Whir is a new proximity-based platform where customers can find deals and events, and business owners can drive foot traffic from those customers. We talk to Co-Founder & CEO Blake Coffee about the process to launch, where he’s headed next and creating a self-taught curriculum to make it all happen. In today’s marketing tip, we talk about why it’s so difficult to get apples-to-apples comparisons from a marketing agency.
Transcript:
I’m Jeff Randolph.
This small business podcast is brought to you by EAG Advertising and Marketing.
We’re going to talk about marketing, and we’re also here to celebrate entrepreneurs.
We have marketing news and advice that business owners can use to keep moving forward.
And if you notice the difference in the sound today, in this episode, it’s because one more
time in Kansas City, we are recording outside of the office because of weather.
Hooray.
But, still very exciting because today we’re talking to Blake Coffee.
He is co-founder and CEO of WHIR, and we’ll tell you all about what WHIR is.
But first, we’ve got another small business marketing tip to talk about.
In today’s marketing tip, let’s talk about why it’s so challenging to get an RFP, a
request for proposals, from a marketing agency that makes sense.
You put out an RFP to a marketing company, several fine agencies may respond, and what
you get back is all over the map.
Why?
Why is it so hard to get an apples to apples from a marketing agency?
Well, I’m so glad you asked, because it’s not like we’re intentionally being difficult
here.
But there are several reasons why that kind of thing may happen.
First, pricing.
Pricing may be the most challenging portion of a marketing RFP, and it’s a problem because
some agencies structure pricing by the hour, like we do, and some may have package pricing
or flat rate pricing.
When you ask for pricing in your RFP, we may not have all of the information we need within
that RFP to give you an accurate answer, and there can be a lot of room for interpretation.
Another reason you can’t get an apples to apples response for an RFP may be expertise.
All agencies are structured differently.
Some agencies specialize in areas where another agency may just pay lip service to it, or
have a partner they use for that service.
If you’ve asked for something specific, and what you get back is less specific than you
want, it may not be their strong suit, but they don’t want to tell you that it’s a weak
spot so expertise can be an issue.
Another compounding thing is scope.
You may ask for something in your RFP, and we may just not agree with it.
If you say you want organic social media, not social media ads, and your goal is to
reach new customers, we may strongly encourage you to go a different direction.
Or if you have a product that people search for, and you can’t be found in search, you
need to address search visibility.
So we may disagree at a fundamental level about what’s the most important thing that
you could be doing, whether that’s in your RFP or not.
There are a lot of RFPs we just don’t participate in, and often that’s because it isn’t a fit
for our agency.
But it can also be because the way a company structures their RFP is entirely too much.
They want a full plan, even though building that plan is our work product, and you should
be paying for that kind of investment and thought.
Or we may sometimes look at an RFP and see that the way they’ve asked certain questions
lets us know that they don’t know what they don’t know, and that’s going to take the working
relationship a little more time and make it a little more difficult from the start.
So we may just take a pass on that.
We could do an entire segment on how to build an RFP for a marketing agency, but for the
purposes of this tip, I’d like to suggest that you just have a conversation with an
agency instead of heading down that RFP route.
Relationships can tell you a lot about the way an agency approaches a problem, and that
will either be a fit for you or it won’t be a fit and you can move on to the next one.
It also gives us a chance from the agency perspective to ask the prospect client a few
questions of our own.
And that’s just as important if we’re going to have a great working relationship.
So let me try to wrap this one up.
Before you hit send on that RFP, let’s talk.
And that’s our marketing tip for today.
And we’re here on the featured interview section of our podcast.
I’m here with Blake Coffee.
He is the co-founder and CEO of WHIR.
Blake, welcome to the show.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Really excited to chat with you a little bit.
Yeah, let’s see what we get into because WHIR is an app.
I’m excited to find out all about it.
What can you tell us about WHIR?
Yeah.
WHIR is a platform more than just an app is kind of how we like to describe it.
So it’s a community platform for local businesses to interact with their local customers and
also customers that haven’t discovered them yet.
So it’s more of a we enable businesses to interact with their communities in kind of
a different way.
One that benefits both customers and businesses by sharing deals, community events, and helping
customers to explore new parts of their community that they haven’t been to before.
Yeah, and I know for that you’ve got to have both sides of that equation.
You have to have the business side on board.
And let me back up for a second because you as a developer, as an entrepreneur, you said,
hey, I’m diving into this thing.
And yes, I have to build this entire platform.
And then I have to go out and get businesses to join in.
And then I have to go get customers for those businesses because that’s the only way it
works.
It’s an uphill battle.
You’re putting off a ton of stuff.
That’s three different things.
Looking back on it, I was so naive to the process.
Thankfully, I had my co-founder.
He’s a software developer by trade.
He’s an engineer.
He’s been doing it for a long time.
So I came to him with this idea as a fledgling hobby programmer myself.
And I’m like, this shouldn’t be too hard to do, right?
And he’s like, slow down there.
That’s right.
You have no idea.
You don’t know what you don’t know.
But that’s not going to stop us.
We’re going to keep going.
Exactly.
Entrepreneurs, that’s the best part.
It was that naiveté that kept us going.
That’s right.
Let’s talk about the business owner part of it because the development portion of it,
you’re comfortable with and you’ve got a partner to work with it on.
Let’s talk about the business owner part because ultimately, they want to get to customers
and they want to make sure that they can put their deals out.
And that deal could be, what are some examples of deals that somebody would have as a business?
Yeah.
Right now, our biggest demographic of businesses is breweries.
Hey, no argument.
I’m happy with that.
We’re good.
We’re good.
Let’s start with what you know.
We were big fans of microbreweries ourselves.
So we’re familiar with the landscape here in Kansas City.
So that’s where we started because we knew they had beer releases and happy hours and
service industry nights, things like that that were hard to find.
I would try Googling happy hours near me.
Nothing would come up.
So for example, when starting with a border brewing company, they were one of our first
businesses on the app.
They’re a great supporter of ours.
They have these happy hours that they post on there that are able to go out to anybody
in the proximity of border brewing.
So that’s kind of our MO is proximity based market.
So they’re able to put anything.
They just had a miniature beer fest in their backyard area.
They were able to put that on the app.
So if you’re just within the locale of kind of a radius that you set on the app, you’re
able to see it whether you know about it or not.
But I can set my radius so that I can say, hey, this is how far I’m willing to go on
for whatever kind of deal.
Correct.
Yes.
Excellent.
All right.
So for the business owner, you’re going to deliver all of the customers and make them
aware of these promotions that they have going on, these specials that they have and new
releases, anything else.
That’s kind of the beautiful thing about the on the surface level, it’s not for the businesses.
But when they actually get into the system, what started as more of a consumer focused
platform with a business aspect has turned into more of a business SaaS platform with
a consumer focused aspect.
So we have a really well built out and we’re continuing to develop it as well in the back,
but a really well built out platform for deal management and planning and analytics.
So they’re able to pretty much plan out all of their, we focus mostly on in-person deals.
Our mission is to drive foot traffic back to businesses.
So it’s a backlog of in-person deals that they can create, curate and analyze.
So they’re able to, let’s say they want to plan their Christmas deals out for three years
in advance.
They can set those up in the backend of our system.
And then when the date comes, when those turn on, they don’t have to do anything.
It’s kind of a set it and forget it.
So they can pre-plan everything ahead of time without worrying about having to scramble
every weekend to do it.
And at the same time, they’re able to look at analytics as far as views, shares, and
we’re currently working on building out a process to convert or to set up the conversion
of eyeballs to feet in the door.
So they’re going to be able to see if the customer sees a deal and comes into the business,
they will see that traction in that conversion and really show the value of what their deals
are.
That’s one of the ultimate ROI pieces.
And we use a couple of platforms that give us that kind of data where we can see, hey,
someone saw this ad and then eventually made it into the store.
And so we’re driving foot traffic.
And there’s nothing like the ability to talk to a business owner and say, we brought X
number of people into your door.
They were on our app.
They saw you there.
And here you are.
Not just the eyeballs where they’re looking at it.
That’s spectacular.
Any hurdles for the customer itself?
Because now you’ve got to go out and recruit a bunch of customers to make sure that these
businesses have eyeballs on them.
Talk to me about what the customer gets and any process there of how easy it is or difficult.
You probably forced them to go through some kind of face recognition.
No, probably not.
I’m guessing it’s an easy process for the customer.
Yes, we try and make it as frictionless as possible.
So the customer side completely and will always be completely free of charge.
Simple sign up, just like first name, last name, email and password.
Pretty simple stuff just so we can customize your experience for you.
Once you’re logged in, you stay logged in, you don’t have to re-sign in or face ID or
anything like that.
There will be no transactions really on their side of the app for the time being.
So there’s easy data security and that sort of thing is pretty much covered with the basic
authorization for that there.
But once they’re in, they’re able to, we have kind of three options.
We have the homepage, which shows kind of a curated list of deals near them, which they
need to start liking deals to populate that.
We have an actual map system so you can go over to, swipe to the left, I guess it would
be and there is a map of the local area around you with points of deals.
So you can tap on them, browse them.
You get more of a visual picture of where these deals are in space around you.
And then we have a discover page, which is really just a page where it has a list of
most of the deals that are in your area and you’re able to filter and search and look
for things more specifically in that way.
So it’s kind of what you’re used to seeing in a, I don’t know, we kind of, we liken it
to like Spotify with a map feature a little bit, but we want to get to the point where
it’s, we’re recommending and curating lists for and things to do for customers based on
that.
But right now, fairly bare bones, but a super easy process to get in and just start exploring
your community.
Outstanding.
And so a year in business, successful launch of the platform.
I saw a post, you were kind of doing a little bit of a retrospective and said that success
is all about redefining what it means at every step and making sure you have fun along the
way.
I want to have a little bit of a discussion about the fun part because we talked about
what it took to get this thing off the ground.
The programming is one side and you’ve got expertise there and then you’ve got all of
the businesses to approach and then the customers to gain.
There’s fun in there, right?
There’s fun, there’s the work hard, play hard thing.
What does that work hard, play hard thing mean to you?
Yeah.
So to me personally, and I think to my co-founder as well, a lot of that fun part was that we
were doing something.
It was never crunch time, I guess you could say.
We never had a limited runway.
We never had, well, we had deadlines we set for ourselves, but the whole process was in
essence a massive learning experience.
And we both really enjoyed that.
We were building something and neither of us had built anything like this before.
My co-founder was really testing his metal on the logic side and the server side and
all that really nitty gritty development he likes to do.
And for me, I was getting to craft the user experience, craft the front end.
This is more the development side I’m talking about, but that was a lot of the fun was every
day getting together and being like, it would be cool if we could add this and then we’d
go start building it.
And then we’d be able to go and actually add that to the system so that feedback loop where
it’s just us two meshing ideas together and then actually being able to bring it to life
was just a really exhilarating experience.
And then that continues on and with anything.
Now we’re at it for a little over almost a year and a half now, I guess, with it being
already large, which is crazy.
With a year and a half, there are going to be peaks and valleys in your motivation and
how you’re, as with anything and having a co-founder like I have, he’s been great and
we’ve been great with each other about keep, when we’re in a valley, help the other side
to bring it up and pick up a little bit of slack and vice versa.
So it’s been not only fun, but it’s not been stressful.
It’s never been something that I’ve been like, oh my gosh, I have to go work on this type
thing.
So it’s nothing that’s kind of the least anybody can ask for in something that they’re really
spending a lot of their time and energy on.
So that’s been a lot of fun and not to mention getting out there and talking with all these
great business owners in the community and being able to kind of hear their story and
what their goals are and just connect with them in a way that’s like, okay, this is just
a new platform.
You guys want to try it out?
And they’re like, yeah, this is great.
The amount of support we’ve gotten just from our early beta users has been insane.
They’re connecting us to more businesses more than we’re even finding businesses.
So it’s just been all around.
I mean, it’s kind of silly to say it, but like I wrote, it’s fun.
It’s just been continually a fun process.
Every step of the way, every major milestone, we look back on it and we were like, I’d do
that again.
That was fun.
So that’s kind of what we meant by it.
And my hope for you is that it’s always that much fun and that you don’t have those kinds
of pressures and deadlines and runway issues that are so often attached to this whole process.
So man, bang up job.
And to have customers who are such a fan that they go out and start pulling that traffic
in for you and start working those businesses from the other side, that says a lot about
the quality of the product.
Tell me about the future.
Where do you go from here?
What’s the future for the company and the platform?
Yeah.
So kind of like I mentioned before, we had kind of a beta run with these early customers.
We’re calling them, they’re going to be our legacy customers.
So they get grandfathered into any of the future stuff that we implement.
But our beta run ended around quarter four and we’re prepping for kind of an official
launch of the platform here coming in quarter two.
So while we had our launch in June, that was riddled with learning experiences and kind
of slow rolling as it goes.
But now we kind of have a feel for what we want.
We’re getting a lot of quality of life features in the app that people expect when using an
interface like that.
And we’re having our payment platform implemented.
So we’re actually going to be able to start charging for the services that we’re offering
and kind of going out and expanding and funding our marketing and outreach efforts and things
like that.
I understand.
Yeah, there is that point that needs to show up at some point.
The funding has to be there around somewhere.
Great story.
If we can, I’d like to move on to the lightning round so we can learn more about you and kind
of what makes you tick.
Are you ready for that?
Yeah, let’s do it.
Here we go.
Your LinkedIn profile lists you as a self-taught web developer and after doing just a little
bit more research, you used a combination of chat GPT and YouTube to get where you need
to go.
As somebody who learned, you can learn how to change the headlight on a Subaru on YouTube.
Yes, everything is possible on YouTube.
Tell us about that journey and why you chose to go that self-taught direction instead of
maybe an instructor led or a different kind of learning to get there.
Yeah, so I’d always known I wanted to kind of go after the programming route.
I’d always loved the idea of creating things and I’ve always liked computers, but I never
had a formal education in the process.
I tried on a few occasions prior in my life to learn it and get in there and kind of figure
it out, but I never really stuck.
It was also self-taught attempts.
It was all YouTube and things like that.
It was hard to get things set up without having a teacher or a mentor or somebody I could
talk to directly.
Then when I first discovered chat GPT, when that first came out, I was playing around
with it.
I’m like, I can ask this question.
This is like this mentor that I was looking for in this space, but they’re going to be
patient with me and not get annoyed when I’m asking all these.
They definitely go at your pace.
You dictate the pace in that conversation.
Exactly.
Exactly.
It’s been a blend of realizing what was possible with that and then also mashing that with
real world examples on Stack Overflow and YouTube and people that are actually using
it because anybody that’s used chat GPT to code or at least that started using chat GPT
to code in knows that a lot of the code it was putting out was like % of the way
there, but you needed to fill in the gaps.
You need to have a little bit of context knowledge.
That’s where YouTube and websites and other resources online really helped me kind of
fill in the gaps there.
Not to mention my co-founder.
I could run ideas by him and that was a little bit later down the line, but he kind of helped
me understand the structure and the architecture of web development and what goes into that.
So it’s been a blend of all these different self-taught routes.
I didn’t go with a formal route because I just didn’t think I had time or the money
to go after kind of education in the formal sense of that way.
Though I don’t knock that at all.
Those are the real programmers.
I’m just kind of over here just slamming prompts together and making it look pretty.
Yeah, but I mean, let’s not sell yourself short on this one.
You’ve done an amazing job with this.
Let me move on to this question.
It’s a would you rather question.
It’s a this or that kind of thing.
Would you rather go through the Apple App Store approval process or wait in line at
the DMV only to be turned away because you didn’t bring one of those documents that you
really needed?
Oh man, I’m struggling to see much of a difference between the two here.
Talk about that a little bit because nobody really knows unless you’ve done it what that
App Store process is like.
What goes on there?
Yeah, so that was kind of our whole thing too.
We didn’t know what to expect.
We kind of came in with what we thought was just we had a gung ho attitude and a great
little app and we were like this should be it already passed the Android approval process
because there isn’t one.
So we really thought that this app wanted to go smoothly and that that whole that was
about a month of just straight back and forth with these Apple approval process people,
which you know, it’s such a love hate relationship because there is there is a quality standard
to uphold and I respect what they do with kind of scanning these things and making sure
it’s all good for their consumers.
It’s it’s a necessary evil.
It’s just the there’s an arbitrary nature to it where depending on who you get as a
reviewer they might they might know certain you know requirements on one end or not know
requirements requirements the other end that sort of thing.
So it was a it is a process like the DMV where you go in and they kind of give you an idea
of what you’re missing but nothing too specific.
So you’re gonna have to be like, OK, I guess I’ll change this a little bit.
How about this?
And then it’s like to hours later.
No, sorry, we need that a little bit different.
So it just it was a very frustrating process to get around.
But in the end, it made our app better and we were able to actually like even just like
in the metadata, the fine print, we were able to just enhance the app, make it better, more
scalable.
So it was a helpful process.
But we were ready to go.
We were like, let’s launch the app and let’s get out there and start talking to businesses.
And we’re like, hey, a month later and then we can get out there and start doing it.
So to answer your question, I think DMV at least there you’re moving in line a little
bit with the Apple review process.
You’re just sitting around waiting, waiting, waiting for nothing.
So it’s kind of a hurry up and wait situation.
We have we have similar kind of things when we’re dealing with Facebook, Instagram, the
meta ad platforms where, you know, it may automatically reject an ad through its automated
process.
But then you can appeal that and say, hey, I’d like a human to take a look at this, please,
because you didn’t get it right.
We know what your ad standards are.
And I understand why you may have flagged that.
You did not get this right.
Could you please look at it?
And depending on the person that you get in from wherever in the world that person is,
they’re judged jury and executioner.
And that’s that’s it.
You’re done at that point.
So sometimes you can wait a week and resubmit the exact same thing and get a different reviewer
and it goes through and you’re kind of like that.
That’s what really got me kind of like, you know, but that’s just the way it is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
OK, let’s let’s ask this question.
What what part of the business do you wish you knew more about?
I would go with the marketing.
Oh, yeah.
So I myself and my co I come from kind of a business leadership background with software
development ties with working with teams as a project manager, that sort of thing.
And my co-founder is a software engineer.
So we’re both kind of technical and then technical leadership side of things.
So really great for getting the product going and getting off the ground.
And I’m also my personality makes it so I’m willing and open to go out and talk to businesses
in person.
Yeah.
Neither of us have much of a marketing background as far as digital marketing, like SEO, social
media presence, that sort of thing.
And that is really where we’re lacking right now is kind of getting our names out there
and kind of investing in advertising and marketing in that way.
And that’s one of our goals for this quarter to relaunch is to be like, all right, let’s
throw a little money into Google ads.
Let’s start putting some more time and effort into our social media presence.
Let’s actually get out there and not rely on boots on the ground.
Yeah.
Customer acquisition, which is great.
And I love doing it.
And it’s fun to get a beer and get to know local businesses, but it’s not scalable.
So scalable.
Yeah.
And I think marketing is just, yeah, our marketing, it’s something that I’m reading books about
and I’m trying to really up my know how on it.
But you know, still got a lot to learn just like every other aspect of this process and
it’s true.
Yeah.
Well, at least with with marketing, you do have some options.
We can talk, but we do have some options.
I’ll say this, though.
One of the most important pieces to get right is the product product, of course, one of
marketing’s famous four P words product.
And if you if you get that right, a lot of things just go well from that point on.
If people love that product and it sounds like that’s exactly what’s happening and you’ve
got customers pulling businesses through for you, which is great.
And that’s a testament to what you guys have built.
So step one, get the product right, because I can tell you, nothing will kill a bad product
faster than good advertising.
If you have a lousy product and you start telling everybody about it and people try
it and they go, this is terrible.
That product dies fast.
So good product.
You’re you’re really in a good seat.
So good.
Great job.
I just feel like I feel like I keep saying, no, no, you’re doing a hell of a job.
Keep keep going.
Keep going.
Last question in the lightning round and I’ll free you from this lightning round.
Imagine you are responsible for tourism for the state of Iowa.
What would you say to get more people to visit Iowa?
Oh, man.
And of course, I’m asking this question because you you you spend some time in Iowa.
You’ve been around there for a bit.
So yeah, yeah, I have.
That’s an interesting one.
As far as tourism goes, I would I would say to get people into Iowa, man, if you just
love really long, gray winters and not having a whole lot to do but drinking, then that’s
probably a good spot.
No, I’m just kidding.
That’s right.
And there is a market for that.
There’s definitely a market for that.
Iowa is Iowa is a very pretty state.
And I think one of the main things that tourism gets wrong with it is that Iowa is just like
just a little bit eastern Nebraska, where I guess like Western Iowa kind of is.
But you get to, you know, northern and eastern Iowa and you get the kind of you get the Mississippi.
You get some really gorgeous landscape.
And I do think as a whole, it’s a great place to raise a family.
And it’s you know, it’s quiet, which is what sucks when you’re growing up in it.
You want to start to do you want a professional sports team.
But it’s also just like a really stable environment.
A lot of great people, great communities.
I’ve lived in a few cities in Iowa.
And you know, I think not only that, but great college sports.
I mean, it’s if you’re into sports, it’s really, really fun to go there and see that.
And as for the Kansas City people, you know, hopping up to Des Moines, that’s barely a
jump.
That’s like three hours.
Des Moines is a growing little city.
I kind of describe it as a miniature Kansas City because it’s growing and expanding nowhere
near the size.
But it’s become a really quite a little happening scene up there.
So I think definitely go check it out.
Surprisingly good food and and yeah, just all around very kind of quiet, but fun atmosphere.
I’m going to I’m going to totally back you on that one.
The the we a year ago, we went to Des Moines just kind of like for a weekend.
Hey, where could we go?
And we’d been to several of the other drivable cities and went to Des Moines just kind of
on a whim.
Crazy good restaurant scene and bar scene.
Like the food was amazing.
A lot of interesting concepts that are different and unique.
And had a great time.
Had some and as a Kansas City person had some great barbecue just outside of Des Moines.
So like there’s it’s a highly recommend we were out with some people not long ago and
said people were talking about where they wanted to visit.
And I said, hey, don’t I hope you don’t judge on this one.
But we had a great time in Des Moines and people’s minds explode.
But the people at the table were like, I know we went crazy.
Keep doing what you’re doing, Des Moines.
I’ll take you out of the lightning round with that.
Blake Coffee, co-founder and CEO of WHIR.
Where can people find you?
Where do they where do they go?
If they need more information, how do they download the app?
Tell people where they can they can they can get more.
Yeah.
So WHIR that’s W-H-I-R.
You can go to getWhir.com G-E-T-W-H-I-R.
That’s a kind of our landing page.
That’s where some of our information is about our platform.
But we’re also on the App Store as we went over a little bit.
That’s right.
We should pay attention to this on the App Store.
It took a lot.
Exactly.
We’re on the App Store and the Google Play Store.
Just searching WHIR, W-H-I-R gets you there for both.
And you can find me on LinkedIn.
So just look up Blake Coffee.
It might be Blake Coffee, PMP for my certifications.
But if you look up Blake Coffee, give me a follow.
I’d love to connect and chat a little bit more.
And yeah, just reach out if you have anything you want to talk about.
All right.
This is a highly recommend Blake Coffee, co-founder and CEO of WHIR.
Thanks for being on the show today.
Thanks for having me, Jeff.
And that is our show.
Thanks so much to Blake Coffee of WHIR.
And thank you for listening to the Small Business Miracles podcast.
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