Over 100,000 companies drop video bombs. Listen to why you should join them; with Darin Dawson

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today we're going all the way to Colorado Springs in Colorado to meet Darren Dawson, who's the co-founder of a company called BombBomb. We're gonna talk about video and why they've got over 100,000 companies around the world using video to communicate. Darren, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Jim. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Well, it's great to be where you are. Having grown up a little bit in Colorado, I know that you are in a beautiful part of the world. So thanks for coming on the show with me today.

I feel blessed and fortunate to be here as well.

Yeah.

27, going on 27 years here.

Beautiful. Well, while I've got you on the show, let's just talk about video and BombBomb and how do you help entrepreneurs to get noticed with video?

Yeah. I think when you ask that question, it makes me think about going back a bit in time when we started this company and we were very much users of our own product to build it from where we are today. And when you're an entrepreneur, I mean, partnerships, relationships are so important. Just kind of breaking through the noise. I think getting the influencers, we used a lot of influencers as we're coming up to build our brand. You know, you're leveraging their audience same way with maybe a partner company that you want to work with. And you know, you work well together. And so then you're going to do like a co-marketing thing. Right. So how do you get in front of those people though? How do you reach out to them? And, and I still do this today, Jim. I do it every day. I reach out in, in introduce myself to people or show gratitude to existing partners and friends who have become really dear friends now. So I think video helps you do that, right? Video helps you build relationships and be face to face when you can't be face to face. We've always said that. So it helps you to personalize at scale. So I can sit here right here at my machine, and I can send out personal videos. And I could say, Hey Jim, it's Darren from BombBomb. Don't know if you know who we are, but I just want to introduce myself and let you know that we have a lot of the same customers. And I thought it'd be great if we couldn't spend 20 minutes maybe talking about what we're trying to do and see if it'd be a good fit for you. It's pretty much a sales call, right? So I'm just giving you what I do and we'd reach out and I've done that now for 10 years and it works. I think that people want to work with people that they know, like, and trust. Right. I might be old school in my thinking there. I don't know what you think about that, but I still think that people want to work with people they know, like, and trust. And I think in this digital age, we get so much stuff thrown at us either through my phone, my inbox on LinkedIn, we're getting assaulted, but rarely do we have someone that's, you know, look, if I saw you at a cocktail reception, I've never met you before. What would you do? You kind of come up and you Hi, you introduce yourself. I think these are the skills that a lot of entrepreneurs have, but in a lot of ways, technology has handcuffed us to not be able to create those experiences in a digital format. Does that make sense? And so—

Yeah, absolutely.

I think video is a way that we can do that. We can be who we are. We can introduce ourselves. We can build this relationship. We can ask questions and be inquisitive. And I think that's helped me to connect better and it's helped others to connect better. It's why we have all these customers who are doing the same things. To connect with these people that you need to connect with when you're building a business and building a brand.

So Darren, I'm sold on the use of video. And obviously, you know, we talk now about having video in it and you see, as we've had through the pandemic, Zoom, and now I'm using Riverside, for example, as a way to increase the quality of the video on a platform like this. But why don't people use video, Darren? Because it seems obvious and we've all got cameras in our phones now. So why aren't we doing it?

It's because you, there's a few reasons here. We spent a lot of time talking about this. Okay. So one of them, it's interesting. It's more psychological. So the way I hear my voice right now is not how you hear me. Okay. We hear ourselves inside our heads. We're not used to this. And so when we create a video, we play it back. Your brain actually says to you, that doesn't sound right to me. I don't like it. It's very interesting. So there's some psychological things and knowing that is important, right? I don't know if you knew that.

So.

The way you hear yourself in your head is not how you hear yourself. And so when it plays back, you play that video back, you're like, I don't sound like that. And your brain actually goes, stop what you're doing. I don't like it. So you gotta kind of get over that a little bit and just know that. So one psychological, the other one is I don't like how I look. Right. So I don't like how I sound. I don't like how I look. Rarely, you know, more and more, I think this is getting better because we do use things like Zoom to communicate more, more often. So you do see yourself more on camera than you did before. This used to be a bigger problem than it is today, but it still persists. So it's the same kind of thing. You only saw yourself when you're brushing your teeth, maybe in the morning. And other than that, you really didn't. So you got to get over that too. Okay. This is how I look. It's okay. People like me, but it's, it's something to overcome. I think one of the other issues that we have facing this, how I look problem is every other, a lot of these video mediums and social media give you filtering, maybe more, you know, for some folks it's like, so I want to mask how I look somehow. And I think that's another problem for another day we can talk about. But so it's how I look, how I sound. Then the third thing maybe is I don't know what to say. And I think that this is, if you're an entrepreneur, if you're in sales and you're in marketing and you're in customer success, you're in all of these things, imagine yourself on the phone calling someone. What would you say? That's what you say on video. Okay. So don't overthink it. Be brief, be to the point, but you can be far more personal and come across as your true self. Entrepreneurs have the enthusiasm. They have the passion for whatever it is they're doing. So bring that passion and enthusiasm through the video. It's far more effective than text, email, or text and these other modes that we're doing. Also, they can watch the video on their time, and this is critical. So in all of these other mediums I've been describing, you're trying to get someone's attention on their time. If I'm cold calling you on my phone, I'm trying to get you to respond to me and I'm interrupting you. Seth Godin called it, calls it interruption marketing, right? With video, I can send it on my time. So if I get up early, I can send 10 videos out and then you can view it on your time. Right? Oh, okay. I like what this person's saying. I might want to talk to them. Not, what's this again? No, I'm busy right now. When they're calling, if I'm calling you. I can't take the call right now. So I think that went really quick there through some of these fundamentals, but I think that's a big deal. Being able to watch it, that this is what we call asynchronous video. I create it and send it on my time. You view it and consume it on your time. This leads to a better connection because I'm not interrupting you in your day.

Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And this idea that people can then consume it when they're ready and when they're sort of in the right space as well. Right. platform to watch it too, you know?

Yeah.

Darren, tell us a little bit about BombBomb because you've talked about some of the structural problems of, yeah, I don't like the way I sound, I don't like the way I look, maybe my lighting's not good enough. I mean, I'm certainly in my case showing my wrinkles, which I'm kind of worried about. My daughter's also pointed them out for me, which is nice. But so I need some filters, Darren. But from a practical point of view, how does BombBomb help? Because if I just record a video on my phone and send it, the file size is massive.

Right.

And I can't upload it. So there's some practical issues with sending video. How does BombBomb solve that?

Yeah, that's exactly the problem we started to solve back in 2006 when we started the business. We're very, been doing this a long time. And so our number one core competency is speed to video. We want to make sure it's very easy and simple for you to create and send videos. And then more importantly, get the responses. That's what you want. You want a better response from your communication. And I think video, I know video helps you do that. So. We encode that video and we squish it down in lots of different versions, right? And at BombBomb, we spend far more time in the recipient experience than we do in our users' experience, right? So, you know, I love my customers, but here's the deal. I know what they want. They want more responses to their communication. They want to do business. They want to increase their scale. These are the outcomes they want. So to do that, I need to focus on how that video looks to the person that they sent it to, make sure it's received, make sure it's played, and then give them any kind of feedback I can in more detail about that experience. I think video also can give you so much of a richer depth of engagement. Okay. So you may know with a lot of technology these days, if they open the email, But you don't know if they read it. With video, I can tell you they opened it, they viewed it, how much they viewed it. And then, you know, a lot of people, we actually drop you into what we call our video page. Our video page is where they experience the video. This has several places for calls to action. It has a transcription of the video present in it. They can like the video. They can comment on the video. This gives you such a deeper engagement experience as a recipient. So I don't have to draft an entire response. I can just simply say like, and now in this day and age, we know what that means. And wouldn't you like to know, I'm not getting any response at all, that they simply did like your message. Okay. Okay. That's, it's a level of, you know, you're scoring maybe the engagement a bit better because of what we try and provide again on this recipient experience. And of course. We want the UI to be great. We offer iPhone, we own Android, Chrome extensions, Outlook, and Gmail. So we work where you work is another competency of BombBomb. Salesforce integration, integrations with other systems, CRMs, accounting software, whatever it might be. Yes, we work in those spaces for our customers. But again, more important to you actually is how your recipient receives that message and how we help you understand the depth of engagement.

Okay. Wow, Dan. And I love the idea that you're focused on your customer's customer, because ultimately that'll keep the loyalty going over 100,000 customers. Amazing. So from a practical point of view, what would happen? Would I, as a customer of BombBomb, have a recording, say through my iPhone, and do I upload that into BombBomb or is it within the BombBomb experience? Interface and I merge that with my database and goes through to my Outlook, just because having tried to navigate some of these systems before, this is where it falls down.

Yeah, exactly. So in your iPhone, it's a native app for the iPhone or Android and you record and you can send, record, send, record text right within the application. Right. And you point out something that's probably unique about BombBomb versus some other services that we also are a complete email service provider. So you can upload your list of contacts and you could send that video to a list of 1,000 contacts or 1 person. So we have that versatility there inside our application. So you can do that right from the app as well. You can pick a list, send it to a list of people. We also have Gmail and Outlook apps. Those are kind of embedded. And so when I go to compose a message, we call it a power wheel and you click the button, opens up a recorder, and now In BombBomb, you can record your screen so you can record anything on your screen, a screen recording. It's important, right? A lot of use cases. Or you can create a simple message, kind of how we've been talking about it. And I always say, if it, if it's longer than a sentence, I include a video. I want to add a video to that because I want to bring my personality and me into the communication. I think, look, we believe at BombBomb that human beings have intrinsic value and that we are uniquely Designed to communicate with other human beings. So we're just kind of handcuffing ourselves when we just send texts. And depending on the importance of the message, I still send texts, don't get me wrong. And I do, but, you know, we use Slack here at BombBomb, and I know many of you may too listening. I send videos in Slack. I send videos in emails. I send videos in texts. I send videos through Salesforce. So in all these mediums, I think it's just a better, higher level up your communication this way.

Yeah.

But it's easy to do. We make it super simple. Click the button, it counts down kind of 3, 2, 1. I record my video and I hit send and I'm done.

So down sort of smaller questions here. What about branding? Because, you know, obviously you've got a sales team or you've got agents or a franchise network. Can you brand the BombBomb videos or because you need to manage that consistency, don't you, across all of your, all the people sending this information out on your behalf?

And from an enterprise, a lot of those solutions exist in our enterprise platform. And so, yeah, so I mentioned our video pages, for instance, you can lock those down. So they have your logo, your call to action. We also have calls to action in the video itself. So sort of an overlay on the video, those can be branded. Those can be controlled. Also, we have email design templates that are kind of out of the box. We work with, I mean, a ton of franchise companies around the world, some of the largest in the world. And so for those users out of the box, it has all the branding they want, all compliant through marketing and everyone else. So we kind of work in our enterprise customers. We work with them to make sure even our virtual backgrounds that you can have in the videos, they can be controlled and they can be locked down to just what the brand wants from the marketing department.

Oh, that's very nice. I love the idea of virtual backgrounds that can go across, you know, all the users, right? Then like if you're a field agent, for example, doing customer service, Then the unification looks fantastic. And from a, I know I'm being a bit dull on the details here, but from a sort of a management and archiving point of view, lots of people creating video and they go, oh, I sent one like that before, or let's resurrect that. Just share with us, I know it's a little bit tactical, but sort of the file management, because as we get more and more content, content management becomes pretty onerous, frankly, plus backup. Restore if you have any attacks on your system, for example.

Yeah. So BombBomb, you have a video library management, right? So you can folder nest different videos. Administrators, let's say you're— we have customers that are managing 1,000 BombBomb users. They can deploy a video into a folder for all of their accounts as well. It's very popular. They can deploy emails, videos, whatever kind of content types that you want. So that those users, your employees, your franchisors have them at their disposal, right? So we do have a complex management platform. And I think the other thing that I want to point out is how we are a secure video platform. So there's a lot of video platforms, but I think we like, we operate in financial services, uh, the mortgage transactions, real estate, these have to be secure and locked up. And so we're very secure platforms. We transcribe all the messages. We even have a system by which if you're, if it's important to you, you can see and preview messages before they're sent out by your team. So we have a scalable way to do that for large companies. And then we also transcribe and we can store for you in a third-party service, everything that was ever said in any video ever by your team. So from a compliance standpoint, now, what did they say on the video that was sent to the customer? And that's nested in Salesforce as well. So working inside of all these systems, I mean, there was our enterprise platform and then there's the one that you can buy for $588. I didn't do the conversion in Europe, but for $588, you can buy BombBomb and that's a year. For the year, unlimited video, unlimited sending, everything I've been describing, or $69 a month. So enterprise is kind of a different deal. We do deals with the big companies, of course. So you can either buy one account. Own it yourself, have it in Outlook, on my phone, everywhere I want to send, anywhere that you want to send video or anywhere you can send text messages today, BombBomb allows you to send video messages.

Nice. That's wonderful. So less than 40 quid a month, you can send unlimited number of videos. I imagine a large amount of functionality and security and from any device, which sounds fantastic. So Darren, you're an entrepreneur and I see behind you, for those that can't see the video, you've got an Inc. Best Place to Work. You've got Inc. 5000. So share with us, how have you managed to get BombBomb, the company, noticed as well in this last 10 to 15 years?

Gosh, that's a great question. I'm less prepared. I think we built a great team for one. The team is so important as you're coming up, the critical nature, who you bring alongside to you in that leadership team, how they think, because you can't do it by yourself, right? You got to do it with other people. You need help doing it. I think that was a critical one. The other one was trying to get out there and do these things. The Inc. 5000, for instance, you just, as you're coming up, that was a big, important thing for us to get in. But I wanted people to know that we take care of our employees just as much as we take care of our customers. I think people want that, right? And so Best Places to Work is one of my favorite achievements because that means everyone here likes to be here. Our culture, our values, you know, we have values of humility, service, Flexibility and relationships. Those are our core values and we live them here at BombBomb. It's harder to do that in a remote environment. We used to be all together, right? But the COVID experience, we're far more separate. So it's been hard. We got to live those out in a different way. But that's how I think people talk about us being a great place to work in Colorado Springs. It's really important to me. But then besides that, I want to be a good partner to the people I work with. I think, you know, I want to do what I say I'm going to do. I'm going to come through for my partners. I'm going to come through for my customers. Of course, number one, if you call us, I want to take care of you. I want our customer satisfaction rates to be high because it's still, people want to do business with people they know, like, and trust. And these are the things that make you trust someone. That's why we keep customers and don't lose them. They tell other people about them. They tell, I want them to tell. others about our people, not just our product. They were so great when I had a problem, because a problem's going to happen. It's going to, but it's how do we help the people who are paying us money, whether it be just, you know, $588 is not a lot. How do we take care of them when they have a problem? I think that's so important. So if you're listening to this, I think that's how you get noticed by being the best at customer service you possibly can. And scaling it is hard. As you grow, but you know, it used to be, we used to have this thing called no phone left behind. So if that phone was ringing and there were 7 people that worked at BombBomb at the time, we were running to get the phone and we tried to replicate that. It's hard when you get many, many, many, many, many more customers. And I've seen other companies just lack this, like, man, the product is cool, but the customer experience or customer service is horrible.

Mm-hmm.

That company does not get talked about. That company does not spread. That company does not get partner deals. They want to know that you're going to take care of their customers too. So it's the best advice I can give.

Well, it's wonderful advice as well though, Darren. And plainly having seen the service, and I was so excited to have you on the show because I downloaded BombBomb on my phone over 2 and a half years ago when I'd heard about it on another great podcast. So Darren Dawson, co-founder and CEO of BombBomb. If you want to find out more about You and the company, where can they go?

Yep. LinkedIn's the best place to find me. I'm easy to find. If you type in Darren at BombBomb, you're going to find me and then bombbomb.com. Want to find out more about my story and how we got started with my business partner, Connor, how we got this thing going. We kind of map it all out there and our values and everything I've been talking about.

Darren, well, I've really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for sharing it in just a short amount of time, massive amount of information. So thank you so much for joining me today on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. You've been listening to Darren Dawson. been mine and on behalf of all my fellow Unnoticed Entrepreneurs. Thanks for all you're doing with helping us create videos that connect with our customers and our audiences. So thank you, Darren.

It's a pleasure. Appreciate it.

So thank you to my fellow Unnoticed Entrepreneurs for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me, Jim James, and Darren Dawson today. And as always, we'll put all the details in the show notes. Until we meet again, I wish you the very best and of course encourage you to Keep on communicating. And having listened to Aaron, I suggest that you download the app and try communicating with video.