INBOUND Bold Talks: Julien Smith "Social Media is Over: 5 New Trends You Can Profit From Instead"

Two things. One, no matter how many times you get up here, the amygdala in the back of the brain still goes off. You still panic. And then you get here and you're like, oh, it's cool. I actually am imagining all of you in your underwear right now. So think about that as you see me up here. The second thing is that who. Can I get a show of hands just really quickly? Who thinks Laura Fitton, the woman who just introduced me, looks like Rogue from X Men? Could you get up for a second? Can I get the hands? Thank you very much. Do I have a slide deck? Let's take a look. Okay, good. They gave me 22 minutes. I've never done a 22 minute talk before, and I'm known for being controversial. So I had no choice but to kind of just decide to be controversial. They said, what is it? I said, what is this conference about? They said, it's about marketing. And I know it's also about social media. So the title of this talk and the thesis that I am presenting to you is that social media is over. It's done. Not in that, oh my God, Twitter is going to die. Facebook is going to die away. But in the sense of being entrepreneurial, in the sense of being able to profit from something, because that's all what we're here to do. It's weird to say right after the mindfulness talk. This is so great. Follow your heart. And now we. So the purpose of getting onto something and doing it and being effective at it is to profit in one way or another. It might be to profit socially. And by that I don't mean like, yeah, like pat on the back, like win friends and influence people. What I mean is to be able to gain a benefit for whatever your goals are. And I mean with Laura and with a lot of the people that are in this room, we were there at the beginning. We were very fortunate. And I've been fortunate that I've been able to do a lot of different things in sequence. So podcasting, which is how I first got rid of my first job, and then all this Twitter stuff that we did, and over and over and over and over again. And I discovered something which is that I'm not good at at cluttered. When something is cluttered, I become immediately useless. All the benefits that I get from or have gotten from social media and from other things that I've done, and probably many things that you've done, the benefits that you have gotten, either consciously or not, you've done it because the Space you were in was not cluttered, it was empty. And so it was easier to do the job than it is now. And so today is literally the most cluttered day in social media of all time, in all of history. And tomorrow will be even more cluttered than that. And the day afterwards will be even more cluttered than that. And so if your voice is, if it's difficult for it to be heard now, how much more difficult is it going to be tomorrow and the day after that? I have an idea. Instead of trying to work hard to get through a cluttered marketplace, be first. Be the first to go out and do something. Be first. Have your company be first. You as an individual, be first for your career, in your personal life, whatever it is, stop working hard, start being first. And so I'm going to teach you, I'm going to hopefully teach you a few spaces, a few things that will help you get to spaces where there is no clutter. Because after all, I'll tell you, when you get to a space that's new, it is so much easier. And we're all here and we're all digging our hands in the dirt and we're all trying so hard to get something that works in our careers, in our businesses, we're trying new things. I know everybody that's in marketing. I know this because I am one. It's like a self help, like just the biggest advocate of that kind of thing, improving oneself. That's how we all get it from the masters in the field, we get it from Susan, we get it from the other Susan, Susan Cain, who we get it from Seth Godin, we get it from everybody. Improve yourself to improve your marketing. It works. But at the end of the day, no clutter wins. So my name is Julian Smith. I run a company called Breather. I'm not going to tell you much about that right now. I might tell you about it later. But just to prove my point, my whole career has been about being first. And that's the only reason I'm on this stage today. Not because I'm good, because I was first. And that's the reason people, if you know my name, that's the reason you know my name. So I am going to help you hopefully by telling you not, not all of these will be right, but some of them will be right. What is coming up, in fact, not even what is coming up maybe, but what is inevitable. Because the most important thing to look at when you're looking at technology and trends and all these things is to look not at what could happen, but at what must happen. Because technology has a direction. It has a way of leading you down the path, not in a sense of uncertainty. Technology wants something almost as if it was an animal or a person, and it is going in that direction inevitably. So here are some of the places that it is going. First, before I do this, before I explain all of this, I explain why this matters. Because the entire way that technology functions is that it functions like a set of Jenga blocks. The tower gets up and gets taller. I know my, my. I don't know if you guys know your, like, max that you've gotten your personal record. Mine is 43 floors, so I would advise you, by the way, it's. Jenga is like one of the best games. This is so weird that I'm saying this. Jenga is one of the best games to play in a bar, because the drunker you get while playing Jenga, the. The cooler your day is. That's just a rule, folks. It's like a set of Jenga blocks, which means layers build on top of other layers. Things build on top of each other. Okay, something came out. What does that mean? What does that mean that people will build on top of that thing that just came out? What? As we know, Twitter is built off a basic functionality that is sms. And without sms, there is no Twitter. So it is a series of Jenga blocks. And the whole world is like this. Everything is like this. Here's a great example of something that you should be paying attention to. The Internet of Things. One of two things is happening to you right now. What the fuck is that? Or I know exactly what that is. I've dismissed it maybe, or I've looked at it, and I know exactly what that is. Here is what the Internet of Things is. The Internet of Things is objects with Twitter, objects with statuses that tell you what they do if a door is open. Well, guess what? Computers have gotten small enough now that you can put technology inside the door. And. And the door can tell you from anywhere in the world that it is open. Is the bathroom full or empty right now? That kind of thing. Internet of Things has gotten to a point where you can turn, unlock doors and lock doors and turn objects on and off from your phone. And so it is inevitable that you are able to eventually turn off and turn on everything with your phone and obtain a status about absolutely everything that is going on in the world at any time that you have access to. For example, is this room full or empty of people? That is the Internet of Things because the actual chairs and other objects in the room will be able to detect it. That is what is happening. It's inevitable. Here's another one. Distributed authorship. Things like Medium. Medium is a great example. Guys who created Twitter also, some of them also created medium.com it is inevitable that the entire world, not just journalism, but everything, becomes bottom up. How are mega monoliths going? Like the hotel industry going to be dissolved and destroyed? They have lobbyists, they have many other things. Well, because of the, I guess, inevitability of bottom up everything, or peer to peer everything is another way to look at it. They will be destroyed by the fact that Airbnb can turn anyone into a hotel at any time. There is no legislation that can stop this. It doesn't matter how legal or illegal it is. It will happen and people will make it happen. So what else becomes bottom up? Well, magazines become bottom up and that's what Medium is. And then what other industries become bottom up? Think of absolutely anything that can be, that is an industry. And inevitably, based on other trends in a certain sequence, they will become bottom up in turn. The sharing economy, another great example. There are things that you will share in five years that if I told you now that you would share those things with others, you would be like, fuck no. Not a chance. Will it get to a point where you will share your bathroom with strangers? I'm not saying no to that. Personally, I think that's a little bit far, but that's my point. We thought Airbnb was far. We think all those things are screwed up and I would never do them. Well, guess what? You're wrong. And what you think has nothing to do with how reality is going to unfold. Stop even considering yourself as being right or wrong. And whether right or wrong matters, the only thing that matters is reality. Here's another. Wearable computing. Computers, as we have said with the Internet of things will get so small that they will be on your clothes. And what that allows for in science, in medicine and in other things like that can absolutely transform any number of industries. Industries will collapse and industries will be born by wearable computing. Billion dollar industries. You think you're surprised by things like Uber, which just got another $2.5 billion valuation. You will be shocked even more by something like this. Now you want to make, want to seem like really smart. You could take any of these trends or the ones that I'm talking about and move them a few years behind and say, okay, well that's what's going to happen. Let's say an example is that I live in Canada, so I know that, for example, Canada is approximately one or two years behind. I know that I can go there and do something in Canada that's already been done here. And it works. It's very easy. The entire developing world, because technology reaches everyone eventually, but doesn't reach everyone in the same order at all at the same time, will eventually reach a developing world. And those. By the way, did you know that we have 7 billion phones on the planet right now? We have more phones than people, almost. Panama has the largest penetration of smartphones of all time. They have 2.3, I believe, phones per person. Every single individual. I think this has to do with the fact that maybe a large percentage of them are criminals, but I'm not sure. I have not looked at that data. Here's another great example, 3D printing. You want to know what Home Depot is going to look like in the future? It'll be a tiny box, probably smaller than the size of this room with a gigantic fucking printer in the back. I will make a bet right now. It destroys entire industries where you have to ship something from China because of collapses so much that it is almost impossible to conceive of how large this is. Of course, we look at Star Trek and we go Earl Grey hot. And you think about Captain Picard getting the Earl Grey, his tea, his favorite tea anywhere in the universe. But that is trivial compared to the ability to print organs, which is now what happened. It happened on stage at TED 2012, a year and a half ago. Gaming. I know because I come from Montreal, that gaming is now larger than the movie industry. Much larger. And because of things like Kickstarter and other trends, you will find yourself in a place where for the generation that has come Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe and all these celebrities, well, guess what? We're talking about Metroid and Zelda, man. That's the things we care about. And that's our Clark Gable to us. Here's a good one. And I'm almost done. A smartphone is both eventually your wallet and your ID card. This has already begun to happen. One of the nice things about it is you can walk into a taxi right now. This is a little inkling on the future. That is an Uber cab. And then you can literally, once you, if you've been in a cab or an Uber cab, you know this. You can literally just walk out of the taxi and say, see ya. You didn't pay and you walked away. The transaction is frictionless. The driver says, great. That that specific Fare is over. He rates you five stars, four stars, or whatever. If you puked in the cab, maybe not. And then you rate him. It is a perfectly functioning system, almost. And it all done with the fact that right now, 95% of us keep our phone within 3ft of us 24 hours a day. It is a better marker of identity than your passports. It's a better mark of identity than almost anything you have. Your driver's license, anything. If it becomes your identity marker, it also becomes your wallet. Get used to the future. Go buy a Starbucks card. Even if you're not a Starbucks user, go buy one and then start paying with your phone at every Starbucks that there is. I started doing this a few months ago because of what we're working on. And I would never go back to paying with cash. And cash starts to feel antiquated as a method of transmission because of it. I only have a few more minutes, so I want to go into why this works. You can see this on the Internet. Who reads copyblogger.com? i know there's more of you. Yeah, you're ashamed. It's okay. Don't be ashamed. He's a cool guy. There's a few people in the room and many more afterwards. So one of the great things about Brian Clark is he started out quite a few years ago doing courses and teaching online. But it was this really sort of not ghetto, but kind of like hacked together means of doing so with his courses. The courses are very effective, but it's definitely not created by a billion dollar company. Right. Why am I using this example? Because now education is becoming something that is being reinvented. But five years ago, it was not done by professionals. It was done by hobbyists. And so in order to see the future, I would invite you to go see what people are doing in their basements right now. What are they doing on the weekends? What are they doing? This comes from Chris Dixon. I did not invent this idea. Chris Dixon, very famous vc, venture capitalist and entrepreneur. Go look at the hobbyists and what they are doing in the basement, and you will find the future again and again and again. You can go all the way back to watching that stupid Steve Jobs movie that just came out, and you can see it happen in fictionalized real time with Apple. And you can go way further back than that. The hobbyists are the ones creating the future. It seems like everything starts big when you see it at Mashable, but that's not the way that the world works. It starts small and it Starts in a way that no one notices and everyone dismisses. And it's those people that dismiss it that are missing out on the actual profit of the thing. Along with that, along with the ability to profit comes an ability to tolerate risk. And so even though it is very difficult in social media now to profit, I invite you to increase your risk tolerance so that you can find the new thing. Because it won't just come into your lap, it'll come into your lap and you'll look at it and you'll be like, that's fucking ridiculous. You will reject the next amazing thing unless you have the ability to tolerate looking a little bit stupid and get ridiculed by a few people. That is just a fact. I would invite you to be as contrarian as you can. When you look at the consensus building about something, I would invite you to turn around and look the other. It's just the way that the world works. When everyone goes in one direction, something becomes overvalued, which means something else is undervalued. Go to that thing, especially if you have an understanding of how it works when others don't. So in my last few moments, I will explain the bet that I have made about the world in relation to these things. I run a company called Breather. Breather, basically a breather is a private room you can unlock with your phone. So that's interesting. Or not. But here's why it will work. It will work because the office industry right now, things like Regis depend on individuals to unlock doors. But 30 seconds ago, in terms of the 24 hour clock of the history of time, someone invented a electronic lock that you can unlock with your phone. This dramatically transforms any industry related to real estate, any of them. It changes the entire mechanics of how businesses can be created and exist. Because once you remove the person that needs to unlock the door, you can do anything. And the margins go from this to this. So that is the bet that we're making. We're also making another bet. Everything goes social. So we went antisocial. Everything is about people being able to talk together. We said, no, we're going to put a person alone in a room. We're going to make a bet that the world is becoming too crowded and people need space. Instead of going wide, we went narrow to the smallest possible thing that we could do. And we didn't try to invent at all. We built on what already existed. Like the Django blocks that I mentioned before. You can do that too. Things that are coming out now will become obvious a year from now. Begin building on them. Now. Do one tiny thing that works. Don't try to do everything deliberately. Make your job as small as you can. Conquer something that looks unscalable, something huge, and it scares the hell out of you. Ask yourself this. What are others not doing? Or what is the company that is obvious to you, but that others are not building? Finally, I would invite you not to join a revolution because it's pointless. It's a revolution. Don't worry. Join one. Create one. Thank you.