The following interview is a conversation we had with Dan DeMers, CEO of Cinchy, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $24M Raised to Build a Data Collaboration Platform That Makes Data Integration Obsolete

Dan DeMers
Hey, thanks for having me. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So to kick things off, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?

Dan DeMers
Sure. So prior to founding Cinchy, I used to work in a bunch of big global banks, always in technology, and did that pretty much from being at a school. Started off as a programmer, started to manage It teams, and just that’s where I got, let’s say, hands on awareness of the immense complexity that plagues every enterprise organization on Earth today. But, yeah, I’ve always liked to build things.

Brett
And are you surprised that you ended up becoming a Founder and CEO? Like, would 20 year old Dan have ever seen this coming? 

Dan DeMers
No, because 20 year old Dan just focused on what was right in front of him, which is kind of how I lived my life. It was actually, long story short, it was through my much younger brother, who started off following in my footsteps, learning programming, realized he hated it, picked up a camera, then went down this whole journey where he ended up going from being a photographer to a videographer, to running his own businesses, to creating startups and then having different exits. And then I was just like, well, wait a minute, I thought I was the creative one. It was actually me following my younger brother, realizing only much later in life that I probably should have been doing that a long time ago. I just tend to focus on what’s in front of me. So I would call myself an intra printer, where I was innovating inside of these organizations, always cooking something that no one was asking but that they obviously needed.

Dan DeMers
But I thought I figured of that eventually. 

Brett
Nice. I love that. And a couple of other questions we like to ask, really, just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. First one, what CEO or Founder do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?

Dan DeMers
I would say Steve Jobs, just because of the absolute conviction and attention to detail and passion and fixation on doing something that is not better, but something that is different. 

Brett
What did you think of Apple’s new headset? 

Dan DeMers
I haven’t watched the full stuff, but it looked exciting and hilarious. At the same time, I’m trying to figure out, are you going to see people walking down the street like that or not? But the potential use of the evolution of that technology is incredible. So I’m personally excited to get my hands on it. 

Brett
Yeah, feel the same. Now, what about books? Are there any specific books that have had a major impact on you? And I’ve stolen this from someone else, but they call it a Quake book. So it’s a book that just kind of rocks your whole worldview and changes how you think about the world. Do any books like that come to mind? 

Dan DeMers
Yeah, for me, it’s audiobooks that do it, but play bigger, I would say, was the one that opened my eyes to categories. The new product in many ways, continues to shape what I do on a day to day basis. Just it reframed how I see the world through a lens that you can’t unsee. So that would be it for me. 

Brett
And that makes a lot of sense now with some of the language that I was seeing on your LinkedIn and the visuals you had. So I saw that I think the key text was making integration obsolete. And I saw you had obsolete crossed out, which seems like that was inspired at least by Mark Benioff’s play with software and everything they were doing there. So we’d love to talk about that, but before we dive deep into the company, let’s just start with a high level so can you just give us a high level description of what the company does? Yeah. 

Dan DeMers
So we sell a data collaboration platform. The simplest way to get your head around that is imagine what Google Drive does for documents and for files and extend that to the world of data. So instead of sending copies back and forth, you’re collaborating in real time. And ultimately, that’s how integration becomes obsolete. 

Brett
And take us back to December 2017 when you were launching the company. What were those early conversations like and what really made this problem be the problem that you wanted to dedicate yourself to solving? 

Dan DeMers
So my co Founder Karen and I, we’ve actually worked together at a bunch of organizations well in advance of founding the company. And we started actually working together at Citi. This was quite a while ago, and we immediately connected. He’s the smartest implementer I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve worked with a lot of hands on technologists and builders, but we stayed connected and I would say later realized that we should do something together outside of the company. Once I started to realize that’s probably what I should have been doing a long time ago. So we actually came up with a list of, I don’t know, like 100 different things, and they were all over the place, like from mobile fruit stands that deliver fruit to your desk to data collaboration platforms that make not only integration, but even apps ultimately obsolete and kind of everything in between. 

Dan DeMers
And it was interesting because I tend to like the bigger, bolder, more scary things, and he tends to be more what’s actually practical. How do we get a win quickly, and hey, let’s get a win and then get another win and another win. So we started with that approach, which is, let’s start with the simpler things. And every time we tried to do that, we just ended up saying, why would we build an app if you can build the end of apps? Which is our long term view on what we’re thinking. Our platform ultimately unlocks is metadata replaces the data, that replaces the code. That’s a longer story. So basically we couldn’t stop ourselves from falling back to what ended up being the single most complex idea on that list of 100 plus. But it was like we didn’t have a choice. Something was pulling us in there. 

Dan DeMers
And that’s why we are where we are today. 

Brett
And then is data collaboration. Is that the new category that you’re pioneering? 

Dan DeMers
Yeah. And it’s interesting the evolution of our thinking on that, because data collaboration was the way that we thought of it right out of the gate, and that Google Drive, but for data concept. But we actually went through a bunch of different iterations where we started with kind of core messaging and then we evolved and introduced this concept called dataware. So hardware, software, data ware. And then while that’s still part of our narrative, our core is back to its roots, which is data collaboration. And what’s clear to me is the world has changed where they are more receptive to our framing than they were back in 20 17 20 18 20 19 and part of that, I think, is some of the work that we did. Obviously we can’t take sole credit for that, but just the world changes. So framing that doesn’t work today may suddenly find itself working three, four years later.
Dan DeMers
And it’s fascinating because if you ask Catchy BT about Cinchy and what it is, and it was trained on the Web in up to 2021, and it will talk about data collaboration. It will use all of our latest messaging, but it kind of skips the fact that we did this whole experiment that we ultimately retreated with dataware went back to data collaboration. So I just found that fascinating. But yeah, data collaboration is a category. 

Brett
And when I did a Google search, I see LiveRamp has a definition snowflake and then a bunch of, you know, shared definition, like anyone writing about this, do they generally agree with how it’s defined if it’s been written in the last six months or a year? Or is it one of those categories that’s so early that everyone defines it. 

Dan DeMers
In a different way still? Yeah. So there’s definitely nuances to how it’s defined, but it is converging and it’s quite simply it’s the avoidance of copies. So one of the things that we had been working on for a number of years was pioneering a standard called zero copy integration, which is, I guess, looking at it from a control perspective, but that term zero copies and integration, free data sharing, these are all just different variations on the same core concept. So collaboration is the avoidance of copies that’s, let’s say, the executive summary that is becoming very consistent. Although the exact language and phrasing might be slightly nuanced, it’s now converging on that as the core differentiator. Like, if I go back to the Google Drive analogy, and it’s not just Google Drive, you can take any collaboration technology. If I create a document and I give ten people access to that, there’s not ten copies. 

Dan DeMers
There’s one. We’re working at it in real time. Whether there’s one person or 1000 people or a million people, you’re not creating a million copies. Right? It’s access based. It’s not copy based. And that is collaboration on documents and collaboration on data would work in the very same way. It’s copyless data sharing real time. 

Brett
And because of your mention of Play Bigger there earlier in the interview, did you do a POV at one point? 

Dan DeMers
I would say we did many iterations on a POV, but yeah, absolutely we did. And it’s a good exercise. It’s a hard exercise, but a necessary. 

Brett
One for sure, challenges that you experienced. 

Dan DeMers
When you were doing it, figuring out. So one of the things that you’re doing when you’re thinking category is you’re backcasting, which is you’re basically picking a future, living in that future, and then helping the world get to that future. But how far out in the future do you get? So we have a whole theory that is I’ll call it midterm because everything happens so fast. I won’t call it long term, where the evolution of metadata driven solutions will make it such that application interfaces can build themselves using metadata, such that what you think of today as an application in the future will store no data. It will simply be an experience on data, and it will adapt itself around the metadata and who you are. So basically what happens in that future is apps become obsolete. And today apps are the evil technologies that are siloing your data and creating the need for all this copy based integration and all these pain points. 

Dan DeMers
So initially our thoughts were apps were the enemy, right? You need an enemy. And then later we realized that’s too far out into the future for people to really get their head around, because it kind of makes sense. But it’s so far out there. It’s like talking about electric vehicles, I don’t know, 20 years ago when you knew it was theoretically possible, but practically no one would really end up be buying them en masse. And so we ended up going a little bit into the less distant future while still being consistent so that took a little while. That was complicated to figure that out. But the enemy that we landed on was integration, which is the copy based movement of data that of course it’s the apps that are causing it. But the problem isn’t the apps. The problem is the fact that we have to do copy based integration. 

Dan DeMers
But that always complicated to figure that out.

Brett
And is there anyone who disagrees with that vision strongly to be like, who is this Dan guy talking about getting rid of integration? You can’t just get rid of integration. Are there any people who disagree with your views? 

Dan DeMers
Pretty much initially, everyone. When I’m explaining to people what it’s like to do what we do, it’s kind of like imagine if you discovered that sleeping is actually evil. It’s actually a byproduct that you’re, I don’t know, lacking a particular vitamin or something, and you’ve discovered this and you have the cure for sleeping and try selling that to the world. It’s going to take a little while for people to accept the fact that they actually don’t need to sleep. In fact, sleeping is a consequence of a disorder or a disease or a deficiency or something that can be overcome. And now they can avoid sleeping. And I don’t know, maybe they live twice a life. So if you picture that type of a scenario like today, integration is perceived as good, but that doesn’t mean that can’t be changed, right? You can see ads from the not too distant past, the more doctors than any other smoke Camels, right? 

Dan DeMers
Like smoking was prescribed. It was good for you. What’s good for you today is often learned later that it is not good for you. And guess what? That is very true of integration. It is going to be the death of organizations if they’re not careful. 

Brett
What about lightning strikes? Did you do any lightning strikes? 

Dan DeMers
I would say that’s where we haven’t done what I think we should have done, that we will do more so going forward. So love the concept. And I could absolutely see in this modern age the necessity of that, and it only grows over time. But I would say, no, we haven’t done it to the degree at which we should. 

Brett
What about alignment with the team and getting everyone really bought into this POV, especially given that it’s changed a few times and then just in general, getting people to believe in a new category. What have you done to get that alignment? 

Dan DeMers
A big part of it, and I would say that this happened somewhat organically versus something that was consciously engineered is the way that we’ve grown the company and hired people is we realized very early on that when people hear the message and then they become curious and then they understand it, they get very passionate about it. Actually, we see that in customers. We see employees. The fact that the people applying for the roles in often cases were actually seeking us out. Meaning they’re here because of that vision, because of that point of view, because they feel the pain of that. And as a result, even in this age where we’ve gone through with COVID and all these different factors that can create environments of high turnover and stuff like that, we’ve had very high retention. We’ve had very good conviction. We have a very passionate workforce that is aligned to making integration obsolete. 

Dan DeMers
And why do you need to make integration obsolete? Well, it’s because it’s the cause of all this complexity in the world and it also prevents people from ever getting control over their data. So to the point where there are people like myself who believe that if society doesn’t embrace this en masse, it’s the end of society as we know it. It’s an inevitability. There’s no other way. The data will be treated with respect, similar to how you treat money. And guess what happens if you copy money? 

Brett
What happens? 

Dan DeMers
You should go to jail. 

Brett
Makes sense. 

Dan DeMers
Yeah. Anything of value you can’t copy. You can’t copy humans, you can’t copy intellectual property, you can’t copy money. And why? Well, there’s good reasons for that. Yet we live in a world where historically you’ve been forced to create endless copies of data. How whack is that? It doesn’t make any sense. And it’s not because people want to. No one sits there and says, hey, I’m a bank. I want to make thousands of copies of your sensitive customer data. They don’t want to do that. Why? Because there’s been something missing in the world that solved that problem. And that missing is data collaboration. 

Brett
Have there been any major downsides as you’ve pursued this category strategy? I feel like online and LinkedIn, everyone talks about all of the benefits of being a category creator. But are there any downsides that you’ve experienced? 

Dan DeMers
Definitely lots of downsides. Like anything, there’s always good and bad. It’s never so binary. And even these downsides, they have a hidden upside. But really getting into the guts of the psychology of who you’re targeting and how they see the world and what words need to be said and the whole languaging phenomena, that’s very hard to do. And if you were, quite frankly, just building an app for that, like trying to create a better or something, you wouldn’t have to so much concern yourself with that. So it forces the development of muscles that you might not have otherwise needed. But what I do believe is that the development of those muscles could then be extended even if you were operating in that type of a context. Meaning it forces you to create superpowers in terms of understanding the power of language, especially not just language, but language and visuals and whatnot. 

Dan DeMers
And quite frankly, a lot of people think you’re crazy, especially in the early days. So if you’re truly creating a category, or at least you believe you are and no one thinks you’re crazy, then there’s something wrong with that. But that’s not always fun, having people think you’re crazy. 

Brett
Yeah, it’s one of those things that kind of sounds cool, I think, to a Founder. Like, you want people to think you’re crazy, but when you’re in the midst of it’s probably not very fun. 

Dan DeMers
And occasionally it will create this glimmer of self doubt, but that becomes very short lived. 

Brett
I want to also ask you about the Data Collaboration Alliance. So that looks like that’s a nonprofit that you’ve set up to really just evangelize this category. Am I understanding that correctly? 

Dan DeMers
That is correct, yeah. 

Brett
So can you talk us through the rollout of that nonprofit and the benefits of it and really just like the mission and how you tie that into your category goals? 

Dan DeMers
So we have the Cinchy company and then we have the alliance, which was set up to enable partnerships with others that are, let’s say, philosophically aligned and ultimately plant the roots to create the ecosystem that ultimately one needs to create if you’re creating a category. And rather than cinchy inc. Pushing for standards, it’s going through the alliance, where we’re working with other organizations and data privacy experts and other such things, and it creates a lot less friction and anyone can join. Right. So it’s a true initiative because ultimately what we’re trying to do is create the category at all costs, knowing that if we’re the ones that are the driving force behind that and accelerating this inevitability, that’s going to put us in a really good position regardless. So we truly want other people to participate and contribute. So that’s part of it. And I’d say that’s actually the major piece of it, which is creating the community that works collaboratively on the standards that Cinchy, of course, already adheres to, but opens it up such that others can adhere to those as well. 

Dan DeMers
And that zero copy integration standard I mentioned earlier was the first such example. But yeah, I don’t think that would have happened without that separate vehicle, if that makes sense. 

Brett
And are you also doing lobbying then, and trying to influence legislation? 

Dan DeMers
That’s on our strategy, but we’re not actively executing on that, at least not yet. Although we found ourselves doing that almost without intent to do so just because we’ve got a number of politicians that are interested in what we’re doing, especially with the formalization of the standard. But no, it’s not something that we’re doing today. And sorry, now I remember what I was going to actually add to that is the nature of Data collaboration is actually quite interesting in that there’s a long term play, which is it’s the only way that our children will be able to live in a world where they can have control over their data. But a CIO isn’t going to buy that, right? Even if he has kids or she has kids and they’re not going to buy it because there’s no ROI on that. That is immediate. Right? So our go to market is there’s a long term inevitability that we want to showcase, and that’s the alliance that is advocating for that and pushing that. 

Dan DeMers
And the short term though is the way to enable the shift in the world to create that future where people control their data is the movement away from copy based integration towards access based collaboration, which coincidentally is a huge efficiency play because half of the It budget of any organization on earth that has any degree of complexity is wasted. Building integrations and the maintenance of that. So we sell it off of the efficiency of getting rid of the integration friction, but our ultimate end goal is to create that world where people control their data. So there’s the super long term and then the short term, but they converge because they’re actually the same thing. The same shift results in both consequences.

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast, I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io slash podcast. Now, back today’s episode. And when I was looking at the alliance website, one thing that jumped out to me was the caveman in the picture. I thought that was funny. And then going back to your LinkedIn, you have the kind of no smoking sign and the smoke coming off integration. You don’t seem to take brand super serious. It doesn’t seem like it’s like a boring enterprise. 

Brett
B2B brand, which is like, typically what I see, typically B2B tech companies are just boring. They all look the same. But I’m guessing on your end, this is a very intentional strategy, right, to really do something different with the brand? 

Dan DeMers
It is, because I’ve been on the buying side in enterprise contexts, and you’re exactly right, it’s boring as hell. And it’s also not only boring, it’s filled with vaporware. And the sales process is PowerPoints and promises and how do I make the decision that won’t get me fired regardless of what the outcome is? That’s just how it has operated for so long. And the reality is the people who work at these people are also outright. So thinking of them ultimately as consumers, and the fact that you need to stand out in order to get people to at least put their eyes on you. So you need to differentiate. You need to be real, right? So the big, bold messaging works incredibly well for us when we go to an event. We were just at a gardener event where were sponsoring a booth just a couple of weeks ago in Vegas, and the no integration sign was up there and were giving away our no integration swag and the smoking, like all that stuff was there. 

Dan DeMers
And I did a presentation and I would say at least a third of the traffic that came to our booth and were definitely one of the busiest booths at the event was, what does this mean? The obsolescence of integration? Tell me more. And it’s a great conversation starter, and it’s not bullshit. 

Brett
And I think a lot of founders probably want to be fun and not be boring, but I think they just get scared and they say, my buyers are serious people. They’re Enterprise. They’re not going to take this seriously if we’re funny. Have you seen that ever happen when you’re on the buyer side or just in your journey so far as you’ve really embraced this approach with your brand? Have you ever seen it hurt you in any way? 

Dan DeMers
Not yet. Not yet. Fingers crossed. I’ve definitely seen it help us. So at the end of the day, if it gave us a couple of bumps on the head once in a while, it would still be okay. Because first of all, it is differentiated and it’s legit. It’s like we are encouraging even our own people to be themselves. Right. I don’t know if you’ve also seen we do these avatars. We have an artist that does renders for every employee and even select customers and stuff like that. And they’re featured everywhere. And Cinchy TV, the stars of the show are the employees. And we have a philosophy of show not tell because no one wants to be told, they want to be shown. So product first. And it’s all real bold, but legit. Back it up. And I honestly think just the world craving that. 

Brett
Yeah, totally agree. And you mentioned Gartner there. What role does Gartner play in creating this category? And are you working with them outside of the event you sponsored? And then what about the peer review sites like G Two? 

Dan DeMers
Yeah, so we are so the gardeners, the forester, the 450 ones, yakrisens, et cetera. They’re important, especially if you’re selling into enterprise. And one of the ways that they are important is, although there’s debates around their relative importance in the present versus the past and how that’s going to trend in the future and all that, there’s different schools of thought on that. But regardless, I can say with confidence that people do listen to them and they actually have smart people who work for them. So I’ve personally spent, I’d say, hundreds of hours over the past years in various interactions with various analysts, and sometimes we get into heated debates and share our point of view. And what gave me, I guess, the will to continue living after all of that is seeing it come out in their research where sometimes we have a very high number of mentions relative to companies of our size and great awareness there. 

Dan DeMers
But there’s so much that has come out where it does not mention cinchy, but it basically is our point of view in the voice of someone who we met with and influenced. And that is amazing because that’s one way of many to begin the process of getting the world to reframe, right. And create the hunger for the food that you sell. Right? And what we found is that they may because everyone wants to be the creator, everyone wants to be the inventor, the innovator, so they’ll introduce their own terms, but it’s describing the same phenomena. So you’ll hear things like data fabric or data mesh or all these different concepts, but at the end of the day, they’re all incomplete versions of the broader vision of data collaboration. 

Brett
And do you view it as you need gartner to eventually use that term for a category? Is that success for you with this category creation play or would that just be nice to have? But it’s not how you’re going to define whether this category strategy worked or not. 

Dan DeMers
Yeah, so we’re not going to define if it worked or not based on that simple data point. So one of the things that we’ve done that is part of our strategy is we are designing a category, we are naming it, framing it, claiming it, all that good stuff. But we are doing what we call category hijacking, which is we’re going to surf whatever the biggest wave is, but intercept that demand and redirect it. Imagine if you had introduced the mobile phone to a world that had hoarded rotary phones and your competitors had cordless phones for the home, where if you remember those, you’re attached to a base unit and if you go 25ft, you have to get static and you can intercept that demand because guess what? A mobile phone is also a cordless phone. But a cordless phone is on a mobile phone, right? 

Dan DeMers
So you can skip the generation and go right to the end. And the reason you’re looking for a cordless is you want freedom, right? It’s a freedom. You’re not attached to a base, you can go anywhere you want. So that’s very much our strategy is if we have that eventual unification of data technologies, a separation of data from code, the enablement of universal controls, the avoidance of copy based integration, and you happen to be looking for insert data buzword here and there’s lots of demand on that. Excellent. We’re going to intercept that demand and redirect you. And how we’re going to win is not because we’re better than what you’re looking for, it’s because of our difference. Right? That brings me to one of the lessons that we’ve had to learn is different, not better, is amazing at getting attention, but it doesn’t translate to immediate sales. 

Dan DeMers
So what we’ve. Had to adapt is we are different, not better is the hook. But when it comes to, let’s say, a sales process, we are actually better because we are different. And that may sound like such a small shift, but it’s actually a game changing shift for us. Is that realization. And I don’t know if that makes any sense. 

Brett
No, that makes perfect sense and that’s super fascinating. Now, outside of analyst relations and outside of the nonprofit that we talked about, are there any other tactics that you’re deploying right now to really help evangelize this category or tactics that you’re just really seeing move the needle? 

Dan DeMers
So one is our use of just video based content. So we’ve had this vision from even before the company was formalized of just seeing even my kids who watch videos and the evolution of long form videos to extreme short forms. And I don’t know, maybe their kids will watch nanosecond videos if it keeps getting shorter, but as shorter attention spans, but just embracing that and kind of going all in on that. And we launched Cinchy TV, which is almost like an alternate site to Cinchy.com. And of course, you can navigate back and forth, but.com is for the let’s call it an old school site, but TV is what I’d call it, a new school site, which is where you can binge watch on all things data collaboration, not just Cinchy. So that’s actually working really well because a big part of category is, of course, the education that goes alongside that and allowing customers to become essentially self educated in creating a portal that can act as a destination. 

Dan DeMers
And I remember in the early days, if we go back a few years, when we started to get inbound prospects, because initially there’s no inbound if you’re doing category. When we started to do that, though, and they would hit our site and they would go to Sentry TV and they would talk about how they would watch literally hundreds of hours of the content, like it was crazy. And that just reinforced our conviction to that. So the best lead that we could ever get is one that stumbled upon us, went to our site, watched an initial video, and then many hours of content watching later, they reached out to us and they’re already educated, they already know the story. They’ve already seen the platform. Right. And that’s a huge time saver when you think of sales cycles and processes and overheads and whatnot. And that’s the future. 

Brett
One of the things that I believe in really deeply is this idea that every B, two B tech company needs to embrace the mindset that they’re going to become a media company. And as I was looking through Cinchy TV, I would have to guess that you have a similar belief or that’s what you’re trying to do here as well. 

Dan DeMers
Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve stood up what we call Cinchy Studios, and that’s our content factory to the point where Cinchi TV is actually built using Senchi. So you can watch the making of Cinchi TV. It’s one of the original series there. And I could totally see although we don’t market this, we market the broader capability of data collaboration, but I can see organizations in the future all creating their own white labeled version of the studio concept. And when we did this a few years ago, it was pretty, I would say even controversial to some. Like, enterprise buyers aren’t going to watch video. I heard that so many times. But it’s like, well, wait a minute, aren’t these humans? If they’re humans, they watch video. Sorry. And if they don’t, when they retire, someone else will, I guess. There’s no question about it. It’s like they live on a different planet and they’re a different species or something. 

Dan DeMers
They’re all just humans. But that wasn’t true. Pre COVID, for sure, but it is changing. So we are seeing that phenomena is happening more and more. So I remember salesforce launched their equivalent, and my initial reaction when I first saw that was like, I guess I was thinking that there was some relationship between that and someone who worked at Cinci because it was eerie. And then I realized, no, we’re not that special. This is just the shift that’s happening and everyone’s going to realize it. Which is true, honestly, of any shift. Right. Even the way I explain data collaboration to people is it is an inevitability. And if what you’re creating is to be a category, it is to be inevitable with or without you. All you can do is accelerate it. It’s kind of like terminator and Judgment Day. You may stop at one time, but it’s still going to happen. 

Brett
Right? 

Dan DeMers
And maybe Skynet comes back as Legion, but there’s an inevitability to it. So the same is true of anything that changes the world. If it didn’t happen when it happened, someone else would have made it happen. 

Brett
And I think anyone listening in this stuff all sounds great, create a category, build your own media brand, have a studio, all that sounds great, but I’m sure the question in the back of everyone’s mind is, okay, Dan, this sounds cool, but what about ROI? How do I measure ROI? And how do I think about ROI? So how do you think about ROI and how do you justify some of these activities? Because I’m sure it’s not an easy buying cycle, right, where they go on Cinci TV, then end up going to the site and buying an hour later. I’m sure it’s a much more complex sales cycle. 

Dan DeMers
It is. And actually we have a superpower, which is we apply data collaboration and collaborative intelligence to that problem. That actually gives us a level of insight that you wouldn’t otherwise think possible, but that wasn’t true in the early days. And honestly, I think, at least for us, and I don’t know if this is what everyone should do. Sometimes you just have to rely on your gut. Sometimes you just know. And I know that sounds strange, and getting if you’re trying to raise funding and stuff just off of your gut, that can be very hard. But when your gut tells you something, and even if the data says something else, but your gut is telling you something, listen to your gut and do what you know needs to be done that makes sense, and the results will then fast follow that. And not everything can be measured. 

Dan DeMers
Maybe one day it all can be measured, but that day is not today. So it is difficult, but I would say, at least for us, we try not to let ourselves get distracted by that. But it’s a fair question to ask as you’re going through it. For sure. 

Brett
Yeah. That’s such valuable insight.

Dan DeMers
Yeah. 

Brett
All right, now the final couple of questions here for you, Dan. I know we’re almost up on time, so what’s the number one piece of advice you’d have to A B? Two B. Tech Founder who’s considering creating a category based on everything that you’ve learned so far. 

Dan DeMers
I would say it’s don’t go half in. You have to go all the way or none of the way. You can’t just dip your toes. That would be it. And every time I would have or anyone in the company would have, let’s say, not approached a particular piece of work with full throttle, it just doesn’t work out. So you got to be all in. 

Brett
And final question now, what’s next for Cinchi? Can you paint a picture for what’s going to be happening over the next three to five years? 

Dan DeMers
Yeah, so we just closed our last round, and we’re heads down, executing and growing. So just continuing to grow that business. And the next big capability that we will be launching is the ability for organizations who create innovative solutions that are integration free to be able to package those up and make those available to other organizations. I-E-A zero integration marketplace, so look for that over the coming years for sure. But right now, we’re focused on enabling organizations to build these integration free applications initially for themselves. But I’m personally excited when you’re able to install an enterprise app with the same ease that you can install an app on your phone, one click done. Because there’s no integration friction. And that integration friction is the barrier that limits enterprise software sales for every software company on the planet right now. So I can’t wait for that to just no longer be a problem. 

Brett
Amazing. I love it. All right, Dan, we’re up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build this company and category, where should they go? 

Dan DeMers
Cinchy TV. 

Brett
Awesome. Dan, thank you so much for coming on and sharing lessons about category creation. As you know, it’s a very niche topic. There’s not a lot out there, so it’s always really fun and enjoyable to hear from someone who’s actually doing it and has a well thought out strategy. So thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. 

Dan DeMers
Thanks for having me. It was fun. All right, take care. 

Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.