Jeremy Weisz 15:31
Thanks for sharing that. How did you originally determine and think about pricing?
Eran Heffetz 15:40
Trial and error, trial and error. Obviously, we started as a very lean solution. We started with only the basic features. So the pricing was a bit lower. But as we evolved as we grew, we add more and more features. And we start launching few pricing plans because smaller organization SMBs, they don’t need to do integration to their HR platforms, they don’t need the advanced analytics and dashboards. So and they’re willing to pay a little bit less. Obviously, enterprises have a lot of demand, both around security, privacy support customer success. So the pricing is a bit different. And to be completely honest, I think we’re not charging enough because we see the ROI that has our platform has for every organization we work with. And we always say we should charge more. But that’s an evolution. I think that in general, big organization enterprises, they’re starting to understand that learning and development is entire P&L center, their start looking at it as a P&L or profit and loss in the balance sheet. They understand the immediate ROI they’re getting from these platforms, but not everybody gets it from the first get go. So it takes time. And it’s evolution. And if you ask me, the prices will be two times or three times, three years from now.
Jeremy Weisz 17:11
How do companies when they’re thinking as far as ROI, how are they thinking about this platform when they go? How are they getting ROI, when you say ROI from using Bites?
Eran Heffetz 17:24
Yeah, so it really depends on the buyer. I will say the biggest advantage and the biggest disadvantage of Bites is that we fit a lot of different use cases in a lot of different industries. So when talking to sales, it’s very clear ROI, they have a limited-time offer this week, they have a new collection, they have a new offer, they have an instruction about the new dish or new cocktail. And it’s very obvious if they send a Bite if they send them a micro-unit to their employees about this new product, they see it in their top line their revenues. So it’s extremely easy to explain the ROI and we didn’t even AB testing with a lot of our customers like let’s say, okay, sent to this 10 branches, send the Bite and to this 10 branches, don’t send it and see the difference on your own. And this is it, they’re hooked. So this is when talking to sales it’s a lot easier to show the ROI. The more difficult things is to show on Operation sites and mostly on onboarding sites. Because the effect comes, it takes a few months for the effect to show. If we’ll take one of our customers, one of our my personal favorite customer, H&M. They’ve been working with bytes for quite a while. But after they saw the value after they saw how engaging this is, they’ve created an entire new employee onboarding plan. And they’ve managed to reduce their frontal training, their instructor-led training for in 30% by 30% decrease. So simply by digitizing sorry, the content, making it bite-size, making it very engaging and very effective to their employees, they’ve managed to reduce the amount of training shifts do they need to do by 30%. So this is direct ROI. But what I like most more as a data person is the NPS or the score that the employees gave it, once they finished the course. And they rated it as 92 points effective and helping their job later on. So it was very, very impactful. So not only they finished the training faster, they were more productive in the end. And they felt they have the knowledge base and the know-how, how to operate well and how to do their job better.
Jeremy Weisz 19:52
When I was looking at Unilever, can you talk a little bit about what you did with Unilever.
Eran Heffetz 20:00
Yeah, definitely, Unilever, it’s actually a very interesting use case as well, we started also in sales department, one of their sales director approached us and said, Hey, we’re launching almost 15 to 20 new products every month. And we don’t know how to deliver this content, how to train our field employees, how to train our salespeople around the country, and all around the world, essentially. And we’re looking for a platform where it would be very easy for brand managers to create the content explaining about a new product, whether it’s a snack, or whether it’s a shampoo, and deliver to all of our frontline employees. So this is how we started. Now, we’ve been expanded more than six times since then working with six times more employees with very, very different use cases. But one of the use cases that is talked about here, it I think if I’m not mistaken, is about safety. They had to deliver a very important safety announcement to all their employees. And they didn’t have a different platform. So the obviously they use Bites. And they saw an amazing, amazing, amazing engagement rates within 48 hours, all their employees watch the content, no matter where they are. And this is like was the final stamp that okay, this works perfectly. So let’s go ahead and expand even more.
Jeremy Weisz 21:29
Yeah, I could see this. And if you’re listening, the audio, we are looking at the mybite.io websites, you can check that out. And we’re actually looking at the Unilever page and some of the implementation, which is very interesting. I’m curious, Eran to what’s been strange use case, right? You mentioned there’s a lot of use cases you could see, when I look at the solutions part, there’s food and beverages retailers construction, consumer fitness, health care, manufacturing, sometimes these things spread, and it takes on a life of its own. And you didn’t realize, oh, wow, they’re using it for this what was one of those strange use cases that customers started using before.
Eran Heffetz 22:12
So I have two stories about this. First of all, Unilever if we’re touching them, it’s not a strange use case. But the I didn’t think I never thought that they would be used for this. Before every season before winter season before summer season, they issue a bite about driving safely during the winter driving safely during summers. And they also distributed to the families of their employees. And this is something we did not think about before that they wanted the families have their employees to be safe as well. So this was something like a use case, obviously, a lot of things evolved around compliance and safety and health. But we did not think about the distribution to the families of employees. The other thing, since our product can be started using for free for very small organization. I hope I’m pronouncing it right. But in Los Angeles, one of one person used it as a mentor, to ex-convicts, to people, they finished their time to serve in jail. And he was helping them to bring that back to society. And he was mentoring them through bites, he would be sending them micro-learning units or micro-learning bytes of information about certain things, whether it’s everyday skills. Oh it still does, by the way, I’m talking like in the past, but it’s still happening. And this is sort of a small community of people that he helps get back to normal life, I would say. Something that no way I would imagine that Bites would be used for.
Jeremy Weisz 24:01
Yeah. And I just going to show this for a second shout-out to Tom Vozzo CEO Homeboy Industries. And that’s actually well to send this to them because they’re the largest and one most successful gang intervention, rehabilitation and reentry programs across the globe. And that’s what they do actually, they have a program for this. And he talks about how the organization works so will to send this to him over at Homeboy Industries. I’m curious, how do you get, when you say it seems like a big feat. We’re looking at Unilever releases across whatever, 1,400 employees within 48 hours. How does it work technically? And then let’s say they roll it out to families. So that helps the families to how do they actually get it to roll out to 1,400 staff like do they just have a central database of those staff and then they have to opt in? How does it work as far as releasing it out to the staff
Eran Heffetz 25:00
Yeah, so essentially, we’re integrating with the company’s HR platforms. And usually these HR platforms such as the UKG and SAP, and in the restaurant business, seven shifts and others, they have all the necessary data, whether it’s phone numbers, whether it’s emails, whether it’s last name, first name. And moreover, the attribution like to which department does the person belongs to what role and what geography and others, everything that we need to know. And then because we’re syncing with it, you don’t need to do anything in our platform, you simply choose by a checkbox who you want to send it to. And that’s it, and they get a push notification to their preferred instant messaging channel. In terms of opting in opting out, this is, again, it varies between geographies. GDPR compliance in Europe, it’s a bit different than in the US. But in general, what they do is they opt-in once, once we start working with a company. And since at this point, they simply get a push notification to their preferred messaging channel. That’s it. And it’s as simple as clicking a button, you don’t need to do anything else.
Jeremy Weisz 26:13
Yeah, so really, it’s integrated on their side, because they have all the information, maybe an HR platform or some platform, and then they could push it out to everyone because they have the data there.
Eran Heffetz 26:23
So just to say that in smaller organization where they don’t have big HR platform, we have a full user management capabilities, where you can create users block users, and from a CSV file or anything at all, but in enterprise, usually where the pain is bigger, because you don’t want to manage 20,000 people on two platforms impossible. We do everything by integration.
Jeremy Weisz 26:48
I’m curious, as a company, what were some of the first in — how did you get some of the first key customers? Clients? Because right now you can go to a client go, hey, we’ve worked with Amazon and Microsoft, now you have social proof behind you. But before when you first started, you didn’t? What were some of those key or a key first customer and how you actually got them?
Eran Heffetz 27:15
Okay, so as I said earlier, the best thing in my life happens by coincidence. So as I mentioned, Tal and Hagai started Bites first and they were actually the one who first thought of the idea and the concept. It was a bit different, but the core of it was still the same idea. And they were very much focusing on education and schools. But then Tal and Hagai knows, from his reserve duty, by the way, speaking on Israel, said, Hey, I’m a consultant for a big retailer in Israel. And I think this could be a great fit for retailers. And this was exactly at the time that we’ve met. And I came with the idea of frontline employees from the hospitality world, not the retail world, now the retail industry. But then things started working together. So this is how we started in Israel. When we went outside the borders of Israel and we went globally, we knew the pain is very big, right? We knew people are looking for solutions, you can go and you can Google it. What’s the search volume of how to train a new server in a restaurant, how to train a new employee in retail stores, or consumer goods, manufacturing, transportation, logistics, you name it. So there’s a big pain around it. So we started as a product lead growth company, that people can go into our website start for free and use it on their own. And this is how we started. And this is how we got very nice volume of customers. Usually it’s smaller, but very, very nice volume of dozens every month. But as the product evolved, and as we evolved, and as we saw that the bigger pain is in a global companies, global enterprises, the marketing methods changed a little bit. We just got back from an event in Las Vegas UKG, which we launched a partnership with them together, UKG is an HR platform, sorry, one that I think it’s the biggest or the second biggest market rich in the United States. And they held their event in Vegas for more than 5,000 attendees. And we’ve just a few of us attended this event. And it was amazing. And so, the marketing strategy evolved as the product evolved, and as we evolved, and fell more mature, and as we found more and more enterprise-ready, because obviously enterprises is the holy grail, but it’s very demanding on the other side, so you have to be prepared.
Jeremy Weisz 29:48
Talk about the importance of partnerships. Right. I noticed obviously, you have a partnerships page. And you just mentioned, there’s some key partners that you integrate with that you can both help each other too?
Eran Heffetz 30:06
Definitely, definitely. And first of all, you finished with the most important thing that I would say, I think the benefit should be mutual. I know that it’s not everybody’s in mind like this, like, what do I get from it. But first of all, I think the partnership should be mutually beneficial. So this is to start with. The second thing is, as we said earlier, we believe that our product should be as easy as possible to use as seamless and frictionless as possible to use. So we believe in integration. And so once you build this integration, great things come out of this, and it’s mutual beneficial to both sides. It’s still not our main, go-to-market channel. It’s not our main region. But it’s definitely a very, very, very important enabler. If we want to work with an enterprises working with SAP or UKG, or other or Azure Active Directory, and other, this is an enabler, if you don’t have it, then you’re out. So this is the way we look at it, but I’m guessing that with time, it will become a more and more Legion channel for us.
Jeremy Weisz 31:21
I know you have a long career in entrepreneurship. And we always hear the good things. But I’d love to hear about some of the failures that you learned from.
Eran Heffetz 31:35
No, I never failed. I think that over the years, I’ve definitely counted more failures than successes, I’m just lucky that the successes were big enough to keep rolling. And that’s the most important part, I think, to keep rolling all the time. And beyond the wheels down on the wheels thing. Definitely what I’ve had many failures in my background, I think the biggest one is where I was arrogant for the first, I don’t know if the first time that I was definitely to arrogant, we own some very successful bars and restaurants and TV, and is, in each one that we’ve opened, it was bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And then we went into a project which was supposed to be our holy grail, or I don’t know, our Northern Star or or whatever you want to say. And it failed miserably. It failed miserably. We lost a lot of money there. It was too big. It was too expensive. It was too fancy. It was too much of everything. And I believe that this taught me I think the most important lesson in life is to try and stay as modest as possible. I don’t know don’t fly too close to the sun.
Jeremy Weisz 33:01
What was it at that point? The successes just led to you feeling? Unstoppable, untouchable? What was it that you take from that?
Eran Heffetz 33:14
I think that with success, you develop an appetite, or at least I do an appetite for more and more and more. I didn’t know we didn’t know how to stop and say, okay, we’re having a great roll. We’re having a great run. Let’s focus on this. We always looked at bigger and bigger players and saw what they’re doing. And we said, while we did it in half the time or 25% of the time, let’s try to be as big as they are. And I think we ran too fast and too high and aim too high. I don’t think it was like, I don’t know, just the appetite grew. We wanted to be better, we wanted to be bigger. We wanted to do more things that people will talk about. And I don’t regret it, by the way. There’s a lot of pioneering things that we’ve done in the course of the last 15 years or so 20 years almost. And most of them could not have been done if we were to overthink them. If we would think about them too much, we will drill them out. But they succeeded. But I don’t know now I’m much more modest than I used to be. I’m sure about this.
Jeremy Weisz 34:34
What’s another lesson you learned from a past failure?
Eran Heffetz 34:40
So for me, and it’s a personal lesson, I don’t know if it fits everybody. I’m a person of partnerships, not just in, in b2b partnerships. I mean, I was very, very lucky to have two partners of mine. One is Roey Dor, which is the CEO and co-founder of Obligo. As you mentioned and the other is Ron Chan, which is founded together with me, we all the three of us co-founded together, also the restaurants. And the CADRE said company now Ron runs this real estate company. I don’t think I could have gone through what I’ve went through without these two people. And the same goes for today, we Tal and Hagai that we do together Bites, and looking sometimes at soul founders, single founders, and I simply can’t understand how they’re doing it. For me, it’s more about the road than the outcome. Obviously I care a lot about the outcome, but I’m a partnership person, I need people on my side, I need to consult with people, I need to talk to people. And to celebrate together when we succeed and to comfort each other when things are going south.
Jeremy Weisz 35:55
I’d love to hear on some of your mentors, and what you learned from them?
Eran Heffetz 36:03
Well, I think first is my father. I don’t know if I can say mentor because it’s my father. But I think that I’ve learned from him many, many things, actually, both my parents, but I will start my father. He taught me what eventually I think helped me go through the Flight Academy as well. It’s okay to fail. But it’s not okay to fail twice the same way. You can fail twice, but not the same way. You failed once, do a correction, maybe you will fail again. But don’t do the same mistake twice. Learn from it. I think this made me a better pilot. It made me a better business person. It made me a better person, I think I hope so. And my mother, she has a PhD but she also runs startups even today.
Jeremy Weisz 37:01
What does she do, what startups?
Eran Heffetz 37:03
She is the CEO and founder of a company that is trying to develop I don’t know how to term in English. So please excuse me. But like Beyond Meat to do it for tuna to grow protein-based tuna.
Jeremy Weisz 37:20
Like a plant-based version.
Eran Heffetz 37:22
Yeah, protein based but I’m not yet sure about this. She taught me resilience, definitely. I think this is something in general true for a lot of Israelis. But she’s extremely resilient. No matter what happens on the way no matter what obstacles she sees. She went through all of them. So in my opinion, they’re the two people influenced most of my life, not just because being parents also because looking at them and seeing how they’re doing it their entrepreneurship life. And the other two people, I think it’s Ron and Roy, I don’t know if I can call them mentors because we’re in the same age level. We went through everything together you can, but they definitely give me a different perspective. We are so different from one another. How so? Roy’s always optimistic always, doesn’t matter what happens is optimistic. Yeah, it’s okay. Ron doesn’t live today. He lives like 10 years from now. Everything that he thinks about everything that he focuses about everything that he imagines is 10 years from now, or if it’s a bad day, it’s only five years from now. And me all is the realistic part. boots on the ground, talking to the Excel sheets talking to numbers and stuff like this. So I think that the combination between the three of us was very significant. But also it’s some kind of mentorship because I look at them and I see oh, okay, this is another way to look at things. This is another perspective. And for me, as I said earlier, this partnership or this different perspective and this dynamic between the two, three people. For me personally, it’s very, very, very important in my personal growth in everyday life, actually.
Jeremy Weisz 37:46
Two quick questions on that one, what’s the company called your mom’s company with the Beyond Meat?
Eran Heffetz 39:29
Wanda Fish. Yeah. And we all are holding our fingers crossed so they succeed. I don’t know if you saw spirity on Netflix. Once you see it, you will hold your fingers crossed that they succeed because again, I’m not an expert in this area in this field. But what we’re doing to the oceans is very bad, I would say like this, and not only what we’re doing to the oceans, it’s also what we’re eating and what’s inside of them. So I think this is the future, and just hoping that it will be as tasty as the real thing.
Jeremy Weisz 40:16
Wanda fish. Yeah. The other question I was gonna ask you about Roy, you mentioned the being extremely optimistic. And I was wondering if there is a past example, story of where he provided a different perspective. Maybe you weren’t so optimistic on something, and he came with his optimistic lens?
Eran Heffetz 40:44
Wow, definitely. I can’t think of a single point or as to point to one thing. But I think I didn’t really it was pretty much on an everyday basis, definitely. Around the closing restaurant that we had in Saranda ones did not succeed. Obviously, it was tough for him as well, right? It’s hard to stay optimistic. But he always gave me the perspective that we managed to get out of it, it’s okay. Things will be sorted out. I’m not exactly sure how, I don’t know all the steps to be on the road to be in the place that we want to be. But eventually, things will work out. And guess what he was right. We lost money, we had to close the restaurant. That’s true. But we as a company, we as a group with founders, we prevailed, and it did not stop us in any way from our growth, if any, it made the opposite. Because it pushed us both Roy and myself towards tech. And Obligo is a very successful company, today’s fingers crossed, that it will stay like this, I’m sure it will still exist. And also Bites is growing very, very, very rapidly and nicely. So, maybe it’s it was a blessing in disguise. And he could see them I couldn’t, I know that I couldn’t see them. That was extremely focused on talking to all the suppliers to all the employees to all the banks, making sure everything is no untied loose ends or stuff like this. So it was very hard for me to see over the horizon.
Jeremy Weisz 42:30
There’s one I have one last question before I ask it, I just want to point people to check out mybites.io to learn more. And I just love for you to talk about EO a little bit as an organization and just the importance of entrepreneurship groups and how that’s affected you.
Eran Heffetz 42:52
So EO, I was actually extremely skeptic about this. I have a good friend of mine that wanted me to join EO for many years. And he’s one of the first people in Israel to join you.
Jeremy Weisz 43:07
And by the ways people don’t know it’s entrepreneurship organization, its founders, helping founders and being in a group. So yeah, who was the person that was telling you to join?
Eran Heffetz 43:18
That person is Nir Zavaro, also, who’s just launches the new book. I’m not sure it’s allowed to say, but I will say it anyway. It’s called F*ck The Slides. And I had the pleasure of reading it previous to it been launched. And it’s an amazing book. So I urge you all to go and buy it on Amazon. And this is for my so much for the PR here. I thought it’s a cult. All right, I thought it like a support group. Nobody talks about what’s going inside the forum and stuff like this. But I’ve been there six years now. And I think it really helped me evolve as a person. Yeah, this is here’s.
Jeremy Weisz 43:01
Here’s Nir, actually released the episode on. We talked about his book and branding. And so you can see here, F*ck The Slides. And Nir here.
Eran Heffetz 44:11
Yeah. It’s a great book and a great person. But don’t tell him I said, so. I think that EO provided me with the place to be completely honest with myself. It’s less about for me personally, it’s less about what value do I gain from other people. But for me, it’s a place to be completely honest and straightforward with myself. And the fact that we meet once a month, it allows me to do a retrospective about myself about the things that I did last month. And if I see that I’ve been talking about something or complaining about something or even whining about something month after month after month. It really puts a spotlight and says hey, enough is enough. You need to focus Isn’t this gonna take care of this. And gave me the structure and gave me the place to deal with things that I used to push back. And I used to say, okay, this is important, but this is nothing urgent. And EO has put them in store spotlight and explained to me, hey, maybe this is urgent after all. So this is it. This is the one that I got.
Jeremy Weisz 45:23
First of all, thank you. Thanks for sharing your journey. Your stories have been check out mybites.io and many more episodes of the podcast. And Eran, I want to be the first one. Thank you. Thanks everyone.
Eran Heffetz 45:34
Thank you very much, Jeremy for having me.
