Episode 26: Interview with Kristopher Jones

Kristopher Jones is an Entrepeneur, investor and founder of Pepperjam, which was bought by GSI Commerce/eBay. Currently, he is Managing Partner of KBJ Capital and Chairman of Internet Marketing Ninjas as well as supporting start ups like ReferLocal.com as Angel Investor.

Andre Alpar: All right. So today’s OMReport is with Kris Jones. Kris, can you please introduce yourself.

Kristopher Jones: Kris Jones. I… um… internet marketer, entrepreneur, investor, author… Most people probably know of me from my former company Pepperjam which I founded, and it was an internet marketing agency and an affiliate network that I built over the course of about a decade and I sold it in 2009 to a company called JSI Commerce and then shortly thereafter that we were acquired by eBay and now the technology and the agency are part of eBay.

Andre Alpar: It actually became the eBay partner network, like the eBay internal affiliate network?

Kristopher Jones: Yep so they acquired JSI including us and they renamed that division of the company, and they actually created a division called eBay Enterprises. That’s really like eBay’s, you know, e-commerce technology and marketing services division of the company so it’s an individual operating unit of eBay, so you have eBay proper, you have PayPal, and then you have eBay Enterprises, and the company I founded is over in the eBay Enterprises part of the business. But anyway, so… yeah so I was really involved in the search and the affiliates base since the late 90s and, you know, I’ve written a couple of books on internet marketing, SEO in particular…

Andre Alpar: One that everybody should know: the Blueprint. ‘THE’ Blueprint.

Kristopher Jones: SEO Visual Blueprint, yeah it sold over 50,000 copies already.

Andre Alpar: Amazing!

Kristopher Jones: Yeah.

Andre Alpar: Third edition now, I think?

Kristopher Jones: Third edition came out…

Andre Alpar: That’s out pretty freshly?

Kristopher Jones: Yeah. Came out in April.

Andre Alpar: Congrats to that again.

Kristopher Jones: Thank you.

Andre Alpar: I know it’s a lot of hard work to A, compile a book and B, to try to work it over again to keep it up to date.

Kristopher Jones: Yeah, my publisher is Wiley and that’s one of the big sort of publishing houses in the US and… you gotta follow this very strict process, you know, you’ve got this big editorial team so the content has to be strong, you know, you write the content, you push it to them, they push it back, you push it to them, they push it back, you push it to them, they push it back… And it’s a long, lengthy, intensive process but… yeah. So…

Andre Alpar: So after you sold Pepperjam what happened to you? Did you like fall in a, I dunno, like a black hole and didn’t know what to do now?

Kristopher Jones: No, no, no I, you know, public speaking, you know, has always been a big part of my career, something I enjoy, networking, having opportunities to, you know, grow my relationship with other successful internet marketers, um… So I continued to public speak. I was finishing the third edition of my book, um… scratch that, the second edition of my book at the time that I sold Pepperjam… and I founded an investment fund, so an early-stage tech investment company called KBJ Capital and um…

Andre Alpar: Which is your initials.

Kristopher Jones: Which are my initials. Right. Yeah and the idea there was it’s all self-funded, so some money that I put aside from the acquisition of my former company, and I started to invest in early-stage… a bias towards early-stage tech companies, so internet software, e-commerce, mobile, um, so… and that, even to this day, you know, consumes a lot of my time. But I’ve taken on a couple of other roles as well.

Andre Alpar: So when you say ‘consumes your time’ it means you’re reviewing, you know, people who apply to be funded by you, or you actively search for companies you could invest in, or evaluate your existing investments, or what does that exactly mean?

Kristopher Jones: So the fund is about three years old now, so it’s like… the companies I founded two or three years ago are going through different life cycles so I’m in some cases helping them raise money, which this year successfully I think we’ve done four or five raises. In some cases, two or three of them, are in an M&A process of different, you know, points in that process…

Andre Alpar: So do you go in as a person, so the, you know, the potential buyer sees you as Kris Jones, helping this company or do you just basically, you know, help the founders in the background, or are you there on the front as well?

Kristopher Jones: For the most part it’s me actually being involved in that process and helping the founders, the investors, you know, representing them… Not representing the founders, you know, I’ll go in as a partner, I’ll go in as an investor, but I’ll do that for investors. So if we have a group of say ten investors, they have… since I do this more professionally they have no problem with me, you know, flying out to Palo Alto and spending a day or two at wherever. You know, any of the companies that might be looking at our… at the portfolio. Um, so… but then, you know, over the last couple of years there’s been a couple of hybrid sort of opportunities that have come my way that have… that I’ve taken.

Andre Alpar: So Internet Marketing Ninjas must just be one of them.

Kristopher Jones: Internet Marketing Ninjas is a perfect example. You know, Jim Boykin the CEO and I have been friends for… I believe it’s over a decade, it’s over ten years and… he reached out to me about, you know, joining him to run the company and because of all the other stuff I have going on, including a wonderful wife and three children, which are my number one priority in my life, it just wasn’t practical for me to join a CEO or have some capacity like that, so what Jim and I decided to do was structure it not too dissimilar from the role I play when I invest in a company, because I become a very active advisor. And in those cases I become a non-paid advisor. I’m actually on Jim’s executive team as… I serve as chairman of Internet Marketing Ninjas and so I’m on the payroll so I actually have official duties so it’s not just ‘hey Jim, call me when you need me…’

Andre Alpar: So what are your official… so you really go to a pitch to a big client as well?

Kristopher Jones: Yeah, yeah. I’ve worked with them on some of our largest clients, I’ve brought some of our largest clients to the table just cos of my background.

Andre Alpar: Sure. It must have been the same clients you knew, that you used to know in your old role.

Kristopher Jones: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know… Companies will still… I do a lot of public speaking so they’ll say ‘hey, you know, can you help us’ and I’ll be ‘well sure’, you know, Internet Marketing Ninjas is my vehicle to do that. But I work with Jim on high-level strategy, you know…

Andre Alpar: They’ve acquired quite a bit of communities and promoting tools and all…

Kristopher Jones: Acquisitions of communities like Webmaster World and Dev Shed and CreateASite… Talent acquisitions like Chris Boggs, Han Smarty, Joe Hall, Kim Krausberg among a number of others… We actually just announced some talent acquisition, that’s what I… I almost look at it like a transaction because these are… these are seasoned people, these are people who are running their own companies, who can run their own companies, and we’re convincing them to come over to Internet Marketing Ninjas…

Andre Alpar: So what is more interesting, I mean, usually I assume that the people you refer to, they would rather run a boutique consultancy, like a rather compact team, and what convinces them to come to a bigger team, you know, under a bigger umbrella and a bigger brand?

Kristopher Jones: I mean, a couple of things, I mean it’s an exciting brand right now, people are really excited… Now, these folks that have joined the team know what we’re up to, but it’s not public information, what our overall strategy is regarding the acquisitions we’ve made.

Andre Alpar: But you can see something is cooking, I mean even from outside even I know if… even if I don’t know I can see something…

Kristopher Jones: It’s almost boiling.

Andre Alpar: I can feel something at my fingertips…

Kristopher Jones: It’s coming, it’s coming. We should look into the camera: ‘It is coming’.

Andre Alpar: It’s coming!

Kristopher Jones: But uh… the excitement of working for internet marketing and just working for someone like Jim Boykin… I mean, the guy is an absolute visionary and he’s every bit as bright as he… you know, if you spend time, personal time with Jim, you know, he just… he’s very attentive, he listens, he’s very bright. He’s a fun guy to work for and, you know, I’m… another thing I advise him on is the overall financial controls and structure of the company, because our goal is to double, triple, quadruple the size of the business…

Andre Alpar: Which always changes the business when you, when you make it bigger, you know like, five people is different than fifty, is different than 150 and so on and so on… So the company has to change how it works in general, it’s…

Kristopher Jones: Yeah. What I was gonna say on the financial side was Jim really just takes care of his people too. You know, his team. Incredibly generous, I mean I look back to my Pepperjam days and… We had an amazing company. I mean it was like, there was a period in 2007, 2008 where, you know, if you were on the Pepperjam team you were a rockstar, you know, coming to shows like this and affiliate summit and search engine strategies, like… That was the big brand back… one of the big brands back then. Well here we are now in 2013 and Internet Marketing Ninjas is one of those brands, so these people are joining the team to work with Jim, to work with me, to work with Chris Boggs and some of the other folks I mentioned and… and to see, I mean, they’re believing Jim’s vision for, you know, how this all works together.

Andre Alpar: Right. So when will everybody else be able to see the big… the result of the big vision?

Kristopher Jones: So, uh… you know, we’re hoping that first quarter, maybe second quarter of next year we’ll have… we’ll have announcements before then but, like, the big announcement, the thing that Jim’s been kinda dreaming and visioning for a long time, I believe will finally come to fruition and, um, it’ll likely come out of the technology portion of the company and um, you know, I believe that it will be additive and supplemental to some of the other technologies that you see out there that are, you know, New Age technologies helping business of all sizes, you know, take their interactive marketing to the next level.

Andre Alpar: OK. So, besides KBJ Capital, besides Internet Marketing Ninjas and your family of course (priority number one) is there anything else in your life? Or is that sufficient to, you know, make your day packed?

Kristopher Jones: So about 2 and a half, 3 years ago I was in the process of looking at… I was very interested in finding a company to invest in, in the local e-commerce, local internet marketing space. And I met with a lot of them. And… it’s just an area that I took a personal interest in so… I took about six months in, uh… let’s see… late 2010, and I flew around the United States and met with some key advisors and people I’d met and I said ‘I’m really interested in this local space, I see how Google is um, you know, getting more involved in personalisation and customisation of the unique search user experience, and I really feel that where the internet started was this sort of big swathe of opportunity where a small business could come in and, you know, compete against the Walmarts of the world’, and that was my message, you know, in the early 2000s. And then again 2 and a half, 3 years ago I started to see Google um, you know, change the way that search results were displayed to tailor to certain things and creating their own eco-system, so long story short, I decided instead of investing only in the start-up, I figured I would found it. So…

Andre Alpar: That’s Reached Localisation?

Kristopher Jones: That’s… what’s that?

Andre Alpar: It’s Reached Localisation. No what’s…

Kristopher Jones: Refer local.

Andre Alpar: Refer local, I’m sorry.

Kristopher Jones: Yeah. Refer local.

Andre Alpar: Refer local.

Kristopher Jones: Yeah. Refer local.

Andre Alpar: It’s closely, closely…

Kristopher Jones: Others like to say ‘Reefer local’…

Andre Alpar: Ew. But that…

Kristopher Jones: Yeah. But we don’t actually sell drugs.

Andre Alpar: You didn’t… no, no, no…

Kristopher Jones: But it’s…

Andre Alpar: It’s a good start. Maybe they come for that and then they find something else which is interesting.

Kristopher Jones: Yeah. True. Yeah. That’s true. It’s uh… I think my father actually was one of the first ones, he was like ‘Aww man, reefer local!’ I’m like, uh dad, it’s like… No.

Andre Alpar: Blush!

Kristopher Jones: But anyway, so the idea was to get involved in the local e-commerce and local internet marketing space, based on some trends that I was watching Google do… and just the way we retrieve information, again much more personal, much more localised. A lot less noise.

Andre Alpar: Is it hard to scale a business that’s kind of oriented to the local search market, because there’s like the customers that you have to cater to, you have to… I assume that you have to cater to them, you know, more directly, probably even in person, or is it as easy to scale?

Kristopher Jones: We’re a technology company, to be fair. We’ve built local e-commerce and internet marketing technology. Our core clients are media companies, traditional media companies. So newspaper companies, TV and radio, and we built this platform as sort of an enterprise plug-and-play where they promoted in their newspapers and on radio and on TV, and they send the traffic into the site so they send their “audience”. It’s really a platform to help publishers, in its original conception anyway, it’s evolved, but its original conception was a platform to help publishers monetise their audience.

Andre Alpar: So again, it reminds me a little bit of an affiliate network, one could say.

Kristopher Jones: So, uh… there’s definitely some performance marketing roots. Actually, core to the whole platform is…

Andre Alpar: I mean, it’s like lead generating for the local businesses…

Kristopher Jones: That’s exactly what it is. Yeah, the platform when we originally started… we had a deals platform, we had pay-per-call and pay-per-lead. I mean, you know, that’s where I came from, you know…

Andre Alpar: Sure, sure. It makes sense.

Kristopher Jones: So uh… but yeah, that platform is doing well. I ended up funding it so I was originally the largest investor and then we brought some media investors in, so some media invested in it, and I have a couple of angel investors there, so I have shareholders to answer to.

Andre Alpar: Right, so…

Kristopher Jones: Which is pretty cool.

Andre Alpar: How do you split your day amongst the different things that you do, like how… what percentage… I mean just the work part…

Kristopher Jones: Yeah.

Andre Alpar: What percentage is KBJ Capital, what part is Refer Local, what part is Internet Marketing Ninjas?

Kristopher Jones: So I wrap everything into KBJ Capital. So it’s all… all of my ownership interests and all those entities are all wrapped into KBJ Capital. So by far and away the two areas that I spend most of my time in are Internet Marketing Ninjas and Refer Local. Now, that’s not to say if one of my other start-ups needs to raise money or they’re in an M&A process, I mean… you know, I’ve spent… I’ve probably been to the West Coast fifteen or more times this year, you know, at various companies and… I don’t wanna drop them on video but, you know, I’ve spent quite a bit of time at a number of large companies in Palo Alto and Silicon Valley, you know, pitching or raising money or whatever. So, when those things aren’t happening I would say I’m probably 50/50 between Ninjas and Refer Local.

Andre Alpar: Right. And you… I think you’re doing… I’m not sure if that’s true, if I’m wrong we’ll cut it out, but you have like two Facebook pages: one is kind of your ‘you as an official person’ and the other is really your personal account, and that looks so confusing to me for quite a while. Can you explain that to me? Is that something historical that you still have? Or is it like a well thought-through strategy that I don’t get because I don’t know why?

Kristopher Jones: So, I was an early adopter of Facebook. And I guess my policy early on was that, you know, I wouldn’t just accept anybody but I probably did so I maxed out on 5000 friends.

Andre Alpar: Oh!

Kristopher Jones: Probably 3 years ago, 4 years ago. And um… So over that time I’ve… I’ve purged some people that were friends of mine, but I still am at that 5000 max so… A friend of mine, JR Ridinger, who’s the CEO of a company called Market America, had a similar problem just about a year and a half, two years ago. And he said ‘Kris’, he’s like, you know, ‘you could start your… you know, create your own, you know, fan page’. That’s what they called them originally. The business… Facebook business pages were fan pages. And so at his advice, you know, I created a page and…

Andre Alpar: >So there’s like one Kris Jones fan page?

Kristopher Jones: Yeah.

Andre Alpar: And the other is really Kris Jones the person?

Kristopher Jones: Yeah so for people who I, you know, meet at conferences or people who I don’t know on a terribly personal level but still wanna follow what I’m up to or… you know, I’m big into personal and professional development which is something I do some public speaking on, and um… But that’s a different group of people than, say, the SEO group or the affiliate group or whatever so… On my fan page, I guess, whatever, is… I cater a little bit more to that personal and professional development so I put a lot of quotes and…

Andre Alpar: So it’s broader, broader kind of on topic? It’s… topic-wise it’s broader, it appeals to more people.

Kristopher Jones: Yeah. And I’m not posting… by the way, the other reason I have two pages is critical. I’m not posting that much personal stuff, like I… I’m very transparent in my personal life, I mean we’re friends so you see the kids and…

Andre Alpar: Everything!

Kristopher Jones: Yeah, I’m posting the kids and pictures of my wife and family and all my travels and stuff, where… That’s on my personal page.

Andre Alpar: Right.

Kristopher Jones: Cos I like to stay deeply connected with people that I consider friends. You know? On the fan page… you know, I’m not so sure I would go that over the… I would be that transparent over there. It’s more professional.

Andre Alpar: Right.

Kristopher Jones: So, on the one hand the one is personal, on the other it’s professional but aside from that I probably haven’t executed on why I really separated it.

Andre Alpar: I just realised once and I was just eager to ask.

Kristopher Jones: Yeah. Yeah. So…

Andre Alpar: So thanks again for your thoughts…

Kristopher Jones: Sure.

Andre Alpar: And for the, you know, really broad information that you added.

Kristopher Jones: Cool.

Andre Alpar: Thanks.

Kristopher Jones: Thanks for your time.

Andre Alpar: Thanks.

Kristopher Jones: Absolutely.