Perfect timing as we have a huge need for this for an upcoming launch.
Question...will you be able to replay/backfill as you add new integrations? For example, Klaviyo is a huge hole in your integrations right now especially for marketing and ecomm. If I install Autotrack now, set up a few events and then a month from now you add Klaviyo, I can just replay everything into Klaviyo?
Also FWIW, I was an early user at Segment (was in their seed deck as case study), Klaviyo, and many others. I'm a technical marketer so can be helpful as beta tester and user research. reach out directly if you'd like to connect [email protected]
As a former early Munchery (and Airbnb) employee, you sound like the worst type of arm chair quarterback – hopelessly wrong.
Munchery was first mover in the space and is an order of magnitude bigger than most in the space, and already doing volume that would blow your mind. Original investors in an A round don't reup to lead the B & C rounds unless there is some serious "proof" of customer base.
This. I've been back multiple times over the years to run some small campaigns for some big startups there and can't believe how bad and rough around edges their tools and processes are.
If I didn't love reddit so much there is no way I would've put up with them to run a small campaign.
I've managed tons of product launches at Airbnb, Munchery and other startups as a consultant.
Do not launch on Thanksgiving. Trust me. Delay until the week after.
Also you should know that Thanksgiving through New Years is by far the worst time of year to try and launch a new (consumer) product of any kind. Every single (consumer) product in the world fights a bloody battle for attention and sales this time of year. Every store, every brand and every product category will be filled with promotions and/or slightly new offerrings.
If you must launch during that window, what you're launching must be either a) fucking amazing itself or b) your fucking amazing at marketing to cut through all that noise.
definitely this. Can get more expensive quick too, especially if a video requires multiple locations, multiple actors, multiple actors speaking, etc etc.
Also I can't remember if Adam does this, but most the industry will have different price tiers based on what you want to do with it. Running something on your homepage is a whole different ballgame compared to homepage + TV ads.
Everything. Researching is horrible. Purchase flows suck. Fees suck.
Portfolio analysis terrible – For example on a stocks page there isn't even an easy way to see existing positions, let alone my historical purchases like when, how much and what price. It's just "here's this stocks history" not "here's this stocks history including YOU'RE history with this stock.
And on and on like that.
I'm just sick of using software that feels like it stopped improving 5-10 years ago....and figured that has to be more out there.
I have a feeling this story is far, far from being over.
And I'm very curious as to how the fuck this happens.
I haven't seen many theories in general, let alone theories with much evidence behind them about how this could have happened. Other than iCloud! No dropbox! No NSA!
So while I wait for more technical minds to weigh in, I figured I'd take a stab at an alternate theory for people to ponder (or hopefully more likely tear apart!)
- Original hacker is one w/ privileged network access, &/or proximity to sniff, &/or compromise device(s) physically at a place frequented by celebs over a long period of time(years).
- Hotels, spas, coffee houses, studio lots, awards, etc etc.
- Potential for many attack vectors to match any given skill set. From MITM, to malware, to phishing, to gathering PII for social eng to compromised charging stations.
- And gives a window of time to allow for fast data transfer pillaging via LAN.
- Also gives a window where on same network, at same time and place pry helps to avoid tripping some suspicious access detection alarms.
- OG hacker is prob up to lots of nefarious stuff and someone else popped their personal stash.
--
What lead me there and away from a single platform exploit, a la iCloud?
I tried making sense of what was known and a few assumptions.
- If it was a platform exploit, finding even 20 of these girls' actual login emails from which to locate their accounts on a service is a massive undertaking – unless you have some kind of privileged position to harvest them (hotel desk, gyms, award ceremonies, etc etc)
-- I feel like the probability of all these girls having passed through same places – like hotels, spas, sundance, soho house, awards, festivals, etc etc – over the course of 2-3 years is way higher than someone managing to figure out 100 correct login emails for them.
- The attacks appeared to have happened over a long period of time. At least late 2011 to within the last month judging from exif data. So they avoided tons of software and hardware updates for bugs and security patches.
- I assume these celebs have TONS of photos on any of their devices at any given time. Being photographed and taking photographs are part of their lives. So we're talking thousands or tens of thousands. Which takes a lot of time to copy. And like all of us, their photos are unorganized which means it takes a lot of time to find the gems. The longer it takes the attacker to get access and pillage, the more they are exposed. They needed to get in quick and consistently, and get out very fast.
- Given the volume and (alleged) success rate of 100+ celebs, manual social engineering or brute is out.
Yes but it'd be insanely easy for a company like UPS with the data it has to:
- Give you a preprogrammed recommended stop route.
- recommended stop route can auto-adjust throughout day based on variables like traffic etc
- the only time you have to "look anything up" is when you need to manually change your recommended stop route.
- and that could be done via simple voice commands
I really find it hard to believe UPS doesn't have some kind of great GPS like this for most of it's fleet.
Delivery routes in lower density parts of the country are going to be huge geographic areas too unlike a SF or NYC too.
They supposedly use software to determine how to store packages in the back of a truck efficiently, I can't see how they wouldn't throw their same weight at navigation.
As a former Airbnb employee, this is honestly the only thing I don't like about the rebrandredesign!
Airbnb pry has one of, if not THE, world's largest collection of amazing real estate photography.
It's possible some massive real estate company might have as much, but I can't imagine how Airbnb doesn't have the largest collection of lived-in home interiors by a long shot.
Are you managing your FB ads in house or via agency?
It sounds like in house, which I always highly recommend is best.
However, you might consider reaching out to one of the big FB ad partners like Nanigans. $100k+ account with known ROI, which means you'll ramp quick and advertise long term, will definitely get people drooling at those firms.
Because here's the issue:
While your situation is unfair, and your even allocation idea is great for the most part, it doesn't take into account the size of your competitor's ad budgets.
I'd be willing to bet Zoosk is somewhere in the range of $2M-$10M per year, or more, just on facebook alone. Probably similar amount on Google too.
At that level of spend, the executive level access and ad partner relationships on any advertising platform is a completely different world than yours.
I bet the head of marketing at Zoosk has Sheryl Sandberg's number in their phone and could get her on the line pretty much 24/7 if they REALLY needed too.
You're advocating with a dog whistle, while they have bull horns.
But the big ad platform partners have bull horns too.
And while obviously no one there is calling Sheryl on your behalf, even their regular day to day contacts at facebook are going to be way more influential than yours.
So it may be possible to piggyback off of them to get higher up the ladder.
If they can do that, just run through them until your big enough to have your own bull horn.
If they can't do anything for you because you're too small, you could try reaching out to other niche or regional dating advertisers that got the axe too(pry a ton that are pure desktop still too so even better).
Find ones with only a comfortable level of overlap to you guys and join up to bring all your individual accounts to the first platform that gets you unblocked.
Anyways, sucks and I feel ya, but hopefully some of that is useful.
PS - The 10% even allocation model you outlined is obviously ideal because it lets the market sort it out. But you also have to think about what that market mechanism would do to your business – a slower death. Big players can spend more and afford higher CPIs. They could just take all the oxygen out of the market for others until you die off.
Back-weighting seems backwards to me, especially for early employees. They receive less options for the risky, earlier stage and more options for once things are stable and proven. Most startups won't even make 4 years, and therefore early employees who take that risk can end up with almost nothing if a sale or IPO occurs in, say, 18 months after starting employment.
Thanks for for doing what you do Andrew, and congrats on the 1000th video.
When I was still early in my career and living back in the midwest, I still remember binge watching Mixergy like it was a Netflix original. It was insanely valuable.
Question...will you be able to replay/backfill as you add new integrations? For example, Klaviyo is a huge hole in your integrations right now especially for marketing and ecomm. If I install Autotrack now, set up a few events and then a month from now you add Klaviyo, I can just replay everything into Klaviyo?
Also FWIW, I was an early user at Segment (was in their seed deck as case study), Klaviyo, and many others. I'm a technical marketer so can be helpful as beta tester and user research. reach out directly if you'd like to connect [email protected]