On my Instagram a couple of weeks back, I talked about all the innovative women I met during Fashion Tech Forum that were to be featured on It’s Tillie!. Mae Karwowski, CEO and Founder of Obvious.ly, is starting off our series talking about influencers, being a woman in tech, the past, present and future of social media, and what it’s like to be an overall badass in this field. [By the way, all the women in this series are badasses, so don’t whine about favoritism. Mmmkay? Thanks.]
Mae provided so much insight to a problem brands deal with everyday, on a small or large scale – marketing in the digital world – that I should be charging a cover fee. Like put a blocker once you get to a certain line reading, “Want more? Subscribe for $3.99 a day! 83% off the cover price.” But I won’t. And you may think you know about digital marketing, but you have no idea. Unless Obvious.ly is in charge, well then, you’re set. If they aren’t, you need to read part one of this interview. Bookmark it. Share it. Take notes. Put on your thinking caps. It’s time to truly own your brand.
P.S. Part two goes live Friday.
Can you start with where the idea for Obvious.ly came from?
Well, first of all, I was at Gilt Groupe. I was doing social media marketing for Gilt City. I was running that. It was going really well. There were so many awesome people working at the company and a lot of people were starting their own start-ups and then asking me to do consulting and help with their social strategy and their social media management and all of their plans. That was really fun. I was like, “Oh, this is the best part of my current job, is this portion.”
Then I started Obvious.ly. We were primarily doing social media strategies, social media management. Then we were doing so much with influencers, just like finding them, finding cool people who loved the brands we worked with, having them create content, giving them product. It ended up becoming a really big part of all of the strategies that we were offering for brands. Then we’re like, “Okay, there’s actually a ton of inefficiencies in talking one-to-one with a ton of people all the time.”
It was really hard for us to scale up the number of influencers who our brands were working with when they were like … We’d have 50 influencers for let’s say Uniqlo. They’d be like, “Oh, can we work with 400?” We didn’t have the technical ability or the manpower to do it. Then I brought on my CTO who’s awesome, his name’s Max, and we built out the platform to manage campaigns with tons of influencers, kind of infinite numbers of influencers, really seamlessly. We’ve been doing that for the past year and a half.
It’s a baby baby.
Yeah! So, I started the company in the social media management strategy part of it three years ago, and then a year and a half ago we really became a product-based tech company. Which is cool. We really had consulting background and everyone’s really good at client services, but then we have the tech portion where we’re building a product to really solve our problems.
It’s been really fun, and then influencer marketing has blown up in the meantime. The timing’s been really good.
Can you tell us a bit about what’s the difference between influencer marketing compared to what everyone’s typically used to?
Definitely. I think that the space has come so far just even in the past year. The conversations I’m having with potential clients is just so much more nuanced and advanced now than it was even a year or 6 months ago. It’s kind of night and day. People are asking really specific and interesting questions, whereas before it was like, “What is influencer marketing?”
A lot of people, because they don’t have the technology or the ability to work with 100, 1,000 influencers at once, they’re choosing to work with 3 or 5 huge influencers who are like celebrity level, who have millions of followers. If they have 1 photo with the Starbucks cup, they’re going to reach 5 million people. You also need to pay that person a lot of money and then now it becomes really saturated where a ton of brands are competing to work with that 1 person. It’s just really cost inefficient. Whereas our model is instead of working with that 1 person to reach 5 million people, why don’t we work with 200 influencers to reach 5 million people? They each have really targeted, smaller, really highly-engaged audiences. It costs way less to work with them, because they’re trying to build their brand at the same time and kind of using that synergy. You also have 200 pieces of awesome content that the brand didn’t have before. There are kind of a lot of cool things that happen when you start working with lots of influencers at once.
We send 1,000 t-shirts to influencers. We then are having an opening party for a store in Miami. 20 of those people, influencers, are actually in Miami. Let’s invite them there. Let’s really build a network and facilitate relationships with people who have large followings and are cool.
I feel as if a lot of major brands, like Versace and Chanel, they have in-house and they have out of house. They have the in-house person and then they have you guys. Would the out of house person still sort of be needed?
Right. Yeah, I mean, I think that PR has really been changing a lot. We actually have a lot of PR agencies as clients because their brands want to work with influencers and we have the ability to do that. They’ll bring that work to us.
It’s hard when a lot of PR companies are set up to get that placement in Vogue or Vanity Fair or The Wall Street Journal. When people are reading those publications less, and those publications are actually having a hard time keeping their subscription up, keeping people looking at them when there are a billion other content sites on the internet, is that Vogue placement as important? When instead their customers are probably all over Instagram, probably all over Snapchat, on Facebook or Twitter, and then on YouTube for viewing and watching reviews and searching for different things. I think what we’re doing becomes really relevant. It really is sort of eating away at what traditional PR is doing.
I’ll see placements, and that’s cool, but I’m also really always paying attention to know what’s in my Instagram feed. What cool products are there, what brands I haven’t heard of and screenshotting those, saving them.
For sure. I mean, I don’t read as many magazines. I read books a lot, but magazines, not so much. I always read Tatler because their stories are still stories that you are interested in. I feel as if nowadays they only, like all these magazines here, always have these influencers on the cover. I’m kind of like, “I care about them, but I care about them from what they post. I don’t really want to hear what they’re saying in the magazine.” You know?
It is kind of like church and state. It’s like, why don’t you just have really high editorial content over here? Then I’m waiting for the Subway and flip through my Instagram feed right here. You don’t all need to be doing the same thing.
I think it’s hard to do that really awesome editorial content, at least for these magazines now because they’re not getting the eyeballs. They’re not getting the money that they used to for advertisements. We work with The New Yorker and that’s just one magazine I love. I was starting an article last night and was like, “This article is going to be at least 12 pages long. I love the first paragraph, so I’m going to have an awesome half hour reading this.”
It’s so rare now. Everything is so bite-sized. I feel like what we’re doing, yeah, it’s bite-size and its super easy to consume and it’s really fun. You don’t want your magazine to be doing that, too. You know?.
Right. That’s what we have social media for!
Exactly.
There’s a podcast called Start-Up. They at one point I had I believe 2 or 3 women who were starting up this start-up. They talk about the difficulties of being a female on the tech side. Do you have any stories or have you had difficulty being a woman in this arena?
Well, I’ve only been a woman in this arena (laughs), so the perspective can be really difficult sometimes to know how much of what you’re feeling and adversity you’re facing is just you and your idea and how much of it is because you are a woman. Maybe people make assumptions about who you are and the legitimacy of your company.
I think that’s probably the biggest problem for me, is kind of when I meet someone. I’m like, “Oh, yes. I’m the CEO and founder of this company.” Usually they’re like, “What?” They, if I’m going to a meeting with them, they assume that I was like, the head of sales or an account manager or someone in client services. Then they really need like, take a step back and kind of calibrate.
Then just making sure that I’m doing the best job presenting myself as someone who is a CEO and founder to show that it’s like, “Oh, actually, no, I own a legitimate company. More than legitimate. Really successful.” I think sometimes people not write it off but they have a set thing in their mind. You need to challenge that with every encounter, so just a little bit more pressure.
I’ve also found that people have been really supportive once I get to know them and once you kind of breakthrough that initial, “Oh, you’re not who I thought you were going to be.” Sometimes people are confused. I think the confusion and then helping them overcome the confusion. The guys on our team are all awesome. I think that it’s been actually really valuable that I am a woman leading the company, especially with influencers. Everything is communication. Everything is trying to figure out, primarily a female audience, what do women want? What kind of content do you want to consume? It’s been really great. In other ways it’s like, talking to other CEOs or that kind of initial conversation, making sure that people know that I’m serious is definitely the biggest thing.
Can you think of any instances where you had to prove yourself or you felt they weren’t taking you seriously, you have to prove yourself? How you overcame that.
Yeah, I think that that happens daily. In my conversations or at least it helps me to go into every conversation with the assumption that I’m going to need to prove myself and they need to … The other person in the conversation needs to leave knowing that, “Wow, Mae is clearly a really competent, awesome CEO.” Whether or not that’s actually something that’s happening is reality, I think it really helps me set it up. Just make sure I’m always presenting the best way possible.
A lot of guys do not have to think that way and don’t have that level of awareness, or maybe like, over awareness. In some ways I think it’s really helpful, too, to always be on in certain business situations. Some of these people can assume when I’m at a networking event or a speaking engagement that I’m someone’s girlfriend or something like that. You just always need to really fight that. It really comes down to really being really secure, too, and knowing like, “Oh, I just need to be really confident, be really assertive in every conversation.”
That’s kind of the main thing. I think about it a lot, though. (Laughs)
Yeah, I do too. My therapist always tells me, “Well, you did something big. You left your old job to create your own thing now. You need to talk about it the way you talk to me about it. You need to show how excited you are. Not dumb your project down because people pick up on that and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, she’s doesn’t even really think it’s that great.’ You really need to hype it up the way you hype it up with me or your friends.
Exactly. I think that so much of it is just the minutia of language you use. I’m always, with our team as well, “Don’t say we’re just doing this.” Don’t say, apologize for something or downplay what we’re doing. What we’re doing’s really cool. I think sometimes women especially are overly humble. We need to be talking about it like it’s really cool. It’s not like smoke and mirrors and what we’re doing is not cool.
I think another thing is with talking to people who are maybe older or who aren’t in the marketing and content space there’s a lot of education that needs to happen. Sometimes in a conversation over a beer some of these people are insecure in how little they know about the space. You need to be able to say what you’re doing in really clear, basic terms, which can be hard, too. Don’t be humble, but also explain things you’re doing in very simple terms. Then show that you’re also extremely competent and good at your job. There you go. Try to have a good time. (laughs)
It’s a lot of gymnastics.
Where did the name Obvious.ly come from?
When I was Gilt I started a blog called Obviously Social. I had this great boss. We would be in these marketing meetings and he’d be like, “Okay, PR, this is what you’re doing.” He’d be writing on the blackboard or the whiteboard. Then, “Events, this is what you’re doing. Business development, this is what you’re doing. Acquisition, this is what you’re doing. Obviously Social, Mae, you’re doing something. Just obviously you need to be doing social. We don’t really know what that means. We just know that obviously something has to be happening there.”
So, I started this blog called Obviously Social. I think social media was so new at the time and so many kids were getting jobs who know how to use Instagram and know how to use Twitter but didn’t have the marketing chops at all. I really started the blog with that. That was my goal, to show that I’m at this cool company doing social media, but I also really know a lot about marketing. I want to convey that through this blog.
I ended up learning a lot in the process because I was writing. The act of writing is so important. So from there I was like, “Oh, I already have this website. It’s already called Obviously Social. I kind of like the name. I’ll just stick with that and start the company.” Then when we built up the tech we dropped the social. We’re just Obvious.ly. We got the url and everything. I think that that’s cool, too.
Yeah, the url really is. When I was typing, I was like, “Wait. Is it missing the .com? Oh my god. No, she didn’t.” (laughs) What have been the biggest challenges that you had starting this baby? What are things that you did before that you realize you can no longer do?
That’s so funny because there are always at least 10 challenges of varying degrees of intensity. I think when I first started really not having a safety net of being within a company and knowing that if you forget to do something, or someone on your team forgets to do something, it doesn’t get done. That can potentially be … Could snowball and get really big and be a … You don’t have worker’s compensation. A year from now you’re like, “Oh my god. We didn’t have that.” That could sink the company.
Those sort of things really stressed me out in the beginning. Then I realized how to really handle that amount of stress and really figure out, okay, here are all the things that are worrying me. How do we organize that and make this something that I can withstand on a daily basis? That was a lot of just mental work that I had to do there to get to that point. Then other challenges are really just about growing the business and managing growth in a smart way. We’re completely bootstrapped, which I think is also super unique.
What is bootstrapped?
It means we haven’t taken on any outside investment. That’s been kind of a scary decision because we are growing quickly, but I think it’s been, up to this point, the right one. I’m in charge of our destiny, which is I don’t have a boss that’s an investor giving us money. I think just figuring out how to manage growth in a really smart way is definitely the number one challenge.
Then, really hiring the right people for the right roles is huge, especially since we’re small. We might have a new marketing need or a new PR need or we may need to do an event. We don’t have those people on hand or, people we have are awesome, but they’re really great at this job right now. So hiring and then managing growth are definitely the two biggest challenges, which is good. It’s been than the challenge of running out of money. These are good problems.
Some years ago blogging wasn’t really taken that seriously and then people didn’t think social media would pick up the way it’s picked up. Do you see anything that would come and sort of have the same impact as social media and blogging in the near future? My thing is, what can be done next?
Yeah, that is a really good question. I don’t know how much further we can go into even smaller and smaller pieces of content. We went from blog, like really long-form, to pretty short-form blogs to now these images or videos. I don’t think it’s going to get much smaller than that. I could be totally wrong, but I think that these content creators, there needs to be more from that to do in terms of monetization.
In terms of actually making more money, getting more opportunities to really get more visibility and grow their brand. It’s like, what does it mean to grow your brand now? Oh, you have 100,000 followers on your beauty account on Instagram. What do we do next with that? I think answering that question is a really huge opportunity. It’s been cool to see. We have a lot of beauty clients. It’s cool to see in the beauty space how once people reach a certain point as an influencer they start doing collaborations or coming out with their own lines. And I think that that is going to happen in other areas, too. Influencers going into e-commerce is kind of an interesting, crazy thing, but I think that that actually could be pretty big. We have over 30,000 influencers that we work with on a within our network. Those are always questions that we’re getting all the time. How do I grow faster? Now that I’m growing, what do I do next? How do I make the most of this to position myself correctly?
I don’t think blogging’s going to go anywhere, though, or the social networking part of it either. People just want to keep consuming that content. It’s like, what else is that person doing to make it really worth their while? It’s like, oh, you have this awesome brand, but it’s a ton of work. You’re like, “Okay, if I’m going to keep doing this, what else, what other revenue streams do I have? What other opportunities do I have?” A lot needs to happen in that area. It’s so new, though that I don’t think anyone’s planned for that part of it unless you have 3 million followers and you’re ready to launch an eye shadow palette with a brand. No one smaller is getting those opportunities now.
My other question is, that has to sort of do with that, is that I sometimes feel that everyday there are like 10 new blogs starting. How do you, one, make yourself not different but different? You know?
Yeah!
Then there’s an over saturation of a lot of other things, too. Like you said, with magazines you see their content from social media is also displayed in content in their print. How can people make it so that If they follow you on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook they’re not seeing the same things over 3 times? Because I will unfollow you because of that.
It drives me crazy. Or when it’s just clearly pushed from Facebook to Twitter. You can take the time to literally put it in Twitter. (laughs)
Absolutely.
I can’t even see the photo (laughs). It really annoys me. That was the biggest thing when we started the company. I was like, “No one, none of our clients, would ever do this again.” Yeah. I think there are two big things there. One is how are you differentiating yourself overall? If you’re starting a vlog right now, if you’re starting an Instagram account, why should someone follow you? That question is harder now than it was a year ago, 2 years ago. For blogging, probably 3 or 4 years ago. Really having a unique perspective and almost weird sometimes seems to work better. You just need to be such a different kind of bold character and brand almost. What is that positioning? How does that work overall? Then, how does that work per channel?
You’re like, “Okay, this is my blogging. This is my personality. This is what people are coming for, for the viewpoint from my blog and for my overarching everything I’m doing online basically. Twitter, what am I doing when I’m live tweeting TV shows or the debate? Am I political? What TV shows am I even talking about? Am I super sarcastic? Who else am I talking to? Am I jumping onboard cute hashtags? What am I doing? Am I having live chats? What’s happening here?”
Then Instagram. Okay, how is viewpoint in this channel different than Snapchat? When am I using which one? Is Instagram really beautiful and do you have a really awesome aesthetic so people want to frame your photos? Snapchat’s really like, raw and crazy. Are you using the dog filter all the time? Thinking of those things underneath the overarching this is why people tune in for me, and then there’s kind of how each channel we can emphasize different parts of that.
People do not do that amount of analysis and strategically think about what content they’re creating per channel, kind of ladders up to their bigger this is my idea. When it’s done correctly it works really, really well. You see a number of bloggers who started things a while ago. I think Man Repeller did an awesome job with … Well, now it’s a totally morphed into an e-commerce and raised a lot of money, but I remember when she started, you’re like, “Wow, that name just cuts through.” You’re like, “What is that? That’s awesome.” Then, the viewpoint was just so fresh.
Someone like Grav3yard Girl on YouTube. She makes faces and she’s the anti-beauty blogger. She’s using like, Cheetos in her hair, to curl her hair. I mean, everything is crazy with her. You watch because it’s so entertaining and so different. I think things are kind of amped up several notches than they were even like, a year ago. I think that would be really hard for some people, but it is important to really have your voice. What is your thing?
Especially if you look in the news in general. The news is so amped up. Donald and Hillary. You couldn’t have two bigger characters. That kind of needs to happen. You can’t just be like, “Hey, I’m the normal girl with my normal YouTube.” But if you’re going to do that, you need to be on the newest, weirdest channel. Just be the first one in. Like some VR app doing virtual reality, then you can kind be that normal person ina new place. Now you need to be larger than life.