Cultivating Confidence as a Founder with Matthew Keemon, Co-founder and CTO at Jebbit

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Matt, co-founder and CTO at Jebbit, about his founding journey and more. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:15) Sup, Matt?

Hey, Joel. Dude, this is awesome. I'm super excited. When I was prepping for the show, I was like, how do I pronounce this name? So how do I say the name of the company?

(Matt at 00:00:25) Jebbit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:25) Jebbit. And where did that name come from?

(Matt at 00:00:27) So it was actually one of the original founders before I was even a part of it. It started out of a college dorm room, and one of the founders' names was Jeb. And I believe the company was originally called Add It Up, and we got a cease and desist from Bank of America. And so we were searching for new names, and our CEO, Tom's mom, suggested, "Oh, well, why don't you call it Jebbit?" No idea how she came upon that, but it resonated and it stuck around.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:00) Nice. Well, if Jeb is the survey guy, you just Jebbit, right?

(Matt at 00:01:03) Exactly. Exactly. But not to be confused with Jibbitz, which are the little things that you add on to Crocs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:12) Oh, I am.

(Matt at 00:01:13) Like the little buttons or little designs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:17) So I'm learning people decorate their Crocs.

(Matt at 00:01:19) They do. They do. It's a big thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:21) Okay. So you're the CTO of this company. How did that come to be?

(Matt at 00:01:27) Oh, man. So I originally got involved—like I said, it was founded out of a college dorm room. And my last semester of school, I got a cold email from Tom, the CEO, asking if I would like to help out on this project called Jebbit. And, you know, it was kind of winding down my coursework at that point. I think I was taking three classes and an independent study, so I didn't have a ton to do. So I figured, yeah, why not? I'll get a little bit of experience, and then I'll go and get a real job.

And about two months later, we got accepted to Techstars, and Tom and one of the other co-founders, Jonathan, dropped out months before graduation. So I don't think I even got through the full sentence of asking my parents if I could follow them before they shot it down. I think they kind of saw what I was asking and said immediately, "Nope. Not happening."

So I finished out school and worked on Jebbit one to two full days a week. And just coming out of demo day, we got a little bit of funding, and then it became a reality of this is something that we can pursue professionally and legitimately. So I just kind of put all notions of, you know, quote-unquote "real job" aside and put my head down and started working. But, you know, back then, titles don't really matter at that point in time. We're just trying to develop as much software as quickly as humanly possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:58) That is so cool. And then I know that I got to research it and look at it before, but it's basically surveys and you do analytics on them. Can you just—how do you describe it?

(Matt at 00:03:07) Yeah, it's a very malleable system. It can do a lot of different things. But our two biggest use cases are creating very slick interactive surveys and product finders. If you think of the use case of, say, landing on an e-commerce website and they have a link to a quiz where they ask you five questions and they recommend the right pair of jeans for you, and based on your responses, they will recommend the product that they think best fits and then kind of push you towards a purchase or conversion of that product.

They don't necessarily have to push to conversion. It can be a little bit more fun or interactive. Like, if you go to the NFL home site, you'll find a little Jebbit experience in there where it's basically asking you, you know, who do you think is going to win the matchups this week as the opening week of the NFL. But what the NFL really cares about are the last two questions in there, which is, "What is your favorite team?" and "What is your personal information—name and email address?" And once they have that, they're able to personalize marketing. So anything that comes to me will have Patriots associated with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:25) Oh, nice. And that's because you're in Boston?

(Matt at 00:04:28) Yep. I'm in Boston.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:30) All right. And when did you fall in love with the Patriots?

(Matt at 00:04:33) It was since birth. So I grew up in Connecticut, and Connecticut has this weird identity crisis where half the state thinks it belongs to New York and the other half thinks it belongs to Boston. And I just happen to grow up on the Boston side of the state.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:49) Nice. And then now do you live in the city of Boston?

(Matt at 00:04:52) Yep. Yep. Live right downtown. So went to school here and then just fell in love with the city and never left.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:58) Nice. Very cool. So I'm curious about—you shared this trajectory of the growth of the business. Where are you at currently? Are you still in survival mode, early-stage funding mode? Are you in expansion and growth? Where are you at right now?

(Matt at 00:05:13) We are in growth mode. So about a year and a half ago, we took a significant round of funding from Vista Equity Partners. So to that point, we'd been venture-funded and this was our foray into the private equity markets, which is really when we wanted to put our foot on the gas when it came to growth and just general maturation of the company. And to that end, they've been really amazing partners of really imposing a lot of operational rigor on us, making sure that we are tracking the right metrics, that we are hitting our targets, and really holding us accountable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:51) What type of war stories do you have from the growing pains of doing a startup?

(Matt at 00:05:58) Yeah, I got one good one. So we were working with—and we were probably punching a little above our weight class at this point with the level of brand that we were working with—but say a nationally recognizable athletic wear brand. And they had a set of coupon codes, I think it was a thousand coupon codes, that they wanted us to deliver to consumers that went through an experience. So they would answer five or six questions, they would provide their email address, and then we would present them with a coupon code.

And to that point, this is probably 2014 maybe. So it was very, very early days of the company, probably five or six of us. To that point, we had never really seen a thousand users go through any one of these experiences because we were working with a lot more local types of brands, and we were trying to push our own audience, which was mostly college students, to it. So it was a relatively small body of users that we would advertise to.

And overnight, this thing absolutely blew up, and ten, fifteen thousand people went through it. And the next morning, we go in, we're checking the numbers, and everyone starts celebrating, like, "Oh my God, we're seeing all this traffic. This is amazing." And I'm just sitting in the corner, eyes wide, having a full-blown panic attack. And they look at me like, "Matt, what's going on? What's wrong?" It's like, "Guys, they only gave us a thousand coupon codes."

And so there are nine to fourteen thousand people out there that don't have a coupon code. They were just given kind of a blank screen. And so we fire up the emails, and there's just a deluge of angry emails from this company. You know, "You are—we have tons of users just overloading our support channels asking for coupon codes. What happened?"

And, you know, we came to realize we didn't have a shutoff mechanism to say, "Oh, well, we ran out of codes. Let's shut this one off, give a sorry message to the rest of the consumers, and then maybe be able to still ask some questions." But it just didn't really occur to us. And it was a great lesson in planning for the worst that day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:15) Oh, man. That's a bittersweet day, isn't it? You sit there and you crush your goals. You have more traffic than you ever have. But, you know, those are my favorite types of problems. I tell people all the time, I like it when you make the sale and you have to figure out how to deliver it. Because if you're building a brand-new product or you're starting out and you're doing something that's on the newer side, you can drive yourself crazy thinking of every single possible edge case. But yeah, that's a great story, man.

(Matt at 00:08:46) Yeah. It's one I constantly talk about when presenting the risks of a project of, you know, we don't want it to be that one, because that one definitely goes in my personal hall of fame of screw-ups.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:01) Well, so then now, you know, once bitten, twice shy, right? So now when you are building, how do you balance building enough versus overbuilding? Do you have a framework? Do you have a system or a set of processes that you use that you know you're doing enough to not have that issue again, but you're not sitting there unable to deliver business value because you're thinking of every edge case? How do you handle that?

(Matt at 00:09:26) Yeah. I would say a lot of the features that we build follow a general maturity curve of—we're still a relatively small organization. I think we're about a hundred full-time employees at the moment. So we're nimble enough where we can build things really quickly and get them to market really quickly. And when we do that, we try to go through the internal alpha-beta tests and make sure that what we're building, assuming it's a significant enough new feature, is going to be accepted by our users. They're going to respond positively to it. They'll get some value out of it, and it actually works.

And, you know, we have a pretty solid base of customers who are really chomping at the bit to get access to those new feature sets, so the interest level is there. And we're able to just use that to our advantage to get them to test things out with the knowledge that they're not always going to be the most stable. And those are where we really find the holes in our thinking. And as we patch those up and get it ready for prime time and make sure it's going to be plenty scalable, that's when we will really just do a double-check and do a final risk assessment of, "Okay, what else might we be overlooking here?" And usually, it goes off without a hitch after we get to that point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:59) And so you're at about a hundred people now?

Correct.

So when you're looking at your next generation of leaders as you continue to grow the business, get new customers, private equity—when you're looking at your next generation, your next layer of leaders, what sort of traits or habits stand out so that when you see this happening, you think, "Oh, I should spend some time with that person and invest in them because they're going to do well long term"?

(Matt at 00:11:27) I'd say it's a combination of curiosity and initiative that I really cling to. When I see those two qualities in someone, that's when my eyes really light up and I want to just pick their brain endlessly and do everything I can to help see them succeed. So, you know, curiosity is just getting involved in parts of the business that may be a little bit outside of their general purview, but just because they want to and they're just wanting to do a little bit of exploration. And then the initiative is when you see something wrong, either raise your hand, make note of it, and then try to fix it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:13) I'm curious to talk about—I saw on the prep, it really caught my attention about this cookieless world concept, mostly because, well, my background is software engineer. I haven't been actively doing it since the podcast got popular for the past three or four years, so I haven't been keeping up with it on a daily basis. But web applications were a big area of where I spent my time. I'm curious, what are they talking about—third-party cookies? What's going on? Explain to me, like a child, what the third-party cookie is, and then why they're going away, and what's making them go away.

(Matt at 00:12:48) So, effectively, what a third-party cookie is—let's say you're on Reddit. And on the sidebar, there's some sort of advertisement, some sort of banner ad. That banner ad, let's say it's coming from Google. In the old world, Google would be able to put a cookie on your web browser within Reddit, or while you're on the Reddit website, and then use that as a means to track you across different web properties. Then let's say you went to Facebook or Google or Wikipedia or any of these other websites. Google would effectively be able to identify, "Oh, it's Joel. Oh, it's Joel again," and just kind of figure out what your interests are from that.

And so Safari has already nixed third-party cookies entirely. I forget if Firefox has, but I would assume it probably has as well. Ultimately, it's Google and Chrome that have been the last pillar to fall in the browser space.

And, actually, I got the update for it yesterday when I updated my Chrome. There's a little pop-up that said, "Oh, you are now going to be opted into the Topics API," which is Google's answer to the third-party cookie deprecation. I think originally Chrome had a deprecation date of the beginning of this year, then I think they kicked it out to the end of 2024, if memory serves. I'm sure we could look that up. But, effectively, the Topics API is a way to more anonymously collect this information at the browser level and use it as a means to still continue to serve relevant advertisements to users on the Internet.

Mozilla and Apple are still holding out and refusing to adopt the API. So first quarter 2024—oh, sorry, 2024. So, yeah, hasn't happened quite yet, but it—

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:07) For 1% of Chrome users.

(Matt at 00:15:10) Oh, interesting. Yeah. I wonder when it's all going to fall.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:14) Yeah. Well, it makes sense. Look, if they own one of the most popular browsers in the world, why are they even messing around with third-party cookies? I know why they are, because you can get a ton of traffic, but you could just put something in Chrome, right?

(Matt at 00:15:26) Yep. And that's effectively what they're doing with the Topics API. It just doesn't sound like it's going to be supported by Firefox or Safari in the near future. I think there are just continued privacy concerns over that, and they don't want to necessarily go back on their word of deprecating third-party cookies if it's replaced by something that's also not very privacy-minded.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:54) Yeah. Or were they going for intent concepts? When they call it Topics API, it makes me think they're trying to—intent data is a huge thing that they sell, right? So that's what they're looking for then?

(Matt at 00:16:05) Exactly. Or, you know, just general topics that you're interested in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:09) Okay. Yeah. And so that's going away. Is there a thing called second-party cookies? I understand first-party cookies. I've just—you're on my site, it's my cookie. Are there second-party cookies, or is third-party just the way it sounds because it's a concept people are familiar with?

(Matt at 00:16:24) Yeah. It's first and third.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:26) All right. Cool. I didn't know. All right. So is that going to impact your business at all, or are you not dependent on those?

(Matt at 00:16:35) Not dependent at all. So this is actually a stance that we took pretty early on when we were trying to find our niche in the marketing tech space. We wanted to be the place where consumers could come and actively share pieces of data with a given brand and only share those pieces of data with a brand. So it's what we called zero-party or first-party declared data. It's all a bit of alphabet soup at times of what a piece of data actually is. But the idea is that you can proactively share your interests, your preferences, your intent with a given brand and allow them to use that data in the moment to provide you with a more personalized experience.

(Matt at 00:17:25) So it's meant to be much more symbiotic versus traditional ad tech is more about looking over your shoulder, observing what you're doing on the Internet, and then trying to provide you with things that it thinks is relevant. We took the approach of just asking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:43) Oh, okay. That's a simple way to do it. Josh, maybe you can help me remember who this was, but we talked to this one company. They're the second largest search company in the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:55) And as far as request goes, Algolia. Have you heard of these people yet?

(Matt at 00:18:01) I have not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:02) Okay. So they do a lot of search, and you can look them up. But one of the things that I thought was interesting is an area of business that they were getting into was product recommendations. So if you go on a site and you're looking for jeans and you're like, "Hey, I'm looking for these types of jeans," it would help you find those products better because it's commerce searching. And I didn't know if you had explored them at all.

(Matt at 00:18:29) No, we actually have not. So thank you for turning me on to them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:33) Yeah, I recommend you check them out because they have really bright people, and it was cool that we did an episode with them. I can send it to you. But when I heard what they were doing with search and AI, because, you know, everybody wants to talk about AI, right? It's like you can't have an interview in '23 without bringing up AI. And so I was curious if it had impacted them at all. And this is one of the things that they were using it for. Apparently in commerce, there's this problem where if I go to a website and I'm searching for a specific product, the product searching isn't that good to find nearby products or things that might, you know, and this was one of the solutions to it. And when you were talking earlier about you would fill out five questions and it would recommend a product, I was like, "Oh, Matt should go check out what these guys are doing just so at least you're aware of the different techniques people are using in the industry to do this different types of product recommendation."

(Matt at 00:19:29) Cool. Yeah, I appreciate that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:31) Yeah. Are you currently using AI? Or how are you using it?

(Matt at 00:19:37) Yeah, we are. So at its heart, Jebbit is a creative platform. So the big appeal is you can create these interactive experiences on the web without needing a development team. So it's WYSIWYG editing, low code, no code, and you can get very, you can customize it quite a bit, and you can really format the content however your heart desires. So to that end, generative AI plays in pretty well to that because it is a creative platform.

(Matt at 00:20:11) So we are using it to help create these experiences from scratch. If you just need a little bit of inspiration, you can prompt a large language model to basically ask it for five questions to recommend a pair of jeans out of my product feed, and it'll be able to create that. And then on the more consumer-facing side of it, we're still actively working on this one, but we are live with a couple of alpha customers. We do have the ability to, based on the responses that a user gives us, recommend a product based on that particular information.

(Matt at 00:20:53) Before, the product as it stands now requires a set of mapping. So based on the questions and answers, you're very explicitly mapping those answers to a particular set of products and narrowing down your search over time. The AI solution to this just does that, but without all of the manual labor that's required there. So the idea is that it can provide better recommendations with less effort, and that will just lower the barrier to entry for these brands to create these and deploy them. And we'll give better recommendations to the consumers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:33) Are any podcasters using this technology?

(Matt at 00:21:36) I don't believe so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:37) To engage with their audiences at all or anything like that?

(Intro Narrator at 00:21:40) We were exploring,

(Matt at 00:21:42) We were exploring a partnership with someone who had a pretty large Twitch channel where it would, they would pop up a link and push someone into a Jebbit experience to try and collect information and learn more about their consumer base. But it never really got off the ground there. We really have specialized within the space of CPG and ecommerce.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:05) What's that acronym?

(Matt at 00:22:07) Oh, consumer packaged goods. So, you know, pretty much if you go into a grocery store, the brands that you see there that are creating your cereal, your toilet paper, your toothpaste.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:21) Yeah, yeah. I had a conversation with somebody about, I don't know, five years ago, and I thought it was fascinating. They worked with a fertilizer company, I believe it was, and that's why they would use rebates. Because the fertilizer companies would ship all this fertilizer out to these big warehouses and farmers would come buy it, but they had no idea who their customers were, right? They didn't know exactly who they were. So they would put these $20 rebates in it, and they fill out their name, address, information, and then send the rebate in. And now they know where their customers are, and they can talk directly to their customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:54) Is that something you guys do? Is that one of the reasons why?

(Matt at 00:22:57) Yeah. So I mean, with going to a virtual world and the boom, or the resurgence of the QR code, we have had customers put QR codes that lead to Jebbit experiences directly on their products, which is pretty awesome. Just walking through a grocery store and seeing, you know, it's like, "Oh, that's Jebbit."

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:16) Nice. Yeah. Dude, this is so cool. So what's next for you? What are you really excited about as far as the future of Jebbit goes?

(Matt at 00:23:24) I mean, I'm just along for the ride trying to grow this company as large as we possibly can. This is the most amazing first job that I could ever have imagined, just having started from those humble beginnings in a college dorm room. It's been incredible to see the amazing people that we've gotten to join us and the product that we've built, the customers that we get to interact with day to day, week to week. And I just want to keep it moving. I've just really enjoyed everything that I've learned, and I'm not quite at the point where I'm looking at, you know, what's next. I think it's just continuing to grow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:09) You're excited and you're in growth mode. Awesome. Well, as you continue to learn and things change and you guys grow, when you're a billionaire and you're doing your exit and all of that, you need to call. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.