Fred:  I'm Fred Faulkner, a husband and father with a passion for marketing and technology. I work at a top 50 consulting agency where I lead alliances and marketing for the digital experience and technology team. On this podcast, I share my thoughts, opinions, and experiences in business and in life.

Fred: This is my view of the world according to Fred.

Fred: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of According to Fred, the podcast. I'm your I'm excited to have another guest on the show today. And that guest is Ryan Lunka, Chief Operating Officer at nChannel. nChannel is a SaaS software that empowers retailers, wholesalers, and technologists with integration tools to sync data and to automate processes among e commerce, ERP, POS, and 3PL systems.

Fred: Outside of his work in marketing technology and commerce industry, Ryan is also involved in a few nonprofits  such as Guitars Not Guns and Can't Stop Columbus. I had the pleasure of working with Ryan in a past life when we both worked at a startup before it was acquired back in 2014. Thanks for joining today, Ryan.

Fred: It's been a while.

Ryan Lunka: Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited.

Fred: Yeah, no, I, you know, it's been a couple episodes talking to myself and frankly, um, you know, that kind of gets boring sometimes. You might have to kind of question your sanity. So it's nice having other people to talk to you about some of the similar interests and certainly As we go way back, um, marketing technology has been one of those things that we've kind of, you know, gravitated to and had a lot of good conversations.

Fred: So I'm glad we can talk about a little bit of that today.

Ryan Lunka: Definitely.

Fred: So you've been at nChannel for about six years now and had several different roles. And then your current one's the chief operating officer. So why don't you tell me a little bit about what nChannel does and, you know, kind of what makes it unique?

Ryan Lunka: Sure. So nChannel is a, I mean, you hit it pretty accurately in your description there. It's a cloud based. Integration platform for retailers, e commerce merchants, distributors, wholesalers, manufacturers. So anybody  who's doing commerce and, uh, and going through the journey of, um, maybe going to e commerce for the first time, or maybe upgrading their e commerce experience, uh, we have some customers that want to, um, deploy on the channel experiences.

Ryan Lunka: So their e commerce website works really, really seamlessly with their point of sale Uh, and it really runs the gamut. There's a lot of, a lot of different things happening in the market. And so basically we have a product that sits in the middle of all those end point systems, the point of sales, the ERPs, et cetera.

Ryan Lunka: And we kind of become the glue between them all. So they all behave as if they're one cohesive platform.

Fred: So not to oversimplify, but middleware, that'd be a good kind of descriptor or is that not the descriptor that you probably would say and channel sits in?

Ryan Lunka: Yeah, there's some value add on top of just being middleware that we have in terms of how we can, uh, help you report on order data and things like that.

Ryan Lunka: But effectively, yeah, it's middleware. Um, it ties all the systems together. So they behave like it's one. Um, And then, uh,  what that allows you to do is actually implement a lot of your business rules and business logic, uh, in between there. So there's, there's actually like business process automation happening in some of these use cases as well.

Fred: Nice. Yeah. And I think in today's, you know, just omni channel experience, and I think omni channel is one of those great words that, you know, we've heard about it for how long, you know, it's kind of like, you know, um, omni channel as well as, uh, I don't know, I'm trying to think of some of those other kind of great words that people like to use, but, um.

Ryan Lunka: Oh, we've had omni channel, we've had cross channel, we've had multi channel, we've had. Uh, convergent commerce. We've had the people who write these blogs come up with a new term every six months or so. The

Fred: one now is, uh, what's the new experience led commerce or just all those types of ones where like we have to beyond the transaction, like, yes, but it's getting to the transaction, understanding all the data that makes the transaction happen.

Fred: So yeah, for sure. So you've been in different roles. So you started in kind of in the product team and kind of worked your way up to the operating officer. How has that progression worked for you as far as how your content and channels matured and how you've worked with inside the organization? 

Ryan Lunka: Yeah, it's actually been an interesting career journey.

Ryan Lunka: I, so when I left where we worked together before, uh, I actually took a role as digital marketing director, uh, which was probably the. The black sheep of the roles I've had in my career. Um, you know, we had a lot of experience working with marketing technology and what I was doing when we were last working together was actually taking more of the strategy side of.

Ryan Lunka: Um, you know, when you're implementing these Adobe marketing technologies, how do you reorient your business processes around it and stuff like that. Um, so that at least I managed to convince them, maybe qualified to be their digital marketing director. Uh, really what I needed to do was, um, build out their web experience, their social media, uh, effectively their content marketing program to start generating leads.

Ryan Lunka: Yeah. So it sounds like you're

Fred: doing a little bit more what I was doing. Because we bifurcated kind of those roles a little bit when we were working together and you were doing the more the strategy side of the client facing and I was doing more the marketing side on the company side. Yep.

Ryan Lunka: Yep. So I mean, it was a big difference  from going, uh, I was working with the Adobe stack and, and you know, sometimes it was IBM's analytics products.

Ryan Lunka: Sometimes it was Adobe, sometimes it was other things. Right. And then I went to a startup where we're using WordPress and Google analytics. So it was same use case, but a very, very different technology stack.

Fred: Yeah, for sure.

Ryan Lunka: So I did that for about a year and a half, uh, built up a pretty, you know, with pretty limited budget, built up a pretty effective inbound content marketing program.

Ryan Lunka: Uh, we were generating a lot of business through the website. We still generate about how leads through our website and our blog and, and some of the, the content outreach we do. And then, um, you know, there were some changes going on in our engineering CTO had left. So there was need for product leadership again, uh, and that probably aligned a little bit better to my, my background being a little more technical, definitely have, you know, a number of years of hands on coding experience.

Ryan Lunka: So, uh, took on, uh, had a product for about two years. Some give or take, um, kind of rebuilt the engineering team, uh, to some extent,  you know, replace a lot of people that left, um, uh, instituted some new technology decision making, um, you know, hired a different architect who brought in a lot of knowledge of microservices and docker and containerization and open source.

Ryan Lunka: And what we ended up doing is building a version 2 of our product kind of from the ground up. So. While we still maintain and sell a lot of customers on our original product, we, I mean, Greenfield development started, you know, redesigned around newer technology paradigms and deployed a new, a new product altogether that we put almost all of our customers on now.

Ryan Lunka: Um, so that was a really interesting experience. And, uh, I mean, frankly, the learning experience for me, Understanding these, these new things like containers and how cloud native, um, you know, application design for, we built it for Google Cloud and Kubernetes and all that kind of stuff. Um, just how, how effective that makes you when you're, when you're deploying software.

Fred: And you've been doing that for, I mean, you said that was, you know, you're  kind of the middle one before this chief operating role. But I mean, that was been last year, three or four years. So being cloud native first in that environment, making those decisions to be cloud native. So would you have said.

Fred: That's, you know, you saw that writing on the wall to be cloud for the most optimized, optimized way of delivering solutions to your clients versus some other method.

Ryan Lunka: Absolutely. It, the goal is to deliver value to your customers as quickly as possible and both the way you can design software because of, um, the technology that enables microservices architectures.

Ryan Lunka: And, uh, you know, Q based messaging and things like that. And the fact that computing is just so cheap and so accessible now allows you to really deploy software rapidly and, um, and very flexibly. So for. I mean, it's an insanely low amount of budget. We are deployed in multiple data centers around the country.

Ryan Lunka: We have automatic failover. We can scale resources up and down by like pushing a couple  buttons. It's it's just insane. Five years ago, we kind of started doing that where we worked together before and it was It was pretty novel stuff. I mean, yeah, whatever way to practice deploying to AWS and things like that.

Ryan Lunka: And now all this is just, it's just so easy. It's crazy.

Fred: Yeah, I mean, Adobe is now released, you know, because part of where we work together is with the Adobe marketing now experienced cloud stack, but now they've even released AEM native to the cloud with their AEM as a cloud service, which is, is not fully as robust as at least yet as, uh, you know, the previous or the kind of on premise, you know, version or just putting it in, in the cloud, but they've got a full, Now they've even seen and finally caught up to the whole space of where everyone else is really cloud first.

Fred: They've put a cloud first version out there, but I think it's almost been, had to been rewritten in some cases from scratch to get there, um, as a multi year project for them. So it's not something you just implement overnight, but you know, having foresight like you did a couple of years ago to do that, I'm sure has been a boon for you guys as far as being able to deliver for your clients in a more effective manner.

Ryan Lunka: Absolutely. I mean, the amount of software we're able to deliver and the quality of  it relative to my team size is. It's unbelievable. I mean, we have, we're a small company. I have, you know, six or seven people on my engineering team and you would think based on how fast we deliver software and what it does, you'd think we have 30 and a lot of that's, I mean, a lot of that's because the team is awesome, but some amount of that is because the, the technology that that team is able to deploy really, it becomes a lever for them in terms of adding value.

Fred: So how have you seen commerce is one component of a big marketing technology stack. But I mean, how have you seen in light of kind of where things are today? I mean, the last six weeks, you know, the US has hit, you know, maybe you've seen it maybe coming a little bit further, because your clients might be more international.

Fred: Like, how have you seen the dynamic of commerce change in light of what's going on with COVID? And, you know, And just kind of the state of the world at the moment.

Ryan Lunka: Yeah. So it's something we're definitely watching closely because, uh, it, you know, for us and many other businesses, it's kind of a make or break, uh, thing that's happening in the world.

Ryan Lunka: Um, we  have, I would put our customers into three kind of buckets. Uh, we have probably 40 percent or so of our customers are actually B2B, um, companies. So distributors, Or, or they are companies that are doing their B2B transacting through our product. Um, and, and the B2B companies are interesting because they were already kind of on the precipice of, of deploying modern e commerce experiences, but they're lagging a little behind just as the nature of those businesses think about.

Fred: Yep. You know, B2B still is very much a laggard in the transformation kind of space, general experience, commerce, content, that type of stuff.

Ryan Lunka: Right. But now you're seeing, um, they either are in a place where they have to deploy those experiences now to stay transacting, or they're able to take advantage of the fact that they were working in that direction already to really double down and being successful in this, in this market.

Ryan Lunka: So we have some, uh, B2B companies in like the medical supplies. Uh, industry and they're doing, they're doing really, really well. And a lot of it's because they've been able to deploy these  modern e commerce experiences to do B2B transacting online, not just, uh, kind of that old school web portal experience where you can log on with your salespeople and place orders.

Ryan Lunka: And technically it's electronic, but

Fred: yeah, it's like, it sends an email that goes to someone to process it. Does someone, you know, Right. Yeah.

Ryan Lunka: So we have that going on and, and the companies that are able to invest now and continue pushing forward that sort of, it really is a digital transformation for their business, but to deploy those, those commerce experiences are going to do well.

Ryan Lunka: Um, and then there's gonna be some that struggle, uh, but then we have a lot of, a lot of companies that are, uh, direct to consumer or B2C, uh, e commerce, uh, a lot of people using Shopify plus. We have a very close partnership with Shopify plus, um, big commerce, Magento. Um, occasionally we get a couple other random ones as well.

Ryan Lunka: And for them, we're kind of in wait and see. Um, certainly we've, we've seen probably more success than failure so far, but it is a little early to tell. Um, but it's interesting, you know, there are certainly some  people where their supply chain has been disrupted and, and, and like, you're just, you're stuck at that point.

Ryan Lunka: If you were dependent on a supply chain from China, you're, you're in trouble right now. Cause now they're

Fred: just finally getting ramped back up and you've got a month plus sitting of orders without delivery of things behind.

Ryan Lunka: But I've had a lot of conversations with customers that don't necessarily have that limitation and they are, um, if they have retail stores, they're closed right now.

Ryan Lunka: So they're reinvesting their time and their energy and their e commerce experience, or a lot of times they're trying to diversify how they fulfill their orders for e commerce. So they're looking at adding new three PL, uh, Providers to their kind of portfolio fulfillment options, or they're switching how they do their fulfillment.

Ryan Lunka: So there's a lot of companies I've been talking to that are viewing this as a challenge, and they're actually really double downing on their e commerce investment and kind of leaning into this whole, uh, this whole pandemic scenario to try to come out the other side of it stronger.

Fred: Now, with the DTC, world, direct to consumer, and that's a wide range, right?

Fred: It's,  um, some of it is very much dependent on, uh, consumers having disposable income. Some of it is, I'm sure, not that scenario. So, you know, is that also part of, I've been having conversations that kind of also led into that, kind of, you can double down, but if the customers aren't there, or at least aren't willing to buy, it's kind of, is that the gamble that they're looking at taking, as far as, you know, the lean in component of this?

Ryan Lunka: Yeah. It really probably depends on the vertical of products they're selling. Um, we have a lot of, uh, sporting goods brands and they, for whatever reason seem to be doing pretty well right now. Some, at least we've been doing okay. Um, we do have a lot of like outdoor shooting sports and, uh, Similar types of industries like that.

Ryan Lunka: And it's a little weird to talk about, but in a world where people are prepping, the preppers are, are good. If you're selling to preppers, you're in good business right now. So there's some kind of, uh, industries that do a little bit better in an environment like this. But then, yeah, I mean, if you're selling luxury goods, if you're selling things  that yeah, when you're, when you're tightening the purse strings at home a little bit, you're, you're maybe not going to make the purchase.

Ryan Lunka: They're, they're going to struggle a little bit, but you sell what you sell your businesses. You can't change that overnight. So you still have to find ways to lean into it and live with, you know, play the cards that are dealt. And there are, there are a lot of interesting things that those brands are trying to do to.

Ryan Lunka: You know, incentivize people to buy product now and find ways to keep cash flow going.

Fred: Yeah, exactly. I mean, the need to pivot has never been probably more accentuated, you know, than what we're dealing with in such a quick period of time. I mean, you and I both lived, we're working in the past, you know, kind of recession of 2008 and Either I was oblivious to what was going on back then, or maybe I was in a spot where it didn't have as much direct effect because I was working at an association, but there never have I seen a time where companies had to make some really hard decisions about how they're going to continue to move forward in a very short period of time if they're going to say like, Oh, we can't do this anymore because this business has gone completely  down.

Fred: What are we going to do to kind of make up for it?

Fred: Have a friend that's in a manufacturing, um, space and like their automotive business gone. But now every medical manufacturer, cause they have a unique welding kind of solution. Like now is like coming into place because everyone needs to have masks.

Fred: And so now they're, they're selling machines because they have a unique way of making that happen. Like that's picked up, but how long will that pick up versus, you know, the other industries and we'll make up for the same business or we'll expand and grow. So companies that can do some of that is obviously the best part of it, but, um, there's others obviously are trying to figure out what's going on and certainly retail with brick and mortar being basically a zero sum game right now.

Fred: Right. You know, there's, you're not paying, you gotta pay rent, but you got no one with no foot traffic. I think the world's going to be very different and commerce is going to be. I think one of those, and I think you're saying this and seeing it, is that companies that can do it well and companies that have a solution and a service that they can sell commerce is going to be the winner at the end of the day when it comes out from this.

Ryan Lunka: Yeah. And there's never, there's never been a time in history when something. This big has  happened where technology has enabled companies to pivot as quickly as they can. All right. So this is bad, but if this was 20 years ago, at least twice as many companies would already be out of business. The fact that if you really are disciplined about what you're doing, you could deploy a brand new B2C e commerce store using something like Shopify plus and enterprise e commerce product.

Ryan Lunka: In like two months, that's insane. I mean, that's a, that's a two year project for kind of traditional operating companies. And it, and the fact that you even have that opportunity in front of you, you still have to be able to execute on it, but yeah,

Fred: but it's, you're right. I mean, You put enough smart people in a room and it doesn't take a huge amount of teams.

Fred: It's, it's, you know, you put your best people on, on the project, you can turn something around pretty quickly. Absolutely. So before I was like, you might be able to get the idea in that timeframe, but then to go execute it, that that's a bigger lift. I agree. No point. Are we in a spot where we can. Deploy to mobile, deploy to, you know, multi devices, you know, and have  that, you know, as we say, omni channel, you know, data collection, the whole nine yards of understanding how you can deliver to your customers.

Fred: That's, that's a pretty powerful space to be in for sure. Definitely. So, so speaking of the commerce and one of the things that, um, this just came out this last week, you know, the MarTech conferences went virtual. Um, you know, Scott Brinker puts out his annual MarTech 5000, you know, list, which is now 8000.

Fred: Um, It's, it's a pretty crazy, pretty crazy list. Have you seen the infographic that they came out?

Ryan Lunka: You basically need a microscope to see all the logos at this point. It's so big. I

Fred: feel like I saw someone I know in the industry, he now works at one of the big DXPs and he bought one of those like 46 inch, you know, high, like 16 by nine, you know, whatever monitors.

Fred: And he put the infographic up on that and like he tagged Scott and it was just like this insane, It's insane. Like just monitors with the graphic on. I'm like, holy cow. Like, and even that you still felt, I felt like you needed a magnifying glass is a little bit to kind of see and zoom in what's going on.

Fred: Um, it's, it's pretty nuts.  And it's nuts on how like it's grown over the years. I mean, again, where this was five years ago, it was, you know, 1500 companies, maybe 2000. And now that it's grown so far and so fast, it's been, Even in today's day and age, like, it'll be interesting to see what happens next year.

Fred: How many of those companies are still gonna be around given what's going on in the dynamic of the world. But, um, but there are definitely some areas that have grown. I want to kind of get your hot take on a few of these. I don't think any of this is, is, um, is shocking. But, you know, the biggest area as a major category that's grown according to, according to the blog post that Scott put out, which I'll put a link to it in the show notes, is, um, is data.

Fred: I don't think that's a shocker for anyone, right? Data is by far still one of those, again, one of those things you've talked about, we've talked about in the industry for years. Like, gotta know your data, gotta know your data, but how you've stitched your data together and how you've actually understood your data.

Fred: I think it's been one of those big question marks still. So, you know, data being one of the big spaces, like what's, what's your take on how you, whether end channels kind of dealing with connecting that data or how you're seeing your customers  take advantage of it?

Ryan Lunka: Sure. So there's, there's sort of two aspects that I would, uh, think about looking at the, this explosion of technologies to help you deal with data, move data, analyze data, et cetera.

Ryan Lunka: Uh, there's one that I'll call the analyst slash VCU, which everybody knows that this is the future. Everybody knows that to deliver the types of experiences you're going to need to, you know, today and in the future, you have to be able to do all these things with data, right? Right. Um, so that does really, really well in terms of, uh, VCs getting companies money to build tools for these kinds of things.

Ryan Lunka: It does sounds really good from a marketing perspective for these, these companies out there trying to sell their products. Um, and there are certainly plenty of brands and certain play companies out there that are able to be successful using those things. And they're at that kind of upper echelon level of being able to manage data.

Ryan Lunka: Uh, but when it comes to the, the brands themselves or the companies who are using these tools, there are still a lot, a lot of companies that are, I mean, just  at still struggling with the basics, which is how do we even, you Move our, our basic transactional data effectively. And that's generally where and channel spends.

Ryan Lunka: Our time is helping companies with, with that data, that data problem. So how do you even make sure that your orders that are placed on your e commerce site get appropriately put in the ERP so that a, your accounting system is up to date, accurately, your inventory is up to date, accurately, and in real time.

Ryan Lunka: And then your fulfillment process in the warehouse can actually occur in a streamlined manner. Um, that that's I mean, that's like entry level, making sure your data is correct across systems, right? But we, a lot of people still struggle with that. So, um, there's certainly a lot to talk about in the really interesting data analysis world and big data and how do you make all these predictive analytics and stuff like that.

Ryan Lunka: Um, but there's also still a lot of people that need to get that foundational piece in place. Is

Fred: that a skill gap in today's modern marketer and modern merchandiser, you know, versus where, you know, hasn't  caught up? Or is that technologies have just been continuing to get built and built and you have the SAPs of the world, you have the Shopify's of the world, you have the Magento's of the world, and they're all just using, you different data models and different, you know, practices, their best practices and the other person's best practices.

Fred: The fact that the industry hasn't matured enough, or maybe it never will, maybe that's their competitive advantage for all those companies to have their own way of doing it. But is it a, is it a people skill gap thing? Is it a technology thing or is it a combination of both? Do you think,

Ryan Lunka: yeah, I think like any technology adoption, there's just a long tail on it.

Ryan Lunka: Right. So you're always going to have the really sophisticated companies with big budgets who are able to buy, buy the whole technology stack that can do all these things and hire the, the minority of people who actually really, really understand how to assemble these things and do this advanced data analysis and things like that.

Ryan Lunka: And then there's this huge long tail of companies. You know, we are very frequently in the mid market or even SMB market. So there's. A lot more companies trying to do these types of things with smaller budgets, uh, dealing with  connected or disconnected technology. So your e commerce store, your ERP, your data platforms, they're all, you're kind of piecing these together yourself.

Ryan Lunka: Um, and there, there is both a technology challenge and a skills challenge there. So these mid market companies maybe don't. You know, they have really good people, but they're not going to hire the industry leading data people, uh, because they don't have the budget to do it. Um, and then their technologies aren't necessarily built to go together in a way that allows them to do this.

Ryan Lunka: So that's obviously where we help a lot of people is making these things behave as if they're one big platform. A lot of times they're on older technology. So we still deal with a lot of people that have, um, on premise ERPs that don't really have APIs or they kind of have an API feature, but it's not really meant for connecting to the cloud.

Ryan Lunka: You know, it's 2009, 2010 type technology. And the reality is we just have to figure out how to help them, um, Um, overcome the technology challenges they have to accomplish some of these data, data movement and data analysis  projects.

Fred: And that's probably why, you know, the MarTech list has grown so much is that there's just companies that are finding, like you said, the long tail, people are seeing opportunities to take advantage of that long tail and they're, they're starting up their version of it.

Fred: They were maybe at one of the big ones and said, Hey, You're not serving this market. I'm going to start something that can serve this market. And that's how the competition kind of grows and gets in there. And that's probably why we've seen this such a big growth. Um, okay. Another one that kind of thing falls inside.

Fred: I'm curious if you're seeing any of this is conversational marketing and chat. So have you seen conversation? I mean, Alexa, the Amazon echo came in, you know, play what five years ago, everyone had to have, because they want to say, Hey, Hey, Alexa, go order me. More toilet paper and just shows up my house, you know, two days later with a prime, um, but conversational chat is certainly continued to grow and grow.

Fred: And it's not, it's gone beyond an Alexa kind of skill world. Have you seen conversational commerce start to come into play as part of this as well?

Ryan Lunka: You know, in the mid market, I've not seen it, uh, really proliferate yet.  Uh, I think we're still a little early there and I'm going to, I'm going to borrow from a podcast to listen to.

Ryan Lunka: I wish I could remember who said it. It was a company here in Columbus that does conversational, uh, technologies for, for marketing and things like that. Um, and he talked about how when you have a new user interface, so to speak, and in this case, it's, It's a human talking to a device to give it commands or asking questions, things like that.

Ryan Lunka: Um, what generally happens is the big companies like Google, like Amazon, like, uh, Apple. Deploy these things in kind of a goofy consumery manner to get people used to the paradigm and to teach them, kind of teach them how you would talk to a computer. That's something that 10 years ago was inconceivable basically.

Ryan Lunka: So even when you go back to like when smartphones and touchscreens came out, like you had a bunch of weird apps on your iPhone, like a level app and you could do the thing where you turn it upside down and like it looked like you were drinking a beer and none of that has any actual value except that it, It trains people to interact with their phone in a way they never have before, right?

Fred: Computer human behavior, interaction  behavior.

Ryan Lunka: Exactly. So in conversational, we're kind of, we're a little later into it, but we're kind of still in that phase, in my opinion, where, uh, you're asking Alexa dumb questions cause it's fun and you're, you're playing Jeopardy or you're, you're, Doing, you know, games or calling your living room cause you can, um, but it's still not really like fundamentally changing anything.

Ryan Lunka: We're still being trained. How do we interact through voice with the computer? Yeah. Um, but I think what you're going to start to see, or we're also being trained by Alexa specifically to buy things on Amazon. Yeah. Two years ago, I never would have told Alexa to order paper towels on Amazon. Now I do it all the time.

Ryan Lunka: So as, as we start to get trained that that's a thing that we can do, and that's a way we can incorporate commerce into our life. That's when you're going to start to see it start, start to see proliferate a little bit more.

Fred: I would not be

Ryan Lunka: surprised to see Shopify in some over the next few years. Deploy a sort of native conversational feature into their products so that all of their merchants can supply the same kind  of Alexa order this thing for me and experience for, for the people at Shopify stores.

Fred: Yeah. And there's a whole other conversation around. And I, Brown privacy and how much you want to give any one company access to your information. I mean, Amazon's one thing, right? They have your credit card. You have Amazon prime account. Yes, I can. I have now this device in my house that I can just say, go order paper towels.

Fred: And it's, it's one singular company versus now I'm, I have a Google home and I have a lot of the Google, that's my ecosystem. And you know, people have the Apple ecosystem, um, for those companies like Google and Apple, they have to now go through other parties to, to fulfill. Said transaction. And so now it becomes, well, who owns my data?

Fred: Who owns my credit card? How, who's, how's the purchase going to happen? So Amazon was a boon because they, they own the entire supply chain essentially. Right. From the conversation to the moment of fulfillment, I don't think it's taken on as much yet, just because all your other systems you want to integrate with are yet to kind of make those connections happen.

Fred: And who's actually  giving enough of that information. Who's willing to give up enough of your private information to, you know, Make that transaction be fulfilled. I know I've struggled. I really wanted to, uh, Google to offer a very similar experience to the Amazon one. And when I saw they partnered with Walmart a couple of years ago, I was like, Walmart was an interesting bet, but Walmart is one of the biggest commerce companies out there.

Fred: And, you know, maybe that was the way to fulfill it. But they never got it off the ground in classic Google fashion. They put a great idea out there, but they can never quite get the consumer experience quite there where Amazon is just, they've nailed it. You know, it's so seamless for that.

Ryan Lunka: Yeah. I think Apple's behind it behind the eight ball there too.

Ryan Lunka: They just have nothing. They're conversational like, Oh, Siri's terrible. Like I can't get Siri to do anything, but set a reminder. It's it's, and, but when it came out, it was super exciting to be awesome. And they just have very little connection to the commerce space as well. So they're going to miss a big opportunity there unless they, For some new strategic partnerships or acquire some kinds of companies that they can sort of build out this kind of experience.

Ryan Lunka: Yeah, exactly.

Fred: So, all right, so let's, uh, there's a ton of other  categories to, you know, I mean, shoot, I mean, they just seem to grow and grow another area that grew, but we don't necessarily get into talking about is like governance and compliance and privacy. So I kind of alluded to that, but that's like a 68 percent growth in the, in the.

Fred: the Martech, you know, landscape from last year. And it makes sense, right? You mean, it's one thing to have all these disparate technologies out there, but if you don't know how you're going to govern it, you don't know how you're going to actually make all the compliance stuff work. It, um, companies still struggle with that all the time.

Fred: You know, how you, from that perspective.

Ryan Lunka: It is so, you know, as a COO of a software company, we have to pay attention to that stuff. And it's so hard to keep straight the different, first of all, data best practices and how you implement them. And then aligning that to different regulations that you're, you have to adhere to, whether it's GPR or CCPA or any of these other, you know, uh, things.

Ryan Lunka: State or locality based ones, it's, it's overwhelming. It's hard enough just to deal with it. Let alone are you dreading the day that more

Fred: states come on board? I mean, there's enough states that have different versions of privacy laws, but like to the point where like CCPA out there with California, and then  you have GDPR for anything international, but like, can you imagine we had 49 other states?

Fred: That just said, Oh, here's our version of it. I mean, as a, as a technology company, that just blows my mind of having to navigate that matrix of if then this, that statement is just to figure out what that logic would even look like.

Ryan Lunka: Oh yeah. And not to get into a political conversation, but just the way the United States is organized, where we tend to push regulation down to the states for a lot of things.

Ryan Lunka: I think it's entirely conceivable that the federal government never has a, a standardized, you know, countrywide data protection law. Or at least maybe not in the next 10 or 20 years, it doesn't. So you're going to see a lot of fragmented, uh, regulation from state to state.

Fred: Oh yeah. And then in addition, you know, compound that with biometrics.

Fred: Like I found out when I was doing some research for another, um, kind of post about privacy, like, Define it like Illinois has a biometrics law, like how you can use your thumbprint or fingerprint or retinal, like in certain ways for privacy versus others. Like I didn't even know, but it's been around for four years and like no one ever talks about that type of stuff.

Fred: Everyone talks about this. Where's  my email address going to go? And how can I get on some, you know, marketing list? And now, you know, I unlocked my phone with my, with my thumb. You might do with your face, you know, like how does that all, you know, you buy an app, you know, transaction at a store. I mean, all that stuff is just, it's crazy on where other permutations even go out to besides just like who has your data.

Fred: Yeah. So let's shift gears and talk about the non profits that you are working with.

Ryan Lunka: Well, we got Guitars Not Guns is the one that I've been working on for a few years. And then recently I got involved with another one called Can't Stop Columbus.

Fred: Yeah. So, um, so let's start with Can't Stop Columbus cause that's on the technology side.

Fred: We'll get into guitar for a second. So, so that is a organization that, that you didn't necessarily. found, but you've been part of for a couple, for a little while. And it's around just trying to help companies and organizations adopt commerce. Tell me a little bit about what, you know, can't stop Columbus really does.

Ryan Lunka: Yeah, it's basically a community wide hackathon to describe it briefly. Um, Jordan, who runs it, I believe it, the whole thing started when she just put a tweet out that said,  Hey, what if a bunch of people came together and helped help people who need it through COVID 19 and it just snowballed from there.

Ryan Lunka: Uh, and now it's, it's organized over the shared Slack channel. We have, there's like 1400 people involved in the Slack channel. There's probably. A few hundred people that are like really, really actively involved in day to day basis. Uh, it's all volunteers. Everybody's just, you know, joining in and contributing as they can.

Ryan Lunka: And it's everybody from, you know, executives at companies to developers, to designers, to stay at home moms, to like, it's any kind of person you can imagine is involved in this in some way. And they're just raising their hand and saying, how can I help? Uh, I think we have 14 different initiatives that are live or close to live now, and where I'm at is I'm, uh, project lead for one of those, uh, and then we got a whole bunch more in the hopper and the just constant flow of ideas coming in for new ones.

Ryan Lunka: And really, the goal is just how can we. Harness the talent in Columbus to, uh, deploy solutions really, really  quickly that help anybody who needs help in whatever way that means in Columbus during, during COVID 19.

Fred: That's awesome. And the fact that the community is coming together and sharing resources to make it happen, and whether I'm assuming is helping small businesses, you know, mom and pop shops, I mean, the whole kind of yard, as far as helping them figure out how to navigate these.

Fred: He's waters in the commerce community.

Ryan Lunka: Oh, it's how it goes way beyond just that. So my project is, uh, uh, we can sort of call it project ecom. And now it's get see bus online. So we're, we're basically organizing and offering a pro bono digital commerce agency. So small businesses that need to quickly pivot to e commerce, we're gonna try to get them up and running with a minimal solution in four weeks.

Ryan Lunka: Um, maybe there's a little bit of cost to them to, you know, pay for a subscription Shopify or something like that. But all of our labor and our strategy, and that's all on the house. It's just all volunteer. But then there's, you know, another one of the projects that's got a lot of attention is called, um, uh, face masks for us.

Ryan Lunka: And it's a website that's  connecting demand and supply for face masks and providing a lot of content about how do you create your own and basically just everybody's trying to figure out face masks right now for a lot of different reasons. Here's just a whole bunch of information for how to do that.

Ryan Lunka: Uh, and there's a project called curbside concerts. I saw that a bunch of, a bunch of volunteer, a bunch of musicians have signed up to volunteer for it and you can order a concert. So maybe you can't go visit your grandmother who lives by herself in a neighborhood with a bunch of other elderly people.

Ryan Lunka: You can, you can have a concert delivered their world. I'll just pull it in the back of a pickup truck and right from the street, they'll do a little, a little concert, live concert for everybody. Just to, you know, it's not really doing anything other than cheering people up, getting their spirits up, things like that, but it makes a big impact.

Fred: Which is a great segue to this next part. So you're a musician. I think this is your most recent track on Spotify.

Ryan Lunka: Oh God.

Fred: So, but you guys, Local Tourist is your band name, right? Yes. Yes. So you guys have been around for,

Ryan Lunka: uh, how long? Oh  God. It's been four or five years now. I can't remember exactly when we started.

Ryan Lunka: Um, but you know, a number of years, we put out an EP a couple of years ago and then we put out that single last year. We might get back in the studio this year. We'll see. That's

Fred: awesome. So that is that. You've been a musician for a while. Obviously you didn't just start a band and learn how to play guitar five years ago.

Fred: You've been a musician for a while. So tell me more about guitars, not guns and your involvement with that organization.

Ryan Lunka: So that's a, it's a national, I tend to be international cause we have a Canadian chapter, um, volunteer organization that, uh, provides free guitar lessons. Uh, and when they finish their classes, we usually do a 12 week program, uh, they get to keep the guitars.

Ryan Lunka: So that's nice provides the guitars as well To at risk youth anybody who you know is in the inner city and is at risk of getting involved in gangs You know, kids are challenging home lives, don't have a lot of other creative outlets in their life, things like that. So, you know, we're in downtown Columbus, so there's a lot of populations really, really close to home here that we can, that we can work with.

Ryan Lunka: Um, and we typically partner with afterschool  programs like, uh, the YMCA. Or we've done some with boys and girls club. Um, there's a couple of after school all stars is another one we've partnered with and we really just, I, you know, we supply the teachers, we supply the guitars, we just plug into their programming and all of these after school program, correct?

Ryan Lunka: Programs are looking for arts programming. Um, so it's, it's a really easy fit there. Um, and we've done five or six classes now, uh, that we've completed all the way through. Uh, we got a lot of volunteers that have raised their hand and wanted to get involved. Um, so it's, it's pretty cool organization.

Fred: That's awesome. And you know, music being such a part of, big part of almost anyone's life, you know, for the most part, I mean, but being able to learn, I've picked up, I've had a guitar for probably better good at 20 years. I finally started taking lessons a couple of years ago, but even though I got a couple of guitars sitting in the corner, you know, over here, but it's, it's just a dabble thing.

Fred: But I mean, it's, it's a great hobby cause you can do it on your own, but then you can be part of a larger community as well. You know, just getting together with a couple of friends just to jam out and do something. It's awesome. It's better to do that than, than  maybe be doing something else with your life.

Fred: So it's a great program.

Ryan Lunka: Yeah. And we're, we're targeting kids that are, you know, fifth, sixth, seventh grade. So that's a, especially if you have a challenging home life, you're in a school that's not great. You've got older brothers who are getting into things that are, are, are not savory. That's a really, really critical age for some of these kids.

Ryan Lunka: And look, some of them are going to be down that path and there's nothing you can do about it. Right. Even if a few of them, you know, grab the guitar and that gives them an alternative to going out and, and, You know, getting in trouble on the street or, or doing a bunch of drugs with their friends who are getting into that or, or whatever, you know, it makes it, it makes such a big difference.

Ryan Lunka: Um, and it is a good confidence builder for, you know, when a kid finally picks it up and like gets a song down, you can just see it on their face, how confident it makes them.

Fred: Yeah. We've talked about a lot today and Ryan, I really appreciate, you know, learn more about end channel, uh, talking a little bit more of what's going on with the marketing technology stacks that are out there in the landscape, which is this continues to grow.

Fred: Um, And a little about what  you've been doing on the side here, too. So I really appreciate you popping on the podcast today and joining me for a little bit of a chat.

Ryan Lunka: Absolutely. It was great to catch up. Yeah.

Fred: Yeah. We'll, uh, we'll do another one soon. We'll maybe do a different topic, but, uh, but I appreciate you hanging out.

Fred: Uh, and, uh, we'll talk soon. Sounds good. Thanks. That wraps up another episode of the podcast. Hey, have you subscribed yet? Be sure to do so so you can stay up to date when I drop new episodes. I'm trying to get a little more regular with the schedule in this COVID times and more interviews between solo topics.

Fred: If you like what you heard, I'd appreciate it if you gave the podcast a five star rating on Apple Podcasts wherever you listen, maybe even drop a review. I really would appreciate it. Also, if you want to send me a note, you can share some of your comments or some feedback. You can hit me up at fred at according to fred.

Fred: com or on Twitter at according to Fred. Thank you again for listening and I'll catch you on the next  one.