The Power of SMS: Why Your Business Can't Afford to Ignore It with Uku Tomikas of Messente | Soar Payments LLC
Uku Tomikas of Messente; Business SMS

The Power of SMS: Why Your Business Can’t Afford to Ignore It with Uku Tomikas of Messente

Are you missing out on potential sales and customer engagement by not using SMS as part of your marketing strategy? In this episode of PayPod, host Jacob Hollabaugh sits down with Uku Tomikas of Messente to discuss how SMS communication is a highly effective marketing channel for businesses, with an open rate of 98% within the first five minutes. Messente’s software links all major messaging hubs and directly connects to many mobile network operators. Don’t miss out on this episode if you’re looking to up your marketing game!

Payments & Fintech Insights In This Episode

  • How SMS communication has a significantly higher open rate compared to other marketing channels
  • The measures Messente takes to fight fraud
  • What makes the technological aspect of SMS more powerful than any other communication channel 
  • The combination of high reach, open rate, and click-through rate makes SMS communication a valuable addition to any business’s marketing strategy.
  • The benefits of being and early adopter
  • The main industries that work with Messente
  • The trends Uku expects for 2023
  • And so much more!

Today’s Guest

Uku Tomikas : Messente

Messente advises companies on which types of messages to use in different situations and how to navigate this complexity. They have built a full suite of free high-performance tools and API’s, helping you to make the best use of the selected platforms. Messente is part of the Mobi Solutions Group, and their core team has been working with enterprise-level global messaging solutions since 2001. Messente’s software links all major messaging hubs and directly connects to many mobile network operators. Global messaging capabilities are brought into one simple API, sending and delivering messages to people all over the world.

Featured on the Show

About PayPod

PayPod is the leading voice in the payments and fintech industry, covering payments, risk management and new technology. Host Jacob Hollabaugh interviews leaders who are shaping the payments and fintech world, as they discuss the latest developments in the payments and fintech industry.

Episode Transcript

Jacob: Welcome to PayPod, the Payments Industry podcast. Each week we’ll bring you in-depth conversations with leaders who are shaping the payments and fintech world from payment processing to risk management and from new technology to entirely new payment types. If you want to know what’s happening in the world of fintech and payments, you’re in the right place. Hello, everyone. Welcome to PayPod. I’m your host, Jacob Hollabaugh. And today on the show we are talking about the power of SMS communication as a marketing channel, as a way to engage with your customers as a security tool. We’re going to get into the entire scope of how you and your business could better be leveraging this powerful tool. Join me to explore these topics is Uku Tomikas partner and CEO at Messente Communications, your dedicated business messaging platform that’s connecting services to people worldwide. Uku, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Uku: Hey, thanks for having me. And hello, everybody.

Jacob: Yes, Thank you so much for staying up later on your end with us to do this. Much appreciated. Let’s start out kind of just high level overview for folks. What makes SMS communication such a powerful marketing channel for businesses? What brings the power to that device in your hand is able to connect you to your customers.

Uku: The stats around business messaging are quite sort of mind boggling. The first one, of course, is the open rate, 98% within the first five minutes. I mean, no other channel really has that. And then you have the reach. Anyone with a cell phone has the ability to get a text message. You don’t get that with any other ODT channel. You don’t get that with email. You don’t get that with anything else. So the combination of reach plus open rate makes it already an immense tool in terms of purely just reaching people. But then what you need to take into consideration is it also has super high CTR. So the click through rate on average is between 17 to 45% on promotional content. And then if you go into cost per click based on that, then the average cost per click globally taking into consideration that the average global SMS price is like $0.06, then it’s between 10 and $0.40 cost per click. And just to put it into context, Google ads get about 3 to 4% CTR and have 2 to $4 cost per click. So SMS compared to Google ads is literally nine times more effective than 15 times cheaper. Yeah. So that’s what makes it that powerful. It’s just that immediate. It’s just that higher reach and that’s what makes it super effective as well.

Jacob: My first reflection is obviously those numbers are astronomical. If you are, you know, as a business owner, if you’re using any of the other means of communications or marketing, you know how high those numbers, the different the cost, the click through rate, the open rate, everything, you understand how astronomically high those are compared to all of your other platforms. But specifically with the 98% open rate part of that, for me, my like first instinct is and this may be different in different parts of the world, I’m looking at this from my perspective in the States as a consumer here that because it’s newer and because we’re not as used to something coming through our phone that maybe there’s going to be at some point a kind of weeding out where we’re a little more the same way we might be with an email that we’re like, We know that’s an advertisement forever Delete, Mark as spam, so it doesn’t come in here again, whatnot. When those things start to maybe happen in the future, do you see that kind of curve being there where that rate’s going to still drop? I mean, 98% is a pretty wild number to think if like it stayed 98% open rate in the first five minutes forever, that would be pretty incredible. Do you think that has a little bit to do with it? And if I’m on a kind of a right theory here, how much do you see it dropping or do you see it being more tolerant of that type of thing than like email was, for instance, or any other one where we might start to recognize, but it wouldn’t be as quick or the tools. Is it any different between the way we do with email now of like we filter those out pretty quick and now from when it first was introduced to what email marketing is now, those rates are much different. Am I on to anything with that?

Uku: I think you are. So if we look at the actual trends in terms of in terms of messaging as well, the consumption of that message has changed in the sense of we’ve gone from reading more to glancing more. So it’s the usual pull up the actual notification bar and see what it is. So you’re glancing at much more than just opening it. So there’s already a transition into that. But there are two things that play into the positive aspects of business messaging that sort of promise to keep the open rate at that high level for at least a fairly long amount of time. And one of those things is A, it’s still a standard feature of the phone, and it’s a feature where you very rarely turn off getting text messages or text message notifications. So as opposed to something like an ODT channel like me, for example, all of my WhatsApp messages, all of my Facebook messenger messages, they’re turned off because they don’t like the notifications, but the text messages always come through, so it kind of differentiates. itself from a usual notification, even how it’s presented on your phone, it’s completely different. So the technological aspect of it might keep it in a position for a longer period of time of being on a high open rate. And what really plays to its benefit right now is that roughly about 5 to 7% of companies in the world actually use business messaging for their own customer communication, which means that it’s also quite rare or it isn’t as often as getting 60, 70 emails per day that we get.

Uku: Instead, maybe you’ll get like two, three, four, five, maybe promotional text messages per week. And since it’s short as compared to an email, you’re going to consume a large part of that content immediately as compared to something like an email where you just you might even open it and go, Oh my god, it’s too long. Or look at the header way too long. But with text messages you kind of already see the majority of the content. If you especially if you do a well executed promotional campaign, when you actually open up your phone and see what’s there, you’ll get like 90% of the content, including the CTA. You’ll get it immediately. So that immediacy keeps that open rate at still at a higher rate, I think, for a longer period of time. But I mean, the more that channel is going to start used, the more it’s going to be abused, The more technology advances, you know, the more it’s going to degradate it’s inevitable it’s going to happen. You know, we used to send telegrams for a very long time, so it will happen at some point in time. But for the time being, it’s still very, very high and it has been at the same level for the past seven years that I’ve been in the business. So it’s been around at the same level for quite a while now, certainly.

Jacob: And that’s where being an early adopter of it right now, while it isn’t saturated, while the rates are what they are, the earlier you can be a part of that and take advantage of that, the better and the more you could possibly build up to. Even if you’re doing it into the future, your customers have a good relationship with you and are okay with your messages coming through where if you know down the road there may be there’s a little more friction from their side of you that you would be one of the ones that would be more accepting of a couple continued follow ups on this then. Do you think there’s any reason that you know of for why business adoption has been a little slow? Because from my point of view, and correct me if I’m wrong, like smartphones hit mass global adoption, I don’t know when, but at least sometime in the last decade or so where it became their you know, we hit the tipping point of it doesn’t matter geographically where almost any market worldwide, they became accessible and people had some version of a smartphone where these types of services could be utilized. But then there was a bit of a gap and still, you know, as you said, there’s still not a lot of people in this industry. Has there been any reason, has there been friction points or is it just simply the proper tools like the ones Messente is building haven’t been there before to make it easy for people to use?

Uku: Yes, there’s like two main things that that have popped into my head whenever I thought about the same question. First one is that if you do a direct head to head comparison to an email, then if you think about it in theory, every email you send out from your business usually costs you at least something. You’re running some form of a service to use it. Or if you’re doing a bulk campaign, you have a platform to manage it, so you have some fees. But sending out a million emails is going to cost you fairly little reasonably guessing. It’s not going to be super expensive. If you send out a million emails in a market like Azerbaijan, for example, it’s going to cost you €17,000 for that campaign. It’s more expensive per single instance of actually using that. So every text message will cost you and you will see it on the invoice that it’s brought to you. Now it’s the question of cost that very often actually stops businesses using business messaging more. And that’s the very usual friction point that you get into. It’s the question of cost versus value. Like if you think about the stats that I talked about in the beginning and you think about the cost per click compared to Google ads, the value is so much more than Google ads, for example. Yet people look at the cost and they don’t actually think through all of the mathematics behind it. They just look at the actual sheet that’s in front of them and in on the Excel sheet, it looks like a big cost, especially if you’re a company running in multiple markets as well.

Uku: We have companies that send literally two 197 markets globally, so it gets more complicated. Every market has its own pricing. Sometimes every market, every operator has its own pricing. There are additional fees for sender names, etcetera, etcetera. So what happens is it becomes more complicated Google ads. You can set up more easily in a single interface than you can in terms of messaging. You’re going to know even if you use someone like Messente, you still have to know, okay, so where am I sending? Do I need multiple languages? Am I going to need to deal with different regulations? You know, marketing campaigns in UAE versus Poland aren’t the same. And the US, again, another tool set that needs to be used. Right? So that leads to the second thing, which is the complicated nature of business messaging and the way that in a way this industry that we’re in hasn’t really done a very good job in taking the complicated nature out of it. You know, operators aren’t helping either, to be perfectly frank. So it does lead to a situation where the comparison of cost versus value with people looking at cost more often, and then the complicated nature of actually getting running on a global scale and using it effectively. I think those are two of the main things that inhibit companies from using business messaging or using it effectively at least makes sense.

Jacob: Who have been what geographically or industry wise? Who have you seen be some of those early adopters, the ones that either where it is a little less complicated or there’s less friction to it? Who have you seen geographically industry wise, be those early adopters?

Uku: So the geographical sort of dispersion of how it’s being used is quite fun because it’s literally everywhere. Every market in the world uses it. It’s in Papua New Guinea to to Marshall Islands, to Iceland, to Burundi, to Vietnam, to everywhere. It’s literally everywhere. There’s no difference, right? But I guess the things that get the most traction or have seen most effect are usually financial services. Why? Because financial services have tapped into very effective use cases for business messaging, one being two factor authentication. So SMS pin codes and the other one being reminders. For example, payment reminders. If you’re overdue on an invoice and you get a text message, it’s significantly more effective than an email is, you know, the usual conversion rate on a payment reminder from our services that that uses is something like 13 to 17% again, and that’s not a click through rate. That’s a conversion rate. Click doesn’t mean conversion, but you know, a straight conversion rate at like 13% on payment reminders on text messages is very, very effective as a means of communication. And the other one has been logistics. So why logistics uses as well as anywhere? When you get like a parcel locker notification or a DHL courier notification, it just reduces the friction between the deliveries or just creates a very easily visible, very immediate way of people to actually get the information. Because for logistics, the alternative cost is immense. If you don’t get a text message, you don’t pick your parcel up from your locker and they have to reprocess it. In Estonia, every package has like a €50 additional cost to the logistics company. So if you then ramp that up, the less effective your communication even by like 1% in a market where you send 100,000 packages, for example, that’s a thousand packages. A thousand times 50 is 50K That’s a lot of money and stuff like that adds up. So those are the industries that have used it most effectively so far.

Jacob: That makes perfect sense. And being the ones that both sides need that communication to happen versus when on the marketing front, the business wants that communication to happen. The receiver may or may not be actually interested in whatever is attempting to be sold to them. But when it comes to finance related things, if you’re making payment or delivery things I literally just had yesterday a large important to me package being delivered and it was slightly different with the company. I was getting it through. Normally I wouldn’t get the text update, but on this particular one it was like I had added in like, give me the text update, let me know right when they’re here because I have to come down and receive this. It’s not just dropped off like normal. And yeah, I could only imagine the cost of them of like, this guy doesn’t answer his doorbell and we aren’t able to get in touch with him. This is a £80 package that we’re delivering the cost of taking this back and then bringing it back to you. One way either I’m going to pay that, they’re going to pay that. So it makes sense that those would be the kind of leading use cases where the customer is also like, I need this as much as the business does. Do you see looking forward or maybe as you with Messente, look at like where growth opportunity is, what types of industries do you see being that next wave of maybe they don’t see the need yet, and you look at it and say, these are the places that could be the most fertile, like this would be the most useful for any industries stand out as the next one to really take that step into adopting these tools.

Uku: We’ve seen a quite a spike in adoption in e-commerce platforms because one of the most effective forms of business messaging for them is abandoned cart notifications. You know, somebody abandons their cart midway through the process. If you have their number, you can just send them a text with like a dollar discount. Finish your cart, here’s a coupon for a $10 discount. And those are quite effective again, in bringing people back to the cart and actually getting them to move because it’s quite instant. You immediately see it, you go, okay, fine. If I get $10 off, I’ll buy those pair of shorts or shoes or whatever I was planning to buy. So that leads to that direction. But what we’ve also seen is a rise in anything related to if you have an appointment. So dentists, doctors, car services, anything where just the form of a simple reminder that, hey, you know, you have this in two hours or you have that tomorrow, just reduce the amount of no shows that people do. And because of that also increases the the amount of effectiveness that they get. Because if you think of like, for example, a dentists hour costs quite a lot.

Uku: So if you could send in the states for example, spend like 2 to $0.03, literally 2 or $0.03 to increase the probability that a person will actually arrive to the appointment by, let’s say, 30%, 40%. It’s a no brainer compared to the actual cost of a no show. So I think that anything related to those plus e-commerce is a big thing, but sports betting getting more popular. Companies want to use that anything where there’s a new trend coming up where they want to reach clients immediately, you see a trend of companies starting to adopt different channels, especially if it’s if it’s a more difficult market or if it’s just hard to reach people or if you want to create immediacy. So I guess those would be the ones that we’re looking out for as well. But at the same time, the existing businesses are also expanding their use cases as well. You know, financial services would start with Two-Face and end up with reminders Promotionals too, for security related transaction related notifications, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So they’ll build those use cases on top and expand by that as well.

Jacob: Yeah, certainly. And that last example you used, like the sports betting, it makes sense to me that it would be from the marketing perspective outside of verification or reminders or anything as companies, the ones that would be the most inclined to get into the marketing, true promotional side would be places where it’s reoccurring sales, like a sports betting where it’s like you’re already using this every day. And so there would be a benefit to us reminding you that, hey, today there’s a special this there’s a discount that that those would be probably the most successful early on versus the one time purchase of we’re just going to kind of cold call you essentially, you know of like cold outreach. Hey, just so you know, if you’ve ever been needing a mattress, we’re doing 20% off today that it would make more sense for those that are reoccurring your customers actively engaging on a regular basis, that those might be the first forays into the marketing part. The kind of main thing that I think maybe a lot of listeners, both from the business owner side and from a consumer side, might immediately think of is when we think of other channels like an email and whatnot. I use the word spam earlier when I said, you know, emails, we’ve gotten used to just like send that to spam or whatever. There can be at some point maybe similar feelings within SMS communication. There’s also already started to be a lot of fraud within messaging. There’s going to be bad actors anywhere you go, any type of anything, but they’re attacking either the users or the companies themselves. What type of threats do you have to deal with when you know if you’re the company using SMS or from your point of view working on to SMS tools for companies to use? What are the types of threats out there that you’re actively trying to be on the lookout for or protect against?

Uku: There’s three main kinds right now. Luckily, first and foremost, it needs to be stated. SMS is still a very clean channel, especially if we compare it to email. So if you think about the three different types of common fraud or scam or spam, it’s a total of about 10% of the total business communication. While on email it’s 40% scam.

Jacob: Seems like 100% sometimes. Honestly.

Uku: Yeah, exactly. Sometimes every email is pretty much spam. But on text messaging you could pretty much look at it this way. So if we think of just spam, which is just sending too much either promotional content or sending content that hasn’t been opted into, that’s about 3.3% by the last estimate of the total pool of messages. And then 3.6% is actual malicious scam. So spam is one of those things where if you get it and you just get it often, yes, it’s annoying. You can talk to your operator, get it blocked, you can do a few things to actually manage that. But scam is much more insidious and it’s getting worse these days because we talk a lot about AI this i that companies using ChatGPT. Is this the next thing to go forward. Well so are scammers. We’ve seen an enormous uptick in the quality of text messaging scam. You know in Estonia, for example, we see scammers try to use the Estonian tax authority and create spoofing websites of the tax authority to then send you a notification that, hey, you made a mistake on your tax returns, click on this link to fix it. And that link looks sort of familiar. So that’s dangerous. That’s the first really dangerous part. And this is called pretty much spoofing, where you’re using either a company’s name, impersonating a company, a business, an organization to try and get somebody to either give you money or get their details, essentially act in their worst interest.

Uku: Right. So those are the first sort of really dangerous ones. And here it’s a combination of working with clients, working with operators to actually filter those things out. So in our home market, what we have is that since we are the biggest player in the market, we also control the biggest market share, which means that not only messages that our clients send, but messages coming in through other service providers, other aggregators come into us as well. So what we’ve been doing is we’ve been working with one of the largest banks in Estonia and the Estonian police to keep on cherry picking where we find new types of scam and then consistently filtering them out. You know, every time we see it come in, we block it, put it into filters. And like last month, I think it was about 150,000 messages of pure scam. And the really scary part about this and why this is so dangerous is we’re kind of used to the Nigerian print scams already, so we’re trying to see them coming. But text message scams look very, very legitimate and they look quite scary in that sense as well, which also leads to a much higher CR. So if you have 150,000 messages, you can expect something anywhere between like a half a percent to 4%. CR So if you’re talking about, let’s say, 1% conversion rate on 150,000 messages, you know, 1500 people are going to convert.

Uku: And then if you look at the average damage that is being done in those cases, the global average is something around $800, let’s say on an Estonian market, it’s a little bit smaller. Let’s say it’s two for $200, $400, something like that. But if you do that multiplication, you’re looking at hundreds, literally hundreds of thousands, up to millions of dollars of damage from just that singular campaign. So that’s the dangerous part. And this is where us as providers and then the clients and the operators have to work together to keep on filtering these contents out and creating more rigid rules, which ultimately complicates things, but also keeps the integrity of the customer as well. Because, you know, if you get DHL scam, for example, you’re not going to write to me, you’re going to write to DHL, or you’re going to write to your operator. So it’s their name that immediately gets tarnished with that because you’ll immediately think, Well, how come DHL is not doing anything about this? Even though DHL is not a telco company, they can’t filter out text messages. But the perception is that it came through their name. So it has to be their issue. So that’s a big, big part of the issue where where companies really need to pull together to do that. And one of the things we’re working on very heavily as well, it’s one of those things where we found our niche in a way where fighting fraud and taking a very strong anti-fraud stance helps us be a more effective company as well.

Uku: But then the more insidious form of fraud that is much harder to see that doesn’t really impact you but impacts the business is actually using business messaging is something called AIT or artificially inflated traffic. Now, I think Elon Musk did a post about three months ago or two months ago how telco companies are have been defrauding Twitter to the tune of $60 million a year. That’s AIT the damage estimated for last year was $700 million. The damage estimated this year is 1.5 billion, so it’s estimated to double this year. So we’re talking about a huge amount of scam and it’s kind of a very interesting type of scam as well because it’s pretty much just utilizing creating fake accounts, fake transactions, fake instances of SMS triggers on the client side to ramp up their bill for messages. And that’s done by the companies who at the very end will usually cash in on that. They usually what they do is let’s say you have something like Twitter. Twitter’s example is actually perfect. They would buy a bunch of numbers from an operator that were legitimate numbers. They would then use a bot to create Twitter accounts and then. They would use that number to verify those accounts. And every time that account was verified, an SMS instance would be triggered.

Uku: And it doesn’t matter who Twitter is using as a provider, it doesn’t have to be the person actually creating that. They just have to know that they’re the last link in the chain. The message will reach them through the various aggregators, partners, operators, whatever it reaches them at the end of the chain. And when they’re at the end of that chain, they knew and they know what number they sent that text message from. Every single time that message passes through somebody in the chain, a chargeable event happens. So Twitter is charged at the first instance. Every aggregator charges every aggregator until the last person who actually picks it up in the chain. Now, if they forward it to the mobile operator, then the operator charges them. But if they don’t actually forward it to the operator, just take the code from the content. Because remember, they know the number that they use to generate the account so they know what number the request will come from. So they take the code, put it into the app. And on Twitter side, it looks like a successful transaction happened. The operator never sees the text message, the handset never reaches the text, gets the text message, the business sees a chargeable event. The CR is there because obviously, you know, conversion happened. The text message got there, the actual instance happened and the person controlling the chain at the end makes a 100% profit.

Jacob: Very devious. Very devious. Yeah. And as you said, it’s very hard to be recognized by anyone else on it. And it seems even when you do recognize it, it’s it’s inflating their numbers in a way that would also, when they just look at them, might be like, well, that looks good. We just don’t realize that underneath that looking good, we’re actually losing a bunch of money or being tricked and whatnot. So yeah, that’s a pretty insidious to say the least. And I meant to do this right pretty much early on here. But we’ve mentioned your company quite a bit. Could you give us just a quick overview of what Messente is and the services that you offer?

Uku: So we’re a business messaging company focusing mainly on helping companies deliver messaging, communication very reliably, very securely and with an anti fraud focus. So we work with a lot of financial institutions, large logistics companies, retail platforms, KYC companies, insurance companies, making sure that their customer communication is very effective, reliable and secure. We do so across multiple different messaging channels. So SMS, but also WhatsApp, RCS, or RBM which is the next iteration of SMS in a way, and then Viber as well, depending on where you globally are and do so to ensure that every message gets there, because we know that, you know, the alternative costs based on the logistics of sample is very, very high. So we focus on getting a very, very high delivery rate, but then also advising you on, you know, what are the tips and tricks to use to make sure that you get the most out of every campaign. So the value is the highest. And that’s what we focus on and that’s what we’ve been doing for the past ten years.

Jacob: Love it. And operating, as you said globally. Anyone anywhere can use your services or reach out to you.

Uku: Yes, we literally send messages globally. Absolutely everywhere all the time. Of course, we’re a Europe based company, so we tend to have most of our clients here. But there’s literally traffic going everywhere all the time, every single second of the day. So in that sense, it’s it’s not a question of where you are or where you want to send. It’s more about how can we best help you.

Jacob: Yeah, love it and love hearing. I was going to ask about the different possible channels but you already hit that that it’s not just SMS, but that is the main driver. You did mention though a new type of SMS. I wasn’t familiar with that. Can you tell me what that was, that other academy use?

Uku: So it’s interesting because RCS or rich communication service or rich business messaging as Google names it, that’s one of the driving factors behind this as well. Has been around for ten years. It just hasn’t had a lot of adoption. But for a lot of the new Android devices, what you will see is something was delivered as a as a rich communication message or an message or an RCS message and what this essentially means is that think of Whatsapp’s capabilities to, you know, share videos and pictures and have carousels and have stuff like that, or at the same thing that you have kind of an iMessage as well, that it has a lot of this more functionality than usual text messaging. Think of that. But it kind of becomes the native tool for Android. So that’s why it’s kind of being called as SMS 2.0, but it kind of is it because the platform is different, there’s more drawbacks in terms of actual reach because it’s only Android devices and only newer Android devices, but it is something that’s now factoring into the the whole communication ecosystem in business messaging, because rich messaging is more effective than text messaging, even though text messaging is very effective. And this is this is where it kind of gets crazy because we have two examples of clients launching with Viber in Bulgaria and Vietnam and.

Uku: They sent out text messaging campaigns would see the same numbers in terms of open rates and click through rates that we’ve seen before. And then they switched to Viber and saw a 3X increase in pure conversions on top. So you’re talking about an effective communication channel that’s just made more effective because it’s richer, it creates a more engaging experience because of that, and that’s why we’ve gone down the cascading messaging part. So let’s say that you’re in a market like Saudi Arabia, for example, or even in the States or Latin America, Mexico, for example, you will go WhatsApp first. So every message you want to send or a campaign you want to send, you’ll send a WhatsApp first. And then if the person doesn’t have a WhatsApp account, then WhatsApp will tell you that they don’t and then you fall back to SMS. So you still get the value of SMS. But in case they do have a WhatsApp account, you’ll also get that increased return on investment from using a WhatsApp message. So you have to have a sort of a multi-channel, very varied approach these days to make the best impact possible.

Jacob: Yeah, I love that. And I think I believe is yeah, your website. I was looking at like the little diagram of the API doing just that of you want to send it to here, you could select what’s your best route. If they have this, you would prefer it to be the first channel, but if they don’t flip around, what’s next? What’s next? Eventually we will get it to them, whatever the best method possibly is, and we’ll figure that all out for you based on, you know, the parameters you set. It was super, super cool. I’d like to finish up here kind of a quick pivot at the end to finish it out with a bit of business or career advice for those listening, because as I read a little about you and your career, I was absolutely fascinated. I listened to another interview that you had done, and could you just give a little overview of the journey that you went on? Because I saw it was either on your site or maybe in the interview I listened to you stated, you know, you went from selling almonds with a street cart to now being CEO of a multi-million euro company. And that’s catching and definitely a story worth hearing. So could you give us kind of the overview of your journey?

Uku: Yeah, it has been quite a varied one. The first job I ever had was a child actor in the Estonian National Opera.

Jacob: How young are we talking of a child? Actor?

Uku: Ten ish, I think.

Jacob: Yeah.

Uku: And since my mom’s a singer, then she kind of got me to that role. So that was the first job I ever did. Use the money to buy books.

Jacob: Good use. Smart ten year old.

Uku: Yeah. I mean, there were some things that I was quite good at. One of them was I really liked to read a lot back in the day and still do. Yeah. And then the first job I had during high school was I went to work in a medieval restaurant and I started as a shouter or a person who would just, you know, try to bring people into the restaurant. And then from there I went and worked in the almond cart that was actually a part of that restaurant. So I stood on the streets of Old Town Tallinn and just sold almonds and was in a medieval costume with like green tights and curled up shoes and did that for a little bit of time and then actually spent four years in that restaurant working myself from being a shouter to a then an almond salesman to then in the shop to then a waiter to then also a host of different kind of events, up to the point where I would lead the New Year’s festivities, where the house would have five, 600 guests in two different houses, and then I would do the plans and help execute all of that and the hosting services as well. And then during that time, finished high school, went into uni the entire time, worked in that restaurant. I studied law in university because ever since I was in like first or second grade, I knew I wanted to become a judge. And then I actually went and studied law and realized I don’t want to do law ever again, still finished law school because I tend to not stop things I finish and a law degree is still quite helpful.

Uku: Yes. So I’ve finished that. And then I did my mandatory army service, which here in Estonia is mandatory for boys, and I ended up being an artillery platoon commander, became decorated, actually was decorated as one of the three best platoon commanders of of my tenure and got a few accolades. I’m actually a second lieutenant by rank. And then once I got out of the military and my mandatory service, I got an opportunity to run a small seafood wholesaling company. So you can already see that it’s taking a multiple different kinds of paths. But at 23, running a company with like global aspirations, and I was definitely chucked in at the deep end. I burned out quite quickly and I realized that I’m way too green to do something like that. So I took a step back and I took an SDR or a sales development rep role here at Messente, and that was seven years ago. And throughout that seven years, I worked myself from a junior salesman to now CEO and shareholder of that same company. So that has been kind of my career journey throughout and I like to call myself a grinder because I’m rarely good at things at the start, but I’m absolutely furiously tenacious at getting where I need to get to by just executing consistently over.

Uku: Over and over and over and over and over again.

Uku: Until I get it. And that has worked out for me so far.

Jacob: I love that. Yeah. And I was going to ask, that’s definitely one of them. Is there any other throughout that whole thing, key strengths of yours, personality traits that you think helped lead to this type of success outside of the one you just mentioned of always being willing to grind it out and go from novice to pro as long as it takes.

Uku: I guess there’s two other things I lean on. One is I’m quite strong at taking accountability. So if I f up, I f up and I own it and I rather learn from it and I’m willing to take responsibility, you know, with the CEO role as well, you’d be a fool to say that you’re ready for that role if you’ve never been in the position of running a multi-million dollar company, you’re probably not. But I’m willing to give it a shot. A very strong shot, the best that I can give it, right? So so that has been another strength. And I guess the thing that has carried me the most throughout my entire life is. I am blessed with the gift of the gab, so I am fairly good at speaking and that does help a lot in selling and running a business and leading people. If you’re reasonably articulate and can talk your way out of different situations. So I’ve been leaning on that for the better part of 20 years now. Actually was a I’m a national champion declarator in Estonia. So presenting prose and speeches and stuff like that. And I started competing in first grade up until the end of high school. So that has carried me throughout life as well.

Jacob: I love that I see a common thread there of also being whether it was a true awareness early on as a kid or not. But you picked all of the right things that are going to work no matter where you work. Now, like the law degree thing is your I don’t know what the actual rates are, but every person I know that went to law school, none of them are lawyers, but they all benefit greatly from having gone to law school and all the other ancillary things you learn there and communication then having that, you know, if you have those two kinds of things like you’re going to be set up pretty good. And yeah, that’s all really, really awesome. The final thing then kind of similar that I’ll will get out of here on is outside of being a CEO, you still do a ton of other things as well. I saw volunteer firefighter work teaching to some degree consulting. You’ve got a family, you’re kind of doing it all. And I know there’s lots of business owners or just company leaders listening that also you get to that role you’ve always wanted to get to. You get that position you’ve always wanted. You start the company you’ve always thought about, but then it’s really busy. It’s really difficult to do even that one thing and balance it with one single other family, let alone just life in general. Additional pursuits. How do you go about or any advice for others who may be in a similar situation of trying to balance a whole bunch of things while trying to lead a company?

Uku: Yeah, I guess the and I’ve already learned this the hard way. I’ve gone through burnout once, so there’s a few things I learned. And the first thing is whatever you do, you have to ruthlessly prioritize. And especially in the CEO role as well. You interestingly enough, your sleep, for example, you cannot make any allowances for continued lack of proper sleep. It’s not going to work for the business. It’s not going to work for you. The business is run on optimism. And as the CEO, you are the first embodiment of that positivity and that energy and that drive and that push. And if you are in a position where you’re tired and you’re cranky and you have a short fuse that’s going to carry over into the company as well, that carries over into your family as well. So making sure that you take care of yourself is super important. And this sometimes means that I’ll draw an example from three weeks ago was feeling a bit tired. We had done a lot of events back to back, a lot of stages that needed to be on and then woke up Wednesday morning, decided, you know what, I’m going to take a day off and go to the zoo with the kids.

Uku: Told everybody, I’m off for today. I need a break. I’ll be back tomorrow. You know what? Nothing happens. The world doesn’t end. Nothing breaks. But you will do significantly better when you’re back on Thursday. So that’s very important, you know, prioritizing those things. And I guess the second thing is realizing that you don’t need to do everything perfectly. You know, something is better than nothing. And for me, that is that usually comes through in training. So one of the things I have is that I have a daily yoga streak, so I do yoga every single morning. Sometimes I’ll do five minutes, sometimes I’ll do 45 minutes, sometimes I’ll do two hours depending on how much time I have. But that consistency and building that chain and not putting myself or not giving myself an expectation that I need to do 40 minutes every day has allowed me to literally today hit day 991 in a row. So I’m nearly on a thousand days in in succession without ever breaking a day. And this is meant doing yoga in hotel rooms, on mountaintops, in airports, on buses, wherever. But just, you know, the basic thing is just get five minutes in, just do something.

Uku: And doing something is better than doing nothing. But that consistency over time of doing small things of even if I’m a volunteer firefighter and I can’t be on call all the time, hey, I’ll help with the text messaging service or I’ll help send some emails or help with an event once a year. It’s still something. You’re still really giving something back and it doesn’t have to be a lot. Just make sure that you prioritize what’s most important, not try to do everything super perfectly. Just try to do a little bit from everywhere that that is actually important to you. And by doing those little bits, you also feel so much better. You see the impact that you create around you and you realize that you don’t need to do a lot to have a large impact, but prioritizing you. Is crucial in that because if you fail, the company starts failing after your family is going to be let down by you. All of the organizations you’re a part of will be let down by you as well. So make sure that you’re strong, healthy and able to perform and then you will be able to perform.

Jacob: Love that. And I like the kind of thread through that in your last answer of just awareness too, and that even if you’re only performing little, but it’s you’re performing optimally in that little, you’re going to go a lot further than if you’re performing a lot. But suboptimally the whole time, you’re not going to get very far. And I really appreciate you kind of tied back into your two answers ago of that. You know, no one’s actually ready necessarily for a CEO role. And to be aware of that fact when you’re stepping in of there’s going to be mistakes, there’s going to be things. I don’t know. I’m going to have to ask questions, anything like that. Having that awareness going in and being able to is going to help you react so much better to the inevitable time where you don’t know what the hell you’re doing or you did something, made a wrong choice, anything like that. So this has all been really great to learn from. You get to hear all the insight and knowledge for those listening who might want to follow you or get up and keep up with what you in the company have going on, where would be the best place for them to go to do so?

Uku: I guess the best thing to do is if you have questions about anything related to business messaging, like how much does it cost to send to market or how do I set up a promotional campaign? Just find me on LinkedIn. First name, last name you can find me. I’m very active there as well. Or if you just want to get started with sending business messages, go to Messente.com. Setting up an account is free and blast away.

Jacob: Fantastic. We will, of course, link those and more in the show notes below. Thank you so much for your time in knowledge. It’s been a real pleasure. Hope to speak with you again sometime soon.

Uku: Thanks a million for having me and have a great one.

Jacob: If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, head on over SoarPay.com/podcast to subscribe on your podcast listening platform of choice. That’s s o a r p a y.com/podcast.