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Adam was the co-founder of UrbanSpoon, Dwelable and now FreshChalk. He comes from an engineering background, but he has done some incredible marketing to grow his businesses. This is a dive into some of those strategies and tactics he used at FreshChalk. Some highlights:
How FreshChalk solves the problems of Yelp/AngiesList/HomeAdvisor
How Adam thinks about building two-sided marketplaces
How SEO has changed, and how he does it now
How to engage small businesses (who usually don’t have time for “marketing services”)
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Transcript
Edward: This is part two of my interview with Adam Doppelt. Today, we're going to dive into his experience as founder of Fresh Chalk.
Adam, could you start by explaining what Fresh Chalk is?
Adam: To start up the Genesis story is always interesting. That's always the interesting part to me.
For one of my prior companies, I had to move to Austin and it was one of those weird situations that probably nobody ever goes through, except for a couple of lucky or unlucky individuals. I had to move to Austin with a couple of weeks’ notice, including my family, my wife, and my three kids, and my dog. One of those kids was actually a six-month-old at the time. It's very traumatic to have to move to a new place like that. We were settled in Seattle, we'd been here for a long time. It's great that we sold the company, but we were not super excited about moving to Austin.
Our opinion changed once we've been there for a while, but the idea of packing up and leaving Seattle was very difficult for us. We arrived in Austin and we immediately bought a house right away within a couple of weeks, and I got a car and we moved in. We had to acquire a bunch of furniture on no notice. I had an intense need for professionals. I needed a house cleaner and a babysitter and an arborist to look after the trees. It wasn't a particularly nice house, but you're in Austin, there are trees everywhere. I also needed people in specialties that I had never even dealt with before. I needed a termite person and I needed a garage door guy. We needed all kinds of things.
I worked quite closely with this team at HomeAway and I started asking them for recommendations. Does anybody have a good termite person? Does anyone have a realtor? Does anybody know a good arborist, a plumber, an electrician, a handy person? The list kind of went on and on and on and I amassed pretty quickly this little spreadsheet of recommendations of what I thought were the best people that have been recommended to me by my new co-workers at HomeAway.
A funny thing happened, when I had that spreadsheet as part of the acquisition, a handful of people had moved down to Austin as part of the deal, and they started asking me if they could look at it. They said oh Adam, I know you care about these things. You built up this spreadsheet of these professionals. I need that stuff, too. I just moved here. I need a cleaning person. I need a babysitter. I need a handyman. Can I just look at your spreadsheet? At the time, I was very focused on vacation rentals. I didn't think much about it. But then when I was trying to figure out what to do next, I remembered that experience. I thought, there's probably something here after years of looking on Yelp and Angie's list and Googling for the best electrician in Seattle.
That is a very annoying and difficult and unreliable process, I might say. I'd much rather have recommendations from friends. That simple idea turned into Fresh Chalk, which is recommendations for local professionals from your friends. I was very focused on home improvement. I thought home improvement is where it's at. That's the sweet spot for me. But as we talked to potential users of our products—consumers—we quickly realized that there were equal opportunities in beauty and wellness, and health, and healthcare, financial services.
All of these things turned out to be really fruitful. As much as I needed a plumber, if you need your eyebrows waxed, your needs are just as intense. We built this product we're making. I would say great progress with it and people love it.
Edward: Talk more about how it's different from Yelp. Because can't I go on Yelp and see how people recommend hairdressers and eyebrow cleaners and plumbers, and can't I even see if my friends recommended those things on Yelp?.
Adam: To some extent, you can do that. You can look at Yelp and you can get recommendations. They're not going to be from your friends. I've never seen a friend's recommendation on Yelp. The reason is because there's no social experience on Yelp. It's a lot of strangers recommending things. I can say from my experience at Urbanspoon and after that at Dwelable, a lot of those reviews are fake.
The best way to get great reviews for your business is to ask your friends and family to write great reviews of your business. A lot of those reviews are really not to be trusted. I think that's a problem with Yelp. That's a problem on Google My Business, which is what you see when you're Googling for businesses. I think to a lesser extent on Angie's list because Angie's list had a lot more validation of their reviews. But reviews, whether they're from strangers—trusted or not—are not going to be as good as reviews from friends.
When you want a real recommendation, what do you do? You pick up your phone and you text your buddy. If you're considering a remodel, you want to talk to your friend who just went through a remodel. That's always the best place to get that information.
The other thing I've learned is that I have a real love for the story. I think maybe even you and I have talked about this before. When you told me about your house, I wanted to hear all about it. I wanted to hear about how you found it and the work you did on it, who did that work, and what they did right, what they did wrong, what you learned. With my maximizer philosophy, it's just I'm intellectually curious. I want to hear about those things. It turns out that you can share those stories pretty broadly.
And a lot of people find that stuff fascinating. Not just about home improvement, or doctors, or pregnancy or whatever, but like maybe even about products or travel. There's a human need to share these stories from friend to friend. I think that's where Fresh Chalk can really shine.
Edward: Is Fresh Chalk a two-sided marketplace?
Adam: Yeah, it definitely is. Like the other ones I've done, we have local businesses or small businesses on one side and consumers on the other. There is a marketplace. There's no transaction per se, so it's hard to really put the word “market” in there. We don't have a transaction yet might be a better way to phrase that. But it's definitely a marketplace and we have to keep both sides happy.
Edward: Where do you focus then? Do you focus on the merchants or the users? How do you weigh those two?
Adam: It is so hard. This has been a struggle with all the companies in this band that I've participated in. My philosophy, and I can't say whether this is right or wrong, but my philosophy is that I really want to focus on the consumer side of things. That's what I like to do.
I think that if you don't have consumer interest in your product, then the merchants are not going to show up. Why would they show up to use Fresh Chalk? Why would restaurants be on Urbanspoon if there are no diners on Urbanspoon? They're just not interested. My purpose has always been to get consumers interested first. Once you have consumers, the businesses are always going to show up. If you don't have consumers, it's very difficult to get businesses to show up. But especially with something like at Fresh Chalk, a lot of what we're doing is social. It's friend recommendations.
You can bootstrap just by having people coming out of the recommendations and then sharing it with their friends. That will create a distribution for your product, even without having a lot of businesses on the platform.
Edward: So how do you get users? What have you found that's successful getting users onto your platform and using it?
Adam: Fresh Chalk is interesting because it's a combination of—there's a social network component, so it's people creating and sharing in a similar way as they would do on Facebook, or Nextdoor, or places like that. I guess Nextdoor isn’t particularly social, but there is a lot of sharing.
And then there's a ton of SEO. We have landing pages for a lot of the businesses in the cities that we cover, especially places where we've gone deep like Seattle, we might have every business. We also have the categories. There's a ton of SEO traffic coming in. If you start Googling for businesses in Seattle, you're probably going to see Fresh Chalk showing up in the top 10. So there's an SEO component, there's a social or viral component, and especially in the beginning where you're tinkering with the product, there's a lot of manual outreach. You've got to reach out to users and say hey, can you, can you kick the tires? Just give it a shot.
Some of these social networks, they really jump start with these massive marketing efforts. That's never been my way of doing things, especially I'm not into raising all this money to experiment. I'd rather experiment with small amounts of money, and then when you feel like you have a good story, then you can put some money on marketing to really expand your reach.
Edward: Talk to me more about the SEO. What are you doing on SEO? You can build a directory and Google obviously likes directories, but a directory without any traction is not going to get very far on Google. Why are you ranking?
Adam: There's something to be said for breadth. We have this great directory. The last few companies that are built, there's been a crawling aspect to them. Fresh Chalk aggregates reviews from other sites, and so we can actually build even without anybody.
If you were to look at Fresh Chalk Atlanta or some arbitrary city like that, we probably already have a decent ranking for small businesses because we're aggregating reviews from other third party sources, and we can put stars on those pages and maybe even attract some links with our badge program. We reach out to small businesses and we say, hey, you're one of the best businesses in Atlanta, you should put this badge on your page. And it's true. They are one of the best businesses in Atlanta because we calculated it. We're pretty certain about it.
It's not like it rings false and we've got this good looking badge, and a lot of these companies are very happy to put on their site that creates links for us and increases people's knowledge of Fresh Chalk. I think that SEO is always the long game. The way I talk about it is that it's like a garden and we have planted some seeds and the seeds are growing. I can tell you that yesterday was our best traffic day ever, and most of that is just organic SEO. We've been to the garden, we are watering the garden and some things are sprouting.
Edward: Let's talk a little bit more about those merchants. How are you getting merchants to sign up?
Adam: The easiest way to get them to sign up is there are some very simple pitches you can give them. I've always had good luck with really honest pitches. In fact, that's the only pitch that I can do.
Edward: Adam, when you say pitches, is this like an email you're sending them or it's like you calling them up and talking to them?
Adam: Direct outreach either through email or in some cases, phone. The things you say to these small businesses are honest. What you say to them are things like hey, we built this great page for you on Fresh Chalk and people are leaving reviews on Fresh Chalk. Would you like to be notified when you get a review on your page? People say yeah, of course I want to be notified. Then we go and collect an email address and they're on the platform. They're considered a verified merchant on the platform.
The obvious backdrop to this whole conversation is COVID and lockdown and how that has affected small businesses in the US which is not good, in case anybody's been living under a rock. But if you put that aside, Fresh Chalk has had pretty good success with getting businesses to sign up on Fresh Chalk.
Edward: Doing that way, doing the direct outreach, is that one of those things that don't scale, or do you think this outreach strategy is scalable?
Adam: I’ve always had good luck with doing them in ways that don't scale in the beginning. So you try things. We may hire somebody, you just have to make a thousand phone calls. That's fine. If we measure the response rate, the commercial management, we may try a few different pitches. Maybe we hire somebody and have them send 1000 emails, handcrafted, and we measure the response rate. If it seems like it's working, we can always hire 10 people to do that. That's a playbook that has worked for me really well in the past.
I have a high sensitivity to spam and people's time, and these small businesses are playing in an environment where all these small businesses really, really, really hate Yelp. I can't even tell you the anger that small businesses feel towards Yelp. They despise Yelp with the heat of 1000 suns. They really can't stand Yelp.
In a way, Fresh Chalk through—I'd say some planning and a lot of luck—is the anti-Yelp. We don't have negative reviews. It's just recommendations. You can recommend a business. If you want to take a dump on a business and say I hated this place, you have to accumulate a certain amount of karma points on Fresh Chalk before you can even access that feature.
If some electrician comes to your house and they blow your fuse and charge you $800, which by the way, has happened to me, and I want to leave a negative review, I can do that because I've been on Fresh Chalk and I've accumulated all this karma and I have access to the negative review feature. But you can't get these drive by negative reviews. These rants where people trash businesses, we don't have that feature. We didn't design it that way. It's supposed to be positive. We want to step away from all the negativity on the internet and get great recommendations from your friends. Sure, maybe your friends want to steer you away from businesses. But mostly, they just want to point you at the right electrician, not rant about the wrong one.
When we talk to these small businesses, anybody who bothers to listen to us for more than about 30 seconds, they start to understand the Fresh Chalk is the anti-Yelp. It's social. It's positive. We want their business to succeed. It's free. It's a pretty good pitch. The trick is just getting past—if you can get them to pick up the phone and listen for a few seconds, you probably can get them to sign up.
Edward: Right now, there's no monitor. As you said, it's free for users, it's free for merchants. Where is your monetization going to come from?
Adam: I've had good luck with these businesses. Until you really know they've got some product-market fit and some usage and people are interested in what you built—if you built something compelling—that's always a good time to start layering on monetization, the kinds of products that I build. I'm very wary of trying to monetize too early. Obviously, if you build a platform where consumers are coming in to get recommendations for services, or products, or restaurants, or travel, the advertising revenue is obvious there. There's a very obvious play for businesses that just want to get more traffic. That's something that, if we had real traffic, I think we'd be looking into, once we get there.
The other place that really stands out to me is referral programs. A lot of these businesses are already tracking referrals. If you use a particular service, they want to know how did you hear about us? Was it one of our existing customers? And then they kick them a $25 gift certificate or a free cleaning is something that dentists do sometimes. All of these businesses are looking for ways to increase their own businesses, and we're very receptive to that. Fresh Chalk, as a social platform for sharing recommendations, is really well suited to slide right into those referral programs and maybe take them over and start tracking them and doing rewards, and I could see that being a great way to monetize as well. But that's all down the road. Right now, we just got to make something that's fun, and then we can monetize it later.
Edward: Transitioning from fun, you mentioned earlier that COVID has affected your business. You talk a little bit about how you guys responded to COVID.
Adam: Obviously this has been a horrible time for everybody, particularly in the US, and if you're running a small business, it is so, so, so hard right now. We can tell that many small businesses are struggling or closing. The cities that have been hit the hardest and have locked down the best are the ones that are having the most trouble keeping their small businesses alive. The restaurant business is basically dead. Travel is toast. A lot of the services that people love on Fresh Chalk are really struggling.
Our most popular category six months ago was probably nail salons, and people are not really going to nail salons at the moment, or if they are it's 1 out of 10 if they’re going before. These businesses are on life support, Fresh Chalk is really well-positioned to, in some ways, be the voice of those communities. If you have something to say to your customers about what you're doing to be safe with COVID, Fresh Chalk is a great place to get the word out. We have a COVID status thing where any small business can say we're doing curbside pickup and we're all masked up. We do a very thorough cleaning each night with XYZ products. Fresh Chalk is a great place to say that to your audience.
We've also advocated for a lot of these communities. We stepped in and we worked with some of these small business alliances to run surveys, to find out how small businesses are feeling about things. I have to say, it's heartbreaking. It's very sad. I didn't know this, but I am a lover of small businesses. I frequent a lot of small businesses in my neighborhood and around Seattle.
I had a guy come to my house and his specialty was working on gas fireplaces. That's pretty much all he did and mine was broken and he fixed it, and then he spent half an hour rearranging the little fake embers so that it looks more aesthetically pleasing, which I didn't even know that I needed. But he was practically in there with toothpicks moving things around.
When I meet somebody like that, it really makes a strong impression on me. Somebody who loves their work and it's not in technology and it is important and they're getting paid for it and they are enjoying it. I'm getting a lot of value out of it. I love businesses like that, and I want those businesses to survive COVID. A lot of them won't. I think it's incredibly sad. But Fresh Chalk is here to help some of them survive. We're doing our best.
Edward: Adam, thank you. This has been fantastic. I like to end these interviews by asking you about quake books. But in your case, it's more of a quake genre. Is that right?
Adam: Be more specific. What would you like to hear?
Edward: I think you mentioned that science fiction has dramatically changed your life and how you think about things.
Adam: I have read a lot of books that made strong impressions on me. Sometimes you read books, it takes you a long time to really internalize what they mean. Some of the books that I read as a kid, I think, are still resonating with me. Sidhartha made a really strong impression on me as a kid. I still remember very clearly, and more recently things like The Three-Body Problem which is a science fiction book.
Occasionally, you read a book and you're just desperate for it not to end, and then once it's over, you close it and you think, I wish they had written another one, and they've been dead for 100 years. That's what a lot of my reading is like.
I was reading a book the other day by Jack Vance who, I think, was a largely forgotten fantasy, science fiction guy. I was laughing so hard. I'm lying in bed, reading it on my phone. Shannon's asleep next to me, and I'm chuckling and the bed is shaking. It's the middle of the night and I'm cracking up. How often do you read a book like that? It's like my whole philosophy of life. I'm always going deep and looking for these hidden gems, and you know what? Sometimes you find them.
Edward: We're going to end with that. Thank you, Adam. This has been fantastic.
Adam: Thanks Ed.
Podcast: Adam Doppelt, Co-founder FreshChalk/UrbanSpoon - Part 2