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Malcolm Lui:
Welcome to the High Value Sales Show of Eversprint.com. I'm Malcolm Lui, the Managing Member of Eversprint, and today we're speaking with Gil Eyal, the CEO of HYPR, a provider of influencer marketing tools and solutions. Welcome to the call Gil.

Gil Eyal:
Hi Malcolm, thanks for having me

Malcolm Lui:
Gil you grew your company's revenue from a $110,000 dollars in 2014 to $3 million in 2017, a 1,855% increase, and in 2018 you more than doubled your company's business. Before we talk about how you grew your company so fast, can you briefly share what your company does beyond my quick intro and how your company differs from the competition?

Gil Eyal:
Sir so HYPR as a player in the influencer marketing space. But we have a different approach than most of the companies we're driven by an insight that influencers on the Web are actually interchangeable. Or we like to call them a commodity as opposed to what most of the industry treats them as which is celebrities and what that means is that if you have the right amount of data and the right amount of information as a brand or as the marketer you're able to reach audiences through a variety of influences and that allows you to then dictate the terms of a transaction. So HYPR builds different tools that facilitate channels that make it easier cheaper more efficient and mostly most increases the other way of people who want to be in the influence of marketing

Malcolm Lui:
Can you share maybe an example of your tools and services and who the ideal customers are. Because I believe you work with bigger brands bigger companies not ready with individuals who strive to be an influencer.

Gil Eyal:
Yeah that's correct. Typically we only work with brands and that's the decision we made early on because I think if you build a platform that serves both influencers and marketers you end up being stuck with these conflicts. You know the influencers want to make as much money as they can. The brands want to pay as little money as they can. The Influencers want to get paid upfront. The brands want to get one to pay after the. The post has been made and after performance has been verified and so by making the decision to only work with brands and only work with sophisticated brands it's really shaped our business in a very specific way. So we don't work with influencers at all which is also a differentiator and we traditionally work with brands that are a little more sophisticated understand the value of data plan on spending at least one hundred thousand two hundred thousand dollars a year on influencer marketing but want to focus on channels that aren't necessarily obvious channels. So if you're going to work with Kim Kardashian you can use our platform. But the value is going to be limited. But if you want to reach Kim Kardashian audience through hundreds of small influencers on the web and understand which ones are the most effective which ones will cost you the least to get the most return out of that's where HYPR really does what

Malcolm Lui:
Can you give an example of how you would reach 10 productions audience with HYPR

Gil Eyal:
Sure so yeah. Because we have such a robust understanding of who follows who online who's actually influential and which conversation when a brand comes in and says look we want to reach an audience that's similar to Kim productions. For example we want to reach an audience that is female in North America interested in fashion slightly wealthy. What our tool will do is it will do a few things one is it will actually look at Kim rations audience breakdown and look for people who else do those people follow other smaller people online that reach that same audience. It will also rank those people based on how influential they are. It will also look for twins or people who are very similar to those people and who they follow and what you'll end up getting from HYPR is a long list of influential people that reach that specific audience demographic with those interests that have actual ability to dominate conversations and influence them. And we like to separate fame from influence what we see with a lot of really big name influencers that they have a huge audience but they're not necessarily influencing their audiences decision. I might really like people and he might have tens of millions of followers but it's not necessarily true that we look at. People's account to understand which clothes to buy or which car to drive but there are much smaller influences that are very dominant in conversations like that that we do and HYPR will then provide you with a very large list of different tools to activate and track the performance of the sponsors so you can continuously optimize instead of working with one really big influence or being limited to their terms and kind of gambling a really big amount of money if you want to work in production you have to be hundreds of thousands of dollars to see if you'll even get the results. If you work with a lot of small influences you activate them slowly and in a pace that works for you and see that they actually convert before you continue spend.

Malcolm Lui:
So do you provide the tools to engage the influencers that come up on the list as being having high influence ability

Gil Eyal:
So today what we've done is we provide contact information and way to reach out to them as well as a support team that helps you build your outreach program. We're actually about to launch a bot that will automatically reach out for you and if let's say you found a thousand influencers imagine what it will do are you to reach out to each one of them individually. What this bot will do it will actually reach out to them and do the very basic negotiation and optimum get signed a contract get all the payment information that you need for the ones that are willing to accept the terms that you've dictated and because you have so many options you can actually dictate the terms as opposed to if you only want to work with a really big influencer and they're the only person and they'll dictate the terms that they want

Malcolm Lui:
Right now it up a bot communicating to me like say I'm an influencer say I have an audience of Kim Cardassian fans or are fans who are similar to Kim Cardassian. How would the bot engage me and not have me think that I'm being done I'm talking to a bot

Gil Eyal:
You know it's interesting I work with I have a box assistant personal assistant that's one of the one of the companies are pretty well-known in the space and I get to see the emails that people send this bot and it's anywhere from people trying to score a date with her she has a female name to just flirtatious joking around people don't recognize that they're speaking to about now once the conversation becomes really sophisticated it gets harder but at the very base what this does is they'll reach out to all those people through a formula will know what to offer them and we'll just say I'm representing this brand I'd love to invite you to participate in this campaign this is what it pays. These are the dates are you available. And then it knows how to understand the response and based on that follow up the next step. It's not very sophisticated in that if you try to have a very you know it's not a high to the level you can converse with it freely but within the confines of approaching an influencer and just making them an offer it's sophisticated enough remember the influencers we typically reach out to don't have a manager they don't get a lot of offers they're not the guys who have 10 million followers guys we have ten thousand or a hundred thousand followers. And as soon as they opt in then we start speaking to a regular person and so the board has a very very specific role.

Malcolm Lui:
Right. Yes I used your bot to schedule this call and you know I know you said it was a bot up front but I'm telling you during the course of the conversation in the changes we need to reschedule the call and how it went seamlessly it really not seemed like a bot at all

Gil Eyal:
Yeah. And look even if it is then I just say Isn't it cool you you've been talking to about this whole time. And most people are just like really. That's awesome. That's really cool. So

Malcolm Lui:
I was a skeptic on that. No way a bot can do this guessing. You know some of the changes in rescheduling we did this spot was able to handle it so it is a

Gil Eyal:
Yeah.

Malcolm Lui:
Bot. It was fantastically well designed because there were some things that I

Gil Eyal:
Yeah.

Malcolm Lui:
Thought

Gil Eyal:
And

Malcolm Lui:
A

Gil Eyal:
We

Malcolm Lui:
Human

Gil Eyal:
Can't

Malcolm Lui:
Would have

Gil Eyal:
Take

Malcolm Lui:
To

Gil Eyal:
Credit

Malcolm Lui:
Do it

Gil Eyal:
For that one that's another company that I don't know if I can shout out amazing companies it's called Clara labs.

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah. Yeah. Go right ahead.

Gil Eyal:
You can edit this out if I'm not allowed to but it's just an amazing product and ours will be similar but but it'll focus obviously on up to get influencers for you and will require that same level of sophistication as as what they capital will allow you to not spend time on the 90 percent of influencers that are going to accept your offer.

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah it's fantastic. It's great to have that one. One additional layer of

Gil Eyal:
Yeah

Malcolm Lui:
Filtering right at the very beginning is automate it so that no one doesn't pick up anyone's time

Gil Eyal:
Yeah it takes an an average of eighty four emails to sign a deal with an influencer today about 84 emails. That includes about 75 or so that go to influencers who don't respond who don't end up signing and about you know 5 to 10 with the person who actually does the campaign. So if we can kill that 90 percent of emails that you don't need to deal with. That's a big big jump.

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah. So you send out your your your bot sends out eighty four emails which includes the one deal that you win which requires

Gil Eyal:
Yeah

Malcolm Lui:
Five to ten.

Gil Eyal:
Exactly

Malcolm Lui:
Okay but it's

Gil Eyal:
A

Malcolm Lui:
All

Gil Eyal:
Lot.

Malcolm Lui:
Automated

Gil Eyal:
There you go. And a lot of you don't know what that does is really I mean imagine if you had to deal with it yourself sit there in front of your e-mail and wait for responses and try to remember what you spoke about two days ago. So it's definitely a major major time saver and a headache saver. And it also creates this ability to dictate the terms because you always have alternatives. The bot just knows how to reach out to more influencers if it needs to until it reaches whatever your goal for an audience.

Malcolm Lui:
Nice. Yeah I could see the time saving there is huge. And if anyone

Gil Eyal:
You're

Malcolm Lui:
Doesn't agree to the terms and it kicks it out to a real human person

Gil Eyal:
Yeah.

Malcolm Lui:
To

Gil Eyal:
Just go to the next one.

Malcolm Lui:
Talk about the next solution or an alternative solution that might work. So cool.

Gil Eyal:
Yeah.

Malcolm Lui:
Very cool. No. You shared how your company what your company does and how it differs from the competition you've explained to me how it works in and from my perspective a layman's term perspective. Can you hear me. What were the three growth drivers that were your sales from one hundred and ten thousand two in back in 2014 to over six million in 2018.

Gil Eyal:
Yeah I think you know the number one thing we can't ignore is just that the market came into shape. Timing is a big thing. When we started this company in 2013 we had zero sales and zero people to talk to there was nobody who had an influence or marketing role anywhere like you can go to a company and say Hey who's in charge of it goes to marketing. I want to show him my solution. And it was very very difficult. And if you look at on indeed dot com or any of the job sites they'll find thousands of roles that have influence or marketing is the required skill. And that's made our life a lot easier. People are looking for solutions and it's very hard for them to do influencer marketing manually at the scale that they want. So so over this time since 2016 we started seeing. Cigna or even two down 15 we start to see significant interest and people. It's a lot easier to identify clients so literally reaching out to them telling them that there's a solution out there will get you a meeting with some of the biggest companies in the world and that's that's been a big driver. The second has been for us that I may not apply for everyone who is going to shift from small clients to big clients.

Gil Eyal:
So instead of selling the product at a low priced low price to a lot of small clients started focusing on clients I really have a big budget to spend because we realize we're really bringing a lot more value in that place. You're going to spend one hundred twenty thousand or a million dollars on influencers then you're going to appreciate this tool you're going to use every tool as much as you can as opposed to somebody who's running one or two campaigns a year. They're only paying a little bit for the tool and they forget about it in between or they say OK I'm only doing one or two campaigns I might as well do the manual. So that shift upscale has gone to the point where people we know the price and the value that we create have both gone up and we've created additional tools. And then finally maybe the biggest driver for us is business understanding that different is better than better. I don't know who to attribute that saying to but it's one that I follow everywhere I go. There are a lot of really good companies in this space and a lot of them do the same thing which is one on one interaction with influencers and they fight over the best well-known influencers and they want them to join their platforms.

Gil Eyal:
We're not in that game. So when we meet a company and they say well we already have an influencer market solution we say That's great. We actually offer things that are different or a different value proposition. We're not trying to compete for Kim Cardassian business where we're going to offer you all these people that you don't have a way to reach today. And that gets really interesting because suddenly you're not competing you are competing for the same budget but you're offering something very different that might be appealing to a part of the market much more appealing than what they've already seen. Now when you do that you also have to give up some of some of the market some of the market absolutely wants what the other platforms are offering and we're destined to lose in a head to head battle for that business. But by carving out our own value proposition in our own market we've created we've differentiated ourselves in a way that we generate the most value for a certain type of customer. And that's something I think a lot of companies miss out on.

Malcolm Lui:
Right now. How do you quantify the impact of your solution versus someone who goes after the mainstream one so say I'm a big brand. Say I want to target Kim Cardassian audiences and I I'm I'm thinking OK I can cut a deal with Kim whatever he charges or her company charges to help her promote my product or service. And now you're approaching me and you're making me an offer to say hey we can target the same audiences and different influencers. Now how have we. How can you quantify the impact of what you can do for me so I can compare it to what having Kim Kim productions do can do for

Gil Eyal:
So

Malcolm Lui:
Me

Gil Eyal:
Yeah yeah we have different tools but at the very base what we do is we have our system works in a few ways one is discovery but the next is we have a prediction an algorithm that looks at audiences and sees how strong and how uniform they are. So if you're Dunkin Donuts and you basically appeal to any person who likes donuts in the world then the exact demographics of the audience aside from the fact that they're near a store isn't that important. But if you're ninety nine percent of the other brands in the world demographics really really matter and you want to make sure that every dollar you spend reaches the right audience in its nature or someone like him Cardassian has a very diverse audience meaning she has the diehard fans and then she has tens of millions of other people that kind of like her that she was recommended to them when they signed up. That have some kind of interest in her but aren't necessarily avid fans or followers and they don't necessarily see her as an expert on a subject. So what our tools do is do two things One is they identify people who have a uniform audience and two is that that audience views that the people we identified as an thought leader is an actual influencer in that space. So for example if you want to sell a hair product hair products with Kim Kardashian you could choose to use to pronounce you or you could choose the person who does Kim productions hair whereas a much smaller following but that following follows them because they assume that that person knows a lot about hair products.

Malcolm Lui:
Ok

Gil Eyal:
A This is where the tool really excels. So we help the brands optimize their campaigns and then at the other end we insert performance tracking solutions that can understand what your demographics actually interacted with your post. How many of them are positive how many were negative. Did they end up going to a website or not. So it's not quite at the level of Google Google Analytics yet but it's definitely our number one focus today which is tracking and performance analytics so that we can complete the circle. We have this discovery and an outreach tool. We want to close that with performance in real time so by the way not only against can Cardassian or a big influencer but also within the 20 influencers you activated which ones are performing really well. Which ones are not let's replace the ones that aren't in line. You tell them Okay don't make another post you're out we're gonna bring in a new influence. And

Malcolm Lui:
Right.

Gil Eyal:
The ones are doing well here double down do some more costs

Malcolm Lui:
Right. OK. So the influences that you're working with. They would do some posts for you on on various media channels and you're going to have their posts will have your tracking technology embedded within its track with the

Gil Eyal:
Yeah.

Malcolm Lui:
Impact. OK. And Kim productions team will do that as well allow you to embed your tracking code into their posts than they do

Gil Eyal:
Potentially if you pay you if you get if you strike the right deal with them not all influences will let you do that. There's definitely a shift if a year or two ago you would have to pay somebody. You know we use Kim Kardashian but she's actually you know just one out of many many other big examples and each one of them behaves differently. So I don't know exactly what Kim Kardashian this team would do but some of them would just demand the money upfront that I won't even talk to you and brands are so Interested in getting these services that they'll often agree to things that they would never agree to another channels

Malcolm Lui:
Right.

Gil Eyal:
With a small one so you can really dictate the terms. So if you're not going to put in a tracking link or if you're not gonna post on this date if you want too much money and spend go with somebody else

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah

Gil Eyal:
It's a much better position for the brand's

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah. And if you need you know if you want to make sure you're getting some value for your investment you need the tracking right. If they're not gonna let you track it and you have no idea that it's going to work in

Gil Eyal:
Yeah.

Malcolm Lui:
A

Gil Eyal:
But believe it or not this industry up until very recently had zero solutions in the tracking space

Malcolm Lui:
Hmm interesting. Yes.

Gil Eyal:
Yet still people spend four billion dollars last year

Malcolm Lui:
Right. So what when. When you when your big brands are looking at influencer marketing what are the metrics are they looking at this. Yeah this is great. I mean are they somehow measuring mindshare that they're getting in their audience that's the that's the target. Are they actually looking at increasing sales among that audience and how are they measuring that they're getting value from influencer marketing

Gil Eyal:
So most of the solutions in this space will give you two things they'll give you mindshare they'll give you something called EMV. Both of those are metrics that I really think are worthless Mindshare is kind of impossible to really measure you know what does that mean. Just because somebody posted online and people reacted to the post does not mean they really like your brand or not. There's a missing link there. And then EMV has always been a ridiculous. Metric for me and you know it's like PR agencies tell you that your article appeared on Forbes So and Forbes has 50 million readers. So you're EMV is this not it's just useless to me. I think what we focus on are two things. One is demographic data and psychographic data. Oh who. Who are the people that actually interacted and what was their tone of voice and intention. And the second is traditional marketing digital marketing metrics cost per click cost per million views and cost per action. So you can go and compare that budget to other channels and if you can't compare that positive budget to other channels you're never going to be able to convince the head of marketing to give you more budget because they'll say look I spend on Facebook I spend on YouTube spend on Google I get you know I spend a dollar I get one and a half in return influencer marketing you telling me I got increased market share thanks. Well what am I going to do with that. So unless we can offer similar metrics influencer marketing is not going to get to the size that it deserves to get because it's really a very effective channel.

Malcolm Lui:
Right now. You mentioned the acronym EA and the what does that stand for.

Gil Eyal:
An estimated media views or media value. So how much we estimate how much you would have paid to acquire the same amount of attention. So let's say I was. They tell me that I was posted on Forbes and Forbes has 50 million readers and each one of them. So you know and 20 cents a reader so I just got a million dollars of estimated media value. Now we all know that's nonsense because we don't know anything about who these readers are. Did they read that article. If they did did they like it. Were they in my demographic. So it's just a metric that is like it's a lazy metric for people who don't. Who don't who want to show some number but don't really care what it means.

Malcolm Lui:
Yep

Gil Eyal:
And I don't think I think digital marketing is become what it is. Because it provides such a great tracking and measurement advantage detriment in reporting compared to virtually any other channel you use to advertise on TV used to advertise on street signs. But you can really get much information. People still spend money there but there's always money moving towards digital because that's where you can get actual information about how well you're spending.

Malcolm Lui:
Right now. You mentioned the cost per action what action do your clients typically want to get from the campaigns that the influencers are running on their behalf.

Gil Eyal:
I mean the most obvious action is somebody going out and buying something. It's not always relevant to every product that could be using a coupon. It could be liking a page. It could be signing up to a newsletter. So the campaigns really vary. And you know they're not any different than a digital campaigns but the key thing is their ability to associate and attribute value from a specific campaign in whatever way works with the rest of their campaign. So if they're doing a campaign that's influencer and digital and TV what came from where. So that they can then learn how to spend in the future.

Malcolm Lui:
Right. Exactly. So why isn't signing up for a newsletter signing up for more information and getting their contact info. The number one action. Because then once they have the contact info they can continue marketing with them directly and not depend on the influencer

Gil Eyal:
I mean a lot of times that is the a lot of times that is the goal. There's this belief that I know I don't know if I subscribe to that the message coming meaning the relationship with the influencer carries the big weight towards that audience meaning that even if you get the e-mail addresses sending them a message directly from the brand as opposed to getting the message from the influencer is just not as effective. And there hasn't. I mean there have been some non-scientific studies to support this I haven't seen anything that I would say is actual science. And a lot of times they're sponsored by but by interest groups people who represent influencers and so forth. But generally speaking there's a logic to say that working through the influencers is still valuable for the brands because they provide this channel where people are voluntarily subscribing to the information as opposed to advertising where you're you're kind of being presented with it but you're not necessarily interested in seeing it.

Malcolm Lui:
Right. I suspect in this particular case I got like an all marketing. It's worth a test to see because I can imagine in some markets depending on what the product or services the person who was the brand may have nothing to do with the product or service right. So hence you might appreciate getting messages from the brand directly. Say you know if I had a football player touting a a variable insurance annuity product or something like that like getting an e-mail from the quarterback what about that product that really makes sense but really give me comfort and credibility. I'm not

Gil Eyal:
We

Malcolm Lui:
Sure of that but in the case of Kim Gard Ashley and she's talking about her favorite makeup. Well yeah maybe it coming from her might make more sense.

Gil Eyal:
Well we really. It was interesting we just saw this ad with this whole craze with cryptocurrency there's something called an ICAO which is basically like a way to buy what it's not really shares it's by some kind of some interest in a company through cryptocurrency and a few companies hired some really big celebrities like Floyd Mayweather and I can remember who else but people who really did not make their money through financial savvy they made their money through being famous and being athletes and they're saying I'm going to buy this you should buy this too. And aside from the legal issues that that creates as far as recommending the way people invest their money it was just ridiculous to me. That how many of the people who follow Floyd Mayweather and yes like a hundred million followers of something cross social networks actually think he knows anything about finances actually know how to buy cryptocurrency and or. You know Will we'll make it an election to go invest in a company because Floyd Mayweather said that it's a good investment. And that is exactly the bad. The reason why people will say things like influencer marketing doesn't work. You know if you if you do it the wrong way of course it's not going to work. And and so picking you know if you're if you are going to sell financial products take people that are influential towards financial decision making and you're going to sell an insurance product. Yes. It used to be that you put a model in a magazine she would sell clothing. But but guess what most of these models today have mostly a male following today because guys like to look at pretty girls and athletes have an audience that doesn't really trust them in decision making about insurance. But there are people online that actually have an opinion on it that people view as thought leaders. So when you have the data and the information they're discoverable and you can use them. But I think one of the biggest challenges for influencer marketing has been this obsession with cool factor or fame that doesn't always deliver results

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah exactly. Talk you tell Imagine that. So for 2019 What are your targets. What are your plans.

Gil Eyal:
I think what we want to end up to 19 is a fully automated solution where you can come in defining audience and everything will be done for you the system will identify thousands of options for you and we'll reach out to them and all of them in a low note. No one they've posted it or pay them based on their performance and they will tell them to continue or stop in real time based on how well they're doing and to add more people. We want to end the year with that tool fully implemented. That's from the product side. We want to add an additional revenue stream for us. Today we haven't been doing well we just started doing processing payments through a third party. We don't actually process it using a third party to process payments for clients which we think is a huge and other huge problem. Imagine if you're activating 50 influencers and you have to go to your account department and get you whatever is for each one of them and make sure go see if they posted and pay them. So each one of these things that we introduced solves what we hope is a really big pain point or what we hope solves a really big pain point for our clients and we want to get to this point where everything is resolved. We think that this new once we include incorporate this into a tool we can definitely continue growing significantly fast because it will add a much bigger business model than the subscription model that we have today. If today a brand is spending tens of thousand dollars a year with us. But they're buying influencers of millions and we can make that easy for them. There's a big revenue jump for us. So I don't have exact numbers that I can share but we want to be on the INC 5000 list again in 2019

Malcolm Lui:
All right now can you share how you can go about finding new clients to use their system

Gil Eyal:
Yeah. One of the biggest things that we've been working on right now is partnerships with players who already sell to our industry. We have an API that allows us to incorporate a version of HYPR into their tool for an additional charge and so that's a great sales method that's been effective for us. We have a great sales team that we're growing relatively rapidly. Any sales people are listening to this and you're asking me please. Yes that's experience and the third is of course increasing the revenue from in each individual customer by also procuring the payment solution for

Malcolm Lui:
Right. So the payment solution no increase business because it makes it easier for them to do business with you.

Gil Eyal:
What we you think about having. If you're if you're you know a Fortune 500 company and I want to say any brand names and you know you have to wait 500 influencers in a year and each one of them makes five hundred dollars or a thousand dollars in each one of them has to go through your accounting department through legal through taxes through employment or through other forms that you're required you need to get your ten ninety nine. That's a big pain. It's just part of the big pain in this industry. So if we can automate that and do all of it for you we think that's going to create save you a lot of money and time and the people that are engaged with it and create a lot of value. And that's really where the big value is because the customers that pass a subscription will spend so often 100 times as much on influencers.

Malcolm Lui:
Right.

Gil Eyal:
So it's very significant

Malcolm Lui:
Now how do your sales team go about finding new business. Do you have a marketing program in place to generate leads for them or are they just counting the pavement meeting and greeting

Gil Eyal:
It's actually kind of funny. You know this is a space where anybody is do influencer marketing is easy to find because they're doing marketing right so it's all they need to do is go on Instagram look for hashtags that disclose advertising and say oh this is the potential customer and then we send them somebody reports we offer them some free samples we do some online digital advertising though we haven't been as successful as we'd like to. There I think with the new year we'll start from scratch. We'll probably hire somebody internal to do it because to date because we're targeting such a relatively high level and high experience type of customer it's been difficult but as as the people who have influenced the marketing roles become easier to find then I think digital marketing is going to be more effective for us

Malcolm Lui:
What did you try. Digital marketing wise in the past that didn't work so great

Gil Eyal:
We've done some Facebook ads we've done some linked in ads. The biggest challenge stress has been that it's driven a lot of traffic that we can't service. So people who don't have the budgets or are just not sophisticated enough to see the value in the platform as opposed to the people who are really a great fit for it.

Malcolm Lui:
Right.

Gil Eyal:
So

Malcolm Lui:
Okay

Gil Eyal:
Yeah I think in our to be completely honest to us I think we didn't have the expertise in-house to do it and we've sent it outside to people who weren't necessarily the best choice.

Malcolm Lui:
Right. Now

Gil Eyal:
I'm a big believer in it actually comes from digital marketing myself. I used to work in the gaming industry it's like Wired millions and millions of customers online. I think if you figure out if you have somebody who knows what they're doing who can dedicate the time to it it's a very effective channel that I think this year will definitely be spending a lot more resources on

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah I mean the best part about it once you get your digital marketing doubt in especially if it's more

Gil Eyal:
The

Malcolm Lui:
On outbound has both the inbound basis is that you can switch it on and off right.

Gil Eyal:
Yeah and it becomes a machine.

Malcolm Lui:
Yes. So now a question for you. Why aren't you using your own services to find influencers to generate awareness of your company and in turn find more business for yourself

Gil Eyal:
You know it's it's it's it's a question we get a lot in the challenge for us is that we really do view the influencers as a commodity. Meaning that in our space to find somebody who is influential towards our audience would generally mean that they have a business that is focused on selling to those customers so influence of marketing doesn't work perfectly for every type of business. In our case influential people in the industry are people like me. People talk a lot on social media who give tips or write articles. They're not necessarily the person who posts photos of themselves in you know provocative clothing or traveling the world or doing sports. And those people typically have an affiliation with their own business that makes it all difficult. We do partnerships we do rev shares we do things like that. But it's not a naturally industry the mass retail lends itself to actually finding online influencers

Malcolm Lui:
Right because the best influencers may also be your competitors

Gil Eyal:
Yeah they're in the industry themselves.

Malcolm Lui:
Right. Exactly. OK so

Gil Eyal:
Like

Malcolm Lui:
What he

Gil Eyal:
Gregory is not going to advertise my business because he has some business

Malcolm Lui:
Right. Yes exactly. So unless you are getting

Gil Eyal:
But

Malcolm Lui:
A big

Gil Eyal:
Just

Malcolm Lui:
Cut

Gil Eyal:
Advertising

Malcolm Lui:
Of your business.

Gil Eyal:
But now it's I guess a great business site but it's not the same business. But it's still not as easy not as natural for collaboration.

Malcolm Lui:
Yes

Gil Eyal:
In this case.

Malcolm Lui:
I can see that. So what do you say to your biggest challenge as you mentioned one that you were did you do that keen on tackling the digital marketing side of things. You mentioned you know you're keen on building out your new platform to do the third party to make it easier from accounting perspective legal perspective tax perspective. Any other challenges that you foresee in 2019 that you need to tackle and overcome to get your internal targets

Gil Eyal:
Yeah. I mean I think one of the things that have made things harder in 2013 was one is Facebook in their story with Cambridge analytics and then GDP in Europe which has created some fear with people to deal with companies that are very data proficient. But what we saw in our case was that when we had to spend a lot of money to ensure that we are compliant. And that was an expense that we didn't anticipate. And 2 is that every deal now has a component of that with their attorney speaking to our attorney and getting comfortable with the fact that we don't violate any laws and that we're very careful not to do that but that that process add some sales time and it also adds costs. And I think that's definitely going to continue in 2019 as a world world rightfully moves to a place where people's privacy is more protected and hopefully finds a comfortable balance which I still don't see. But I think we'll get through I think that comfortable balance will help everybody until it's found. There's always gonna be this fear of companies that use a lot of data and understand data well and what happens if they accidentally give me data that I'm not supposed to have and then I get into trouble in that kind of fear.

Malcolm Lui:
Right. So how are you going to overcome this compliance issue. It sounds like it's more of a compliance burden than anything

Gil Eyal:
Yeah

Malcolm Lui:
Else.

Gil Eyal:
I mean with us really what we did is we hired a firm that has a lot of expertise in it and then we laid out our entire process and they said well you know here 90 percent of what you do is great. Don't worry about it just 10 percent. What can we stop doing. I said you know a lot of this we can stop doing ok stop doing that. And then this stuff that is questionable let's let us do some research and let's clean it out and what we ended up doing is just kind of clearing out of our system anything that is is questionable or not permitted for example say Europe. Now there are certain countries that don't allow you to process data of people under the age of 16. So we no longer do that. We used to be 13. We have to change our whole system for

Malcolm Lui:
Right. OK I understand Tony I understand that. No. How about from a marketing sales perspective any challenges there beyond the digital marketing effort that you're going to try to roll out again in 2019

Gil Eyal:
Yeah. I mean I think we touched on the issue of differentiation and when you have a differentiated business the biggest challenge is to make sure people are aware of it so they don't say oh it's another influencer marketing company I've already seen them all and know what they have to offer up so getting in the door and explaining that you're not the same creature they've seen before and that you might have different values to offer them is especially if they're disappointed from the industry or they've had some lack of success. I think it's a big challenge for anyone even in a crowded space. So getting that message out there I think is a big challenge. And then the second is you know a resource allocation question which is always we we are always trying to be at the cutting edge of technology so do we hire more developers that we are more salespeople do we spend more on acquisition and there's a balancing act with a startup whether the blanket is always too short to cover the entire body.

Malcolm Lui:
All right.

Gil Eyal:
So you get your physical although your or your head is cold or you know I don't know is your elbow sticking out but

Malcolm Lui:
All right

Gil Eyal:
There's always somebody who needs more budget doesn't have enough to do what they need

Malcolm Lui:
Yeah. I can see that. All right. Last question for you. Who are your ideal customers and what's the best way for them to get in touch with you.

Gil Eyal:
Great. Yeah. So our ideal customer is somebody who is already doing influencer marketing plans on spending at least a hundred to twenty thousand dollars a year on it and sees it as a meaningful part of their marketing strategy and cares about data and analytics understands that it's not about a gut feeling but actually but actually understood using data to to understand what the most effective channels are and the best way to reach us. If you wanna reach me directly it's just Gil. JL At HYPR h y PR brands dot coms or HYPR brands dot com with an E or if you just want me to company its info at HYPR brands dot com. Either way is fine and I'm very responsive so feel free to reach out to me.

Malcolm Lui:
Thanks so much Gayle for joining us today and sharing how you accelerated your company's high value sales

Gil Eyal:
Thanks so much for having me and so much fun.

Malcolm Lui:
We've been speaking with Gil Eyal, the CEO of HYPR, about his company's rapid growth. For interviews with other fast growing high value sales companies or to learn how we can accelerate your firm's high value sales through automation, visit Eversprint.com.

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