Ty Morse Interview – CEO of Songwhale, Revolutionizing SMS Marketing
Who is Ty Morse and what is Songwhale?
I think it’s fair to say that me and Ty got on very well in this interview – Ty is not only an intelligent and fascinating young marketer and entrepreneur, but he is also a comical guy with a great sense of humour. There is no doubt that when it comes down to business, Ty Morse is as focused and determined as the next guy, approaching his company with all seriousness, but from reading between the lines he has a great social life playing music etc.
At the end of the day, it’s Ty’s successful company Songwhale, which has allowed him to enjoy the fruits of life so freely. Songwhale is an interactive media company that enables brands/companies to reach consumers across multiple touch points, with their core competency being mobile content and advertising, including SMS marketing and WAP (mobile websites).
Amongst many reasons, ask yourself this – how many people do you know who own a mobile phone? (everyone, right?) And how many times will you delete a text message (SMS) before you have even read it… never! This is the kind of forward-thinking that has allowed Songwhale to grow a client base including giants such as McDonalds, Nike, AT&T, EA Sports, EMI, Fox and KFC to name a few.
I know for certain that you will absolutely love this interview with TY – he is a really likable guy who clearly knows his stuff when it comes to SMS, and marketing in general. Ty knows exactly how to reach customers which is why he has helped so many large companies interact with their target audience, and more importantly, turn it viral (leveraging the effectiveness of SMS marketing by rewarding those who forward texts to a friend).
I had a great time conducting the interview and I am certain you will love listening to it!
All the best,
Luke Etheridge
“The Interview Guy” at Blogtrepreneur.com
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Ty Morse Interview (Audio Transcription)
Luke Etheridge: Hi guys, it’s Luke Etheridge here from Blogtrepreneur.com bringing you yet another one of our inspirational audio interviews as part of our popular interview series.
Our next guest goes by the name of Ty Morse who was referred to me by a previous guest of ours called Phil Laboon. Many of you might remember Phil, he’s a great guy and he’s a great inspiration but it turns out that Ty is also set for big things with Songwhale.com and various other projects so without further ado I’d like to welcome Ty Morse to Blogtrepreneur. Welcome along, Ty.
Ty Morse: Thanks Luke, I appreciate it. I’m glad we finally figured out the time zones to make it work.
Luke: It’s always quite tough getting people from across the globe to get on Skype and work it all out. The worst one’s Australia.
Ty: Yeah, I’m confused often. I spend a lot of my life right now on a plane and so twelve-hour difference between here and Indonesia and also China so you know you kind of get flip-flopped. You wake up some mornings, you can’t remember where you are and what time everything is happening.
Luke: So in your own time zones all over the place it just doesn’t make it easy.
Ty: Exactly.
Luke: So first off, before I get something wrong or misrepresent you in anyway at all, could you please tell our readers about what you do about Songwhale and also inform us of any other projects which you have gone on at the moment.
Ty: Yeah, sure. We started Songwhale in 2007. My original partner who’s our CTO, John Greenlee, he and I have done a lot of projects together and we had started a record label and from there I had been working at Virgin Records and we realized that the record labels really had less of idea how to make money on music than we did.
So John kind of came up with the concept of targeting hand-helds, the iPhone had just come out and there was a lot of growth and so we launched Songwhale in 2007 with [inaudible 02:09] standard compliant technology, WiFi, Bluetooth, SMS, WAP, to deliver free music to fans and add advertising and sponsoring that music. So you know, we sold sponsorships [inaudible 02:23] VISA, couple of different brands and surprised it worked.
We had over half the people download content so we very quickly launched the business around the music-side but then figured out that there was a lot of content that could be monetized in the mobile space and in the sports arena as well, so we started working with NFL teams, Major League Baseball teams, NHL, in the US, the large universities and colleges generate a lot of revenue, through sponsorship and advertising.
So we started kind of doing the same thing we’re doing in the music space and the sports space and that is taking videos, taking interviews, providing score alerts and updates, breaking news, doing live stream video on hand-helds, basically any type of content you can put on a mobile phone, we were doing, we were monetizing and then that quickly expanded into working with brands that we’re actually sponsoring the sports initiative.
So we started handling mobile marketing in general for brands like Pizza Hut, Panera, AT&T, Dunkin’ Donuts and that’s basically creating initiatives in the mobile medium for the brands that drive a conversation between the brands and the consumers and allow consumers to have access to discounts and breaking news about new products, things like that on their hand-held.
So that grew very quickly and then we got into real estate and created a real estate platform and then we started working overseas and handling mobile marketing initiatives in Indonesia and China and so yeah, that’s the quick version.
We’re a mobile marketing business, we’ve now expanded into social media and we also handle digital in general, so there are a lot of web initiatives now that we do.
Basically there were three of us who started, John, myself and then Jay, who I told you about Luke, who is a footballer over in the UK for six or seven years, the three of us started the company and now we’re over a hundred, have the two offices in China, one in Jakarta, Indonesia, our headquarters are in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the US, and then have offices in the Twin Cities, Madison, Wisconsin, and San Francisco. So, been a wild ride.
Luke: So it’s been quite a quick success really in a way. What, four years? So what do you think the key was?
Ty: About three and a half years, I think I mentioned to you before, one of the things as a CEO of the company I know that there are a lot of things that I am not good at and so I spent a lot of time hiring people that are good at things that I’m not good at and we have a really amazing team and I think that there’s a couple of things that contribute to that success.
I think our team and bringing on people, extremely talented people which we’re very fortunate to have and then I also think that we ended up…on a space its very sexy and cool mobile but we were also tied to very large brands. We got in right away with music artists and sports teams and then that led to the big brands like Pizza Hut and AT&T, and Panera and so I think that gave us a lot of exposure.
The other side of that is we had created more of an eco-system so you can go find a ton of companies out there that do text messaging and that’s a “dime a dozen” or a ton of companies that build mobile websites “dime a dozen” or a ton of companies that build apps.
That’s easy to do but it’s hard to find a company that creates a single eco-system where you have all these mediums, you have SMS, MobileWeb, Web, Applications, Social Media, all tied into one and then you can do the data-mining behind it.
So I remember when McDonald’s first came to us and said “Hey, we have a third-party doing our text messaging, we have a third-party doing our mobile websites, we have a third-party doing our applications, we have a third-party doing our social media”.
It was too many third-parties for them to coordinate and the consumer experience was all mixed because you couldn’t coordinate that many people and so I think Songwhale’s grown because we’re the big attractive pieces is that we have all of it within a single eco-system and that gives you a lot of power and flexibility and it’s also more cost-effective.
And then when you talk about data-mining and being able to understand the…kind of the user’s profile and behavior it’s much easier to do when you have each of the platforms and your cross-pollinating them. So I think that’s really contributed to the success of the company.
Luke: So you’ve actually brought all these things and put it under one roof and made it easier for the companies that are looking for this kind of service?
Ty: Exactly. It’s more of a one-stop shop which allows them to coordinate much easier.
Luke: Sorry there Ty. I think the…
Ty: Luke, are you still there?
Luke: Yeah, the cord broke up a bit there a second. I don’t know if you could answer just that last question again.
Ty: Yeah, not only is it more cost-effective but it’s more efficient. I mean the most important thing is because we can pull and have the same customer experience and pull all the data on the back-end into one place for analysis.
So with all the great social media tools popping up left and right, we have Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare and Scavenger. There’s a lot of great tools out there but I think companies are looking for people that can aggregate them into a single eco-system and do it in a efficient and clean way and we’ve been good at that and that’s helped us grow very quickly.
Luke: Yeah, so basically the messages don’t get mixed like you said, so you haven’t got two different companies doing you’re social media and your twitter messages and then you’ve got some text guy now and if those two companies don’t communicate then there could be big problems but if it’s under one roof then things should go a bit more smoother and the message should be clearer.
Ty: Exactly, and I think the other thing is even though we have our own platforms, not only do we create the platforms, we also consult on them. So we’ve been fortunate enough to build the most successful quick-service restaurant campaign in the US with Pizza Hut and we’ve built the largest mobile database in the NHL with the Black Hawks and built the largest database in the NFL with the Pittsburgh Steelers.
So I think that when there’s a lot of consulting that goes along with it too. We know how to build successful mobile marketing programs, we know what the foundations need to be and we know how to build a roadmap to create success and basically move the needle and drive our life for our partners.
[inaudible 09:16] a service site to move, which has helped as well because there’s a lot of people that are looking to learn how to navigate the space, even brands that have been around for years, they’re looking for a little bit more hand-holding in the space.Luke: Yeah, yeah. So I’m pretty sure that when you actually first started it wasn’t all plain sailing. I mean people set, tend to see the final product of any business and they always assume that it doesn’t take that long to get there or that it’s an overnight success.
I’m sure that with every other company out there, there’s been some downtime and some negative times where you thought that it was never gonna happen. Could you tell us about any kind of struggles that you went through?
Ty: There’s plenty of those and I think in any growing company when you’re still growing, they happen everyday. So it’s still not plain sailing because you go from three people to a hundred people in three-and-a-half years. First of all I don’t recommend it.
[laughter]Luke: Yeah, yeah.
Ty: It’s been wild. Yeah, it’s been wonderful to be successful but to grow that quickly there’s a lot of culture that needs to be built, a lot of management. So we’ve definitely struggled. On the outset some of the products we’re building, live stream to handheld for example, live stream video to handhelds; we completely abandoned that a year-and-a-half in.
We spent a lot of time on that but the reality is it doesn’t monetize in the way that it needs to for our partners. So there’s been a lot of products that we’ve launched that hadn’t worked.
There’s a lot of figuring out along the way, so let me just give you an example, I mean my wife says to me all the time “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” and I say “No, I have no idea what I’m doing but it’s going pretty well” and I studied literature, marine biology, and Jon, co-founder, he’s a computer programmer.
So Jon was focusing on technology, I had to learn the business side so having a background on literature and marine biology didn’t help too much. I mean in the beginning, I remember invoicing one of our first clients and going into our account at the time and saying “Hey, where’s that money we invoiced last week?” and he said “Oh, it’s net thirty on the invoice” and I said “What does that mean?”
It’s something called cash flow, you have to learn about when you’re gonna be paid and all that, so I think it was definitely a hard-learning process, and I’m still learning but it’s been kind of trial-by-error, so the way that I’ve learned usually is getting punched in the face and then you say “Whoa, I don’t want that to happen again.”
Luke: I think we’re gonna get along great Ty, ‘cuz that’s exactly how I’ve been sort of doing business ever since I’ve started out and every error that comes, you try and build on it and work from that.
Ty: Yeah, I think I’ve certainly made plenty of mistakes and there’s still a lot more for me to learn, but I think the important piece is knowing when you’ve made a mistake and then working on making better decisions in the future and working on correcting it.
So I think I’ve been very fortunate I’ve been surrounded by some really bright people who’ve helped out this company and like wonderful [inaudible 12:23] I think we’ve certainly had plenty of dark moments in Songwhale’s history where planning that I’ve done or decisions that I’ve made have come back to haunt us or products have failed or there’ve been rough periods where maybe there’s a lot of [inaudible 12:54] from a particular product or the other problem that we have is when you grow real fast, you have to manage cash flow.
But then the other pieces, now that we’re bigger we have a lot of demands so when you have a lot of business coming in, you have to be able to facilitate that business in a way that leaves the clients happy and still feeling great and still feeling special and when you start getting bigger that gets more difficult to do unless you keep hiring more and more people, and so I think that’s definitely a challenge.
I think we’re at a point right now where we really have more work coming at this point, so we’re spending time focusing on kind of a leaning down the types of verticals that we wanna focus on. We’re very spread out and that’s wonderful but we’re also gaining, instead of continuing to be spread out, we’re gaining more focus within the verticals that we’re in.
Luke: Yes, so expanding in order to keep up with the demand which you’ll see isn’t a bad problem to have at all.
Ty: No, but you do always want to work on scalability. So I think we’re expanding to keep up with the demand, but at the same time there are other areas we could expand into that we’re choosing not to at this point because we want to spend, we want to have a greater focus on the areas that we’re in. Instead of, we want deeper penetration in the areas we’re in instead of always adding on to the different verticals that we’re working in.
Luke: Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I’m a huge fan of SMS messaging to promote a product or service and from what I’ve seen and from what you’ve just said, that sort of see where Songwhale that’s where your expertise lies and from first hand experience as well.
When I’ve worked for various companies, I’ve actually ended up being in charge of SMS messaging of certain companies because I’ve believed in it so much, whereas, I think others haven’t believed in it so much but I’ve had this kind of real belief that that’s the way you need to be going with your business ‘cuz like people say, there are so many people out there with their mobile, that you need to cash in on it. What do you personally think is so good about SMS messaging for businesses?
Ty: Well there’s a lot of things. Again we do a lot more, here we have a lot of different ways that we engage consumers and how brands engage in mobile marketing but you’re a hundred percent right. The foundation to all of our programs is SMS and the reason that is, is because it’s the gateway [inaudible 15:23] ubiquitous.
It’s the only standard compliant technology that’s on every cell phone out there. Every cell phone does SMS. So apps are sexy, apps are cool but now you have to support the Blackberry platform, the Android platform, the iPhone platform and that’s wonderful and they’ll continue to grow, but the reality is when you look at mobile marketing and engage it with a brand, you start with the biggest door, OK, the biggest door is a hundred percent wide and that is SMS.
The next biggest door is mobile web browsing, OK, so maybe you’re about seventy percent there, then you get down to the apps which are smaller percentages but a lot of brands make the mistake if they create an app and they spend all this time on the app but then they don’t have a way to create awareness.
Well if you create a mobile database for SMS first, now you can push a message out to that database to say “Hey, download our new app” or “Hey, check out our new mobile website”, so we usually take that approach of going to the widest door first which is SMS and then we’re tearing it down. I think SMS has been really successful too because you know…when you think about email, email is free.
I can go sign up for a Gmail account and search spamming people like crazy right now. With SMS, there’s always a charge to the carriers, meaning there is a cost associated with it which keeps the media more clean, and then when you think about the psychological connotation to an email.
OK, we’re both sitting here right now on this Skype call, we both are getting emails, OK, there’ll be more emails in our inbox when we end this and we will go back and say “Oh, answer that at the end of the day, I might answer that tomorrow, I might answer that in a week”, because with email, that’s our behavior, that’s our natural behavior with the medium. With SMS, you don’t get a text from somebody, and say “Oh, I’ll answer that next week”.
There’s an impulse or there’s immediacy and that connection, that immediacy is what brands are looking for with consumers and in the opposite side, the consumers are also looking for that immediate type of information from the brand.
So the reality is, is that SMS isn’t going anywhere. Yeah, it’s very simple, yeah, it seems like that’s still SMS but there are ways that we continue to innovate on top of this SMS platform to make it an integral part of how we communicate and that’s why the numbers continue to grow and grow and grow.
So SMS is growing faster this year than it was last year and faster last year than the year before. And again it has a one hundred and sixty character set just like Twitter and the Facebook status update. So that’s part of the ADD culture that we live in now, and I think that there’s no question that with all these wonderful things we have, app-based mobile websites, Bluetooth.
There’s no question that these can be really creative ways to engage with the consumer but they’re not as effective if you don’t have the foundation which is an SMS platform to build from.
Luke: I like this idea ‘cuz I hear a lot of companies saying “Oh, you must, you must have an app, that’s what you must have, you must have.” And they talk about apps a lot and they also talk about having mobile versions of your websites, they say, “You must have that, you must have that.”
But like you say, if you haven’t got that database to actually advertise to, like you say, SMS is on absolutely every phone and an app, not everybody has an iPhone, not everybody has a Smartphone. So…
Ty: And the other thing is push. So if I’m the owner of the mobile website, I have to wait for the user to come to my mobile website. Now if I have a mobile website and combination with SMS, I can push them an SMS that says “Hey, breaking news, check this out.”
And then have a link to my mobile website where they can consume the content. But the key is to push the mobile website, it hasn’t been effective. So you push an SMS and say “Here’s what’s going on,” then you click the link to the mobile website or say “Hey, you’ve been a part of our database for score alerts for Chelsea.”
Now we pitched them on a big blast and say “Hey, check it out, we have an app, you can download our app.” And that’s how you get the consumers; you again start with the largest database and then you can make offerings with more rich media than they can select based on their device and capability.
Luke: Yeah, yeah. I mean what you mentioned earlier is the fact that you need a database to obviously, to text, to send SMS to. But how do you actually go about collecting a database? Is their clever ways that you can do that? Is their a way that you can do it from zero and do it quickly as well?
Ty: Yeah, so we’ve built out ways to grow databases virally. And one of the main things we built out that’s been incredibly successful, is called Friend Forwarder.
And what we do is, let me give you an example with Pizza Hut. We’ll run a TV spot with Pizza Hut that says “Text to win pizza for a year”. You text in and the bounce-back says “Thanks for participating. Winner will be [indecipherable 20:19] in two weeks. Here’s free breadsticks for participating.
Forward these free breadsticks to five of your friends and we’ll give you a free soda. Forward these free breadsticks to ten of your friends; we’ll give you a free pizza.”
Well everybody wants the free pizza. So everybody forwards it to ten of their friends and then the ten friends that got forwarded get the same text message. Here’s breadsticks, forward this to five friends, we’ll give you a soda, forward it to ten, we’ll give you a free pizza.
So you actually have your patrons growing the database for you. And why, cuz you’re giving them a great offer. And so they want to forward it because they want to have that great offer.
So it’s important to have a great user experience that’s giving a valuable prize and then that allows us to use that incentive to virally grow the database very quickly and we call those acquisition campaigns.
So you have a kind of a high-end prize which would be a large pizza and everybody wants to have that high-end prize and so they’re forwarding the message. It virally grows, that’s the acquisition campaign.
Then you start once you have a large enough database, you have retention campaigns. Now we’ve been very fortunate, we’ve developed a formula where an average of over ninety percent retention rate. Meaning yeah, you get a little bit degradation of people opting out every month but we always get people opting in as well.
So we retain over ninety percent of the members of our database. It’s a cross all of our, whether it’s Pizza Hut or sports teams or whatever it is. And so then you use your retention campaign, that keeps them interested.
The offer might be not as rich but it’s good enough to allow the messaging in the pocket. What we don’t allow our partners to do is say “Hey, come to Pizza Hut.” Well, I don’t want a text message in my pocket that genuinely says “Come to Pizza Hut.” I want some value there.
So we’ve used methods like the Friend Forwarder. We really grow mobile databases. Now we also have our own television platform, so we’re an exclusive mobile provider for several channel positions in the US, whether it’s on satellite TV or whether it’s on local or regionalized TV that goes through cable.
We actually control channel positions where we can show and say there’s a cooking show on, so it’s food. Well, we’ll put “contextual” at the bottom, we’ll say, we’ll put a banner at the bottom while the show is running and we’ll say “Hungry? Text Pizza Hut to nine-four-two-five-three”.
Well, Pizza Hut knows that the mobile user has a higher average order and a higher frequency. So what we’re doing is, we’re driving people to become part of Pizza Hut’s mobile program and we’re using our own television space to do that. So these are some very effective methods to grow databases quickly.
Luke: This is very, very fascinating. The Friend Forwarder is something that just seems so easy. So why hasn’t anyone else thought of this? It sounds perfect…
Ty: We thought the same thing. I’m sure they will. We thought the same thing.
Luke: Yeah, you must have…
Ty: And the thing is. Even with the [inaudible 23:23] and it’s your friends signing you up so it’s your friends sending out your number. Obviously we couldn’t do it, because mobile marketing association says we can’t just send somebody a message without having them opt in, while their friend sends them the message and then they choose whether they want to opt in or not.
Luke: Yeah, yeah exactly. And they have more trust with their friends so they’re gonna trust their friend’s recommendations.
Ty: Exactly.
Luke: And also you give somebody something for free, it all goes back to that. You give somebody something for free and they gonna jump at the opportunity, aren’t they?
Ty: Exactly. And Pizza Hut knows that they’re trying to create a great experience for their consumers which they’re doing by offering something free. And on top of that they’re bringing high value to the table when they send out their messaging. So they’re playing nice with the consumer too and trying a great experience. So it’s one of those rare win- win’s for everybody.
Luke: Yeah, yeah. It sounds fascinating and you know and everybody knows that once you have the people in your store, we call it over here, I don’t know if you call it in the US, but we call it a “Loss Leader”; where you get them into the place and you know that they’re gonna spend a hell of a lot more money.
You know that the salad that you give them that’s free or whatever, is not enough for them so they’re gonna have to buy some more.
Ty: Exactly, that’s exactly what it is.
Luke: So, getting back to the actual SMS themselves. How often do you message, let’s say you have a database, how often would you message it? How can you avoid seeming like a spammer? Are their specific ways that you can actually write the message? Would you put specific words at the beginning of the message for example?
Ty: Well, we also have best practices. We know how to routine our databases so we know if you message somebody everyday about pizza, it’s not gonna work. You’re gonna opt out [inaudible 25:14] because they don’t want to have [inaudible 25:17] messaging about pizza.
So we’ll take something like pizza and recommend “Hey, the maximum we should do is weekly messaging, we recommend by monthly so two messages a month.” And we know based on history that we have a high retention rate with two messages a month, so not only do you have a lower frequency of messaging but you also have to have value with message and that’s how that formula, those two variables are how you maintain a healthy database.
You don’t annoy people with messaging, at the same time whenever you do pop-up in their pockets, you’re just plain value and so it can depend, there are like score alerts for example that we do where people want messaging all the time. They wanna know when the score changes.
They’re getting text messages every thirty seconds in a basketball game. That’s up to them though, they set that preference and they say “Hey, I want a text every score or I want a text every quarter, I want a text every minute”, and that when the user can set it, when it comes to the marketing, where we’re pushing it and it’s just offers…you know…and lest we’re pushing it on a specific event, we typically space out the messaging to make sure that we don’t fatigue the consumer.
Luke: Yeah, yeah. I think that’s really important to bear in mind because everybody hates, and like you just said, SMS is not like email, you don’t want to get that into people’s minds.
You want it to still feel special, so when they receive their text, you want them to feel happy to open it. You don’t want them to think “Oh, it’s Pizza Hut again, oh just delete it.”
Ty: Exactly.
Luke: Yeah, so I noticed on your site that your clients are generally, really, really big. They’re Fortune five hundred companies some of them. Which is obviously great but how did you actually manage to build that clientele? Is there something that you did specifically, did you head into that area? Did you always aim to get Fortune five hundred companies on your clientele list?
Ty: I think because we’re in the music and sports space, where a lot of high-profile brands spend money, we started creating relationships. So for example, when we’re working with NFL teams, the NFL being as big as it is in the US; has a lot of premier sponsors and large sponsors and so they saw our brand and they saw that we’re doing a good job driving value and that opened up the doors for us to have conversations with them about how we can provide platform services for them.
So I think it kind of started by being in these high-profile industries and then if you add value, and your service actually works, well then everybody in those large brand Fortune five hundred industries they talk and if you can position yourself to be a solutions provider for those types of large brands then the word gets spread very quickly and fortunately in our case that’s what’s happened and we’ve been able to provide such a great platform and at the same time, great service.
And I think that’s helped these larger brands. The larger brands are looking for not only the best platform out there but also something they can help them navigate the [inaudible 28:27] space. They’re looking for information and consultation and we provided both with the technology and the information and consultative side and I think that attracted a lot of these big brands to us.
Luke: Yeah, so you’ve not only got the software that can do it but you have the brains behind it. So you guys can actually analyze what you’re doing and understand it.
Ty: Yup, and we can help them ‘cuz they’re gonna say “Well I don’t know what to do with Twitter, I don’t know what to do with SMS, I don’t know what to do with Facebook.” Well we do, and we can help walk them to that.
Luke: So are there any companies and specific niches out there that won’t benefit from SMS marketing just as a heads-up? Are there any that you find it very, very difficult to monetize that kind of SMS marketing?
Ty: Yeah, I think if you can’t build a really big database in terms of monetizing through advertising, you need a big database. But for any company, even a mom and pop, SMS is useful because it’s creating again a conversation with the consumer, wherein keeping the brand top-of-mind.
So SMS is cheap enough now that if you’re a one-man taco stand, it’s worth it to use SMS because you can remind, at 7PM at night when people are out on the streets and you need to drive traffic to your taco stand, with a push of a button you can pop-up in their pockets and if you’re sending it to a hundred people and you drive ten, well you just made money because SMS is so cheap and so I really think that we’re gonna see SMS permeate into every single industry.
We’re working in theater now, we work with the movies and the cinemas, we work in real estate, we work in sports, we work in entertainment, we work in education. I think we’re gonna see it in every facet of life because it’s so basic and important.
It’s like the telephone or it’s like a computer, now we have a little computer in our hands and more people use and they use SMS to…it’s great for the promotional side of things because it’s short, it’s simple, it’s clean and everybody has it.
So I really think it’ll permeate in every set of business. We’re doing health care now, we’re doing automotive, it’s fascinating. We’re doing safety, it’s really one of those unique platforms that is helpful anywhere even down to a mom and pop who might only have fifty people on the database.
Luke: I completely agree with you there because it’s something like I said earlier, I’ve personally always wanted to push for any company that I’ve been working for in marketing.
I’ve always said “No, SMS you cannot beat it, it really is that great”, and the first thing that I think the first major sort of text campaign that I noticed over here, I dunno if you’ve got it over there or whether you’ve heard of it is Orange Wednesdays?
Ty: No.
Luke: You haven’t heard of it, well the following company Orange, I don’t know if you have Orange…
Ty: Yeah, I know Orange Wall…
Luke: Yeah, Orange, what they do is they do a thing on every Wednesdays, called Orange Wednesdays, you text them if you have an Orange mobile phone. Now you don’t even need an Orange mobile phone ‘cuz they realize that anybody…they might as well just go for anybody.
But you text, you can basically download an app which if you haven’t got an Orange mobile but if you have got an Orange mobile, you text a number, you text something like food to a number and they give you a product, they give you a coupon code and you walk into the cinema and you get half-priced tickets in the cinema and also you get a half-price meal at Pizza Express. So it’s that kind of thing that have just driven so much business to every single Pizza Express now; it’s full every Wednesday.
Ty: That’s awesome, it’s a little bit of like a reverse coupon.
Luke: Yeah.
Ty: It’s kind of interesting.
Luke: Very interesting.
Ty: That’s cool. Are you guys seeing over there in the UK, have you seen any text-to-purchase platforms where people are buying thru text?
Luke: No, no, well I personally haven’t known and I always keep a wide eye with advertising always. I love to see new, innovative ways of reaching customers and I haven’t personally seen it, no. What’s that about?
Ty: OK, just basically using text messaging to make purchases. So “Hey, I like those pair of shoes”, there’s a keyword on them, I text a keyword, my phone number is tied to my credit card, done.
Luke: Really? That’s fascinating. We’ll probably get that in a few years’ time.
Ty: Well hopefully it’s coming from us. We’re launching the platform pretty soon.
Luke: That’s good. Another thing I want you to talk about is have you ever gone near Bluetooth advertising? We have a few companies over here that when you’re driving past a place, say you’re driving past a car warehouse that sells cars, you might get a text saying “BMWs: ten percent off this weekend”, which will be sent to you through Bluetooth as you drive past. Do you do that?
Ty: Yeah, we actually did that when we first started, so we did a lot of that about three-and-a-half years ago…three years ago. We did a lot with Bluetooth but in the US, it’s just not as big as it is in Europe.
The phones, Bluetooth has mainly been for headsets in the US and it didn’t have the ubiquity and the critical mass of SMS so we decided to move away from Bluetooth and more towards SMS because again everybody has SMS so we get them to opt in, we can interact with everybody instead of just the people who have their Bluetooth turned on at the time that they’re driving by.
I like it, but I think it’s a space where there can only be a few players because again Bluetooth is not something that every single person has and so we kind of just made the decision to focus more on text than Bluetooth.
Luke: Yeah, I mean it’s probably quite wise as well in the US. I’m just thinking, this maybe quite a good point to make is that a lot of these places are in small, very, very small, intricate little villages where everything is really close together and the actual span on these transmitters that send the messages is only like…it could be thirty to ninety meters.
So I think in America where everything is quite spread out. [laughter] So it might not work so well…
Ty: Exactly, exactly. Yeah and the other thing is with patent laws and everything, the cell phone technology in Europe has just been ahead of the US.
I mean there’s iPhone and a lot of Android stuff now and Blackberries out of Canada but I mean the reality is its taking us a little bit in our culture to catch up. Cell phones and Bluetooth is something that other than headsets just really hasn’t caught on here.
Luke: Yeah, yeah.
Ty: And it could be the proximity.
Luke: Yeah, definitely. Of course it could be. So going slightly off-topic a little bit, to a more personal side of things. I did actually manage to read an old interview with you and you mentioned that you’d written two rock operas which I was quite surprised. But is this true and if so, what was your inspiration behind this and why did you do it and did it work out for you?
Ty: Yeah. You know it’s pretty funny, the story of Songwhale starts when I was eighteen years old, I was sitting in an English class and Jon is seven years older than me. So my business partner is seven years older than me.
I’m sitting in this English class, we’re reading Beowulf the rock opera and the teacher plays the first half of Beowulf the rock opera written by students seven years before and I listened to this thing and I said “My gosh! I was listening to Pink Floyd, the Wall and Tommy by The Who”, and I was kind of into that rock opera thing and I’m like “Wow!” and I’m like “That’s pretty funny”
I mean it certainly makes reading Beowulf a lot more interesting to think about it musically and I asked the teacher, who wrote it and he said “John Greenlee and Zach London”.
Well I knew Jon’s name ‘cuz he was a family friend, my parents were friends with his parents. So I went home and I said to my mom “Hey, do you have Jon Greenlee’s contact info?” He only did the first half of the Beowulf thing and the teacher said he’d give me credit if I do the second half.
So I called John up and Jon was a programmer in Minneapolis and it’s funny how the story comes full circle cuz now we own Songwhale together, but he was a programmer in Minneapolis, he was 25 years old and I said “Hey, I’d like to do the second half of this rock opera.” And he said “What instrument do you play?”, and I said “Nothing”.
[laughter]And I forgot. So he said “Alright, well figure out how to play an instrument and then call me back.” So that day I went out and I bought a guitar and mowed lawns that summer and I bought a guitar and I taught myself how to play and started writing tunes and I sent them over to Jon and he said “Well these aren’t very good but it takes a lot to do this so I’ll help you out”.
So I spent my winter break and as much time as I could going up to his studio in Minneapolis where we recorded Beowulf the rock opera and at that point nobody much cared except maybe my mom who thought it was cool and everyone else thought it was crazy and then I went off to school and one of the professors heard Beowulf the rock opera and she said “If you wanna make a rock opera in another piece of literature, I’ll give you credit.”
So I said “Sure, I’ll make another rock opera in a piece of literature.” Again as usual, I worked on the songwriting but Jon is the producer and the technical side of all the things that we do. So I asked if he’d help again and he said “Yeah”, so we kept going back and forth in his studio and then over the next four years we recorded Frankenstein the rock opera based on Mary Shelley’s novel.
Spent all my breaks doing that and working with Jon and writing tunes and then Jon would record them and mix them and then we ended up starting our first company out of that.
We got investors and did a little tour, and went to New York and did the whole thing and it was a blast and then what happened is I had gone over to Europe to work on another album, just a solo album, and John Hendricks who owns the Discovery Channel I guess had seen or heard our musical and said “Hey, would you like to come write music for Discovery Channel?”.
And so I did that and again working with Jon, so I went to D.C. and worked on that and fly back and forth and Jon was a part of a lot of the music that was done on Discovery Channel and then after writing a song for Animal Planet and picking out music for TLC and things like that and was enough of that. We started a record label and then after that record label I was at Virgin and then we started Songwhale and here we are.
Luke: So really in a weird way that little passion for rock operas was the best of your business and maybe if you never actually pursued it you wouldn’t have gotten in touch with Jon and things wouldn’t have been the same.
Ty: Well, I think it totally was. I mean the reality is, is that to this day, what Jon and I love to do most is make music. That’s what we love to do together, that’s what we have fun doing. Actually for Wofford with Jay we did a track called “Soccer rocks” as and sold CDs at the stadium as part of a fund-raiser and then Jon and I record in our office all the time.
We have a little recording studio in our office here in Pittsburgh and we recorded maybe forty tracks last year and really we built this business because as we were doing music in the record label we couldn’t get…we couldn’t make enough money off of music. So we said “My gosh!
We got to start another company and make a bunch of money so we don’t have to worry about the money piece so we can just play music”, and that’s kind of how we started Songwhale.
Luke: There’s me thinking that you were serious businessmen but you’re not, you’re just running this business so that you can actually just have fun all day. I’m really jealous of you.
Ty: That’s the real truth. We’re actually running it so we can make more music ‘cuz nobody will pass for our music.
Luke: Yeah. Your music is that bad that you need a business to help it succeed.
Ty: That’s exactly right, that’s exactly right.
[laughter]Luke: So how’s that going for you, do you see yourself ever getting anywhere with your music or is it purely just hobby now?
Ty: Oh, it’s hobby. We make music cuz it’s fun to make music. I don’t even necessarily make music for other people to hear and a lot of the time it’s more just fun to do.
It’s kinda like hey if there are people who build model planes, they don’t necessarily need to invite hundreds of people over to see ’em, they just like the process. I really enjoy the process in making music and then I like to be able to listen to it myself.
I think Jon and I have probably have a couple more rock operas in us that we’ll write but I think the beauty is I don’t know that the goal is fame and fortune from the music as much as it is to be able to just do it all the time because it’s fun.
Yeah, it’s a beautiful hobby and one that I just personally enjoy. It’s my favorite thing to do. So if I can support just making tunes it doesn’t necessarily really matter to me at all if anybody ever hears it or cares, it’s just a process.
Luke: Yeah, exactly and actually I completely agree with you there because I’m a music lover myself and I learned the guitar probably three years ago now and.
I did it all my self and I always said to my girlfriend “I never, ever want to play this in front of a crowd”, I just purely do it because when I sit there and I get the chords to a certain song, it is the most satisfying feeling ever. And just to hear it back played when you record it is awesome.
Ty: Exactly. There’s a group of us that does recording and we share solace with each other. We got a couple of friends, we have offices in the Twin Cities, in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minnesota and we have a couple of friends there that we make music with.
There’s just a small group of us and we share tunes with each other and there are things that a lot of people will never even hear but it’s part of the experience. I enjoy creating so whether it’s music or companies, I like creating.
Luke: Cool, cool. It’s good to hear anyway from one music lover to another, I think it’s really good to hear that you’ve got this really, really successful business. It’s probably quite a dream of mine to be honest, have this successful business that you kind of do run and you take very seriously but in the same time you get the chance to goof around with your music. [laughter]
Ty: Yeah, exactly. Jon and I work really hard, we work late nights but I’ll tell you what, if the office winds down and people go home at nine o’clock on a Friday night, we’re gonna turn on the electric guitars and we’re gonna play music.
Luke: I want to be a part of that, I’m really jealous of you now.
[laughter]Ty: Well you guys [inaudible 44:04] much of my favorite music comes from over there so I’m jealous as well.
Luke: Yeah, well we do seem to have quite a good repertoire for music actually, I do agree there but one of my favorite bands…one of them comes from over there is Kings of Leon. They were huge over here for years and then I never really made it over there at all and I think they’ve just started to get a bit bigger now.
Ty: Oh, they’re huge over here now and it’s funny when I was at, Virgin’s under EMI and Kings of Leon were on Capital, and I was in the collegiate marketing and promotions, so I got to work with them and help promote that record.
Luke: Wow! Which record?
Ty: Oh, man. It was the one before this last one. I can’t…
Luke: Probably one of the best albums for me, if only we can remember it, is it “Only by the night”? Is that the one?
Ty: Yeah, I think that’s the one.
Luke: With “Sex on Fire” on it? Let’s have a look.
Ty: No, it’s the one before that.
Luke: The one before that? So let’s have a look…
Ty: Yup.
Luke: “Because of the Times”?
Ty: That’s it.
Luke: The one with “Charmer” and “Knocked Up”. Anyways, moving off the music slightly, I think we’re going off-topic; this is the music lovers in us coming out here.
[laughter]Ty: Yeah, you’re gonna give me off easily. I’ll talk about music forever.
Luke: Me too. This is a real bit danger here. I hope everyone’s got a really long time and a really good music brain.
[laughter]Ty: Exactly.
Luke: Do you have any other projects on the horizon, Ty? Any businesses? You mentioned you’re gonna be doing something with Phil Laboon, if you could tell us about that at all?
Ty: Yeah, Phil and I are working on a really cool project. He’s the one who really understands SEO. To be honest just like business, there’s a lot of people that I sit down with everyday that have a lot of better ideas than I do and Phil really understands the SEO world and is super creative and for a long time I’ve admired his business here.
I think it’s just an amazing business Iflow, and I suppose the thing that I like to do is [inaudible 46:22] so we create synergy and then I’m able to go out and champion it and help build excitement around it and create strategic relationships and really work on business development synergies and so Phil and I have been wanting to work on a project together and he came up with a really neat idea.
Basically it’s going to make SEO incredibly accessible and easy and I’m trying not to unveil too much because it’s gonna be a really neat product that we’re gonna launch with a big bang.
But it’s gonna really change the way people could interact with SEO and it’s gonna make it much more accessible to mom-and-pops and the platform that we’re building allows people from a business that has ten thousand employees to a business that has ten, really utilizes platform to help them in their Search Engine Optimization.
I think the couple key pieces of platform are the ease of use; I think it’s the kind of the accountability, and the track ability, the metrics and I also think that it’s extremely cost-effective. So it’s kind of a new niche for Search Engine Optimization.
We’re gonna be able to…with the software that we’ve created; we really engaged and move the needle in very quick and cost-effective way for a broad spectrum of clients. So I wish I could get into more detail at this point, but I’m sure you’ll see it, when you see the tool you’ll know understand exactly what I’m talking about and why it’s really going to change the way people look at SEO.
We’re looking to make a big splash with this one. We’re very, very, very, very excited about it. It’s a platform and that’s something Songwhale’s done really well, is build upon platforms and I think now we’re just taking Bill’s built, Phil not Bill, Phil, his brother’s name is Bill.
Phil’s built an amazing company with Iflow and I think what we’re doing with this new business is we’re catering to a different type of a client and so Iflow will continue to have the clients that they have but we’re catering to a different type of client and we’re building out a platform which is something that I’ve been fortunate enough to have experience expanding around the country and using strategic partnerships to grow.
So I think we’re both able to pool our strengths together here on this project and I haven’t been this excited in a really long time so I’m very fired up about it.
Luke: Well, that’s good. That’s good to hear and I’m sure it’s going to be really good and I think reading between the lines I can tell what it’s gonna be, the kind of thing that you’re getting at and obviously you don’t want to give too much away but I think the SEO is one thing that is just so hard to conquer on your own unless you do so much research or you do a course in it or anything like that.
I think to actually conquer it properly, I think there are small things that you can do as a website owner to better your SEO but you can’t conquer SEO. You won’t necessarily be number one from just the small little tweaks that you can do. I personally would be very, very up for having a look at these products and maybe mentioning it on Blogtrepreneur in the future.
Ty: Yeah, I think it’s gonna be really neat and when you see it, it’s so easy to use, it’s gonna be beautiful. You know the other thing I’m working on is a…it’s a social media shopping network.
I can’t say too much about that either but it combines social media, and e-commerce in a really unique way. It’s very, very, very exciting so I got a couple side projects but I think it’s the beauty of creation and so getting to do something with friends and building new businesses is always a blast. There’s still a lot to do with Songwhale.
There’s still a lot going on here, a lot of growth, a lot of changes, it’s a fun environment, but to be able to work on this couple of opportunities especially with a friend and another who owns another business I admire is pretty fun and exciting.
Luke: Cool, I mean it’s good to hear that you’re putting in the efforts to take things forward ‘cuz it’s like anything really. It’s a bit like a Steve Jobs and Apple, they take things forward.
They’re always, always doing something bigger and better next time and things that people haven’t heard of. So it’s good to hear that you’re…you may be on a slightly smaller scale than Apple but it sounds really exciting. So happy for you there, buddy.
Ty: Thanks, I appreciate it, man.
Luke: So moving on to my last question which I seem to ask everybody ‘cuz it seems to sometimes create a really good response. If you ever had to start again from scratch, if you ever lost everything, so if you lost Songwhale or Songwhale just seemed to go down, which I’m sure it won’t. [laughter]
I don’t want to bring out those kind of feelings in you, but if ever you had to start again basically and you realized that you may have to go and get a nine-to-five job and work for somebody, what would you do, what would be the next thing that you would do, say if you lost your job, say if you lost everything today. What would you do tomorrow to get you back on the track to success?
Ty: Hmm… I think… Oooohh… I’d have to figure out something quick. I’ve never been very good at working for anybody else so I don’t know who would take me or how long I’d last. I think…
Luke: You’d work in a music shop and a record shop…
Ty: Yeah…you know it really depends I think I’m one of those people where hey, if Songwhale blew up today I’d rebuild the next Songwhale tomorrow and pool together my resources and this is what I like to do.
I’d say “Alright”, I mean I’ve blown up plenty of companies before we got it as good as we gotten Songwhale. I failed plenty of times so I think for me it’s something like OK this is what happens and you pick up and you learn from it. I’d pool together some of the people that I’ve admired and come up with a new concept and start again from scratch just like what we did with Songwhale.
But if I had to get a day job for a little awhile, I don’t know, maybe I would become a member of a renaissance festival. That would be fun. And maybe be a part of a jousting competition of a renaissance festival. I don’t know what they pay for that kind of thing; I’d be in to it.
[laughter]Luke: It’s a very different road. It sounds like you’re in to all sorts of things.
[laughter]Luke: But anyway, thanks so much for the interview Ty. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you personally because obviously your love for music, that obviously we share.
Obviously sharing a few similarities, with you coming over here, not that I’ve been over to America at all. I’ve never been able get over there. I’ve hardly ever been to Florida which is in America at its best. I know I’ve to go over there one day and do some touring.
Ty: Phil has a place in Florida so make sure he let you stay if you go there.
Luke: I will. I’ll pop him an email and see what he says.
Ty: Alright.
Luke: But thank you anyway. To the readers please comment below and let us know what you think of Ty and if you’ve got any experience at all with SMS messaging, let us know. If you don’t agree with it, or you think it’s bad, let us know that as well and I’m sure Ty will do his very best to put you down on your comments.
[laughter]Luke: So yeah, let us know anyway. Ty, I’ll come back to you after this recording but thanks so much for today.
Ty: All right. No problem. Thank you. It’s a pleasure.