Mike Smith: If you build a business around a powerful mission that is real and tangible and is noble in its intent, I don't think people just all of a sudden decide one day I don't care about the planet anymore.
Peter Bray: You know, they've gone piece by piece thinking about different ways to reach different people, but they've needed technology to be able to enable that so it can
Mike Smith: scale it looks from the outsider's perspective, it looked amazing. It was an absolute shit show on the ground.
Nathan Bush: Welcome to a very special bonus episode of Add to Cart, which we call the Explainer. This episode is brought to you by one of our partners who make Add to Cart possible. We're going to dive deep into an e commerce topic and unveil the secret tools that leading Australian retailers use to grow.
Nathan Bush: Hello and welcome to another very special Explainer episode of Add to Cart. As always, my name is Nathan Bush, director at E Suite and host of Add to Cart. This week our partner content is brought to you by the crew@impact.com now impact.com transform the way businesses, especially e commerce businesses, manage and optimize all sorts of partnerships. In this episode we are going to dive into the topic of how to leverage your communities for growth and this will be a really great conversation if you are planning for 2023 and looking for channels outside your traditional acquis and growth channels to unlock that potential. Today we have two guests. Joining me are Impact.com sales director Peter Bray. You might remember Pete from our very special Booktopia episode last year. Always great to have a chat with. And we've also got someone who's been on my conversation list for some time. It's the man behind Zero co founder Mike Smith. If you haven't heard of them and
Speaker E: you might be living under a rock,
Nathan Bush: Xeroco is committed to solving the global
Speaker E: single use plastic problem by producing personal
Nathan Bush: care and home cleaning products which come in Forever bottles using reusable refill pouches. You literally take the product out of the pouches, put it in the forever bottles, send the pouch back and it gets filled up and sent back to you with more product. Taking single use plastics out of the equation.
Speaker E: Really cool concept.
Nathan Bush: Zeroco also do a whole lot of cleanup work to get rid of plastics already in existence. Some of which, and you're going to hear about this today, involves building rubbish pyramids in Egypt. And Mike gives the most entertaining and funny story around what actually happened when he camped out on this pile of rubbish for three days in Egypt. So let's get straight into it. Let's Explore how to use communities to
Speaker E: drive growth in your business.
Nathan Bush: With Peter Bray from impact.com and Mike Smith from ZeroCo, we have two very,
Speaker E: very special guests today. Mike, welcome to Add to Cart.
Mike Smith: Thank you so much for having me. Stoked to be here, stoked to have you on.
Speaker E: Now, before we introduce our second guest, I want to open with your story and obviously the founder of Xeroco. If people haven't seen Xeroco, then you'll be living under a roc. If you're in the retailer E commerce world and it feels like you guys are everywhere at the moment, can you share the Zeroco mission and how you're going about it?
Mike Smith: Yeah. So we, we're on a mission to solve the global single use plastic problem. To do that we need to do two things globally. We need to stop making single use plastic and we need to work out a way to get all of the plastic that's made its way into the natural environment out of there. So that's what our business set out to do to solve the plastic problem at both ends of the supply chain. We do that by making personal care and home cleaning products super unsexy things that everyone uses every day, laundry, liquid deodorant, dishwashing, detergent, and we deliver them all direct to Aussie households minus all the single use plastic. So when you become a zero co customer, you get what we call a forever bottle that you keep at home and refill forever and a set of refill pouches that you send back to us when they're empty so we can clean them and fill them up and send them back out into the world.
Speaker E: How good? And you're often seen in a dolphin suit. What's the story behind that?
Mike Smith: I am often seen in a dolphin suit. It's just having a bit of fun. Right. So one of the things I learned very early on in the Zeroco journey is that when you are trying to tackle big global problems, they can often feel really overwhelming and daunting and the worst thing you can possibly do is bash people over their head with the problem. So we've from kind of day one said let's just, we never talk about the problem, let's just talk about the solution. And if you can make people smile or better yet, have a laugh while you're talking about doing something good for the planet, then you've got a better chance of engaging them over the long term. So anything we can do to take the piss out of ourselves to make the problem seem a little bit lighter, we do. And that Often means me dressing up in a dolphin suit and doing silly things.
Speaker E: Yeah. So if this sounds a bit muffled, it's because it's having trouble getting out of the dolphin suit at the moment. All right, let's bring our other guest in from the shadows, Peter Bray. Welcome back to ADD to cart. It's great to have you here.
Peter Bray: No, it's great to be back here. And Mark, I have to say we share a kinship because in a previous life, I used to work in the radio game and I used to get dressed up in a chicken suit to which people would chase me down and tackle me and win 200 bucks. But yours is much more purpose driven.
Speaker E: Mike's like, I haven't even met you. I don't know where to go with that comment.
Peter Bray: You don't need to go anywhere. Anyway.
Mike Smith: Chicken seats. Chicken seats.
Speaker E: Yeah.
Mike Smith: Good.
Peter Bray: I actually should have said more porpoise driven, but that's okay.
Speaker E: Oh, Pete, what has been happening in the world of impact.com, since we caught up with Booktopia last year?
Peter Bray: Yeah, look, a lot, you know, it's a really interesting time to be a software provider that works in the world of partnerships, affiliate and growth. Every customer that we're, we're bringing onto the platform is looking for new ways to, to be able to grow and kind of mitigate their over reliance and a whole bunch of the acquisition channels. But what's been really interesting has been seeing our current customers do amazing things in looking at partnerships in a whole new light. And that's why I'm so excited to be here today hearing from Mike. And also I can share a bit about what zero could do in the impact world in terms of building partnerships, communities as a way to drive awareness, but also tangible growth.
Speaker E: Yeah, absolutely. And thankful for impact.com for bringing us this episode and, you know, introducing us to Mike. Mike, you've actually been on my hit list for add to cart for some time. So when the impact.com said actually we can, you know, bring it all together, I'm like, oh, here we go.
Mike Smith: I am, I'm here.
Speaker E: So we are here to talk about community driven growth. And we know that 2022 has been challenging for many e commerce brands, whether purpose driven or not. We've had a lot of changes in algorithms and privacy and everything else that goes along with this. Mike, how have you found 2022 and where have your biggest challenges been?
Mike Smith: Yeah, it's been interesting, right? The world of performance media broke probably last year, to be real. Right. And this year, everyone's Dealing with the pain. And everyone who's in the data C space knows that acquisition's more expensive. Attribution's really difficult. It's just tough out there at the moment. I think the thing for us is from day one we've never solely relied on performance marketing because I always kind of felt like it was a fleeting beast of a thing. So from day one we've really done a whole bunch of stuff to build out a much broader marketing mix than just Facebook and Google. So look, we've fared pretty well throughout the last kind of 12 months. Yes, CAC has gone up a little bit, but it hasn't been crazy. So I think it's super critical for D2C brands to now think about the old school way of growing a business. Right. Which is about building brand and building community and they're two things you just can't really do with performance media alone.
Speaker E: Yeah. And from a customer perspective, have you seen any changes in the way that customers are connecting with your mission in 2020? You know, have the financial pressures made them less likely to prioritize sustainability or are they more connected to the sustainability message now?
Mike Smith: Yeah, it's an interesting question. We've kind of been talking, you know, with our leadership team here at Xeroco and waiting for this, for the cliff to come. You know, there's a lot of, lot of businesses are seeing massive drops in sale and cost of living pressures is a thing. We're yet to see it impact our business. And I think it's a function of where a mission driven business. Right. And so, you know, I know that a lot of people out there are doing it tough right now. There are a lot of people that have less money to spend every week than they used to. Interest rates have gone up, inflation is going crazy. But I think if you build a business around a powerful mission that is real and tangible and is noble in its intent, I don't think people just all of a sudden decide one day I don't care about the planet anymore. So I think we've been able to go and build a really tight bond with a really interesting community of people out there in Australia who do care really deeply about the planet if it means they got to spend an extra dollar a week on their laundry liquid, but it's going to solve the global plastic problem. I think people are willing to do that now. Yeah.
Speaker E: And it sounds like you haven't got to the point where you're like, oh shit, CAC is really expensive now we better do some community stuff. It feels like it's been built into the core of the business from the word go.
Mike Smith: Yeah, definitely. At the heart of what we're trying to do is build a people powered solution to the global plastic problem. That's why I started this business. That's the heart and soul of everything we do. It's my fundamental view that the global waste problem is not going to be legislated out of existence. Government's not going to move quick enough to solve this problem. It's not going to be big business who comes in and solves a problem because they've got a vested interest in not changing the way that things work because they make a lot of money out of the current system. So it's been my view from day one that it's going to be startup founders that can build communities and engage and inspire people from everyday walks of life to make small changes in their daily buying and consumption habits that will add up to a big impact on the planet. So from day one we've been building a community. Everything we do, everything we think about starts with how are we going to build a community? How are we going to inspire people to join us on this mission? So in the early days, performance media was a way for us to connect with that audience. But it's by no means been the sum totality of what we've done.
Speaker E: Yeah, brilliant. And we're going to dive into some of those brilliant community initiatives that you've done recently, including one that you've just got back from. I can't wait to hear more about them. But before we do, Pete, you work with some of the biggest brands around the world. What are you seeing in terms of 2022? Mike just mentioned shifting customer acquisition costs, mission still being important, sustainability still on the radar. What are you seeing?
Peter Bray: Look, from a selfish perspective, what we do as a technology is just help brands be able to do things like awesome deep community initiatives. How do they work with affiliates and influencers and content creators in better and different ways. So our mission, our purpose and what we do in our business hasn't really changed. But the question is around how do we see our customers, how to see brands do things differently. And there's no one better doing such a broad breadth of these type initiatives than Xeroco. So I think it's better kind of sharing a few of those in case, in case people haven't really been exposed to all of them. And you can just jump on the Xeroco website and see they've actually got like a program section which talks about all these different types of initiatives. So there's the sustainable schools initiative, there's the collaborations, there's refer a friend, there's the workways challenge, Sustainable Stays. Now each of those we could dive into in this, in this chat I know Mike will share a bit about them. But you know, ultimately it comes down to being able to leverage your brand in a way that people want to work with you, that you are. Yes. Purpose driven. Yes. You're kind of giving back and you've got, you've got the right type of, type of mission that people want to, want to align with and Xeroco has that in spades. But I think what I do want to touch on briefly is kind of thinking about this idea of how does the, how does you know, programs or community initiatives as a channel really deliver value? And we've got a case study coming out with ZeroCo, impact.com and Xeroco shortly and just a couple of numbers on that. Like since June 21when, when Xeroco launched with impact.com, you know, they've had over 380 new active partners driving acquisition. The average month to month revenue growth has been 27% and then the average monthly ROAS is greater than 1700%. So from our perspective, when we see a brand that's been on a great growth trajectory, we have been part of that. It's been over indexing against a lot of the rest of the market, particularly in a growth period. It's pretty fascinating to see.
Speaker E: Yeah, Mike, and in terms of those numbers, they're pretty impressive numbers out of the partnership space. How do you see partnerships as part of your overall spend? Is it a huge, significant chunk of it? Especially spend, but also time that you spend on nurturing those partnerships?
Mike Smith: Yeah, I think the time thing is a tricky one. Right. The reality is it takes a lot of time to build programs, to build platforms. Right. Which is why a lot of businesses don't do it. Because it requires an investment of multiple different people in your business focusing on it. That's the first thing. And in terms of budget for us, we think about partnerships. It's all kind of upside for us because it's all built around acquisition. And so we don't really even have a budget set aside for partnerships. The budget is as big as it needs to be. Like whatever we can drive out of it is what we'll drive out of it because it's kind of a cost neutral or profitable on first sale kind of exercise. So it doesn't really even sit within Our marketing budget, it has an endless budget. Whenever we can come up with awesome partnerships that are going to drive more people to join the Xeroco mission, then go for it basically is the directive I've given our marketing team.
Speaker E: You know, you shouldn't say those kind of words like, you know, bottomless budget to people like Peter Bray. He will jump on that.
Peter Bray: But you know what's interesting on that for a long time, the affiliate thinking. And ultimately that's what we're delivering. We're delivering a service that provides an affiliate service. But we just think affiliate is a pay on outcome mechanism. And so as Mike said, like if you build this channel in a way that's, that's scalable, it's automated and you can do lots of them. Every single bit of return that you get is if not cost neutral, it's, it's profit positive. And so when we think about that, there's endless opportunities. But the team at Xeroco, they've gone piece by piece thinking about different ways to reach different people. But they've needed technology to be able to be able to enable that so it can scale. And that's, that's the role that we play within that.
Speaker E: That's it. And I love what you said before, Pete around Mike and the team at Xeroco having the big, big ideas around, bringing the community together and then impact.com being the technology that powers it and the ability to scale it.
Speaker F: Yeah.
Peter Bray: And one more thing on that is it's also this idea that when you think about your marketing budget, marketing gets put into a place which is like, hey, we're going to use this money to try and get customers. And then to Mike's point, if you look at the investment in partnerships as a cogs or a cost of goods sold, it's a much different way to proportion that investment.
Speaker E: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Now Mike, let's get into some of those big ideas. You just got back from what sounded like a pretty epic trip. Can you tell us about that?
Mike Smith: It looks from the outsider's perspective, it looked amazing. It was an absolute shit show on the ground. Literally everything that could go wrong went wrong every single day, multiple times a day for two weeks.
Speaker E: Oh no.
Mike Smith: It was probably one of the most hectic trips of my life. But for those of you who don't know, we just launched a campaign called the 100 Year Cleanup, which is a big, audacious, bold vision to clean the planet every year for the next hundred years. Because I've been doing this for two years now and I've realized the problem is getting worse, not better. I've realized that we're not going to solve the global waste problem in our lifetime. Unfortunately. It's going to require an intergenerational effort and it's going to require everyone doing their little bit. And so we thought what we feel like the world needs now is a big bold vision for how we're going to create a long term meaningful change in the waste problem. And so we've committed to doing a whole bunch of cleanups every year for the next hundred years. The ultimate ambition is to pull 15 million water bottles worth of rubbish out of the natural environment every year. We've just pulled our first million water bottles out of the River Nile. So we went over to Egypt in the lead up to COP27. We spent about a month cleaning the Nile. We pulled a million water bottles worth of rubbish, which is just short of 20,000 kilos. To give you kind of a bit of weight perspective, we built the world's largest waste pyramid in the middle of the Egyptian desert. It was 10 meters high, taller than a three story building. And I set up a tent on top of it and camped on top for three days to try and get some global media attention about the global waste problem and to raise some money for the 100 year cleanup. And so I think we've raised about $350,000 now for the 100 year cleanup. The goal is to get to a million bucks this year. We're a third of the way there
Speaker E: off our first event, which is awesome, incredible, well done. And tell me, you got to tell us what went wrong. So tell us first about the actual process. Are you, are you and the team literally going into the Nile and picking bottles out and then putting them, piling them onto a pyramid? How does it actually work?
Mike Smith: So we work with local cleanup organizations all around the world. So every cleanup we do we're either working with a local, not for profit, a local charity, or a local cleanup organization. In Egypt, we work with an organization called Very Nile. We're going to continue to work with those guys ongoing. They have a full time presence on the Nile. So they, they've got a bunch of staff, full time staff that they employ doing cleanups. They also have volunteer groups come in every week from like schools and universities and work, you know, from, from companies that come and do weekly cleanups. And then they've also just started paying local fishermen that while they're out fishing to collect rubbish. And they pay them a price per kilo for Any rubbish they bring back to the facility. So they've got a processing facility there. All the plastic gets bundled up and then it gets sent to a local recycling facility. So what we did is we, instead of sending all the rubbish that we collected to a recycling facility, we sent it out to the desert and built this giant pyramid, did the stunt, and then sent it to the recycling facility afterwards.
Speaker E: That's amazing. What was the best piece of feedback that you got, either in the press or like that you heard off the cuff?
Mike Smith: So this is probably the biggest, craziest stunt that we've done around cleanups. We've done a heap of them over the last two years, but this is probably the biggest one. It was the first one where we said we really want to go and get global media attention off the back of this and really try and raise a significant amount of money to fund our cleanup projects. And so that's where this idea came from. And we ended up, we're just doing a tally Yesterday. We've had 517 pieces of media coverage around the world in. On TV and magazines, in print, in digital. It's been absolutely incredible. So it was really awesome for us just to see that a tiny little startup from a little town, Byron Bay on the north coast of New South Wales, can go and have a big global impact. Right. There's not even 20 people that work at Xeroco. So for us to be able to pull off a stunt of this magnitude and get as much media coverage as we did, raise as much awareness about the waste problem, but then ultimately raise a bunch of money to fund future cleanups was. It was super humbling and it was super exciting to see having a global impact.
Speaker E: I just think it's an inspirational story for people who are aspiring founders out there that you one day can sleep on a pile of rubbish in a tent for three nights in the desert. What a thing to look forward to.
Mike Smith: Yeah, totally.
Speaker E: And you mentioned so much went wrong. What was the worst thing that went wrong?
Mike Smith: I've thought long and hard about how much of this story I'm going to tell publicly. I still haven't decided yet.
Speaker E: Go. Go for it. Really.
Mike Smith: There was some blackmailing involved. I got blackmailed a few times. I had my passport taken and photographed by police on three separate occasions. I got violently ill. I got a thing called the Pharaoh's Revenge. It's a really violent form of stomach bug that travelers get in Egypt. And I was literally vomiting and diarrhea ing for 48 hours right into the lead up of when the pyramid, when we launched it and I was literally about to go live on TV around the world and I was still vomiting and diarrhea. Oh. So, yeah, there was quite a few things that did not go quite according to plan.
Speaker E: Brutal. And I bet when people are putting cameras in your face and this is your moment, you're like, I'm just holding this together.
Mike Smith: Totally.
Speaker E: Super.
Mike Smith: Like exhausted, dehydrated, hadn't slept properly. Yeah, it was rough. And then had to go on top of a 10 meter pyramid of rubbish that was stinky and full of flies and try and get some sleep. Yeah, it was rough.
Nathan Bush: You need to write that book while it's fresh.
Mike Smith: I came back deeply exhausted. I don't think I've ever been more exhausted in my life than I was when I came back from Egypt. I just felt down to the absolute core of my being that I had just drained every piece of energy from my life.
Speaker E: Would you do it again?
Mike Smith: Totally. I'd go back tomorrow.
Speaker E: You're a madman. I love it.
Mike Smith: It was awesome.
Speaker E: And then obviously a key part of this is publicity for the mission, raising funds. Did it have any impact on sales at all?
Mike Smith: Indirectly, but it wasn't really. We didn't go into this campaign saying, hey, we want to do this to make money and to drive sales of Xeroco products. So if when you're kind of building out a marketing campaign, depending on what your objectives are, you're going to do things quite differently. Right. So there was no hard sales message. And if you go online and have a look at the imagery that was shot, you know, there wasn't even zero co branding really on the pyramid. This was really about driving a mission based thing, about we've got to stop using plastic and we got to clean up the planet. So we tried to be really pure about this and say, this is not about zero code. This is not about trying to flog shit to people. It's about trying to solve this big fundamental problem in the world which is people buying shit and throwing it away and then ending up in the ocean.
Speaker E: It's a really good lesson in if you've got clear objectives and you don't try and do everything with one execution, how creative and big it can be from a community perspective. How did you bring in your community on that initiative? Because I can imagine most of your community is here in Australia cheering you on. You're in the desert sleeping on a pile of rubbish. How do you connect the two?
Mike Smith: Yeah, that's a good question. So we've thought a lot about who is our community and what are the different kind of segments within our community. So give example. Like, so this time last year we did an equity crowdfunding campaign on the virtual platform, which was a wild thing. We broke the equity crowdfunding record. We raised like $5 million in under five hours. It was a pretty wild thing. And off the back of that, we turned three and a half thousand customers into shareholders. And Pete is actually one of those shareholder customers. And so, you know, from that moment in time, this time last year, I said to myself, okay, I've now got three and a half thousand business partners, which is a super powerful thing if you use it correctly. And so we have different comms channels and different platforms set up for different audiences. So we've gone and built a closed Facebook group just for our shareholders. We've got an emailing list that's just for shareholders. And so we've managed to like tap into those different parts of our community at different times. And so to give you an example, when I was on the pyramid, I made sure that I shot some videos specifically to our shareholders and thanking them for being part of the journey. And that got sent out via email to all the shareholders, got posted in the Facebook group to the shareholders, which is about making sure that everyone who's part of this journey feels like they are genuinely part of the journey. Which means that when I'm out in the middle of the desert on top of this waste pyramid, they're there with me kind of thing. We spend a lot of time thinking about not just our community, but like, what are the segments within our community and what do we need to do to make sure that they feel like they are part of the journey? Because they are absolutely incredibly important to the, to the long term viability of our business.
Speaker E: Awesome. And Pete, as a shareholder, what was your response to seeing Mike's efforts up on the pyramid?
Peter Bray: Look, I'm very grateful that Mike's sacrificing himself in that way for the benefit of our investment.
Mike Smith: So that,
Peter Bray: but you know, it's a, it's a fascinating thing to think about when you have a community shareholder like me being one, but also impact technology that's enabling it behind the scenes. It's not only do you have three and a half thousand business partners, Mark, you got three and a half thousand salespeople out there speaking to their aunties, speaking to their friends and family, being quite vocal about the benefit of Xeroco and why not? And then I just love the halo effect that sits around that. And then when you couple that in, like, I've got, I've got a young family and I go and talk to my school about it and then where does the Sustainable Schools program come in? So there's a whole, there's a whole overlap that exists within all these programs, but they're all for the right reason.
Speaker E: Yeah. And that's that intergenerational effort that you were talking about earlier, Mike?
Mike Smith: Yeah, totally. I feel like sometimes I talk about our mission too much and don't talk about our products. But for me that's, that's like, that's the reason I started this business, that's the reason everyone's a customer or a shareholder, is because we're trying to solve this big fundamental problem that we absolutely have to address. And so everything for me led us back to the mission.
Speaker E: And sorry, just to go back to what you were saying before, Pete, around Impact, helping power the community and the shareholding scheme. Can you elaborate on that? Because obviously virtual is the platform that we invest through and some brilliant brands on there. How does Impact take that to the next level then?
Peter Bray: Yeah, it's really the same methodology that we've used in that idea of affiliate marketing. Even as a community shareholder, if I refer new customers to Xeroco, I get some sort of reward from that sort of financial incentive, but it's got a greater halo. It's also that you know that you're doing the right thing in so many right ways. And then that's the same principle with the sustainable stays and the sustainable schools as well. And look, Mark, do you want to give some people some insight into how they operate?
Mike Smith: Yeah, totally. So when we were building out our kind of sales plan, our kind of sales channel and distribution plan, we started to think about, you know, there's obviously really, there's really obvious places to go to sell our products, right? Online and supermarkets and pharmacies, that's where people buy hand wash and shampoo and deodorant. Right? And so those, those were just easy made sense, just go and do those things. But we also started to think about what are the other places that people use our products and how can we build an interesting distribution channel around those? And so one of the places we started thinking about was accommodation providers, right? Hotels, guest houses, Airbnbs. All of those places use heaps of hand washing, heaps of dishwashing liquid and heaps of laundry liquid and all that stuff, right? And the reality is it all comes in single use plastic at the moment. If they're buying it through the supermarket so we thought to ourselves, how can we go and build a platform that would, number one, enable us to get into, you know, 100,000 Airbnb properties around the country to help solve the problem of single use plastic in those Airbnb properties by getting them stop using other people's products and using ours. But then thirdly, how could we promote and incentivize those. Those Airbnbs, which are essentially, you know, mom and dad businesses to be involved? So we went and built a platform called Sustainable Stays, which was basically a really simple program that says if you start using Xeroco products in your Airbnb, we'll promote your property on our platform. So you can go to xeroco.com sustainable stay, you can see a whole bunch of properties that are listed there. We send out emails to our audience saying, hey, you're looking for a holiday? Why don't you go and stay in one of these epic Airbnbs? We do stuff on socials about those properties, but then also we added an incentive scheme for those properties which said, if someone comes and stays at your Airbnb and they then go and buy Zeroco hand wash, we'll give you a commission on that sale. So there's flyers and QR codes and stuff in these Airbnb properties, which enables the Airbnb to earn a little bit of extra revenue out of each guest stay. So it's kind of a win, win, win. Right. The planet wins because we're stopping single use plastic. The Airbnb wins because they get promoted and they get a little bit of extra revenue on a stay. And Xeroco wins because hopefully we go and acquire a whole bunch of new customers. And so Impact has been the platform we've used to manage the Airbnb community.
Speaker E: Isn't it brilliant from us? I know a lot of online retailers struggle with the physical nature of, like, getting people to try it hands on. What a brilliant way to get people just experiencing it in person.
Mike Smith: Yeah, totally. It's a free marketing channel, right?
Speaker E: Yeah.
Mike Smith: People get to use our product in a. In an epic Airbnb.
Speaker E: And so that's a big idea. That's, you know, 100,000 Airbnbs. If a marketing team would normally come forward and put that idea to a founder. Founder, like, like, that's a great idea, but shit, that seems like a lot of work. Obviously you need the technology to underpin it and be able to scale. Pete, can you give us insight into how that actually works from an impact.com perspective?
Speaker F: Yeah.
Peter Bray: And you've touched on it there really
Speaker F: well, Nath, which is technology underpins it. But I do have to say, when it comes to the idea and the execution, partnerships are all about trust and it's all about finding the right type of people to be able to execute upon it. And so the Xeroco team at this stage, you know, Emma's one of the, one of the people on Mike's team
Peter Bray: who really pioneers this stuff.
Speaker F: She's in the platform creating contracts, she's in the platform distributing promo codes or tracking links or enabling those QR codes to be directed to the right place. And when you go to the Xeroco website, as mentioned before, there's a whole bunch of little program links that you can go through to sub to subpages that explain so easily what these programs are and the benefit of them. So Xerocode do all those pages. But impacts behind the scenes in terms of driving a new Airbnb host to kind of sign up to the program and then ensuring that when a QR code is scanned that it's being attributed back to that Airbnb host. And then Impact is the platform that's distributing all those commission payments so that the Xeroco team don't have to do a whole bunch of invoicing and back and forwards like they can really focus on the strategy, the implementation and the tech kind of just does all the other stuff.
Speaker E: So to just drill down into a little bit more hands on without giving away too many state secrets, Airbnb owner goes on, signs up through the Xeroco website, does that automatically, then go into the Impact platform to generate the right QR codes and links and then do they get a special offer or Xeroco product sent out to them automatically from there?
Speaker F: Yeah, Mike can touch on that.
Mike Smith: Yeah. So they, they become a customer. I think we have a, there's a discount that we give them to be a customer of ours. And depending on the volume, the product they're going to order, you know, if they're managing multiple properties, they can even get a wholesale ra. And then they get prompted to go and create an account with Impact. And then within the Impact dashboard, they've got all the, all the creative and content stuff that they're going to need. So they can download flyers, they can download QR codes, all that kind of stuff, and then track their affiliate earnings through that platform as well.
Speaker E: Beautiful. And does the Airbnb owner know that they're on the Impact platform or does it all is Zero Co branded still throughout that process?
Speaker F: It's Zero Co branded when the Airbnb host, in that instance has made their way through. But its impact URL, its impact kind of background stuff, but ultimately it look, looks and feels like Xeroco.
Peter Bray: And even when you look at the
Speaker F: sustainable school side of things, it's the same, the same premise. The school signs up via the website, Xeroco website, they go through that, that onboarding process. It's all Xeroco branded, but it's all the impact stuff behind the scenes.
Speaker E: Yeah, brilliant. And, Mike, tell us about the sustainable school. So I think we've got the gist of it, but why, why was that so important to you?
Mike Smith: So sustainable schools is the same concept as sustainable stays, but working out how do we help schools be more sustainable? Right, there's. There's 10,000 schools in Australia and a huge part of what we're trying to do is educate people about the waste problem. And so the best way to start that is to go and talk to young people. So we took the same concept of sustainable stays and applied that to schools and said, how could we build a educational and fundraising platform for schools that would enable schools to sell Zeroco product instead of selling chocolate bars or whatever, and they would get a commission on that and at the same time educate their students about sustainability.
Speaker E: How good. I bet it's a lot funner talking to kids too, about sustainability than trying to turn some adults around.
Mike Smith: They're certainly more open minded. And it's been super interesting. Like we've only been doing this for a couple of months now, but it's been really exciting seeing how many young people are genuinely passionate about the planet because they haven't been kind of bombarded with all these preconceived ideas about this is how we live and this is how we do things and this is how the world works. And so they're much more open to like, ah, yeah, that seems really dumb that, like, my parents go to the shops and buy a bottle of hand wash and then they throw it away every month. That seems really dumb. I'm going to tell them to stop doing that. So, yeah, it's awesome to see how much young people just get it and how free they are of preconceived notions of this is how the world works.
Speaker E: I love it. And you opened up really early on, talking about all your different community groups, like, zero Code Community isn't just a Xeroco community. And we've talked about shareholders, we've talked about schools, we've talked about accommodation. Are there any types of communities that you would love to crack next?
Mike Smith: It's a really good question. I feel like the next stage for Xeroco is going from kind of fast growth startup to big scaled impactful business. So we're in about 70,000 households are using Xeroco products now, which is still less than 1% of all households in Australia. Right. There's over a million households. So we're on a phase of going into supermarkets at the moment.
Speaker E: Right.
Mike Smith: Because that's where mainstream Australia shops. And so for us the next thing is expanding out into mainstream Australia. How do you get into a hundred thousand houses? How do you get into 500,000 houses? How do you get into a million houses? Because that's when you'll start to have a scalable impact on the waste problem. So thinking about community, for us it's about how do we go from the super passionate, super engaged early adopter type audience, which is where we're at now, to every single household in Australia, really thinking seriously about stopping using single use plastic.
Speaker E: So good. And Pete, from someone who sees different partnerships and communities every day, what Mike and the team at Xeroco must be pretty impressive and inspirational also to some of your clients in broadening the thinking of how they can engage those around
Peter Bray: them, the amount of prospects, the people
Speaker F: who want to work with Impact that see the zero Co logo and like we want to talk to them, how
Mike Smith: can we work with them?
Speaker F: And Mark, I guess it's one of those ones where there's so many opportunities.
Peter Bray: You're a lean team. You know, you have to kind of
Speaker F: pick the, pick the right battles. You can't spread yourself too thin because you become less effective.
Mike Smith: Yeah, totally.
Speaker E: And Mike has it scaled as well because you know, we've put 100 year cleanup in there. Sustainable stays, sustainable schools, shareholders, you know, we're adding a few things to the pile here and Obviously we've got impact.com as you know, underlying technology. Do you feel that it's set up to scale there without having to add huge layers to your team as well?
Mike Smith: Yeah, totally. It is a lot of work though, right? The thing that has scaled has been my receding hairline. That's what scales over the last couple of years.
Speaker E: Join the club.
Mike Smith: Look, as a platform it's super, it's super intuitive, right. And it is super scalable. The reality is the more of these types of platforms like program ideas that you want to launch, they just take, they take heavy lifting from a people person.
Nathan Bush: Right.
Mike Smith: From a people perspective. So our kind of thing now is we're not going to go and launch any more big major programs. It's about how do we scale out the existing ones that we've got? How do we go from a couple of hundred sustainable stays locations to a couple of thousand Airbnb properties? How do we go from 50 schools using sustainable schools to 10,000 schools? And that's where the scalability will come from. When we don't have to build new programs, we're just leveraging the existing programs we've got and scaling those out. Yeah.
Speaker E: You've done the groundwork of the big idea and the processes behind to make them work, and now it's just taking it wider.
Mike Smith: Yeah.
Speaker E: So if we've got founders or e commerce managers or marketing managers who have been obviously inspired and the thinking's kind of, this conversation's opened up around what partnerships and community could be for them. Mike, what would be your 1 tip to be able to set ideas up for success with those partnerships?
Mike Smith: I think you need to think about what is the benefit that you are bringing to the table. I think I've seen a lot of people thinking about partnerships as how can I generate a quick sale or a cheaper sale than I can generate through Facebook or Google? And I think if that's how you're thinking about partnerships and affiliate, you're probably going to get results for a short amount of time, but you're probably not going to have long term, ongoing, scaled outcomes through it. So one of the things that we've thought about from day one is what's the value we're bringing to the table here? What is the benefit that we can provide to an existing community of people out there? So the sustainable stays one is a perfect example. How can we make it financially beneficial for an Airbnb to stop using single use plastic? Because then it's not about like, oh, you should do it because it's the right thing for the planet. It is. You should do it because it's the right thing for your hip pocket. Right.
Speaker E: Yeah. I love when you said the win, win, win.
Mike Smith: Yeah, it's a win, win, win. So that's, that's how we've thought about building out partnerships. What is the tangible, real world benefit you can bring to a partner and then how are you going to nurture that relationship over time?
Speaker E: Brilliant. Pete, anything you'd add to that, setting yourself up for success?
Speaker F: I think it really comes down to having the right people in the business that can think strategy and then be willing to put the effort in to kind of see it, see it through. As Mike said, if you're just thinking about it as a quick win. It's just, yeah, we need to kind of normalize our CPA channels then sure, you'll find some benefit in there. And there's other solutions in terms of tech and legacy affiliate stuff that'll do the job. But if you really want to kind of get the brains together in the business and actually say, hey, let's think about something bigger than just next month's reporting, we can make it happen. And look, ultimately the plug for Impact is always about going look, think big and leverage technology to kind of bring it to life. And so grateful that we've got Xeroco as a customer and that we're on the journey with them and me as a shareholder, I love seeing where it's going. And I'll keep trying to get my aunties and uncles and cousins trying to buy the products too.
Speaker E: Salesman at work, salesman at home. Look out, Mike. Now one thing that's always stood out for me and I literally read an Inside Retail article on your brilliant Egypt trip just before we got on. It was just published. But one of the quotes that stood out for me and you mentioned it is around the problem getting worse, not better. Now, as someone who holds mission very close and is at the core of everything that you do to see the line going in the opposite direction, how do you stay motivated and positive around continuing on with that mission when that's what you see?
Mike Smith: I think there's a couple of points that one is whenever I go overseas and and do well, not even overseas, just just being out on the ground and doing cleanups is the first thing right? Whilst there's a cacophony of motions, emotions, whilst you're surrounded by a bunch of rubbish, on the one hand you're like holy, this is a massive problem. But it also you get a dopamine hit an endorphin rush from actually being out there and doing something good. And we do lots of cleanups where we invite customers and invite shareholders and they all say the same thing. It's such a wholesome, lovely. It makes you feel good about yourself being out there doing actually something that is meaningful. So I think that's super important in maintaining kind of momentum and motivation for this stuff is just being in the field. But then we get so much positive feedback on the mission based stuff that we do. We're constantly getting emails from customers and Facebook messages and LinkedIn stuff from complete strangers that just say, hey, we're just reaching out and want to let you know we love what you're doing and we think it's awesome and thanks for doing it. And those kind of little bits of support from complete strangers are really awesome
Speaker E: and keep you motivated, how good you're doing incredible things. What's next? So we talked a lot about 2022 and the challenges you faced and some of the big initiatives that you've done to kind of overcome them. What's next on the radar for 2023? What are the big things? What are you camping on top of?
Mike Smith: Yeah. So the big things are scaling out into supermarkets and like 10Xing our impact on the plastic problem from a distribution perspective and then you know, rolling out the second phase of the 100 year cleanup. You know, year two of the 100 year cleanup, taking it to new heights. We're going to go and do some stuff in the Himalayas, cleaning up some rubbish and waterways in the Himalayas probably around Nepal and Bhutan. We're going to do a whole bunch of underwater stuff next year as well. Doing. We're hoping to do like a simultaneous underwater cleanup of the world seven oceans. So like scuba diving crew live in the seven oceans all at the same time broadcast on the Internet.
Speaker E: That's awesome.
Mike Smith: So yeah, we got lots of big crazy stunts which will hopefully be backed up by lots more people ditching single use plastic and buying our zero waste products.
Speaker E: How good packing plenty of Imodium with you when you go on those missions.
Nathan Bush: Yes.
Speaker E: What about yourself for 2023? Where what's on the radar for impact.com and your vision of where partnerships will go next year?
Speaker F: Yeah, our thing is making what we do accessible to more, more organizations and more brands. And a big part of that is another acronym which is called plg. It's an initiative that we run through the business which is product led growth. And so what we'll be launching very soon is the ability for any size business to go to the website, sign up and get a version of the technology so you can start to build your own partnership program. And then as you need more stuff from the technology, then you can kind of upgrade and you know, go go through the motions of getting more access to stuff. So it's about expanding what we do with our customers now to more businesses and providing a great experience along the way.
Speaker E: Brilliant. And if this has triggered some big ideas, how could people get started with
Speaker F: impact.com Drop me an email. It's peter.bray@impact.com. find me on LinkedIn Peter Bray. Or just follow Nathan Bush around and I'll end up on your LinkedIn at some stage. No doubt.
Speaker E: Just don't look you up on Instagram, otherwise you'll come across a wedding celebrant.
Speaker F: That's it man.
Speaker E: And Mike, you mentioned the feedback that you love getting. If we've got listeners who want to give you that feedback or learn more about Xeroco products, what's the best way for them to go about that?
Mike Smith: Yeah, you can go to xeroco.com au is our website. You can flick us an email@helloroco.com au find me on LinkedIn. Find me. I don't really use other socials very much, but if you want to reach out, I'm on LinkedIn.
Speaker E: Brilliant. I loved your as a recruiter. I loved your job ad for your marketing manager. That was awesome. You do some awesome content. Mike. Pete, thank you so much for joining us and sharing more around how you're driving growth through communities. Fascinating chat. I feel like we could have gone down all those rabbit holes for for a lot longer, especially your Egypt trip. Mike sounded amazing in the funniest way that you tell after you've been there. Not in the moment, but thank you guys. Really appreciate what you brought today and I'm sure our listeners got a lot from it.
Mike Smith: Yeah, awesome. Thanks much for having me.
Speaker F: Thanks gang.
Nathan Bush: So we promised you some tips on how to leverage your communities to drive growth and I couldn't think of better people to speak on the topic than Mike and Pete to dive into that. And I hope you got a lot out of that. Here are my three takeaways from the chat. Number one, don't settle for one community. Just like you might have multiple target audiences, it's likely that you probably have many different communities. We heard from Mike that he has school communities, sustainability communities, travel communities, investor communities, and each is a very different opportunity to turn them into raving fans as long as you treat them different and tap into their core motivators. So have a think about that. Who would be your top three communities and what do they value? Number two, scale community with tech and processes. Mike mentioned it a couple of times in there. Engaging communities is not a set and forget activity like some other channels. It requires a fair bit of attention and human effort and you've got to be prepared for that up front. However, the key is to make sure that much of the onboarding and the connection and the day to day activities is underpinned by great tech samples such as impact.com with clear processes on how it works. This frees you up for the fun stuff and it brings me to number three. Don't be afraid of the big ideas. Sure, you can absolutely set up a loyalty club or chase customer reviews and both of these aren't bad ideas, but they're just not going to spark the flames of your biggest fans. You need big creative ideas to give your fans permission to talk, and that's what we want here, right? So camping on top of a rubbish pyramid. Big talkable idea. Turning an Airbnb into a product demo and sales channel. Big talkable idea. Teaching kids about sustainable alternatives. Big talkable idea. You get the point. But if you get number one, the right community groups and number two the tech and processes underpinning them, if you get both of those things right, you have the permission to go on chase number three, the big ideas and chase them really hard. To get the highlights of today's episode, head on over to addtocart.com and sign up for our free newsletter each Tuesday we will send Monday's episode summary links and discount codes for you to go next level on. And if you're looking to explore your next e commerce opportunity, come and Visit us at eSweet. We're a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands in Australia. Head on over to esweettalent.com where you can download the free e Commerce Salary Guide and sign up to our weekly
Speaker E: e commerce job emails.
Nathan Bush: Thanks for listening and until next time, keep those customers adding to Carr.
