[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Hello again. Welcome to the Partner Marketing Podcast. Today I'm joined by Andrew Smuffett, General Manager of Shopback Australia and New Zealand. Gus, you are a leader in the cashback and reward space who's grown the business from a three-person Airbnb team to millions of shoppers and billions in transactional value. Welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you here today with me.

[Angus Muffet]

Thanks for including us in your show. I'm really excited to share the journey that we've been on.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Great, great to have you. Maybe, shall we start, maybe introduce yourself a little bit about what you're up to, what you've done, just like that we get a bit of an understanding what you're doing.

[Angus Muffet]

Yeah, sure thing. First of all, we can remove the formalities. You can call me Gus. Everyone aside from my grandmother calls me Gus, so I feel like that's appropriate for the show today. Yeah, so I'm the general manager, as you said, for Australia and New Zealand for ShopBack. I've been with ShopBack now for seven years, having spent time in other e-commerce giants like Groupon. And prior to that, I actually had a very non-linear track into e-commerce and then subsequently into affiliate marketing. I spent four or five years working in hotels back in the day. So straight out of school, my first job in Sydney was with a five-star hotel and it gave me a really good understanding of, you know, what customer service is like, working in amongst diverse teams, you know, how fast hotels move and operate. It gave me a really good flavor and I got the e-commerce bug after joining Groupon in about 2013. the fastest growing company at the time, leader in mobile commerce and that gave me the step into where I am today at Shopback.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

That's really funny. When I went to university, when I studied, I earned my money with working in a restaurant. And I always said later that everybody who works in client services should have been working in something like that, right? Because then you really know about how to service people and what quality is, how you take care of them and all this kind of stuff. Absolutely. Because that's kind of like where I kind of like started my kind of like first jobs during studies. Great stuff. So how did you then come from Groupon to Shopback itself?

[Angus Muffet]

Oh, this is a really interesting story. So I'd worked at Groupon for five years and I was running the national sales team and I was working across like quite a, and the team were working across quite a big portfolio. So anything from theme parks to cinema chains to national QSR brands, we were essentially bringing those, brands to the Groupon audience, to the Groupon customers. And so I had a real flavor for working with multinational corporations or enterprise-sized brands. I've run sales teams before and I had a real interest in marketing, on the marketing side, and I used to work closely with our team marketing team at Groupon to bring brand campaigns to life. And I do vividly remember when Shopback must have been looking at Australia and there was a few LinkedIn DMs going around from the recruiters at Shopback. And I remember looking at it and thinking, you know, I'm not sure what Shopback is. I'm not aware of cashback. There was really like a very low presence of that particular value proposition in market at that point. However, one of my team members working at Groupon in my team, he joined Shopback and, you know, we had a conversation about him leaving Groupon and joining Shopback. And I thought, oh, wow, that's an interesting move. And he then spent. good four or five months convincing me on the, you know, the opportunity and where it's going. And subsequently I met the founders and really believed in their vision for ShopBack, not just across Southeast Asia, but their vision for what it could be in APAC and beyond. And as I say, the rest is history. It's been a good seven years. Yeah.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Groupon was a big, or still of course is, but back in the days, I think even more, it was a big company at that time, right? When you made this decision to change to something that was much, much smaller, maybe much, much more entrepreneurial back then.

[Angus Muffet]

Yeah it was night and day and i mean like if you go back to um the gfc the global financial crisis when groupon was born it was really born at a time where customers needed um to save money and wanted to make every dollar go further it also rode the mobile commerce wave which was very interesting they were a pioneer in in in mobile app commerce and so the uh the transition from a big organization a global organization to uh more of a startup with 150 people in presence in four or five markets was like it was quite real and i had to kind of reset my mindset on how to operate and um yeah i think The team here are really ambitious and they want to make sure that the people that come in have great growth opportunities. And that's been true since day one. Hence the reason why I enjoy working here and I've grown over the last seven years.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

So Shopback's coming from Singapore, right? Now you said that it was already 150 people when you joined. But when you joined, that was kind of like the start then for Australia?

[Angus Muffet]

Yeah, very near the start. So we founded in Singapore in 2014. We quickly scaled across the region to places where you would love to go on holidays, places like Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan. And then our first leap out of the Southeast Asian region was into Australia. And at that time when I joined, we had an office not too dissimilar to the size of the room I'm in now. It had no windows. It had peach-coloured walls. And we had four people in there that We can speak about the people in the early days, but those four people were really mission-focused on bringing ShopBack out of an Airbnb in Pyrmont into its first office and then into the hands of millions of Australians that it is today.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Okay. Can you share a bit about ShopBack itself, like what you're doing and what differentiates you from other cashback or affiliate platforms?

[Angus Muffet]

Yeah. So, I mean, in simple terms, ShopBack's a double-sided marketplace. So not dissimilar to an Amazon or an eBay, where on one side we have the supply, which is the merchants that we work with. So they're global brands that you know and love. And then on the other side is our customers. And our job is to bring those two together, to introduce customers to brands and to really encourage them to shop through the brands that feature on ShopBack. When it comes to the differentiation, I'd say there's a couple of things. We really work hard primarily on the supply side of our business to make sure that we have brands that you know and love, but also. expanding into new categories, which I'm happy to share about today as well, and introducing new use cases for customers to earn and save money when they're shopping online, they're playing games, they're answering surveys. We hope that we can capture more of the customer's mindshare and therefore create engagement for the brands on our platform. And on the customer side, I think the real main differentiator is our app strength. So go back. a couple of minutes we were born in southeast asia as i said and if you go around like you probably know like you go to uh the philippines or you go to indonesia the it's like customers when they moved uh when the econ boom happened they skipped the desktop altogether and they they primarily used mobile first all the markets yeah exactly right so that was our um that's our home ground we needed to be strong uh strong and have a very useful app one that has high engagement for customers and you know helps merchants to be discovered and so actually when we entered australia that was kind of our secret weapon i'd say beyond the people and the product we had so you had the app already back then yeah yeah yeah so when we launched um there was no other there was uh one other cashback uh player in australia they had no mobile app presence and so if you think about when people shop It can be on the bus or train on the way to work. It can be when they're lying in bed and trying to go to sleep. There's a number of different places that desktop just won't reach them. So about 70% of our transactions today happen on the app. And that's a really strong point of difference for us when you compare that to other affiliates in market.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Okay, I see. When you started, like you were really small in Australia and whenever kind of like when you start a business like that, I think you always at one point run into this chicken and egg situation. On the one hand, you need the supply.

[Angus Muffet]

So you need the brands with their different offers. And you need the customers obviously and the one you only get with the other how did you solve that situation yeah that's a really interesting problem to solve for anyone who is starting a marketplace or indeed like even amazon today work on hard on both sides you know amazon for example work on the widest range and the best prices which bring the customers in and the flywheel spins excuse me how we approach that in australia was is quite interesting our um um the tom howard who was running the business development function and still is today on day one i've heard stories from affiliate networks or brands where he took them out for a coffee and said look you know tom from shopback shopback's big in southeast asia we have zero customers in australia but you've got to believe that we're we're on a mission to become australia's leading rewards player um you know here's what it looks like in other markets um so that brands could get a sense of you know how they'd be placed uh on shop back and how we do our marketing and so actually the supply side was we had a bit of a leg up in the sense that we've we're a proven entity and we've done well in other markets and so coming to australia the belief is that we could do well and i think we're very thankful that a lot of brands made the jump uh that leap of faith the early first leap of faith and of course we have strong uh regional partnerships too which help uh and then from there it's just about just trying to figure out who your first customer is. And for us in Australia, it was more than likely a young female fashion buyer. And so we just doubled down super hard on influencer marketing and, you know, tried to find those like people coming out of the reality shows before they got big and we grew with them. And I think that was kind of like that gave us the fuel on the customer side once we'd had the supply side bedded down.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Super interesting. On the brand side, did you acquire all these brands yourself and directly? Did you work with affiliate network or kind of like both? How did that help you to scale? A combination of both.

[Angus Muffet]

I would say the affiliate networks have been like really, really supportive or were really supportive of our move into Australia. And in other regions that we operate in, the network. landscape is quite small, I would say, and brands tend to often go direct. Whereas in Australia, what we found was that there was a much, much larger affiliate network presence here. We love to work with everyone in the space. You know, of course, we're direct connected into each one of the networks, which then gives brands the opportunity to connect and to shop back quite quickly. But there's still a lot of brands out there like, you know, I think affiliate market, it's still growing and it's still like the awareness job we need to go out there and educate brands on what it is and how important it is in the in the funnel as a cmo when you're making budget decisions like it's quite a powerful tool when you're looking at the roas that comes in um through the affiliate channel and when you even consider the dominance that like the googles and the metas of the world have in the digital marketing spend it's like 84 cents in every dollar in australia goes to those two giants And they're only increasing the click-in impression prices. So the best thing I think the advice that I probably give is try and diversify and go into channels that have safe and incremental ROAS. And I really believe that affiliate is coming up, an up-and-comer in that space.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

And on the consumer side, then you focus on one kind of like vertical or target group or however you want to say, you said like fashion oriented, younger females. And then you expanded from there. Was that the acquisition campaign that you were taking?

[Angus Muffet]

Yeah, I'd love to say it was deliberate at the start, but I think you don't know what you don't know. And when we first started in Australia, we were really interested and we, you know, we spoke, we went to cafes, we spoke to users, we showed them the app and got real-time feedback. And of course, when we started to see traction, we could tell it was the female fashion buyer, younger female fashion buyer. And over time, it's certainly, you know, diversified. We still, biased uh have a have a an audience that skews female um surprisingly um there's a good representation of parents and it's generally that kind of um you know 24 to 35 year old that we see using shop back on a frequent basis um so to answer your question like i think we we we run specific campaigns to address specific audiences but looking at what we can offer it's it's you know for example my mum uses it to shop with david jones which is a a large well-known um online and install marketplace in australia um and i've got other friends that you know from various walks of life and ages that use it as well so it's quite it's actually quite broad at this stage i'd say how many users do you have now in australia and in new zealand Yeah, so Australia, we've clicked over 3 million some time ago, users that we call members today, which is, we're super proud of that number.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

3 million out of 20 million in total, but that obviously includes children and everybody, right? So that's a good share of the market.

[Angus Muffet]

Mate, it is, yeah. And I think it's like, well, it's even 20, like I think the population today is 26 million. And so, yeah, if you kind of look at it on that standpoint, I think that the market penetration in Australia is okay, but it's still underpenetrated when you look at more mature markets. the US where there's been some giants operating there for some time, the UK, which has a much more mature affiliate and cashback programs. So, yeah, I still believe there's a long way to grow. New Zealand, though, is an interesting one. It's our fastest growing market to date. Fun fact, we've clicked over, I don't know what the live number is, but it's well north of 250,000 customers out of a population of four and a half million. And interestingly, it's quite greenfields as in there's no other cashback and rewards plays over there. It's great because it's a lot of customers that are coming in and enjoying it. On the other side, it's hard because you have to do the job of education, especially around what it feels like on the merchant side.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Kind of a completely different game, so to say.

[Angus Muffet]

Totally different game. And it should be, right? They're two different countries. I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that or treating New Zealand like it's a state of Australia. Like, you know, it's just. with its little nuances, but actually, no, and nor should they. It's a totally different country. So yeah, we're learning fast and hopefully we're being useful for the population over there.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Okay, great. Can you describe a little bit on how it works? So it goes through the app, the users go to the app, they find different offers, they acquire or they buy these offers through the app, or do they get forwarded to the shop and then they redeem their reward, their cashback? Can you describe a bit on how that works?

[Angus Muffet]

Yeah, so our main business is the typical affiliate model. And we have three platforms. We have a desktop. We have a browser extension and we have an app. And as I said, the app is about 70%, north of 70% of where our transactions occur. What we do is we showcase brands to our customers. When they see a brand, they click through and we redirect them through to the brand's website to complete the transaction. And only when the transaction's been made does the brand inform us of a sale and we award cash back. um in a temporary basis in a it's called pending cashback after the brand's return period has passed or in the case of travel you've taken your travel only then does the brand say to us no returns no refunds no cancellations you can award the cashback and then shopbacks pay the commission and we share that with the user as cash how many brands do you have connected to the platform now in australia On our affiliate program, we have about 4,500 brands that are connected to ShopBack, which is, yeah, it's a good number. We also have a gift card program where we have about 250 different brands that people can buy gift cards from. And then we have our in-store proposition where we have closer to 3,000 outlets across Australia where you can actually pay using your ShopBack app.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Shopback is active, I think, in 12 countries now. Is that correct? Yes, 12 markets. Is there any particular differences between these markets on how consumers behave, how you work with brands? It would be interesting if you could share a little bit about that.

[Angus Muffet]

Yeah, I'd love to. There's so many differences. And, you know, we were talking before, like last week, with your travels, you're going into different markets. And I think that the key that I've found, you can kind of broadly bucket the markets we're in. Southeast Asia, you can bucket Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Germany loosely into the second bucket. And I think that a couple of the key points is one is the shopping behaviour for the consumers is so different. There's a sale day on like, you know, what we call a mega sale day once a month in Southeast Asia, which is their, you know, 8-8. 9-9, 10-10, 11-11, 12-12 campaigns, the date-based campaigns. Whereas in Australia and other parts of the region, what we see is it kind of can follow the US marketing calendar a bit closer. So, you know, key events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday. In Australia, we have an event called Boxing Day, which is the day after Christmas. And there's a merging. It's interesting. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But what we're seeing is some of the Southeast Asian sale event dates coming into Australia. So 11-11, which is Singles Day. It's not typically a sale day in Australia, but there's a lot of interest from global marketplaces operating in Australia to try and bring this one to life. um so yeah i'd say the shopping behavior is like a real differentiator and then also platform bias you know app versus web versus extension uh is a big one as well and then probably the last one would be kind of um merchant concentration so customers shop from a very large range of uh brands in australia versus some markets you know you have uh a marketplace that has done well to to capture a lot of the the customer share so you might see more Small orders going into the top 10 versus in Australia, it's more, you know, the top 40 or 50.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

What does that mean when you operate now, when you have like your campaigns, for example, when you have the app or like the web offer or the browser extension? Does that mean you have different flavors or different versions for the different countries? Or does it not matter because on the way how you work with the app or the consumers, how they use them is kind of like the same? Or with the marketing campaigns, is that then separate country by country? How do you operate one large region within these different setups at Shopback? How do you manage that?

[Angus Muffet]

Yeah, it's interesting because like I was in China the other day and we were experiencing going around and trying to get firsthand experience of some of the main apps over there. So like Meituan, Alipay, WeChat. And, of course, that's a very dense experience from a customer standpoint. There's a lot of information squeezed into the small screen versus in Western markets like Cleaner. um experiences and simpler ui is typically what's favored i think from a customer point of view so you will see some like whilst the app and the web and the extension they're all the same platform globally each market can go and make its own decisions with respect to you know how we um how we provide the best possible experience for users when it comes to the layout um the richness of the app the campaign can change that in the app we can change a lot of things in the app um okay and i think i think the key one is the campaigns you can't have a cookie cutter approach across 12 markets we we some markets you can bundle together perhaps like southeast asia there's a lot of commonality versus um the rest of the markets there's whilst there's commonality there's still a lot of differences so we we tend to operate very much independent and just do what's best for the for the for the customers in that market.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

And what about the offers themselves? I could imagine that is quite different between, for example, Southeast Asian countries, Australia, then maybe Europe, Taiwan, maybe. About the offers that are attractive for the consumers, that's very different as well, right? Isn't it?

[Angus Muffet]

Yeah, there's definitely nuances. And I mean, aside from the brands looking different, there's also different realities for brands too, when it comes to what their margin profile looks like. how much they want to pay to acquire a customer. At the end of the day, our job is to acquire customers and drive revenue. So the cashback rate will dictate, you know, a lot of, sorry, the cashback rate is dictated a lot by, you know, the category, the type of advertiser that we're working with as well. So, yeah, there's no, I'd say that's one of the probably biggest differentiators, just starting with the brands themselves and then, you know, across markets, there's different nuances when it comes to. Customer acquisition costs, yeah. Makes sense, makes sense.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

What about Australia itself? Is there anything very unique or specific about consumer behavior in Australia or the whole market in Australia that you could share with us?

[Angus Muffet]

Yeah, I'd say like from trying to look in from the outside and just be, you know, try and understand what, you know, might be different. I'd say probably a couple of things would be, I mentioned before the merchant density, like we have a really thriving and diverse ecosystem of brands right across categories. I think supermarket's probably one of the outsiders where there's, you know, two key brands that are quite big in the market versus, you know, fashion is quite diverse. Let's say electronics and retail more broadly is quite diverse and the customers. you know, enjoy shopping. It's actually quite interesting to see the shopper behaviour and how that changes over time with respect to brand preference. But what doesn't change is that they really do shop around for the best price, the best offers, the best, you know, postage off. fulfillment um offers so like whether it's cheapest postage the fastest postage and also looking at refund policies as well so i think that customers are willing to shop around quite a bit in australia and the last one would be like what surprised me over the last six years is the aussies are really willing to jump on like these new sale dates like if you asked if you asked some friends at a barbecue say like six years ago what black friday is it'd be really hard pressed to say like maybe one in five would have heard about it. And maybe, you know, maybe that person shopped. But today I reckon all five have heard and probably four in the five shop on Black Friday. And it's just amazing how quickly that those global shopping phenomena can be picked up. Exactly. Yes.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Yeah. Yeah. You said in the beginning, like cashback, that's your bread and butter business. This is where you're coming from. But you said as well that you're looking into other categories of business to do. What is that?

[Angus Muffet]

Yeah. So I can tell you what's live today. So yes. Like in terms of like online, like affiliate is where we started. So it's online cashback. Once we got that to scale, we then ventured into gift cards and vouchers. So imagine buying a gift card from your favorite brand and you can earn cashback for that too. We took that from zero to close to $150 million business in two or three years. That works really well, yeah.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

I saw different approaches elsewhere and that did not really scale, I had the feeling. Okay, good.

[Angus Muffet]

It's a really, yeah, it's actually, it's something that we looked at. This is during COVID where we were kind of like, you know, our business is pretty resilient in the sense that we've got a diverse merchant category. So, you know, fashion, travel, electronics, groceries, alcohol. Yes, travel was affected during COVID. The rest were going really well. And then we're kind of like, okay, what else can we do? And we hadn't taken transactions on our platform, of course, because our job is just to redirect customers quickly to the merchants to shop. So we introduced payments, which then allowed us to sell gift cards and that scaled well beyond that we do in-store payments and i think just the really like surprising one recently was we introduced um uh mobile gaming So today customers can come and see ShopBack play on our app. And essentially we allow customers to earn cash back when they download a game. It might be like Monopoly or Fruit Ninja. And as they progress through the game, they earn cash back. So it's just an interesting way. You don't have to spend anything. You can just. like a lot of people do on the train, play games and be rewarded for it.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

It's going really well. So you get paid for the time that you spend within the game.

[Angus Muffet]

That's right, exactly. And as you progress through the game, and I've tried, like I'm not a great gamer, but I still learned some meaningful cashback.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

That's very interesting. Since when do you have that? That one launched, when was that?

[Angus Muffet]

That was like, late last year and I really think you know there's good examples of it working um internationally and that's one thing we look at it's kind of like you know what's happening internationally you know how might we think about that uh at shopback and um you know bring that to our users and we saw that you know it was it was a booming industry and I've got to tell you man like when i'm on the train on the way to work there's people with gray hair like me. Playing games there's young people playing games i know i see them you see them right and now i think of course it's big in southeast asia but i think it will probably or it is big everywhere right so that should be a really good i have never heard about um this kind of offer before right so i think that could really be um that could be something big yeah it is and if you think about the flywheel of the business. You know, people come in to play games, they see merchants that we have on our affiliate program, or they see the gift cards merchants and we're able to cross them quite easily through the different modes of our business. Yeah.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Very good. Very interesting. What else is new or what else do you have in the plans for ShopBack in Australia and New Zealand, especially to roll out like new categories, integrations, product features? What's your plans?

[Angus Muffet]

You mentioned before the, you know, cashback for attention, like the shopback play, the premise of that. And so, you know, we're kind of doubling down on categories that are similar to that, especially, you know, times are a bit tough. The interest rates just got dropped in Australia today, which is great news for people with, you know, home loans. But I think it's still like we're not out of the woods. So we want to try and. give customers the opportunity to earn cash back beyond their shopping uh you know their everyday shopping so play is a good example of that the next one surveys and so it's amazing the subculture of survey users out there of people that are willing to give up their time and to surveys that give companies obviously the trade-off you know is your information like you can tell a company your preferences in terms of certain products or services and then we can award cash back for those particular activities as well and the last one i think it's probably on everyone's lips is ai and like hey what's our play you know i think um beyond its internal tool adoption and you know everyone is is really trying to uh you know really learn how ai can you know help them in their day to be more productive to be a thought partner we're actually now deep in thought uh and close to a working model of something that would be able to put in front of customers and so customers now like 700 million global chat apt users they know that conversational search is a efficient way to to browse and so we want to position a product that can meet that need as well.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

What's your general view on AI? I have the feeling at the moment it's rather something that is helping us to accelerate everything. On the publisher side as well, you have more content, you have more offers, speeding up things, everything is getting a little bit more efficient. On the other hand, obviously you have the whole traffic acquisition where then many are dependent on acquiring traffic from Google, for example, which is changing fundamentally. What do you think will be in the future? maybe not even longer term, but now in the next one, two, three years, how that will impact our industry.

[Angus Muffet]

I think that's the biggest, it's not a million dollar, it's a billion dollar question. Like how fast will user behavior shift from, say, let's say, searching on Google for products and services and doing comparison on Google, how fast will that shift into? conversational search through AI. That one I'm actually not sure of, but what I do know is that like with some certainty, I believe that the users will migrate across. And so what it means for like even for us especially is, you know, we need to make sure that we are in that conversational search response that whatever AI platform gives them. And so, you know, the new age of SEO might back off. what ago or aio i'm hearing a lot of different acronyms but answer engine optimization essentially and just making sure your content is readily available for the for the ais to pick up and surface to the users um but i i like i don't think this is overhyped like i genuinely you know i i think that we're up for yeah how do you feel like what's your take on it.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

I think it will be much, much bigger than we even estimate today. So when you say you don't think it's overplayed, I think it's maybe still underplayed because many, many people won't understand or still don't understand the impact it might have. I started to play around a bit myself. We have an AI team here where we do two things. We do something on the product side. just like in our interfaces, publisher recommendations, the whole onboarding process and stuff like that, making that easier. On the other hand, we have a team that works outside the product development itself, looking into the operational stuff. So like sales processes, for example. So everything goes much, much quicker. Like before a sales manager could maybe like on a day reach out to three, four, five brands with a qualitative researched outreach and now you can automate all of that right so the question is what what happens if everybody is doing that um so so we're looking into that but then like we are a fully digital companies or everything we do is working on these computers, right? So per se, I think everything could be automized, streamlined, done differently. So I think it will have a much, much bigger impact than we can imagine now, right? I think about back in the days when the first iPhone came, nobody really understood what kind of impact it will have. Now it's just there, right? I think only sometimes realize how big of an impact it had in the last 10 years on everybody's lives. And I think it will be the same here.

[Angus Muffet]

And to use your pick up on that, like when the iPhone came out, I don't know if you've seen the BlackBerry documentary on Netflix, but the one thing in the back of our minds is you don't want to be the Kodak or the Blockbuster or the BlackBerry that didn't move fast. It's very clear the winds are changing. um you have to adopt or you'll be left behind and so therefore like okay let's put a lot of thought into um making sure that our business is ready set for the next next stage which i definitely i agree with you i think it's moving quickly i think that's exactly the threat what you say because the blackberry was kind of like a little bit different tool to work in the same way as you did before.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

And that's how like our brains work, right? We still think in the same categories and processes while something underneath, I think, is fundamentally changing now, which is, of course, a threat. Then on the other hand, like when, like, for example, listening to you, when you say what you do with Shopback, what you're up to, the ideas you have. This is something I think that characterizes our whole industry, partner marketing, which is so innovative with all the time new ideas are coming up. ideas how to do things differently new stuff right we kind of like see that almost every day which then again makes me think that we are in a quite resilient environment resilient industry where I'm actually it's me as a person right so I need to be careful but I'm quite optimistic actually I would say yeah that's awesome yeah and I think.

[Angus Muffet]

Just to double down on that, like I really think that disruptions everywhere, you know, someone will come in with, whether it's AI or not, someone's going to come in with fresh perspectives or a different way of doing things. And what we're hypervigilant on is making sure as a business we're resilient to those, you know, new and interesting technologies or models that are coming out. And at the same time, because we're so forward thinking in that respect. we're actually serving our merchants and customers better. We're building a more resilient business, more interesting business, something that gives them more utility. And that's a byproduct, I think, of the mental model of being across what's happening when the winds are changing globally. Yeah, I agree. I agree.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Gus, thank you so much for a good conversation. Thank you about sharing about ShopBag and about yourself. Thank you for being my guest. At the end, I have three questions to you that I ask all my guests. It's a little bit more personal. Would you mind sharing with us your favorite book as a recommendation for us and for the listeners? Cool. Okay.

[Angus Muffet]

I read business or self-improvement books. I'd say, can I give you two? I'll give you two quick ones. So one's a book I just read called Amp It Up by Fred Fluteman. Amp It Up. Amp It Up. Yeah, it's as it says on the sticker. It's about introducing like intensity, pace and speed into your organisation no matter what the size and how important it is. to be intolerant of drag and mediocrity in your business. I think that was one. The other one was, maybe you've read it as well, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, which really just talks about his perspectives on what it takes to build an enduring business, the challenges. Oh man, it was like, you know, when I was listening to the book and I was just taking notes the whole way through, just like a lot of really interesting ideas. Yeah, so those two are probably my picks.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Very good. I will put these on my list. I get many now. That's really, really interesting. Thank you. Is there any kind of app or tool? That you say you can't live without that you're using daily.

[Angus Muffet]

I think there's granola which I found is there's a million note-taking apps out there but i really feel like granola like I even use it to brainstorm. I just talk to it and it's able to really synthesize the information and you can search across conversations. It's actually still free. It's a really good app.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

Is it an AI app?

[Angus Muffet]

Yeah, it's just an AI assistant, so it's a note-taking assistant. I'm sure it does much more, and hopefully the people at Granola don't listen to this because I'm butchering what they do, but I use it in one-on-ones with team members or if I want to ideate on my own. I just pop it on the table, it listens, but then it does a really good job of just. um articulating what the conversation was with different modes that you can select and it'll reformat it depending on the mode so one-on-one interview board presentation podcasts like you could do all of these things in a little you just like put it next to you and then you record it and then it gives you this kind of like summary afterwards it's awesome yeah.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

 Yeah okay great. Granola yeah like the cereal I don't know if uh yeah yeah exactly yes yeah yeah exactly i will try that as well good and um how should i phrase it once you're done with shop back and when you're completely free when you've done all the ideas you realize everything and it's okay there is nothing for me to do anymore um and you're completely free what would you do do i have a budget or is the budget free full budget free

[Angus Muffet]

Okay. I'd probably, when I, as I was doing my year 12, this is like back in 2000, the year 2000, I actually started doing, I was a student pilot and I learned how to fly a plane and did my, did a couple of solos. So I was allowed to fly around the airport on my own. And since then, I've always had this like regret that I didn't continue it. So if budget wasn't an issue and And of course, I didn't have the challenges that I have today shot back. I'd probably look to go and restart that little fire that's still burning somewhere on, you know, flying, you know, flying around Australia, just to different remote parts of Australia.

[Matthias Stadelmeyer]

That's good. That's a good one. Great. Thank you, Gus. Thank you for being my guest. Thank you. My pleasure.

[Angus Muffet]

And thanks so much for having us. And, you know. hopefully the shot back story or some part resonates with the people that listen. So thanks again, Matthias. It was a great talk. Thank you. Appreciate it. Good. Thank you.