mpire's CEO Matt Hulett on Scaling Consumer Empowerment Quickly + His DIY PR Efforts
Mpire surprised me once I started digging in for questions - their offering feels unique, and, to me, seems to actually embody the idea of consumer empowerment.

Their early partnership with eBay impressed me too. (See Collector's Corner.)

They are fascinating in their early alignment with powerhouse eBay, and their funding comes from the interesting and to-be-watched Ignition Partners.

For those seeking to understand how a shopping 2.0 site comes to shape in short order, this interview with mpire's CEO Matt Hulett is an interesting view into pieces of that process.

Matt's interview is well over 2000 words - I'll have a shorter, best quotes version to Loren Baker in Search Engine Journal next week.

At the end of the post please find links to the articles I read that helped me form questions, and I have some follow up questions that I'll be writing up and sending to Matt tomorrow.

And thanks to Matt for his transparency - I hope you find his thinking on mpire, pr and scaling quickly informative.

digging into mpire:
Brian Smith doesn't see you as a mainstream shopping tool, but rather a tool for ebay buyers and sellers. Why does he have this opinion?
MH: I don't agree.

My sense on what we've launched is a new type of shopping service. It is hard to peg us as a "traditional comparison shopping product." But, in essence that is what we've done.

We've been public about being focused on the "used" and hard-to-find space. But, really we've built a consumer platform to find deals. We launched with eBay, Yahoo, and Overstock a little over a couple of weeks ago but we'll have many more things to talk about soon.

I have always wanted to provide consumers with a service that really is about consumer confidence. We have the ability to provide consumers with the true market value for virtually any product that they are looking for. Our customers are partners thing that is very mainstream.

It’s a trend that I call, "Shopping 2.0". Building search and analytics into a single service that empowers consumers.

What is the direction of mpire and how is your partnership with eBay important to getting there?
MH: Our mission is to empower the online millions of sellers and buyers by organizing and analyzing their shopping experience. We wont rest until we're the most popular shopping service on-line. Our partnership with eBay has been fantastic. We have a multi-faceted relationship that ranges from seller and buyer products.

Most recent example of the results of our relationship was the recent (June 12th) launch of Collector's Corner (a destination that powers the buying experience for eBay collectible consumers).

eBay is partners with Yahoo. How does this affect your direction?
MH: Not at all. We have great relationships with both companies.

At what stage did the idea to partner with eBay emerge? Did mpire begin building with eBay in mind or did that come about later?
MH: eBay approached us. Dave Cotter (the founder, now CMO of Mpire) built a strong relationship with eBay. eBay heard that we were shifting our companies strategy to more of a consumer-facing service and went on faith that we could deliver. We did. Stay tuned for more fun projects between Mpire and eBay.

In other words, talk about Laurence Toney and how he got involved with mpire.
MH: Laurence is one of those business leaders that you always want to find in a large organization (like eBay). He is an intrapreneur. He is responsible for one of the largest businesses at eBay (collectibles) and took a big step to look outside of eBay for innovation to help his business. I've got to hand it to both Laurence and eBay for thinking way outside of the proverbial box.

What kind of agreements did you have in place when you began work on the eBay project? Were there contracts involved?
MH: Unfortunately, I have to respond with the classic, "we don't discuss our business agreements publicly."

If ebay vendors are already paying for their listings plus a cut to paypal then how can they justify paying mpire 20 cents a click, and aren't you essentially cannibalizing ebay's potential search profits? AND Yahoo's?
MH: We believe we're going to be an efficient channel for our marketplace partners to bring cost effective leads to their products. For sellers, we've spent well over a year talking to thousands of sellers. We have tens of thousands of customers using our listing, business management and research tools -- one thing that we've heard loud and clear is that sellers want customers.

There is a general sense from sellers that we've talked to that any solution that is cost effective while better merchandising their listings/products is something that they'll pay for. Our early results covered on blogs.mpire.com are very promising.

Lots of folks are adding votes and user ratings as a judge of quality. Where is mpire in this method of rating data?
MH: Stay tuned. Building community powered shopping is going to be important for us.

Can you talk about how you've been spending that $5.5 that ignition partners invested in mpire? What percentage has gone to what aspects of the startup thus far? Is $5.5 enough?
MH: We don't talk about our use of proceeds publicly.

How will you be (or have you...) incorporating/ed the various eBay APIs (eBay Express Search; eBay Express Shopping Cart; eBay Product Info; and Contextual Keywords) into your offering?
MH: We have full support for the eBay API that we support for our buyer and seller products. We are currently looking at the keywords initiative as well as other APIs to support.

Transparency is your hallmark and yet you've left (as far as I can tell) the financial relationships with your advertisers opaque.
MH: Transparency is our rallying cry. We feature our current Mpire Builder customers in the display with a "feature seller" icon. Since our shopping is contextually relevant you may not have seen the specific sponsored search. It's there. In addition, rest assured it is going to be even more clear as well roll out the merchandising functionality this summer what is a paid relationship v. a general listing.

Also, you're leaving money on the table with your ad model - someone selling a corvette pays the same as someone selling a baseball card (20 cents per click, right?).
MH: Potentially. But, I like to be measured about early businesses...I've seen a lot a press around revolutionary new business models but haven't back that up with product execution. I really want us focused on building a world-class consumer experience while driving tremendous value to sellers. Introducing multiple schemas (PPC, keyword bidding, CPA, etc) is way too confusing and hard to execute on as an early stage business.

How do you protect the baseball card seller from getting clicked on so much he makes no profit on his card... and yet still ensure that he makes the sale?
MH: We will be introducing tools this summer that allow very specific control over the spend for every seller by item.

Are you familiar with Jellyfish's model (consumer gets rebate a month after purchase)? Would you talk some about how it would or wouldn't work for mpire? (would this be too complex, involving paypal escrow and stuff?)
MH: Only from what I've read. I wont speak too much about their model but I think having more shopping services promoting transparency is a great thing. There are a lot of dynamics around getting to scale---our approach is to work with the marketplaces and leveraging their infrastructure.

There is a lot of science to building merchandising, slotting, product listings, taxonomy, in a manner where you don't have to hire 50-100 people cramming products into SKUs. I would rather build something that can scale fast so that we can then dissect additional models to roll-out on top of a large base.

Is CPA on the table as a possible offering for your advertisers? Why or why not?
MH: It could be. I like the idea of it. One issue for us is the level of sophistication of the actual seller. Some customers would understand it and others would not. We are starting at "this" (finding deals online) largely from a non-branded retailer perspective. I am not going to rule it out.

mpire pr efforts:
Matt - I appreciate that you, as the CEO of mpire, reached out to me personally.
MH: You bet.

Do you consider this action to be PR?
MH: Yes and no. The best thing to do is to build relationships with individuals in shopping and search. The more that folks such as yourselves pepper the Mpire team with thoughts and questions, then we'll only get better. I have made some surprisingly great relationships by basically reaching out to people and actually listening to their advice. If folks want to write about us, too. Then that's great to but its not the primary motivator.

Do you consider your blog a PR effort?
MH: Yes. I will be blogging more but I have been swamped with trips, travel, and a brand new job. We have a meritocracy at Mpire; we have a light process for editorial guidelines and topics but largely want anyone to be able to articulate a particular salient point.

Do you have a dedicated PR team?
MH: No.

Why are you the sole blogger?
MH: I'm not. We've had some of our developers blog recently. To be honest, we've been really busy launching the product, then eBay Live, etc.

I can't believe that amount of work work getting done and we'll have to start to slow down and articulate some of the very interesting things that we've discovered.

Dave Cotter is the CMO. Why isn't blogging in his realm?
MH: It will be. Dave is a real dynamo across program management, product management, and marketing. You'll be hearing from him soon.

Why did you decide to reach out to SEL (how did you hear about us first, what prompted your first email)?
MH: I've been tracking you for a bit; you've helped me formulate my thoughts. Coming out of a large company like Expedia, I really wanted to go deep on search and shopping. I feel like I've been training in the "Web 2.0 dojo" for the last six months and you've been a part of that.

personal:
Why did you move from the Ingnition Partners board to being the CEO of mpire?
MH: I took a break but had several good ideas. I like consumer plays and absolutely loved the team. What I realized is that Mpire had actually built all of the core Web services that I'd need to launch a new venture. It is harder that it looks.

Corporate Travel at Expedia appears to be a far cry from mpire. What experiences at Expedia have best served you thus far at mpire (or before, when you were a mere ignition partners board member ;)
MH: I am always on a seemingly non-linear path. After school, I had a X-windows/TCP business, then RealNetworks, then AtomShockwave, and then Expedia. I came into Expedia as an intrapreneur. It is really, really hard to launch new businesses when the larger corporate entities P/L is large. You may have the fastest CAGR in the company but its hard to get attention. Tenacity and creativity is what I've always brought to ventures. It is a nice foil for Mpire in the marketplace. It is crowded out here and I like to find ways to break through the noise.

What are you applying from your time at AtomFilms?
MH: My friend, Mika Salmi (founder and CEO), emailed a bunch of old Atom executives recently and jokingly exclaimed in email, "Matt you had the idea of YouTube back in '99." What drives me is the power of the consumer. At Atom, I really believed (and still do) that consumer-powered services can result in fantastic experiences. Sometimes I feel like I could dust off some of my old slides because a lot of what we talked about is coming to fruition: community and open, digestible bits of entertainment. I take that same passion of having the consumer in charge of their shopping to Mpire. Whether is controlling the shopping display, to showing the real price of any product, to voting on the best search for products, etc.

Why did you leave AtomFilms - did you have concerns about the business model?
MH: Atom moved to the Bay Area. I am a 4th generation Washingtonian. Deep roots.

We did restructure the company. Remember that the consumers never left the Internet. The advertisers did in 2001 beyond. John Batelle's latest book really does a good job of capturing that time. We knew that it would take awhile for the advertisers to come back. They did. Atom is doing great.

meta:
Why did eBay partner instead of buy?
MH: You would have to ask eBay about that.

Why didn't AtomFilms partner with or buy or steal the model concept from Channel101.com?
MH: I'll get you in touch with Mika on that.

Are you more of a Yacht Rock or Kicked in the Nuts kind of guy? (update... Channel 101 seems to be down or something. Probably from the copious traffic from SEL. Here are the same vids from YouTube: yacht rock and kicked in the nuts.)

MH: Interesting question. Kicked in the Nuts.

Honestly, I am more of one of those Indie Rock fans (bands like Wilco, Nada Surf, Ben Harper, etc).

I really enjoyed this conversation.

Matt.

Matt Hulett
Chairman & CEO
mpire

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Bibliography:
Mpire - Transparency & Empowerment (Brian Smith's review - excellent. Brian I hope I didn't misquote you too badly in my first question :)

Search engine aims to find good prices on used goods

Farecast and Mpire: Smart sites that will save you money

eBay To Go Head To Head Against Google For Online Ad Market
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |