Partners not projects. That’s what Matthew Barnes of Momenta Media and his company is looking for. Learn how they figure out a solution to your marketing site problem, which is not a website problem, through the different phases they’ve developed. He provides insight on their processes to find out your pain point so you can communicate your idea and make your business run more effectively. He also shares the different tools they use to orchestrate, manage, and communicate different projects across the team.

Matthew Barnes Partner & Chief Solutions Officer at SeeSaw Labs | Owner of Momenta Media | From side hustle to digital production agency and partnering

We’re here with Matthew Barnes. He’s the owner of Momenta Media and Partner and Chief Solutions Officer and Virtual Reality Lead at SeeSaw Labs. We’re incredibly fortunate to have Matthew Barnes. Matthew, welcome.

Thank you.

Matthew, tell us a little bit about how you got started and your business.

My background is in engineering. I am formally educated as a civil engineer. Part way through that, I realized that what I love is problem-solving, not necessarily civil engineering. I got started in the startup entrepreneurship world pretty early on in college, realizing that was going to be my out. I liked diving into things that were complicated that I didn’t know a lot about. Getting up to speed and trying to work in that realm and technology is very attractive because the barrier to entry is so low. You need a computer and internet to start getting your hands dirty. While I was at the university, I was doing seismic design, earthquake engineering, while moonlighting running an apparel company, so getting my feet wet in eCommerce.

I eventually went on to drop out of grad school to run that eCommerce company for that startup and built from the ground up their whole platform as far as marketing and advertising and then the eCommerce website, the whole nine yards. I also did apparel design and did that for about three and a half years, and then went onto a company called Moosejaw Mountaineering, which if you’re in the outdoor space, you may know. It’s a little bit like Ariad, all the analytics and split testing there, so diving into that marketing aspect and understanding how users interact and behave with a piece of technology. I find that thing is one of the most interesting problems for me because it goes beyond just the basic problem solving.

Now you’re getting someone to do something that you anticipate you want them to do. Closing the feedback loop on that and testing hypothesis is a very exciting thing. All the while, Momenta Media, was the side hustle thing along the way. I couldn’t get enough with just the one thing I was doing. I wanted to also find other people who were having problems and say, “I can help you too.” A lot of times that started with just personal connections and then moved on to getting connected with other people that had eCommerce businesses where I thought I could lend a hand and reshape things, building websites, just teaching myself all of that.

Now I’m at SeeSaw Labs. SeeSaw Labs is a digital production agency, which is just a vague enough term that can encompass almost anything but specific enough that you get a little idea. The short version is if it’s on a screen, we probably create it. What I try not to say is we don’t build apps. We don’t build websites. That’s a discrete way of looking about technology. Quite frankly, you can get just about anybody to build something like that. People do it all the time, ship a website out to India or whatever and get something built. Anybody who’s done that probably knows that that’s not always the most effective way to get the job done. Where we focus is we are not looking for projects, we’re looking for partners. The reason I say it that way is we’ve developed our process into these phases that come alongside a business and find out what’s your pain point? Why do you want to build this thing? Maybe you don’t know what you want to build. You just have a problem and you know that technology is probably going to be the realm in which you have that solution, whether it’s getting customers in the door, which is the way that everybody makes money or communicating your idea or even making your business run more effectively.

An example, we partnered with a company who does textile recycling. You would be thinking “How the heck does textile recycling fit technology?” There’s a fleet of drivers out there that need to go collect from these bins. That’s not a simple task when these bins sometimes might be blocked or damaged. You also need to do estimating for what types of things you are picking up. There’s this whole complicated problem and we’ve developed a solution that just works on an iPad that they take around with them. It just simplifies dramatically all of the number crunching and accounting things for a business like that.

Our big thing is partnering, figuring out what that solution is. We then do the execution phase, the build phase, but it goes beyond that, because, I built you a thing. How do you know that it works? We’re interested in that problem. That’s a scary problem. It is easy for people who are maybe not as confident or talented to build you a thing, hand it to you, and then just walk away. Our thing is we want to help make sure we solve the problem or maybe the problem changes.

You mentioned that on a prototypical client, when they come to the door, there’s a discrete process that you go through with them. I could come and say, “I want a website,” and what I mean is, “I want a customer.”

I often try to avoid specifically saying the word “website.” What you need is a marketing site. That’s usually what it means. That captures this thing of, “I need a customer. I need somebody to do something.” My bad pain point is, “I want somebody to engage with me.” We’ll come alongside and find out how do people find out who you are? What does a typical customer look like? What are they looking for? There’re a lot of different ways that we can do that. This initial prototype phase, building something can be daunting, especially if the project is quite large. We came up with this initial phase, which is an engagement that’s much smaller. We dive into analytics. Most people don’t even have analytics. If you say you want a new website, I’m going to wire up your old website and find out how people are using it.

Matthew Barnes: Our big thing is partnering, figuring out what that solution is.

An example that comes to mind is we partnered with a company in Oklahoma. They have a website and they technically had Google Analytics on it. It wasn’t very granular. We spent an initial month with them analyzing the data coming out of that to find out what people are looking for when they come here, how do they interact and we found some interesting stuff. We found that a lot of people were coming to the website because they wanted a job. This was a company that was one of the best places to work in Oklahoma. They were getting a lot of traffic from some sites that were mentioning them in news articles. We talked it through, “Is that something that’s important to you? Your business is expanding. Do you want to capture those people?” It’s something that we could emphasize in the next phase. A lot of times you’ll have where people think they want one thing, but their problem means that they need something else. There’s another one, Restore Cryotherapy. Cryotherapy is the service.

You see people standing in a box and they get frozen. They don’t stay there very long. They stay there for a period of time.

It’s not quite like coming out like Dr. Evil in Austin Powers, but you get very cold for a short period of time. It’s very huge in the CrossFit community, student athletes, anyone that’s looking for these recovery aspects. As probably many of the audience know very well, as your business is growing, you’re not always doing things the most optimal way. You’re just adding something on to help get you through the next day, week, hour, or whatever it is. They had built up this website. It became a franchise. For all their locations, there was just one more thing tacked on and they were outgrowing it. We came alongside them and realized, what is the purpose of the site? A lot of it was they needed to get people in the door. As we did that initial discovery phase, we found out that one of the ways that they were driving customers was through Groupon.

For people who aren’t familiar, Groupon has changed their model for how they do pay out. It was hurting them. The other aspect that we discussed that they didn’t consider is that there’s a particular type of person that uses Groupon. It’s usually, “I’ll try anything once,” and that’s not necessarily for businesses who are looking for long-time commitment, the type of person that you’re necessarily after. They want a steep discount and to try it once. What we have done then is before we even finished building their new website, we built a specific landing page and started experimenting with advertising through AdWords, Facebook, Yelp, all of those avenues and wired up those analytics. It’s how do you know when it’s working, and now we can get into hypothesis testing, split testing on what’s the video you’re showing, what are the images that you use, how do you talk about the service? That’s just another case of that initial phase being so much more important than you might think. It’s not something a lot of people do.

Going back to the Restore Cryotherapy, you guys went through, did the analytics, started doing some work and retooled what they were doing. For them as the customer, what type of feedback did you get from them after you went through the process?

The common thread that we usually get as far as feedback is, “How we keep working together?” They realized that there is so much solutioning and strategy that’s needed and it’s not something that usually is coming internally, especially when it has that heavy technology component. We’re now an extension of them insofar as monitoring those analytics. We’re monitoring those campaigns, making suggestions, helping them refine it. We’re even starting to engage in some other projects because they got excited about some of the things we’ve done for their clients for continually engaging. They have another service they offer which is like drip therapy, like an IV. It takes a long time and very boring. We’re prototyping a virtual reality experience while people wait. There’s a lot of different ways that we found that we can work together. It’s usually one of those things where we engage thinking we’re going to build a website and end up doing a whole marketing campaign, getting into virtual reality. That’s typically the way things go once people see how valuable that strategy component is.

I’ve had this discussion for a number of folks on that company. I’ve engaged you guys, you’ve done the side. How do I know that I got a return on my investment? What tells me?

The thing that is important to us is that feedback loop. If you think about the three stages, we have that initial assessment and prototype phase, the middle one is the one everybody thinks that they want, which is the build phase where we make the thing. The third phase is ongoing support and monitoring. The way that you know that you get that return on investment is that we bake analytics immediately into everything that we do. Maybe you’re not selling something directly on your website. You’re trying to focus on email signups or something like that. As much as we can put the tentacles of analytics into your site and show that increased engagement, show that interaction, whatever it is that piece of software or that tool is trying to accomplish, we show that it’s working. We show the direction it’s going. A lot of interesting things can come out of that.

The example, the textile recycling company, you might find that your drivers are doing things that you didn’t anticipate that they do. You find that they have pain points that you didn’t know that they had. If it’s your website, you might find that your users interact in a different way or, as everyone is familiar with, the landscape of technology is changing day to day, every single day. That means that if you build something today, tomorrow it might be interacted with differently. We try to focus on how we capture that behavior so that we can learn and capitalize on it. You get a surge of traffic to your website because some new platform has opened up or someone wrote an article. How do you leverage that and how do we know when it works? It’s an important step that gets missed. Quite frankly, a lot of people that “build things” are afraid of providing because they’re not that good. They are not sure that their thing is going to work. We want to try to be as honest about that as possible. It’s like, ”This is the hypothesis. Let’s test it together.”

The landscape of technology is changing day-to-day every single day.

Click To Tweet

If folks are going, “I need to find Matthew,” how do they find you on social media?

SeeSaw Labs. We are currently on Facebook and LinkedIn. We’re continually expanding that as we’re getting more involved in doing more things that are playful that we can surface. One of the things is that we deal a lot with startups. Not everything that we do, we can surface, but some of the things like virtual reality that we’re getting into, these very hot technologies, that’s stuff that’s very easy to share that we’re getting into.

Let’s dig into the virtual reality space. How are you seeing that fit in with your clients or potential clients?

The interesting thing is that virtual reality, as we’ve all noticed, is getting more and more accessible every month. All these phones are coming out that have the capability baked right in. We’re past the cardboard box in the phase stage and now we’re getting into to the Google Daydream, which has got a little remote and it’s in your phone and game systems like PlayStation, all that stuff. It’s all coming together where it’s becoming very accessible. The first space that this is becoming powerful is simply in marketing, because you’re able to deliver a richer experience that anyone has ever had before, getting people to interact with a product or enrich an experience like what I was saying for the Restore Cryotherapy example. You take something that is boring and you make it something you look forward to you, where you’re going to have this experience that you’ve not had before.

Another example of it is it has interesting implications like in architecture space. We have one person that we’re partnering with now who’s looking to build a specific facility. They’re interacting with their investors and they’re selling the dream, they’re selling the story. The components that we’re building for them is we’re building a virtual experience where instead of it just being pictures on a PowerPoint, they can come into this meeting with these daydreams, put it on the head of the investor. That person can now look around inside of this virtual building and see the potential and the scale and the magnitude of what is going to be accomplished. That has powerful impacts because when you go from that flat 2D version of something to feeling like you’re in there and getting the sense of scale, it’s absolutely magical.

Have you done any testing on that to see how the uptake rate is when you put it into customer experience?

The interesting thing is that it is such a paradigm shift that it is hard to find the apples to apples to compare it to. We have found that in the experience that we’ve done, the feedback is phenomenal. It’s not something anyone expects. Everyone knows what it is, but they don’t expect it yet. When you add that virtual reality component to whatever your campaign is, your experience or your meeting, it’s something that’s memorable. People come away and they’re not going to forget that you put on the virtual reality device. It’s very interesting in that regard.

We were talking about another example that you were using and it was with Kountable. What I was intrigued about is the accountability capability that you guys were talking about doing at distance. Let’s dig into that case study a little bit.

Kountable started as an idea, as many great things do. It was a startup that we partnered with very early on. The audience may be familiar with microloans. Usually, it is a loan to somewhere faraway, another country like Rwanda, where sometimes it’s for medical equipment or coffee or something like that, “Starbucks has told me that they’re going to buy X number of pounds of coffee from me roasted. I need now to go buy the coffee and the roasting equipment to supply that, and I need a loan to do it.” Traditionally, there are a lot of risks in that. It’s a very distance relationship. There’s not a lot of accountability. It is not easy to just phone someone up in that regard.

We’ve partnered with Kountable to build this platform that has several different components to it, but what it does is it tries to mitigate that risk by creating that accountability. For the lendee, what they’re doing is providing documentation, taking photographs. There’s a schedule of how everything’s going to happen, “I’m going to pick up the equipment on Tuesday. It’s going to be delivered to this location at this time.” They’re taking photographs, they’re scanning documents. There’s that component where they’re capturing everything. For the lender, they’re able to see the schedule.

As they’re dispensing the necessary funds for all of these steps, there are checks and balances that are happening. Then there’s the wrapper around it where Kountable is managing all of this and making these opportunities available to these people that want to do the investing. That started out as something very small. They’ve just finished their Series B funding. Now we’ve taken that partnership and we’re helping them transition to handling a lot of it internally. It’s like the baby bird leaving the nest thing. That’s where I say that we’re after partnerships, not projects. Anybody could just build them the thing and try to just like, “Here’s your...