How a China start up became a leading platform in the global events industry.

Jim James: 0:00

Welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today it's a really special pleasure because we're celebrating the 10th anniversary of a company called Glue Up, founded by Eric Schmidt and his partner, actually in Beijing, and I met Eric when he ran a company called China Entrepreneurs back in Beijing, all the way back in 2008, 2009, eric. So welcome to the show.

Eric Schmidt: 0:25

Thank you, thanks for having me, jim. It's so great to see you again.

Jim James: 0:28

Well, it's wonderful. You and I, luckily, have touched base in between. I've been tracking you because you started Event Bank, as it was called then, and now it's called Glue Up. You've grown it from what was really a husband and wife team in Beijing to now a worldwide operation with 110 people. You've got 12 offices. You've got over 1200 clients. So we're going to talk about how you've really managed this transition, amazingly moving as well the business into America and into these other countries around Southeast Asia and Africa, and really about online events and how you've managed to help organizations, chains of commerce and companies to make the most out of their events and their memberships. Eric, tell us about Glue Up first and let us hear the story.

Eric Schmidt: 1:17

Well, first of all, again, thank you. Thank you for having me, jim. It's always a pleasure and certainly so awesome to see what you've done with this podcast and the books, and I hope everybody's reading everything you've written and will write in the future here.

Jim James: 1:29

Well, thanks, buddy. Yeah Well, they will, because you're on the show. So now people are banned. Read it.

Eric Schmidt: 1:37

You know, is what we consider a community engagement CRM solution. We provide a full suite, what we call all in one solution, to our customers and mostly in the Chamber of Commerce and Association, space, business, executive Organizations and some corporates as well, the core being a CRM, and then, layered on top of that, is our membership management tools, our vent management tools, email marketing and, of course, our community platform that we launched a couple of years ago and really our goal is to enable, you know, organizations who are doing awesome things around the world to really help and make it easier for them to manage their memberships and their events and help them grow. And that's what we've been doing for now 10 years and hopefully be doing it for at least another 10.

Jim James: 2:31

Yeah, congratulations on making it through the last decade not easy, especially when you've gone through immigration. For you going back to america and then also surviving covid as well, eric, let's just first of all look at what an organization like a chamber of commerce Should want to find in a platform when they're managing their membership. Let's go to that first, because not everyone will be familiar with what platforms like yours provide and also the opportunity that they provide to transcend geography.

Eric Schmidt: 3:06

Absolutely so. I think any member based organization, you know they're dealing with a couple different challenges. Generally they're underfunded and under staff, so they're dealing with that first layer of the other already, starting off on the wrong for disadvantage. So when we come into, the equation is how do we help them get an advantage, help them automate, help them make sure that their organization is really trying to look forward with technology so that they can focus on the things that are important. So if we take an example of memberships Globally, you know memberships is, you know it's an annual membership that people purchase and it needs to be renewed again. Well, that membership manager where was in charge generally needs to send invoices. They need to make sure they're sending out a renewal notices. They need to make sure that people renewing and hopefully, at the same time, providing value so that they do come back. And so we take that and we automate it and we make sure that it's done from the platform. At the same time, you know those folks who are engaged with a chamber of commerce or an association, they want, like I said, value from that and that generally comes from the events that they're attending, from content that they're reading, but also from the interactions that they have with other members and so, by us building our community tools and really the communication element of what we have Is to really bring that whole group of people together. Now, you know, when we look at any of these sectors, it could be somebody who's focused on, you know, manufacturing computers because, again, in most parts, many parts of the world, there's an association for everything, especially here in the US, and because there are so many people need to know, you know again, who are I, who is the right association for me and how do I fit into that? Of course, how do I participate? And again, we can provide all the technology to help that organization run, at least from a, from a software perspective.

Jim James: 5:05

Yeah, there's wonderful. Yet, and having been involved with the British Chamber of Commerce in in Beijing and on the on the board, membership was a remarkably painful process, in fact, of sending out paper invoices and checking, but also you're able to add a huge amount of value. You've expanded out of China. Just tell us, from a marketing point of view, how you accomplished that? Because you stayed vertical in terms of doing memberships rather than growing the software to serve Existing customers in China with more functions. So you decided to find you know the answer of thing to go new market, same product. How did you overcome the challenges of going global from a marketing perspective?

Eric Schmidt: 5:51

Yeah. So I guess part of what's important there is. We always knew that when we were building a global business, china just happened to be where we were. Of course, anybody that's read the paper in the last you know five years knows that. You know China and associations. You know there's there's not that many associations that are doing what they are in the rest of the world, or business organizations. Obviously we were all involved in chambers of commerce, you know, within Within China. But at the same time, you know, for us it was how do we go out and how do we make sure we have a product that we can take to the rest of the world at the right time? Because the needs of somebody in Asia is different than somebody, their needs in In Africa, and very different than generally than those needs of somebody in the United States, and so that transition took some time, but it was really having the right product that could then be sold in those markets. And that's what took us the most time was having the right product. You know we, as we sort of transition from being you know I would say you know having a basic product into more advanced products. Again, it takes time to build anything, and anybody who builds software knows that the software is never done. There's always something another customer would like to see and there's always a wish list that, in a product, person like myself always wants to build on top of everything else.

Jim James: 7:15

So, eric, how did you find that different markets you know, asia, europe, america and Africa Manage events differently, because you've highlighted, you know, the challenge of cultural changes, for example. Were there any things that really have stood out to you where one market required this and another that required something else?

Eric Schmidt: 7:39

Yeah, I would say, from the perspective of you know technology in general, events are. You can sort of bring in, manage events. Similarly, you know, almost anywhere in the world. The difference is, you know, to sort of to your previous question, which is when it comes to marketing, how am I marketing my event to get an audience to come to attend? And that's really a key thing that we realize they need different tools to be able to do that. Some have bigger audiences, some have smaller audiences. But is it email? Was it phone call? You know, way back in the day when we are running events in Asia ourselves, you often had a call people directly to make sure that people felt that it was an invitation that they were receiving Personally from you, that they were important and you were making that special you know invitation to them. We've gotten a little bit beyond that now, I think in most parts of the world where social media has changed how people promote events but at the same time, the email invitations that are going to people with inside the community who are the members of that organization Is the most common way. But again, as we saw Even in Asia and especially in Africa, mobile technology and how people use their mobile phones Really made a big difference, and something we had to learn early on Was how to really make sure that we could build for mobile but then also be able to build for web, and especially, of course, that changed during COVID, because everybody was at their computer At their home all the time, and so we had to switch back, even thinking about the web platform come 2020.

Jim James: 9:21

So interesting. Do you find that Asia was more advanced with with mobile than Europe and the States, for example?

Eric Schmidt: 9:27

Absolutely, absolutely. I think we're probably seeing almost on par right now with many things. But back to pre-COVID. We definitely saw it as Asia was very far ahead of where certainly the US and Europe was in terms of mobile adoption, but also how they use the phone. A good example of that is we had built onto our mobile application for our customers the ability for them to manage the members directly from the mobile device. That was because if somebody is in Bangalore or somebody is in Jakarta or somebody is in Manila and they're sitting for two hours in traffic each way to the office, they have a lot of time on their hands because they're not really moving very far, but they're sitting in the car. They actually had time to do simple tasks while they're sitting in traffic. We had developed a way for them to manage the members while sitting in traffic. At that point people thought that was crazy, because why would you spend time developing that? For our customers, that was important because they needed to make sure that their time was productive while they were sitting there. Fast forward to today. I had a client here in the United States about two months ago called me and said hey, I was sitting in traffic in my city and I actually started using it. That was cool to see that we've now caught up here in the United States to where we were and why we had developed it back a while back. Hopefully they were driving safe and they weren't obviously doing anything on their phone while they were driving.

Jim James: 11:06

Yeah, that's another thing that in Asia a lot of people were driven where they managers had drivers, business owners have drivers or people in taxes, whereas in America, in Europe, you would tend to be driving themselves. There's another slight difference, unless they're going autonomous, of course. Eric, tell us one thing when you came back to America and you were marketing a software that was built ostensibly in China, did you have resistance to you being an Asian software? If so, how did you deal with that? I know you're American yourself, but was there any sort of well? You couldn't be as good as some of the ticket masters and some of the big American companies.

Eric Schmidt: 11:53

Yeah, I would say this. I mean, first, you know we had already expanded by that point to having our technology being built, you know, in probably four different countries, so it wasn't specifically China, you know, which, again, in the world of politics, that you know have existed for the last five years. You know that would definitely be a very big challenge for any company who was coming specifically from China to the United States. But the good thing was is because we had diversified, we sort of saw what was happening politically prior to that. We were able to diversify ourselves into other markets. The same time, you know, we knew that Every company and every technology has a path of development and at what point is it going to be able to satisfy the needs of the customers? Back to 2018 and a little bit into 19. You know that was its own Challenge. As it relates to, we had some features that we didn't develop. You know that we needed to and you know we knew that, and so we were building them in order to prepare ourselves For, you know, an eventual push into the, into the US market. Now, what we didn't know was, obviously COVID was coming. You know, if anybody could have predicted that, you know we would have, obviously, you know, been better positioned and better prepared for what was coming, but Nonetheless, we were already preparing some of the features, like our community product that was therefore ready to be launched into Into the markets worldwide.

Jim James: 13:32

So you, you're already sort of multinational. Now. You started off, eric, as a, as a business called event bank. You know as I knew you and live your bet in the day. Now it's cool. Look, just take us through the naming and why you changed the business name and the impact that's had.

Eric Schmidt: 13:49

Yeah. So, as with any name, um, you know, you always think of something you thought sounded cool and then you've realized later on maybe it wasn't as good as a thought. Um, and you know, when we had come up with the, the name of it bank, um, you know, way back in 2013, I was like, oh, this is great, the domain name is available, and you know we're ready to roll. A few years later, you know, two things happen. One, people were confused that we're at bank. Um, you know, you go to a bet in Hong Kong and people ask what kind of bank are you? Um, same thing would happen in New York. Um, the good thing is is, you know, we sort of had some foresight of we were thinking about changing. But you know, as the platform expanded to build our new features and crm and membership and all these other things that we built over over the years, um, it was limiting our ability to convince people that we weren't just about events. And you know, having those tools is one thing, letting people know what you do is another, and that's obviously the. The challenge of marketing anything is making sure people can easily tell what you do. Um, and so, as we sort of move forward and and coveted hit. That's where we got to a point where the name was already sort of Uh, sort of keeping us back from where we could be. Uh, we were about to launch our community platform and we knew we needed to make a change. And that was actually a marketing meeting. We realized that we were bringing people together through our technology. Um, and our name was not conveying that message. Um, and therefore, um, I think it was just blurted out glue up. We should glue people together. Um, sort of came from that and therefore, uh, that became the name. Okay, we went through a process a little bit longer process of making sure you know of all the names you could think of, plus what the name, domain names were available. Uh, but eventually we got back to glue up with it and Now, if you can relate to it because of that tagline in January��, all right, sciệlya, thank you, and thank you, thanks to all of our Sauya Poers. I hope you have a lovely day. You sad celebrated kannada.

Jim James: 16:10

Nice and the new branding and so on is really fantastic and, as you say, you're bringing people together and you've also developed some new products, I think, for example, one called speed networking. So you've also started to iterate. What's been the thing behind that?

Eric Schmidt: 16:26

Yeah. So, again during COVID, we realized that our customers weren't necessarily going and creating big conferences. They needed tools to really bring their community together in other new ways, and so our speed networking tool was really built from some of those events that we were all attending, whether it was a happy hour or just a gathering of people at a restaurant and with that, it meant that, hey, we need to think of ways that we can do that online. Well, we didn't realize, of course, that COVID would push people again being at their home and people wouldn't be going back to their offices. And so now, actually, what we've realized and certainly our customers have realized that this is perfect for those distributed workforces, because when people are not in the office together, they're not building their team, they're not building their culture, they don't really understand that much about each other personally, outside of what used to happen at a water cooler. This was a perfect tool for them to be able to have those impromptu conversations, structured, of course, but in a new way, and teams love it. Our team did it this morning for our 10-year anniversary, and the cool thing was our team members. You know, in here in the United States, we're meeting people in, you know, in Hong Kong Our team members in the Philippines were meeting folks in South Africa and you know, really just building those relationships across the organization is obviously a necessity for any business that's growing and you know, we sort of one step forward with achieving that.

Jim James: 18:06

Eric, I love the way that you have managed to grow this business out of China, make it global. Tell us, there must be maybe one thing that you've done that hasn't gone quite according to plan from a marketing point of view. I mean, you've accomplished a great deal, but is there one thing that you think, hmm, you wouldn't want anyone else to do that?

Eric Schmidt: 18:26

I think there's always many things that we wish we hadn't done. You know those are expensive lessons along the way. I think, you know, as it relates to software, there's always tools that you want to be able to build that, you know, end up not working out. But if, from a marketing standpoint, there's one thing that we probably should have done better, was actually our LinkedIn marketing. We did not do a very good, you know, job with that and we spent a lot of money on LinkedIn marketing, which is very expensive compared to other platforms, and we just did not, you know, see the ROI from it. I think the good thing now is we look to today. You know events are back in person and those personal relationships that people want to build can, you know, can take place again, and so, you know, we can look at a very long list of mistakes that we've made over the past 10 years, and there are many, as I said. But you know, when it comes to building any software, you know it's always a challenge, but it's never done.

Jim James: 19:25

Yeah, okay, fantastic. So over investing in LinkedIn, maybe because you weren't getting the sales leads? Was it just a matter of spending too much money on that? Or the strategy was just the wrong platform?

Eric Schmidt: 19:38

I think it was a combination of all the above. I think, you know, using it more in a limited scope ended up helping later on. But you know, when we were initially trying it I think we just A didn't have the experience with really you know how we needed to use it but also, at the same time, you know the best way to find our customers right, and marketing is all about finding your customers and really what's the cheapest way to reach them. That's going to drive value. And you know we experimented with many things over the years and some things worked, some things didn't. But you know us understanding where our customers were and you know where they were spending time. That became obviously the core. And again back to today, you know we realized that our customers, many of them, go to various events and there's a couple events on the calendar. You know we hosting our own thought leadership programs that we try to run on a regular basis and you know that's been more important than anything because our market is special in a certain way. Everybody's running their own events. But at the same time, you know there's always more to learn for any professional in any industry and how do you speak to them in the right way.

Jim James: 20:54

And so that takes us onto my final question, eric, the one thing from a marketing perspective that you think really does move the needle. You've kind of alluded maybe to that little bit about focus and finding where your customers are, but anything else overreaching, overarching idea, that has really moved the needle for glue up.

Eric Schmidt: 21:15

Yeah, good question. Obviously, we're in the B2B space. Everybody in the B2B world is going to tell you it's not sexy. You know people who want the exciting marketing careers are going to go into the B2C world where you always do some cool events a new video, you know, a new launch. But in B2B, I think it's really about consistency and over time, you know that consistency then builds the brand, then builds, you know, your customer base to be able to look at you in a different way. And then, of course, those customer testimonials that are going to bring let's say good things about what you have been doing over time, you know, really helps build the brand. Like I said, the brand, but also making sure that you know it is something that's continuous. I don't think anybody in the, you know, in the B2B world wants to work with a business that you know is inconsistent, because are they really continuing to invest in their product, but are they going to be around next year? And that's always, I think, the challenge when you're in the B2B space.

Jim James: 22:15

Yeah, that's a really good point. As you buy something as a company, you're integrating it into another business system, aren't you? So you don't want to be chopping and changing once you've made that decision. It's integrated into every other dimension of your company and you really want that vendor to be plugged in and growing as you're growing too, right.

Eric Schmidt: 22:37

Absolutely. And I think, as an early entrepreneur in the B2B space, you're like well, why aren't they buying? They should buy it, this is a great product, they need to buy it. And then you realize you know, as you're a more experienced entrepreneur, that well you know we probably were not the right fit at that point because we actually were too young for that business to trust us and what we were doing. And now I think again, here we are, 10 years later. I think we built that trust, but we still have a long way to go and, you know, obviously trying to achieve our mission and really empowering these organizations worldwide.

Jim James: 23:09

Well, in a decade that I've seen you doing it, you've made a massive, massive impact and certainly when we installed Glue Up or Event Bank, as it was then into the British Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, it made it just a transformed the operation wonderfully efficient and engaging. Eric, if you want to find out more about you and Glue Up, where can they come?

Eric Schmidt: 23:31

Yeah, of course. Obviously our website is glueupcom. People can get in touch with me at eric at glueupcom and, of course, any of our social media sites are. You know, we're always there, we're active and, you know, always trying to think of new ways and new, better ways to do things.

Jim James: 23:49

So, of course, as we continue to grow, Eric Schmidt, long time friend, a much admired entrepreneur. Thank you for joining me today.

Eric Schmidt: 23:58

Thank you, I truly appreciate it.

Jim James: 24:01

Well, I appreciate it, and watching Eric build his business with his lifelong partner is amazing, and I believe she's back in China, isn't she, eric?

Eric Schmidt: 24:11

She is at the moment. That's right.

Jim James: 24:13

So we're sending her our best, but Eric's going to steal the limelight for today and if you've enjoyed this, please do share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur and rate it. A takeaway from today for me is that if you're in B2B, it really is about trust and consistently showing up over time and building and building and building and learning and growing, but staying in the long game. So thanks to Eric for sharing that with us today. Thanks so much for listening. Good, I have to stop long enough to.