In this week’s monumental episode, Stewart and Travis finally hit the one-year mark with VB Engage. To celebrate, they’ve launched a fantastic competition to win a Huawei tablet, details of which you can find at the end of this article.
In the news, we talk about a marvelous new fund for AI startups, an AI-powered photo aggregator that is going after the events industry, and how content is taking over the social media universe this week in the news. Then, we mark episode 50 with one of our biggest ever interviews — the one and only Noah Kagan. You won’t want to miss a single word he says, as we dig into his story and his secrets of success.
- Welcome to VB Engage’s one-year anniversary special, episode 50! [0:20]
- We have an amazing episode today with Noah Kagan, who just bought the domain Sumo.com for over one million dollars. [02:00]
- Nvidia is hosting an event called Nvidia Inception where the top 14 AI startups will be competing for $1.5 million dollars. The winner will be announced on May 10. [03:40]
- There’s a new AI-powered app that helps you consolidate photographs from attendees, professional photographers, and staff at your event. Shoto can also tell you which of the sessions at your event creates the most buzz. [05:40]
- To all app developers out there: Travis would love to have an app where people can share notes from different sessions or events. [07:40]
- Instagram just reached 700 million users! Up by 17 percent in just four months. [08:45]
- LinkedIn also announced that it has passed 500 million users. It has also launched a marketing solution — Matched Audiences — that can help with advertising [09:30]
- Twitter is slowly becoming a global TV network after reporting that in the first quarter of 2017, 800 hours of live premium video watched by 45 million users. [10:10]
- Amazon Prime outbids Twitter for rights to livestream Thursday Night Football games [11:20]
- Did you know that Travis is also celebrating his 10th year of being a Twitter user? [12:50]
- Let’s welcome our guest, Noah Kagan! He is the Chief Sumo at Sumo.com, and he has a podcast called “Noah Kagan Presents” at OkDork.com. [14:10]
- How did you launch a daily deals website and turn it into a community? [15:00]
- Kagan has two properties; one is AppSumo.com, which is a daily deals site, and Sumo.com, which hosts their free marketing tools.
- Building a community is like a garden; you have to maintain and water it. [15:45]
- “I never intended to build a community around the business, but I cared for the customer, and I love engaging my customers.” [16:20]
- You don’t grow if you do the same things over and over. You have to be a little uncomfortable and try new things out. [19:00]
- Everyone goes through problems. The most important thing is how do you learn from it and how do you improve. [20:45]
- Do things that you are interested in. Eventually, when you get uninterested in it, you have two options: learn how to make it fun again or find someone who is interested in it. [22:50]
- In everyone’s business out there, you are eventually going to have a down day. When it happens, focus on helping one customer at a time. They will remind you why you are doing it in the first place. [25:00]
- Noah Kagan on AI and VR: These two-letter words are going to screw us over. [26:30]
- VR and AI will be ignored in the beginning, but they will take over soon. Everyone used to discount Snapchat as the “dick pic app,” but now it is a $20 billion company that is communicating to 160 million people a day. [27:30]
- Stay naive, humble, and curious. With all the new things coming out, you don’t need to be obsessed with them all. Just stay educated. [28:50]
- Because we have AI, VR, a lot of automation, and smarter systems, marketing is going to be more individualistic. [29:15]
- Thank you so much, Noah Kagan for being our guest on VB Engage and sharing your inspiring story on how to become a victor even after losing your Facebook stock options. [30:20]
If you missed last week’s episode, VB Engage 049, we interviewed Jon Miller of Engagio. We talked about account-based marketing, engaging your customer, and why he left Marketo.
June 5th: The AI Audit in NYC
Join us next week in NYC to engage with top executive leaders, delving into strategies for auditing AI models to ensure fairness, optimal performance, and ethical compliance across diverse organizations. Secure your attendance for this exclusive invite-only event.
Competition time!
To mark our podcast-iversary, we’re giving away a Huawei MediaPad M3! Entering the competition is easy — just click the image to get started with your entry below, and earn extra points by completing simple tasks. The more points you have, the more chance you’ve got of winning the MediaPad. Our special thanks go to Huawei for donating such an awesome prize. Good luck!
Above: No image? That’s OK – just click here to enter.
Next week, we will have Sujan Patel, who will shed some light on growth hacking and growing audiences at scale.
P.S. If you want to hear Travis singing a digital marketing parody of “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” listen until the end of the podcast!
