- Okay, so today we're gonna learn about how a business
can go from 100,000 in revenue to 114 million
in revenue and appear on the Inc. 5000 list,
not just on the Inc. 5000 any ranking,
they're actually number one,
so how you can actually get to number one.
We're gonna learn from the co-founder
and Chief Strategy Officer, Rizwan,
on why he decided to start the business,
how he navigates the waters in terms of
working with the same five partners for 10 years.
We're gonna learn from the marketing lead, Aaron,
what he's doing in terms of marketing for Ultra right now
and the different brands that they're spinning off.
So lots to take away here, hope you enjoy it,
and we'll see you inside.
- All right, everybody, today we have Aron North
from Ultra Mobile,
and we're going to talk about what Ultra Mobile is,
what he does at Ultra Mobile,
and just learn a lot more about the company.
So, Aron, I mean, first, like, we can get started.
Tell us a little bit about kind of who you are
and what you do.
- Yeah, well, I'm a traditional marketer raised
through the stakes of all the various agencies here
in Southern California.
Spent about a decade doing agency work,
advertising, promotion, marketing agencies,
then made the leap to client side about seven years ago.
And kicked off my client-side career with Taco Bell.
Spent almost six years there.
In charge of all advertising, communications,
packaging, point-of-sale.
Big job. Fun job.
And then was actually recruited to come here at Ultra Mobile
and help grow our base business, Ultra,
and launch a new business,
which is an online disrupter called Mint SIM.
[Eric]- Awesome. So what does client side mean.
[Aron]- Well, I mean, simply it's your no longer
on the agency side.
So you are at the place where the products
and services are being made,
versus a vendor built to support those clients.
- Got it.
Yeah, so Taco Bell sounds really interesting,
I think people can learn a lot from these brands.
So what was your role at Taco Bell
and, kind of, what was the difference switching over there?
- Yeah, I was the director of advertising and communications
and it was an exciting job.
It was a fantastic job.
What we did was we worked with product development team,
and the product development team were constantly
coming up with all these fun innovations.
We worked with them and consumer insights
to develop the strategies of how we were going
to launch these products, the communications strategies
and then my team helped write those strategies,
work with our agency
to create all the creative and advertising campaigns,
we work with the in-house shop to do all the packaging,
all the point-of-sale materials,
all the training materials, etc., etc.
So it was really -- if it was something
that had paid media around it,
it came through our team
and it was all about building 360 degree communication plans
to launch new products,
and Taco Bell is a new-product machine.
They launch something new every four to six weeks.
So you think you've got a robust annual calender,
plus you're also always testing new products
and test markets.
So on a given year we would launch anywhere
between 20 and 25 new products
with a full suite of communications.
- Got it.
There's a lot words that I want to try to distill here
in a second, but I think we talked about a couple
of months ago when we connected,
there's a specific key phrase you use
when you talk about measuring things at Taco Bell
or coming up with new products.
Do you know of any frameworks
that you can, I guess, teach people here.
- Well, I mean, we always looked
at macro-economic transfers, right.
Or macro-eating trans --
- Where?
- Where people --
Okay, so for example, Taco Bell was not selling breakfast.
We know, obviously, people eat breakfast every day,
but when you look at the market
and you see what people are demanding for breakfast.
They need speed, convenience,
something that's easy to eat in the car,
because they're multi-tasking.
You know that people are typically running late,
so you need to build products
that, not only are delicious,
but also satisfy these need-states that people have.
One of the big innovations
for us was the Breakfast Crunchwrap, right?
So it was everything you wanted in breakfast,
plus a hashbrown all wrapped up in a tortilla --
[Eric]- Whoa.
- and grilled, so it's easy to eat on the road.
And that product was the flagship product that launched.
- So, I mean, you learned a lot at Taco Bell
in terms of brand marketing and things like that.
How's that carried over into what you do at Ultra.
- Yeah, I think one of the most important lessons I learned
from Taco Bell was, actually, it's okay to take risks.
So many companies are risk averse today.
They're so trying to be safe and politically correct,
that, in fact,
what happens with their marketing is it ends up being --
The edges aren't sharp anymore.
They're so rounded
that you really don't communicate anything,
and it's not really breakthrough.
So one of the things we were really good at was
taking calculated risk,
and being okay with failure.
So we always had the saying,
if you're going to fail,
fail fast, fail smart, and fail cheap.
So don't have this thing go on forever.
Make sure you learn from it,
and don't put all your eggs in one basket
from a spend stand point.
Diversify that out,
but test new things.
We were always taking ten percent of our budget
and trying new stuff with it.
And a lot of times
that ten percent paid off like jackpots,
because you had a small investment
in something that was high-risk, high-reward
and it would pay out,
and you would have all the benefits of that
without enveloping your entire program in this risk.
- So here's a key take-away.
I mean, when it comes to marketing
or we can call it growth hacking,
whatever you want to call it,
marketers do use a framework called the ICE framework,
which is impact, confidence, and ease
and you score each of those on a scale of one to ten,
and you average them across the board.
When you're doing tests like this it shows you,
should you be taking --
It shows you how you should prioritize each risk.
That's just one way you can go about doing it,
and I'm sure Aron has their own way of doing it.
So, curious to know, is that how --
something like what you guys do, or --
- Yeah, what we do --
I mean, I don't use the ICE method,
I'm familiar with it,
but what I like to do is I look at the biggest pain points
in the purchasing process
and figure out how to rectify the biggest pain points.
[Eric]- Right.
Because you get constant feedback with social media,
we have a very robust customer care center,
and we get customers talking to us all the time.
You have to listen to the customer
or the potential customer.
And then if you see people asking the same questions
over and over again,
you know you have an opportunity for clarity.
If you see a purchase hurdle,
in this case, it was like this fear of trying it.
We looked, and we said, look, this is the largest
hurdle we have right now,
so how do we knock down that hurdle
and if we knock it down,
what is the impact on the business.
So that's the way I really approach it,
because if you think about our business,
it's new, it's young, it's growing.
We want to eliminate all the rejection points we can,
while still maintaining a profitable business.
[Eric]- Got it. This is really simple, right?
So take away is just look at the data, whether --
For example, the videos that we're doing right now,
YouTube -- you look at the audience retention,
for them you're looking at the customer feedback.
Okay, take it one step further, you've solved one point,
now go to the next one.
You just keep optimizing from there.
Is that right?
- Absolutely, and, you know,
it's easy to get hung up on, maybe, a loud customer,
somebody who's very vocal in the social space,
but they may only represent a small fraction
of what the larger issue is.
So we look at the data
and we look at the mass volume, right?
Like, if we see lots of people talking
about one particular thing,
then we will focus our efforts there,
because you get the best yield
when you have limited resources.
We're in a start-up, scale-up, right?
So you've got limited resources,
where do you deploy?
My philosophy is deploy against the biggest opportunities.
- Got it.
So Ultra Mobile, can you give people and example
of what kind of people would be using it
and then I think we can talk about Mint for second, too.
- Yeah, Ultra is --
So Ultra is very much built for the international customer
and what that means is,
that's people who are immigrants to the U.S.,
who are still calling abroad.
So Ultra's unique position --
When we think about the three pillars,
it's innovation, international,
and value, right?
So if you think about the Ultra brand,
we're constantly trying to add value
in the wireless segment,
but our 'special sauce,' if you will,
is the international approach.
- So if I come in from China,
I just buy an Ultra Mobile card
and I'm good to go?
- Yeah, you put in an Ultra Mobile SIM into your phone,
fires right up,
and now you have unlimited calling back to China.
So we have a variety of plans,
just like many other wireless providers.
We have everything from as low as 19 dollars,
all the way up to 49 dollars,
which will get you unlimited data,
but the real special sauce is that
with all of our plans,
you can call up to 120 countries, internationally,
and 60 plus of those countries, right now, are free.
- Wow.
Ultra Mobile, that there's one segment there
and then you guys started Mint recently,
which is what the tee shirt is
that you're wearing right now.
It says -- we said foxing,
"Very foxing clever."
Check out this shirt.
I need to have one of those.
- Well, we've got one for you.
- Oh, cool.
Great. So why Mint?
What's the difference?
- Right, if you think about the portfolio of products
that Ultra has,
you have Ultra,
which is very much focused
on the international immigrant community and it's sold
through 75 hundred indirect, wireless retail locations.
That is this segment here.
We wanted to create a product that was complementary,
but had no --
there was no crossover between the audiences.
So what we've done is we built a heart of the market,
general market product
that is exclusively available online.
So it's domestic only,
it's built for an online shopper,
and it's really built to satisfy the needs
of the core U.S. customer.
- So what are some key branding lessons you can take
in from Taco Bell that carry over
into what you're doing today.
- Yeah, well, it's very interesting,
in my mind,
how commoditized the wireless marketplace is.
- Yeah.
- If you think about it,
I could take your phone right now,
swap out the SIM
and unless you knew what the EON was,
which is the little name in the upper left,
you could not tell the difference
between the service you're on now and our service.
That is, by definition, what a commodity is,
so the biggest lesson, for me,
is building and establishing a strong brand,
right from the start,
so that way you can start to have things
that separate you from your competitors.
For example, Ultra, we're constantly looking at ways
to do new innovation
that doesn't cost the customer anything.
One of the things we heard from customers,
was they want the --
they run out of data.
We're always running out of data.
We're all big data consumers.
So what we allowed them to do was have a toggle
that when they're watching video,
they can toggle their speed down, so, that way,
videos are coming in
just slightly outpacing the viewing speed,
which is really important,
because what Facebook does is --
Facebook wants to get that video
on your phone as fast as possible.
[Eric]- Right.
- So you're using your data --
It'll download the entire video
behind the scenes.
You may only watch five seconds,
yet you've consumed all that data.
- Wow.
- So we built this switch
and we allow the customer to toggle slow, toggle fast,
to, hopefully, let them save more data.
Cost them nothing.
[Eric]- That's great.
- Just the innovation we put out.
So we're constantly looking at things like that,
to try and separate ourselves as we build value
within the brand.
- From a marketing perspective,
what kind of struggles are you facing right now
with the business.
[Aron]- Well, there's always pressure on price.
I mean, if you look --
I think this is a really fantastic time to be a customer
or a consumer in wireless,
because prices continue to drop,
value continues to go up.
What we're looking to do is how do we remain competitive,
while remaining profitable,
and making sure
that the customer has the right value equation
for the service.
[Eric]- Got it.
And what's working for you in terms of marketing nowadays.
- At Mint we are very much, what I like to call,
performance media driven,
so these are all the things you would typically find
with an online brand,
whether it's search, cost per click,
all these conversion based tactics.
So we're deploying all those.
We are also doing influencers.
So we've just launched several influencer campaigns --
[Eric]- Oh, nice.
- with a young product
that is newly launched.
This is sort of like Marketing 101,
but independent third-party validation carries lots
of weight --
- Yes.
- Because everybody knows the brand is going
to beat its chest and tell you how great its offer,
and service, and pricing is,
however, that's tainted.
We have a perspective on our product.
So having independent third parties validate that,
we've found is incredibly effective to,
not only amplifying our message,
but making our message more effective
when it's out in the market place.
- Got it.
In terms of how you go about getting better as a marketer,
as a leader at this company,
how do you keep improving?
- Well, we never stop learning.
One of the things is I'm constantly reading industry pubs.
- Like what?
- Ad Week, Ad Age, Ad Freak.
Believe it or not,
I also really like the Wall Street Journal --
[Eric]- Yes.
- and their CMO section.
[Eric]- I love it, yeah.
[Aron]- I find it's very rich
with big, almost like the macro-trends.
That's where you'll find big movers
and shakers doing big things.
It's really interesting, their take,
because they are such a business forward publication,
to how they look at marketing,
and their basic view on marketing,
in my opinion,
is they look at the business side of it
and what strategies, tactics, techniques,
and tools the big guys are using
and what's the impact of those tools.
- Right.
- And those are the main sources I have,
and then, of course, I'm always talking
within my peer networks,
understanding what things people are using,
and are having or not having success with.
One thing that's really great is coming
from Taco Bell, they have big budgets,
so I got visibility to a lot early types of technologies
and platforms that were coming out.
- How big are those budgets?
You don't have to give me an exact number.
I'm just wondering at a Taco Bell
versus an Ultra, for example.
- Well, I'll put it to you this way,
McDonald's, who is the largest player
in the QSR segment spends a billion a year on advertising.
True, in absolute dollars we had big budget,
but we were competing against people
with budgets four x and five x hours,
which made that incredibly competitive
and difficult.
So the same thing is true here,
while our budgets are, in absolute dollars, smaller,
we're still fighting against these big guys
with more, we just --
the thing I always take away is...
How do you get more creative?
How do you get more interesting?
How do you keep the edges sharp,
so that way you cut through?
And that's really the trick to doing great marketing,
is having, one, a strong insight,
a great understanding of your customer base,
and what they're looking for,
but then doing things that people want to engage with,
like why do I share, why do I care?
- Right.
- That's really what we're solving for.
- I love that.
Why do I share?
Why do I care?
Think about that.
So what's one book that you'd recommend to everyone?
Could be marketing, could be just fiction, non-fiction,
just what pops into your head?
- Purple Cow.
[Eric]- Purple Cow.
[Aron]- The thing I love about that book,
too, is some of the great, just sort of like,
convention-challenging questions.
I remember in that book,
there's one instance
where they say supermarkets have express checkout lines.
Okay, so you're going to take extra great care
of these people who have very few items,
because you're trying to get them
through the store quickly.
I'm, like, yeah, of course, that makes sense.
Low volume, you just crank them out.
Seth said in that book,
"Those are your worst customers."
They're the people buying the smallest amounts,
and yet you're going to give them special service?
Why don't you have a line dedicated
to the people who have two shopping carts full of groceries.
Those are you best customers.
Wouldn't you want to take care of them?
[Eric]- Right.
[Aron]- And I'm going, all right, how do we miss
that as a marketer.
So we're really trying to bring that type of thinking here
and think about what can we do to promote the best type
of customer we want
and how do we make sure
that customer is taken care of the best,
because they're the ones
that are doing the thing we want the most.
- Is there anything else that you'd like to add,
that you'd like to share with the audience?
- Yeah, I would say,
don't be afraid to challenge convention,
and don't be afraid of failing.
That is the crux of so many wins
and so many success stories I've had in my life
and in my work history.
I think that has been the cornerstone of growth
for me, honestly.
I'm not reckless with the risk we take.
We take very measured risks.
So, even today, with smaller budgets,
we are constantly testing things.
And a lot of times they don't work.
So, I think, my note to the people out there would be,
if you're going to do something that's risky,
and you're going to calculate it,
make sure, either your management team,
or your supervisor team,
or whomever your partners are,
in the endeavor,
understand that this may not perform.
I think if you set expectations appropriately,
it's much easier to take risk
and we do that here --
I do that here really well,
because I know --
Hey, this is a very small expenditure,
but if we learn something very valuable,
we can amplify that quickly.
And if you're not testing things all the time,
you're not growing
and you're not trying new marketing techniques,
because everybody's, like,
"Oh, I want to do whatever the best practice was."
[Eric] Right.
- Well, it's only a best practice
until somebody comes up with a new practice
that beats it.
So you should be constantly trying to find
that new practice.
- Love it.
Aron, thanks so much for doing this.
- Thank you.