Dollars & Sense

Are We Time Givers or Takers? ⌛️⏳

Scott Galloway, the NYU business professor and firebrand, pens a weekly, attention-grabbing article about business trends. In last week’s post, he noted the rise of the attention economy.  (...Yes, my post is an attention-seeker writing about an attention-seeker writing about attention.) Comparing our current economy to those of the past, Mr. Galloway notes that today’s oil is time. He tracks the growth of digital companies like Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, and TikTok that increasingly soak up our time and have become the Exxons of our era. 

Mr. Galloway notes two features in particular that make TikTok successful.  Unlike Netflix, which, gasp, requires you to push a play button, TikTok shows you a series of videos, tailored to you, without you having to think—you just scroll down. TikTok has also reduced the costs to create content to: zero. Netflix paid $200m to make Red Notice, its most expensive film ever, while TikTok paid Tommy $0 to do the blackout challenge in his basement. Bridge wants to learn from these digital giants and adapt to this attention economy.  We want to adopt socially responsible practices and leave behind the bad ones (like the blackout challenge). 

Since we started Bridge in 2007, we have proudly compared ourselves to Netflix. We have touted our Product Syncing service (then called the Smart Products service) as 'Netflix for products:' a retailer could receive an online store filled with unlimited products—just like a streaming service filled with unlimited movies. TikTok is a newer entry to the market, and in some ways, the Product Syncing service is akin to TikTok because the store doesn’t have to think.  The entire catalog from Lenox and 109 other premium brands just appears.  The store owner can scroll through endless products, like scrolling through endless content on TikTok.

Today, upon reading Mr. Galloway’s article, we see the Netflix comparison is out of fashion. Netflix is losing subscribers and bleeding money, and TikTok appears to be the rising star we want to mirror. But TikTok's goal is to soak up time. Bridge’s goal is to give it back. (Bridge has saved stores 1,642,500 hours on product maintenance.) What would pivoting to a TikTok business model entail? And if we’re aiming to command attention like TikTok, one should ask: how are we currently attracting and measuring our customer's attention? TikTok and other social media platforms can tell us how long customers are spending on their platform. Can Bridge?  The short answer: No. I don't know how long a customer spends on their Bridge account. I don’t know how long a registrant spends on their gift registry account.  We need to build this into our system. 

What Galloway calls attention, we normally call usage. On a daily basis, our Bridge team receives an email tracking 11 key usage metrics, including online sales volume, how many news posts members write, and the number of reviews left by customers. (TikTok staff probably receive a similar report each day.)   Our goal is to boost usage (attention), and therefore we want all of these usage benchmarks to increase. 

We recently introduced new features to boost attention, including allowing members to see a product’s pricing history and real-time stock.  In 2023, we'll be launching a front-facing registry marketplace.  

A key tool in the war for attention is the mobile app. The mobile phone is peanut butter and the app is the chocolate…fentanyl. The other day, my friend sent me an Instagram post via text, and I couldn’t see it because I wasn’t logged in. Instagram clearly wants me to log in and have my attention attributed to the value of the company.  Add up the billions of minutes they suck from us and it’s billions of pennies making up their billion-dollar market cap. Scrooge McDuck is swimming in our time.  They sell my attention via ads and geo-track me. Bridge can’t do this. Yet.  Creating a Bridge app is on deck for 2023.

Playing devil’s advocate, one could counter that businesses don’t come to Bridge for the thrill of sensationalized content or entertainment. Bridge is not here to elicit serotonin and adrenaline--we're here to save people time. That's exactly the opposite of TikTok’s goals. Bridge is a time-saving service, not a time-sucking one. Maybe our goal should be to develop better time-saving tools that require the minimum amount of attention.  

I can see their point. Maybe we should be aspiring to be more like Visa, which is pervasive and powers your daily purchasing but is out of the way. Visa had a slogan: "It's everywhere you want to be."  Yes, it is everywhere and yet it's out of the way. Paying with Visa is a time saver and it's this ease that we admire. 

Does Bridge want to be TikTok or Visa for the retail industry? Are we an attention-sucking company or a time-saving one? 

It seems contradictory for us to promise a business we’ll save it time, and then ask for more of it. Yet, I think our value proposition can be we’ll save you time, and we want you to use this saved time in other areas on Bridge to help your business. Use our Product Syncing service to save your store 300 minutes when adding 100 products to your account, and then we’d like you to spend 10 minutes creating a news post on your Bridge. Your net benefit is saving 290 minutes. Our goal is to help people first, and if it draws them to spend more time with us, we’re happy to have it. We’ll save you so much time you’ll have more of it to blow on TikTok.   

When comparing companies that take vs. give time, we may notice a difference in revenue models.  TikTok monetizes users via advertisements, whereas Netflix and Bridge are subscription models. (Netflix is currently scrambling to build an advertising model.)  For Bridge to move to an attention-centered model would likely mean a move to a more advertising-oriented revenue model. One could argue that Amazon has started to make this move; it bought the rights to Thursday Night Football and its advertising business now makes up a notable portion of its profit. A business's revenue model is also determined by its customer base. TikTok is a consumer-facing service, and Bridge is business-to-business.  Consumer-facing businesses are more likely to be advertising-supported because there is a larger audience, and B2B is more likely to be subscription based. Considering our current audience is businesses, I think that our subscription model is the right pricing solution. 

We’re not the only B2B software company pondering how to get more attention in the attention economy. FreshBooks, which provides our accounting and staffing software, is apparently reading Mr. Galloway, too. Freshbooks recently launched a social networking platform to get users to spend more time on it. Do I want to? No, but if the benefits are there, I will.  The same applies to Bridge: customers likely want to use Bridge as a tool and seek to spend less time on our platform. Yet, they will give us more time if we make it worth it. We have to update their perception so they see it as time well spent. We need to let them know they are spending more time with their customers and business leaders, and that doing so will grow their business. Again, if they are using our Product Syncing, they are likely already saving years' worth of time. 

Should one ask, "Are we time givers or takers?", I'd reply "yes." 

Thank you for letting me take your time to share how we will give it back to our members. For you TikTokers out there, please be sure to follow me on Bridge 😎

PS - A special thanks to The Way Back Machine website archive. Using that tool, I was able to find a snapshot of our website in 2015.

Tags:
galloway tiktok netflix spotify streaming

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