Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with Jon Carder, co-founder and CEO of Empyr, a B2B platform that helps websites and apps generate revenue from online to offline commerce.
Listen as Jon shares inside info on how he got a deal with Yelp, the Holy Grail of enterprise-level customers, how he dealt with the “dark period” where the company struggled to move forward, how he got 50% of Empyr’s deals from “old school” conferences and 15% from cold calls, and the abundance mentality took Jon from zero to 8 figures of revenue within a year.
Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: How Jon Carder Compelled 80 Million People To Use His Product, Empyr TRANSCRIPT
Times-stamped show notes:
- 01:01 – Eric introduces Jon Carder to the podcast
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- 01:29 – Serial entrepreneur, beginning at the age of 10
- 01:38 – “Empyr is a business that helps websites and apps generate a new revenue stream from online to offline commerce”
- 01:48 – Partnership with Yelp, provided them with 10,000 restaurant offers
- 02:05 – How it works: consumers link a debit/credit card to Yelp, when they go into that restaurant and buy, they earn 10% back in cash automatically
- 02:25 – Yelp earns a percentage on every transaction
- 02:33 – 10,000 restaurants and national brands have joined
- 02:45 – Called “online to offline” and has been running for a few years
- 03:08 – If you’re a merchant, you sign up, give them your merchant number, and are online in 7-10 days
- 03:23 – Make an offer like “10% cashback” and market it on Yelp, Microsoft Coupons, Living Social, and major airlines
- 04:26 – End of the month, the merchant gets an invoice of impressions, people who linked their card, and how much money they generated
- 04:45 – Empyr charges a “pay per sale fee” which is 10% and is distributed to to whoever signed up that consumer gets a piece
- 05:12 – Going with the “Big Guys” because of the broad audience
- 05:18 – Opened up with whoever has a decent size consumer base
- 05:28 – A decent size is 1M members to 100,000
- 05:48 – Launched an API with developers
- 06:37 – $2/month per active user
- 06:45 – If you have 1,000,000 users that’s $2,000,000/month
- 07:04 – Hundreds of millions of consumers you can reach
- 07:32 – “People link cards a lot more openly than they used to”
- 07:52 – If the offer is compelling, consumers will link
- 08:00 – Jon has a couple dozen enterprise users such as Yelp
- 08:06 – How did you get your first 10 big clients?
- 08:10 – Living Social came in the last year
- 08:23 – 1 full-time, 2 part-time staff going after the high-end deals
- 08:45 – The deals came from conferences, face-to-face
- 09:15 – How Dan got the deal with Yelp at a conference
- 09:54 – Dan took the chance and met the Yelp representative at the bar and made a deal
- 10:37 – “Chance combined with a little bit of effort”
- 11:22 – 50% of deals from conferences, 10-15% cold calls
- 11:52 – His employee writes a line or two, by email, and gets responses
- 12:03 – Got deals with LinkedIn and Facebook through cold-email
- 12:59 – Have an abundance mentality and tell your idea to as many people as you can
- 13:12 – People may try to copy you, but you might miss important business deals to grow your company by keeping your mouth shut
- 13:43 – You can also get feedback quicker if you just share
- 15:43 – Empyr is a pivot from an original business model
- 15:56 – The original plan called Mogl didn’t work, the numbers did not hold
- 16:12 – Empyr as a platform is way more efficient
- 16:28 – Troubleshoot, it was difficult to get users to sign up to a point where you can start creating revenue
- 17:00 – Their cold email was 2 lines: “Hey, we’ve got an online to offline monetization platform. Not sure if you’re the right person to talk to about this, but who would be?”
- 18:12 – Empyr is sharing something short and tailoring it to the possible client—this makes a world of difference to get people to respond
- 18:39 – Jon’s biggest struggle was pivoting from Mogl, a consumer-facing brand, to a B2B brand
- 20:20 – The average successful company has pivoted 2.7 times
- 20:59 – There’s a lot of stress, you end up losing great people
- 21:09 – Jon had a COO and CFO quit during the beginning of the pivot
- 22:05 – How Jon got through the “dark period”
- 22:43 – Hope is such a powerful thing that an entrepreneur needs to hold onto
- 23:17 – It took a few “mini-pivots” to get to the idea that landed zero to 8 figures in revenue is less than a year
- 23:53 – Don’t take it personally when people leave you and keep the relationship intact
- 24:09 – Jon’s COO returned to the company because he was dissatisfied with the job he took when he left
- 24:29 – Jon stayed really good friends with his former CFO
- 25:45 – You have to have resilience—you take incredible amounts of abuse and stay energized to motivate your team
- 26:48 – You owe it to yourself, your investors, and everyone involved to pull it off
- 26:57 – People give up way too early
- 30:47 – Jon created a system to reach goals: The Five Steps to Great Execution (the “Great” in the title is an acronym to those 5 steps)
- 31:04 – Jon explains the 5 steps
- 32:22 – One must-read book: Delivering Happiness as it relates to establishing culture
- 32:51 – Reach Jon on his blog or through Twitter
3 key points:
- Celebrate RESILIENCE—keep working at your goal regardless of however many setbacks you face.
- Don’t take people leaving you personally and try to keep the relationship positive—you never know what your future with that person may look like.
- Emotions can FUEL you to keep pushing for that next step, so don’t resent the highs OR the lows; instead, USE IT!
Resources from this interview:
- Empyr
- Yelp
- Living Social
- The Five Steps to Great Execution
- Must-read book: Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by
- Jon Carder’s blog
- Twitter – @joncarder
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