Jason Feifer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. Ii leads to something that is another way of thinking about getting press, which I think is really important for people to remember. So far, Lenny, we've spent the majority of our time talking about press in the form of some kind of feature on you, writing about you or including you in some kind of prominent way in a story that's basically highlighting the thing that you wanted to get out there, your product or something about your business, something. Then we talked a little bit about another way of doing it, which is sort of putting you out as an expert in authority. There's another way of thinking about this, which is that you can either create or present context in which you just happen to be a part. Here's the story pitch that I got that leads into this. This is years and years and years ago. I had just started at Entrepreneur. I hear from a guy named Fred Ruckel. Fred Ruckel has got a cat toy and it's called the Ripple Rug. It's basically, imagine a rug and then another rug kind on top of it, but ill-suited. The rug is lumpy, there's a lot of lumps in and there are holes. This is for a cat to kind of crawl in and out these spaces and bat and do whatever cats do. I don't know. I don't know a cat. He wanted to tell me about the sales of this Ripple Rug and about how the sales are skyrocketing and all the things that he thought made it special. It's made out of recycled bottles and whatever the stuff, made in the USA, all cool stuff, but not relevant to me because we're not cat toy monthly and we're not reaching a whole bunch of cat owners, not that I know of. I replied and I said, what I usually say, "Congratulations on what you've built, but it's just not a fit for coverage." Now Fred stumbled his way into this, but he did really a very smart thing because what he responded with was he said, "Totally understand. If you're ever interested in learning about a gigantic scam that's happening on Amazon and eBay that we've been caught up in, let me know." I was like, "Oh, well, yeah, I guess I am interested in hearing about that." I said, "Tell me more." He sent me this long email. Fred loves long emails, and I got him on the phone and had him explain, and finally I understood it. This is, and maybe people are familiar with this, but this is sort of known as Amazon to eBay arbitrage. Basically the idea here is that Fred is selling his Ripple Rug on Amazon, or at least he was then, I don't know if he still is, but he's selling his Ripple Rug on Amazon. There are a lot of people who are copying the listing for his Ripple Rug and making their own postings for it on eBay. They sell it for a slightly higher price. Let's say that, and again, I'm making these up, but let's say the Fred is selling his Ripple Rug for $30 on Amazon, so somebody will sell it for $40 on eBay. They sell it for a slightly higher price. Let's say that, and again, I'm making these up, but let's say the Fred is selling his Ripple Rug for $30 on Amazon, so somebody will sell it for $40 on eBay. Then somebody buys it on eBay, they find it, they buy it on eBay, they pay $40, that person gets $40, takes $30 of it, goes to Amazon, buys the Ripple Rug, and then just has it shipped to the buyer. It's arbitrage. You might think, "Well, why would Fred care about this? He still gets the sale." The reason he caress about this is because the Ripple Rug shows up at the customer's house and it shows up in a Amazon box, even though they bought it on eBay. They think, "Why did that happen?" Then the next thing they do is they go to Amazon and they discover that it's cheaper on Amazon and now they feel ripped off. Who do they feel like they got ripped off by? Fred, because they don't know about the arbitrage. They don't know that they exist. This person who has at this point opened the cat toy and probably had their cat roll around in it, now shoves the whole thing back in a box and returns it and Fred gets dinged and that's why he doesn't like this. He has tried and tried and tried to get Amazon and eBay to stop this, but he said, "Nobody seems to care and all these small businesses are losing tons of money on returns because of this." I had never heard of this. I thought it was fascinating. It's like a problem small business owners are dealing with. I was like, "Fred, do you know other people who are dealing with this?" He's like, "Yeah, I talk to them on the line all the time." He sends me off. I reported this whole thing out. I wrote this three 4,000 word story on this thing, and Fred was the main character because he was the way to understand this problem. I did all the reporting and I contacted the platforms and I contacted the people who make the arbitrage software. I did a whole report, but Fred got his press because sometimes, and here's the lesson, sometimes you are not the story, but you can be part of the story. Sometimes that means if Fred stumbled into it, but I get plenty of people who've reach out and maybe they have a real estate startup and there's something really interesting happening in the real estate space and they reach out and they tell me about this really interesting thing that's happening in the real estate space and the role that they happen to play in it. Now I think, "Oh, well that's interesting. Maybe there's a story about that." My wife, the freelancer, Jen Miller, she's done this many times where she once did this story about there was a bunch of startups that were all related to helping people prepare for death in some way or another. She's not going to write about one of them, but when somebody reached out and said, "Hey, here's a trend happening and we are one of them." Well, great, that's an interesting story. She wrote that and the company that reached out to her got kind of prominent billing because they were the ones who reached out. You know Barbara Corcoran from Shark Tank?…

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