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Information Inspirations
Transcript
[00:00:00] Greg Lambert: Luckily this week, I think we said everyone’s name correctly.
[00:00:04] Marlene Gebauer: Yes. Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.
[00:00:21] Greg Lambert: And I’m Greg Lambert. So Marlene, in this episode, we are talking with social media platform Fishbowl CEO and founder, Matt Sunbulli. So you pointed out to me a few weeks ago about Fishbowl, which is just entering into the legal vertical for social media.
[00:00:39] Marlene Gebauer: Yep.
[00:00:39] Greg Lambert: So, and again, it’s a kind of a unique way for professionals within that same industry to anonymously engage each other, but it also kind of keeps the troll factor down a little bit.
[00:00:50] Marlene Gebauer: It does.
[00:00:51] Greg Lambert: So how was it that you actually came across Fishbowl?
[00:00:54] Marlene Gebauer: Well, you know, it’s funny, I got an invite from a contact of mine, and I wasn’t really sure what this was, and so I remember sort of reaching out to you and a few other people and saying, hey, have you heard about this? And everyone’s like, oh, that sounds suspicious.
[00:01:10] Greg Lambert: Yeah, I was very suspicious. I was expecting huge troll factor.
[00:01:13] Marlene Gebauer: So as usual, I didn’t listen to you, and I signed up, and I was looking, and I reported back, I was like, it really doesn’t seem trolly at all. It actually seems like it’s got some pretty good content. Then the next thing I know I hear from you, it’s like, oh yeah. It’s like, you’re right.
[00:01:32] Greg Lambert: Jumped right in. Well, and there was a lot of discussion at my firm because people started getting invites to it. And immediately everybody was like, what is this? Should we shut this down? I’m not sure if this system’s going to go on.
[00:01:46] Marlene Gebauer: That’s fair. I mean, that’s totally fair.
[00:01:49] Greg Lambert: Yeah. Well, should be a very fascinating conversation that we have with Matt later on.
[00:01:54] Marlene Gebauer: I think so.
[00:01:54] Greg Lambert: So let’s dive into this week’s information inspiration. All right, I’ll go first. First one I have is real quick. The American Association of Law Libraries is leading the way again for open access to scholarly journals. They have opened up access to the Law Library Journal and AALL Spectrum magazine. which has been open before, but you had to actually sign up, you had to give your name and email account to get into it, and they’ve done away with that. I think it’s a great way for the organization to get the voice of the members out to a bigger audience. So, you know, I applaud the executive board for doing this. And do a quick shout out to the editors who we both know and have both been on the show. So the Spectrum editors, Steve Blasters and the LLJ editor, Tom Gaylord. I am happy that we are able to actually have true open access for these.
[00:02:54] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, that’s terrific. Thank you all. All right, so I’m gonna sneak in a tiny one.
[00:03:00] Greg Lambert: All right.
[00:03:00] Marlene Gebauer: And then I’m gonna have mine, okay? So are you ready?
[00:03:04] Greg Lambert: Ready.
[00:03:05] Marlene Gebauer: And this really just came up. So another person that we have had on the podcast, Hannah Block Webber, will be publishing an article in, I believe it’s the Cornell. Yeah, Cornell Law Review this coming spring. And she tackles a really interesting topic. And it kind of reflects a little bit on what I was talking about last week about Make Me Smart and Cambridge Analytica. And what it’s about is how too much automation in terms of, you know, as it’s applied to regulation of different platforms, can actually hurt the people that it’s trying to help because it becomes much more desirable for law enforcement. It allows corporations to control what the automation is, so without a deeper regulation, we’re essentially allowing them to kind of do whatever they want. It’s really good. So check that out, everybody.
[00:04:08] Greg Lambert: Yeah, and if you haven’t listened to the podcast with her on before, it’s really good as well. She talks about the algorithm black box that we get. So my first information inspiration was about open access. I’m going to flip it now because I was pretty upset to learn that the National Archives censored a display that they put out, which was to celebrate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage. So it showed an old march and then a new march.
[00:04:44] Marlene Gebauer: The 2017 Women’s March.
[00:04:50] Greg Lambert: Apparently someone at the National Archives thought it was a great idea to kind of fuzz out some of the words that were on the placards of the protesters, which included the name of the president, which included the reference to certain female body parts. And so, you can kind of see what somebody was thinking.
[00:05:14] Marlene Gebauer: I can’t kind of see that at all.
[00:05:15] Greg Lambert: But it’s not for the National Archives. You know, archivists and librarians don’t do this. Now, I will say this, and I’ve been a big follower of David Ferriero for a long time since he took over as archivist of the United States. I think he made the right decision to quickly, as soon as this came out that the photo had been edited, they came out and posted on their website that they were wrong, that they shouldn’t have done it, that they were pulling the display and that they were putting up a new display with the photo unedited. That being said, you know, there’s we live right now in an environment where people will intentionally accept things that they know are propaganda and probably lies because it fits their narrative. And it’s up to folks like librarians and archivists to be above that fray. And so although they made a correction, it’s a shame because this is now a black eye on the National Archives and it makes you wonder if they’re going to be able to do this again or if they’ve done it before.
[00:06:29] Marlene Gebauer: Behaviors called into question. It’s like one mistake, you know, how many times do you have to get it right after that for people to trust you again? It’s unfortunate. So, Greg, I wanted to end our inspirations on a very positive note because I saw this really great story and it’s about how two brothers managed to make characters of their spoken language with the help of Microsoft and some others. And it’s just, it’s wonderful. So, there’s two brothers, the Barry brothers, and they are from the Fulbe people. And they were dispersed around West Africa, and they’ve been settling in different countries from Sudan to Senegal. So, more than 40 million people speak Fulbe. There’s estimates like between 50 and 60 million people in 20 African countries. But they didn’t have a written language. So, they used Arabic, sometimes they used Latin to write their native tongue. These brothers basically would, when they were younger, would decipher these letters for friends. And it was very hard to read. So, what they did is they developed their own system. They developed their own alphabet with 28 letters, 10 numerals written right to left. And then they added some additional ones in other African languages and borrowed words. You know, they started basically with, you know, teaching their sister and doing this just sort of internally. The language they created is called Aldem. And it started spreading sort of beyond sort of the, you know, Senegal and some of the other areas I was talking about. The brothers felt so strongly that they needed to sort of teach other people. So one brother moves to Portland, Oregon, the other one stays at home. So they wanted to refine the letters. the brother in the States went to a calligraphy class at Portland Community College. And the instructor was just completely blown away as to what the story was. And he got a scholarship to a calligraphy conference. Ultimately, he got introduced to Michael Evanson, who was one of the editors of the Unicode Standard. And with his help, they were able to put Adlam into Unicode. And then Microsoft gets involved because they give expertise to the Unicode tech committee. Basically, there was so much interest that Microsoft also helped out. And they work with designers to develop a font. So basically, now they have their own written language. And this is going to have a huge impact on literacy throughout that community and enable them to be part of the Windows ecosystem. I think this was just one of those feel-good stories in terms of keeping a culture alive and allowing people that are spread in a wide variety of places to communicate and sort of retain a bit of their heritage.
[00:09:45] Greg Lambert: Very interesting.
[00:09:47] Marlene Gebauer: And that wraps up this week’s Information Inspirations. Greg, I remember when I first told you about Fishbowl and how it was a social media platform where lawyers and other legal professionals could post questions and make comments anonymously. I remember you saying, you know, all that you could think of was it sounded like the makings of a dumpster fire.
[00:10:11] Greg Lambert: A huge dumpster fire.
[00:10:13] Marlene Gebauer: You were very skeptical. But I know that you played around with it for a few weeks and come to appreciate it to be a place where people actually ask good questions and get decent answers.
[00:10:25] Greg Lambert: Yeah.
[00:10:25] Marlene Gebauer: So this is the brainchild of today’s guest, Matt Sunbuli, who started this in the finance industry and has since expanded into other professions. So let’s see what he has to say about how Fishbowl is doing in the legal industry.
[00:10:39] Greg Lambert: I’d like to welcome Matt Sunbuli to the Geek & Review. Matt is CEO and co-founder of Fishbowl. Welcome to the show, Matt.
[00:10:57] Marlene Gebauer: Welcome.
[00:10:58] Matt Sunbulli: Thanks, Greg. Marlene, thanks for having me.
[00:10:59] Greg Lambert: Hey, Matt, can you give us just a brief introduction of yourself and some background that led you to your co-founding of Fishbowl?
[00:11:08] Matt Sunbulli: Yeah, absolutely. So prior to Fishbowl, I’m a bit of a serial entrepreneur. I had three other startups. One of them scaled to a few dozen employees. The other two failed. A common story for an entrepreneur.
[00:11:19] Greg Lambert: Well, hopefully you failed fast.
[00:11:21] Matt Sunbulli: Yeah, the other two were decently fast. And in fact, the last one right before Fishbowl, I ended up using a lot of the tooling that was created for that software to be a bit of an acquisition engine for Fishbowl. So I managed to create some efficiency there. But yeah, my background is a bit of a digital product guy and a media guy. So I kind of appreciate both sides of the coin. Increasingly, most media companies are digital companies and most tech companies are media companies. It’s kind of like Facebook used to be a tech company, but now it’s a media company. Right. And then it’s the opposite way around. And yeah, I think Fishbowl, in earnest, really got going around 2016, where I met up with a co-founder of mine who was at an incubation spot for my last startup, and we just kind of hit it off. We came together on the general idea of how do you bring some of the, let’s call it the cool, organic conversation you see in social media about your social lives into your professional life. There’s all this fodder in your professional life that’s meaningful, that’s impactful, and that’s not shared. Right. And LinkedIn doesn’t do it, that’s for sure. And so we kind of wanted to tackle that.
[00:12:29] Greg Lambert: So what was your idea behind Fishbowl? Maybe we should say, what is Fishbowl? I want to just say, what is Fishbowl before we jump in?
[00:12:38] Matt Sunbulli: So Fishbowl, at its core, is a social network for professionals to come together, either within the same industry or because they have same relevant work experiences, with the goal of having open and candid conversations about the workplace. So on the one hand, when you look at traditional professional networks, LinkedIn, for example, what we witnessed, both from kind of user end point of experience, being a LinkedIn user, as well as interviewing a lot of folks on there, it feels very self-promotional. When you’re going to LinkedIn, and to what degree you are having a conversation, you’re sharing a very exciting white paper or your podcast.
[00:13:20] Marlene Gebauer: Or your podcast.
[00:13:22] Matt Sunbulli: Or your podcast. And there’s nothing wrong with that, right? I mean, there are a lot of laudable moments.
[00:13:27] Marlene Gebauer: But you’re right, it’s not conversational, really.
[00:13:30] Matt Sunbulli: Yeah, it lacks some of that conversational dynamic, that really comes down to. And so that’s one element to Fishbowl, because it’s mobile first, because some of the identity controls, which we can talk about in a second, there’s more of a conversational feel to it. And then, you know, I think other networks that are professionally oriented, like a Glassdoor, for example, they’re similar, but for them, it’s less of a self- promotion aspect. And again, it’s more of a kind of a real-time aspect. Yeah, there’s a real-time nature to it. You might post a question or a response, and within seconds or minutes, another professional across the country will respond. There’s an excitement to that.
[00:14:06] Marlene Gebauer: So you talked a little bit about LinkedIn and Glassdoor and the differences. You know, what about some other platforms like, you know, say like The Vault or even things like Facebook groups?
[00:14:16] Matt Sunbulli: You know, it’s funny, we get all these like movie-mixed metaphors, but in a tech space, you’re like, oh, you guys are LinkedIn meets Reddit meets this meets that. And the truth is, you know, we’re products of what we use. You know, so myself and Lauren, my co-founder, we use all these networks. And so there’s elements of these networks that make their way into Fishbowl just because we’re end users of those products, honestly. And so when you look at some of those, I think Glassdoor, for example, for us, you know, I really never enjoyed the fact that it felt very static. And it felt like, frankly, a moment in time, an employee would come and just cluster their opinion. Sometimes it’s almost invariably disgruntled employee. You know, it was semi-valuable where you might glean some insight from it, but there was no responsibility to it. You can’t respond to that user and expect an answer. And so I think Fishbowl is different from the Glassdoor dynamic in that because of the mobile platform, because of the real-time nature, because of the relevance, all these professionals are kind of grouped together and they have similar work experiences, work for similar companies. A person may have an opinion. You can rebut it or you can acknowledge it or you can add to it. And you can’t really do that on Glassdoor, right, just like the static platform. So that’s the Glassdoor component. And then the other one that comes to mind, you know, Reddit, obviously.
[00:15:35] Marlene Gebauer: Another thing I thought of was the old time above the law that basically you had people being able to post anonymously there. But it was definitely kind of a different feel than what I’ve seen in Fishbowl.
[00:15:51] Matt Sunbulli: Right. So what’s interesting, I had this conversation with Greg earlier on our, I guess, pre-call, is that there is an above the law forum in every industry we’ve launched to. Right. You know, there was this blog, and they had an anonymous comment section, and it got nasty pretty quickly. And literally in advertising, it was agency spy. There was a version in consulting. So every professional services industry we’ve launched to thus far has had that precedent. And so in that sense, it’s good that there’s a bit of a user behavior or familiarity with it. On the other side of the coin, however, it’s kind of bad because invariably the experiences on those forums were kind of toxic. Yeah, very much so. Yeah. The users were fully anonymous. There was a lack of accountability and sometimes even a lack of relevance if someone who comes from a different background in law or a different tier of law firm comes in and says something. Right. I think Fishbowl, we’ve sought to solve that by, A, we have this, you know, I think, Greg, you called it verified anonymity platform. We call it verified with flexible identity. But it’s the same thing. You’re getting at the same gist, which is when users sign up to Fishbowl, there’s a very onerous registration process. And when you compare it to other networks, you know, sometimes users block. Honestly, it’s, you know, your professional demographic, you have to prove that you work at a company with a work email validation. Sixty percent of our users give access to their mobile contact book so we can find other professionals and validate the fact. You know, there’s a lot of, you know, these steps and hurdles to get through to get on Fishbowl. The result is, though, there’s a bit of accountability. So that user who now chooses to post anonymously or privately with just what we call their work identifier, meaning, you know, I work at Baker McKinsey or I work at Kirkland. They still feel accountable because they know the platform knows who they are. Right. And so on Fishbowl, we thread that needle where it’s like your content is private, meaning you can share different points of view and opinions and that content won’t be associated with your public identity or your profile. But your presence on Fishbowl is public, meaning you have to at least be willing to say, I am on Fishbowl. And right off the bat, that acknowledgment, I think, filters out a lot of the bad actors, frankly, who would otherwise use a platform like this for more nefarious reasons.
[00:18:11] Greg Lambert: So you have a lot of Fishbowl, I guess you call them bowls or verticals, right?
[00:18:18] Matt Sunbulli: Yeah, so, yeah, totally. So verticals or industries?
[00:18:21] Greg Lambert: Yeah.
[00:18:22] Matt Sunbulli: We’ve kind of have a playbook we’ve launched since a lot of our 2016, we really got going, where we’ve focused first on professional services within the knowledge professional cohort to really launch to. We find the dynamic of note comparison and leveling up, meaning what’s it like to work at this company or that company? Or is the grass greener? And there’s a lot of comparing notes, a lot of leveling up, leveling down. And Fishbowl plays really well to that professional cohort. So we started with consulting, the management consulting world. That led us to the accounting world. A lot of these big four have their accounting branches. We launched to the advertising cohort within agencies. We are going to launch to advertising within brands as well. But if you look at, for example, the top umbrella network for ad agencies, WPP, Omnicom, IPG, we’re approaching almost 40% of their professionals on the network. So we’re fairly large in each of those three. Law was one of the more recent ones we’ve launched to in the professional services category. We’ve been fortunate thus far in that the engagement and the behavior is really similar, actually, to all the professional services. Actually, most similar to consulting in that there’s a lot of informational use of it. But there’s also a lot of, let’s call it social diversion or work diversion use to it. Go there and share a meme, for example.
[00:19:42] Greg Lambert: I’ve seen a number of things where people have shared and said, hey, am I in the right salary range here for the amount of hours I work?
[00:19:51] Marlene Gebauer: I’ve seen some people say, I got terminated and should I take the package? That’s sensitive stuff. You wouldn’t necessarily want you to be identified with that.
[00:20:07] Matt Sunbulli: Right. Yeah. I think that’s part of the magic in the box we’re trying to capture. Part of this is being relevant to a wide enough age cohort or just rank cohort. What we found at Fishbowl, and almost surprised everyone, is that 30% of our active users are actually 35 plus. And of that, almost 13% of them are 45 plus. We have a very atraditional social network cohort that, when we interviewed them, they tell us pretty openly, look, I’m not on Twitter. I’m not on Instagram, for sure. But I’m on Fishbowl. And we surmise it to be really because they can let their hair down for a bit. These are like high-powered individuals who are constantly have to have their best foot forward and a bit of self-filtering.
[00:20:52] Marlene Gebauer: Game face has to be on all the time.
[00:20:54] Matt Sunbulli: Yeah. You can let go of it on Fishbowl.
[00:20:56] Marlene Gebauer: When we talked about the verification and the anonymity, how do you protect the data?
[00:21:03] Matt Sunbulli: Yeah. It really comes down to two pieces here. A, the first piece is actually being explicit with the user on what the platform’s expectations are. And when you share something, what you should expect. And so we’ve worked really hard from a UI side to let users know that, hey, you have optional identity. That’s actually very difficult. It sounds easy to say, but when you design something with optional identity and traditional social network, it’s very difficult to design for.
[00:21:35] Greg Lambert: What do you mean by optional identity?
[00:21:38] Matt Sunbulli: So optional identity settings means I can come in and now post with my full profile, meaning, hey, I want to represent myself as a partner at Baker McKinsey, and here’s my name. This is who I am. Or you can post as, I’m just a partner. And you’re a verified partner. When you validated yourself during registration, we validate the fact you’re a partner. Or finally, you can just post as, I work at Baker McKinsey. And so these three identity settings seems relatively simple enough in a UI to make it clear to the user that when you post with this one, it’s private. The content is only associated with this anonymous identifier that you’re a partner or that you work at Baker McKinsey. But when you post with this one, it’s public. So the first challenge, honestly, is a product design challenge to make it as clear as possible to the user depending on how they post. And you may ask, well, why do you even bother? Everything we’ve seen is there’s two dimensions to Fishbowl. There actually is a networking dimension. So believe it or not, when it comes to the direct message channel on Fishbowl, 40% of the conversation is with your public identity. Because when you go one-to-one with a user, you want to transact offline. You have to give up who you are, right? And you can meet up. So we have a healthy amount of networking happening on Fishbowl in different channels. So we need to support that identity somehow. But in the more public channels, users want to be more anonymous and get at what they want to get at in a more anonymous way. So A, it’s the design. The second is, obviously, from an architecture side, we’ve taken it very seriously from the get-go. There’s a level of basic user data encryption that’s happening with the databases set up and partitions, any kind of posts or comments that are being generated by either your public user profile or private user profile. So we’re being very thoughtful in that regard as well. But between the two, the product design element has proven to be more difficult, honestly.
[00:23:33] Marlene Gebauer: Now, what if someone screws up? And I was thinking of the reply-all- to-email example that anybody who’s worked in a law firm knows that somebody hits reply- all and didn’t really mean to do that. But what happens when, inevitably, somebody screws up?
[00:23:49] Matt Sunbulli: Yeah. So here’s another use case we’ve debated all the time on the product team is that, A, in an anonymous context, there is a natural propensity to adopt the behavior of, let me get at the knowledge for free, get it, and then delete the post. Meaning, I may post something, get amazing responses, sometimes hundreds of comments, I got what I wanted, and now I want to delete it. And we can’t have that in the sense that, look, this question you’re asking is not only applicable to you, it’s applicable to thousands of other lawyers in your industry as well. The way we’ve kind of designed the system is if you can post it anonymously, that’s your cover, that you’re anonymous. So what we’ve decided on is if a user does it by accident, they do have a window, I believe it’s up to a 20-minute window, where if they go back, they can delete it instantly. I will also say this, actually, now that I recall, if you post something with your public identifier, you can delete at any time. Meaning, in your case, I accidentally posted something with my public identifier. In that case, you could delete at any time. For the anonymous use cases, you have a certain window through which you can delete it.
[00:24:57] Greg Lambert: You’ve entered an industry in the legal field now that is very risk- adverse. In fact, I can tell you, as soon as email started going out, inviting people to join Fishbowl, because somebody had joined and then shared their contacts, that immediately marketing, HR, IT, all of those groups jumped in and was like, what the hell is this? And do we need to block it? That sort of thing. What is it that you’ve seen as far as people saying, well, let me ask you this, have you seen companies block access to it?
[00:25:35] Matt Sunbulli: Not as frequently as you may think. One thing we’ve benefited from, incrementally, every new industry we launch, our playbook gets stronger, our messaging gets better. We can preempt a lot of this stuff because we’ve dealt with it in other prior industries we’ve launched to. That definitely comes into play. I think more generally, what we’ve seen is, since a lot of our virality, and we map how we grow, up to this point, almost 60% of Fishbowl growth is really unattributable word of mouth. With all the fancy analytics that we have under the hood, there’s still 60% of users who have no idea where they came from. That presumably means that one person is telling the other. The benefit of word of mouth is it comes with the trust of the person who told you about the app. In a case where the app may make you a little fearful because it challenges some norms a bit, or it’s new, and we know it’s common, the axiom is to fear what you don’t understand. That’s an understandable one. But the fact that the word of mouth comes from a peer, it mitigates that a bit. To answer your question specifically, we haven’t had many companies that have done that. In the cases where they’ve done, we’ve tried to act as really good actors, immediately responding to that company, reaching out to the email IT team, saying, Hey, this is who we are, this is what we represent. We do that because we acknowledge the fact that the space we’re in has been abused by other players. We’re going to enter the space with better intentions and motivations. We have to be good actors and preempt some of the suspicion that might come our way. We’ve been pretty proactive. When you invited me to this podcast, we were like, yes, and that’s part of the reason. There’s nothing that we’re doing that we’re shy about.
[00:27:15] Marlene Gebauer: You talked a little bit about the demographic in terms of age range, and I want to tweak that a little bit. In the industries that you’ve entered so far, how have the reactions and participations of workers and bosses differed? Have bosses actually stepped in and participated? Are there any best practices that you’ve seen with a company’s take on Fishbowl?
[00:27:46] Matt Sunbulli: To start with, there’s definitely some interesting just general behavioral insights we’ve noticed across industry that may be interesting to share. When you look at the advertising sector, partially because of the way it’s structured, CEO titles in the industry are given a little more freely. There’s a lot of this regional CEO distribution of title and whatnot. Partially for that reason, partially for just maybe the more openness, there’s a lot more legitimately CEOs that not only read content. We probably have CEOs across industries that read content. They’re listening in. What are my employees or what are people in my industry saying? They’re active in the advertising. They’ll actually come in and they’ll respond to a junior creative’s question. If something about their agency is being said, they’ll respond to it, which is fascinating and really cool to see. I think that’s a function more of whatever way that industry is structured, it spills into the app. I think when you look at other industries, what we also see is, let’s talk about the commonalities. That’s an example of a difference. In terms of a commonality, we do see across the board this age distribution stat I shared is consistent. We definitely get a general type of usage. Whether that usage is content creation, responding, or just reading, that’s where the difference comes in. Partners coming in and consulting and responding to a work-life balance question or responding to a challenging compensation question. That happens all the time. In our oldest industries, we see, like in consulting too, we do have a lot more structured Q&As. There’s something that we launched really from the get-go at Fishbowl. We call them Fishbowl Q&As. They’re a bit of town halls. In the companies we’re really big at, in certain companies, for example, I won’t mention the firm names. They’re really notable consulting firm names. Almost 80% of their employees are on the network. And the result is those companies that said, hey, can we host a town hall Q&A on your platform where our CEO Or our COO will take a whole hands meeting and you can ask any question and we’ll answer it. Because they know their employees are more engaged on that than they’re engaged in their quarterly webinar, whatever.
[00:30:00] Greg Lambert: It’d be nice to have a CEO AMA. That’d be nice of CEO AMA.
[00:30:05] Marlene Gebauer: I was going to say, yeah. I have to bring this idea back. So you’re talking a lot about a lot of metrics and a lot of data that you’re capturing. What are you doing with it?
[00:30:20] Matt Sunbulli: Yeah. So for us, the priority right now is to grow the network. But I won’t expound on that because I think anybody, any entrepreneur can tell you that, like, yeah, grow the network. When it comes to monetization, which is important, from the get-go, it’s been very important for us to be able to align any monetization we do with user motivation too. And so when we look at Fishbowl, there’s really two primary kind of monetization revenue pillars we’re looking at. And we’re not reinventing the wheel because thankfully the wheel, in this case, the monetization has already been created by LinkedIn. We can do some piggybacking or Glassdoor. But one model we are looking at is talent brand. So we look at the recruitment spend across different firms. There’s increasingly A portion of that that’s going towards the way companies and law firms are marketing themselves to the people they’re recruiting. And it falls under this talent brand umbrella. We feel Fishbowl plays really well into that in that the conversations that are being created are now tagged to law firms or company names. They’re being housed in company profiles. We’ve had instances where companies will come in and actually say, hey, we want to do a Q&A. We’ll pay you to do that Q&A because it’s a platform for our partner or our domain expert to showcase how great it is to be engaging to the user base and informative and educate them. At the same time, it’s good for us, too. The talent brand is a big opportunity for us, and that’s one pillar. The other is recruitment. We’ve done numerous tests, and what we found is that the nature of our model, because we’re so verticalized, the benefit is we can transact that job cycle very quickly. Meaning, every single recruitment manager we’ve spoken with within professional services thus far, I don’t know how it’s going to play out in law, has told us that 60% of their spend is recruiting intra-industry, so between companies. They’re poaching each other’s talent. This accounting firm is taking that account, and it’s going. Our model is perfect for that because this industry vertical, we have more daily engaged intention amongst that industry cohort than LinkedIn does by far from that vertical cohort. If 60% of this recruitment spend is happening poaching, for us, it’s a gimme. It’s a plug and play. We haven’t launched any job post features just yet or job transactions, but we plan on it, and our users thus far have told us they would actually enjoy doing that.
[00:32:44] Greg Lambert: Now, I was wondering, I was looking at some of the questions that are put out. Does Fishbowl have any type of internal questions, surveys, or things that they put out on Fishbowl to get reaction?
[00:32:58] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, are you generating?
[00:32:59] Matt Sunbulli: Yeah, no, for sure. So, we have a community team, and the community team has kind of a dual focus of keeping that community, particular industry or whatever poll associated, engaged. And in regards to that focus, sometimes there’s relevant news that’s running, and we will think that a particular poll supplemented with a conversation around that poll can be interesting, good fodder. So our community team has a bit of an editorial ability around generating a poll and generating interesting conversation, for sure. Beyond that, you know, there is a, you know, we do realize there’s an opportunity for insights here. Where, obviously from an anonymized standpoint, if a certain company can get a sense of, like, how do my employees feel about X, Y, or Z, that can be meaningful and impactful. The truth is, on the other side of the coin, we will look that way. There are a lot of tools to do that already, right, you know, with the point. But from a community-engaged standpoint, we found users really do care to, like, have referendums on different fun topics. One that comes to mind in our ΓÇô one of our nontraditional knowledge professional cohorts, we launched it to the K-12 teachers in June. It was around 3.5 million of them, teachers. I have two sisters who are teachers. And what we found is they, you know, they’ll love doing polls on everything from, you know, what percentage of you pay out-of-pocket for school supplies? We found the answer to that was 85%. That sounds low.
[00:34:22] Greg Lambert: As the husband of a teacher, that’s low.
[00:34:26] Matt Sunbulli: Meanwhile, lawyers and consultants are getting $100 per DMs a day and, you know, sometimes complaining about the amount of fishbowl. So it opens up your eyes a bit.
[00:34:37] Greg Lambert: How many users do you have on the platform now?
[00:34:40] Matt Sunbulli: So, you know, what we’re comfortable sharing right now is in each of our industries, other than logs, we just launched that literally eight weeks ago. We’re approaching between 35% and 40% of the professionals in that industry. And to give you a bit of a denominator, we’re looking at the top anywhere from 300 to 500 companies within that industry. So it’s actually a little easier to come at some of this. People are like, well, how do you know this? It’s like, well, LinkedIn has done the CRM job of mapping out, you know, and they have a decently reliable monthly.
[00:35:09] Marlene Gebauer: Thanks, LinkedIn.
[00:35:11] Matt Sunbulli: Yeah. And so what we found is in all of our previous industries, we’ve gotten to that 35. Now we’re starting to eclipse the 40% mark of penetration. That’s really when I think most of the ΓÇô hopefully what we think is the meaningful, impactful experiences really kind of start to unlock themselves.
[00:35:28] Marlene Gebauer: So I had a quick follow-up question on that. Like I received an invite from somebody I knew who I’m assuming shared, you know, contacts. But is that the only way to join? Can you just go on and join yourself? You know, other than verifying that you work in a particular industry at a particular place, are there any other ways to access?
[00:35:52] Matt Sunbulli: Yeah. So we do ΓÇô it does depend on the particular bull. So, you know, I guess Reddit has ΓÇô they call them Reddits on Fishbowl. They’re called bulls. And on Fishbowl, depending on that bull, you may or may not have access to or even know it exists. For example, in ΓÇô I’m trying to think. We have a very popular over 40 in advertising bull. And, you know, unless you’re over 40 and in advertising, you don’t know about it. But it’s very active. Similarly, some of our other networks are that as well. When it comes to the broadest bulls, though, which are kind of industry-wide, those are pretty accessible. Meaning, yes, if you just organically sign up and validate, you know, your profession, you will be able to get access to that. Actually, that’s more of the direction I think we’re going towards as we innovate on Fishbowl, is to try to kind of broaden it out a bit where ΓÇô and I think you asked me what is Fishbowl. It’s not just professionals within the same industry. It’s also professionals who have the same work or similar work experiences. So it doesn’t have to be around industry, right? It could be around, you know, the fact that you’re all ΓÇô you’re creatives. We have a very active creatives bull, actually, where it’s advertisers, but it’s also, you know, designers and different. We have a Salesforce bull where, in some cases, they’re consultants. In some cases, they’re engineers. You know, these bulls become more of groups that have a bit broader take or more general take than just industry as well.
[00:37:13] Marlene Gebauer: So have you experienced trolls or people that violate the standards, and what have you done? I mean, I haven’t seen any. I mean, I’ve seen some slightly snarky things, but nothing serious. But, I mean, have you had that? Have you had to deal with it?
[00:37:31] Matt Sunbulli: Yeah. I mean, any and all social ΓÇô if you have social media label appended to your ΓÇô you’re going to have a bit of that behavior, right? So we have some of it, and I think the public record of it actually is there’s a public Reddit group. I believe it’s called Ban for Fishbowl. I’ve got to go check that out. We didn’t feel Fishbowl was either anonymous enough or consenting enough to show whatever opinions and all opinions. They stepped some boundary, and they got banned. And just so you know, our purview here is because the space has been abused, we are pretty stringent. So from a product design standpoint, we have this system of three strikes. It’s not that novel. But basically, if your content is flagged, and there is a community guidelines where we’ve listed the eight types of ΓÇô you have a bit of a legal take on this on what constitutes a flag and what’s a violation. If you have three strikes, then you’re banned. And anything prior to that, it’s like a temporary timeout of sorts.
[00:38:42] Greg Lambert: Go stand in the corner.
[00:38:44] Marlene Gebauer: It’s like when you’re gaming and you do something wrong, you get that temporary timeout, and you’re allowed to come back. But if you continue to do it, then you’re out.
[00:38:52] Matt Sunbulli: And so we’re not that novel. I think more and more, even the big guys, the big players, they’re all adopting pretty aggressive community policy procedures now. They weren’t initially. They were just focused on growth. It’s more of a recent change.
[00:39:06] Marlene Gebauer: I’ve got to say, everything I’ve seen, it just ranges from pretty standard types of questions to fun things to really, really serious topics in terms of wellness and things like that. So I think it’s quite good in terms of being able to crowdsource people’s responses to try and help one another out.
[00:39:31] Matt Sunbulli: It’s been good for us, I should say. We’ve benefited from two filters naturally in the space we’re in. First off, because we’re professionally oriented, all the very noisy, contentious political debates that you see on Twitter and sport debates and whatnot don’t apply in Fishbowl for the most part. And that’s where the majority of trolls come into play. And so in that sense. And then the other thing we’ve benefited from is there is some self- policing on Fishbowl where users have told us that. Again, the accountability part, we know the platform knows us, oh, by the way, in the UI, why don’t you make that full profile toggle a little further than the anonymous? Well, actually, we’ve designed that purposely. We want you to be cognizant before you post something you might regret. So we’ve taken this into account and we’ve benefited from some of these things.
[00:40:20] Marlene Gebauer: It’s sort of the standard rule. If you’re posting anything to social media, make sure that your parents would be okay seeing it.
[00:40:28] Greg Lambert: Your boss or your grandmother. Yeah. Well, enough with the trolls. Let’s finish on an up note here. So what are some more positive stories that you’ve seen?
[00:40:38] Matt Sunbulli: Some people that have posted things that have gotten some more positive feedback. Yeah. So I think the most inspirational content for me, this is very subjective, but for me at least, I’ve read on Fishbowl. It’s a blend of something that’s deeply personal, but also very beneficial to others. And so, for example, there was a story shared in one of our goals where it was a female manager in advertising, and she had a junior many years younger than her, and she became aware that she was being paid less than this junior by a substantial amount. So this whole kind of gender pay equity or pay parity topic. And she posted on Fishbowl, and there was a lot of like, how could this happen? How did you not notice this? All this. But then there was one particular user who came in. I can’t remember their title. They’re very senior. They were either like COO or, you know, very senior, come in and said, this is what you do. One, two, three, four, five, and just started coaching her exactly what you need to do to correct this. And there was a back and forth. And I think many days later that user came back and said, hey, you know, I got adjusted. I’m not making 15% more than that. Right. And so for us, that’s the value, right, where it’s the type of conversation you just you really can’t share anywhere else because you’re not comfortable. And you also don’t have the access to get that value. Right. I mean, where else? You know, if you’re you know, I live in New York now. Right. It’s pretty easy for me to reach out to one of my network circles of people in New York who have answers to these questions. Some of our most fanatical, you know, loyal users are in the Midwest or more remote parts. They don’t have access to this network. They have no one to turn to. And so for this user, wherever they were, to turn to Fishbowl and someone who did have that answer and get it.
[00:42:27] Greg Lambert: That was that was I think that was a positive story that I know the team’s inspired by. Massimili, I’d like to thank you again for taking time to talk with us today.
[00:42:35] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, this has been a really interesting conversation. Thank you so much.
[00:42:39] Matt Sunbulli: Totally. Thanks for having me. It was fun.
[00:42:48] Greg Lambert: It was great having Matt on the show. Like we said, when we introduced him, I did. I thought this was going to be a dumpster fire. I can’t imagine. You know, all I could see was the comment section from above the law. And it was interesting that you talked about it says, you know, every industry has that.
[00:43:05] Marlene Gebauer: I did not know that. It’s true. It does. But you just don’t think about it except in your own profession because that impacts you. But I was I thought like the model was very interesting. The fact that you have have these different bowls and in different industries. Or I also love how they basically look at the analytics and say, OK, what are some commonalities between different groups? And let’s bring those people together. Yeah.
[00:43:34] Greg Lambert: It’s it sounds like it could really tentacle out with with a lot of different topics as well as industry. So very interesting. If you haven’t taken a look at Fishbowl, I suggest at least going out and looking at it. I’ve seen questions. What was the question today? Somebody asked if it’s OK to vape in the office. But I mean, it’s a but then then there’s there’s other questions in terms of what’s appropriate to wear to the office. You know, which sounds sort of, you know, well, I don’t know about that. But actually, those are real questions that people worry about. I’ve seen questions like, do you charge for this particular piece of work that you do? And you found some people do, some people don’t. So it’s really a good place to have those conversations that you may not get more feedback on my work.
[00:44:29] Marlene Gebauer: Do I get more feedback on my work? They’re all really good, legitimate questions in terms of people who need answers.
[00:44:39] Greg Lambert: Yeah. Well, I hope it continues to stay on this path, because I remember the good days of Twitter and I would love for those days to come back. So thanks again, Matt, for taking the time to talk with us today.
[00:44:53] Marlene Gebauer: And before we go, we want to remind listeners to take the time to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Rate and review us as well. If you have comments about today’s show or suggestions for a future show, you can reach us on Twitter at @GayBauerM or @Glambert, or you can call the Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270, or e-mail us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. Yeah, I think we need a little love for the hotline and the podcast e- mail.
[00:45:27] Greg Lambert: Yeah, send us some love.
[00:45:29] Marlene Gebauer: Yeah, please. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeSica. Thank you, Jerry.
[00:45:35] Greg Lambert: Yeah, thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene, I will talk with you later.
[00:45:38] Marlene Gebauer: Okay, Greg, bye-bye.
[00:45:39] Speaker D: Don’t have to go to the cross The salt of the earth on the way to rehearse And the devil’s back Hey, hey, don’t take me away I can walk home by the North Star But I failed to notice that it’s still daylights At the devil’s back from a bar At the devil’s back from a bar At the devil’s back from a bar