Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clickatell CEO Pieter de Villiers from South Africa (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is telecom the largest category in which you’re doing chat commerce?

Pieter de Villiers: Telecom is the largest category where we see high-volume adoption of chat commerce. However, we believe that financial services will eclipse that very soon.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of financial services?

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clickatell CEO Pieter de Villiers from South Africa (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: To do this on WhatsApp, what do you have from a technical layer point of view? Is WhatsApp giving you an API into which you are programming your facilities?

Pieter de Villiers: First of all, Clickatell was one of WhatsApp’s first business partners to enable brands to serve clients in this manner. You have to be a WhatsApp-authorized business partner to do these things. Number two is we provide a web interface in a cloud-managed environment where you would typically open a Clickatell account, select the channels you want to use, and start thinking through the customer problems you want to solve.

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clickatell CEO Pieter de Villiers from South Africa (Part 1)

This is a terrific story of a South African team of entrepreneurs who have provided tremendous thought leadership in mobile chat commerce and have built a great company.

Along the way, they raised money from Sequoia Capital and have achieved (unverified) Unicorn status. The beauty is that this is not a glorified Unicorn built out of financial engineering but one that is firmly rooted in strong revenue growth.

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Tipser CEO Marcus Jacobsson (Part 1)

Tipser is a Swedish company that is turning affiliate marketing on its head!

Super interesting conversation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Tipser. 

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Corbett Drummey, CEO of Popular Pays (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: To be perfectly honest with you, I flatly turn down all of these requests.

Corbett Drummey: One of the cool things about Popular Pays is that although a brand can use our search tool and find an influencer, we also have an app where creators can view all the open gigs, and they can raise their hand. I’ll give a quick example.

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Corbett Drummey, CEO of Popular Pays (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of content are we talking about that Samsung promotes? What kind of influencers are propagating that content? What are the business terms that you are seeing?

Corbett Drummey: You can use us to create content of almost any type. We’ve done everything from tweets, blog posts to longer form videos. Most of it is content for social media such as in-feed posts on Instagram or maybe an Instagram story. Those tend to be a lot of work.

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Corbett Drummey, CEO of Popular Pays (Part 1)

This discussion explores the evolution of influencer marketing and how brands are working with content creators to gain credibility and leverage.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Popular Pays.

Corbett Drummey: I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Popular Pays. We started in Chicago and did a stint out in YCombinator and then moved back afterwards. Popular Pays is a software for collaborating with content creators and influencers.

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Switching gears a bit, when you look around in your universe, what are the key trends and what are the open problems upon which a new entrepreneur could build a new business?

Todd Greene: It’s a great question. It’s actually very interesting. If you look all the big unicorn spaces and companies over the last five years, all industries are changed because of the ability to stream real-time information. What’s different in your taxi experience from Uber or Lyft? You can now open your phone, you can see where the taxi is. What changed the exercise bike market with Peloton? It was the fact that Peloton, as an exercise bike company, allows you to compete with your fellow riders. >>>