Mobile First

Rick co-founded MINDBODY, Inc in his garage in 2001, and today serves as their CEO and principal visionary. MINDBODY is leveraging technology to improve the wellness of people around the world. Their cloud based software powers over 60,000 wellness businesses in over 130 countries, and connects over 300,000 wellness practitioners with millions of people who are seeking to live healthier, happier lives.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Rick is passionate about helping people realize their dreams and live healthy, happy and productive lives. As CEO & Co-Founder, he emphasizes that the core values are the guiding light for MINDBODY. He spends a lot of time ensuring that they keep their values fresh. They also make sure that they evolve by understanding what is going on in the industry they serve.

A day in the life of Rick involves direct leadership either with individuals or different teams in the company. They always need to be reminded on their ‘why’ so communication is essential.

Their company doubles in size every year but the biggest hurdle for them to grow even more is their ability to deliver exceptional customer experience to every new customer that adapts their platform.

Their transition to mobile was huge and the hardest part of all was having a giant set of database so they need to reengineer most of their codes so they could surface their functionality to any device. This is where majority of their energy was spent in when they transitioned over and was a hefty undertaking as they were servicing about 10k clients at this time.

To allow them to customize and make changes, they are continuously studying and interacting with customers. This includes AB testing, usability studies and prototyping. Just like other great changes, they have experienced those which were triggered by a crisis. For them, there were two – that their was not a lot to their usability to be desired and, as far as going from waterfall to agile, was that the release built time were getting longer and longer due to the additional functionalities that they were adding.

In dealing with culture change, they got connected with Jared Spool and they brought him into the organization for engagement and learning methodologies such as observational research which aligned perfectly with design thinking. Simultaneously, they sent themselves to school to learn how to be scrum masters and product owners to understand the different stakeholders in an agile scrum. This was adopted from CEO down to team members.

Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!

Jordan Epstein is CEO and Founder at Stroll Health, a company that delivers an app for ambulatory and primary care to physicians’ offices that enables clinicians to make personalized value-based referrals. Epstein went to Carleton College for his BA in Geology.

He is experienced in business intelligence and SaaS leader, with expertise in design, development, and production of enterprise big data applications across industries. Past Fortune 500 clients include Kaiser Permanente, United Healthcare, Delta Airlines, and Chase.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

There are so many problems in health care and so many ways to improve and what Jordan finds cool about all of this is the fact that anyone can do something about it. He sees a two-fold problem: first, that the cure doesn’t exist and second, that it exists but the patient’s don’t know that it does. This is where he comes in and this is what his passion is all about: he wants to get people to the care that is accessible and affordable, every time.

As a Jewish kid who grew up with a hunger to help people, Jordan tried being a mathematician, a scientist, a geologist but still found them wanting as they do not touch lives as directly as he wanted it to be. He took the leap, quit his job, and was in the middle of nowhere and for some reason, he decided to work in a software company and got rejected to all of them – 100% rejection. But he persisted and from there, he got connected in health care, Stroll was born and the rest is history.

In pitching, talk to investors and paint them a picture of the current nightmare that people have to go through then tell them that you are attempting to accomplish. If they advise you to try something simpler, do a full stop and tell them that you have already done it. It is important to have your data all lined up to be able to speak intelligently about what you are trying to present.

Raising money is the main thing that Jordan is focusing on at this juncture and after this, he is out to prove the technology. He sees a lot of opportunity and he is looking at building distribution partners on his way to solving the problem that he sees.

Healthcare is tough and for them to raise capital, Jordan shares that you can start by identifying your targets well. After that, read an article that they wrote, say something insightful, follow up, and get them in an in-person meeting.

The future of Stroll including seamless patient, doctor and back office experiences and the pieces that they are working on at this time.

Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!

Rand Fishkin uses the ludicrous title, Wizard of Moz. He's founder and former CEO of Moz, board member at presentation software startup Haiku Deck, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand's an unsaveable addict of all things content, search, & social on the web, from his multiple blogs to Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a shared Instagram account. In his miniscule spare time, he likes to galavant around the world with Geraldine and then read about it on her superbly enjoyable travel blog.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Helping people succeed in their professional careers and entrepreneurial ventures is and has been Rand’s passion. This calling was inspired because he was an accidental entrepreneur himself and really got his hands dirty in the SEO world before it snowballed into something.

The philosophy of helping people without asking for return has built up a lot of goodwill and thereby has been instrumental in building their business and their overall success.

Rand discusses a Twitter quote, ‘The best way to sell something – don’t sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect and trust of those who might buy.’

Start-ups inherit the strengths and weaknesses of their founders and Rand’s opportunities are software engineering and technical operations. He feels that Moz had inherited this and is the core of what holds them back in terms of scaling.

Rand gets transparent and shares his combination for disaster: relying on personal intuition and sense of the market, getting khaki and greedy and getting a lot of funding. He further shares his broken theories and his realization that they do not have to lead the market; they just need to follow where it goes.

Their philosophical approach to pivot towards focusing on the ‘now’ and the story behind one of Moz’s most successful launch ever.

About his experience when they did a CEO Swap for week and how this gave him the insights what SEO world was like, what consultants were dealing with, how their processes were working, and what their struggles were.

How the fact that there is no product fit in SEO, there is just the constant pursuit drives them to constantly practice; and how he sees the future and what he thinks is next; and his thoughts about the challenges in standing out from the entire noisy crowd.

The things that Moz, and Rand personally, are working on as of this time including building a better system of keyword research through URLs, the Moz bar, investing in a fund called Backstage Capital, writing a book around transparency and veering away from the mistakes that conventional startup wisdom biases us towards.

Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!

Known for her belief in enhancing company culture to get powerful results through content marketing, Krista helped make Block Imaging a digital leader in the medical imaging space. Her work has been recognized by Social Media Examiner, {grow}, Ragan’s Health Care Communications and the Mayo Clinic’s Social Media Health Network.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Krista’s mission of humanizing and democratizing brands was only awakened a couple of years back but it was spawned by wanting to balance results and relationships in business. She is a family person and doing business with people thousands miles away made her want to earn relationships from afar. This led to the things that she put in place in their marketing department

She got married shortly after college and they moved to Michigan so her husband can start graduate school there. Her degree was in History and English but they just started with doing odd jobs at that time. She interviewed to be a receptionist at Block Imaging and didn’t even get the job. After six months, she applied again and was hired as a temp employee. From there, she got to know the business, gradually asked for more challenges tasks, and became proactive in finding needs to be resolved. She slowly expanded what she needed to take on and finally grew a Marketing Department.

When she first came in, Krista saw a lot of hurdles and things to work on in their company’s website, especially in gaining more web traffic so she shares her inbound strategies which led their leads to jump from 10 leads / month to 880 leads / month in the course of 3 years. She also shares the pros and cons of managing from home.

Krista shares what Block Imaging is and her tactics and best practices which enabled them to scale and get through hurdles: Be able to fully extract the metrics and data so that you have the ability to understand what’s happening and what you are doing, take control of your properties so you can leverage on these information and have the ability to act agilely and quickly to get through it and, democratize your ability to market.

Krista walks us through how she is using digital to inform and engage customers and how mobile has shifted the way she designs her strategies. She also shares their undertaking in going mobile friendly and their line of thinking when it comes to prioritizing which ones to work on first.

Krista wrote a piece about Block Imaging and their case studies in Marcus Sheridan’s book, They Ask You Answer, so check it out!

Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!

Sethu Meenakshisundaram is President of SAP Mobile Services (Sybase 365), the global leader in enabling mobile interconnect, mobile engagement and mobile insight services for mobile operators, financial institutions and enterprises. With more than 25 years of experience in enterprise products and business, Sethu spent the majority of his career at Sybase as Chief Product Officer, building world-class OLTP and OLAP database systems that powers majority of the trading systems in capital markets.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Sethu starts the show off with his mantra: “I want to make complex things simple, and simple things automatic” and what inspired him to chase this passion. Sethu has a mindset that failure is always an option, and it is not a failure but is actually a step towards growth. Coming from a huge family and with simple beginnings, he shares how trials and tribulations had helped him grow and why Kung Fu Panda is one of his heroes.

Sethu has 250 warriors with different passions but works for a collective purpose. He shares that things will always be stressful but they are always happy and have inner peace. Sethu also talks about their business model, the power of their reach, why nobody can beat them and about an interesting little island call Kiribati.

He explains why hyper connectivity is critical to the world’s mobile subscribers and the thing to focus on more than things such as VR. He elaborates that this is because of how the technology can help make people lives better by helping them in managing their money better, for example, thereby bringing in more value.

Interesting topics he had heard during last year’s Mobile World Congress including drone technology and AI but he shares his slight disappointment as well due to the fact that it did not bring big impacts to developing countries. Seamless payment services, education through connectivity would have been great items for the Mobile World Congress to meet their social responsibility.

Bringing people and technology together and IOT virtualizing all network operations coupled with the gamut of solutions that their SAP platform brings.

Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!