EcomXFactor Uncovers The Power Of Referral Marketing With CloudSponge

Yaron Been from EcomXFactor spoke with our CEO, Jay Gibb, to dive deeper into how the Universal Contact Picker helps e-commerce businesses double (and in some cases nearly quadruple!) the performance of its referral programs.

They discuss the untapped power of referral campaigns, how to set up for success, and what can be learnt by observing top brands such as StitchFix, Morning Brew, and more.

Podcast Transcript

Jay Gibb:
Do we want to be a B2C tool that’s probably got a pretty short lifespan until people get comfortable with the cloud, like it was more of just an opportunistic approach, right? Or do we want to take this thing that we’ve built, and all this stuff that we’ve learned, and this market opportunity that we’ve discovered with all these people that are building it, who don’t want to build it, and basically just pivot and transform our idea into being more of a B2B SaaS or B2B tool provider company, and just sell this thing on a subscription basis to all these other websites that they want this functionality, but nobody really wants to maintain it?

Yaron Been:
Today’s guest, Jay Gibb is a former software engineer and the founder and CEO of a B2B SaaS company called CloudSponge. Together with his team, Jay has helped thousands of e-commerce businesses optimize their word-of-mouth sales since 2010. With a unique blend of tech expertise and soft skills, Jay is an expert at helping e-commerce stores build the right features to reduce customer acquisition costs and increase sales. In this talk, we talked about everything that is related to referral marketing and word-of-mouth. We covered how important are referrals, referral best practices, the solution Jay and his team are providing, and much, much more. If you’re not using referral marketing just yet, I’m sure this episode will be a great listen for you, and I highly suggest that you check out Jay’s solution.

Announcer:
Welcome to the EcomXFactor podcast, where it’s all about launching and scaling your business using sales funnels, automation, and smart marketing. And now please welcome your host, the founder of EcomXFactor, Yaron Been.

Yaron Been:
Hi, Jay, how are you?

Jay Gibb:
Doing well, how are you doing, man?

Yaron Been:
I’m doing great, thank you for hopping on the call.

Jay Gibb:
Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me.

Yaron Been:
So without further ado, we’ve talked a bit before going on live for this conversation. I’m very excited because I like speaking with people who have technical solutions to painful problems that the store owners have. So, can you share a bit about your product and maybe how… You told me that you’re already running with the product for 10 years, so it’s probably a long and interesting story. So, can you share a bit about your background and the story?

Jay Gibb:
Yeah, sure. So roughly 10 years… It was 2010, so depending on when your audience is listening, it might be more than 10 years now. But yeah, so we started back then and we were building basically a contact picker or a way for people to access their address books like in Gmail or Yahoo or at the time Hotmail, right? Which is now outlook.com or MSN or windows live or X… One of those Microsoft brands, right? Because they did have a branding problem over there. And basically all these different places around… People around the world store their address books, and we wanted to make an interface that allowed them to access those address books from a website, mostly for sharing interfaces, for situations where you’re trying to create a recipient list of your friends, maybe for a referral program or for e-card or event invitations or finding friends on a social network. There are lots of use cases for why you might want your users to be able to access their contacts on your website, right?

Pretty much everybody’s been through this. They’ve seen these interfaces where you’re being asked to create a common separated list of email addresses, right? That’s a pretty tedious interface, especially if you’re on a mobile phone, right? If you’re on a phone to type in somebody else’s email address or to move the cursor and add commas and move stuff around, it’s pretty tedious, right? It’s pretty bad. Even on a desktop, making somebody switch to a different tab or a window to go look up an email address and copy it to their clipboard, come back to your website, paste it into the list, it’s a lot of steps, and we were trying to solve that problem, and we did. We basically built out the integrations with all of the popular address books, and it turned out, as we were doing that, as we were doing engineering for building our own contact picker, we just discovered that there was tons of other developers who were also solving the same problem.

Jay Gibb:
We bumped into people in Google developer groups, and Stack Overflow, and Yahoo developer groups, any place where people were collaborating and helping each other out, figuring out these APIs, we were seeing them. And so we ended up deciding to, rather than just build this thing for ourselves, we decided to package it up and sell it as an API. And so we did, and 10 years later, right? Just to fast forward to today, we’ve had thousands of companies use it. Big engineering teams have thanked us for doing the hard part, for doing the… Sort of the API integration with all these address book providers and sort of making sure those APIs keep working, and parsing the data and normalizing it all and presenting it in a consistent way so that anybody who wants to use the CloudSponge product is able to just integrate once with us, and we handle all the complexity of all those different address book sources or providers that are out there, right?

And so now we’ve got all these companies that use it for some of the use cases I just mentioned. And one of the big ones that appears to be making a huge impact for them is for referral programs in the e-commerce environment, right? And so as a result, what we’ve done is sort of dissected and reverse engineered what our e-commerce customers that have giant engineering teams… What did they build on top of the CloudSponge Contact Picker? And then tear downs and case studies and interviews, and really just doing a lot of our own investigation, and we’ve assembled all that stuff, and all those learnings into basically a new layer of functionality around the CloudSponge contact picker that we’re calling Better Sharing. It takes those use cases that we’ve seen over and over and over again, and those success stories, and it tries to bundle everything together into something that any WooCommerce store or Shopify store can install, and get the benefits of that contact picker through all those learnings from those other companies.

Yaron Been:
Can you tell me, how did you discover the friction around this point? What was your company doing before? You said you kind of scratched your own itch, and you spotted this problem, but what were you guys doing before and how did you realize that this is a huge friction?

Jay Gibb:
You kind of have to remember 2009, which is when we began working, right? And back then, general consumers, myself included, were not super comfortable with keeping their data in the cloud, right? Nowadays it’s kind of normal to just keep your contacts and all your data in your Google drive or in your Dropbox or whatever. But back then, it wasn’t quite so normal, right? Back then people were used to their data being on their hard drive. It was at this transition to the cloud, and so what we… By the way, the name of the company that owns CloudSponge, if you look at the terms and conditions, is Cloud Copy, Incorporated. And the reason why the company is called Cloud Copy is because the original vision was to create a tool for consumers that would allow them to copy the data that they have in the cloud and keep a copy of it.

It was in this area where it felt like people were being forced to use these cloud tools, but weren’t necessarily really comfortable with that yet. The first thing we built was a way for an ordinary person to give our software permission to download their contacts, to download their Google contacts or their Yahoo contacts or whatever, solely for the purpose of archiving it on their hard drive, right? And as we went through the initial phases of building out that business, the first thing we decided to do… Out of all the different things that we were going to be copying from the cloud, right? We had a big, long list of things, right? First one we did was address books, because we’re like “That’s pretty important. People might pay for that, right?” Just as an entrepreneur, right? And then as we went through that journey of building this thing, that’s when we realized “Wow, there’s a lot of other people doing this for different reasons.”

Jay Gibb:
There was a tool called OpenInviter, like an open source thing that had a really broken version of address book importing for the purpose of making an invite your friends form on a WordPress site, or just any PHP site, I guess. And there was a company called Octazen that was doing it, and it was just a couple of guys out of Malaysia that ended up getting acquired by Facebook. So that product just disappeared off the market. So there is these other people doing it and there was… But it just didn’t seem like anybody was doing it properly and doing it really well with a high quality output, it was just kind of abandoned open source projects at that point.

And so that’s where we kind of reconsidered the business plan, the whole concept of Cloud Copy, right? Of, do we want to be a B2C tool that’s probably got a pretty short lifespan until people get comfortable with the cloud, like it was more of just an opportunistic approach, right? Or do we want to take this thing that we’ve built, and all this stuff that we’ve learned, and this market opportunity that we’ve discovered with all these people that are building it, who don’t want to build it, and basically just pivot and transform our idea into being more of a B2B SaaS or B2B tool provider company, and just sell this thing on a subscription basis to all these other websites that want this functionality, but nobody really wants to maintain it, nobody really wants to build it.

Jay Gibb:
And so we decided to just take that new approach. That was the 2010 launch, right? But I talk about everything that sort of preceded that, was sort of the pre-pivot. And then finally 2010 or so came around and we’re like “All right, let’s just do this, let’s launch it.” We made a homepage, and we put a price on it, and then we went to those communities and said “Hey guys, we built the contact picker that all of you guys want, come get it from us.” And that was how we got our initial, probably 100 customers or so.

Yaron Been:
We’ll go back to e-commerce in a moment but I just want to mention, I think that the most famous growth hack that Dropbox team used is something that is kind of similar to this. If I’m not mistaken, they had a referral program which they gave people who shared their contacts. Whenever someone invited someone from their contact, he would receive also like five gigabytes of cloud storage in the Dropbox account. And I think they also used some sort of an integration with the contacts in order to increase the amount of invitations. Am I correct? Do you know this story?

Jay Gibb:
Yeah. I know all about it and you’re totally right. And I think that Dropbox was part of the reason why all these people that I’m talking about, we’re trying to build it. People were seeing that success and they were like “Wow, we need to build that. We should do that, that seems like a great idea, right?” So that’s why we saw all of these people that were doing this, and they’re all basically individually building it for themselves and that’s… But yeah, that’s exactly what Dropbox did. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but you got basically some free storage for everybody that you referred. The address book integration, like using Google contacts or whatever, that was optional, you could have just typed in email addresses one by one, right? Which I’m sure a lot of people did, but adding that, add people from your Google contacts, your Gmail contacts list, was the thing that really made it explode, it’s really the thing that took it from being, people inviting one or two friends to potentially inviting 20 or 50 friends, right?

Yaron Been:
Before we hopped on this call, you said, and I totally agree, that referrals is a very cheap and potentially viral marketing channel. So can we go back to the e-commerce use case, and can you share a bit about how does this look like? And so for example, someone is making an order from my store, he’s going to arrive to my thank you page, I’ll have some sort of a referral program plugin that isn’t connected to your plugin or I’m going to use only your new plugin which is called Better Sharing? Is this a standalone plugin or it goes on top of ReferralCandy or some sort of a referral plugin?

Jay Gibb:
Yeah, it does. So the Better Sharing plugin by CloudSponge, it basically is an add on to existing referral programs or existing sharing functionality. It just so happens that in the e-commerce universe, referral programs is the obvious place where you want sharing, but there’s other places, right? Like a wishlist is an example of something that you probably have that you want your users to share their wishlists, right? Or even sharing links on product pages, where you want people to post a link to a product on social media or email it to somebody. Like if I’m browsing your store, and I think of somebody in my life that would really love the product that I’m looking at in your store, you probably already have something on that product page that allows me to copy a link to my clipboard maybe or maybe tweet it or something, most stores have something there. But now, with Better Sharing, you can also add something that says email this, and actually allows you to use your contacts to select people out of your address book and email it to people.

So it’s not necessarily just for referral programs, but that is a really powerful use case for it, right? So if you’re on WooCommerce and you’re using maybe AutomateWoo, which is a pretty cool referral program platform, they’ve got a Refer A Friend plugin, or you’re using Friendbuy or ReferralCandy or Referral Rock, or one of these platforms, right? Then our job with Better Sharing is to basically add the contact picker to the forms that are coming from your referral program provider, so that we get that benefit of that… Those address book integrations, so that your user will select people from their contacts rather than typing in one email address at a time, which we just know now, it’s proven that doing that is going to double or triple the performance of that form. On average, you’ll get more than three times as many referrals through that form, if you just add a contact picker to it.

Yaron Been:
This was exactly my next question, so I’m glad you answered it before I even asked it, because I was wondering if you split tested this and saw an increase in referrals? And if you’re saying it’s going to multiply your referrals by two or three, it’s amazing, it’s a lot, because it’s exponential.

Jay Gibb:
It can be, yeah. It’s interesting, the aggregate data, when we look at it, is that, when a user is presented with the form to type in a email address and one of their friends, right? And if that form has the add from contact button beside it, so that people they’ll click that, and then they’ll authenticate, give us permission to read their Google contacts or whatever, and then select people and input that way rather than inputting by typing, what the aggregate data shows is that, out of everybody that actually successfully submits that form, only five to 7% of them are going to use the address book to do it. You’re still going to get 95% of people that submit that form are still going to prefer to do it by hand, right?

Because there’s extra steps with authenticating the address book. There’s a little bit of probably uncertainty about, what’s going to happen to my contacts, just people that are going to be concerned about that, right? But that five to 7% of people that click that button and do it that way, they’ll generate 50% of your referrals. Of course that depends on your product market fit, and your referral program rewards that you’re offering, and there’s all kinds of stuff that are outside of our control that we can just sort of advise on. But the proof is right there in the numbers, that five to 7% end up being your super advocates, right?

Jay Gibb:
The people that want to go in and really find 20 friends, and send their referral code to 20 curated, well considered, thought through friends that are probably actually going to convert, right? Can you imagine typing in those 20 email addresses, right? Even that person who is highly motivated to do it is still not going to do it, they’re still not going to type in a comma-separated list to 20 email addresses. The only way to get those people activated and to get them really fired up to send these referrals is to make it easy, to make it convenient for them to do it.

Yaron Been:
Can you share some case studies that you have, because I know that you helped big companies like Stitch Fix and JustFab. So, can you share a bit about what you’ve done with them and how did their referral program look like and how did they utilise your tool?

Jay Gibb:
Yeah. A lot of that would happen would be anecdotal, so I don’t really… I’m not inside those organisations, we don’t often… It’s hard to get those actual figures from them, but I think what’s sort of proof that it’s working is that they never leave, they stay with us. They’re Continuing to invest, right? They’re continuing to do it year, after year, after year after year, it’s basically become a permanent part of many e-commerce stores sharing functionality, right?

There’s a couple of different things with regards to the way the emails get sent that I think is interesting, and what we’ve found… And it’s actually best described by contrasting before and after, right? Before being something that you’re already familiar with, where if you go to a referral form and you type in my email address, right? And you hit send Jay a coupon or send Jay my referral code, right? The email I receive will generally be from the store.

Jay Gibb:
They might give you a way to type in a message there and put your name or something like that so there’s something there, but you have… In that case, you have to do more work, right? You have to take more things in. What we’ve seen with some of these guys like JustFab and Stitch Fix and stuff that you’re asking about is, they’ll go through this interesting engineering exercise or personalisation exercise that uses the fields that are available in your address book, right? So if you use… In that same scenario where you’re sending me a referral, but instead of just typing in my email address, you use your address book and you select me along with 19 other friends of yours, right?

Yaron Been:
Big favor guys, if you enjoy this shows and have been a listener for quite some time now, we would really, really appreciate it, if you could take the time to give us a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever your preferred podcast app may be. Having lots of ratings and audience feedback makes our show become more visible across multiple platforms, and it also supports our mission of helping as many people as possible to become better marketers and better and better entrepreneurs. So if you’re not driving and it wouldn’t be dangerous, pause this thing right now, and give us an honest review over your podcast app, and we will love you even more than we already do. Thank you for taking the time, and I hope you enjoy the show.

Jay Gibb:
Now, the email that I receive, it can be personalized with your full name, because the address book owner is in the payload, right? With your email address as a sender, with my name, first name, last name, potentially with something else, because the address book records have lots of data, right? There’s phone numbers, there’s mailing addresses, there’s all kinds of stuff, right? And so now the personalization options the store has as it’s sending out those referral emails from you to me are way better, right? They can do a lot more to increase the open rate and the conversion rate of those emails, right? And so one of the most fascinating things that we’ve observed ais those guys, those stores, those customers of ours, they take that personalization really seriously, right? And make emails that for example, the email that the referred party receives, rather than it just coming from the name of the store, which they probably don’t recognize, this is a product that they’re being told about, it’s a store that they don’t recognize, so it might not ever get opened basically, it might just end up getting trashed.

What they’ll do is, in the from name, not the from email address, the from email address is still like noreply@store.com or whatever. From name will be like Jay via store name, right? So the recipient sees the name in that column, in the… The only way that you can do that without making the user also type the name in addition to the email addresses, is if you use an address book, right? And so I think some of the personalization activities that our customers have done have been really interesting and really exciting to watch.

Yaron Been:
This is very interesting because I know that a lot of email marketers are also… It’s obvious that you’ll split test the headline, and it’s obvious that sometimes you’ll split test the sub headline in the email, but lately a lot of marketers have also been starting to split test the name. So sometimes… Even for us, sometimes I’m using Yoran from EcomXFactor or sometimes I’m using Yoran, sometimes EcomXFactor, and you see how the crowds react, and it also affects the open rates. So, this trick of using the name of the friend instead of using a random store makes a lot of sense, and obviously it becomes possible only when utilizing your product, because you can pull the data from the address book, which is very cool.

Can you share a bit more of stuff that you’re seeing that works for brands when it comes to referral? Some sharing features that you see people using the e-commerce stores or stuff like that you see that make a big impact on the referral program?

Jay Gibb:
Yeah. I think one of the trends that’s become more than a trend, I guess, like something… Sometimes a trend just becomes standard, right? And I think this one is kind of getting, there. There’s actually stores that are attaching a referral program to their mailing list. So I think when e-commerce store owners think about a referral program, they usually think about a reward for the referrer, when they refer somebody who makes a purchase in the store, right? Like “I’m going to give you $20 off your next order for every person you refer.” For example, and the ones that are really split testing, they’ll also say “Hey, send your friend this $20 coupon, and if they use it, I’ll give you $20 off your next order.” And they make it a double-sided referral program. So in that case, the trigger for the reward is your friend making a purchase in the store, right?

It’s a transaction, it’s a monetary event, right? But what we’ve started to see in terms of… Again, just observing our customer base is, stores starting to do that for their mailing list where the… Rather than the trigger being a store purchase, the trigger is getting your friends to join the mailing list. Because I think a lot of e-commerce stores… You can tell me, but I believe that a lot of e-commerce stores rely heavily on their list on their email list, that’s why it’s such a big topic, and every time they send out one of those emails to everybody on their mailing list, it basically has a direct correlation to sales in the store, right? And so if you can get your list growing, it ends up being like a top of the funnel sales mechanism.

Jay Gibb:
And so we’ve seen these milestone programs where the rewards aren’t monetary, usually. It’s not like “Hey, get your friends to sign up for a mailing list and we’ll give you $20.” It’s more like “Get your friends to sign up for the mailing list, and we’ll add a ka-ching to your next order.” Or “We’ll give you a coffee mug or some stickers or a sweatshirt.” Or whatever it is that they’re in their store. They’ll give them some free swag, right? Some free stuff to sort of build that community. Famously more morning is one company that’s kind of famous for using a milestone referral program to grow their mailing list, and every… Probably a couple of times a year, they’ll do something crazy. They’ll give away a laptop, right? They’ll give away a $3,000 MacBook pro to get people really motivated to tell everybody they know about that mailing list, right? And as a result, they just… Publicly, they just got a $75,000,000 valuation, for a mailing list company.

And so, it’s one of those things that I think a lot of store owners are going to start asking about and start wanting to do, because it’s really that powerful marketing machine, the mailing list itself, and finding mechanisms to grow those mailing lists with fresh blood, basically, like new customers that are in your demographic is a really powerful thing.

Yaron Been:
Yeah, I also started… It’s funny that you mentioned this because I started also seeing people do this in newsletters that I’m registered to. And I see that they also offer perks in return for just sharing the emails, the newsletter. And it makes a lot of sense because at the end of the day, a lot of e-commerce store owners or business owners, they are paying Facebook ads, Google ads in order to get leads, just giving away eBooks or stuff like that at a lead magnet.

So if they are buying let’s say, a email subscriber for two bucks, and instead, they can ask a subscriber from their list to share the newsletter with their friends which might be more relevant and gives them a compensation, which is theoretical compensation because they basically offer a gift card, which is $10, but only when you make a purchase, so it’s kind of a win-win situation. And it makes a lot of sense but it’s…. As you mentioned, it’s a trend that I also start spotting, but it’s still in the beginning, but I think it’s going to be a very powerful tool, and if people start utilizing this now, they are going to benefit from this tool.

Jay Gibb:
Yeah, I think those trends started outside of e-commerce, right? It started with The Hustle and theSkimm and Morning Brew, basically three famous newsletter based businesses, all three of which are CloudSponge customers, they all use our product as a part of their growth strategy. And now as of probably the last 18 months or so, I’m starting to see it more and more being part of the e-commerce conversation, right? I’m starting to see more and more people who have a store on Shopify or WooCommerce, mostly, who are asking me about “Hey, I see you’ve got this Morning Brew case study on your site. Can you tell me how I can do that? How do I get a newsletter referral program for my WooCommerce store?” So I do believe there’s some opportunity there for any store owner that already is relying heavily on their mailing list or see some kind of successful correlation between sending out emails and receiving sales in the store. It can be something that can level everybody up, that’s for sure.

Yaron Been:
For sure. Do you have any plan in the roadmap in regards to utilizing social media referrals? Because this can be very powerful. I don’t know if it’s in your roadmap or not, but I’m just curious.

Jay Gibb:
So the Better Sharing product, the plugin for WooCommerce and for WordPress, it has a module in a Gutenberg block that enables social sharing buttons. So if you install the Better Sharing product into WooCommerce store, you’ll get that if you want it, it’s optional, you can turn it off, but it’s got basically the preloaded tweets and the pre-loaded Facebook posts and stuff like that. I think for me, I’m still not too sure about the impact. I think that in comparison to an individual hand selecting a friend and sending them a direct email, referring a specific product to an individual person, I think the conversion rate is much better than somebody who posts “Hey, this is a cool product.” On their Facebook wall or just for all their followers.

I can see why that’s an easy thing to do and people should do it, right? Especially if they’ve got a referral program and it’s more of an affiliate thing or they’re putting a link out there that anybody can use to get a coupon and maybe make a little money, I get that, but I’ve just… From what I’ve observed, it just appears that the email channel, especially the referral email channel, outperforms it by a massive margin.

Yaron Been:
I totally agree. what I was referring to was Facebook DMs or now where you talked about the email, so it came to my mind like SMSs, which also makes sense. I don’t know if it’s… Just a idea that come to my mind. I don’t want to…

Jay Gibb:
It’s a good idea, I see what you mean now where you’re saying as a direct… Like a person to person individual method. Why not deliver that message through Facebook messenger instead of through email? Yeah, I get that and yeah, absolutely. On the roadmap, we generally try to wait to get a really strong signal from our customer base before we invest in engineering on that, and so it’s definitely there, and it’s something that as we start to see more people that are using the Better Sharing plugins ask for that, then we’ll prioritize it and get that done.

Yaron Been:
And the Better Sharing we spoke about it, it’s going to be a free plugin for WooCommerce store owners, am I correct?

Jay Gibb:
Yeah, it is a free plugin. It’s on the WordPress repository now. It works with WordPress and it has some add-ons for WooCommerce plugins or add-ons, it’s like add-ons for add-ons if you know what I mean? Yeah. And so it’s there now, it’s totally free. It works with, or without a CloudSponge license, but anybody that actually wants to turn on the contact picker, basically the stuff that I described earlier with connecting to the Google and Yahoo and that part that actually… The add from address book button and everything that happens behind it. Anybody who wants that can bring in a CloudSponge key, which they can purchase from cloudsponge.com and put it into their Better Sharing settings and turn on that functionality, but otherwise it’s free.

Yaron Been:
Amazing. Awesome, thank you so much, Jay, is there anything that I forgot to ask or anything that you would like to share or mention before we conclude this interesting conversation?

Jay Gibb:
I think that one thing that we’ve produced that I think a lot of your listeners might find useful is an e-commerce sharing workbook. You can just get it on cloudsponge.com, there’s a place to download it straight from the homepage of cloudsponge.com. And it’s basically a three-step PDF that helps a store runner… Starts off by taking an inventory of all the sharing functionality that stores have. So you can sort of check off the ones that you do have and identify the ones that you might want to consider, right? The ones that you don’t have yet. And then the second step is looking at each of the ones that you’ve checked off, and it just kind of asks you some high level questions about that functionality. Are you making people type in a comma separated list of email addresses? Are you emailing it at all?

And really going through a list of almost like, yes, no questions about each of those functions… Basically like an audit, to understand whether or not you’re fully capitalizing on each of those things. And then the third step is a metrics tool where the reader can look at it, and if they haven’t thought about how they’re going to measure each of those features in terms of whether or not they’re working or there’s room for optimization, or if they’re doing any kind of split testing or iterative improvements, it kind of forces the reader to think about “How am I going to measure the baseline, for starters, but the incremental improvements to each of these sharing features. And so it’s a short PDF, we made it as a free gift just to get people thinking about the sharing functionality and word-of-mouth.

Jay Gibb:
Because really like with… Especially with new stores or stores that are not at a place where they’re able to spend [a lot of 00:32:36] paid acquisition, making sure that you’ve sort fully capturing all the capabilities of the word-of-mouth and monetizing the existing customers that you do have probably should be a priority, right? Is this going to be a pretty low customer acquisition cost in comparison to paid advertising for the most part? And so that’s kind of what we’re trying to do with that workbook is really make it front and center and take everything we’ve learned over the last 10 years and put it all into one sort of easy to digest tool for store owners.

Yaron Been:
Cool. And this is available in the CloudSponge website?

Jay Gibb:
Yeah, that’s right, it’s just cloudsponge.com. There’s a couple places on the homepage where you can go to download the workbook and I’ll make a link, that’s cloudsponge.com/ecommXF. Any of your listeners can go to and it’ll take them straight to the right place for that.

Yaron Been:
Awesome, great. So if people want to see the PDF they’re going to be… They can look for it in your website, but if they want to download the plugin, they can look it up via the backend of the website? In the plugin section, am I correct?

Jay Gibb:
Yeah, that’s right. They can just go to the plugins section and search for Better Sharing or search for cloud sponge, and it’ll come up in in the wordpress.org repository.

Yaron Been:
Nice. Awesome. And is there anywhere else that people connect with you guys, LinkedIn, social media, anything else that you would like to mention drop a link?

Jay Gibb:
We’re trying to be better on Twitter. I love Twitter personally. And so we’re trying to use it more as a company. So our Twitter handle is CloudSponge and my personal Twitter handle is CircuitFive. So if anybody wants to reach out to me personally, that’s probably the best way to do it, is CircuitFive on Twitter.

Yaron Been:
What is the significance of the name?

Jay Gibb:
CircuitFive, I came up with it when I was an impressionable teenager or maybe in my early twenties and it was inspired by Timothy Leary’s Circuits of Consciousness. If you look up Timothy Leary, he’s got these eight circuits of consciousness that he wrote about, and circuit five is the one that sort of resonated with me when I was a teenager. So I’ve had the same handle for forever.

Yaron Been:
Oh, that’s cool. I’ve Just been binging all day long on Terence McKenna stuff, and obviously he mentions the Timothy Leary a lot because Terence McKenna… He was a big inspiration for Terrence McKenna. Terence McKenna is just a mind blowing genius in my opinion, but it’s not co-related to e-commerce to be honest. Yeah, for sure. Cool, but for sure I’m going to check this out as well. I’m very excited because I haven’t read any of Timothy… I think I read one of his books, but I don’t recall the circuit stuff, but sounds interesting.

Jay Gibb:
Nice.

Yaron Been:
Cool. Awesome, thank you so much, Jay. It’s been a pleasure and yeah, I’ll let you know as soon as we publish the podcast. Take care.

Jay Gibb:
Okay, great. Thanks for having me.

Yaron Been:
Bye-bye.

Jay Gibb:
Bye.

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Yaron Been:
Hey guys, this is Yaron again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, if you want to learn more about e-commerce and marketing, make sure you check out our YouTube channel, which is called EcomXFactor-Official. Number two, check out our Facebook group, which is called EcomXFactor marketing and e-commerce mastermind. This is a great place to ask questions and connect with other business owners. And last but not least, if you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues. Plus leave a review at your favorite podcast app.