Fun fact: Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. Can your business afford to ignore your existing customers? That’s what I’m exploring today with my special guest Amber Dermoudy, social media strategist at Khoros and digital marketing educator at General Assembly. In my conversation with Amber we cover a wide range of topics including why businesses need to focus more on customer retention, how Amber builds thriving communities and why you need to start utilising social messaging in your business. Amber also introduces us to her cat Leonardo DiCatrio who is an Instagram influencer and explains how having a pet can help with your personal brand. So I hope I retain your attention for the entirety of this special retention marketing episode with Amber Dermoudy.

What you will learn in this episode

• Why businesses need to focus more on retention
• How to close the loyalty loop
• What Amber is excited about for the future of marketing
• AI in marketing
• How Amber builds thriving communities
• How General Assembly built their community
• “Word of mouth is your highest form of marketing and flattery.”
• What is social messaging?
• Why you need to focus on personal branding > you are your business
• How Amber learns new digital marketing skills

Resources mentioned

Airtasker Amber’s digital marketing course at General Assembly Google Home Amazon Alexa Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits from 25-95% Brené Brown Digital marketing events and training – Interactive Minds Sydney Khoros: Online Community & Social Media Management Frank Body Slack Is Facebook Messenger the New Email? 3 Experiments to Find Out In a test at a Hubspot event, the Facebook Messenger broadcasts had an average open rate of 80% and average CTR of 13%. That was 242% and 609% better than our email controls, respectively. 1 in every 3 mobile minutes is spent on Facebook and Instagram Babblestack – Acquire, engage & serve customers with Live Chat, IVR and Social Messaging By 2027, 50% of the American workforce will be in the gig economy. Calm.com meditation app Koala Mattresses Follow Leonardo DiCatrio on Instagram

Book Recommendations

Dare to Lead by Brené Brown Hug Your Haters by Jay Baer This Is Marketing by Seth Godin 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by by Piers Paul Read

What business would you build on Mars?

I love this question, by the way. Big Elon Musk fan. I think what I’d probably do is open some sort of museum, gallery, or library. Or, a combination of all of those things which allows people to experience where we’ve come from and also have a space that they can touch physical things that aren’t virtual, and physical things from the past to keep us in touch with yeah, like I said, where we’ve come from, but I guess who we are as human beings before all just AI and a computer, or future arm, we’re just plugged in. I think that’s what I would do.

Get in touch with Amber

Amber on LinkedIn Amber’s website

Transcript

Brendan: Thanks for taking some time out today and coming in and talking all things digital marketing. My first question is, what was your first exposure to digital marketing? Amber: Well, I guess I’m kind of aging myself when I talk about this, but I think I have a really interesting background and probably a lot of listeners will identify with this. In my career, I’ve pivoted quite a little bit, but my first exposure was I’d been studying business and law, working as a paralegal in legal firms and I just wasn’t very inspired and I had an idea, and I had a business partner, and we actually launched our own business called Betty Lifestyle Assistance. Amber: It was in Brisbane, and essentially it was a concierge for time poor professionals. This is kind of before the days of Airtasker. Airtasker came in and kind of I guess put a tech spin on that whole concept, and that was the direction we were going. They beat us at the punch, but it was probably more of a higher end type of help, so anything from arranging nannies, cleaning, having someone at home to be there for services, or waiting in line for an iPhone. Like a PA for your life, basically. Amber: Launching that business, me and my business partner at the time, she was very commercial so she was kind of out there, trying to I guess get backing and things like that. Whereas I was very much on the marketing, PR side of things. This was my first exposure to Facebook was very new back then, people were still on MySpace. Brendan: Wow. Amber: But back then, you didn’t even business pages on Facebook and being a small business, we definitely went out on a PR spin, but it was all of those cheaper and marketing things that we could do such as Google and such as Facebook, to really bring in I guess the customers. That actually started my trajectory into social media, so marketing for the company, especially using Facebook, really helped to build our brand profile, and really helped to I guess cement us in the market. Amber: It was cheap, I really enjoyed it, it was fun, and we ended up selling the business about three years later and I got picked up by News Limited to launch the True Local program in Brisbane. That was my whole career and start in digital marketing. Brendan: When did you come to the realization that Facebook would be such a powerful marketing tool? Amber: I realized pretty early on and it was really interesting, I was teaching a lot of people back then and obviously this is 10, 11, yeah, that long ago. I was teaching a lot of people about it and there were so many people saying, “This won’t take off. What’s in a like? There’s no value in a like here.” It still had advertising capabilities, it didn’t have what it has today, but I knew pretty early on that it was a really powerful tool and I knew the power of just social generally was an upward trend, and I was really happy and really lucky to I guess choose that as my specialty and my career path. Seeing now just the impact that social media has on our everyday lives. Brendan: Yeah. And you’re a bit of an all rounder, an expert in many different parts. Amber: A Jack of all trades. Brendan: Yeah. What got you excited in 2019? What are you focusing on? Amber: Oh look, 2019’s really exciting I think. I call myself a pseudo geek. You’re right, I definitely love to dabble in a lot of different areas and I teach digital marketing at a company called General Assembly. Brendan: Oh nice. Amber: Which keeps me on my toes and I’m teaching people in there, I’ve got everyone from your top leading CMOs to your students just coming out of uni. I’ve even had CEOs in there who more want to understand what their agencies are talking about, as opposed to learning the techniques. But I guess what gets me excited in 2019 is understanding the role that future tech is going to play. What is going to be automated? We’re already starting to see automation takeover a lot of different industries. What’s the role that AI is going to have? Amber: Definitely in the social field, when you think about bots and things like that, VR’s really exciting. How can we as marketers use this automation and use technology moving forward to give better experiences and really provide value to our customers? At the end of the day, marketers and people in a lot of different fields are thinking, “How can I future proof myself?” The way that you can do that is by being excited about the future and not scared, and just preparing yourself in every way that you can. Brendan: Yeah, I wanted to touch on AI in marketing. Here at Metigy, we’re using AI in marketing, we’re building that into our platform as well. Have you seen any early success stories of someone that’s implemented the technology well? Amber: Yeah look, I think AI is a really interesting one at the moment. I think if you look at any of your predictive IoT devices in particular, like your Google Homes and your Alexas and your things like that, I think it’s really interesting the things that they’re doing there. But in terms of I guess different case studies around AI, I think it still is early days. But I definitely look at your Alexas and your Amazons and I’m really interested to see I guess probably more we’ll see it in the US, trickling into Australia, but I’m really interested to look more at that order to shelf to shipping process will all be done by robots soon enough. I’m really interested to see that. Brendan: Yeah, for sure. One area that I wanted to touch on is retention. I know that you focus on loyalty a lot, and you run a workshop about closing the loyalty loop. I mean, retention I think is still overlooked in the business community for sure. There’s some statistics out there, it’s five times as expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. I just read an article out of Harvard Business School this week saying a 5% increase retention, it can lead to an increase in profits between 25 and 95%, just because the small gains lead to the compounding revenue growth and the customers stick around longer. Brendan: I mean, a few questions. Why is it still so overlooked if it’s paramount for growth? And how can early stage businesses put more attention to this? Amber: Oh, my gosh, Brendan. This is like music to my ears. You should hear me in my classes and my students, I’m drumming this in constantly. I guess to answer your first question, why aren’t businesses focusing on it as much, I don’t know. I think that later stage businesses definitely are, so I guess in the product life cycle, you do have to understand that an early stage business is looking at growth and they are looking to just bring in the numbers. I know Amazon at the beginning were like, “We don’t care where they come from, we don’t care who they are. We’ve got $33 to spend on acquiring customer, let’s just get as many as we can.” Amber: If you look at especially subscription based services, they just want to get as many through the door, but you’re absolutely right. Retention is so paramount to the success of any business. Not only from a monetary standpoint, but also from a relationship and a standpoint of loyalty as we were talking about. I think some things that businesses can definitely do is understand that it is a relationship with their customer. I’m a big fan of Brene Brown. Have you heard of Brene Brown? Brendan: No. Tell us more. Amber: Brene Brown, she is a researcher out of Texas in the US, and she does a lot of research into things like vulnerability. It’s kind of a different tact, but she has a great analogy that she talks to her daughter about when it comes to building loyalty, and it’s more about loyalty and friendships for her daughter at school. She has an analogy about a marble jar and this marble jar, it’s for each good deed and each good act of loyalty that your friends do, the marble jar gets filled, but it’s also the same for those acts of disloyalty, exactly, and those acts of things that go against the friendship. Amber: I think that brands should try and look at it in that way a little bit more. So, how can they fill the marble jar of their customers? They can do that through the little things. It’s the honesty, it’s the integrity, it’s taking customer service to the next level. If they can do that and if they can continue that relationship, then retention just comes along with that because if people like from you, they want to buy from you. If you’re giving them great customer service, if you’re listening to everything that they have to say and taking it all onboard, then they’re going to want to continue using you over your competitors, which are constantly going to be trying to take those people from you. Brendan: Yeah, for sure. How does that feed into community building as well? Obviously you have to retain the customers, keep building that community. I know you’re a passionate community builder as well. Digital … Oh, Interactive Minds, sorry, in Sydney. And you’ve got a few other communities that you contribute to, as well. Amber: Yeah, definitely. My work at … We’ve touched on a few little side hustles that I do. Interactive Minds is digital marketing events and I run digital marketing courses with General Assembly, but my day job is with a company called Khoros, which is an enterprise level social media marketing company. We’re very focused on building communities and retaining communities, both in a social sense, and forum based communities as well. Amber: Really, tricks when it comes to community, it’s almost the same as that retention principle. It’s about starting and starting the interesting conversations, listening to what everybody has to say. A lot of people, when they reach out, just want to be heard. I think building a really strong community behind a brand can really help to elevate you. If you look at some of the brands that have kind of built themselves up from almost a fan ideology, you’ve got things like Frank body scrub, based out of Melbourne, purely built themselves from community. Amber: There’s a lot of opportunity for brands or companies to invest in that community principle, as a way of retaining customers. Brendan: Are there any stories that you can tell us of people you’ve worked with, they’ve implemented some of the steps that we’ve talked about, the loyalty loop, focused on retention? Amber: Yeah. I actually think General Assembly is a really good example of all of those things. They are an education company for those who haven’t heard of General Assembly before, and they have a wide range of different courses, free workshops that they run all the time, frequent events, and in terms of the loyalty loop and the retention that they have there, they’re constantly looking for feedback. Myself personally, when I look back at when I first started teaching there, I got an NPS of 60 or 68 or something like that. It wasn’t great. Amber: I was like, “Oh, my gosh,” but they were looking and asking people about all things from, “Okay, what’s your view of the syllabus? What’s your view of the content? What’s your view of the instructor?” Which is me. “What are your view of even the surroundings, the desks, the chairs, the facilities?” They were really asking those hard questions. Four years later, I’m still there and I’ve just received my last round and it’s an NPS 100. Brendan: Oh, wow. Congratulations. Amber: Thank you very much. But it’s taken them and it’s taken me that time to really, with each iteration of the course that I’ve run, it’s changed. There’s changes, and they’re constantly listening. So, I get a lot of students in my class that have said, “I’ve come in from someone else’s recommendation.” Still to this day, word of mouth is your highest form of marketing and flattery. On the community side, everybody’s invited to Slack, so probably a lot of your listeners have Slack. They’ve got a great tribe of alumni with General Assembly. Amber: They keep their community strong with free events, VIP invites to different things, and really just keeping them in the loop because they find that a lot of people will come and do one course, so they might do digital marketing, then they might come and do UX, and then they might come and do programming or something like that. Amber: They’re able to keep people coming back, they’re able to keep people in the game by having really, really good, closing the loyalty loop on NPS, as well as keeping communities strong. Brendan: Yeah, really strong community. Another area that I wanted to touch on was social messaging. I know that you’ve done a lot of work in this area as well. Can you tell us first, what is social messaging? And then, how can early stage businesses utilize this tactic? Amber: Yeah, look, social messaging is I think really important for a lot of businesses to think about. When you think about your average person these days, I think it’s the stat of about one in every three minutes is spent on either Facebook or Instagram. Brendan: Wow. Amber: Yes. When you think about yourself, it is those micro moments. I think, so firstly social messaging is basically using a social media channel to connect with someone. Whether it’s a brand, whether it’s your friends, firing up the group chat, et cetera. The really big opportunity here for brands is that people, primarily anybody under the age of 50 these days doesn’t really want to make a phone call. Amber: They want to use a live chat function, but social messaging takes that even a step further. I think the frustrating thing with live chat at the moment is that if you lose internet connection or something happens, you’ve lost that chat. Whereas with social messaging, it’s in your inbox. It’s still in your Instagram, or it’s still in your Facebook or your Twitter or whatever that might be. That’s a great opportunity for brands to be able to continue that conversation, not just have a one-off or one that can be interrupted. Amber: It also means people can pick up that conversation later. There’s a lot of really cool, interesting things that’ll be happening here. We talked about AI before and a really great brand strategy is to have something like a bot or an automation to be able to pick up those easy questions, the FAQs, and then leave your community managers and your customer service team to pick up the harder questions and the social messaging, as well as being able to delight customers through maybe some fun gives or things like that. I think it’s definitely a space that’s growing. Amber: I know that HubSpot recently came out and said social messaging, or Facebook Messenger in particular, they said is the new email. I think it’s a big statement. They actually ran a test, they just used Facebook Messenger as their primary channel versus email- Brendan: Wow. Amber: … at an event that they ran, and I think they had, it’s on their website and I had them speak at one of my events, but they had a 242% increase in open rates. Brendan: Wow. Amber: And a 620% increase in clickthrough rates. Brendan: 620%? Amber: By using Facebook Messenger- Brendan: Wow. Amber: … versus email. When you think about one on one channels these days, and if you think one in every three minutes, mobile minutes, is spent on Facebook or Instagram, you’ve got an instant one on one channel with your customers who are going to be reading your communications. There’s a big opportunity for brands and businesses to leverage that. Brendan: Yeah, we also had Derek and Ben on the podcast from Babblestack. They’re building out a similar solution with social messaging, so if we call up Optus for example, they can then get pushed to the social media platform of their choice, continue the conversation, and not lose the message as you said. They have it backed up and then on the Optus end, for example, they’ll be on Slack, communicating with them, over WeChat, Messenger, WhatsApp. Yeah, the user experience is definitely going to be improved. Amber: That’s amazing. I’d love an intro to those guys. Brendan: Yeah, no, definitely can introduce you guys. Another area that I wanted to touch on, I mean in digital marketing it is becoming a bit of a hot area, personal branding. I mean, everyone wants to become a personal branding celebrity. There’s so many platforms now. Give me your take on personal branding and where it’s headed. Amber: Yeah, I think that’s a really great question. I heard a stat yesterday that 50% of Americans by 2027 are going to be either freelance or in the gig economy. Brendan: Wow. Amber: Even for listeners out there in the startup space, you are your business. You really represent your business and your brand, so having a really strong personal brand is very important. I knew this very early on when I was switching careers. I knew that I didn’t have the experience of other people in the space, but I was still going for the same jobs. Amber: The thing that gave me the edge over those people was that I was really, I put a lot of time into my personal brand. I learned how to build a website before you could just go and buy a template. Brendan: Drag and drop. Amber: Exactly. Before Squarespace and Wix and all of those things. I learned HTML and I built my own website and I did all of that, and I did so much work to kind of build my portfolio and build my brand. It helped me when I moved to Sydney, I didn’t even look for a job. I got approached straight away by two people and at 26, I got a head of digital role. Brendan: Wow. Amber: Purely through my personal brand. It was really, really great. I think for everybody out there, you do need to invest in yourself. You need to really come to the table with what makes you unique. Again, back to the AI thing we were talking about before, even in recruitment, AI’s going to take over a lot of that. Brendan: Wow. Amber: If you don’t have that, all those tick boxes, you’re not even going to get the opportunity to be in the room. You’re going to have to come up with other ways to standout amongst your competitors. And personal branding is definitely a way that you can do that. I think some tips there, know what you have to say. Like, stand for something and really back yourself. Have something interesting, a little bit quirky. Mine is I have an Instagram famous cat called Leonardo DiCatrio. Brendan: Nice. Amber: I mention him in everything. He’s on my website, he’s in my resume, he’s everywhere, because people remember that. Most of the time, people will remember my cat before they remember my name. I think having something that’s a bit quirky and giving personality is important. But I think outside of that personal branding, and there are other channels, definitely be across all the channels that you want, but maybe you’re stronger at LinkedIn, maybe you’re stronger at Instagram. I guess it depends on the audience that you’re trying to appeal to, and also what you enjoy the most. Amber: I think anything in life, if you enjoy it, you’re going to be better at it. If you love Instagram, or if you love Twitter, that’s the space that try and build yourself there. LinkedIn is always so important, as well. From a professional standpoint, everyone’s going to be looking there, but I think as well, invest in yourself. Educate yourself, do everything that you can to really I guess build your confidence and also your network. Brendan: Speaking of investing in yourself, what’s an investment that you’ve made in yourself that’s made a big difference? Amber: Look, probably lately, the biggest, it’s a very small investment, it was only $70, but it was an app that I bought, and it’s called Calm. Brendan: Oh, Calm.com? Amber: Yes. I’m one of those really cheap people that hates buying apps. I’m really cheap. I will spend all my money on food and it doesn’t matter, but when it comes to apps, I always want the free version. But Calm has been a huge investment for me. Probably a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners can relate, but I don’t sleep very well normally. I never have. When you’re running your own business, you’re on 24/7. You don’t get to switch off. But Calm, for me, has really, they’ve got some great tools in there to- Brendan: Sleep Stories. Amber: Sleep Stories, yes. Brendan: Matthew McConaughey sleep story. That always puts you to sleep. Amber: Oh absolutely, yes. Matthew McConaughey, that voice. Yeah look, the sleep stories are amazing, but I think in this day and age, we’re all so stressed. We’re all connected all the time, so I think something like that is really, really helpful for us to just take a step back, help our sleep, take some time out. I definitely recommend it for anyone looking for I guess an investment in themselves, because if you invest in yourself, if you’re rested and you’re feeling good mentally, you’re only going to do a much better job in everything that you touch in your life. Brendan: Yeah, for sure. Now I wanted to talk about learning how to learn. You’re an instructor at General Assembly. They’re pretty innovative, the way they teach as well, and especially the content. How do you learn how to learn the new skills you learn? Because as early stage business owners, there’s a lot of noise, there’s a lot of things that you need to become an expert on. What’s the best way that you recommend how to do that? Amber: Look, that’s a really great question. I’ve always been a very hands-on person. I think there’s people that come to my classes or that come to … It’s a 10 week part time course, or a one week intensive course, and there’s people that come in thinking, “I’m going to be an expert at the end.” Digital marketing has so many facets to it. It’s just incredible, and they continue to evolve. Brendan: I guess being an instructor’s a good way to keep your accountable and up-to-date. Amber: Exactly. I always say if I was to take a year holiday, I’d be behind by the time I got back. The best way to learn and stay up-to-date is to always keep reading. You need to just have the blogs that you love to read, books are great, but books get outdated so quickly, so invest in eBooks, videos, all the online learning tools. But as I said, I’m very much a doer, so I’ve always had little side hustles, or even little things that I can practice on. Amber: Leonardo DiCatrio’s been a great one for me on Instagram, because I can try out different tools that come out all the time with his account, not having to compromise my own business accounts. My suggestion to business owners and small businesses out there, you can still do this with your own businesses, but just do smaller, like your, I guess more of your lean startup approach, right? Just do a smaller sprint, doesn’t have to be perfect, but just try it out, try something new. If it doesn’t land, it doesn’t land, but if it does, then you’ve found something really cool and you’re learning as you go. Amber: Just be open to what’s out there and don’t be so afraid to fail, I guess. Just give it a go and see how it all pans out. Brendan: How many followers does Leonardo DiCatrio have? Amber: I think it’s about 12,000 at the moment. Brendan: 12,000? Wow. Amber: Yeah. He goes viral constantly. Brendan: Wow. Amber: When my phone’s pinging, I’m like, “Oh, he’s gone viral somewhere.” But he hasn’t been very good at posting lately, so he needs to get back into his content. Brendan: Definitely. We touched on business books, so they do get outdated but some principles remain the same. Are you a big reader? Are there any books that you can recommend? Amber: Absolutely. Huge reader. I mentioned Brene Brown before, and I saw her when she was in Australia a couple of weeks ago, so that’s why she’s so, I guess, present in my mind. She has a couple of books but one of my favorite is called Dare To Lead. Brendan: Dare To Lead. Amber: She talks about having those hard conversations, she talks about being in the arena, and not listening to the voices of people who are not in the arena. I think for entrepreneurs, small business owners, really anybody out there, really great lessons. Same kind of thread on that, Hug Your Haters by Jay Baer. A really good one. Amber: Anything by Seth Godin, of course. There’s a reason he’s got God in his last name. This is a weird one, because it’s mainly young men that like him, but I love a bit of Jordan Peterson as well. 12 Rules For Life, I thought that was a really interesting read and good principles. And then I guess this is going to be a little strange, and I hope not too morbid, but a book that I absolutely love is the book Alive by Paul Read, and it’s about the Andes survivors from the plane crash, that ended up having to resort to cannibalism to survive. Brendan: Wow, interesting. Amber: Hear me out. Whenever I’m in a moment of thinking that I don’t have anything more to give, or that life is terrible, or that things are so bad, I remember back to this book and I think about the struggles that these people had to go through to survive, they had to climb out of the Andes- Brendan: Wow. Amber: … they had no food, they had nothing, and they just kept pushing and they kept going. One of the survivors from that is now a motivational speaker. I’m very much a big advocate of his. A little bit of a weird one, but Alive, a great story about perseverance, and I think perseverance is so important, especially in the startup hustle these days. Just keep going. Just keep going. Brendan: Awesome books. We’ll put all of the resources and books that Amber’s talked about today, you can find them at Metigy.com/podcast. So, what’s in your current business black box? What are you struggling to solve at the moment? Amber: Yeah. Look, the thing that I think myself and a lot of marketers are really struggling to solve at the moment is probably measurement and attribution. There’s always been an issue of attribution across channels so okay, you have your Google ad set up, but it was converted by an email. Who gets that attribution? Or, there’s 10 channels involved in this, what should the weighting be for that attribution? I think Google has the first and last touch model. They’ve got a few different models, and it’s definitely something in the industry that’s up in the air. Amber: Especially depending on where you work and what channels you’re using, but I think my big struggle is it’s gone beyond measurement and attribution of channels. It’s now measurement and attribution of channels and devices and sessions. Did they start on the desktop but finish on mobile? You have to take in all these different things into account to look at the full user journey. That’s definitely something I struggle with and in the past have had to prove worth, when I was on agency side. Amber: But I think there’s definitely some really cool tools coming out there and people trying to solve those problems, but I think it’s something that a lot of marketers these days are struggling with. I guess watch this space. Brendan: Yeah, for sure. It’s a tough one. Amber, thank you so much for dropping all the value today. To your audience, we have a couple of abstract questions that we like to ask our guests that will finish off the podcast for today. So question number one, if you could have a billboard that all business owners would see, could have text, visuals, whatever you want on it, where would you put the billboard and what would it say? Amber: Oh, gosh. Okay. Well, I mean if I could have, I would love to put the billboard on the moon. Brendan: That’s some good visibility. Amber: But I might be beaten by China, I don’t know. I don’t really have one for me right now, but I have to say, I have to give respect to the Koala guys when it comes to billboards. Brendan: Yeah, amazing. Amber: I love the one they did recently, right in front of IKEA, with the … They’re always doing it, with the more comfortable beds that already come assembled. I think that’s strong billboard game. I don’t have anything to contribute, probably just a big photo of Leonardo DiCatrio to be honest. Brendan: Get the followers up. Amber: Yeah, exactly. Brendan: Nice. Our final question, I’m glad you mentioned the moon, because we’re about to blast off into space. Are you ready for launch? Amber: Oh yeah. Let’s do it. Brendan: All right. Because you’re on the first flight to Mars with Elon Musk and the first settlers aboard the SpaceX starship rocket. What business do you start when you land on Mars, and how do you market it to the new Martians? Amber: Okay. I love this question, by the way. Big Elon Musk fan. Brendan: You’ve got two years on the trip to talk to him, pick his brain. Amber: Two years, oh wow, yeah. I don’t like the cold, but I’m sure there’ll be some kind of thermal amazingness. Brendan: Elon can solve that. Amber: Exactly. He can solve everything, right? Look, I think it really depends on what I’d be looking to achieve. I think making some assumptions here about climate and landscape and also I guess myself, am I out to make money? Am I out to have fun? Or, am I out to contribute to our new community? Amber: I think if it was anything to do with money and fun, I’d probably be thinking down the food, alcohol, weddings. Brendan: Weddings? Interesting. Amber: I don’t know, weddings are always so much money. Just add 40% on top. I would love to know what a wedding on Mars would look like as well. But I think, I guess for fun, you could think of things like a ski resort, very cold. But then again, the logistics around that. I guess if I was going to go back to my roots, me as a person, I’m from a family of artists and architects and historians and a lot of the books I read outside of the business ones are history and also fantasy, because I love escape. Amber: I think what I’d probably do is open some sort of museum, gallery, or library. Or, a combination of all of those things which allows people to experience where we’ve come from and also have a space that they can touch physical things that aren’t virtual, and physical things from the past to keep us in touch with yeah, like I said, where we’ve come from, but I guess who we are as human beings before all just AI and a computer, or future arm, we’re just plugged in. I think that’s what I would do. Brendan: Sounds like an interesting place, and does this museum have a name? Amber: Oh, my gosh. I don’t know. The Museum of Things. I don’t know. I need more time- Brendan: The Martian Museum. Amber: The Martian Museum. There we go, perfect. Brendan: Amber, thank you so much for coming in today. Some really valuable tips and resources. You guys can find all the show notes and resources Amber has mentioned at Metigy.com/podcast. And Amber before we wrap up, is there anything that you’d like to say, and how can people get in touch? Amber: Yeah look, definitely get in touch with me. I’m on all the social of course, but probably LinkedIn is the easiest one. You can look me up, Amber Dermoudy, D-E-R-M-O-U-D-Y. I’m the only one in the world. Brendan: Oh wow. Amber: Right now. In terms of tips and anything I’d love to say, look, for anybody who’s out there in the startup journey right now, big kudos to you. Definitely get on that car map. It’s exciting, it’s exhilarating, enjoy the journey. It’s going to be stressful, but you’re here to solve a problem and you’ll try and make a difference, so remember that. I think some advice that I’ve had from having my own businesses and pivoting and having successful exits, and also not so successful exits, is leave your ego at the door. Amber: I think it’s really hard to get caught up if you’ve had a big idea and maybe no one understands it or no one wants to buy it right now, or whatever it might be. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with pivoting, and there’s nothing wrong with failing and coming back later and trying again. Some of the biggest companies have pivoted, Instagram, Starbucks, PayPal, and I think too, probably got this from some of the books that I’ve mentioned, but I think the other thing is to listen to your own voice and believe in yourself, and don’t take any criticism from people who aren’t in the arena, people who aren’t in the space, people who aren’t risking everything to try and do something different. Amber: You have your own journey and be really proud of that, and all the best to everybody out there who’s trying to do something really cool and interesting right now. Brendan: Amazing. Amber, thank you so much and of course, we’ll put Leonardo DiCatrio in the show notes as well, so you can get a few more followers. Amber: Oh, great. Please follow him, guys. Brendan: Amber, once again, this has been fun, thanks for coming in. Amber: Thank you so much.