Zac Darnell: Hey everybody. Welcome to the show. My co- host for today's show is Mike Mumau. He's the VP of Customer Experience here at SEP. Now, Mike is a fellow curious extrovert, and I asked him to join me because he's great at being curious and helping others tell their stories, namely our guest for today, Chris Keaney. Chris is the CTO over at Vibenomics. And I got to say, this was actually one of my favorite interviews. Chris is full of insights, understands the product, understands his industry, and it's actually a new market called Digital Audio Out- of- Home. I learned a lot of new things, so I hope you enjoy. Welcome to Behind the Product, a podcast by SEP, where we believe it takes more than a great idea to make a great product. We've been around for over 30 years, building software that matters more and we've set out to explore the people, practices, and philosophies to try and capture what's behind great software products. So join us on this journey of conversation with the folks that bring ideas to life. Hey everybody. Thank you so much for joining us, Chris. We're really excited to learn about you and about what you're doing at Vibenomics. How are you?

Chris Keaney: I'm doing great, Zac. Thanks for having me today.

Zac Darnell: You know, for a little bit of context for anybody listening, tell us a little bit about you, maybe a little bit about your background and Vibenomics the company.

Chris Keaney: Sure. My history is primarily in building software as a service systems, so SaaS. And also native mobile apps has been a big part of what I've done over the last 10 years. So a few industries like financial services, telecommunications, marketing, those are some of the industries that I've spent time in throughout my career. Currently, I'm the CTO of Vibenomics. One of the great things about that is I get to lead our amazing product team there.

Zac Darnell: That's really cool. You mentioned you spent a little bit of time in the telephony space only because that's a little bit of my background. I'm curious if we crossed streams at any point in time. What's a little bit of the experience there?

Chris Keaney: Yeah. This is a while ago. I was with AT& T, Ameritech SPC for a while back in the day.

Zac Darnell: Oh, very fun. Okay. I always love beating fellow former telecom folks. It was a fun industry, especially here in Indy. Quite a few companies, I feel like, that spend time in that space. We're talking a little bit about Vibenomics, the company that you're at now. Can you give us a 30, 000- foot view of the product that you have at Vibenomics and maybe the market that you're in?

Chris Keaney: We are in what is considered a relatively new category and that's called Digital Audio Out- of- Home. It's an advertising space. At the high level, Vibenomics is a Digital Audio Out- of- Home advertising company and audio experience company. Let me try to explain what Digital Audio Out- of- Home is because that's going to be new for a lot of people. Out- of- Home, the Out- of- Home part has been around for a long time. So if you think about Out- of- Home advertising, you're talking about like a billboard.

Zac Darnell: Oh, okay.

Chris Keaney: You're driving down the road, you see a billboard. That's Out- of- Home advertising. Then you've got Digital Out- of- Home, which is the next evolution. So for that, think about walking in times square. You look up, there's giant video displays on every building with advertisements all over the place. That's then Digital Out- of- Home advertising. If you then go into say a grocery store or a convenience store or a coffee shop, and you hear music and messaging and advertisements coming from the speakers in the ceiling, that's Digital Audio Out- of- Home. That's Vibenomics.

Zac Darnell: Ah, that makes a whole lot more sense. So if I'm hearing," Sale on prime rib this week," while I'm at Kroger or Whole Foods, that's the experience that we're talking about mixed in with elevator music.

Chris Keaney: Yes. If you hear that coming out, say at Kroger, one of our clients, you would definitely be hearing Vibenomics. They have self- promotional messaging. It could be. We also have the advertisements or the programmatic advertising which is what our platform does. And then, of course, we have curated music lists. So when you say elevator music, it kind of struck a little bit of a chord because that's kind of the legacy providers. That's what they do in this space. It's background music. It's really just something there to fill the space. We're taking a different approach on that. And we believe that it's all about the experience or the vibe that you create in the space.

Zac Darnell: Yeah.

Mike Mumau: There it is. I was wondering where the vibe was going to come in.

Zac Darnell: I was curious where Vibenomics was coming from. Now I get it. That's awesome.

Mike Mumau: So curated music, it's about the mood, or is there some advertising in the curated music as well? Because you've got the Kroger ads and I'm assuming you have some product in there as well.

Chris Keaney: Yeah. To talk about how extensive this is, you can go and the clients... our host networks, we call them. So like Kroger will be a host network for us. They can have self- promotional messaging. They can also have operational messaging in there as well. So things like, they need to make an announcement for some reason, like of course, going through the last 18 months, there's been a lot of mask messaging. So we'll create mask messaging and that messaging will get put into their system, into their venue for whatever scheduling they need to do with that. And all those messages that we create are, of course, done by our professional voice talent that we have. And then that is also mixed with actual programmatic advertising that goes in there too. And that programmatic advertising can be both endemic and non- endemic, endemic meaning it's for a product that the venue might carry. If you're looking for cereal, it's an ad for cereal, it's going to be in that grocery store venue. So that'd be an endemic ad. If we're talking about a non- endemic ad, it might be Honda advertising in that space to those listeners.

Zac Darnell: Oh, okay. I'm kind of curious a little bit to dive into this a little deeper. Thinking about from a tech perspective, is there any intelligent, targeted advertising based on buying behaviors? I scan my loyalty card when I buy my groceries, they obviously know it's me and that I just bought all of those things, that it's Monday at three o'clock. Is there any kind of intelligent targeting there from an advertising perspective that's mixed in?

Chris Keaney: Yeah. We definitely use data from different sources and we're looking at POS data and all kinds of information that we can put together to determine those things. So building up this platform is great, but there's still a lot we have planned to do and that we're working on. Things like more intelligent and dynamic reaction to events that happen. In other words, taking some of those data sources you're talking about and matching them up with other data and then making dynamic decisions based on that. One of the interesting things about our system, that, again, sets it apart from the typical radio type system or something that's on a clock, where you know for the next month, exactly what's going to play when. It's that our system can react dynamically in real- time. So there could be a change that happens now, and it literally would get pushed out in real- time to all of the locations that it applies to. If you can think about it, if you're a host network and you have 2, 500 locations across the US, you can effectively manage those locations like they're one. It's taken the scale of that and turning it into something that's very efficient and easy to manage and can react to real- time events in real- time.

Mike Mumau: Can you give an example of a real- time event? What would happen that you would push something?

Chris Keaney: Some of the dynamic pieces of our system, our messaging can be introduced at any time. Sometimes we get high- priority requests from a client, from a host network that say," Hey, we need to change this message. It's not right, or," Something is expired," or whatever we need to do. As soon as that is ready to go, as soon as it goes through, and if we're creating the message for it, our professional voice talent creates that message, uploads it to the system. As soon as that gets approved, it goes immediately out. So it's immediately available to be played. In real- time, it's going to go out to the locations all across the United States and immediately start playing. Other things that we look at doing is taking into account more dynamic things like what's the weather like at the location. And does that then play into the type of playlist you're going to select for that day?

Zac Darnell: Oh, interesting.

Mike Mumau: Gotcha.

Chris Keaney: Okay.

Zac Darnell: That makes more sense.

Mike Mumau: What I was thinking was I was shopping and I was in front of the meat section and I'm sitting in front of the pork. And it's like, there's something that's on the announcement like," It's pork, the other white meat."

Zac Darnell: Do you want to buy pork?

Mike Mumau: Not that real- time and not that personalized today anyway.

Chris Keaney: Right.

Mike Mumau: That's not what you're doing.

Chris Keaney: No, exactly.

Mike Mumau: That would be creepy, I think to get that message.

Zac Darnell: A little bit. It's like a directional speaker. It's just like Mike Mumau, you want to buy the pork, don't you? It's on sale.

Mike Mumau: I'm not sure I want that. Okay. Very cool.

Zac Darnell: So nothing like also, I don't know, it's Sunday and there's a Colts game. And it's one o'clock. The game is getting ready to kick off. Hey, there's a special on brats. Could that be an example as well?

Chris Keaney: Yes.

Zac Darnell: Okay.

Chris Keaney: What you're talking about there is the targeted on- demand side of our audio advertisements.

Zac Darnell: Yeah.

Chris Keaney: That is definitely something we can do today. We're able to create those types of campaigns in conjunction with our SSPs that we integrate with. An SSP is a Supply- Side Provider. Think of it just as an ad system that we make requests to for ads. It's a way to manage all of the different orders that are in the system, all the different campaigns that are running, that kind of thing. For example, in your case, that would be exactly scheduled that way. There would be a Colts game coming up. There's a specific advertisement that needs to be played during that period of time. And our systems will then be requesting those ads for that period of time that the event is going on.

Zac Darnell: You mentioned that the host company could be regional. It's Indy, it's Illinois, Chicago, it's Ohio. You could have two or three different regions that are... Indy is obviously Colts. Chicago Bears up Northwest. They could, even though they're one chain or one customer host, they can regionalize those ads as well. It can get down to the store level.

Chris Keaney: Yeah. That is an excellent point. That is exactly how the system is designed. It's basically made to manage. You can micromanage it as much as you want. It's not our best practice, but a lot of times our host networks will manage things by either their banner. Obviously, a Kroger has many different banners underneath it, like the fries, different sub subsets of Kroger with different banners, different brands. So a lot of times they're organized by those banners, but then they'll even get even more specific than that because sometimes those banners will cover a large geographic area too. And so they might need to regionalize it more, localize it more. And you can take that from either the top level and you can go all the way down to an individual location, which is something, it's unique. Being able to think that you can target a specific location as opposed to a more general demographic.

Zac Darnell: Right. That's a fair point.

Mike Mumau: I have just a little bit, not a lot of background in advertising. There's people who want to promote their products, but then you got the Kroger's of the world, there's someone who's running the store. Who's sitting at this interface or whatever, and scheduling these ads? Who's controlling that? Is that you guys as a service? I don't know. How does that like ad network and the priority of ads being pushed work?

Chris Keaney: That's a very good question because it is a complicated scenario. When you're thinking about scheduling, just think about any scheduling, think about trying to just manage your calendar. This is complicated enough for one person. Now you're managing the calendar of 2, 500 locations across the US, multiple banners, et cetera. We've had an interesting journey here. When we first got started in the earlier days, we were really focused on providing all the tools to the clients to manage their schedules. And there was a really interesting point where we started having these discussions about getting pushback. Well, the host networks were worried about," Well, how am I going to manage this? How many people am I going to have to hire, or find to manage the services?" And to be fair, we think that the system hides the complexity well. In fact, that's one of the tenants of our system is we want to hide all of the complexity to the user. In other words, only expose the complexity actually required by that user's particular situation. But we started having these conversations and getting this pushback on it. And one of the comments from a host network was," Why don't you just do it for me?" Right.

Zac Darnell: Yeah. Almost like a professional services request?

Chris Keaney: Right. Exactly. So a managed services.

Zac Darnell: Oh yeah.

Chris Keaney: And so we're having this conversation in a meeting, and we were like," Let's just do that. Why don't we just do it for the client? Let's just manage it for the client." And that started our evolution from client managed to a managed services environment. What normally happens is that we can go managed service. Since we can do both ranges, we can do everything from the client manages everything on their own to we manage everything for the client and they don't even have a login into the system.

Zac Darnell: Oh, wow.

Chris Keaney: If that's the way they want to do it, that could be done. But there's a big range in between. Where we've actually ended up is we're moved heavily over to the managed services side, where we're managing most of the scheduling and changes and requests from the client, playlist changes, messaging changes, all of that. But we also have some clients that say," Well, but we want to do this one specific function. And we want to give that out to individual locations to do." Maybe it's they want to be able to let them override their playlist. Let's say they define a playlist, that's a default for the banner. But then there's a few stores regionally, they really want a different vibe for their location. So this goes back to we're really heavily considering the audio experience. When you walk into a store, how does that make you feel? One of the first things that you get when you walk into a store is you hear something. What does it feel like when you walk in? I think we've all probably walked into a store, it's like dead quiet. Right?

Zac Darnell: Yeah.

Mike Mumau: Yeah.

Chris Keaney: That to me, I get super creepy when I walk in there.

Zac Darnell: Yeah.

Chris Keaney: Well, if you're going to have a super creepy feeling because the vibe is not right in the store, are you going to stick around there and do a lot of shopping? No, you're probably in and out as fast as you can on that. And that's the way I am when I do it. It's like I walk into a store, it's dead quiet it feels creepy, I'm just like, I'm getting my stuff and getting out of here. The whole curation of that vibe does need to be tailored to individual locations or regional locations or banners. And so we do that. We have on staff someone that curates all of our playlists. Our host networks will tell us the type of vibe they want, the type of playlist they want to have. And we actually customize that for them. All the way down to the case where, well, we want a one- off. You want to look at some locations the ability to override some of the playlists that the other banners have. So that's the case where, okay, now we give a little bit more control back to the customer when it makes sense and they want to do that.

Zac Darnell: I'm curious, the transition from focusing more on the self- service sales model to having more managed services offerings for your clients, how did that impact the product? Did you have to build more things out from an administrative perspective so that you guys could manage that for your clients?

Chris Keaney: Yeah, that's absolutely what we did is in the beginning, we designed the system to be equally usable by either the client user or our internal admin users. Because internally admin, we're looking at all of the locations as a whole. We have around 6, 000 locations, so that's what we're managing, 6, 000 locations. A large client network might have a thousand, a couple of thousand locations. What we did is, initially, we were focused on the actual client user experience. What happened is, when we started to look at how are we going to transition this and go more to a managed services model, because that's where the feedback we were getting from the host networks is," We don't want to mention this. We want you to manage it for us." We started looking at shifting the priority. This is the whole software development thing. It's like, what do we focus on? What are the current priorities? What features are we building and who are we building them for? What we did is we just started shifting, instead of focusing on a lot of necessarily the client end- user features. We started shifting our focus to making sure that all of our admin and admin features that are used to manage across the board for all of the locations, we started building more and more functionality into that. Because it becomes very difficult when you're talking about a few hundred locations and you start dealing with 5, 000 locations at a time.

Zac Darnell: Yeah. I would imagine that having a huge impact on just the entire experience and a very different shift. I don't know that I've talked to many companies that have gone that direction where it's less... I feel like most SAS companies, these days are all about service. How do we scale through the platform itself versus how do we balance that with this managed service approach and targeting more enablement? I don't know. I can't think of a better word other than enabling your staff to then serve your clients. That's a very interesting shift. I'd imagine making those decisions were rather difficult.

Chris Keaney: Yeah. Again, it's been a really interesting journey as we started out thinking of that typical software as a service model. Or is this going to be a product- like growth company? Is it a sales- like growth company? As we've really started to move to that advertising model, we're really seeing ourselves as an advertising company, which is not going to fall into your typical software as a service model or product- led growth model that a lot of companies fall into these days. And the other thing that complicated it, is we actually have to ship a piece of hardware. Because something has to play all of this music and messaging into the audio system at the location, at the venue.

Zac Darnell: Yeah. I didn't even think about that. Did you guys build that in- house?

Chris Keaney: Yeah. It's one of those things where it's like it's hardware and it's named that for a reason. Right? We started out with basically we used a tablet and it was basically a mobile application that we used as our media player. And as we've been evolving into that more enterprise space, we're taking our media play to some more enterprise level. And so now we're partnered with Lexmark with an IoT Edge device. And that's exactly what all of our enterprise customers are asking for, something they can plug into a rack in the closet and not worry about it.

Mike Mumau: Are you going in and hanging it up? You're installing it or do they do that?

Chris Keaney: Yeah. We have both. We have the ability for... Our installation, we have got our installation down to literally you plugin like three things and it's up and running.

Mike Mumau: That's cool. Oh, wow.

Chris Keaney: Whether it's our older tablets or our newer Edge device, you take it out of the box, you plug it in, you turn it on. It immediately starts communicating back to our platform. And it just starts working. The installation is very simple. However, any installation can run into complications. We're onsite. It's like, is their amplifier working? Is their speakers working? So there is that component to it. It's one of the areas that it's kind of challenging to find the exact model for that. We have a mix right now of some self- installed, but we really like to lean towards a professional installation of it, because then we know it's done, it's up and running. It's verified and we can move on.

Zac Darnell: Yeah. Because you have this weird physical hardware, third- party interoperability problem when you run into that. Trying to compare that from a mental model, connecting into a third- party API, that's kind of what you're doing at the hardware level. Right?

Chris Keaney: Right. Yeah. We've eliminated all of the problems from a software and our application standpoint and the hardware. But when you walk into a closet at a random convenience store in the middle of Nebraska, you don't know what you're going to run into there. It's like, what type of amp is that? What decade was it built in? Do the speakers actually work? Our presenting and installation group, they have plenty of stories. We've had all kinds of crazy stories about how they'd show up, but there's no speakers at this location yet. So it's like, well, that's not going to work.

Zac Darnell: Yeah, a little bit. You kind of need speakers for that to work I think.

Chris Keaney: You kind of need speakers.

Zac Darnell: Yeah.

Chris Keaney: It's an added challenge, an added complication that we have to overcome, but we've got it down to a pretty good process right now. And so as we go, we learn things about making sure what the... We do a review of the locations, and say," Are these ready to actually be installed?" Because a lot of the locations we're bringing on don't necessarily have audio before. So yes, we replaced some of the legacy providers. We do a lot of that as we're gaining the market share in the space. So a lot of legacy replacements, those are pretty straightforward because generally they already have everything they needed to be playing music and messaging before. But a lot of times, we're bringing on new ones that haven't even had it before, or they're new installs. So you think about it when we go in when we have a banner or a host network, and we're going into a store, they're adding new stores. They're building new stores. See stores opening up new ones every day. There's an entire project management piece of, when is it actually going to be okay to go in to get this new location that's come on board up and running?

Zac Darnell: Yeah. I'm curious, you mentioned fun stories and it's probably not just grocery stores that you guys are working with today. Any fun stories about maybe the most unique use of your product that you can think of?

Chris Keaney: I'll give you two fun stories. The first fun story I think explains when we really understood the power of where we're moving with programmatic audio. And that is, we decided to move towards programmatic audio. So we're going to integrate with an SSP to do that. And that's great. We had to build it. We had to integrate with it. And I would say that that first time we literally flipped it on for programmatic advertising, and all of a sudden the ads just start flowing through the system and we can hear them playing in our space, that was very cool to hear that. Other things that we've done is, we have this feature that isn't quite used anymore because of where we've moved. We've gone from this self- serve to a managed services. We have a feature in the application that call is called live messaging. You know we have a professional voice talent team. And that's how we generally funnel, we have a whole workflow system for that. Clients can request a message that goes through a whole workflow, gets assigned to voice talent, gets rough cut, gets final cut. And that's how we do most of our stuff, but we thought it would be kind of neat that if you could just use a companion mobile app and create your own message on the fly and hit a button and have it immediately go out and play in all of your locations that you chose. And we called this Live Messaging. This is one of those features that is a jaw drop when you're doing it for a demo. So you're showing this out to a client or prospect, and you sit there and you create this message on your phone. And you hit a button. And then in near real- time, that message starts playing in your space and all your venues.

Zac Darnell: That's awesome.

Chris Keaney: And whether that's one venue or you send it out to all 10,000 of your venues at the same time.

Zac Darnell: Oh, wow. I'm sure that has some interesting potential unintended human error-

Mike Mumau: Circumstances.

Chris Keaney: Yeah. We recognize the sensitivity around that. Sure. And we have that locked down under some specific permissions in the obligation. We have a full permission set, which is what allows us to craft all of these specific client scenarios. So it's not just like, well, you have three roles in the system and you pick one of those three roles. We can basically create any arbitrary permission set we need to. So that's why we're able to say if a client wants us to do managed services for just about everything, but let's say they want individuals at locations to be able to request messages or change a playlist, we can craft a permission set that will allow them to just do those things in the system. And that's all they kind of get to see and do. In developing it, we're really focused on, we have a complex system, it's scheduling. It's going to be complicated anytime you're dealing with scheduling. We want to really focus on keeping that cognitive load of the user down so that they're not confused when they go in and schedule things. But the live messaging is one of those interesting features that while it demos really well, it is literally a wow moment. It's a shock and awe moment when that happens and you just did it real- time in demo. But as we move to managed services, it's also one of those things where you had to take a look at and say," Well, this feature, the use cases around this feature are not very big right now at this point." That's part of, going back to when we were talking about how do we make those decisions in what features and what priority? And that's how we move from client- specific, in- venue type of features to more of the, what are all the features we need to support tens of thousands of locations in a managed service model?

Zac Darnell: Yeah.

Mike Mumau: My mind goes to walking up to the store manager," JJ Darnell, your dad is looking for you and he'll be leaving in five minutes if you're not at the front door." That's his son.

Zac Darnell: Yeah. I've said it.

Mike Mumau: You probably don't want them doing that though, I'm sure.

Chris Keaney: Well, we had all kinds of fun with it in the office as you can imagine.

Zac Darnell: I'm sure. I bet.

Mike Mumau: Totally.

Zac Darnell: Okay. I want to shift to maybe the last 18 months. Obviously, a big topic for, I don't know, the whole world.

Chris Keaney: A few people.

Zac Darnell: Just a few. And lots of different industries impacted by the pandemic. Thinking about brick and mortar, that's a big vertical that has been impacted with the... I don't remember, but I'm going to guess, a hundred X in online shopping over the last 18 months. I don't know if that's actually real, but maybe it's real. How has that impacted Vibenomics and your customers and maybe the trajectory that you guys were headed down?

Chris Keaney: The last 18 months have definitely, I think been a challenge for just about everyone. For us, it was a challenging time as well when one of our big segments that we've focused on or are focusing on are the grocery store and convenience store chains. So when lockdown started happening and all that, that really shifted things around. We have two client groups really that we focus on. We have the host networks, which are all the locations, the C stores, the grocery stores, all of that. And we have advertisers that we also are focused on because the advertisers are looking to place ads into these different venues. One of the things that happened though is that grocery stores became essential businesses during this period of time. And advertisers still wanted to reach those shoppers. It was one of the surprising things that happened during this time. But at the same time, we had to be a little excited about the effect it had on the revenue from an advertiser, still wanting to place ads into these venues.

Zac Darnell: That's fair. You mentioned that was surprising. When I think about supporting brick and mortar, why do you think it's important that we continue to do that?

Chris Keaney: This is the talk of, is brick and mortar dying or dead? And the interesting thing is we've been hearing about brick and mortar dying for a long time. Yet it's still here. And I think that certainly while online is a big deal... It's not going anywhere. It's going to keep growing. But there's still a huge opportunity for brick and mortar. The way I look at it, this is my view, is brick and mortar is an experience. Online is a convenience. It's certainly necessary sometimes for convenience, but we see this in all kinds of other ways and spaces that people will seek out a positive experience. And that's where we come in back to creating this vibe for your venue. It's like, how do you want your customer to feel when they walk in the door? And it's not just the playlists that are out there and the music that you want and what kind of atmosphere you want to create in your particular location. But it's like, what kind of messaging do you want to give to that customer? They're in your store. People talk about the path to purchase. And how do we get people to go there? How do we get people to go to your online site? How do you get people to go to your physical store? They're already there. Our messaging is going to someone that is in the venue ready to purchase, has their wallet out. And you have the opportunity to talk directly to them while they're thinking about making that purchase. In my view, it's incredibly powerful. You're not wondering about how you're getting them there, or can you convince them to go to your online site. They're literally at the venue ready to buy something.

Zac Darnell: I love how concise, the brick and mortar is an experience, online shopping is a convenience. I think about my own buying behaviors. That actually really resonates. I still like going to the store for a lot of things, even grocery store, we're still going to go to the grocery store. Now, sometimes it helps to buy some stuff online and do that when it's convenient. But my wife and I actually like going to the grocery store. It's a fun experience sometimes when our kiddos are compliant, but generally speaking, still like going to... especially clothes or different things like that.

Mike Mumau: It's an experience for them when they get to ride in the car-

Zac Darnell: That is true.

Mike Mumau: In the cart that you're pushing them in. Like, all right. Nope, put that back. Nope, put that down. We're not buying that.

Zac Darnell: No, you can't ride on the side of it right now. Yeah. I love that. So thinking about decision- making, I would imagine that it's different for everybody. It's probably different for you as an individual throughout the day, versus you as a leadership team organizationally. Tell me a little bit about maybe how you make decisions, whether it's product decisions, technology decisions, organizational decisions. There's been a lot of things to navigate, especially here over the last 18 months. Tell me a little bit about how and maybe Vibenomics have done that.

Chris Keaney: I'll try to step through those. Let's start at the organizational level. At the organizational level, we've spent a lot of time getting everyone on board around this whole Digital Audio Out- of- Home. This is what we do. We're an advertising company. We're creating advertising networks is what we're doing. We're hyper- focused on blazing that trail for programmatic Digital Audio Out- of- Home advertising. And one of the things that highlights this is because it didn't exist before we started it. And to show you why, it's like when I talked about connecting to those SSPs, the ad serving platforms that we use to help manage all of the campaigns and orders. In all the cases where we've gone and integrated with one, they had to modify their systems just to allow Audio Out- of- Home advertising to work. And they saw that, they saw the value and the growth potential in that space enough that they got on board and said," Yes, we'll modify our systems so that we can serve ads, audio- only ads to your platform."

Mike Mumau: These systems, just so we all understand. They serve ads to websites, they serve ads to different platforms-

Chris Keaney: Yeah, absolutely.

Mike Mumau: They added your platform because they saw the future like you guys did and what you're doing in audio.

Chris Keaney: Yes.

Mike Mumau: That's cool.

Zac Darnell: That's really cool. You really are in that way, blazing a trail because it's new.

Chris Keaney: It's brand new. In fact, one of the challenges with this is... and this is why in the beginning, when I tried to describe what it is, because when you say Digital Audio Out- of- Home, not a lot of people have heard of it before, because it didn't really exist as a category until recently. We view ourselves as we're establishing that category. And when you think about a small startup as establishing a new advertising category, that's a huge challenge. And the only way to do that is we built an exceptional team at Vibenomics. Specifically, in the product team, we focus on having a small high- performance team. We need to be able to react quickly and change from self- serve to managed services. We need to be able to make those changes very rapidly. We need direct to changing requirements from the customer, changing environments in the market the last 18 months, for example. From an organizational level, it's that piece. It's making sure everyone is focused, laser- focused on what we're trying to do and what we're trying to build, and that's across the organization. It's operations, it's product team. It's our programming voice talent department, it's accounting, it's everybody, sales, ad ops, all of them. So on the product side of things, we recognize how challenging it can be to manage schedules. We recognize how challenging it is because just managing your own calendar can be a challenge. So now think about, you're going to manage the calendar for 10,000, 20,000 different locations. It's kind of mind- boggling. So it's not going to be easy. And it's not going to be just this simple, one- click, two- click type thing. There are going to be a lot of options. There are going to be a lot of considerations of when things play and what they look like. So we really focus on making that user experience, that complex scheduling as simple as possible. And that's why I talk about, we really focus on at any point in time that our users are in that product, what is that cognitive load on them? Are we making them think about things they don't need to be thinking about right now? So if we can remove behind the scenes, the complexity of selecting all the locations, because all of our content is location- based. It can be tied down to a specific location. If we can remove as much of the overhead of thinking about that and making it as simple as going through and selecting the right objects you need and scheduling it and then being able to push that out. So now, you don't have to worry about, well, now I got to do that update 2, 000 more times. No, you can manage that all as one. I refer to it as our many as one tenant of the application. It's like, we want you to be able to manage as many things as you want, as many locations as you want, as if they were one location. And we do that by just limiting the user experience down to only the necessary complexity for that user for their use case. For example, when we do things as simple as, let's say you're a manager at a host network for a location. There could be 2, 000 locations for your host network, but you're only responsible for one, we remove all of the complexity of the other locations. You get to view the system as if your location is the only thing that matters in the world.

Mike Mumau: So you're creating a new category. You have customers that are excited. You've got ad networks that are excited. I'm sure you get tons of feedback like," Hey, can you do this too? Can you build this? Can you build that?" I'm sure you have more feature ideas and requests than you have time and money to build. How do you guys make decisions on like," Well, what do we do? And do we do it for everybody? Do we do it for one person? This is a big customer." How do you make those decisions?

Chris Keaney: Yeah. If you've been in product development for very long, we've all had those scenarios where we're having to make a decision about, is this is fly in from this prospect something that we need to entertain? And so we do. We've had a lot of these come flying in and the key... From leading that team and from leading those product decisions, the key is to keep your focus. It's so easy when you have a product like ours, we're literally applicable to any location- based business out there. It's not just grocery stores and C stores. We can keep expanding. We've got the hotel industry. You've got anything, restaurants. You've got any physical location that wants to create an atmosphere, a vibe, and is open to programmatic advertising as well. Because we've taken that legacy background music, and we've turned it now into a potential revenue stream for our clients. It's hard to compare it to what used to be there, because we're not building a product that just says," Oh, we're going to play some background music for you so that you have something going on in the background." We're building a programmatic advertising platform. And so we have to stay laser- focused on what features are moving that forward. There are all kinds of neat whizzbang stuff that we come up with all the time, like live messaging, which we just talked about. It's awesome. But at the same time, we have to watch for those types of things coming in now. At one time, that was a really great thing to have on the system as part of the platform of features. Now we have to say," Does this fit into? Are we moving forward our host networks? Does this feature move forward our advertising platform?

Zac Darnell: All right, Chris, last question here as we wrap up. What keeps you most excited?

Chris Keaney: Hah.

Zac Darnell: Do you have a favorite feature or just the opportunity or what?

Chris Keaney: Yeah. Everybody likes the opportunity to build something new, but you don't often always get that chance. I've been very fortunate in my career. I've been on a number of these first things that come along, a long number of startups along the way. The things that make me the most excited, that keep me the most motivated go back to when I mentioned how we flipped on programmatic for the first time and the ads just started flowing just for the system. And all of the time and effort we put into building the system, connecting to the SSPs, all of the testing that went on, everything, you finally actually go and press that button and turn on programmatic. And ads just start playing on the system. It's hard to describe the feeling that you get like, that's working. We literally right now press the button and we just created a new advertising category.

Zac Darnell: That's cool.

Chris Keaney: In building something from the ground up, it's always fun and exciting. It's a great journey. It's not always something you get to do all the time. I just feel very fortunate to have been part of this whole journey.

Mike Mumau: That's awesome.

Zac Darnell: Yeah. That is awesome. When it works the first time, it's always very, ah, thank God. We don't have to go fix anything.

Mike Mumau: We thought it would work. And it did.

Zac Darnell: We thought it would work and it did. That's great. Well, Chris, thank you so much for spending time with us and teaching us about a brand new category and the things that you guys are doing over there.

Chris Keaney: Oh, thanks for having me. This has been a lot of fun.

Zac Darnell: Hey Mike, we just got done talking to Chris, learning a little bit about his world and Vibenomics.

Mike Mumau: That was fun.

Zac Darnell: That was a fun chat. Yeah?

Mike Mumau: Yeah. That was a lot of fun, man. Thanks for having me.

Zac Darnell: Yeah. I appreciate you joining. Hey, this is the part of the show where we get some thoughts, some takeaways. What did you find interesting? Maybe the one to three things you pulled out of our conversation with Chris that you thought was either interesting or fun.

Mike Mumau: I can't put it in fun or interesting, and maybe it's more interesting than fun is just a little bit of an eye- opener for me. You and I both work at SEP. We tend to just stay in our lane of software product development. And so I think about products when we're talking to people just in the context of software, and as he talked about going, especially it was going from the SAS product to more of a managed service product, and just thinking about the ecosystem that is his product, he's got more than just software. He's got software for his people. He's got software for his host networks, the Kroger's of the world. And then he's got things like that IoT Edge device, just thinking about hardware as a part of his products. I don't know. That was just kind of cool to hear. He doesn't think about products just as one user interface and one customer segment. It's about a lot of different things that all need to work for his customers to have an awesome experience.

Zac Darnell: That's true. They even have voice talent as a product.

Mike Mumau: That's true.

Zac Darnell: That's one they're offering.

Mike Mumau: Yeah.

Zac Darnell: There's not a lot of technology there other than actually recording.

Mike Mumau: Yeah. There's a lot for them to coordinate and it doesn't sound like he let's... Now he's a CTO, but he's obviously a product thinker too. He doesn't let that kind of like, I stay in my technical lane, keep him from serving all of the different segments well. Whether it's the voice talent or his people or host networks or advertisers, he's got a lot of people to keep happy.

Zac Darnell: That's true. Another thing that I thought was fun just to quote him really quick, was this idea of a brick and mortar as an experience and online as a convenience. I found that to be, I don't know, really insightful and true for me. I love going to Whole Foods or going to the store sometimes and shopping online is really a convenience. I thought that was a really awesome way to look at their industry, especially given the last 18 months.

Mike Mumau: Yeah. Especially like guys like you and I, we like to see people. It's not always convenient. Like," Hey honey, I'm going to go to the store. I know it's going to take longer. We could just quick ship this with Amazon." But no, that was helpful. And I don't know if you meant this or not, but it was funny to hear when you brought up the elevator music, it was kind of an interesting segue.

Zac Darnell: Yeah.

Mike Mumau: Because you're basically like," Elevator music, right?" And you're like," Ah, man, that's the legacy experience we're trying to get rid of."

Zac Darnell: Yeah.

Mike Mumau: It's just kind of funny because that's their target segment. They're probably used to just it being, paying this cost of I'm going to have some kind of lame music. I'm not really thinking as a convenience store or as the host network about the experience that our folks are having. And the sell for Vibenomics vibe which is cute, to create a different vibe. But also, maybe it's not just a call center. Maybe they can actually make some money selling some of that airspace to advertisers. That was cool to hear too.

Zac Darnell: That's a really good point. Yeah. That was an unintended segue on my part. Normally they're intended. That one not so much.

Mike Mumau: That's good, man. Ask dumb questions.

Zac Darnell: Oh, my friend. Well, Mike, I appreciate you so much for joining me for this conversation. I really enjoyed learning about this and I actually want to follow up with Chris in like a year and just see how the vibe is. I don't know if that's-

Mike Mumau: Yeah, absolutely. Good stuff. No, I'm never going to walk into a grocery store the same way again and just be like," Oh, I wonder, is this the vibe that they wanted? Because this is really cool."

Zac Darnell: And it'll be very obvious if there is no vibe-

Mike Mumau: Exactly.

Zac Darnell: ...or if it's a creepy vibe of no music, no nothing.

Mike Mumau: Yeah. Former sales guy here, I might be tempted to like,"Hey, is the general manager here? Because this vibe is really bad. I know a guy.

Zac Darnell: Well, thank you again, Mike, this was too much fun. Two extroverts on a podcast, I feel like can be overload, but I think it was fun.

Mike Mumau: I think we both behaved.

Zac Darnell: Yes.

Mike Mumau: We let him do more talking than we normally do. Good job Zac and Mike.

Zac Darnell: Thanks, brother.

Mike Mumau: All right brother.

Zac Darnell: Hey, take care man.