Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Should we move on to tech themes? Yeah, let’s do it. There’s a few that we’ve talked about but one that we haven’t talked about yet and that AOL is completely notorious for, is a lot of their rise and especially in branding and in brand recognition and then in distribution is really like one of the earliest internet growth hacks and that’s distributing the CDs. It’s doing something that other people aren’t to get noticed and to get distribution because the point I want to make here is, there’s a trick and then the earliest people make out like bandits and then everybody realizes what’s going on and then it becomes the normal thing and then there’s basically a CPM raise to the bottom and you're competing against everybody else in sort of a commodity, highly efficient marketplace. Like, if you're buying Facebook ads now and it’s not in any of the new formats, you're not jumping on whatever the new flashy thing is, like you can basically, depending on your category, understand what your cost of customer acquisition is going to be. And if you're AOL and you do a very brilliant marketing move of putting these CDs at the checkout where no digital company and really no company is doing their distribution, like it’s in movie theaters, it’s in blockbusters, like all these unconventional places and you're giving away something, the benefit of AOL is 100 hours or 1000 hours for free, like there’s so much that they can give away for free because it’s the internet and it’s software and it’s reduced marginal cost relative to hard goods that it’s shocking to people. And for the first time, they’re like, “Oh my god, this seems like a crazy deal and no one has ever tried to reach me at this point before.” So to me, it's like a lot of times companies succeed because of the initial basically distribution or hack or I guess growth hack but really like figuring out how to get in front of people where no one else is getting in front of them. I love that image of like the, you know, Virginia suburbs, AOL and 80s and 90s guys being the original growth hackers.…

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