cleaning up the spreadsheet. We all know that if you work for a company, enterprise organization, you can't load Gmails or hot mails or whatever into your database. And so you got to go through and scrub those and eliminate them, or like what she's doing, manually going in and trying to see if there's a work email address. But a lot of people sign up for their conferences either through just hitting the autofill button or because they don't want their company name on it, they'll put a bad email address or a not relevant one to get it thrown out. And so when you can kind of bypass the crap data that's coming from what their badge was associated with and actually pull real relevant work-associated data from your AI kind of um appending the information, like that's amazing.
SPEAKER_01Yep. Yep, bingo, you got it. Um, yeah, people have smartened up to the fact that when you go to a trade show, you're gonna get put on a million lists. The trade show is gonna sell your data to every sponsor and every exhibitor, and you're gonna get inundated with calls and emails from people who you never spoke to, who you have no interest in speaking to. Um, so people have they put fake emails, burners, hello at uh, they put Gmails, they just put comp like completely fake emails because they don't want to deal with that. Um, and so even if you then go pay thousands of dollars for the event provided lead retrieval, oftentimes you're gonna, like you said, get crap data. And that's that it's basically a roadblock for your sales team to take the next step and and action these leads in uh an efficient, timely manner.
SPEAKER_03So, what's the security protocol, the GDPR, the whatever stuff that happens when you're able to capture this information appended from an outside source? I mean, obviously there is an act of opt-in because they're allowing you to scan them at some point, but it wasn't the data they gave to the show. So, how does that work?
SPEAKER_01For sure. So um a couple ways to to answer this. One, I think there's data security around the company who is capturing leads. So you want your employees and your leads information to say stay stay safe, um, which we have uh protocols in place for. But I think more what you're touching on is um when when I scan a badge and I get someone's info, do they consent to that, right? Like, how does that work? And so to answer that, we have to kind of look at compliance laws that are in place, and those laws differ depending on where you live. Um generally in the United States, it's still kind of the wild west in terms of where your data is. Europe is very uh particular and sensitive around this, so they have what's called GDPR. Um, and we have developed uh GDPR mode for our badge scanner. So if you're going to conferences there, as the admin, you toggle that on. And when your teammates are scanning badges in the field, there is a uh this person that I'm scanning approves and acknowledges that I'm you know getting their their information. Um so that's how we're able to operate at European conferences and in that market.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01But um in the United States, so you know, we all as B2B professionals, I think we've all gotten accustomed to just putting our phones on uh silent if uh if if number is not known, just silence it and send it to voicemail because otherwise my phone would be ringing all day. And that's because our data is just out there. Everywhere.
SPEAKER_03Everywhere. I can find your address by looking at the appraisal district you live in. Like everywhere.
SPEAKER_01Yep, exactly. And I think Zoom Info was the original pioneer here. It's the name that most people know, even if you don't really know what they do. You've probably heard of Zoom Info. Um, and then companies like Apollo and then now Clay is a popular emerging one. These are data enrichment platforms that uh is typically the use cases for business development teams that sit behind their computer, not going to conferences, and it's like I'm targeting uh someone at Coca-Cola, who's the decision maker there? Let me go into one of these platforms and say, uh head of marketing at Coca-Cola, and then it gives you that person and all their info, and then you can email, call them, LinkedIn, etc. Um, so these platforms exist and have existed for a long time. You can go to any of their websites, and in the bottom right, it says um remove my data or something like that. And yeah, so here's a tip for anyone that wants less cold calls. Go to those platforms, click that, and then just submit your name. And they are required by law to remove your data from their system.
SPEAKER_03Interesting.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_01And there are even automated tools. Like I use LifeLock by Norton Security, and they have an automated AI-powered system that will go to all of the data providers out there, and there are, you don't even want to know how many there are, little guys that no one's ever heard of, and will just in an automated fashion process these data removal requests for you.
SPEAKER_03Fascinating. Well, we also talked a little bit about um, I would say proper booth behavior in that when you scan somebody's badge, it's going to append data from whatever the heck it can find on the internet. One of the girls was like, uh, it got my dad's phone number instead of my phone number. So it's like one of those pieces of it is the conversation around can I scan your badge? And then you do and be like, okay, so it's pulled in some info. Can I just double check your phone number here? And then just do that before you hit send. And then the email address that it pulled in was this, and then they're gonna confirm or deny it. So there is some personal responsibility and then your own kind of guardrails that you need to train your boot staff in to make sure that these opt-in steps are happening along the way.
SPEAKER_01Yep, exactly. Um, and to your point about phone numbers, phone numbers are notoriously hard. People change phone numbers way more often than they change email addresses, especially in the B2B world. Um, and when you go to a conference as an exhibitor, typically what you expect from your traditional lead retrieval is a name, a company name, an email address, and probably a job title. Um and so as long as you're getting those pieces, that is those are like the building blocks um to get everything else. Phone number is typically a cherry on top. And even the Zoom infos and Apollo's of the world are never gonna be able to do that perfect. Um, so that's that's how that ends up.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's fascinating though. That those auto dialers, like, no wonder I keep getting calls for somebody named Brian.
SPEAKER_01And that's like, what the Now you don't even know if Brian's a real person or not.
SPEAKER_03Exactly. So what what you've seen now, you've gone from colleges to exchanging contact information to moving into a true B2B environment where you are competing with some larger organizations that have venture capital backing and like have all of these things, and your your organization is still up and coming and growing. So, how do you compete with that in the market? What's your kind of value prop that makes you go, we're the one?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um, well, I think it it comes down to your team and your culture. And with that, ties into AI. And a quote that I heard recently is the the companies that win the next 12 months will win the next 10 years. Um, I think we have a massive advantage over a lot of legacy players, bigger companies, because we can be lean and we can be nimble, and we don't have systems that are so built out and robust and inflexible that you don't even know where to introduce AI. And if you do, you might break something that like is you can't afford to break, right? Um, and so we are just implementing AI in every corner of our business. We're um enabling every employee to become a superhuman with AI and really think about how you can automate things that you've been doing that you never even thought about doing because you didn't know it was possible. Um so that's that's like a newer piece, and I just felt obliged to mention it. But at the end of the day, I think it's it's the team and the culture that you build. And for us, we're very hardworking. Um, you know, generally startups operate um on untraditional schedules. There's a lot of evening work, there's weekend work. Um, I've been guilty of working on Christmas and birthdays, and my fiance will tell you all about that. But um, you know, I think we're all really excited about what we're building and what we're disrupting and the opportunity that's ahead of us. And and so as we build a team, we find people that are excited about doing something like that. And it doesn't feel like you're just showing up for a paycheck and clocking out so you can then go uh, you know, take your place on in the other bucket of your life, right? So there's a lot of alignment, and people just enjoy working with other people who feel that way about their life. Um, and so we're very selective about um who we invite to join this team, and we're very protective around our culture.
SPEAKER_03That's cool. That says a lot, and you can control that and contain that, and you'll make some missteps, but then you can pretty easily. And I think that that's the important part is fixing it. And when you're small and nimble, you can, as opposed to when you're much larger, those people that stay there a couple years too long.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Nope, the system.
SPEAKER_03What's your go-to-market motion? Like, are you doing a lot of digital or is it in person where it's at for you?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Uh so that has certainly evolved for us over time. I think what's unique as a startup who has pivoted and not pivoted in a drastic sense, because digital business cards are actually still a feature of our platform. Oh, cool. But if you come to our website, you'll be hard pressed to find anything about digital business cards because it's a very small feature these days. But fortunately, uh, we didn't have to scrap everything we built and like you know, 360-degree pivot our company. And so the go-to-market piece started with these physical digital business cards. And what was nice about how we were able to operate profitably and not have to go raise a big round and have runway. And are we gonna run out of money? Can we keep paying payroll? Is that we were selling these physical cards on our own website. We were selling them on Amazon, we were selling them at wholesale to promotional companies. So think about like the PCAs of the world who uh do mugs and backpacks and swag and sell it in bulk to companies. They were a customer of ours buying um digital business cards. And so we're distributing our product across all of these channels and creating brand awareness for Popel and what it was. And it's so funny because um on our inbound form submission on our website these days, which is really all B2B, we've got a how did you hear about us? And so often I see I'm an original Popel customer. I used to have a digital business card. I actually went to UCLA with Jason. Um it's like so funny the brand equity that we've built through that digital business card journey that still uh propels us forward into this like B2B um use case. And so that's that's kind of how we built our brand. And then we found that conferences work quite well for us, right? Makes sense. We're selling to event marketers and marketing teams that obviously value conferences as a go-to-market channel for themselves. So we need to be there. We need to talk to them in person. So we go to a lot of conferences and we we chat with our prospects and customers there. Um and then all of your traditional channels, people say cold calling is dead and cold email is dead. It's not true. Uh, you just need to have the right message for the right person at the right time, and you need to have someone driving that seat that understands that. So you're not just sending garbage. Um and LinkedIn is huge, right? I'm sure you've seen me and my team, we're super active on LinkedIn. We encourage everyone at our company to be active on LinkedIn, and it's not just good for the company, it's good for the employee to build their brand. And even if if and when they go somewhere else one day, that is going to be an asset that they'll have, right? The the followers, the thought leadership, the proven track record of being someone who has an opinion in the B2B world. Um, so that and then all your traditional paid ad, SEO, social, et cetera. We're we're covering the gambit.
SPEAKER_03That's great. And I have noticed some promoted posts on LinkedIn that you're doing. Have you seen that those are working? I've heard that LinkedIn's promoted posts are way more expensive than boosting on some of the other platforms.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think what we've found, especially as we we've said goodbye to the B2C portion of our business, our buyers are on LinkedIn. Right. And I and LinkedIn is every day it's evolving. Um but at the end of the day, if you want to get in front of B2B decision makers, that's where they're hanging out. Um sure they're on meta, sure they're on TikTok.
SPEAKER_03Um I you're disrupting their personal life when you feed them an ad like that generally.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. You gotta and and we do use those as complementary, right? So we know who's seeing our ads on LinkedIn, and if you are on Meta and um and maybe it's like okay, it's a touch point. Um, but that's not where people are first discovering us.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um but yeah, um, I think having an executive presence uh who has an opinion on the market, especially in an in a space like ours, which is an emergen like a new category that we're really pioneering here. We call it in-person go-to-market. Um the your customer base, the market, needs someone to look up to for answers. Um there's a a great book that I read. One of my mentors, his name is Anthony Kenneda, and he was the founding CMO at GainSite. GainSite is customer success software, and they were basically the first ever customer success platform, CSP, I suppose is what you call it. And he wrote a book called Category Creation, and it talks about how there are there are different ways that a company can go to market and find success. And typically there's like a disruption play, which is a better mousetrap, just a better way of doing something. But then there's category creation, and category creation is you find this group of uh professionals who are underserved, who are expected to do a lot, but don't have a playbook and don't have tooling and don't have a career path defined. And they did that for the customer success managers out there, which happened as basically a byproduct of Salesforce, got really huge. And the SaaS model, where you can't just sell a hard drive or like a floppy disk with software and say, Hey, good luck, have a nice life. Um, you have to earn your customers every day or they're gonna churn. And Salesforce created the customer success position, which created this whole market. And um Gainsight came and said, We've got the solution for you. But not just the tooling, they came out with um buying guides. And here's how you get promoted, and here's a community of other people who you're not gonna find someone at your company to talk about your problems with. So let's give you other people at other companies and like really being a resource and a leader in this category to say, hey, even if you're not ready to buy our software, we're here to help you in your role and get where you want to go as a professional.
SPEAKER_03You know, game sites is another one of those companies that just has this infectious personality. We uh actually, one of our Club Ichi members pulled us in to run a spontaneous think tank for the Gainsites Executive Summit a couple years ago. And it's just they they're one of those companies that that gets that. Like obviously they are customer success. So, you know, they want everything to feel that way, but from the branding to the CEOs, outfits on stage, like the whole thing pulled through and category creation. I can see that around them. And it's something that we've always talked about too for Club Each, because it's like we're I mean, we're a community. Is the community a new category? No, but we're not a community. We're so we're like we're so we kind of put this social club for professionals around it because that doesn't exist in our industry. It's like, well, you're either in an association or you're in a professional network, or you paid to be in some$8,000 a year blah, blah, blah, executive mastermind thing. And it's like, well, but we're not any of that. That's not the goal.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I love how, and you know, obviously, it was my first Club Ichi experience last weekend in in Chicago, and Elmer and I walked into dinner and you you had the name tags there, writing names, and by default, our brain said, Write my first name, last name, my company name, and you grabbed it out of my hand and said, We don't do that here. You write your first name, and it's like, okay, I get it. This is club Ichi. This is not community button tie suit Ichi, right? So I I love that you guys are doing it, and it's like palpably different than um the other networking community experiences that are out there.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I want to go back and reread Play Bigger and Blue Ocean, and I need to get the one that you just mentioned too to figure out like, okay, so we've got this category creation, but how do you actually go like bring it forth and say, because you have to, I mean, I know that those processes include um conditioning the market and helping people understand that they they're missing something in their lives and all that. I just maybe Claude can help me figure this out.
SPEAKER_01There you go. Just toss it to Claude.
SPEAKER_03Exactly, my new best friend. So you but you've talked about like using a lot of AI in the process, and um, obviously it's part of the DNA of allowing the employees to use it and in the tool itself. What do you see as the future? Are you uh AI will do my job and I can drink penny coladas on the beach person, or is it gonna release you to do even more?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. It's it's like the ultimate question right now, right? And my favorite use case is building applications, building like internal solutions to eliminate inefficiencies and disconnects in processes that exist today. Um so like I use lovable because I'm not technical, so I don't actually care what the code looks like, and even if I saw it, I wouldn't know where it's wrong. You know, Kyle from Club Eachy, who is uh qualified to look at the code, says, I I love that for you, but you're building a house of cards, right? So I think there's like a balance there, and you can create excellent MVPs um and proof of concept.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But I think we still have some time to go where any individual contributor who's not an engineer can build like a full end-to-end solution that's gonna hold up over time, but that's just one piece of it, right? So, like in Claude, I personally feel like a late adopter, I'm probably earlier than most. I just went into the connectors and connected everything Gmail, Google Drive, uh, all my meeting recordings, Apollo, you name it, if it's there, I connected it, and I'm trying to condition myself to think differently. And I think that's the hardest part about this. Um, one of my colleagues, Aiden, put gave a really good analogy here. It's like, if I gave you a butler and I said, Hey, this butler is here to s to serve you and and help you out, you could probably think of a few things to give, like give him your laundry, uh, drop the kids off at at school, do the dishes, maybe clean the yard. But this guy, he doesn't stop, he doesn't sleep, he doesn't rest, he doesn't get tired, he doesn't get sick and miss a day, and so he comes back and he goes, it's done. Done, dun, dun, dun, done. What what can I do next? And you're like, uh, like you don't even know what to give him next because you've never been in a situation where you had to use your brain to ask, like, what could I do? And so that's what AI is today. And I think the key is to understand what are the things you don't even realize that you could be doing better that you can offload, and it's it's a a complete mental shift. I there's gotta be a course on this, and if there's not, someone should start. It's like how to reprogram your brain to be open to implementing AI in your own life to become more efficient. Um so these little things were like listening to your call recordings, your email, just ask Claude, like, hey, what what did this customer talk about? What was this pain point, or what are across the past 30 days, what are customers complaining about the most? Um that kind of thing. But to answer your question ultimately, do I think it's gonna replace jobs? Yes.
SPEAKER_03Oh yeah, jobs that are absolutely I used to be one of those people that said, you know, AI won't replace you, but people using AI will, but now I'm like, absolutely not. AI will 100% replace you. So you better make yourself irreplaceable.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I I yeah, a lot of people I do should be scared, I think. Um or scared's not the right word. A lot of people should be concerned, and I think there's a healthy amount of stress that comes with it. Um there's there's we're inundated with options. There's ChatGP just for chat, right? There's GPT, there's Claude, there's Perplexity, there's Google, uh Gemini, there's Grok, and it's like, which one do I use? And you know what? Unfortunately, you should test all of them and form opinions, and that is stressful, that is hard. But uh I think eventually we're gonna see winners emerge and like clear choices or at least clear use cases, right? Like I'm seeing Claude be positioned as the AI for work and Chat GBT is the AI for your personal life. Um and these are the kind of things that I think we all need to have opinions around, not just to protect our livelihoods, but also to just make our lives easier, yeah, even in our personal lives.
SPEAKER_03I listened to a podcast and they said that AI will really just amplify your own personality, whether there are flaws or or good things about you. Like if you are the type of person that is enterprising, curious, and solution oriented, then you're going to leverage AI to help you continue to do those things. But if you're a lazy person, you're gonna use AI to create lazy things and it's gonna break and the code will be wrong and it'll be messy, and it'll be a house of cards, and it'll be all those things, and that's just it's just gonna do more of that. And so I think just from a content perspective, we can see that on LinkedIn and everywhere else, right? You can see the lazy content that people think that they're outsourcing their brain to, and then it just creates more scroll past kind of stuff versus the people that are using it to really sharpen their thoughts and to really try to get that story honed in and to really build copy that's worth reading. And you can like there's a huge difference there. So I'm excited for you know the future of what it's gonna do for all of us, but I I am worried for a lot of our people and and not just the the more tenured folks in our industry who have been laid off now and are struggling to find work because they've just eliminated those jobs, and especially for someone who's senior and strategic, they're they're not seeing the value for that anymore because they've offloaded strategy to a different department. It's now the marketing department instead of the event department, and and then they try to bring in younger professionals, which of course is fantastic. However, even the young professionals can't find jobs because now they're fresh out of college and that lower level job has been eliminated by AI. So that's my biggest concern, is kind of the larger industry challenge.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I agree. And it's it's an awkward time for a lot of people. And I I particularly agree that I feel for a lot of the event marketers because um generally my understanding is there's not a lot of like technical backgrounds when it comes to event marketers. It's more hospitality, um, marketing, communications. And just by the nature of that, I think there's less opportunity to be exposed to technology. Um I personally am very grateful to have been able to work side by side with with our CEO and founder Jason, who is a software engineer and a technologist, and just being around people like that, you start to learn what's possible. Um and and change like going back to reframing your mind and not being scared to try new tools.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um, and not and not saying, I never I've never coded, how could I even use like Zapier or or something like that? But at the end of the day, it's you just got to take some time, download the tool, get in there and play around, and you'll find that it's not as technical or scary as you thought.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah. And then I think that we come back to the human connection part. So, as you said, you guys were founded on in-person. You will continue to go to market as in people, and then the the tool itself is intended for when you meet a person. If people weren't meeting in person, then they could use Apollo or Zoom Info to just find folks. But but this is still based on the people. And as everybody keeps saying, the more digitally connected we get, the more humanly disconnected we've been. Therefore, these events are necessary because we are tribal people. Like we are a race of people that need to be together.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, there's there's really uh going to be a premium placed on in-person experiences. And as it becomes easier to find people's info and engage them offline, no one knows what to trust. Am I talking like when that guy calls you on the phone? I don't even know if I'm talking to a human. How so how how can I build any trust with this company? Um, and so the importance of a handshake and a smile and a joke and sharing a drink and being part of these communities is is, I think, just going to be more valuable than ever. And even with with costs of travel and things that are impacting things, companies are still willing to invest in this. And then people are even beyond their companies are willing to spend their own money to go meet up in person. So that's that's what's important to us, and that's where we we feel that we are unique in a B2B SaaS world is uh there are all these go-to-market tools that more or less do the same thing, but no one has really tackled the in-person piece and allow you you know you hire great in-person marketers and in-person sellers because they possess skills that are invaluable. Um people that can build trust and make you laugh and and form connections. That is really hard to come by, and I think harder than ever, as the younger generation you know, is is not exposed to picking up the phone and making phone calls and knocking on doors to see if you know your friend's available to play, and you gotta sell sell their mom to let them play for an hour.
SPEAKER_03My child will not go knock on another door, like just won't do it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, gosh forbid. So uh yeah, the the in-person piece is is powerful, and we'll it'll be crazy to see how in-person experiences unfold over the next several years here.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think so too. I actually just heard yesterday that even Zoom is now starting their Zoom AI, is looking at allowing you to create an avatar of yourself that you send to meetings. So it's the next evolution of the note taker. You're actually sending yourself in a window that will sit there and listen to the meeting and then at the proper time ask the questions you pre-programmed it to ask if they didn't get answered. And I'm like, Yeah. Like I remember doing COVID days, my son, when he was doing virtual schooling, recorded himself sitting at his desk and then used that as his virtual background so he didn't have to be in front of this. But now that that avatar can actually be interactive.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Unreal. Good for him. Major respect. See, that's a technologist right there. What do you think of a world where we go to conferences and whether it's like uh glasses or a contact lens or a little device on the back of your ear that as you navigate, it says, Hey, that's John. He's an open dream. Okay, let me talk about it now.
SPEAKER_03Yes, yes, yes. Because here's what I want. I want it to be able to like pull up. So if everybody is part of the registration process, let's say you put in your LinkedIn profile. And so as you're walking around, then it can pull up, like like in the Sims where it's got the thing hovering over your heads. It's like, here are the top three connections you have in common. So that you can walk up to them and be like, oh my God, Bryce, I just met Elmer at this other thing, and then you can talk. Imagine it for the political landscape. If Trump walked into a room, if Obama walked into a room and could see how much people had donated to him at every place, like it would just change the landscape of everything.
SPEAKER_01It would be wild, like helping you prioritize who to talk to. I do wonder if it would result in like um sort of like more what's the word, like exclusivity and clickiness, right? Where it's like, oh, this person's like social worth isn't or business worth isn't enough for me to even go back. That's a black mirror episode. Yeah, exactly. So crazy.
SPEAKER_03And I think that that is a huge part of it, right? So that is, these are the things that I dislike about technology. So you experience the think tank where we bring in sticky notes and sharpie markers, and we have people write stuff. And every time we do these events, somebody comes up to me and says, I could make an app for that. And I'm like, no, you do not understand. It is the the tactile, the human moment of people seeing what you're writing, of you slapping it on the wall, of the sticky note falling off the wall, and someone else picking it up and rereading it as they put it back on the wall. And now they're having a human spontaneous collision where they found a problem that someone else had that was their problem too. And when you start seeing those things, if it's if it's just like, I hate all these AI matchmaker things that everyone's trying to sell me. And they're like, you have a community, we should use AI matchmaking. I'm like, yeah, on one level, okay, cool, I get it. On the other level, that that is completely an echo chamber. You're you're matching things based on what people are saying that they need and have. But when I put people in our room together, they find things they didn't even know they had in common. And that's way more impactful, I think.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And I I use a physical journal and a pen. And there was a period almost a year ago now where I was like, why am I still using this pen and paper? It's just like I really need to force again, root mentally reframe my mind to use AI. And you know what? As much as like I'll uh say everyone needs to be doing this, I tried to like fill the need for my journaling, self-accountability, whatever you want to call that. And I tried a bunch of AI tools, and none of them felt right. None of them felt as meaningful or tactile or human as me writing in my like sitting in a chair drinking my coffee in the morning, sun coming in my eyes, and I'm writing with a physical pen on a physical paper. Technology can't replace that.
SPEAKER_03Right. For me, there is definitely a cognitive connection between what I'm doing with my hand and what's going into my brain and then the visual and like the entire process. And so that's I worry about that for my kids, you know, all of their school assignments are on a Chromebook and they're like they're taking tests on a Chromebook, like they're not having that experience anymore of having to write stuff down. And I that that is my concern for our next generation of folks. Like, can they can they do these things? What does the learning really look like and how does that change?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And and when you write, you have to be more selective in what you put down on the paper because there's a process from thought in your brain to then another layer of like evaluating that thought and then saying, okay, I'm gonna commit this to paper. And then even with the keyboard, like, yes, you can type more and faster, but I pretty much only talk to my computer these days because I find that I can give it so much more context. Um and and in that case, it makes sense, right? Like I can give it more context, a lot of it is lower value, but within that is the high value stuff, and the AI is intelligent enough to extract that. But when you are writing like journaling, what's important for you to do today, how to hold yourself accountable, you want that layer of cognitive like processing to happen in your brain because you're you're choosing what's important, and that's what's going down on the paper. And when you just AI vomiting, you don't get to do that. You're handing off part of your brain to the computer.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's so true. Oh my gosh. We've talked about so many amazing things. This has been so fun. So how would you bring this back to B2B marketing?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Let's do it.
SPEAKER_03No, but I I truly think that all of this stuff is it it to use your word, layers. Like it is layer on layer on layer, and it is our job as the humans in this industry, the leaders in this industry to peel those layers back and try to help the people in our community, in our in our audiences figure out how to navigate this world. And I think that it has to be us coming together in person, us playing with these things, us being in the sandbox together, and us, you know, have having a drink at the bar or on the beach.
SPEAKER_01Um I think that's fall down, scratch your knee and keep playing in the sandbox. Yep.
SPEAKER_03Exactly, exactly. Bryce, it was so fun chatting with you. It was so fun having you at the think tank in person. And um, where can people find you and Popel?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's uh appreciate you asking. So, me, LinkedIn is probably the place to go. Just Bryce Alston. Um, you could also find me on Instagram if you want to see that side of me. Um, so that's just also at BryceAlston. And then Popel is P-O-P-L. Um, some people accidentally call it Popy, but it's popple.co. That's our website. You can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, you name it, uh, podcasts on YouTube. We're out there. We'd love to meet you. Reach out, shoot me a message. Let's meet up in person.
SPEAKER_03Amazing. You can also find Bryce on the Club Eachy Slack channel. So thanks everybody for joining in, and we'll catch you again.
unknownThank you.
SPEAKER_03Thanks for tuning in. If you'd like to be a guest on the show, join Club Eachy as an insider today at weareichi.com. That's weare i c i.com.
