B2B Inspired

Launch Lessons from Lovina: The Importance of Customer Obsession

• BlueOcean | The B2B Agency • Season 1 • Episode 24

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What if the secret to transforming your marketing performance lies in a laser-focus on your customers' needs and experiences? This episode of #WeDoB2B delves into this crucial topic with Lovina McMurchy, COO and CPO of Kry10, as she shares her remarkable journey from South Auckland to global tech leadership.

Learn how Lovina's customer-centric initiatives at Starbucks, such as the first national Wi-Fi network and phone-based ordering systems, have redefined customer experience and technology innovation.

We also explore insights from the Southern SaaS 2024 keynote, where Lovina discusses the future of SaaS and its potential for Kiwi entrepreneurs.

Gain a fresh perspective on customer-centricity in B2B marketing and discover how New Zealand's strengths in various tech fields are driving global innovation. Lovina's candid stories offer invaluable lessons for marketers, especially in the B2B field.

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Let’s roll up our sleeves and take on tomorrow together.

For more B2B insights, ideas and opportunities, head to www.blueoceanagency.co.nz

Subscribe
When you subscribe to B2B Inspired, you're playing a key role in growing and supporting New Zealand's B2B Marketing Community.

Share Your Feedback
Got something to say? We're all ears. Your voice is what powers this community – it can't grow without you.

Connect with Us
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blueocean-agency/
Website: https://www.blueoceanagency.co.nz/podcast/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@WeDoB2B

Let’s roll up our sleeves and take on tomorrow together.

Dale Koerner:

Kia Ora, and welcome back to We Do B2B, the podcast by Blue Ocean, where we unpick the ins outs, ups and downs of B2B marketing here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I'm your host, Dale Koerner, and I'm a B2B marketer like you. From emerging trends and thinking to inspiring real world stories from smart, good people here in New Zealand, we are here to help the New Zealand B2B marketing community to become one of the best and brightest anywhere in the world. If, like me, you're a B2B marketer looking for a place to connect, learn and be inspired, you have come to the right place.

Dale Koerner:

Welcome to the next of the we do B2B Southern SaaS sessions here up at Southern Saa 2024. We're joined next by Lovina McMurchy, who is the Chief Operations Officer and Chief Product Officer at Kryten and has an amazing journey to share with us here as a Kiwi marketer, product owner and just awesome human being who is able to share the view back from the other side. So, Lovina, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here. Thank you, so you've just come off stage. You're relatively fresh from your keynote. How was it?

Lovina McMurchy:

Oh, I think it went pretty well. I mean, I think that you know where SaaS is right now, is it's you know it's getting to a point of it's been around 10 years.

Dale Koerner:

You know there's a a lot of.

Lovina McMurchy:

We're heading for a phase of maturity, right, and so the opportunities are still there, but they're a little bit kind of harder to find. You need a nuanced approach to how you kind of you know find sustainable value valuable in in SaaS. But still tons of opportunities, you know, for kiwi founders to participate oh, that's fantastic, and so you've.

Dale Koerner:

You've have a. I'm looking through some of the list of places that have made it onto your CV. I mean there's Amazon, there's Pushpay, there's MoVac, there's Microsoft, that's it's a pretty star-studded career. Take us through your journey.

Lovina McMurchy:

Yeah, I mean I like to say I've worked for all of the Seattle-based monopolies, which is Starbucks, amazon and Microsoft, but so you, but I spent my first 30 or so years in New Zealand. I was really lucky to grow up in New Zealand, I think, at a time where we had tremendous support for kids of all different socioeconomics to learn to grow. I grew up in South Auckland, went to university, and so it was a great, great time. And when I was 28, I won a scholarship to go to Harvard Business School. It was fully funded.

Lovina McMurchy:

I always say I got all of my luck in life in that kind of one moment and you're better off to have all of your luck condensed into one big thing than have a lot of little bits of luck. So I went off to business school thinking I'll do two years at Harvard and then come home, but after Harvard that you have an opportunity to work for two years of you know work training. And so I went out to Seattle, really because it reminded me of New Zealand, okay, and my first job there was working for starbucks.

Lovina McMurchy:

It was just after the tech big, you know, web crash yeah and it was a fascinating environment to say how can you take technology, technology services and bring them into this like really special? You know brick and mortar and environment, um, and then once I was there, you know, then you know, then you kind of get, you kind of settle in, you put down roots you found a husband, had a couple of kids and then went on to work for 10 years at Microsoft and then four years at Amazon.

Dale Koerner:

And it sparked from a scholarship that took you through Harvard and then through coffee. So I'm intrigued what was the scope at Starbucks? What were you covering there?

Lovina McMurchy:

Yeah, it was really fascinating. So it was. You know how do you take. It was called New Ventures. So how do you create new businesses using that base of consumers? The Starbucks consumers are a really special set of people. You know they're quite tech forward um, you know they're reasonably high kind of socioeconomics and their level of relationship to the brand is really high. I mean it's an addictive substance.

Lovina McMurchy:

People are in starbucks, you know, sometimes twice, twice a day yeah um, one analyst looked at like as though, or a cell phone network, and said what's the rpu? You know the average revenue per user of a starbucks customer and it's actually, it was higher than most cell phone companies. So it's, it's a tremendous environment and they've always wanted to complete, continue reinventing themselves, and so the idea is how can we bring technology into the stores in really appropriate ways? Yeah, and the first problem we tackled was how do you speed up the line? Because it's not, you know, it's a discretionary purchase.

Lovina McMurchy:

Yeah, if there's 10 people in front of you, then you know you just do an abandon, yep and um. Back then we were all the stores were on dial-up, so the the credit card processing was very slow. Yeah, it was hard to do things like store training of employees. You've got 100,000 employees at that time and so our big project was really putting high-speed T1 band communication into stores. That would enable things like employee training but also internet service front of house for customers.

Lovina McMurchy:

It was the first national Wi-fi network in america. It was the one place you could go and you knew you'd be able to get on the internet back before it was everywhere. So it was really an important part of the store experience. And then, because all the credit card processing was through that same, you know, bandwidth, um, we, we managed to, you know, get your coffee to you more quickly. And then we went from there to um phone-based ordering. So why wait in the line at all? Right, why don't you use an app, you know, to order your coffee in advance and come and pick it?

Lovina McMurchy:

up, pick it up so you know I look back. I've done many things in my career, but in some ways I'm still most proud of the time I was at Starbucks, because I can look at the services I created and they're still there, that's what a legacy that's fantastic and everyone can relate to it right, so it's a lot easier than talking about my time in windows and certainly right about that same time, xp versus a cup of coffee.

Dale Koerner:

You probably had a much better experience with the coffee than you did with.

Lovina McMurchy:

XP. Yeah, you got a lot less complaints anyway.

Dale Koerner:

Okay, and now Kry10.

Lovina McMurchy:

Well, I'd start by saying I spent five years as a venture capitalist here in New Zealand and I kind of thought at the back of my mind, if I spend a lot of time looking at Kiwi companies, I might fall in love with one of them okay and Kry10 was actually the last investment I did within that particular fund, so it was coming to the end of the fund, you know, anyway, we deployed all our capital and it was a particularly special business.

Lovina McMurchy:

I'll tell you what it does and then I'll tell you why it was special, but it's it's. It's very technical. We are making an operating system. Okay, and you think about operating systems.

Lovina McMurchy:

You've got windows, you've got linux yeah, you know what there's not too many operating systems out there across the last 20 years like building a new operating system is incredibly bold and aggressive in a market, like you said, that's saturated and dominated that's right, but our, our belief is that the operating systems that exist today are really a function of the past and a function of times where there was a lot less concern around cyber security, where hardware was less um was was less powerful yeah right, so you didn't have the same processing speeds and we didn't live in a call it an iot world.

Lovina McMurchy:

Yeah, right now machines run the world and I don't mean, you know connected you know thermometers. I mean our cars are becoming software connected you know we've got, we rely on communication systems.

Lovina McMurchy:

the grid energy grid is increasingly software connected um machines, ventilators, heart machines, software connected, and so, as we see, intelligent machines become connected to the internet. The foundation of software that runs them is really important, and the existing operating systems are really not able to kind of meet the security needs of these new breed of software defined and intelligent devices, and so we're trying to reinvent them.

Dale Koerner:

Wow.

Lovina McMurchy:

Yeah, and how did I find this company and why is it special to me? Crazy. But the founder is an American guy, boyd Moulterer, from Wisconsin, and he spent 17 years at Microsoft. So that was the weirdest thing for me to have been at Microsoft for 10 years come home here to New Zealand and then meet a bunch of old Microsoft people that had also moved to New Zealand, and so it was sort of that kind of crossover between this is my home country and I want to be involved in a really big, bold idea, but yet it's with people that also understand that other part of my life, having spent 20 years in in the US, and so you know I couldn't walk past it. I mean the the level of technical leadership in the business. You know it's unusual to find businesses here. We've got good businesses, but ones where you really look at it and say, boy, we're trying to do something that no one else in the world can do, and so that's what really attracted me to Kry10.

Dale Koerner:

I see that. So you have a number of different lenses on the New Zealand tech landscape. I mean, you are a Kiwi Yep, you've invested in Kiwi companies, yep, and you're now based in the US and you know looking back over the water and seeing what's happening over here. So what are your observations from afar?

Lovina McMurchy:

my observation. Well, I mean I think you know generally, um, the vc industry across 20 years here and the tech startup scene across 20 years 20, you know, 20. When I left I would say it's pre-internet times, because trade me didn't exist, right. So so just winding back 1998 like we had nothing technology maybe banks used it, but we there wasn't really. You couldn't see the impact in society and it's been a slow burn. It often is when you're starting a tech ecosystem.

Lovina McMurchy:

I think the next 10 years that was kind of post internet. It was hard, it was hard, it was slow, there wasn't enough capital. It was just a very kind of difficult time. But ecosystems, tech ecosystems, reach some tipping point where they just take off and some of it's about access to capital, some of it's about having founders that have found success. They can go on and inspire other founders.

Lovina McMurchy:

But there are also some factors in there I think that were around covid. You know covid was a time where there was a tremendous amount of venture capital in the world. Um, vcs had trouble deploying it because their their hands were so hot with money so they needed to go out of their way to find opportunities that were fairly valued. Yeah, and back in the day. You know their mindset was hey, I'm a silicon valley vc. If you're more than 20 minutes away from my office I'm not interested, right. So that was hard for kiwis to get um us capital. But during covid all of that changed. All the meetings moved to zoom. Yeah, and at that point why does it matter where you are?

Lovina McMurchy:

That pace of change was so rapid it was so rapid, and so I think that change really opened up the USVCs to really look globally for good founders and for good deals that would give them returns, and now we're in a post-COVID phase I don't think that's changed. So, it's a permanent change that really, I think, helps Kiwis get access to, you know, to foreign markets.

Dale Koerner:

So when you're in, when you're rubbing shoulders with the people that you rub shoulders with over in the US and you say, you know I'm Lovina or I'm from New Zealand, yeah, what's the response? How do people perceive that origin? Do they understand your accent? First and foremost, do you have to repeat yourself?

Lovina McMurchy:

often they don't understand my accent, especially in america. In america, yeah, yeah, they do struggle, uh with it. So you need to try and talk real slow and that can help. But the first question out of their mouths is always why did you come back?

Dale Koerner:

Well, that's good Okay.

Lovina McMurchy:

Yeah, so I think that a lot of Americans really do have this dream of oh, and it's a reflection of the worry, the pressures of America, the concern for the future. There's a lot of anxiety in America and I think many people have this dream of having a ripcord. They could just pull and just if things get so bad, they want to get out, and most of them aren't going to do that, but it is something that you know. There's that kind of constant dream, so they can't understand why I've come back. That's kind of the first question. But very much you know New Zealand is regarded as a, you know a special, you know a special place, you know kind of a leader in the world in terms of, you know, our idealism you know our degree of innovation.

Lovina McMurchy:

I think there's not a huge depth around what we do from a tech point of view. I try tell people how successful we are, for example, in the space industry and rocket. You know rocket ship, satellites and and they literally don't believe it. You know, they assume that we'd be great at agri-tech.

Lovina McMurchy:

Yeah, so if you talk to them about holter totally makes sense yeah they're there, um, and when you explain to them why we're particularly good at, you know, sass businesses that target smb, you know, because we're a nation of smb businesses, then they kind of not nod their heads yeah but yeah, there's a certainly a lot of interest in what we're doing.

Dale Koerner:

What, then, are the knowledge gaps? So you kind of talked about the fact that there's an association, that yep, of course you guys are going to be good at agri-tech because it's green and you're full of cows or whatever, or sheep, I suppose, is the other perception as well. What else is seen and what else is missed?

Lovina McMurchy:

Yeah, I think we do have some good basic science and deep tech businesses, and I think that's where the understanding isn't there. Whether it's innovation around things like bioengineering, pharmaceuticals, materials science, they wouldn't necessarily assume that we're good at that and I think it's not across the board. There's just some little caches of technology that we've, you know, particularly been strong at. If you think about power by proxy and you know, wireless charging, like we invented that right, everyone around the world who uses apple products is using, you know, technology that was invented in a new zealand university I feel like I should have known that.

Lovina McMurchy:

Yeah, you probably should.

Dale Koerner:

That's a bit embarrassing.

Lovina McMurchy:

Because we don't have this. Our universities may be the same level of name brand recognition and there isn't an assumption of that, and so I think, kind of educating them about, like the some of the real kind of centres of excellence and you know, photonics and lasers I mean there's so many interesting things that you're you're seeing come out of New Zealand I think they understand that our general population is, you know, well educated, is hard working, so we get kind of credit for that. I think they understand that the you know the kind of the relative cost of labour. There's some arbitrage here because it's not quite as expensive to hire an engineer in Auckland as San Francisco. But yeah, those are some of the gaps.

Dale Koerner:

It's interesting that you say that there's a perception that we're hardworking when we're a nation with a productivity issue. I mean, that's an interesting kind of mismatch there. Yeah yeah, Okay. So one thing that I would like to kind of dig into, given that our audience primarily is B2B marketers, what could the Actually can I respond to that, Because that's an interesting challenge.

Lovina McMurchy:

Are we hardworking? I might have misstated that a little bit, like it's not so much that we're hardworking because Americans do work harder right, many countries around the world have people that work harder. It's that more we're pragmatic, like. I think, a Kiwi could understand what are the things that move the needle, and they're capital efficient. They get a lot done with little. Okay, so it's probably more about like output per person.

Lovina McMurchy:

You know like they're amazed when they see some of our startups. It's probably more about output per person. They're amazed when they see some of our startups. How much has been accomplished with so little money in such small teams.

Dale Koerner:

Right, so there's a resourcefulness element there, yes, yeah, okay.

Dale Koerner:

Oh, that's a trait that we can wear as a badge of honor. Yes, absolutely. So what else, looking at that through the lens of the B2B marketer who is communicating into the US or selling, promoting the origin story of their business into the US, what are some of the hot buttons? What do you know of that market that says, okay, well, you put this in market and you showcase this in front of them and you're selling the dream yeah, and I would say there's been a tremendous change, you know, over the last five years.

Lovina McMurchy:

I mean the in the early days or kind of the middle age of sass, um, you know the the go-to-market was. You know this whole product-led growth thing. Every vc wanted to hear how you could be a product-led growth company and what does that mean?

Lovina McMurchy:

it means that you have a product that's super easy to adopt. Maybe there's a trial version of it. You don't even have to get a credit card. You know, you come into some team inside a big company, you get them using it right, so you've got a foothold and then you do a land and expand right and that works super well. And there was a lot of opportunity for different solutions that were needed. Um, so people were interested in what new services could, you know, help them improve their businesses? Now you roll forward five years and because sas has such a low barrier barrier to entry, most companies in america are awash with sas services they've got that many logins and that many things, that many logins because all of this oh, that department like ordered this one, this other department ordered something else and none of them even connect.

Lovina McMurchy:

Like you've got all these shadow it problems and so we're at a time where companies, enterprises, are looking at it and going. I don't know if I want 200 sas, honestly, and I liked SaaS at first because it was like I didn't have to have really high upfront costs to buy a box product and buy servers. It was just this little monthly charge. But now I've got 200 little monthly charges. It's actually quite expensive and they don't connect. Where the heck is my data?

Lovina McMurchy:

it's sitting with all these sass vendors yeah um, and so the move at the moment, particularly as the economy has slowed down, is to say how do I consolidate, how do I simplify um? And I'd rather have fewer vendors who are selling these suites of products rather than like just have a one point solution. So I think it's become a lot harder for SaaS marketers. If you're trying to market a point solution and then some of the outreach, how do you get that initial foothold? That's become harder as SaaS enters a period of kind of climbing the slope into maturity.

Lovina McMurchy:

As SaaS enters a period of kind of climbing the slope into maturity, that's a time where the GTM becomes extremely efficient, almost scientific right. Like to be in that game. You know you can't be slapdash and there's a lot of competition and a lot of noise to cut through. So most of us in business, every morning when we open our inboxes, you know you have 10 mails from different SaaS vendors and it's. You know, the whole GTM of SaaS has also been SaaSified. So companies like Outreach great company love it right.

Lovina McMurchy:

But it's what it's been doing for the last five years is saying how do I give leverage to your Sdrs by automating a lot of their workflows? Well, I'll just write the email for you yeah now what I see as a customer is a bunch of vanilla dear blank. Yeah, I'm so impressed at how you you do blank. Have you considered a new payroll solution? Yeah, and it's like, oh, delete, delete, delete.

Dale Koerner:

Get me off your onboarding.

Lovina McMurchy:

And it's also kind of cutting through. For example, some of the. If you were to do that through email marketing, there'd be unsubscribes, but these emails, because they're semi-written by a human, don't have unsubscribe buttons. And because they don't have unsubscribe buttons, it's leading to this massive volume of automated outreach that isn't really targeted, because what's the cost? Why target right?

Dale Koerner:

yeah just you can fill someone's inbox yeah, if you can saturate without actually having to spend the money and time on. On the segmentation and targeting piece, absolutely that's right, but it's not cutting through.

Lovina McMurchy:

And then if you really have a message where you have targeted it, unfortunately you're stuck in this like delete, delete, delete. So I don't even want to read these mails anymore. I think, um, you know, I think that as a marketer, it's very important not to follow those models because they are failing. You know you need to be creative and find other, different ways of cutting through with your audience. So I think that's really going to be important and I think, at some point soon too, the notion of why is it okay for you to fill my inbox with the spam? It's really spam. It's not really a person, it's really an algorithm. Like, how is that really different to sending me a newsletter that I didn't?

Dale Koerner:

sign up for the list.

Lovina McMurchy:

Yeah, you know, so I also think that those models have a pretty limited shelf life I mean the focused inbox as well.

Dale Koerner:

You know, as soon as that came in for for outlook, that was just a. You saw the email rates, the open rates, just drop off a cliff and I there's going to be no way that that some of automated AI generated content like that's gonna start to get picked up.

Dale Koerner:

It has to somewhere along the line, and that's just gonna get shelved and, before you know it, this once lucrative window into the market will be closed, and at that point you've gotta have something else, and you've gotta have that creative lens and you've gotta have another horse in the race.

Lovina McMurchy:

Basically, I think the other thing I'd call out about the GTM is that, as you know, sas companies grow bigger and offer suites of solutions. They obviously have a gtm advantage because they can um amortize their cost of acquisition across multiple products in the family. So I think if you're being a, you know, single point solution, getting the economics of customer acquisition to work is very challenging, yeah, very challenging yeah, I see that.

Dale Koerner:

I see that. So there's probably lessons to be learned from other people who've gone through that journey. So what I'd kind of like to ask as a bit of a wrap-up question here is what is the role of community in the software as a service space? I mean, we're here at a KiwiSaaS community event. What role does that network and that community have to play in shaping and progressing the sector?

Lovina McMurchy:

Yeah, I mean, I think you know, back in the day before we had that community, founders had to make their own mistakes, and I think in the early days of SaaS, because there was so much opportunity, sometimes you couldn't afford to make mistakes. You could afford to learn slowly. Sometimes you can even afford to make mistakes, you could afford afford to learn slowly. But given the lead, the pace that we see now, the level of competition, like you, really you can't afford to make mistakes. And so how do you learn from other people's mistakes?

Lovina McMurchy:

yeah uh, so that you're kind of wise, you're armed with the knowledge you know, going going into your business. I think that's really important and I think that think that community exists everywhere. Us has fantastic founder communities as well, but there is definitely something special about being part of that kind of Kiwi network where every founder is really willing to get behind and help every other founder. And I have actually in Kry10 business business, because we are government focused from a sales point of view actually also got a great deal of help from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, yeah, you know. So leveraging New Zealand's, you know, state level relationships in a way to get introductions, you know, for us and to create kind of credibility. So we've really felt we've benefited a lot from being being part of the kiwi community it's such a really, really good to hear.

Dale Koerner:

It's actually heartwarming, to be honest. Yeah good knowing that, having come from here and gone over there, you can still look back and say, yeah, there is this, there is, there is something here. There is still something special about it here. I'm going to ask you one last question, um, because you talked about learning from mistakes. What's the mistake that you learnt from the most?

Lovina McMurchy:

Oh, I'm going to have to pause and think about that one.

Dale Koerner:

I like your original comment about having all of your luck concentrated on one moment in time. That was great, but I don't know that you could plan for that.

Lovina McMurchy:

No, no exactly.

Dale Koerner:

Or what's the steepest learning curve perhaps is another way of phrasing that that you've gone through um, I think those are very different questions. Cool yeah choose which one you'd like to answer or both, I mean I.

Lovina McMurchy:

I think for me the steepest learning curve was coming and being a vc later in my career you know, I've had 20 years of operating experiences in big tech companies, and when you're in a big tech company, I created a lot of new services, right? So you go. Yeah, I'm like an entrepreneur right.

Lovina McMurchy:

Like I've created new things and you haven't right, because Amazon and Microsoft and Starbucks all these companies they already have customers. So when you're launching a new service're launching and you're building product, I think you really learn how to build products. But you get to cheat because the go-to-market piece of it is handed to you on a platter.

Dale Koerner:

You've got a brand that people know. You've got customers.

Lovina McMurchy:

And yeah, that's right. You're Amazon, You're Microsoft, so you come into the market with credibility. You come in with an audience. All your problems in go to market is well, all my other peer groups are also trying to get access to the marketing lists and be at the top of the newsletter or whatever home page. How do I get my share of voice relative to all the other things the company is doing? But, that's not the same as being a startup and saying I'm nobody and.

Lovina McMurchy:

I have nothing to leverage and I've got limited money and I've got to go out and find customers and convince them of my product. And so coming back and kind of learning, how do you really do that? Because it's not. You don't learn any of that when you're in a big company. You know that was a very steep learning curve. And then going from there into venture capital where I had a lot of very good operating experience. I think many founders that I work with found that valuable. But I had no investing experience at all and I had, you know, a couple of mentors that really you know worked with me through that period. You know David Baird from MoVac was amazing. Randy Commissar, you know from Kleiner Perkins, you know people that really took me under their wing.

Dale Koerner:

Yeah.

Lovina McMurchy:

And I was so fascinated that I just I read voraciously. You know people that really took me under their wing. Yeah, um, and I was so fascinated that I just I read voraciously, you know. So I think your initial question was oh, you know, tell me when when you kind of failed and I've got I definitely have lots of failures in my career I can talk about but but it's that coming into something totally new, that there was so much I didn't know and understand, and having the opportunity to go and learn it, it was just one of the most incredible, you know, periods of my life, you know, or my career, you know, just from having the insatiable learning and mastering you know something you know totally new. So it was fantastic. Okay, the failure one okay, I process this now. So I'll tell the story from the point of view of I loved working at Amazon. I loved the values, the leadership values of Amazon. I learned so much there. One of the most important leadership values at Amazon is customer obsession.

Dale Koerner:

Okay.

Lovina McMurchy:

I talked a lot about this today on stage is customer obsession. Okay, I talked a lot about this today on stage and I'd launched many products. Some were successful and some were not. The one that was most challenging, where I don't believe we had market success, was the last one I worked on, which was Alexa Shopping.

Dale Koerner:

Okay.

Lovina McMurchy:

And this was always a dream of Jeff Bezos's, right From the moment he had the napkin and he, you know, drew the first little sketch of Alexa. It was always like, wow, people will have these things in their home and they'll speak to them and they'll tell Alexa what they need bring me some tomatoes or whatever and then a drone will come and drop it out of the sky and then maybe one day we'll have a chip and we'll put it in people's brain. He didn't really say that, but you know it was that idea of you. Know we can.

Lovina McMurchy:

We can reinvent shopping you know, through this device and I feel that we we didn't meet our goals, you know for for making voice-based shopping prevalent. And if I look back and say, well, why were we not able to? We had all the resources in the world, literally a blank check. We had tons of the best people at Amazon, we had Jeff's attention and, at the end of the day, it's because we didn't use our own leadership value of customer obsession, because you know what People don't want to shop with their voice. Right, they can shop with their computer, they can shop with their phone. They've already got tons of ways that they can shop easily. And so that's one of the risks, I think, of being somebody in technology that loves technology, that loves the idea of technology.

Dale Koerner:

That's a really interesting angle.

Lovina McMurchy:

You fall in love with these ideas that you actually haven't validated with customers, right, you want them to be true. You want this dream, the science fiction, to be true without really listening to what people's real needs are and that must be quite sobering as well.

Dale Koerner:

You know that that to have got you know the napkin sketch and the robots and the drones and make it happen sorry, sorry, jeff, no one wants it.

Lovina McMurchy:

They were hard conversations, I bet.

Dale Koerner:

But hats off to you for having them. It must have been a wild ride.

Lovina McMurchy:

Well, but to your point, it's the thing Failure is what teaches you, and I think you can read in read, you know, in a manual we care about customers, but it's only when you really fail at launching a product that it really teaches you the value, right which is hey, we weren't customer obsessed enough to really pull this one off right, so it was a great lesson.

Dale Koerner:

I think it's a wonderful place to put a pin in the conversation, because we're out of time, unfortunately, but it was such an enjoyable conversation and thank you for sharing the journey and all of the insights. Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks. That's that. Thanks for listening to. We Do B2B by Blue Ocean. Now brace for CTAs. If you want to join and grow the community, make sure to subscribe. Wherever your eyes and ears absorb information, don't forget to switch on notifications so you know when the latest episodes drop. And for more B2B goodness, be sure to follow Blue Ocean, the B2B agency, on LinkedIn. Now look, you know how this next piece works. The more reviews we get, the faster this thing grows. So please do for us what you hope your customers would do for you Leave a review and share your thoughts. Let's stay connected and keep the B2B marketing conversation going.

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Dale Koerner

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