Giannis CTO / CoFounder of PollFish

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today, we are talking to Giannis, the CTO and co-founder of Pollfish, and we discuss how his company predicted Brexit, their play for SDK dominance in the gaming industry, and dealing with hyper-growth inside their engineering and sales teams. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Giannis.

(Giannis at 00:00:36) Hey, how are you, Joel?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) Oh buddy, it's so good to hear your voice, man.

(Giannis at 00:00:43) Been a month or so, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:46) Yeah, it's been a month. Wow, life is—time goes by fast.

(Giannis at 00:00:50) Yeah, really fast. I heard you're using Alexa.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:52) Oh, I love my Alexa. Yes, I do.

(Giannis at 00:00:56) Are you Alexa or Google Home?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:00) We have both, but I'm a fan of Alexa.

(Giannis at 00:01:03) Ah, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:04) What about you?

(Giannis at 00:01:05) Google Home. I'm not sure which—I think I'm a Google fanboy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:12) Oh yeah? Best friends with Sergey?

(Giannis at 00:01:17) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:18) I like talking. I like the fact that it's like a human. I like the human component.

(Giannis at 00:01:24) Exactly. It's very nice. I think it's just starting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:29) So how far have you gotten? What have you made yours do, your Google Home?

(Giannis at 00:01:33) Unfortunately, currently I'm in Greece, so we don't have that many options. For example, you can use Google Express to buy stuff. So mainly using it for events, reminders, check the weather, that stuff. I have also used a couple of routines. I don't know if you use Yonomi or IFTTT, Stringify, some of those apps.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:59) No, I haven't used those. I mean, I haven't used them in the context of my Alexa.

(Giannis at 00:02:04) It's nice. You can, for example, let's say when you return home, you can use your routing app to open the lights and stuff like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:13) Oh, there's a routines menu inside of Alexa. I just haven't played with it yet.

(Giannis at 00:02:18) Ah, okay, so it's integrated there. With Google Home, I think it's not yet. You have to enable a third-party app.

(Giannis at 00:02:30) Yeah, probably. It's nice. It's just starting, so I think it's going to be really interesting in the next year or so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:39) Yeah, the next five years is going to be crazy for voice.

(Giannis at 00:02:42) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:43) So you want some stats here? Because I looked into it. You ready for some stats?

(Giannis at 00:02:47) Yeah, sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:49) I went to Best Buy to purchase a Google Home because I wanted—I got the Alexa for Christmas, and I wanted to know what Google Home was like. So I went there, purchased a Google Home, the miniature one, the smaller one. And I asked the manager there. I said, "Hey, you know, what was the best-selling item this holiday season?" And he said there was one. It was the Alexa and the Google Home. And I said, "Alright, what was the second and third?" He goes, "There wasn't a second and third."

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:17) He goes, "Kids wanted it. Adults wanted it. Teens wanted it." He goes, "Everybody only wanted that."

(Giannis at 00:03:23) Wow, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:24) I know, right? It blew my mind.

(Giannis at 00:03:27) We didn't expect that from kids.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:30) Right. They all like the idea of talking to Alexa. Okay, and so I said, "This is interesting." So then I went home, or back to the office, and I went online, and I started looking about the growth of voice and the sales year over year. Three years ago, nobody. Two years ago, some people. Three years ago—it's doubling, tripling. Right now in the United States, 10% of all the households have one, and it's exponentially growing. So I'm thinking two to three years, almost everyone will at least have one in their home.

(Giannis at 00:04:10) Yeah, and I think it's going to be way more advanced. I mean, the thing with the contextual conversation is just starting. It's very interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:19) Well, they get to apply all their machine learning at scale now. The fact that they have 36 million Americans that have one of these in their homes means they get to learn all that much better on massive amounts of data. And as you know, the more data you have, the smarter it is.

(Giannis at 00:04:33) Exactly. That's the point. This is the best part. We're helping to make the system much smarter.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:39) Yes, until it ends in our demise. The robots win. Oh no. So you're back in Greece right now?

(Giannis at 00:04:49) Yes. The R&D department is actually based in Athens, so I returned back to Greece.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:57) Okay, because when we talked, you were in New York, right?

(Giannis at 00:04:59) Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So we have an office there—marketing, sales, operations, and all that stuff—but the product is built in Athens, in Greece.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:09) Oh, that's awesome. So you said the marketing, sales, support, all that stuff is in NYC, but the development team and research, all that good stuff's in Greece?

(Giannis at 00:05:18) Exactly, exactly. I mean, it's a bit of a challenge because you have the time zone difference. But in general, it's pretty much okay because you have three to four hours in common, so you can still make things work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:34) So what time is it there right now?

(Giannis at 00:05:36) It's 10.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:39) 10 p.m. at night, and it's 3 p.m. EST here. So it's late. Is your family upset? Like, "Go to bed!"

(Giannis at 00:05:49) We're still up. Actually, I'm still recovering from jet lag. So it's kind of strange because I wake up at 3 a.m. suddenly. It's the first time that I had such a jet lag. I was always proud that I never had one, but this time is like all the jet lag together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:11) It's catching up to you. That's what's happening.

(Giannis at 00:06:15) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:16) So Pollfish, that's going well. How's your hiring spree going?

(Giannis at 00:06:21) Actually, we're pretty good. We're almost there to have what we call a full basic team, at least. For the product team, at 20 people right now. We're expecting to have six more by the end of February. And then we're going to be full, at least to run the way we would like to. It's been a bit of a challenge because we had to hire about 12 to 14 people within one or two months. So double the team.

(Giannis at 00:07:02) We had a lot of things that we need to take care of, like good onboarding and fit with the current culture that we have. We're very proud of the way we do things there. But I think we were really lucky, and the people that joined us are very good and are bringing a lot of value. I think value is something that you focus a lot, and it was a very interesting discussion we had back then. And I think they really bring a lot of value, which is the most important aspect of things here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:38) Oh, I'm all about bringing that value. So how did you—when you're expanding your team, these 12, 14 people you brought on, are they mostly developers, or were they kind of mixed between developers and sales?

(Giannis at 00:07:50) Engineers and product owners, so everybody in the product team. No sales.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:58) So what made you say to yourself, "Oh man, I need these extra people"? How did you know that you needed them?

(Giannis at 00:08:04) Well, actually, things were getting out of hand in a lot of areas of the product. So we had a huge pipeline that we wouldn't be able to cover. We also had, let's say, two different business needs that we should address. So from one side, we have a researcher, someone that wants to run a survey within Pollfish, and most of the team was focused there. But on the other hand, we also have a publisher.

(Giannis at 00:08:36) A publisher is the owner that provides an app where someone can respond to a survey from Pollfish. So it's actually the engine. We weren't focused so much there because we didn't have the resources. So we were taking turns, like one year focused on the publisher, next year on the researcher. And you know, this is a marketplace. You have to balance both sides.

(Giannis at 00:09:01) Now that we had the science and we were growing and we're really happy with the revenues, we decided that we need to build dedicated teams to develop both business needs in parallel. So that was the main thing. And in terms of the planning aspect of product team, I was doing most of the planning, which was not enough. I was trying to be a CTO, a VP of product, product owner, and sometimes an engineer. So you realize that if you're doing three full-time jobs and it's one person, then probably something's going really wrong.

(Giannis at 00:09:50) So this was the time that we decided we have to delegate and find people that do that full-time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:58) So you just let yourself—when you noticed, "Oh, I'm drowning in three full-time roles. Now it's time to—I push myself to the limit. Now let's get some people in here to take this over so we can run it smoothly."

(Giannis at 00:10:08) Exactly. Perhaps we should have done it a bit earlier, but I'm glad we did it now. I mean, the results are already showing up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:16) Were you able to make this transition off of your cash flow, or did you need investment capital to do so?

(Giannis at 00:10:22) We're venture-backed. So although we have our own revenues and we could, let's say, go slower with the hiring, I think we decided to always raise some capital and proceed with the hirings.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:37) You know, that's what the venture is there for, right? If you have a cash flow that allows you to maybe bring on two or three people, but you have a need to pivot or a need to address the market demand and you need 10 people, well, then it's not so bad to have partners that are VCs, right?

(Giannis at 00:10:51) Exactly. I mean, it depends on how fast you want to scale. We think that it's best to serve the customer needs we have right now and go fast instead of waiting to cover them in a year or so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:07) No, I agree. That's a valid plan, valid business model, right, of how to grow. We had a special—we're actually in the process of filming a special episode. And what we did was we went and found the most influential coding developers on Instagram, people that have, you know, tens of thousands of followers. And then we had them come on the show and talk about what they're doing and how they're being influential on Instagram, things of that nature. So has Pollfish done anything with influencers in the market, from your marketing side of things?

(Giannis at 00:11:40) Yes. Not always like professional influencers. However, we tried to partner with experienced people, for example, experienced researchers to use our service and see if they can get quality results and see the turnaround of the service. So what we did is we tried to onboard a couple of people from places like Microsoft, Stanford, et cetera. And they ran a lot of benchmarks and compared us with a lot of traditional firms.

(Giannis at 00:12:18) And some papers were published. Also, some publications in places like Washington Post, New York Times, et cetera. So it's like influencer marketing, I think. And it was actually pretty great because it was a validation for us too, you know, to have experienced researchers validating your service. I mean, it's pretty cool and it's pretty inspiring. And then, of course, it brought a lot of great business. I mean, I don't know your results.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:52) Oh, I was just having them on the show to talk about their position as being influencers.

(Giannis at 00:12:56) Mm-hmm. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:58) Because they have so many followers, and they're posting about programming. And I wanted to know, you know, they're the next generation, right? They're the up-and-coming set of programmers that are being hired now and just entering the job market now. And they're on Instagram with, you know, 50,000 followers posting, and everyone's following them and liking their posts. And I'm wondering, what do they think? What type of people are they? So I brought them on the show to talk about them to kind of give some insight to the CTOs, right? Because we're CTOs, and we need to know what's happening in the next generation of developers.

(Giannis at 00:13:34) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:35) Because we're busy doing our thing now and dealing with—usually, I don't know about you, but I interact with the people that have been writing code professionally for several years. I'm not interacting with the newer programmers as much these days. So I figured, you know, let's pull the next generation on and see what they're interested in because they're the—you know, the next generation drives the market, right?

(Giannis at 00:13:58) It definitely makes sense. And you need a lot of—you actually need a mix of people. I mean, new generation, old generation, I think you need a mix of people to make things work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:09) Oh, I fully agree with that. A diverse ecosystem is super important. I just realized that I hadn't—I didn't know what was going on, so I pulled them onto my show. And then I found out that being influential on Instagram is super important for us.

(Giannis at 00:14:24) Even for engineers, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:28) Yeah. And you know, did you know that it's like 80% female on Instagram for the programmers that are popular?

(Giannis at 00:14:34) Oh no, I had no idea. I actually thought—I mean, I'm using personally Twitter and LinkedIn for engineers, but I wouldn't have thought about Instagram.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:45) Right? They're there.

(Giannis at 00:14:46) And it's mainly female?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:48) Well, the people that are popular are mainly female, but their audience is, you know, 80% male.

(Giannis at 00:14:55) Okay, that's very interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:56) Yeah, that's what I thought.

(Giannis at 00:14:57) I'll have to check it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:59) Yeah. You're busy running Pollfish, you know, doing massive things over there with like 400 million polls going on and responses. And I'm over here, and I'm trying to figure out what's coming next. You know, I run my business, but I always want to know, like, what's happening now? What are the kids these days doing? What's going to surprise me?

(Giannis at 00:15:19) And it's always hard, you know, to keep up with all the meetups and everything that's going on because the community is so active these days. So it's really hard to actually keep up with everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:29) Yeah, it is. That's why I'm just pulling them onto the show and asking them questions. I'm like, "Just give me—give me the good—they're out there eating, sleeping, and breathing it." And I'm like, "Just give me the gist of it. Is Snapchat something where programmers are hanging out? Where is everybody at?" And so I took the top, you know, four or five most-followed programmers on Instagram and had them come on the show. So we're putting together that special.

(Giannis at 00:15:53) So do you think it could be even used as a hiring platform to attract talent and stuff like that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:01) Absolutely. I think that you can use the info. So people, they seem—and this is, you know, we're halfway through. So I've had two of the five influencers on. So I'm still getting a good feel for it. But what it seems like is happening is everyone's watching these people and what they're doing, and that's attention, right? If everybody's looking over there, then you need to be over there, right? There's no excuse for not being where everyone's paying attention.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:30) So if everyone decides that Facebook's really important, then you need to be on Facebook because that's where everyone is, right? And if everyone decides Instagram's really important, then you've got to go be over there because that's where they all are. So I was thinking about using influencer marketing. When I think about your company, do you guys have APIs that you integrate with other people?

(Giannis at 00:16:50) Yes. This is one of the main ways that we operate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:55) Yeah. So these Instagram influencers would be super important in promoting your APIs because they've got, you know, fifty, sixty thousand programmers that follow them and like every single thing that they do. So if they post, you know, oh, hanging out at the Pollfish office today, working on their API or, like, integrating a mashup into their API. Instantly, 50,000 people know of Pollfish that could integrate with you, right? If you look at it like that, it's kind of interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:20) Right?

(Giannis at 00:17:20) Yeah. That definitely makes sense for us, and I can relate actually a lot because as I told you, one of the main roles within the company is what we call a publisher.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:32) A...

(Giannis at 00:17:32) A publisher, someone that owns an app or has developed an app, someone like an indie developer. So I suppose it would make a lot of sense to see if an influencer can actually relate to the APIs and the SDKs that we have developed for developers. So we're actually a monetization stream for any developer, for example, where, like, when they use ads, they can now earn on top of the ads by also using. So it's risk-free. So for me, it definitely makes sense.

(Giannis at 00:18:11) I'm really glad to hear that. We're actually going to research even from tomorrow about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:17) Right. Because if you have the option of tomorrow, 50,000 developers learning about Pollfish, like, would that benefit your business? Probably. Yeah. So then all you have to do is go online and find the people who have like 50,000 people follow them and just say, hey, talk about Pollfish. And they do, and then instantly everybody knows who you are.

(Giannis at 00:18:40) Exactly. Exactly. I think the main point is to find an influencer that actually can understand the value that you're bringing, if you're bringing any value to the market. This is the main point. For I think for all products, it's a real challenge. It's a real challenge to actually bring value, unique value, and then to communicate that value to the whole market.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:08) Yeah. That's business, right? That's like business in its most simple form. So do you have a cofounder at Pollfish?

(Giannis at 00:19:16) Yes. Actually, we're four cofounders. So the CEO currently is running the whole company, of course, and is in New York, John Papadakis. And two other cofounders, Andreas Vourkos, is mainly running the publisher acquisition side of things since we mentioned it. And Zisis is responsible for all the user experience and the communication of all these to the customers and the publishers as well. A lot of people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:49) Yeah. How did you meet each other?

(Giannis at 00:19:53) So with John and Andreas, we were at the university together. And initially, we thought about a developer tool to collect surveys, then we thought, okay, why not allow everyone out there, every company, every organization to collect feedback from everyone out there. I mean, we knew back then that in five years' time, when we started was 2012, everybody's going to be on smartphone. So this is the way we thought about it. And through a common connection, actually, one of our advisors, we met Zisis, the designer and the user experience guy. Sorry about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:42) No, you're breaking stuff back there. So you guys all were engineers working together and wanting feedback from the apps you were making, so you created Pollfish. That sounds a lot like Slack.

(Giannis at 00:20:54) Oh, yeah. Yeah. I've known about Slack. Yeah. Actually, it's quite similar. It was mainly for internal usage, and then we decided to go public. That's true. Never thought about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:07) Right. And then it says here that Pollfish predicted Brexit. I want to know about that. How come that bullet point's on my list here?

(Giannis at 00:21:16) Yeah. Actually, I think that due to the fact that we ask everyday people like you and me, I think we have a way to get more quality responses. So initially, actually, we even predicted the Greek referendum here in Greece. Then we managed to predict Brexit. And actually, we even predicted the favorable vote in the United States and also a couple of swing states. So it's going pretty good, actually, in terms of predictions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:57) Well, that's like 100%.

(Giannis at 00:22:01) It's going well. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:03) Yeah. It's amazing. If you ask the people, they just kind of tell you.

(Giannis at 00:22:07) Yeah. Exactly. And for us, it's interesting because it's one of those times where you have a lot of things that are, you know, you can't actually predict them because they're 50% there, 50%. So you're not exactly sure what's the outcome. So it's really interesting because if you had, like, a sure win, then, okay, it wouldn't be that valuable. But now that it's always, you know, somewhere in the middle, it makes much more sense if you can predict something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:45) I was just thinking about, you know, who's going to know the next election? Amazon and Google because they have these recorders in our homes. And all they have to do is go, like, machine analysis, the transcripts and say, oh, this person wins.

(Giannis at 00:23:00) Yeah. Exactly. I think it's a next step for Pollfish even to have a skill that is powered within one of those mediums.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:10) Oh. Please.

(Giannis at 00:23:12) Yeah. I mean, it makes sense for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:15) I had some other people on the show who will remain nameless, and they were very, very like, not interested in voice being the future. They're like, no, that's not right for my company. That's not... And I was like, dude, I use your product, and it would be right for your company.

(Giannis at 00:23:33) I'm a huge fan. I'm a huge fan. I mean, I'm totally sold.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:37) Why not? It's the future. I even put it in my book because I'm like, I wanted it to be published, you know, at a certain date so I can look back and be like, told you so. You know? Look. And I can see, like, look, it was in my book four years ago. I told you voice was the future.

(Giannis at 00:23:52) You can actually keep their Twitter accounts and then send them tweets. I think it was, who did that? I think it was Gary V from Vaynerchuk. When he told that Instagram was bought at a really low valuation, and everybody was laughing at him. And then when they made the offer for Snapchat and I'm not sure WhatsApp.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:22) 18 billion or something. Yeah.

(Giannis at 00:24:24) Yeah. Then he sent everyone tweets that I told you so. After, I mean, after, like, four or five years, and he sent them tweets. I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:35) Oh, I love Gary V. I remember that story. He, like, went on vacation with his wife, and he sat there on the beach and just, like, responded to every single person. I told you so.

(Giannis at 00:24:44) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:46) Did you get to meet Gary Vee while you were in New York?

(Giannis at 00:24:48) No. Is he in New York? Didn't know him. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:52) Yeah. His offices are in New York.

(Giannis at 00:24:54) I was busy trying some cocktails. Sorry. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:59) When are you going to be in New York next?

(Giannis at 00:25:02) I'm not sure really. I mean, we have a lot of things going on here with the product. It's really exciting times to be in our department here. So I think I'm going to stay, perhaps even enjoy the summer here. It's a bit better than New York.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:21) Oh, yeah.

(Giannis at 00:25:22) Yeah. I don't know. Perhaps September or October.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:26) Okay. So probably later this year.

(Giannis at 00:25:28) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:29) All right. Well, next time you're there, let me know because I have family in New York, so I'm going to bump up to New York. It's only, like, a three-hour flight, and we're going to come hang out and try some of those cocktails.

(Giannis at 00:25:36) Great. Great. We'd love to meet in person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:39) Yeah. Gary V has this dinner thing that they do, like, once a month where you can buy a ticket to, and you go to dinner with, like, 20 people and Gary V.

(Giannis at 00:25:46) Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:47) Yeah. We'll get tickets, and we'll go try some of his wine, the cocktails, and then be like, what up?

(Giannis at 00:25:54) Okay. We can definitely try that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:56) Are you speaking at any conferences in the near future? Any public speaking in the near future for you?

(Giannis at 00:26:02) Actually, not me, but Andreas, one of the cofounders that's running the publisher acquisition. He's currently in a conference in LA, and then he will be in London. So a couple of app conferences, game dev conferences. So we're going a bit, we're trying to see if offline works too. I mean, the Instagram, the medium that you mentioned, probably worth a shot, but we're also trying different ways.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:37) Do you compete at all with... I know some of the platforms offer their own sort of polling. Do you, how do you look at that as a business? Like, what do you, do you see it as an opportunity getting more people involved with polling? Do you see it as competition?

(Giannis at 00:26:50) So there are two different types of companies. One kind is companies like, let's say, SurveyMonkey, et cetera, which are forms or survey forms, and they are not our direct competitors. So because our value is not the form, our value is the way that we bring the audience. In that aspect, we don't have that many direct competitors. So our main goal is to actually get a lot more people from the traditional market research firms. So this is where we are aiming. If you see market research and how it evolved from cold calling to take the survey to online polling to now mobile polling, they always used to have and maintain panels. That is people that are registered and receive emails daily to answer surveys and have a very specific profile. These are the main companies that we're trying to compete with because we think that instead of having what we call professional panelists and having everyday consumers like you and me, we think that this is much more valuable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:16) Yeah. Well, it should be, right? Because I really like that you're going after the traditional market research because now would be a great time to go pick them up being a modern tool, and they're just starting to open up, you know, because the corporate world moves a lot slower than our tech world, right? So it looks like a lot of those traditional market research people would be just starting to open up to this more modern technology.

(Giannis at 00:28:39) Exactly. This is what we believe too, but we'll see.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:44) Are you integrating with any other platforms to grow your brand? Like, is Pollfish being integrated into other platforms?

(Giannis at 00:28:52) What we try to explore currently is to integrate with platforms about data visualization. Imagine that we collect millions of data points every day from all those active users, and we try to provide real-time result dashboards for our customers. However, when you see out there solutions like Tableau, for example, I don't know if you're familiar with this visualization software. We try to see if we can integrate and provide an even more sophisticated solution for visualization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:31) Oh, so are you actually going to data visualization companies and embedding your product inside of theirs to so people can say, oh, I want to fill this chart up. I'll use Pollfish to do that?

(Giannis at 00:29:41) Right. Yeah. Exactly. This is what we're exploring now. We haven't completed any integrations, though. But I think in the next couple of months, we will roll out a couple of those.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:53) Yeah. Because that's, like, a great way to advertise. All of a sudden, if you get a company that has, you know, 10 million views a month in their data visualization platform, and all of a sudden, Pollfish shows up as a way for them to gather data, that's, like, lots of eyeballs.

(Giannis at 00:30:10) Exactly. And also from, if you see from another perspective, there are a lot of companies that already use those tools. And instead of having them trained in your own result dashboard, you can just let them use what they already know how to use and just populate the data there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:29) That's smart. I love it. I love it. And data visualization is huge right now.

(Giannis at 00:30:33) It helps a lot. I think it's a huge part of machine learning process too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:37) Yeah. What type of talks is Andreas giving in LA and London? What's he talking about there?

(Giannis at 00:30:45) A lot of stuff about publisher monetization and what's out there because, I mean, things have evolved a lot since the days of single banner ads to, you know, interstitial ads, video ads, and all that stuff to polls and surveys, which is what we are doing. So it's mainly about that and sometimes even some more technical talks because Andreas is also an active developer, mobile engineer. So he's actually the guy that developed the SDKs that power all those 400 million consumers. So it's from tech to purely monetization strategies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:32) Wow. What SDKs for, like, iOS and Android, or what type of SDKs is he making?

(Giannis at 00:31:38) Android and iOS. And we have also expanded to other platforms like Unity, et cetera.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:45) Oh, like polling inside of video games? Whoa.

(Giannis at 00:31:49) Yeah. It's one of the high converting. Because imagine if you're in a game and you can, let's say, either purchase a life or respond to a quick poll and get a life for free.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:03) Wow. This is the future right here.

(Giannis at 00:32:06) Yeah. Because it's like a virtual economy if you think about it. It's very interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:11) You got it. Man, this is it. You... It just clicked for me. When I'm inside of a video game and a video game developer can prompt me for some sort of digital currency, right, like a DLC pack or, like, something that's motivating for me. And I can answer a question and give him or give them actionable feedback as the way that they should be directing their brand. That is priceless.

(Giannis at 00:32:34) I'm glad you liked it. It's actually, like, 40% conversion rate. It's really high.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:41) Wow. So you guys are... Are you going... So you're building these, you're building the SDKs for Unity, and then developers are just snatching them up and integrating them into their apps. You don't even really have to sell the companies on it. The developers just see the need and they grab it, and they put it right into their app, and they start getting feedback.

(Giannis at 00:32:58) Exactly. And the best part is that we have made it so easy. It's like one line of integration, and it's ready. I mean, one line, it's less than five minutes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:07) So when do you buy the private jet?

(Giannis at 00:33:12) I'm more of a sailing boats guy. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:16) There you go.

(Giannis at 00:33:17) But I think we have a lot of work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:20) Yeah. So do you see the light at the end of the tunnel for becoming cash-flow positive and paying back the VC or, and then, like, running things on your own? Or how does that relationship work?

(Giannis at 00:33:36) I think that currently, we're more focused on growth. So for us, it's like turning those users to five times more and acquiring a lot more customers in the enterprise space. So our main focus is on growth and much less on profitability. This is the way we see things now. Although I'm not sure how it's going to be in two years from now, but currently, it's growth. This is the first priority.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:09) So you guys are making a mad dash towards dominating the market. And once you have the brand in place and everyone's like, oh, you use Pollfish for that. Oh, you use Poll... Once you become the household name, then it's like now we're shifting our thoughts to revenue and how to become profitable.

(Giannis at 00:34:22) Exactly. Couldn't say it better. The revenues are quite high, but we're not focused on profitability. We're burning a lot. Our expenses are quite high too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:38) Right. Yeah. I'm sure the VC people know all about that. But seriously, though, the way you get the unicorn style brands is by making the mad dash towards owning the household name.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:51) Like, you want to become the word. You want to be like, oh, yeah, don't be stupid, use Pollfish for that. Like, that's how we do it. You know? And once you become that, then it's just a matter of keeping it. You know?

(Giannis at 00:35:03) Couldn't say it better. I mean, for us, this is pretty much happening a lot in the publisher space. I think in terms of survey monetization, I think we're the leading, let's say, company. And we want to do the same in terms of the researcher space, to be the leading in terms of online polling and mobile polling in the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:29) So do you structure different teams to go after your different industries? Do you have, like, one team that focuses on Unity, one team that's focusing on sort of your corporate world? How do you divide that up?

(Giannis at 00:35:40) So this is exactly what we did. We had, initially, we had one team as I told you, and we were taking turns which aspect of the product we're going to develop. But currently, this is our approach. So we have a dedicated team that is focused on publishers and a dedicated team that is focused on researchers. And we're trying to treat two different companies. So we're trying to think as completely different companies, so have different sales structure for researchers, different sales for publishers, and the same for the development team. I think this simplifies a lot of things, and it's much better to be decoupled because it allows you to scale the teams much more easily.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:32) What are you arguing that decoupled systems are more stable? Preaching to the choir. Speak up. I love it, man. Are you the first one to enter in this Unity thing, or am I just, like, so out of it that I didn't realize that this is a thing inside of video games?

(Giannis at 00:36:50) In terms of surveys, I think, yes. In general, as I told you, we're trying to be the leaders there. We pretty much had the know-how because we're solving our own need. This was the best part about Pollfish and the publisher aspect of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:03) Are you making videos of how you're able to do that for video games and then, like, pushing them out to the video game company employees?

(Giannis at 00:37:12) We have a couple of tutorials. I don't think we have an updated video with the latest SDK version, but we have a lot of use cases and examples on GitHub too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:26) Imagine this. Imagine you're scrolling through Facebook, and you're a developer at one of the Microsoft gaming studios or maybe PlayStation or Xbox or whatever. Maybe you're working on, like, the newest iteration of Call of Duty. Right? And you're scrolling through your Facebook feed because it's Saturday and all of a sudden you see this high energy video game style trailer. Right. And in, they're showing the user play and all of a sudden, like, the poll comes up, like at the appropriate moment, the user responds, boom, and then it shows the video turning to the development team of the game and getting, like, actionable feedback. And it's all animated and, like, really cool, like, high energy stuff. All of a sudden that developer sitting there saw, like, a, you know, one minute, ninety-second clip of the fact that this is possible. Right? The fact that they can do this in their games, and then they're, like, blown away by it.

(Giannis at 00:38:17) That's actually pretty good. Are you interested in joining our marketing department?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:24) Yes, I am. No. That was just right off the top of my head. That's what I, that's what I see in my head when you're talking. Like that just is what pops in. I'm like, this is what would get me. And you could run that ad against all the developers that make video games at those companies. And then within, you know, one week, every developer would know that Pollfish is a possibility to drag and drop into their video game. And they would bring it up in meetings and they would talk and everybody would be like, whoa, you got to do this Pollfish thing because I haven't seen that in a video game yet. I play video games. I'm a fan of gaming. So is my brother. So is Jake, who's here in the studio with us. We all play games and none of us have seen that yet. And I'm like, that's the win. That's a huge win.

(Giannis at 00:39:01) No. As a developer, I can definitely relate. I mean, it's a really great approach.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:06) Yeah. So, yeah, we'll clip that part of the call and send it to your marketing team. There you go.

(Giannis at 00:39:11) It's been pretty inspiring, this whole conversation. I mean, from Instagram for engineers to even this idea. It's very nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:20) Yeah. That's what we try to do. We try to bring value to you and the listeners, and that's what it's all about. You know? Just sharing. We actually have, do you know EPIX Entertainment?

(Giannis at 00:39:31) Yes. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:33) Yeah. We had Adrian Jura on the show. They're a large mobile gaming company. He was actually our first episode. I'm going to send an email to him after this and be like, yo, check out Pollfish because you can get crazy stats on how people are using your games. And they do 20 games a year, man.

(Giannis at 00:39:51) Okay. Yeah. That would be great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:54) And if you look at their games, oh my god, Giannis. They're, like, they're the best of the best, man.

(Giannis at 00:39:59) Wow. Okay. I will check them out. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:02) Yeah. Check them out, and then just be like, yo, hey, Adrian, you and I both talked to Joel. We're both on the show. We should, get us in the email. I'll connect you too.

(Giannis at 00:40:11) Thank you very much. That would be awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:13) Alright. Cool. This is a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate you coming on and talking with me, Giannis.

(Giannis at 00:40:19) Thank you very much. It's my pleasure. It was really fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:27) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.