Episode 24: Data As Currency – Transforming PR Into a Powerful Sales Function

Gain insight into how serial entrepreneur and CEO at Delight Labs, David Niu, has cracked the code on leveraging PR to drive sales and increase business value. David emphasizes the importance of using “data as currency” and shares how this strategy has played a pivotal role in his journey of founding and exiting three successful companies. He reveals his methodical approach to PR at Delight Labs, where his team helps clients identify, organize, and utilize their unique data to attract media attention and build organic traffic, generating immediate interest and creating long-term SEO value.

Listen & Subscribe:

Digital PR and Data

Aaron: Tell me the story of buying a one-way ticket to New Zealand. 
 
David: So I had gone to an EO conference and there was this gentleman speaking and talking about how come we save up all this money and then we retire and then we have money but we don’t have time. So it sparked this idea of saying instead of doing that, what if we chop up our kind of retirement throughout our lives versus saving, because a lot of people, they want to travel, but they can’t physically anymore. 

So that’s when it really sparked it in my mind. And prior to marrying my wife, we had gone to the session where we do some pre-marriage questioning and hopefully increases the chance of success. And one of it was what are your dreams in life? So we were asking each other and one of mine I shared with her was like, I would like to take this career break instead of like just backloading it. 

And my wife is probably a little bit more conservative than I am. However, because I shared it with her when, when you hear other people share their dreams, you want to make them come true. So after BuddyTV, I said let’s go on this “careercation” or career vacation and so that’s how I convinced her and she was on board and we bought one way tickets to New Zealand, stored all of our belongings in the storage area and at that time we only had one daughter and she was 10 months old. 

Aaron: I think you traveled for a year?  

David: Six months.  

Aaron: Six months, okay. And in the course of that travel, you wrote a book and you developed the idea for a company. You’re a serial entrepreneur. You have three exits, which is very impressive. Tell me a little bit about the way that you germinate and came up with the idea for TINYhr, which then became TINYpulse. 

David: When I was going on my careercation, one of the things I wanted to understand is how can I be a better leader? 

One of the things I struggled with is how can I build a great culture? How can I inspire people and create a place that I want to go work at? So during this time, I still like to be very disciplined despite having a lot of family time. I thought why don’t I just reach out to business leaders wherever I go and just check out their place, give food recommendations, but also just understand their business and how do they create culture and leadership in these disparate industries and disparate geos. 

So I spent some time doing that. And by talking to them, I realized that it was still all comes down to people and retaining and attracting great talent. So if that was still the problem set that was universal, despite geography, size or industry is, then I started thinking is there a potential, a solution to enable that? 

And I think one of the most haunting feelings for any business leader. It’s when they get that two weeks notice out of the blue, they’re just like, “What? How come I didn’t see it? How can I save you?” But usually it’s too late as we all know. So then I thought is there a way that we can get early detection or early warning system so that us as leaders, we can make changes sooner rather than later. 

So that became the impetus for TINYpulse. And a lot of times I went back to the people I interviewed when I was traveling around and I said, Hey, Aaron, you said this was important. I’ve got something. Would you like to try it out  for free and give me some feedback? And so that’s how I started getting the ball rolling on that TINYpulse side. 

The Birth of TINYpulse

Aaron: And I know we’ve talked about the role that PR played in building TINYpulse and ultimately in significantly increasing the value of TINYpulse. When it came time for exit, it seems to me that even the genesis of TINYpulse in writing a book PR was formative in launching the company as well. So maybe give me that through line. 

What way did PR help you to build the company, exit the company, and how does that tie to what you’re doing today? 

David: First of all, the confession is I had failed in PR so many times prior to finding something that worked for me. So I did not think that PR would be so pivotal to the success of TinyPulse. 

But what had happened was at the very beginning of TinyPulse, I had gone to a conference. And on stage speaking was Cameron Herold, one of the co-founders of 1-800-GOT-JUNK. And he asked everyone, “Do people know my brand 1-800-GOT-JUNK?” And invariably everyone raises their hand. And then he says, “Guess how much we spend on marketing?” 

And people are throwing out these wild figures. Then he says, “Okay the answer is we spent zero on marketing.” And then you could hear like a pen drop. They’re like, how is that possible? And, the aha reveal was he’s put all that marketing budget into PR. And at this time, I’m at the edge of my seat, I’m like, wow, he must’ve figured out a different way. 

And one of his platforms is treating PR as a sales function versus just a comms function. So then afterwards I approached him and I was really fascinated by his approach because I had never heard that before. And maybe that was why I had failed in hiring agencies on the PR side. So I took that approach. 

I got him as an investor, got him as an advisor, and then I started orchestrating that early on in the TINYpulse days. So I started employing this playbook. And very early on, I had reached out to someone at the BBC who likes to write about company culture or work environment. So talked to him, I didn’t know what was going to happen. 

One day when I was at home, I was just looking at my leads on my phone because that’s a harbinger to if we’re going to grow and have sales. And every time I press refresh on my leads. I saw that the leaves were going up. I’m like, what is going on? Because it never grows that quickly. And I thought for a split second that we were getting hacked because there’s just no way. 

What I realized was, could it be that article in the BBC went live? I did a search and indeed it had gone live. And so the impact in Europe, East Coast, Central and was rippling through. We’re getting hundreds of leads. People were signing up and buying it without even trying the software. 

More importantly, at that time, we were also going and getting financing. I think that also added millions to our evaluation because it had this aura. And this exclusivity that investors also wanted to be a part of. So that was very instrumental in the early days of TinyPulse and something that we kept on investing in all the way through the acquisition. 

The Role of PR in Business Success

Aaron: I understand PR is a sales process or a function of sales. Talk me through the process that you use in your new company, Delight Labs, and examples of early results that you’ve achieved?  

David: One of the things at Delight Labs and what we really focus on the PR side is one, we do want it to have the discipline of sales. 

So when we have hard numbers, we can debrief and figure out what’s working in the funnel for campaigns. The other thing that we really think about is that the currency for PR is data. Data is the currency of PR because absent of data, we just have opinions. The premium is what currency or what data does a client have? 

And almost every client has data, but it’s about being smart about it, orchestrating it digesting it and having data points that you pitch to reporters and journalists who, and then they care about it because that’s something they cover, our first proof point client was in surrogacy because I had no idea if we just got lucky at TINYpulse or can we create that motion that we did in PR and apply it to other clients and get the same success rate, right? 

Surrogacy is so crazy. I have no idea how that happened. Industry work, but if we can prove it for them, then maybe this Delight Labs approach has wheels. We looked at their data and one of the things is we, a lot of people have questions about surrogacy because one, it’s very intensely personal. 

If you can’t have a child and you want a child, it’s usually costs a lot of money. And there’s a lot of information asymmetry, like people in the industry know a lot, but other people who’ve never done it before, just, they just don’t know. There’s a lot of questions. We looked at the top questions that people cared about, and then we said what data can we have that you have that we can check off those boxes? 

For example, how much does it cost? Is the cost going up? What’s the inflationary pressures on surrogacy? How long does it take, the legalities of it? Then we created these reports, like the state of surrogacy. And by using that, not only did we get press to cover it because they wanted the data points, but we also got backlinks from other people. 

And now even AI will, when there are blurbs, will also cite those data points. So that’s just one example of how we leverage that. 

Aaron: Yeah, that’s one of the things that intrigues me about the approach that you’re taking. Because of and because of the rise of LLMs and AI overviews in search results and because of how clear it is, brand building and creation of citations in particular in important forums like Reddit and Quora are to presence and prominence in those AI overviews. 

I like the approach that you’re taking. It seems to me you have a couple of things that, that work very well in AI overviews. You have data that is differentiated it’s non consensus data. No, it’s not two plus two equals four. No one gets cited for that. That just is in the overview. And it can quickly build brand for clients, which is critical to succeeding in such a fragmented and rapidly evolving search landscape. 

Let’s go back to earlier in your entrepreneur journey. I would love to hear more about the first couple of companies that you built and sold and what you learned along the way. You then brought to TINYpulse and you bring to Delight Labs. 

David: The first company that I started, I dropped out of business school. I met a classmate, Andy Liu, a very prominent local entrepreneur here in Seattle. So the company was called NetConversions, and we were trying to take some professors research that we heard during Welcome Week, ironically, and we were trying to commercialize it. And the whole premise is it ended up being, if we can look at how users are engaging with a website page, then how can we optimize that website and usability aspect to yield more of the outcome that they care about. 

So a client would be like American Express. They want people to fill out a credit card form. How can we optimize the yield on that? If you optimize it 10%, that could be a 10% increase in the application process and sale, so it’s very important for these clients. But we made a ton of mistakes along the way. 

So we probably don’t have enough time for all of them. But early on, we just had these big visions. This is before the first dot com bubble. So we started in 1999/2000. And people would ask me like, “Hey, what’s the end goal for NetConversions?” We’re like, “Oh of course we’re going to go IPO.” 

Are we going to sell for, hundreds of millions of dollars? As I think back, I’m like, that was so silly. Like our goal should have been, we’re going to build an offering that delights customers. And as a result, they pay us. And if we do that enough times, then we have optionality, but it shouldn’t be like jumping to that optionality overnight. 

One of the biggest lessons we learned at NetConversions is sales. Sales in business school is almost like a dirty word. Rarely take a sales class. And then, we are like interpretation sales, like the used car salesperson, right? We were pretty arm’s length about that, but when things, then the dot com crash happened and we were really struggling, we couldn’t raise any more money and so we’re like, look, we either have to shut this down or we’re going to have to do something different. And at that time, Salesforce had just launched, which is crazy to think about in hindsight, right? And they had a five-seat model for, I don’t know, it’s like 1999 or free per month. I’m like, “Okay, let’s try it.” So we tried it, and then we started reading everything about sales, like Neil Rackham spin selling. 

I would say that was one of the biggest lessons learned, because as I sit back now, everything in life. It’s about sales and then to understand that is I’ll never go hungry because I know how to sell and it impacted NetConversions, BuddyTV, and then obviously TINYpulse and Delight Labs. 

I would say that is a great lesson learned. I would encourage everyone to at least understand the mechanics of sales. 

Aaron: So you sold NetConversions? 

David: Yes. It was aQuantive, which is local to Seattle, that then became Microsoft.  

Aaron: Tell me about BuddyTV.  

David: So BuddyTV was also hard. For NetConversions, we raised about a million dollars, and then it’s much easier to raise money for BuddyTV, so we raised about ten million dollars. 

The initial goal was to create a two-sided marketplace. One side is we’re going to attract a lot of eyeballs, and then based upon that, we were going to look at how they consume media and then try to become a new Comscore or Nielsen competitor as everything went digital versus back in the day, they would literally put a device on your TV set top box to see what you’re watching. 

We said there’s got to be a better way because everything’s going digital, look at what they’re listening to, what they’re looking on the website, and then provide better reports of advertisers can make better decisions. It’s hard enough to create a one-sided marketplace, much less a two-sided marketplace. 

And one of my realizations is that’s why when you can create a two sided like an Uber or Airbnb, they demand such disproportional returns because it’s just so hard. You’re going to have to raise a ton of money and burn fast and either you make it or you don’t. And I don’t know if that was really at that time in Andy and I’s DNA, my co-founder and I’s DNA, because we were very good stewards of money, and we’ve never lost money for investors. 

But we have to be comfortable with losing to actually hit that outcome. And we weren’t, I think, in hindsight. I don’t know if there was a company to values mismatch that I think back upon. We are trying to create like millions and millions of page views and unique visitors to the site. So if we were going to pay for that, it would just cost a lot of money. 

And then if we don’t pay for the PPC, the spigot turns off, right? So that taught me a lot about the value of SEO and the durability. At one point we got to 30 million uniques on a monthly basis just by doing SEO. And I think that also was maybe the harbinger prior to TINYpulse about how PR SEO and this organic. 

It’s just so important to companies in terms of control. They get to control that versus paying someone and really being the Googles and the ad sense controlling you based on your pocketbook. 

Delight Labs and PR Strategies

Aaron: Most entrepreneurs would brag. They would tell a story about how they triumphed three times. You told a very transparent and objective, and also I think introspective story, about what went well and what didn’t go well, which leads me to PR. 

In what ways are you personally comfortable PR and in what ways have you not been comfortable with PR, as the person being interviewed, and how has that led you to the approach that you use with Delight Labs? 

David: I will always be slightly nervous going into an interview with a TV station, like when I was interviewed by the BBC and I can only stare at a black screen. 

I’m sure my blood pressure and my heart rate was all elevated. Yeah, but I also know that’s part of the game that CEOs and founders usually have to play. And so one of the things that’s also very important is that when I talk to prospects, it’s like, “Hey, are you going to be comfortable?” Because these reporters, they don’t want to talk to a spokesperson, unless maybe you’re a Fortune 500 company, right? 

They want to talk to the CEO and get these types of stories. One of the things, despite my discomfort, I’ll also think about my goal is just to tell story, right? They’re trying to do their job, which is to get great materials and stories tells, just tell the angles so much better. So that’s one thing. 

And then when I talk to clients, as I try to reiterate that with them as well, and also provide media training. We have a former newscaster and social talk and put them at ease. But I know that everyone’s a little bit different. There’s always going to be a little nerves, but I say welcome it. 

If it because that means that there’s opportunity there, because if you were just chatting, you had no nerves, the stakes might not be there because if you do a great job here, it could have a profound impact on your business that sometimes it doesn’t happen. 

But sometimes when it hits like the BBC, it can really change the trajectory. 

Aaron: Yeah, the focus on data also creates comfort because it’s not about the story I tell about me. It’s about this information that I have to share, which is objectively true. And all I need to do is tell that story accurately and clearly. 

David: I would say yes and no, right? The yes part, yes, is the data is the underpinning because that’s ones and zeros. It’s fact. So the data gets us through the door, but to really bring the story to the data to life is telling human interest stories on top of that, right? So I think that’s why you have to be able to do both, have the hard edge, but also the soft edge and constrain the data and telling stories around it.  

Aaron: You start with data and tell a clear story about data, rather than starting with a set of assertions about my product or my service or my background. It’s a much better foundation. 

David: Oh, a hundred percent. I remember Cameron said, “Put yourself in the shoes of a reporter.” 

First, we’re helping them do their job because they’re very busy. But nowadays the first thing they’ll do is they’ll look at their phone and they’ll look at the message. So if they don’t read the subject line, if the subject line is not enticing, you have one second delete. Then you only have a few sentences if they open it to decide if they want to keep reading it and respond. 

Or they’re going to delete. Part of that is do we have something unique in terms of data? When you said, “Hey, I’m going to say our product is the best since sliced bread?” Delete. But, if you have data, and then you tell the story, it’s much more likely that you’re going to earn the right to go to the next stage of their mental pipeline, which is oh, let me reply and let me learn more about this. 

Aaron: You mentioned the power and the value of the organic traffic label to generate. First at BuddyTV and then a TINYpulse. I know that is a part of the strategy with Delight Labs. Talk a little more about that. What have you seen as the byproduct of the successes you’ve achieved? How does that work at a methodological or systematic level? 

David: Yeah. First, we know that investing in PR and that organic traffic actually works because when we were acquired by Limeaide and they were an older company and they were publicly traded, we took snapshots of our SEO profile, and we just dominated them on domain authority, even though we’re a younger domain, referring domains, and then backlinks. 

It was very stark. With our clients, we focus on the same thing, like they may be doing PPC and ad buys, which is great. But how can we bring synergistic organic traffic to them? That could be they, someone reads a PR article and they come to their site. That’s a direct outcome. Indirect outcome could be they read that article or that article sits there, but it has a reference to them. 

There’s a SEO long tail that will happen as well. And then third is if they’re really creative and they’ve got really great data, they can create events around that as well. Let’s do a webinar around this data and get interested prospects and customers to come and listen to us as we tell more stories that impact their business in a positive way. 

So there’s a lot of organic ways to have that PR and that data and then spin more value around it versus just saying, “Oh, I feel great. I got this piece of earned media, but we can bring more value out of it.” 

Aaron: So the company is called Delight Labs. At TINYpulse, you focused on delighting your customers. 

I had the privilege of speaking at a couple of your conferences and we know that joy and delight were a through line there. It seems to me, even as I tie back to a career that the notion of pursuing joy now, creating delight for other people is a theme in our life. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and how you think about that and what role that plays in animating the decisions that you make and what you create? 

David: There was a point of time when TINYpulse was starting, 2011-ish, where it was about like products needed to like customers, right? I wanted to take that and that resonated with me, but I wanted to take a step further and say that the organization also needs to delight internal customers, not just the external people who are paying, but internally, like our culture and our people. 

So first, in our acronym, the D in delight was delight customers, but that was externally and internally. And that’s always resonated with me from a values point of view. I think the through line with Delight Labs is, I bought that URL, not knowing what I was going to do with it, but I just love the concept that could do almost anything, but, it has to focus on bring some type of joy and delight. And as I get older, this year I’m 51 or I’ll be 52 later. What type of delight does my endeavors bring to my family and being in myself and being much more intentional, especially around joy, because I don’t know. I think in the past I would say things like delight, enjoy spending time with my family, but my actions may not be congruent with it. So now I try to be much more congruent and one of the reasons I’m doing a services based business versus a venture backed business is because I can actually control my time better to spend more time with things that I care about and be more congruent with my values such as delight and joy. 

Lessons From Past Ventures

Aaron: I think that’s fantastic. Reflecting on the massive change that we’re seeing in the world of AI, in digital marketing overall, in the search landscape even in the PR landscape as well. What do you envision as the future for digital marketing, maybe marketing overall, and how does that differ from what you’ve seen in the past? 

David: One of the biggest changes that we’re already seeing is that when people, one, they’re using AI or ChatGPT to do searches now, so they’re skipping around these search engines, or if you’re doing search in a search engine Google will give you that overview or that AI generated snippet, right? So very less attribution to potential companies who want SEO versus that game in the past with that means there’s just going to be less traffic and you have to have unique data is not to plus two equals four, but there’s something unique like the price of the cost of surrogacy has gone up 17 percent from 55,000 to 62,000 or whatever the math is, right? 

And then people are like, “Oh now if I want to learn more, I can click on it.” We have to shoehorn our strategy to use that as a tailwind versus a headwind, because if we keep doing the same thing, we’re just going to get pushed down. It’ll be less relevant. So I think that data part will become more important. 

I think another part of digital marketing is the rise of, social, like social was always important, but now we have like this. Like these shards that are much more like siloed. Someone might have a thousand followers, but those thousand followers doesn’t seem like a lot compared to millions, but those thousand really care about what he or she says and could be really targeted to my ICP, my ideal customer profile, who I want to get in front of. If I am able to engage with them, and they resonate with my offering, and we can do something together, then I can actually reach my ICP who follows that person. I also think that’s going to be a, thinking about being creative to directly influence and reach my ICP versus just paying for it in PPC, which is super important. But then also, how can you add more fuel with the data as currency on the new kind of AI SEO and then also on social. 

Aaron: That makes a lot of sense. Do you have another careercation in your future? 

David: Yeah. So I think that’s a great question. My kids are, right now, 13 and 10. I would love to take them somewhere and live a year abroad. I know society’s pressures are like, you can’t take home when they’re in high school and it’s just. It just randomizes the resume and the pattern recognition from admissions officers in college. 

I don’t know if I believe that, and I think it’s about differentiation and how you stand out. I would say, but the chances of that are probably lower, but certainly when my kids are not home anymore, I would love to spend more time and live three months, six months in Europe, maybe South America or Asia again, but not just be anchored here in Seattle because there’s so much that I still want to see in the world. 

Aaron: I can certainly tell you from our experience that you can send your kids to school elsewhere, you can live elsewhere, and it turns out fine. I have two daughters who are doing that in New Zealand. One who finished school in New Zealand, and we go to New Zealand tomorrow to take the other to school. 

David: Wow. Wow.  

Data Limitations Due to Patient Privacy

Aaron: Yeah, so it’s certainly possible. You made the statement, and I think it’s true, that everybody has data, but they don’t realize that they have data. For example, if we think of healthcare organization or in particular, let’s say a medical device manufacturer, how should they think about data and data that becomes currency for PR in a context that has so much to do with patient privacy? 

David: I think in the context of medical advice, there is this whole underpinning of what you can and cannot disclose because of patient privacy. So that’s when I think they really need experts to help them because it’s not like you hire some intern or data scientist and he or she just creates this magical report. 

It takes a lot of refinement and an at bats and then pitching it to journalists and getting feedback and knowing what you can and cannot share. And probably most importantly is how do you put that all in one single source of truth, right? So that you can do cross tabs and you can look at the data in different ways. 

I would also say for the these device manufacturers, they have to be also very creative because let’s say they have data themselves. But the reporters were asking for something else, maybe related to the disease or the condition that they’re trying to address. If you don’t have this data, you can also hire a firm to do research and then you can augment the data store that you already have, and you can make it more, more rich and provide that texture and the human interest stories that can build on top of the data set that you have. And I think that’s where it gets very interesting is because, how can you differentiate yourself so that these reporters will cover you more and then you’re building your brand slowly over time. I think it’s important to keep in mind that what’s interesting journalistically actually is not private information. It’s aggregated trend information. It’s about changes societally, changes in behavior in the aggregate, which as you said, can be made readily available by some combination of anonymized data, first party data and an entity has available to it augmented by what you might purchase or source through your own research. 

Here’s a great example of using social for example, I’ll just make this up. Someone’s getting a knee replacement. Maybe because of privacy the manufacturer cannot do cannot get the testimonials. But if someone got a knee replacement with that device and they’re already like spewing how great it is on social. We can reach out to that person and say, “Oh, let’s put that together.” Then we can tell that human interest story on top of “I love playing tennis, I wasn’t able to play for three years, and then I got this. And within three months I’m back on the court.” 

I think there’s very creative ways. When they think outside of the box and they really put effort in is how can we make that data really worth a lot. It’s really refining and enriching it with other data sources as well. 

Aaron: I’ve really enjoyed talking with you. 

David: Yeah, thank you very much for spending the time. It’s been a pleasure, Aaron. It’s always good to come and enjoy the great view outside.  

Aaron: Thanks.