The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Winning Through Platforms: How to Succeed When Every Competitor Has One (American Marketing Association) by Ted Moser, Charlotte Bloom, Omar Akhtar

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

Winning Through Platforms: How to Succeed When Every Competitor Has One (American Marketing Association) by Ted Moser, Charlotte Bloom, Omar Akhtar https://amzn.to/4atbvZh Winning through Platforms is your new go-to guide for modern competitive advantage. Digital platforms are no longer for just the tech elite. They’re spreading to every company and industry, powered by the growth of customer sensors, streaming data, and artificial intelligence―lighting the valuable customer Use journey that was formerly dark. How will you succeed when your markets get platform-crowded? Three senior advisers to the world’s leading technology companies reveal how to win through platforms when every competitor has one. Winning through Platforms decodes growth moves from a decade of platform competition, communicates them through a platform playbook. It’s a treasure trove of 24 proven platform strategies―such as customer coalition design, in-use enrichment, AI branding, and much more. These playbook strategies are delivered through engaging stories of over 50 companies, plus proprietary frameworks and workshop-style questions that lead you to act. This game-changing playbook will teach you how to: Revitalize your business through strategic use of platforms Design platforms that are compelling to customers and hard for competitors to match Accelerate in-market growth through brand-and-demand excellence that spans your customer’s entire platform journey Innovate in high-impact benefit areas to differentiate your platform Elevate your customer’s personal platform experience Transform your enterprise and operations to drive superior performance Every CEO, innovator, go-to-market leader, and aspiring professional will gain valuable insight through this book. Whether your company is just starting on its first platform journey or is a born platform disruptor, this book will transform your ability to win. Learn the platform playbook. Find and apply your plays. This book forms part of the American Marketing Association (AMA) leadership series. About the author Ted Moser is a Senior Partner at Prophet, a growth and transformation consultancy. He helps leading technology-based companies to anticipate customer and market evolution, craft distinctive value growth strategies, and realizetheir ambitions. He holds an MBA with highest honors in marketing and strategy from the Wharton Business School, following a BS in Political Science from Wheaton College. Based in San Francisco, he has lived and worked extensively in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. His published thought leadership focuses on pattern recognition that helps companies thrive in the face of change. He previously co-authored Profit Patterns to identify how profit pools would shiftwith Internet business model innovation. In recent years, his extensive consulting work with global platform leaders and with companies transforming to platforms inspired him to write Winning Through Platforms. Ted supports global microfinance development as a lifelong avocation. He has helped to scale the Opportunity International microfinance network, which has served over 250 million of the world’s poor and is developing innovative platforms to better serve poor farmers, schools, and microentrepreneurs. He served on program boards of CGAP, the World Bank-affiliated multilateral research group, to help extend the boundaries of global digital financial inclusion.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys being a part of the show. As always, thanks for joining us and being every part of what we do.

For 15 years, we've been bringing you the smartest people, the CEOs, the billionaires, the Pulitzer Prize winners, the brilliant authors who share all their stories and everything that goes into it. The White House presidential advisors. We just had another one on the other day, the other week, day, I don't know. The days all blend together, folks. You're going to find the most amazing guests that we have on this show, bringing you the most amazing stories that will change your life.

And if you're not paying attention, you're going to miss just so much stuff. I sit through every show after thousands of interviews that I've done in my lifetime. And every show, I get epiphanies, I get goosebumps, I learn new stuff, I learn new paradigms of looking at stuff in a different way that maybe I thought I knew it before. And so what we ask is one simple thing. Refer the show to your family, friends, or relatives. Just do it.

Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss. LinkedIn.com, Fortress Chris Voss. Subscribe to the big LinkedIn newsletter, the 130,000 LinkedIn group over there as well. Go to Chris Voss Facebook, Chris Voss 1 on the tickety-tockety and all those great places. And there you go. We had an amazing gentleman on the show. I'm excited to talk to him. Ted Moser joins us on the show today. His newest book just came out December 10th, 2023, Winning Through Platforms, How to Succeed When Every Competitor Has One. And it's part of

a book series in the American Marketing Association series, I'm told. So there you go. You may have heard of them. They do some marketing over there. Ted Moser is the author of the latest aforementioned book. He's a senior partner at Profit, where he helps leading data and software-enabled companies

to anticipate market evolution, craft distinctive platform growth strategies, and realize their ambitions. His client work spans innovation, branding, companies to anticipate market evolution, craft distinctive platform growth strategies, and realize their ambitions. His client work spans innovation, branding, go-to market excellence, and operating model transformation. He has a Wharton School MBA that he has with highest honors in strategy, oh, I love strategy, and marketing. He previously co-authored Profit Patterns with Adrian Slavowski. And to identify

profits, pools shift. I can't even say that right. I flunk second grade, folks. You know that. To identify how profit pools shift with internet business model innovation. He is a decades-long digital innovator for global financial inclusion. Welcome to the show, Ted. How are you? Hey, Chris. I'm doing great, thanks. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming. We really appreciate it.

Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs. I'm at tmoser at profit.com. There you go. And so what motivated you to want to write this latest book, Ted? And give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside?

Chris, I felt like the digital revolution really had a second chapter to be written. Overall, I felt we've been watching for the last 50 years how digital lights up the customer journey to where companies can watch their customers carry out activities and with that visibility, create more value for the customer and for the company. Around the turn of the century, network electronics and the internet had lit up the customer's choose journey as they were shopping. Companies could watch their customers shop by setting up a website, could talk to them and interact with them as they were shopping to hopefully earn their choice. But the second half of the customer's journey, the used journey, was pitch dark.

Once a customer bought, they disappeared. And I just held my breath and hoped they came back someday. And what's happened between 2005 and 2010 are two big deals in terms of infrastructure. Smartphones were invented. And people like Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, the big tech titans decided to rent out their data centers and become cloud service providers. So that if I was an entrepreneur, I did not have to sensors that were watching the customer, whether the sensor was my keypad, my thumb swipe on my iPhone or sensors in my car, sensors underneath my bed, sensors in my industrial plant. And basically could watch the customer use what it is that they had acquired.

And that second part of the revolution, the use journey, is really what the platform revolution was all about. So the 2010s were the takeoff years. You couldn't go wrong if you were a platform. You were a high-flying growth company. But as everyone said, that's so powerful. I want to do that too. Our markets have now become platform crowded and our customers are getting savvy as to how to choose between platform players. And there was no competitive strategy book out designed for the platform era to say, how do I win when my customer has several platform choices?

How do I gain competitive advantage? How do I accelerate my growth? And we heard business team after business team said, I don't really have a playbook for this new era. And so that's the book we wrote. There you go. Winning Through Platforms. So give me a bit more definition on what a platform is and the variance of it. So I think you mentioned sensors.

Let's go through a few examples. Some of the ones that are most well-known, let's say Facebook would be a platform because as I talk to my friends, Facebook sees who's talking to whom. But let's go to an opposite end, sleep number. As I sleep at night, if I have sensors in my mattress, it senses my body temperature, it senses my breathing patterns, it can sense my vital signs, and change the firmness of different parts of the mattress throughout my night and the temperature of the different parts of the mattress, give me a sleep score in the morning, and basically turn what looked like a mattress into nighttime sleep therapy. So also watching the customer use what it is they were

required. Tesla, as I drive, every move I make, the Tesla sees it's basically a computer on wheels. Disney, as I'm walking through the theme park, I'm wearing a magic band. And that's an Internet of Things band that's tracking by every move, but also enhancing my visit to the park. And so all those things are platforms. Uber obviously would be a platform or Airbnb as well, where the app gives me the chance to perform the use of the product and be observed by the company to add value as I'm using. So that whole wide range of companies I just mentioned, those are all examples of platforms. And we say that simply platforms are simply the tech stack that let a company watch their customer use and add value as they're using. So we try to keep it very customer centric rather than getting

all cut up in the tech layers of which there are many. Yeah. This is like whenever I say something or talk about something or type something on my phone, suddenly I'm getting ads fed to me. Suddenly you're getting ads. It raises the question, is it a comfortable or uncomfortable relationship with a company who's always present and the customer? And is the company using that knowledge to exploit the customer or to serve the customer?

So one of the dynamics in platforms is a new deal between the customer and the company. How much will I let you see? And how much value are you going to add for me in return? And that's really the deal of the 2020s is that data deal between company and customer. There you go. You mentioned the sleep number bed, I think it was. I have an eight sleep bed that I highly recommend. And the AI in the app, actually by monitoring me with its platform, will adjust the temperature of my bed because

it's learned over time where I hit my deep REM sleep. And so it helps walk me through that, which I think is just extraordinary. It's the goal of giving you a higher quality night REM sleep. And so it helps walk me through that, which I think is just extraordinary. It's a goal of giving you a higher quality night's sleep and as a result, a better life. SleepMember is also partnering with Mayo Clinic to study the relationship between certain sleep poses and apnea, between cardiovascular health and sleep. And before you know it, your mattress is going to be promising you a longer lifespan because it becomes a platform, not just a night's sleep. I would believe it. Now, if we just get Facebook to not serve me ads of stuff I've already bought, that seems to be the biggest problem.

You buy something and you get all these ads and you're like, I already bought it, you guys. So there you go. So, Ted, give us a little bit more in-depth for our audience, your background, how you grew up, what motivated you into the fields that you're in now that led you up to the book, and what interests you? I've always been interested in the growth side of business because the customer is a dynamic animal. They want something until you give it to them, then they take it for granted and want the next thing. And to me, that's kept business interesting because you have to both be analytical and creative and trying to stay one step ahead of what the customer is going to want next. So I've been involved in growth consulting for several decades, started out with a spinoff

of Bain & Company named Corporate Decisions. We eventually sold that company. And then I joined Profit, who I really respected by the work they were doing in terms of growth strategies for their companies. So my own passion is twofold, I'd say. Continuing to crack the next code, if you will, of customer behavior as technology and customer meet. And then second, how can I use that for good? Obviously, there's plenty of ways you could do that in the US. You mentioned before that I helped build digital platforms in developing countries as well for financial inclusion to try to make banking, savings, insurance available to folks who were too

poor to be able to access them in the past. So there's a ton of innovation going on there in the lowest 2 billion people in terms of their GDP per person, as well as there's a ton of innovation going on in the societies where you and I live. There you go. What excites you about this or does it excite you, this sort of field in what the future holds? What excites me is the extent to which companies who do platforms right will add more value to their customers than ever before by doing things for them that they always wish somebody would do for them. Let me give you an example. All my photos have for years sat in a wish I could make a home movie out of this someday

to-do list. Apple now sends me a home movie as a gift every month or every week. With music to boot with a bit of a theme in terms of the photos that are chosen. And I get the nostalgia. I get the good memories of time with kids, with family, with friends, with parents that I always wish I had done myself but never could find the time to do. So that's an example of platforms going beyond what it could do. You know, the brain, the artificial intelligence that's available to us in terms of suggesting

what to do next is, you know, really a superhuman capability that exceeds what most humans are available or capable of doing. Excuse me. Now, obviously, that could be used, again, for good or not necessarily for good. So it's all about the direction of the technology use and the customer centricity of it. But in my mind, platforms would bring people together versus divide them and would serve them better when you play it out. There you go. And then you led me into my next question I had for you.

How do you see AI changing that in the future? Do you talk about that in your book? We do. There's quite a few branches of AI. The one we've been most comfortable with in the past or most knowledgeable about was in your book. We do. There's quite a few branches of AI. The one we've been most comfortable with in the past or most knowledgeable about was called machine learning, a bit of a super regression in terms of what's correlated with what, what's driving what, and what does that mean for predictive analytics as to what's coming next. But now there's new

exciting branches like machine vision, where basically something can watch and make sense of a movement. That's what tells our car whether it's a shadow on the road or a tree or a semi-truck when we're deciding whether to swerve back into a lane. There's also semantic recognition, when you and I talk to Alexa, and it recognizes what we're saying. And then the most shiny new toy, if you will, within AI is generative AI, where a set of AI that's trained on a data set can take what it quote unquote, learn from it, and then make suggestions. And so you could ask a question in normal English language, and it would give you an answer in normal English language. And that's an exciting area that most companies are asking themselves,

how do I bring that in to my business offers? Now, if I have a platform, I'm advantaged because as I watch the customer use, that's usually when they need the kind of advice. They might need it as they're shopping, but it's really valuable as they're using. And so those companies with platforms can take advantage of AI in ways that others can't and have the best opportunity to turn that into new value and to turn that into new customer choice. There you go.

Yeah, it's going to be really exciting, some of the different things that are there. So you talk about revitalizing your business through strategic use of platforms. If I'm, let's say I'm a startup, I'm a new company, what are some of the things I should maybe be looking at? Or let's say I'm like a brick and mortar company out there in the world. And, you know, it's like, we need to, we need to go online now. You know, one of the things I saw in COVID was a lot of restaurants didn't really have online stuff going on. They still don't, but they kind of learned that they needed to adapt really quickly. So what are some ways that maybe a new business or a new startup can target different uses

of platforms or platforms to use? Right. So I'd say a couple of things. New businesses on the one hand and that brick and mortar business you were describing on the other hand, they each have sort of a move they can make. The new businesses in the 2010s had the easy pickings. There were whole swaths of the economy that were not yet platformed, if you will. list by private equity companies was to take markets that didn't have a platform approach and launch that disruptor in, let's say Netflix, into the movie business where I could watch which

movies I was using and then choose which movie to bring up on the screen to suggest to me next based on my inferred preferences. So you could go across every sector of the economy, let's say auto insurance, smart insurance people who are startups said, what if I told the customer, let me watch you drive? And if I assess that you're a safe driver, I'll give you a lower insurance rate. But to do that, you got to keep that sensor in the car and let me watch you drive. It's not a, you know, turn it on, turn it off deal. And so new auto insurance companies were created that way. If we think about a market such as appliances, hire, I'm going to go to a brick and mortar company, H-A-I-E-R, big Chinese manufacturing company, one of the world's biggest sellers of ovens of refrigerators said, why don't we put a barcode in the refrigerator so I can watch, since most of my food has a barcode on it, I could watch the food as it comes out, let the customer know what's left in the fridge, order it by what's closest to the expiration date, tell the customer what could you make out of what's in the the expiration date, tell the customer what could

you make out of what's in the fridge tonight. Or if I'm in the oven, I could put a little camera in the oven and let the customer watch on their cell phone food cooking rather than having to open the oven and check it and do it from any room. So hire's innovating. You would think it's an old-fashioned company because it's appliances. But in fact, they're turning themselves into a modern platform company. And now if I'm a yogurt maker, let's say Dannon, and I want to decide what's going on in my customer's yogurt market, the less interesting information now is when the customer buys the yogurt at the supermarket. And the more interesting information is when does the customer pull the yogurt off the shelf? One pot at a time, one flavor at a time,

and what can they learn from watching the customer use? So hopefully that gives you a sense of how both startups and quote-unquote old-fashioned companies can all reinvent themselves or invent themselves as platforms. And trying to understand the customer more, trying to see what their usage is of their product, how they're defined. I get the one thing I have now is like card abandonment stuff. There's a few of my favorite companies that they have a card abandonment tech service

that we'll reach out to and be like, hey, was there a question you had? And if I ask for a rep to answer a question for me on something I want to buy, they'll actually put one on the line. It's actually pretty cool. I like it from my favorite companies. I don't like it from my not favorite. Right.

Maybe there's a reason I didn't abandon that cart. But sometimes, you know, some of my favorite companies all put stuff in the cart, and I'm thinking about, oh, I need to check and see if I still have more of that protein if i need to buy this other right and so i'm like okay i got back this cart but it's actually been really handy in having conversation with them sometimes i i initiate a conversation with them hey you know your protein got you know is it got milk in it am i gonna get am i gonna get the whole experience there with lactose so what's going on there so there you go um What impact does a poorly managed platform have on a business? Well, so there are three benefits of having one, and the

poorly managed has sort of the inverse. A well-managed platform strengthens a company's brand. We do brand evaluation of about tens, testing with tens of thousands of customers every year on several hundred brands of the world's leading brands around the world. And we have found a strong correlation between the brands that are most relevant to a customer's life and those that are platforms. So the ability to be with a customer as they use is becoming the definition of a useful modern brand. If I don't do it well, I'm either absent because I'm not doing it at all, or I'm doing it poorly. And as you'd mentioned, you know, angering the customer. If they think, hey, am I shopping for airline tickets, and the airline

figures it out and raises the price of the airline ticket? Are they using information about me against me? Or are they using it on my behalf? So doing it poorly will hurt my brand. Doing it well will help my brand. Doing it poorly will degrade my investor confidence, would take my stock down. Doing it well does the opposite because investors feel like I'm going to have structural advantage. And then doing it poorly puts me in a poor position to compete. New modern competition that's data driven around who has what access to customer data. It creates what we call convergent competition.

Companies don't stay in their lanes in the traditional industries that you would think. So Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, you wouldn't think of them as financial services companies, right? Banks traditionally would not. But in a world where what matters is having access to my customer at the moment of purchase, You wouldn't think of them as financial services companies, right? Banks traditionally would not. But in a world where what matters is having access to my customer at the moment of purchase and being able to understand what they're doing, all of a sudden, if I can get a hold of customer data, I can serve the customer. And so we see these adjacent competitors that are not like for, if I'm not set up with a good platform, I can have a bit of an invasion from the side, if you will, rather than from the front.

And I'm taken by surprise and I'm not ready to adjust. So I think competitively, investor-based and customer love, those are all three things that if I do it well, I come out on top. If I do it poorly, I'm many times at existential risk if I don't do it right. There you go. And, I mean, if you don't do it, your competitors are. So you're definitely competitive advantage, and they're just going to keep better and better. What are some future things that you see people are pursuing now

to get to know their customers better, to see what the use case is? I know one thing that was interesting. What was the Amazon thing that they had? It was the click or something like that. They had some clickety thing. You could put one on your washer, and when you're out in the laundry, you could click on it.

Yes. That failed, I think. I know. How do you watch someone wash their clothes? Well, click lets me do it because I see when that's happening. And so there's a lot of innovation as to ways of watching that you wouldn't have expected that if the customer says this is adding value to me, they say, OK, I'll take that trade off. I think some of the new frontiers will be geofencing your home.

A warehouse today is geofenced. Every box in the warehouse Beacons know where everything is because they're reading the barcodes. In a retail store, same thing. And our cell phones are like a barcode in that the beacon can read where we are or where the sales associate is. But I think at home, that hasn't been the case. And who's going to be the first one? Maybe Amazon, maybe others. Say it's in my self the first one? Maybe Amazon, maybe others. Say it's in my self-interest to offer you sort of full coverage of your home and be able to observe and by doing, by observing, serve you better.

So I think that's going to be a frontier. Even areas where we believe that we can watch the customer already, let's say Peloton, there's new ways to push it further. So Peloton, if I'm on a bike, can watch my exercise, can take my pulse, etc. A trainer can watch me through the screen and I can show them what I'm doing. But something like Peloton Freeweights now, an AI camera using machine vision, can take a look at my technique, can see if I'm straining my muscles. So there are new ways for companies to go further to ask customers, if you let me watch at the next level, I'll give you value at the next level. So I think there's both brand new markets that aren't yet lit, that will be lit, and markets that are partially lit, that will be fully lit. I think those two

things continue to go as sensors get cheaper, as AI gets more available, and customers get more comfortable with the value they receive and the visibility that they're giving. There you go. Would you say that Alexa and Google are, you know, the Alexa and Google Now machines are part of that? Yes. They're monitoring inside. Alexa is very much through my voice, watching me, you know, through my voice interaction

and what I tell other people is watching, if I can put that in quotes, machine vision would allow more expansive watching by evaluating what movement means. And so we're seeing that coming into play with Nest as well, that sort of thing. Is it a burglar outside? Is it my cat at the window? How do I assess through visual technology? How do I assess what that shape is about and whether or not I should turn on the lights, whether I should turn on the alarm, whether it's no big deal? So I think all those things are going to be new frontiers of visibility. There you go. What are some examples of where you can think of where it's gone wrong,

where it's been too intrusive or abusive and people have kicked back on it? I know I remember originally when Mark Zuckerberg said, said privacy is dead. People were really angry with him, but he kind of knew where we're going. But he, he thinks that if you give time enough, customers will evolve and we'll get accustomed to it.

Or what we call boiling the frog slowly. Yeah, that's right. I'm afraid so. So I think this is where data ethics come in, where intrusion ethics come in. You know, am I going to be served up ads that I don't want and it won't stop? And that's where when customers fight back, ad blockers are a good example. If a company goes too far, a good entrepreneur says, hey, you're pissing off the customer.

Let me help the customer fight back. Or if I'm finding that somebody's using a complex platform pricing model to cheat me or to keep me on subscriptions that I didn't even know I had signed up for and just keep rolling, then they find the subscriptions that you're on but you don't want becomes a product that's interesting to push back. So I think technologists and entrepreneurs are going to help the customer fight abusive behavior by other companies. And you'll see a bit of that battle going on between the two. So I do think there are correction mechanisms in the market. Obviously, there's also correction mechanisms for the government. GDPR over in Europe is a great example where the governments are saying, our people would like more privacy than you're giving, please.

And they're using that to create a wall. And the companies are having to learn to behave within those parameters or ask permission rather than assume the customer would be okay with it and act without asking. So hopefully we'll find the right balance over time. There you go. And I imagine there's some marketplace if you're a businessman or an entrepreneur to hijack platforms or maybe jam yourself into the middle of one. Am I, I'll explain this to make sure I'm doing a good analogy that makes sense. So one of the apps that I have is called Shop. There it is. I just found it.

I was looking for it. And Shop, when it first came to me or when it first came out i didn't know what else it did so maybe it was doing all this that back then well basically what it did is it hijacked the amazon process and the shipping process so it started monitoring you know where amazon has this relationship with me it knows what it's delivering it knows what i'm buying what's delivering so shop jammed themselves in there and they said hey do you want to, do you want tracking on all your products?

You want tracking on your UPS and your Amazon, your FedEx and all the different deliveries you're getting. Do you want, would you like to have all that in an app? And I'm like, yeah, that's pretty cool. I'd like to know when stuff's being delivered. And they're like, we'll tell you when it's being delivered, you know, so the porch pirates can't steal it. Or, you know, you just want to know when your stuff's coming in.

And so they have an app that i i enjoy using that that tracks that so they've kind of hijacked between you know ups fedex and amazon between they and they and they they're actually you know jumping onto their their base too and using their base on amazon and so they're telling me what what deliveries are what they've done is they've made it so after I get my package, it says, hey, you got your package, Chris. Hey, do you want to do a review on that product? So it helps drive reviews. It helps drive more sales. And then they also have some cash back sort of BS I was playing with today. And they have a bunch of

products that are advertised that I believe probably all go to Amazon. I imagine they're affiliate related. But they basically, like here's the thing they have on here. Shops that you love, Chris. It's all places I bought from. So they're reminding me to go back and buy from those shops because they know my patterns. And then they recently paired with a loan company. We had a couple of loan companies on that were recent. It wasn't a firm.

It was another one. There's these small loan companies that will do loans with you. We had one on the show a few weeks ago. I can't remember the name of them, but we were talking about a firm, and I believe there's Kruve or Krove or something. Something starts with a K. And I see them on Amazon or when I'm out shopping. It's like, hey, do you want to buy this on payments and stuff?

And so they've partnered with them now to where anytime I'm buying something expensive, they're like, hey, do you want to put this on one of these loan things? And so they've really created this multifaceted platform. And what's interesting is they've hijacked the user base of FedEx and Amazon and everything else. They're almost doing a better job for me than Amazon does at suggestions. So Chris, I think you're discussing something that we call, it's one of the 24 plays in the playbook. Our playbook is structured by different types of plays, not unlike a sports team would use to say one of the plays we could run. If I go to 49ers, being a football fan, you know, the run plays, the pass plays, the defensive plays, et cetera, et cetera. In our case, we have different types of plays,

some of which are how do I make the best use of a platform in my business? It feels like a strategy play or how do I design a new platform? But then when we get into how do I use a platform, we talk about this moment of pivotal value where if you find a spot in the customer's journey where your platform could add so much value that the customer was willing to change their behavior and start and invest there, plant your flag there, that companies have done that. And so what you're describing with shop with the application, they said the receipt of and the information about your receipt of packages. If you're an e-commerce customer, it's so important to you that you'd rather not have all this channel dedicated information coming at you, but holistic cross deliverer information. And if they invest there to add new value value you're going to switch and say i'm going to do that rather than watching my fedex or watching my ups and once they've got you then they say okay i've now got the customer's loyalty at one moment in the journey how do i add

more value well this is delivery to my door but i could add more values to where you have shopped and haven't shopped. So that's an example of how I can extend once I land. So a company that did this really well that we write about is Zillow. Zillow is the most important step in all of our home buying journeys, which is when we start out and go, how much is my house worth? And how much is that other house worth that I'm interested in buying? And they said, let me invest for differentiation there through their Zestimate. And when they first came to market, they became such a winner that they won the customer's love at that step. And then they had a relationship with me. And then they could walk me through my whole home buying journey after that saying, would you like a mortgage broker? Would you like a real estate agent? Would you

like a plumber? Would you like a roofer? Would you like a plumber? Would you like a roofer? Would you like a mover? And monetize its relationship as a ecosystem broker for me. But it was all because it caught me at that pivotal moment. So that's one out of the 24 plays that you described with Shop and that I described with Zillow. It's an example of the ideas we're trying to provide in the book to say, how could I win and how do I create a language at my company for what each

play means and get facile and saying, one should we run this play, one should we run that play. Ah, so you have to think of it like you're Bill Belichick in business. Completely that way. Exactly that way. Maybe these days Kyle Shanahan, but something like that. There you go. Something more offensive.

Oh, the other thing about Shop that's interesting to me, they started doing this recently. When I go to log in, you go to some company, you want to buy something. I've been buying a bunch of Espresso shit. I joined the Espresso cult. And if you're not familiar with Espresso. I've been to the cult as well. It's a bottomless money pit cult.

It's just, wait, there's something more expensive I can buy and yeah it's never ending it seems i should i don't know so i started doing that so i started going to websites that you know oh hey i want to buy whatever accessories and shops started popping up when i would go hey you should sign up with our website so you know you can track your cell and we can track you, et cetera, et cetera. Shops started popping up and go, hey, do you want to use your shop login for us to log you in and give this company your data and we'll track your stuff for you and your sale and stuff. And I'm like, ah, fuck it, that's easier.

And I've been doing it and so instead of using like google or facebook or you know doing the long way around where you enter your email on crap or even amazon they're getting in there and then they you know and then of course when i go to checkout they're offering me financing if i wanted of course they're going to track the shipment and it makes it it makes it really it makes it really nice. I've been like, I mean, I feel like I'm selling my soul, but it seems to be working for me so far. So what you mentioned, again, you're giving great examples, Chris, of another one of the plays, which is what we call reimagined flows. In a business, it's workflows. In a consumer world, it's life flows. You're

describing your own life flows. And they're saying, what if we took this step out for you? What if we made this step so easy that it was like falling off a log? And you go, why not? You just made my life simpler. So there's a play called reimagining flows. And the company's job as an innovator in platforms is to understand the customer at the flow level, not just in the narrow bounds of the market that they think they're in, but holistically what the customer's life is. And the more they understand our life as flow, the more they can say, I could do that for you better than what you're getting it done now. And so that's the new mold of R&D is really assessing how a new flow could add value versus an old flow. And then from a marketing perspective, being able to tell the customer what's the value of the new flow. And that's really platform marketing in a nutshell. So you gave a great example of it in your, you know, the espresso example. Could I give you one from another company?

So Nike, which is a real platform hero, maybe you wouldn't think of it that way. And in fact, it's not yet fully platform because you and I don't have sensors on the bottom of our sneakers that tell us whether we're messing up our knee joints or our hip joints when we're walking or we're running or telling us that we're not doing enough. But Nike, because of Apple Watch or its ability to watch me run with, you know, bands around my arm or my cell phone, they've basically been able to watch me use their products as an athlete. And so Nike not only engages me up front by asking me to buy a shoe, but the first thing they ask me to do is well as join a community. Because if I say yes, and I become a Nike owner, I'm immediately asked, what sort of Nike events would you like to participate in? I've got a fitness club. I have a running club. If I'm a geek for sneakers, I have a sneakerhead,

you know, Nike collection group, and I've got other events. Nike found that it can add enough value to the customers as they use the sports apparel that they buy or sports equipment. But somebody who joins two or more communities has a 4x higher lifetime value as a customer than somebody who doesn't. So Nike is changing my flows of making it more enjoyable for me to exercise. I can get virtual runs now, or if I'm traveling in a city, I can be shown the best runs and basically get a guided run so that I'm more willing to go out and do the exercise. I'm getting value from it. Nike's getting value from it. It's that same virtuous cycle of flows that you and I talked about with the Expresso example.

There you go. And so building communities is basically the platform too. It's a big part of platforms because I'm not only connecting customer to company, I'm connecting customer to customer. And so part of the value proposition of a platform isn't just the company that's organizing it and fueling it, but it's the quality of the user base and whether I want to basically belong to that group of people. This is where if I don't do platforms well, let's say I enable hostile forces into my community and people begin to feel like they're not safe, then shame on me as a company for not curating that better. And obviously, we're seeing that with X in spades today in terms of people going, well, let freedom be anybody can do what they want in the name of freedom. That might

become to customers. I actually don't like that bargain. I'd like to go to a place where I know more that there are rules of behavior. So companies have choices as to what their community looks like to the next joiner. And how do I market? How does the community become part of my value proposition so communities are a really big deal we've seen whole companies start up on a community glossier as an example of a cosmetics company the founder said let me start talking to women about wanting to make their skin better not just cover it up with makeup and created a whole set of content exchanges about

tips as to how women were doing that. And from that, then she said, now let me give you the kind of makeup that's going to keep your skin good. And she started with the community and built a very serious cosmetics company on the back of the community where members are contributing to each other and contributing ideas to the company itself, feeling real pride in ownership in what they do. And they did pop-ups in New York City when they were a know-nothing, you know, nobody knew their name startup. And their fanatic community went and gave them higher sales per square foot than the Apple store in Manhattan.

Even though it was a climb up three flights and get to a, you know, something that's just a temporary made-up shop, they ended up having higher retail traffic because of the power of the community and how much engagement there was. You know, community is so important. I mean, I've become such a trained dog now that when I buy something, I go see if there's a Facebook group. Or sometimes the website will say, hey, join our Facebook group for this product you buy. And another example of the espresso cult, you know, I bought like a really nice expensive grinder and they're like,

Hey, you know, we have a Facebook group for this grinder. And so I go there and I can talk to people. Hey, I just got my grinder. How do I do the settings? It's almost like customer service, but

by other users. People have tried doing that forum bullshit that I hate. What is it called? You ask, try and ask customer service. They're like, yeah, our chatbot would like to deal with you right now, but we just hate customers. Can you go to the forum and find the answer?

Facebook groups seem to work a whole lot better because people are so helpful and, you know, you're talking to human beings. So you feel that communal sense that we love as a tribal species. But, you know, learning how to use it, celebrating owning it. I mean, that's a real thing too.

The celebration, you know, you go in, you, hey, congratulations on buying that new expensive espresso grinder. Yes. Kids don't really need college and that sort of thing. And you can interact. And part of it gives you that affirming nature. What is the reticular activating system in our brain?

You buy a red car that's a Chevy. I'm just going to joke around with Nova. You buy a Chevy Nova that's red. You start'm just going to joke around with nova you buy a chevy nova that's red every you start driving everywhere you see it's red chevy novas because you're wearing hey you're not a dummy although that's right you're like me yeah yeah then your car will just explode when it hits the back one thing i should mention with the shopping too is they've hijacked the because i the reason i'm talking about this is because i see it as a play for entrepreneurs to figure out how they can get in there on, instead of creating a whole new Amazon or a whole new retail business, getting in there to try it, like you said, and try and make those, those,

those situations easier, slicker or less friction. And so the shop actually gets back to me. I'll give you an example. One of my favorite companies is a protein company. I'll give them a plug, Naked Nutrition. And they make basically proteins and supplements that have usually five to six or seven pure form things in it. No fillers, no crap. That's why they call it Naked. It's supposed to be just the purest form of what you need, no fillers. And so i buy a lot of stuff from them for working out but they shop will remind me more often to buy products from hey do you need to refill that protein you out of that protein you should probably have that protein now because we know when you buy we've seen your

patterns and and i imagine there's probably a back end to this that they're making off of the companies or affiliates or some sort of thing they've got set up through amazon or wherever but it's pretty freaking brilliant i mean it's just the the multi-faceted thing of it's interesting and chris the idea of multi-faceted i think you're bringing up a critical point we're used to thinking in a product line company about a product for a customer. In a platform company, we need to create what we call customer coalitions. One of the plays in the playbook is to design who's in my customer coalition. We say you've got users, you've got sponsors, you have service providers, you have creatives, you have advertisers, and you have rule makers.

Those are six archetypes of different folks who might be in your coalition. You have service providers, you have creatives, you have advertisers, and you have rule makers. Those are six archetypes of different folks who might be in your coalition. And there's strategic creativity in designing who's in and what relationships they have with each other. And then when you go to use and you are in the process of using, a smart platform will create these relationships between different types of folks. You're just describing them in your espresso example. You know, Salesforce is a great example of this. They not only have created the customer coalition that's very diverse, but then they brand their customer coalition through the idea of trailblazers. When I come and use Salesforce, if I want to go on a learning journey to advance my professional career, I join what's called Trailhead, the idea of charting my own path.

And those who do that are called trailblazers. So there's a second branding going on, which is the branding of the community. So wouldn't you like to be a Trailblazer? Well, come and be part of the Salesforce community. And there I'll find users, but I'll also find senior executives who don't use Salesforce, but want all their people to

and who insist that they all use it and buy it for them. Those are the sponsors. I'll find third-party systems integrators or other app makers that are selling on the Salesforce platform, and I'll find advertisers. So you see that customer coalition that Salesforce designed becoming active

and becoming a really rich ecosystem. And then they brand it so that I want to belong to that ecosystem. Those are all new disciplines in winning as a platform company that Salesforce has done a great job with and that the company you're describing is also doing a great job with. There you go. I'm thinking, too, of back in the day, Twitter was so horribly run.

It was such a horrible app. There was a bunch of, I mean, there was a horrible app there was a bunch of i mean there was a huge app app coalition or app makers that made all these apps that improved the quality and one of them was tweet deck and i remember tweet deck was going to go for in back back then they weren't controlling their their users and access and and it was pretty much an open sort of wild west and at one point one of the other because with their open ai one of the other app makers controlled a good portion of their of their client base their customers and data and then with the tweet deck sale went up for 50 million to them and twitter was forced to buy it

at an incredible price and then they eventually just shut it off. Just to fix it. But they had to buy it just to control access to their clients. I mean, if I was Amazon right now, I'd probably be buying shop. So there you go. So it's billed in your book as Treasure Trove of 24 Proven Platform Strategies. We could talk all day about this, but we do want people to go buy the book, so there you go. Give us your final pitch out, Ted, on final thoughts and getting people to order up your book. Sure. I would say platforms are to the 2020s what websites were to the 2000s.

And if I ask you to tell me the name of a company who passed on putting up a website and is thriving today, I think you'd have a hard time giving me the name. And I would predict that five to ten years from now, if I ask you to tell me the name of a company who passed on deploying a platform approach to business and was thriving, you would end up with a blank piece of paper as well. So we think platforms are no longer nice-to-haves. We think they're becoming must-haves.

The minute that's true, I need a competitive playbook. I need to know what has worked. We studied a decade of moves by the 50 top platform companies in the world. We said what moves have worked in what situations. And we use that to distill this playbook that you can use in your company. You could teach your employees to use in order to say, when the market looks like this, when competition looks like this, when the customer looks like this, this is the right play that I should use. Just again, any play calling sports team would do.

And without that playbook, you're sort of making it up as you go along and not benefiting from all the lessons that we learned in the last 10, 12 years in the platform era. So I think the pitch for the book is save yourself a bunch of time and a bunch of hurt, learn platform playbook and find the plays that work for you. And beyond avoiding a negative, you've got a lot of upside by doing so because you'll learn how to win with platforms when every competitor has one. There you go. Give us your dot coms, Ted, as people can find you on the interweb. So I'm at Profit.com, www.profit.com.

And again, Tmoser at Profit.com is where they can find me. There you go. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Ted. We really appreciate it, man. Super insightful and great discussion. Chris, really appreciate it. There you go. And thanks, Ron, for tuning show ted we really appreciate it man super insightful and great discussion chris really appreciate it there you go and thanks for on us for tuning in we couldn't do it without you so please refer the show to your family friends and relatives go to goodreads.com fortress chris voss linkedin.com fortress chris voss chris voss one of the tickety

talkity chris voss facebook.com order up wherever fine books are sold out december 10th 2023 winning through platforms how to succeed when every competitor has one. And a great playbook. Don't reinvent the playbook. Go get a playbook and run with it. And don't try and reinvent the wheel, folks. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.