Yeah, I think it’s really a mixture of three things. One is, where is the underlying technology disruptions happening? So, if you go back to 2010, the disruption that was happening was the iPhone was coming of age. The iphone 4 had just been released, it had a beautiful display a great camera—certainly a fraction of what we have today. But it was a game-changing technology piece. It was still small, it was yay small, but it was it was definitely fully functional as an engine.
The second thing is really deeply connecting to the customer. So really talking to customers, working with it. And if I didn’t have the Kaboodle background, I would not have the knowledge of customers. And if I didn’t partner with Tracy, I wouldn’t have that second other knowledge of customers. So, if I think of my knowledge about passion, about what people want, etc, was at a certain level back in 2010, 10 years later, it’s at a whole different level.
The third thing is to then look at how do you use technology to bring these pieces together to innovate. So if you think of trends, technology and deep consumer insights, when you combine these three things, it’s important. And then once you build it, it’s important to keep testing your assumptions. One of our assumptions back in 2010 was that in order for this product to succeed, we would have to remove the background of the images so that they don’t have all the clumsy backgrounds.
And in 2010, the technology was very nascent, so we partnered with a lot of PhDs and stuff, but we couldn’t get it going in the first year. We said, “You know what, we can’t do it, so let’s just apply a filter and work with it.” And here we are, 11 years later, and finally, you see third party technology coming of age. It is still very sparingly used. And we’ve been working with different backgrounds for now 10 or 11 years and people have been selling and buying on the platform. So, retesting those assumptions is super critical.
