Episode 113: Elevate Your Client Experience with Tech that Gets Personal, with Mike Liu
This episode takes a bit of a different slant this week, as Sam is joined by Co-Founder and CEO of FreeFuse, Mike Liu. Headquartered in Los Angeles, FreeFuse is an interactive video platform which allows the user to build personalised digital communication, for a multitude of purposes such as corporate training and education, digital content and videography or sales and marketing activities and product demonstrations. In this conversation, Sam and Mike discuss the origins and inspiration behind FreeFuse, as well as the benefits of this type of technology in promoting both client and employee engagement.
With a background in Engineering, Mike explains how both his education and the inspiration for FreeFuse were founded in his early experience of Lego building blocks and “choose your own adventure” books. He pursued Engineering whilst always having an eye on entrepreneurial platforms such as the early days of Facebook.
Keen to make a direct impact on people’s lives, Mike explored a couple of business options before landing on the concept of FreeFuse and the idea of adaptive learning and education tools. Despite strong positive feedback from students, Mike and his partners struggled to gain a foothold in the education system and targeted their marketing towards business instead, recognising the need for ongoing learning in the corporate sector.
Mike explains his desire to create technology that people love and that solves a problem, and how FreeFuse enables businesses to develop immersive experiences for both internal and external stakeholders. Sam and Mike discuss the training opportunities brought about by allowing people to experience decision making in real time, as well as the potential for illustrating the complexities of professional services to clients.
You’re invited to “choose your own adventure” as you tune in to this podcast and gain a better understanding of how technology can help you in your business, and the myriad of possibilities that await.
Listen to an excerpt
What we cover in this episode
How “choose your own adventure” books inspired FreeFuse
Mike’s path to entrepreneurship
Building products that people love
The Pareto Principle
Interactive decision based platforms creating different learning pathways
The one downside of solving problems
The power of creating personalised experiences
Mike’s advice for having an exploratory mindset
Quotes
“It was just this feeling of ‘am I making a direct impact in peoples’ lives and building something that they love?’ ” - Mike
“We created an interface where you're actually able to do interactive decision based trainings and create different learning pathways for your clients, your customers, your employees, your tribe whatever you would like to call them and whoever your audience is, we wanted to provide a versatile experience” - Mike
“I knew exactly what I needed to solve because I knew exactly what the pain was and that's the part that I think a lot of people don't explore” - Mike
“What I enjoyed most was the positive feedback that we got – ‘I enjoyed so much utilising the tool’, ‘this is so awesome I really appreciate this’ - we got rave reviews from the students. A bunch of students wanted it in all of their classes 'cause it made learning easier for them and so we thought OK we're really on to something here” - Mike
“We had a crossroads - do we continue trying to onboard more courses, kind of bang our head against the wall, even though I had a personal motivation to try and really help these students, or do we go with where this is naturally pulling us in and really just keep bringing this to more and more people who really see the value and love it” - Mike
“if you want to create something meaningful you need to allow people to put their own meaning behind it whether it's teaching courses, whether it's delivering immersive experiences, so that's why we constructed the tool in such a way where you would actually be able to develop these type of experiences” - Mike
Links mentioned
The Speed of Trust book by Stephen Covey
The Trusted Advisor book by David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford
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