Dave Cooper for IPSecure Newsletter Spotlight

Speaker: Dave Cooper, Founder & CEO, IPSecure

Dave Cooper: I started IP Secure uh in early 2020 in the middle of COVID, after 19 years in the corporate brand protection space. And it was primarily because during those two decades, it was quite clear that the brand protection space didn't have a connection to economic revenue growth and return on investment, you know, they were completely disjointed, you know, and, and even today, the brand protection Legacy market is focused on risk mitigation and solving problems for you, which is great and has real value. But I knew during those two decades that the work that we were doing for big brands was having a dramatic positive impact on their revenue performance, especially on marketplace like Amazon. So when I started IP Secure, the idea was to build a product that no longer focused on hundreds of platforms and, and really calculating activity as the the metric for success. Instead, we would focus on one platform, the most important one, we would integrate quite deeply and we would really combine legal enforcement tools that have historically been used and are quite familiar with everyone with ecommerce analytics in real time. And, and really the the the place that the software really differentiates and the platform really differentiates is our ability to monitor the buy box at a granular level at a massive scale. There really isn't anyone else who can do that. And so we're on a mission to turn brand protection into the revenue multiplier that we know it is and render that explicit for our users.

Dave Cooper: The biggest lesson we've learned by far. In addition to the fact that it's incredibly difficult to start a technology company in the middle of a global pandemic, it works, you know, the the buy box on Amazon creates a dynamic where there are a large quantity of sellers. They're all competing for a very small piece of real estate on Amazon's platform, the most important piece of real estate. And we knew if we could build technology that could provide real visibility into that the impact on brand protection would be significant. It, it enables us to understand who we should be pursuing uh in inside the Amazon ecosystem. It enables us to almost forecast essentially the quantity of growth and revenue that we could recapture through successful enforcements. So the validation is the biggest thing that we've learned, which is that if you abandon the old strategy of, you know, carpet bombing hundreds of platforms to try to, you know, get some semblance of brand protection uh and distribution control, most of those programs are gonna fail or at least be unable to measure what they're doing and the impact of it instead, if you have a laser focus on the one platform that is the most important to consumers on a global basis and can integrate with it and see that fluidity of the Buy Box happening in real time, you can make much smarter brand protection decisions. We have use case after use case of customers who have been doing brand protection for years almost in the dark and not really understanding the impact and then they move to our platform and because of the analytics and our ability to track their performance and compare that performance with the bad guys. Also on the platform, it's really been eye opening. It's been AAA tremendous um innovation in this space in my view. And um it's quite unique and and very exciting. So I think for me, the biggest thing that I've learned is that our instincts were right. And um that this approach from a technology standpoint yields tremendous benefits and unique insight and capabilities that just weren't, weren't available before. So all in all it, it's been an exciting ride.

Dave Cooper: The best part of my job is probably the people. We have a fantastic team here at IP Secure. We have an amazing CTO and team of, of engineers and experts, Amazon experts. And um I feel that building a business uh should start with surrounding yourself with the highest caliber people you can find. And while that may be expensive and time consuming in the long run, it creates a culture that's healthy and it creates a focus on customer um success that I think is just absolutely paramount. So that's, that's the easy, the easy call. I think the second thing that's the best part of my job is the actual sort of awakening that occurs with our customers. And when they realize that they can actually get visibility into this really critical part of their ecommerce business and effectively do brand protection and then effectively measure the return. You absolutely get this reaction of utter delight. And that to me is the most fulfilling part of what we do. The fact that I think we've brought a very innovative and disruptive technology to a space that very much was crying out for something better, something that could really help people. And I find that immensely gratifying in addition to the fact that our capabilities have proven reac miraculously effective at uh rooting out counterfeiters and rooting out the worst offenders on the Amazon platform, which is incredibly difficult to do. And, and our analytics now have made that something that took, you know, hours or days or weeks to minutes. And I'm very, very excited about that and that gets me excited and the customer is excited. So it's the people and it, it's the, the change that we are having and the impact that we're having on the brand protection community and space really gets me excited and I think it's absolutely the best part of my job.