This inspiring podcast with Bonavest Capital and Blended Sense’s Albert Baez, and Ransome Tucker will light a fire under small business owners and creative professionals as these driven individuals describe the bridge we’re building between two isolated groups with a groundbreaking and novel marketing tech platform.
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Aileen: Have you ever wondered how people succeed in real estate and what steps they took to get there? If so, this podcast is for you. Your hosts, Seyla and Aileen talk with top experts in the real estate community to share with you, their real estate journey and how they achieve massive success. Our goal is to provide you with valuable real estate resources and to help you apply them to your own real estate goals.
Welcome everyone to today’s episode of the how did they do it podcast. I’m your host Aileen Pratt, and today we have two guests coming from Blended Sense, Albert Baez, and Ransome Tucker. Blended Sense is a media technology platform founded in Austin, Texas that connects business owners with creative professionals in their local communities., and each month they dedicate creative teams to capture, edit, and deliver digital media assets to help start and grow local businesses.
So welcome to the show, Albert and Ransome. How are you guys doing?
Albert: Thanks so much, it’s Friday before a long weekend so we’re feeling fantastic.
Aileen: Absolutely that’s always a good feeling, right. So you guys can give a little bit more information about your background and how you got started with Blended Sense, that would be wonderful.
Albert: For sure, I’ll start with my personal background and then we’ll throw it over to Ransome. I was born and raised in New York City, son of immigrant parents from the Dominican Republic, originally. Spanish is my first language and really my first life was all around baseball - all the way through high school, college . . . I ended up being a head baseball coach at a Deep 3 NCAA school as well, and I thought that was gonna be my life. . .
After an injury that kind of steered my life in a different direction, I found technology sales and started at a company called Yodel. We sold later down the road to Web.com and that’s where I met Ransome and really why I started my career in technology sales. I really didn’t think it was for me. I struggled like many probably do early on, and once I finally got my first sale, I realized that it was a craft just like baseball was, and something that I could really practice and get better at and so I felt in control again.
Prior to that I had always heard about sales being a numbers game, and it being luck, and I just couldn’t relate to that. I didn’t understand what that meant. So once I started seeing success, I was able to move up the ranks if you will, from data specialist, to manager, then eventually to sale training manager, senior sales training manager, and then got moved down to Austin, Texas to help Yodel scale from a 300-person to upwards of 500, to get ready to sell to web.com. Ever since then I’ve been in the technology and sales world, for the last 8 years now.
The second place I was at was Op City who sold to Realtor.com, and there I was the 5th employee, so I got to see something built from the ground up and be a big part of that. So that was really cool and that last start up I was at was Main Street Hub which sold to Go Daddy, and that’s really where the A-Ha moment for Blended Sense came from, which I’m sure we’ll talk about here in a little bit.
Aileen: Awesome, thanks for sharing, and how about yourself, Ransome?
Ransome: Alright my turn, pass me the baton. So I was also born in a city, but it was not New York City. It was more Oklahoma City. So slightly less populous, right. But then bounced around a little bit and actually moved to Austin in 4th grade. So I think I’m currently the longest tenured resident of Austin, Texas. No not really, but I’m probably close to the top. I’ve been here for 20-something years.
And then I have a similar background to Albert in that I was very sports-minded. I played everything, but my main sport was soccer. I played that all the way through college. But then I moved back to Austin after college, and my entire professional career has been in the sales world. I’ve never done anything, not sales.
I had an internship with New York Life when I was still in college and I didn’t like the insurance industry at all and then when I got back to Austin, my first job was as raw as you can get from a sales perspective, selling coupon books and discounts for local businesses, door-to-door in the Texas heat wearing a suit and tie and sometimes walking through unpaved sections of the city, walking through knee-high grass, trying to track someone down to get them to spend $30 or $40 bucks, and I had carbon paper receipts for credit cards that I would rub in and give them their receipt. I honestly don’t know how anyone bought anything from me. . .
But from there I got recruited. I actually sold some golf packages to a gentleman that was starting a remodeling sector for a local custom home builder, and he bought, I guess. . .4 packages then recruited me over to be his sales manager. I got into that world, and actually got up on roofs, and trained a sales force, again going door-to-door, but actually going into neighborhoods now and knocking on doors so I was moving up in the world, right? From there,
I eventually found a posting online for a company called Profit Fuel, which was very similar to Yodel like Albert mentioned, in that they serviced SMBs, they provided website solutions, and SEO, no SEM, but Yodel actually came to Austin because of Profit Fuel. They acquired them. And that brought them into Austin and made Austin their headquarters, essentially, from an HR standpoint. We moved into the old financial services building, a 100,000 square foot building and helped to build that our, and very similar to Albert, kind of ascended up the ranks there.
All the way to Yodel’s sell to Web.com and my final role there was essentially an internal team consultant to make sure that all their products and services and teams across North America were running smoothly, as the numbers indicated they should. And as they would have it, a lot of people from that world moved into the real estate space. I got recruited over here to a brokerage here in Austin but also had an office in the DFW Metro called HomeCity, which Albert actually mentioned, Op City was a company we can talk about more, but Op City came from Home City and was an internal service that they offered their agents and spawned out into its own company. So along the way there, and with Albert at yodel, just sort of Austin. . . Tech. . . Real Estate. . . it's one of those bubbles where everyone knows everyone and you’re all kind of on the same team and it’s a fun ride.
Aileen: Great. It sounds like you have really great backgrounds in everything that you guys do, and especially you, Ransome, it sounds like you built up a lot of resiliency selling those coupons going door to door.
Ransom: It was fun yea.
Aileen: So, can you guys share a bit more about Blended Sense, and how did the company come together, and like, what is your mission? What is your focus?
Ransome: Of course, I’ll let you field that one.
Albert: I appreciate it. You know, back to Ransome. Yodel was offering web services to small business owners, and so now dating back, it's over a decade since I started and Ransone probably has a little bit more time with Profit Fuel and Yodel, but the enthusiasm around getting a website up 10 years ago was incredible, right, and really it was exciting to help a small business owner get their website up.
And the last place I was at, Main Street Hub, which was sold to Go Daddy, has just released a one-time photo shoot as part of the product sweep and services to the small business owner, and now, at that point, Im’m 8 years in and thousands and thousands of phone calls with small business owners, and that enthusiasm from just getting a website up had gone to getting some photos to “put on my website.”
And the questions that we were hearing on the phone were: do I own the photos? Do you guys keep coming back? Can I edit the photos? And the answers were all - No. I quickly started doing research in the marketplace and I couldn’t find any platform or any company that was solely focused on just getting the assets produced and in the hands of the small business owner. And in a landscape where digital has become essential - it’s part of doing business - so many small business owners were left by the wayside with inaccessibility to get the photo, video, audio and copy assets that they needed to drive any campaign online: whether that’s social media, web, paid, all down the line.
So, at the same time our Chief Creative Officer, and Co-founder, my wife, was having a struggle on the other side of the coin. As a creative freelancer . . .she’s a film actor for over ten years, and when we moved to Austin she was seeing a lot of great success doing gigs for Google, Verizon, Samsung, UPS. You’ ve probably seen across all the national UPS commercials. But she was still struggling with cash flow and it was for a couple reasons, right? The net pay was net 60 to net 90. So all those checks were great but they were not coming in time, and leaving dips in the cash flow and then she couldn’t find local gigs that were professional enough to live up to a standard for her to tap into, to fill in those gaps between those bigger gigs. So she was left to having to do fitness instructing and other things that are outside of the career that she’s dedicated her whole life to.
And so this morning we just talked about this in our town hall. . . in June of 2018 she came home very frustrated . She was on a big set and she didn’t know where to go, and had no communication. She didn’t know when she was gonna get paid, and she had just had it, and she was like, Albert, I want you to quit your job, and I want you to help me start a company that helps creators get more money. . . .(laughter). . .and get gigs.
And that’s how it started, and you know, the mission is really to connect the local supply and demand chain of creative services across the world. We feel very strongly that if we can do that we’re going to stimulate local economies in a way that is not happening today in the creative field. If a small business owner needs assets, they either have to take out a loan or really dig into the marketing budget to go hire an agency. That agency may not be in that local community or it may, but they outsource work and so that money gets really fragmented. That capital gets really fragmented.
Where our model [is different] is we match local creatives to local small businesses owners on a recurring basis so every dollar that comes in, now is going back into that local community. Like paying out that creative who is the marketer for that small business, who’s the customer of the small business, and now that creative has a little bit more supplemental income so they can go ahead and eat out at a restaurant in their neighborhood, etc. So that’s really the core of what we’re doing.
The big differentiator for us is that we are a managed marketplace, so unlike an Upwork or a Fiver, where it’s a very open marketplace, and you have to hire someone you have to vet them yourself, you have to manage them yourself, you have to manage that project. . . .our technology does all of that. So it really gives the time back to the small business owner and empowers the creative to execute and be reliable for the small business owner. So that’s it in a nutshell. We incorporated in 2019, and that’s when I approached Ransome.I knew that in order to do this we were going to need sales expertise, we were going to need to know how we can take this marketplace and scale into different markets and so I asked him to be an advisor and when I did he asked if he could invest, and he did both, and that’s how we ended 2019.
Aileen: And the rest is history.
Albert: Absolutely It’s been a heck of a ride.
Aileen: So when your wife had come, your wife Abigail, had come over to you and said, “Hey quit your job lets’ do this,” I mean did you go like, ‘Yes let’s do this or was it like wait let’s take a look at this. Is this model going to work kind of thing?’ What was kind of like the conversation that you had?
Albert: Yea, it was not easy. I was making really good money in a space that I’d been in for years now. And my network was big, and I was in a great position, but this may be a little too touchy but I love her so much and she was so serious. And she was really frustrated and I knew, I had been with her now for five, six years, so I knew how hard she worked to just get to this point, and she was still frustrated, right, and I thought she was doing really well, and she thought she was doing really well too, but it still wasn’t enough. . . so the conversation was like, o.k. I’ll quit this job but we gotta do research.
So we took a lot of our personal finances actually, and did about 3, 4 months of research . . the first thing we were trying to figure out is how do we help the supply change be professional and be reliable and show up and ge the assets done and get them delivered, because that was one of the biggest gaps in the marketplace is that a freelancer by themselves, often times was really unreliable to the business owner.
The way we did that is we paid a lot of local artists and creators to create different things and projects and then we had everyone together in what we called The Spectacular - which was a huge event where all the creators got to show off their work - music videos, songs, we brought in and hired 12 local artists and we learned very quickly that creative freelancers are in isolation. They’re an island by themselves and a big part of what they need is community.
From there we kind of knew enough that we needed to figure out how to package this and sell it so we went into 2019 all smiley and ready to go.
Aileen: Oh I love that, kind of the fruits of your love.
Albert: Absolutely.
Aileen: So can you share a little bit, so if I’m a business owner, right, and I come to you guys right? How does the model work in terms of pairing me with a creative freelancer and how does that process start?
Ransome: Great question. That’s kind of part of our secret sauce. So, everytime that we have a new client whether it's a small business owner, whether it's an individual that’s putting on an event, whether it’s an organization or corporation, whoever the point of contact is, we get to know first, right, what are their content need? So, early on we did what was called a digital diagnostic. That was kind of our first evaluation of, let’s look at a surface level at al your social platforms, look at your website, and we would kind of offer that up. We’ve kind of evolved that into what’s called a Creative Vision Call. So we have an initial exploratory phase to figure out, what stage of the business are you in? Are you raising money? Are you. . . .did you just start? Have you been in business for a while and you’re just looking to grow? Are you needing assets for social ads? Do you need assets for your website? Are you looking to recruit? Are you - again if you’re raising money, do you need pitch assets, like a deck or any sort of ‘How it works’ video? So first, we start with what you are needing, right?
Then we can figure out what platforms do your assets live on where you’re going to get the best R.O.I, and then we can also look at the industry that you’re in and look at the background of the individual team that you’re working with and then what we can actually qualitatively match those to creatives that both have a skillset, and equipment, and are geographically local to that business, but also their personality type, right? Because if you’re a creative videographer, copywriter, actor, photographer, typically there are certain types of assets that you like to capture and certain types of people that you really enjoy working with.
So part of what we do when we bring people into the network, either as a customer or as a freelancer is kind of - figure out those details and store those details so that when we do get that ingestion of a new customer, we can not only match them with someone that’s local and has the skill set, and the equipment and the talent to give them the assets that they indeed, but also someone that can be part of their internal team on an ongoing basis that they’re gonna love working with.
Albert: Something that’s very unique, Aileen, we are a subscription model which is new in the creative services and you hear about retainers with agencies, but with us you’re subscribing to platform that has a service which is capturing assets every month - photo, video, copy, and audio, every month - and we deliver what we call a “Content Kit,” so we take all those raw assets and we edit them via technology and our in-house editing team and then we deliver them ready to publish. They come tagged, organized, labeled, and you know exactly what platform that asset is meant for.
Commercial break
Aileen: oh no, so I was just going to say that you’re like a digital matchmaker then.
Ransome: Yeah
Albert: Love that.
Ransome: I’m going to put that on the website. The subscription model is super unique and I think the genesis of that is . . .Albert kind of touched on this earlier, but our experience in the SMB space as young professionals having thousands and thousands of conversations specifically talking about websites and SEO which had its run as the king of the hill. And that’s still very important nowadays but seeing the evolution of business owners where its like, “Hey, maybe 20, 30, 40 years ago, maybe the phonebook, the yellow pages, and you’ve got to be in there. If you’re not in there, you;ve got no shot. Someone looks up and they need a plumber or an attorney, right? You gotta be in the phonebook, and then once there’s the Internet, you’ve got to have a website. Why don’t you have a website? Everyone’s on the Internet. You gotta get a website.
So even back when I was at Profit Fuel, we’re talking to people with SEO, and a lot of people would hire us just for the five page website we would give them. A basic, basic website, but they were like, “I get a website?” And that was a lot bigger deal and kind of part of the value. Then moving on into the Yodel era, it was like, “I already have a website but how do I get it on the front page? What strategies can I use to get people to click? And then there were several years when that was the one thing people were hearing about. And now we’ve moved into this era where all that stuff still exists, but now it's how you engage with your audience.
Now, it’s not enough to be found. Now, once you are found, how are you keeping someone there with content? With fresh content, with continuous content? How are you telling the story of your business? Your products?
There’s that element now which is really a necessity for a business to be competitive, so we grew, really when we started building this out, as business owners, it was very much, this isn’t going to be a one-time project where you get like one video and now you’re good. It’s hey, you’re gonna need videos . . .cornerstone videos, micro-videos. You’re going to need photography for your team, your products, your services. You’re going to need assets for education. . . there’s never going to be a time where you don’t have a need for content. And the business owners have reacted incredibly favorably, and it seems like they agree with us.
Albert: Laughter
Aileen: So then you also help with the content creation piece of it as well, not just the audio and the pictures, and the digital marketing aspect of it, but the content itself as well.
Albert: Absolutely, yea, so another thing that’s unique to our model, it is a managed marketplace so not only does our technology do that, but we match a dedicated producer who’s actually an in-house employee of Blended Sense. And this producer is the creative liaison who does the pre-production work, right? The-storyboarding, the treatments, which empowers the creative to show up and be a professional . . .go in and out and not have to worry, and the creative professional’s role is really unique in that they aren’t doing any accounting, customer service, project management, or post-production. So once they capture it, they send it home to us and we take care of the rest, and that’s really enticing for a videographer or photographer who needs some supplemental revenue.
Ransome: And to tie that into what’s going on in the real estate space now here over the past 3- 5 years. What we’ve seen real estate brokerages do is that same thing. . .but they’re recruiting agents, because if you’re a successful real estate agent, you’re probably really good with people, you’re probably good at identifying properties, negotiating deals, things like that. . . .and you’re really good with that skill set, it’s probably not that efficient with your time to be doing things like working on your own marketing, like working on tech, working on lead generation, like doing your own contract to close, doing your own transaction services, so you’re seeing a lot of teams and brokerages start to really understand this and say hey, we’ll provide leads for you.
We’ll provide in-house marketing, we’ll provide transaction coordination, we’ll provide all these things, if you’re good, if you’re a talented realtor, go do that and we’ll take care of everything else, and that’s kind of what we’re doing for the freelancer. We’re saying hey, you’re really good at shooting video or capturing photo. Just go do that. We’ll handle the sales. We’ll handle the backend. We’ll handle the accounting. We’ll handle the customer service. You just go do what you love all day. . . and for the customer, same thing.
You don’t want to go source creatives, and manage people, and sift through 20 - 30 candidates for a project that you don’t even know if it’s the right project that you should be doing for the assets you need. We’ll do that for you, right? So it’s very similar to what’s going on in real estate, it’s just a little bit different implementation.
Aileen: Oh that is great, so you’re serving more than just one set of people, not just the businesses, but the creatives at the same time. You know you’re serving a wider audience. . . And so one of the things you had also mentioned was in today’s market now, you need to start engaging more with the audience, and with the customers and they’re not just looking for a pretty website anymore. They’re looking for content engagement. So, are you guys producing, as you guys are working with the client, are you guys producing things like daily, weekly. . . like how often do they have to like engage with them? And then I guess, what kind of engagement level is needed to be able to increase that level?
Albert: Great question. So we pride ourselves, part of our proprietary process of how we capture, comes from Abigail, right? From all her experience in production. And she felt like production is a legacy industry, like real estate, and it was very clunky. And like old school and outdated and antiquated. And so we’ve kind of revitalized it, and evolved it into being really efficient and lean. And so on the content creation side, we do 4-hours every single month with our customers. And we’ll deploy a photographer and a videographer, and we’ll capture photo, video, and audio. From there, then we turn it into a Content Kit, which are all, ready-to-publish assets and that gives you about a month, sometimes 2months’ worth of content.
So to answer your question, the content creation side. . .we have something really cool in how we do it, in that in 4 hours we’re able to capture so much. And that’s unique to us. And we knew that was gonna be key because small business owners, realtors, brokers . . .they don’t have time. They just don’t have time, so if you’re asking them to come make videos multiple times a week, etc. it’s just not going to work. It’s not going to sustain. Not everyone is Gary V. But, on the part where you just asked about. . .what does it take to be engaged? It’s content continuity and distribution and consistency there. So consistency and continuity in the distribution is what we’ve been able to unlock for the average small business owner, where yesterday they weren’t able to do it because they didn’t have enough assets that were ready to publish across all of their platforms. . . .Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
So the Content Kit allows them to really start to measure what their audience wants to see, what level of engagement have, and then from there, just like traditional marketing - A/B testing. Understand what’s working and then give the audience more of what’s working. So I think the content creation side is still a very hard thing to overcome in the world, even if you have resources. I think we have a really solid and unique solution there, but where we’re just driving tremendous value is in the ability to get so much in such a little amount of time, and then every single month give you a Content Kit that puts you a month or two in advance, so. . .
Aileen: Yea, and one of the things that you mentioned . . . you mentioned investors also, and why is this. Can you walk us through how an investor would be able to utilize a service like your guys’.
Albert: Absolutely. I can go into this one. I can go into real estate or big tech investors they need deal flow.
Aileen: Maybe we can stick to the real estate investors and how it applies to them.
Albert: yea, for sure, so it's similar deal flow and recruiting. These fields are super rare.
Ransome: Yea, I mean we’re in Austin and the real estate market here, if it’s not number one it's in the top five. It’s just insane, so as you can imagine there are just a ton of investors from all across the country and in the world looking in a place like Austin, but also even in Dallas, Houston, I mean everywhere. It’s very competitive to get [investors] to put their money into this so if you’re an investor specialist in real estate, you need to obviously have a brand that people can engage with so that people can consider this person as. . . essentially someone I would give my portfolio to. But also, there’s lots of ways to kind of tackle that project.
There’s. . .am I just looking for whole-saleling? Am I looking for something to flip? To hold on to? That’s a single-family, multi-family? Commercial? We’ve got some agents that did their work with us currently where they have kind of a cool approach where they handle everything A to Z. so they would approach a potential investor or someone looking to invest in real estate by saying, “Hey. I’ll go do everything. I’ll go find the property. I’ll take care of the acquisition. I’ll take care of the rehab. I;ll take care of listing it. I’ll take care of making sure it closes. I’ll just report back to you what your profit is. The same way you would give money to a hedge fund or someone that would just manage your stock portfolio. So someone like that can really use some educational assets. Right, something that’s, “Here’s how I’m different from a typical agent in this space. Here’s what I can do for ya. And here’s some samples, and testimonials from past clients. And it’s really no different than any other industry. It’s “Here’s who I am. Here’s why I do what I do. Here’s the skillset and here’s my background. Here’s how I do what I do. Here’s the value to you by using me, and it’s all the story you’re telling. It’s sales 101. Going back to our early 20s days when we were on the phone.
Albert: We have an account, a long-time customer. They just celebrated a year with us back in April of this year, Blue Anchor Properties. And when they came to us, I believe they had a dozen units in the New Jersey area, Patterson area, and now they’re close to thirty. And what we’ve done for them is we;ve actually just. . .the seeking out of properties as an investor, finding the properties, winning the deal, documents and all that, down to the last video where he felt like he was on HGTV. You know the before and after. But if you’re putting stuff out there as an investor, from that perspective, you’re naturally going to gravitate more deals to you, right? I mean we say this all the time but, if you’ve got the content, people want to be around you today because they want to be part of that. And so, I think investors, are a little bit more unique than the other side of things that we do, but they benefit greatly because not as many investors are doing it.
Ransome: Yeah, which also ties into some of the benefits they can get from traffic, from an SEO perspective, from an SEO standpoint. If someone is looking to possibly invest in San Francisco, or Austin or Miami, or New York City . . .to Albert’s point, back to the investment world and real estate being kind of antiquated, and kind of a good-ole-boy network, just oh I know someone, these off market deals. . . .it’s this small little bubble of “if you don’t know then you don’t know, right?” You gotta know someone, but then there are people all around the world looking for opportunities - they’re looking to invest in real estate, especially in this climate, and so if you’ve got content out there where people can see who you are, see your successes, and they kind of feel like they know who you are, then all the more likely you’re going to get someone to reach out to you and they’re going to have that conversation with you.
Aileen: And is this how you see, I guess the consumer demand going from here into the future in terms of the change and everything like that. Is it the future of how people are looking to interact on the web?
Albert: 100%. We see it most dominant in the ECommerce world with products. Like no one’s buying products today unless they get to see a video, see some nice photos, right? Here’s some reviews. Here are authentic reviews. We’re doing something really special where we’re helping turn text reviews into audio reviews so they sound more authentic and real, and we’re doing video reviews. So imagine a world where the Yelp’s are no longer just a wall of text and you’re like “Is this even real?” You actually hear the review being said, and recorded or you see the person giving that review. So yea, absolutely. It’s happening. The pandemic obviously accelerated it a little bit, and it’s just so much more efficient.
Ransome: All that said, the standard’s been raised, right? It’s like what we talked about earlier. It’s no longer, hey this company has a website, it’s now, if there’s not a ton of content on there, if there's just a couple photos that don’t look that great and there’s no video, and there’s nothing like where you can get a feel, it’s just like, it’s off-putting. If you pull up their social platform and there’s not that much content on there, it leaves kind of an awkward uncertainty in the user, in the potential customer’s mouths, taste or eyes. . . brain. And whatever you wanna say, and when the consumer tries to consume this content, it’s very easy to bounce elsewhere, where you could find an engaging video. If I can watch 90 seconds of what this company is all about, then it's a done deal compared to someone who can’t do that.
Aileen: Yea, it has a factor of wanting to see, wanting to know, wanting to hear, and then really feeling the authenticity of whatever you’re looking into. Especially these days online where at the tip of your fingertips you can find like a million things about anybody.
So for you guys, what is next for you and what is your next focus?
Albert: On the asset side, for us, we’re extremely bullish on audio. Today we’re on a podcast, so I think you understand the value of audio. Clubhouse, Greenroom, Spotify . . .these platforms are showing quickly that audio is an under-utilized asset in the business world and if you really think about brands. . .you know the Coca-Cola’s of the world. . .all of them have always had a sonic logo or a jingle. And that’s something the small business owner has never had access to. . .for whatever reason, whether it’s creative or the money, etc. but audio is the one sense that starts in the womb.
From the time we’re in the womb we can start to hear and it never shuts off, so it's an incredible marketing tool that we’re not using at the macro level. So we are doing things like taking reviews and turning them into audiograms. Taking snippets and videos that we’re recording with small business owners, and then putting a photo on it and turning it into an audiogram. We’re creating sonic logos. And content today is the number one driver of SEO and we believe strongly that the front pages of Google and all these search engines are going to going to be voice-activated at some point and so the businesses that are creating an audio footprint now, are the ones that are going to show up on the receiving end in those [search] results. We feel we’re going to be able to bring a unique offering to the small business owner when it comes to audio, so that’s really exciting and down the line.
Ransome: As far as expansion and what’s next, we’re very fortunate to be in Austin which is a fantastic city and the business opportunities for tech, for real estate. . .we couldn’t be in a better city. And Texas as a state there’s just so much business here. It’s such a prosperous state so all the usual suspects, right? We already have boots on the ground in the Dallas Fort Worth metro, Houston, Austin’s just up the road from San Antonio, so those are the big 4 in Texas - plus Houston. Then there’s Albert and Abigail’s ties to the Northeast, in New York City. That’s probably our second biggest area right now in terms of having clientele, actually having freelancers up there that are specific to deploy for capture.
So I want to continue to pour research into there for obvious reasons and because we have ties there already. Then there are some other markets that are top of the list. Miami, Florida, but really, we’re anticipating the ability to expand from the geographical sense, really rapidly. Once we prove this out on home turf in Texas, where we can get it to scale, there’s not reason why we can’t deploy capture’s, creatives all across the country. We’ve already done it. We just haven't done it full peddle on the gas, but we’ve done everything coast to coast. . . California, New York, D.C. We’ve had some opportunities come up that were outside the U.S. and we’re like, “No, we’re not there yet, but eventually.” So from an expansion strategy that’s kind of where we’re at. Hoping that heading into next year, we can really be multi-state.
Albert: From the tech side, Aileen, I’ll leave you with this. We’re developing a mobile application very similar to what we know in ride sharing for the creative professional where they can track everything in one place, mobily. Get matched. So today, when let’s say Aileen, the photographer, Ransome the photographer, and Albert the photographer and we’re all the right match? So there will be a cascade effect. So you’ll get a text and it will say Aileen will say, “Do you want it?” You say no, and it’ll go to Ransome. And there is a mobile application where they’ll be able to cash out their earnings right there on their device as well.
Aileen: Well awesome you guys. I really love what you guys have built with Blended Sense and the business and you guys are really filling a space for small business owners who might not have access, and might not know where to start in this new digital media age where you need to have that digital footprint, so I’m really excited to see what you guys are gonna be built of in the next couple of years and down the line. So thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of that.
Albert and Ransome: Thank you for having us.
