[2020 GGGF] 조나단 첸 FiscalNote CTO 'Digital Transformation'

Based tech company that has gone on to raise over 300 million dollars in funding from the likes of Jerry Yang and Mark Cuban and various other investors. We currently employ just under 500 employees. What we do is we use cutting edge AI machine learning to change the way that people use open data. We specialize right now in the government tech industry. I've also co-founded another tech startup called Pathover, in which we use AI and machine learning to deal with logistics and e-commerce. And this past year I've been investing heavily into the social media space because, as this presentation goes on, I'll explain how that has changed the way that we do business in the last 20, 30 years.

To start, I just want to go over some of what we used to do, let's say 50 years ago, in order to reach our customers and to reach people, and also what businesses did back then. So what's one of the first things that you think about when you're trying to reach somebody? You didn't have the internet or whatnot. We used to use newspapers, we used to have physical meetings with people in a room, and the way that information usually spreads is through one-to-one word of mouth, and we use direct mail. This was great 40, 50 years ago, but why is this not so great now? Well, that spread of information takes way too long. It takes way too long because of all these meetings. It could take days, it could take weeks, hours. And having physical space limits the amount of people that could walk into your shop. The space is only so big if you own a physical shop like a restaurant. Like I said before, the information spreads not in real time. It may take forever to get to the end person, and it's just more costly sometimes. These mediums are more costly in general.

So then what happened was, just a couple decades ago, we had the whole internet revolution. The internet came alive and that was a complete game changer. People often didn't really understand why. There are many core reasons, and one of them is basically the spread of information is instant. Getting to your customers, getting to the people that are potential buyers of your products or users of your services, is instant. In addition to that, the reach is ginormous. The amount of people that you can actually target and narrow down who your core audience is has also become a thing. When I say that you can reach your customers instantly, you can do it through an email campaign, app notifications, or text message. You have this instant access to those people. Also, you don't have to have physical assets. With the internet, you don't have to own physical space. You just have a website or a mobile app, and that really makes it so much easier for the everyday person to just start a business. You don't have to go through renting an office space and all this physical stuff.

The global audience matters. This matters a lot. Just imagine, for example, if you have a local shop and you're trying to get new customers in your door. So when someone's walking by, maybe you pay someone to stand outside your store just to get people to try to get into your store. You pay someone maybe ten dollars an hour, and maybe 20 people walk by that hour. How many people actually go into your store from the person that you just hired to get them to try to get into your store? That's the way people did it back then. Now imagine instead of doing that, you pay for Facebook ads. You pay ten dollars on Facebook ads. You pay ten dollars and you can reach thousands of people, not just the 20 random people that walk by. So the power of the internet is just so much greater than just your local area.

Then not just with the internet, 10 years later the birth of social media happened. Social media completely changed the game again. It allows anybody to build an audience, anyone to engage with an audience on a more personal level. It allows businesses, it allows regular people to have instant access to their followers. This allows businesses to grow so much bigger than what they could have grown if they just had a local small store. Potentially the entire world if necessary. What I mean by that is if you have 10 clients or 10 customers, and then to get to 100, if you're a physical store you can't really get to 100 because you don't have that much space inside your store to have 100 people. But with a website, with an app, you could have millions of people using your app just like that. So the scale, you can scale your clientele, you can scale your customers much bigger. The scale has so much more potential than what you would have.

Business is just completely changing things. The power of consumer data, the power of user data. Why does this matter? Having access to consumer data means you can do so much. Let me explain what I mean by that. Have you ever wondered why companies that have a lot of users, like Snapchat with hundreds of millions of users, their valuations are in the billions, but their profits are not that much? They're nothing compared to the valuation. Why are these companies getting valued at billions of dollars? Because they have access to hundreds of millions of people in real time. You can just send a message to all of them. Then you have the potential to sell them things instantly. So even if Snapchat's app fails, just as an example, they have the user data. They can instantly create a new product and just push it to the users instantly, hundreds of millions of users just like that. They can keep doing this as long as they own the user data. This allows them to either pivot or create new products and potentially new sources of income and increased profits. So the potential is insane. Having access to a huge amount of consumer data is where the value is at.

It's not just having one product with the same audience. Once you have the audience, once you have the users, once you have the consumer data, you can sell them anything over a long period of time. You can just keep pushing them new products and creating new sources of revenue. That is why consumer data is so much more powerful. And that is why when you start an app or social media, having instant access to your audience is the key.

Like I said earlier in the presentation when I was introducing myself, I spent the last year building up digital assets. LinkedIn, Twitter, you can build up an email list, you can have a mobile app for your startup, or just anything. It doesn't have to be a full-fledged startup. You can build websites. All these are digital assets for you to potentially start a business with. It's not just social media. Some people have this wrong idea that social media is just for fun. Yes, it can be for fun, but it can also help you if you want to start a business. It can be a really great business because you have access to your followers, because you can instantly push information out to them, push a new product out to your followers.

I'll give you an example of a digital asset that I really invested time and money in. I grew it. It's been about 10 months right now, and it grew to about 90,000 followers, hopefully 100,000 soon. I actually didn't treat this as just a fun social media like my own personal Instagram account. My own personal Instagram I just do for fun. But this one, Hack University, I focus on tech content. I focused on tech and design and the startup world. That's the content I focused on. I treated it as a business. I treated my audience as potential customers. I treated the content as my product. With this, I was able to build a following, to build a user base of 90,000 people. Now this is extremely valuable because if I ever want to launch a new product in the tech industry or something, I can instantly just push it out to my 90,000 followers instantly. So building up this digital asset, building up this social media, this Instagram, it just presents so many future opportunities for me as an entrepreneur. I highly recommend getting into this if you don't have an idea right now, you don't have an app idea, you don't have a startup idea, and you still want to get involved with the whole digital transformation of business. Start an Instagram account, start any social media, TikTok, anything, and try to build it up to 100,000 followers. You'll have this audience in which you can push out your product instantly. That's the most powerful thing about this.

Another example of a digital asset that I actually have, and I didn't realize I had this, is my other startup. We created a product called Mix Bowl. My other startup, Pathover, we basically over four years built a food ordering app with over 80,000 users. Again, like I mentioned before, and I'm going to repeat this again and again, the user information is extremely powerful because we can upsell them new products. We can push any new products if we need to pivot. We can reach over 80,000 people in real time. That is so much better than having a physical store, which would take a long time and be extremely time consuming and difficult to do.

Before I get to the conclusion, I know a lot of people are trying to start a business but they don't know what to do. Like I said, I highly recommend getting into social media. Starting an Instagram account, for example, or starting a YouTube account, a TikTok account, it's the same thing as starting a business. You have to do promotions. You have to get your product or your content out to people. To do this, you can reach out to blogs, newspapers, other channels, other pages, and pay for shout outs or whatnot, and try to grow your audience organically that way. So treat it as a business. Invest some money into it, and then you're good to go. You'll start building up your digital asset that way.

In conclusion, the digital transformation of business is happening and it's evolving over the decades. In the beginning of the 2000s, it was just internet stuff, websites. Then it started in the early last decade, the 2010s, with social media. Whatever social media you use, if you're able to build an audience, you have the potential to build a business. You have the potential to sell new products, to create new products. Whatever you want to do with that audience, you have that potential. You should invest in it. It doesn't have to be what you see online. It doesn't always have to be an app. It doesn't always have to be a website. It can be social media. Building a product is the same thing. You're still an entrepreneur. You're still doing a business on these platforms as well. Like I said, I want to repeat one more time: the reach is humongous compared to that of a physical store. If you build a social media following, it just changes the game entirely.

Thanks for your time, everybody. I do want to say that if you guys have any questions for me, I would love to help people. I love to help people build businesses. I left my Instagram on here if you guys want to catch up with me. My personal Instagram is Hackbird. You can see it in the slides. If you're interested in following my tech and design Instagram, it's called Hack University. I love to answer questions. Thanks for having me.

We have a few questions here and I would love to answer. So question number one: what was really the catalyst to catapult people to realizing that the whole online, the whole digital world and having digital assets, the whole going online in general, is a huge part of the future? If you don't move your businesses online, you're going to get left behind. One of the core lessons of starting businesses, one of the core philosophies, is that you always have to innovate. You always have to move with the times. If you're stuck back with your old thinking, then eventually you'll get weeded out by the new. That's just how business is. A hundred years ago, business was done differently. The trends were different. In a hundred years from now, it's going to be different again. It's not too late. People are jumping on. If they have a restaurant, they're jumping onto all the food ordering apps. They're building their own apps, trying to get people to buy from them digitally, for order pickup or delivery. We have a lot of shops out there, pawn shops, clothing shops, anything that are starting to open up online stores, e-commerce stores. That's why the stock price of Shopify is going up like crazy. Right now is the perfect time to get online. There are so many websites that allow you to quickly put up a store. You're selling to more customers than you would if you just stay local. People are actually making more money. For example, I know a restaurant owner back where I'm from, the DC area. He is actually making more money during the pandemic through online orders than he was when he just had his physical store. He actually wishes he could cut his lease and get a smaller kitchen because then his profit would be even larger. That's what he realized during the pandemic, and it actually helped him out. By going online, you'll start to realize the potential and how much money you can make.

Another question: how would you get your business online as quickly as possible to address the pandemic that's going on? For people who are new to this, I know it can be really scary because this is a completely new way of doing business. I totally understand why you would be scared to go online if you've always been used to the traditional model of brick and mortar. The first thing is you want to look into getting a website. There are a lot of websites out there. You can use Shopify for e-commerce, you can use Squarespace. You need to start doing digital marketing instead of just physical marketing. I'm sure most people have done digital marketing even with a physical store. It's somewhat the same thing. Start investing your time learning how to do all the digital marketing and get people onto your website and buying there. It might be a different story for different businesses. There are restaurants, there's traditional e-commerce, or you're selling products online like clothes. There are different strategies for these types of businesses. If you're doing a restaurant, get on all the apps and get your own website. What I like to tell restaurants, because I work in the industry, is to use the apps to get the first time customer in and try to convert them to your own website where you can sign them up through various online ordering services. For e-commerce, you would have to focus a lot on digital marketing. You can pay for Google ads, Facebook ads, and target those customers. Everything is online. The last piece of advice is to start building a social presence and invest money into building that social presence because it's the same thing as investing in your business. Once you invest money in building a digital asset, as I mentioned before, you can get shout outs. Shout outs are basically you look at bigger accounts on that specific social media, could be TikTok or Instagram. You message them and you pay them for a shout out for them to tag you in a post or say check out this other account, and then you'll get followers that way. By doing this, you're building up an audience that you're actually keeping. Instead of paying for ads over and over again, you pay for it one time, build up the audience on your own social media. Then you can push them new promotions, push them new products every time you have them. You own them. If you have a social media with 10,000 followers and you launch a new product, you can announce it on your Instagram or on your TikTok or whatever channel you're building up. You use this medium to really propel your business and your marketing forward. Building up a digital asset like this for your business is really powerful. Some people want to do it for free. What I say to that is you need to invest in it. If you just think about it, can you build a business if you were to open up a store? Can you build a business with no money? Can you get customers with no money? No, you need some money. You need an investment in your business. This concept is the same thing for your social media, for your Instagram. Basically, how would you build up your own physical store? It's the same thing as building up your own digital asset. Once you have that, that's when you start to see your presence online. You start seeing your business moving online. Having an online store and building up your digital asset, which is basically your social media accounts, and investing in them and treating them as a business as well, that's my advice for getting started or moving your business online in this pandemic.