Michael Blanche, Co-Founder of Surfside | Entrepreneur, Identity & Marketing Leader, The Future of Marketing Ecosystems

Welcome to the success story podcast, I'm your host, Scott Clary. On this podcast, I have candid interviews with execs, celebrities, politicians, and other notable figures, all who have achieved success through both wins and losses, to learn more about their life, their ideas, and their insights. I sit down with leaders and mentors and unpack their story to help pass those lessons onto others through both experiences and tactical strategy for business professionals, entrepreneurs, and everyone in between. Without further ado, another episode of the success story podcast. All right, thanks again for joining me. I'm sitting down with Michael Blanchu is the co-founder of Surfside, a customer acquisition platform that empowers clients by leveraging data from existing customers to not only retain, but acquire a new customer base prior to finding Surfside and Michael served as DTO at SIDO. He had several executive and lead roles, including head of product at momentum cloud, and co-founder and head of product at operations at CompSite Services. He began his career with Yakka Media Services that he founded straight at the university. He gained his global perspectives from working with companies ranging from startups to corporate and public list of companies, and from his time traveling the world and obviously going through all these roles between 2012, 2013, it's been a long time since then, so I appreciate I just pulled this off your LinkedIn, but I really want to understand your career, what led you, you know, you serial entrepreneur, a lot of different types of roles, different types of customers, different types of companies. Talk me through, you know, first of all, thank you for coming on, I appreciate it. But yeah, walk me through your career, your origin story, your past, what led you to Surfside, why Surfside, why are you doing what you do now, and all that stuff. Yeah, sure thing. So first, thanks for having me on, I really think you've built a great foundation here in a great platform, so I appreciate the opportunity. My pleasure. So for me, I grew up, you know, about an hour outside of Sydney, back in Australia, small sort of blue collar town, my parents and my family were immigrants to Australia as everyone is, but really focused on building a family owned and operating construction business. So my grandfather initially ran that and then my father later on took that over. And what that taught me was the value of a good day's work and that real hard work at it. You know, I witnessed my parents, my family working incredibly hard for a long period of time many years, and my parents hadn't even had a very young, so you know, we grew up and we didn't have a huge amount of money, but one thing was that they always had a very solid work ethic and that commitment to a larger goal. And you know, through that, I learned a couple of real tenants from my family, which was that that value in a good work ethic coming in being committed to a larger goal and then being able to recognize that goal. And I think that was something that I took through all of my companies and even when I first started working, you know, it was always have a job, always be employed and work towards something. So I went to school. I did a commerce degree at the University of Wongong, which is, you know, a local university. And it was fortunate that right around the time that we were graduating, I took a job with Apple. And what I was doing with Apple was larger educational sales and was selling into my local university. That was great. It was part time job while I was rounding out a business degree, you know, it wasn't necessarily the best student like the social aspect of university, more than anything else, but it was always working and always connecting. So what the job at the Apple store afforded me was essentially a dialogue with a number of professors and academic leaders at my university. And one of them was the Head of the Computer Science Faculty, which is five out of the name of Peter Eckland. And what happened was we essentially started building a relationship, you know, just based on me being interested in what he was up to, you know, he had a lot of his early works around this idea of a digital ecosystem, which is thinking of digital technologies in a way that is more akin to biology, right, and the living and breathing ecosystem. So how can we create these, you know, binary machines and turn them into more human experiences? So from that, we actually are connected with another gentleman that I met through the Apple store, right? It is hard. And he ran a telecommunications business. So what we did was we formed a partnership and we built some software that allowed us to measuring, understand all of the safety risks associated with the telecommunication industry. And this was a really good opportunity for me because I thought like it was a somewhere where we saw a clear opportunity and there was true value in the solution. So we built a software platform that essentially managed and mitigated all of the risk and concerns around gaining access to a telecommunication site. We would do things as that platform evolved on some time in multiple pieces of technology. We would make it adaptive so that based on whether conditioned by getting that say a web, whether services API, we could then say, no, you're not familiar to access this site because of the pending safety concern. We would hit credential databases to ensure that at that time you were actually certified to enter the site. And we took this sort of approach. The thing that I really got out of it though was this, it's called like a spatial aspect of the data set. You know, each telecommunication tell was in a real-world location anchored by a lat long. And that was the start of me getting interested in sort of location intelligence. That company was great. We ran it for a while and then ended up sort of offloading it to a large scale telecommunications provider back in Australia. And I thought, hey, this is great. You know, a couple of years out of university, I've made it. Let's go travel. So I went and traveled through sort of Southeast Asia, spent a bit of time in India. I've got a long-term girlfriend who's now my fiance who's resided in America so we came over here for the first time. I really just tried to enjoy the world and brought my experiences. That was great. Did that for a couple of years and then realized, hey, you know, I've got to come back to the real world because we've got to get back to work. So with that, that's when I started working with momentum. And what momentum was with a way for us to digitize every aspect of the student learning experience. So essentially with ComSide and our first business, the idea was let's create almost like a CMS for occupational work and safety using the cloud to underwrite it. With momentum, it was not dissimilar, but now it's pointing that capability at the education industry. So the data points I want to collect are student attendance, behavioral issues, absentee rates, when a certain piece of learning was taught so that then you can associate that back to learning outcomes, okay, personalized learning plans. That was a really good business, you know, something that I slept very well with at night. Just, you know, the objective of that and where you want to get to, you want to make every student's life better. And I love that. So we put that through a small accelerator in Australia called Muradid which is backed by the largest helicopter there in Telstra. And as we were just coming out of that, that we announced a raise in the same day that we did that. There was a county here in New York called Schoology that announced a raise that was several orders of magnitude largely. You know, we've done a couple of million dollars and today it's done, I think it was like 45 or something to that effect. And the problem for me was like, no matter how hungry or driven I am, the things that they can just do better based on the capital they have access to, you know, how can I compete with say two million dollars when they've got this war chest to apply to the problem in such a bigger market. And that was really the inflection point for me when I decided, all right, we have to move away from Australia and come and chase opportunities in the larger market. So that led me to moving over to the United States. And the thing that was really good with that was I moved over and it was the easiest transition in the world because of the people that I had met along the way. So I always joke that like I moved halfway across the world and I didn't even have to show a resume or anything like that, you know, there was no notion of a job on because of people that I had met during university and the relationships I've made so that I think is one of my biggest kind of talents for anyone is make sure you go and you just continue to invest in building out that network and those relationships and be genuine in those because then it will open up and pay dividends in the future. So that led to me moving over to New York, it was about 2015 and we built a, what's called a DSP, so this was in the advertising space, it was something completely new to me. I hadn't hadn't thought of it too much, but once I knew that I was going to be moving over here to tackle this problem, I really started looking into it and what was the main sort of drive is for it and from an engineering standpoint, working in like the advertising space offers a number of challenges which are really, really interesting in that you have billions of events of data coming through, okay, so that's sort of one large scale engineering problem. But where that compounds is that you also have to be able to make near real time decisions on that, so I need to be able to say, all right, every opportunity that's coming through, do I want to bid, do I want to place an ad, how much is that, am I prepared to pay for that, just who do I believe that individual is. So from an engineering standpoint, that problem started to fascinate me and that's why we build out this demand side platform. Now the other opportunity that we saw there and this goes back to Fender, my first position was this location story because what it happened is that the smartphone had risen to prominence and now obviously everyone has done all the time, but it was a first truly personal device. So because it went everywhere with you, it gave us a new lens into the consumer and that was really the opportunity that we sought to build a platform for now on a kind of high level that that journey was essentially, you know, we came, Fender, the company ended up being acquired by a public company and then they stood onto the NASDAQ and we ran that company for several years, you know, microcaps, stock, but great experience and great exposure. You then moved beyond that with so side, me and my co-founder John Lowe and left Sido and started so side with the hypothesis that there was something more that we could do there, right? Rather than just think of location data and a location based narrative, we wanted to incorporate all the different touch points of consumer data. So that's really what we're doing in so side today. The very, I love this story and now when you look at what Surfside is, it makes a lot of sense because every single influence in your life has led you to understand a separate facet of the ability to use data whether or not it's in an ecosystem location or just insights and consuming and understanding masses of amounts of data that drive all these consumer decisions. So what are you trying to accomplish with Surfside that hasn't been done or perhaps hasn't been done well in terms of understanding how consumers buy, how influencing how consumers buy, helping businesses understand those data points? Yeah. So I think what we see the opportunity with Surfside is that, you know, people, companies exist today that will ship data for may to be, you know, or do basic transformations. Essentially, that's like the plumbing of your data infrastructure and organization. And that's critical, everyone needs that. But with Surfside, what we're really trying to do is to provide that infrastructure to make it seamless, focused on your customer touch points. So as a brand, as a retailer, you have these different disparate platforms that are all collecting customer related information, whether it be your retail coin sales system, your online website, but then you're also running paid media and advertising and that's having an experience with the consumer as well. So that information while it's not as specific as some of your coin sales data or your CRM data, is still very valuable. And what we're able to do is to collect all of these different channels of data and bring it in and consolidate it into one view of the consumer so that you can then understand that this person that received the Facebook ad then came and visited my site. They abandoned their car. We saw them come back three days later on their desktop computer and then they purchased YNZ and being able to stick together that narrative of the customer is something which was seeing a huge opportunity for and a huge need for in the space. And then if you couple that with a proprietary data set or essentially like a contextual lens of the consumer, it allows you to really improve your outcomes as a brand or a market that because now you'll you're coming from a more informed decision about all of your strategies and your marketing and advertising initiatives. It makes a lot of sense. I'm looking on the website and and now that that adds a layer that a lot of marketers don't have access to. So if you go through this five points listed on your website, digital events, material world advertising and media point of sale and offline. So I would say that most marketers can capture digital events quite easily, advertising and media that's that's always measured. Even point of sale can be measured to some extent, but the things that I never see measured are material or offline. And I think that that's adding a layer that I don't think I've ever seen as a marketer or people that somebody else, somebody who's worked with other marketers, I've never seen that ability to capture that effectively. You see some simple tools, you know, like when you walk into a store, you you can measure how many people walk into a store and you compare and contrast that to how many sales there are for that day. But that's a very rudimentary basic metric, right? It's not it's not that anyway, and it's actually funny that you mentioned that because as Tito that was kind of one of the real differentiators that we went to market with initially, the back in 2015, we we wrote an attribution technology called Verified Walk-in and because we had that understanding of the location data coming from cell phones, we were able to associate media exposure to that. Now the whole reason we invented Verified Walk-in as a solution was, you know, it's a proxy metric. A brand or a marketer you alluded to before really wants to understand like a fair return on that span, so it was a transaction level data. But in the mainstream retail months, that's incredibly difficult, especially understanding like the marketing, advertising landscape, quite often a brand will engage in agency to work as a middleman, so now your arms length from being able to actually access any transaction level data. So for us being able to show the effectiveness of driving someone into a retail location was a proxy for performance. With the side, we saw an opportunity where we could kind of solve that limitation by entering one and a narrow vertical to start and we selected the cannabis industry and I can go into that one in a minute as to why. Two, e-commerce, because the hypothesis was that it's going to be a massive influx of drive for e-commerce and this is obviously pre-turbled, so no one saw this coming. But it's fortunately been true where we are seeing a huge migration of brands having to adapt to predominantly e-commerce or focus to get up in store by online type approaches in order to continue growing their business. So the whole reason that we build it to do closed loop measurement is that that was what we as marketers saw as a real opportunity, but like if we can take the guesswork out of this and we can prove measurable results, then there should be no reason why we can't continue to grow the business. We wanted to kind of take that guesswork out of it and that really sort of touches on why we saw that the cannabis space is our first vertical. One is highly regulated, so there was a massive opportunity there for we had to look at the landscape and went out to the largest cannabis convention called MJB had a bit of a look around and and just said hey look the nascent technologies here are 10 years behind where we think they should be. We know that we can do it better given our experience so to build a solution for it, but prior to that one of our former board members actually had a spack and was making acquisitions of a number of dispensary groups and the first problem that he came to us with and this is kind of as a consultant initiative was I've just acquired all these different dispensaries and they're all on different point of sale systems I'm telling me how am I going to get my finances in check. So what we did was we came in and we created a total layer, a total layer, whatever you want to call it, but essentially a normalized view of all of these different point of sale systems aggregated into a standardized structure and through doing that we went through and integrated with the top you know half thousand point of sale systems in the space and when we then said all right we finished this project we've already done this great work how can we apply it to our face from what we know and that was really where we we founded stuff like based on that capability and then went off to the market and can you help me understand for somebody who's listening to this who is who is used traditional marketing metrics and collection of different data points how do you and what do you collect that is offline and material outside of like you know we point of sale digital events traditional CPM click-throughs all that stuff so what's the what's the physical component offline component that you can collect and how do you do that yeah so the offline component is really driven by us working with you know your mobile phone okay I'm standing you know we'll have an SDK that gets integrated into publishers and we'll partner with partners that sell this type of data but essentially it's all high quality location data that is user-opted in so we'll practice compliance and what it is is just timestamp and roll that long the roger gets bored but then what we'll do is run a a number of different data pipelines that allow us to contextualize that data so rather than saying you're at xyz loud long you know we can understand that you're at Starbucks on you know Broadway and what's bought for something to that effect and that there allows us to form attributes or profiles about the consumer in their movement and behavioral patterns so we can essentially tag you with metadata that says no you're a frequent jim go on you have to be in a park or hiking trails so therefore these become attributes of the get associated with you as a user now in addition to that we're able to because we have a an anchoring data point which we refer to as a suicide ID that corresponds to a cookie ID maybe across you know different advertising on marketing platforms the advertising identify of the mobile advertising your hash email address data points such as this right which give us that assistance and how we can leave with the data so then we're able to join together visitation patterns with digital browsing exposure know the type of sites you're visiting content you're consuming when we focus on a specific vertical it becomes very common behaviors you know what you're looking at items you add to card sites that you have a band and check out from everything like that um and it's really the convergence of these data sets into one 360 degree customer profile and then powering that with the ability to model and scale that audience out that allows us to go and acquire new customers for our partners business so just it's it's look alike but the the input is just exponentially larger right I mean the the notion of a lookalike is is flawed for most businesses because what they'll do is you'll take say a bid request that comes through the advertising ecosystem and then use those as features to train a lookalike model whether it's regression or on nearest neighbors but what happens is that you're looking at the creative sides you know the creative idea the publisher these types of attributes we essentially we don't throw those away but they're weighted far less valuable to the actual user level attributes that we see so we build a maintainer of really large key values data saw that allows us to hit with a user ID and that's so say they did and immediately resolve back their profile now that profile will have a household income live stage demographic data and for us they become the features that we train our acquisition models from and those look alike so it's look alike yes but it's more so like they have the same consumer competition you know for then train that audience out now walk me through um this this all sounds great at a high level but walking through a use case walk me through perhaps one of your customers that's used this and what results do they see in contrast to a very traditional um set of data points and measuring and optimization yeah definitely so say we were to engage with uh you know what what in the cannabis industry would be referred to as a multi-state offer here so they have multiple brands the multiple productions supply chains in multiple states so with that they might have three different groups of dispensaries or dispensary brands that they're working with depending on the state of the market and they may be you know connected to different point of sale and e-commerce systems so we would engage at an enterprise level with them and we would come in and using our software platform we would configure the different data collection points so that would be tying into their CRM system their point of sale system their e-commerce system and their digital sale and then once we have that all flowing in we're able to start understanding what that audience looks like okay so we can start seeing transaction volume sizes stuff like that on the retail level but then also we start looking at the digital events the content that consuming we can track that as well and profile that audience so that's kind of the main hub and then of course there's a location data as well where we can uh physically monitoring people that are visiting their dispensary locations or their competitive locations as well so now that we've got all of these data coming in what we're able to do is to then essentially intercept those different sources of data so you could look at people that have say walked into one of your retail locations and that have also transacted online or people that have purchased a specific skew or product category across any of your channels rather than you having to go and pull that on your point of sale system for several reports but then once we've got that we can use that as essentially a training audience to then extrapolate out and identify more people that you know have a high propensity to purchase or transact in a similar fashion so that there that capability is really critical to the strategies that we execute for our clients because we'll come in and we'll we'll create these audiences and training data sets that are then proven to perform in the meat depth save and because we have all of the data points connected we're then able to explicitly measure that coming back in to the system so that allows us to show the performance leaves or improvement uh so I want you to I want you to sell yourself too I want you to I want you to tell me some of the the numbers that you see when you actually implement like what's the what's the uptick on pick a metric top line revenue yeah I mean conversions all these so you say like performance traditionally someone would give you all we can give this type of CTR like a click trigger okay that's just a rubbish metric because really it doesn't matter if you as a brand when you're compared about driving sales um so that's how we speak now it looks about return on ad spend that authority of outcome based metric and what we're seeing in in the cannabis vertical where we have our lodges proprietary data set you know what's seeing about 4.5 to 5 times return on ad spend okay it's really good you begin you know so it's uh what we're quite happy with the the success was seeing out of the platform when john and i started building that was you know it was really an idea um we thought we could do it better and now to see you know in a relatively short period of time so I've certainly been around two years uh but we are being able to continue winning business based purely on that performance metric in the fact that we can measure a data point that that no one else can very impressive um I have I have some questions less about surfside and just more about you um serial entrepreneur and an incredible career history and profile so I want to I want to ask those before I switch off from surfside on what you're doing now is there anything that I didn't ask about surfside what how the process works how the technology works that you wanted to cover um the floors yours if you wanted to bring up anything else no look I think um know that those that listen to the the podcasts and are interested definitely jump on our website surfside.io and you'll be able to see a little bit more about what we're doing but from that from a platform standpoint we're incredibly excited for the fourth quarter of this year we've got some great location based intelligence insights that we'll be rolling out is complete sass offering uh well as making our our audience measurement capabilities widely available so and very interesting now these are these are more questions for yourself as as an entrepreneur serial entrepreneur um in terms of where you want surfside to go do you where do you where do you want to see the company go in five years do you want to go into different markets different industries just grow expand exit what's what's your vision yeah as um where we're proving it out in a highly regulated vertical right now because it lends itself to the strengths of the platform right um but everything that we do with surfside is you know entirely scalable across adjacent industries so for now we're building out this proprietary asset and the cannabis space and that's where all of our direct uh sales efforts are but at the same time we have you know a number of partnerships and other verticals that we're starting to open up to uh for us it's really about that the platform itself is industry agnostic but in order for the platform to really run right you need to inject up with specific industry specific datasets and so for instance we'll open up into the automotive vertical in the near future in order for us to do that i don't want to be getting point of sales system from dispensaries i need to be getting you know please agree man's any increasing transactions based on you know individual dealerships and categorizing that type of information so that's definitely something that we have there are ready to go other other verticals that will expand into in the near future are also you know obviously direct consume my huge today um and it's incredibly easy for us to measure that because we already have all of the integrations with the e-commerce systems um from our historic work so the and then um you know likely into another highly regulated industry such as healthcare uh and a lot of that is just based on our ability to you know ensure that we adhere to all of the the privacy and user regulatory requirements uh of an industry and but then also because we understand who that user is explicitly it allows us to be far more brand safe uh and reduce the risk for our clients um by ensuring that you know we're not bombarding people's sensitive messaging we're not sending too many messages or communications to them and you know really being aware of that and and that works across channels so we're not just talking about a you're sending target email you're sending SMS messages to these people but it allows us to stitch together that full user journey now one question i have for you um you're so heavily involved in in very disruptive marketing i i think that we can say that this is very much on the on the leading edge or bleeding edge of what marketing technology is today so what what are you curious about or what are you researching in the world of marketing uh technology and consumer trends you think will be something that will see in five years or ten years from now yeah um it works a couple of different ways in terms of like a backup house actually powering the industry uh there's huge changes to the way that identification can be made digitally um and there's a really positive initiative so in your piece or something called GDPR come out and uh in California we have had something similar of CCPA but essentially starting to to quick the wins of digital companies being able to you know identify users across platforms and track with cookies and there's a big change in the way that that's being handled both by Google and Apple um but i think it's incredibly interesting to see how that shakes out um so that's one one side but then more for consumers and consumer facing applications um very very bullish on augmented reality as opposed to virtual reality and the push to sort of augmented reality in shopping and commerce i think that will be huge other than that we see you know we expect to see a continued migration to e-commerce and the online experience uh to think it will become more how you can put new creative and immersive ad units in front of consumers very very very interesting um now as an entrepreneur how do you going through all these different industries yet still underlined with with data driven technologies how do you stay on top of new trends emerging trends where do you go to learn yourself yeah um a lot of content online um and i say that no i'll write into the office and listen to one podcast on the way in one podcast on the way back while i'm working and i have the same thing just finding different ways to continue to consume um i will also you know have a tendency to continue to read a lot of articles from academia um to be right at the forefront of it um in the marketing and advertising space there's some incredible people out of Stanford such as Michael Kaczynski um you know that that are just right on the bleeding edge of how to think about these problems and it's not just from a technology standpoint but all from also from a psychological and cultural standpoint and understanding the impact that these technologies will have uh and then me also a a kind of uh i'm very very interested and naturally curious about the area that i work in as well so i think because of that if you're passionate and you're hungry and inquisitive about a body of knowledge um learning it and becoming an expert in it isn't at all you know here it says that we're not necessarily coming to work we all care about where we're going with the business now no we work in marketing and advertising so take that with a grain of soul but we're passionate about the capability and what we can do with it in the future you know our our idea is that if we understand the consumer better we can create more complementary advertising experiences for you rather than just you know exploit the fact that we have information about you as a user no one wants that but i definitely i'd be in a future where you know you can cut the middle man out of that directly incentivize the consumer to share their information and because of that receive a more personalized or tailored experience around what would be advice that you would give somebody who would like to start their own business don't do it on your own i'm really fortunate that i have a co-founder you have many guests that uh you know self-made entrepreneurs that have gone out and done it on their own and i have the almost respect for anyone that can for me there's just not enough hours in the day we're already working around the clock as it is that ability and can i mean that in that it becomes a counterbalance you can't be on all the time and through having that it really gives us the ability to switch off the business to continue moving forward right um so i appreciate the other thing would just be hungry being positive um for me i remember like flying over to New York and i knew nothing about the advertising space yet i was moving over here to build what became one of the largest advertising platforms so you know um being up for the challenge being hungry but that's it yeah um and almost in line with that same question but curious if it's a different answer what is the lesson that you would tell your younger self it's gonna be all right it's gonna be all right i um i remember losing sleep as as a kid um it's just thinking about you know how how will i be able to support a family or anything like that um and these weird sort of i guess insecurities that i didn't need the technology at the time but later on it's like wow you know just we respect the journey meet people be open communicate network um and everything will be all right good advice um and and the last question uh i'm going to get some websites i think you mentioned one before but i'm gonna get some socials and websites for you but before i do that what does success mean to you uh for me so being from Australia and having a lot of my family back in Australia it it means the ability to go back and forth as as we need to um my fiancee she's from here work is in New York it becomes a matter of how you can blend that lifestyle so that we can be without family and enjoying a time with them um without any limitations we need to be able to travel the world you know a couple of times a year unfortunately uh so that that is definitely my measure of success would be the ability to to live that lifestyle the way i want very good um and then of course most importantly uh where do people connect with you uh go find surfside what are all the links and socials yeah surfside is surfside.io uh is it is our website and then uh on obviously LinkedIn and Twitter um we we don't do Instagram for this type of business um and then myself you can uh find on LinkedIn and micro pledge that's all for today thanks again for joining me on another episode of the success story podcast you can download or stream this podcast wherever podcasts are available including iTunes Spotify Google Stitcher iHeartRadio and many others you can also watch this podcast on YouTube if you haven't already please subscribe and share this podcast with your friends family 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