Hello welcome to the retail podcast live at NRF Geolocation
anything zoo with location has always been a headache for
retailers. So when I got the opportunity to
meet with Radar and upcoming and established local, is it
location? How would you describe the
dumbest? Describe the company.
We've been calling ourselves the All in One Location platform so
they're really easy to add geofencing or maps to your
application or website. OK.
So the all-in-one geolocation and company, when I got the
chance to meet with Nick, the CEO of Radar, I thought would be
wonderful share with you guys what they do and how they solve
that problem. So Nick, for those who don't
know you, if you don't mind giving us a one minute overview
of who you are, what obviously you're the CEO, Yeah, but
telling us a little bit about you and then we'll focus in on
Radar. Yeah, of course.
So my name is Patrick. I'm the cofounder and CEO of
Radar. It's fun to be here in New York.
I've actually been in New York tech scene for over a decade at
this point, man, my cofounders at Foursquare.
Foursquare, the early location based social apps and that's
where we sort of fell in love with location.
I went to another startup, had to build a bunch of things with
location tracking and geofencing and it was very challenging and
we set out to star Radar back in 2016 as the full stack developer
friendly location platform. We really started as a
geofencing platform. So we've been long, long been
the industry leader in geofencing.
We work with a tonne of retail customers.
I mean a lot of love is up here, but Dick's Sporting Goods,
Michaels, T-Mobile, many others and we've since expanded.
We just lost Radar Maps Platform which is a cost effective
alternative to Google Maps Platform and Map Box.
So we can now, you know, truly call ourselves the all in one
location platform and any location feature you want to add
to your app website whether it's you know for a retail app or
website or really anything. So did you find that you look,
when retailers come to you for you to solve their problem, do
they know the problem that they want you to solve?
So like I've got a supply chain problem or or is it they come to
you and then you sort of say, well actually, sure, did you
think about this or this? Yeah, you know, I think it
depends. Some retailers are more
digitally mature than others and some folks come with have this
really clear picture of exactly what I want to do.
Other folks are looking to learn and and and be educated a little
bit more. So we solve location use cases
that, you know, varying levels of maturity.
I would say pretty much every retail opera website has a store
locator. Yeah, power your store locator.
That's pretty obvious. So you're looking for, you know,
accurate maps, reliable service. Yeah.
You know, I think what a lot of people think about geofencing,
they might think of it as a sort of background marketing centric
thing. You know, I'm near a Walmart,
send me a 20% off coupon, but really there's a lot more than
that. And you know, we power other
types of use cases as well. So we power the the store mode
for Dick's Sporting Goods. I downloaded Exporting goods
job. You open it and sore radar
helps. That app detects that the user
is in store and show them a location based app experience.
Ohh cool. We do location based arrival
detection for curbside pickup in store pickup.
So you know rather than a scheduled order or a customer
arriving unexpectedly, you can know when they're on the way to
pick up the order. After 2 minutes out. 10 minutes
out of 5 minutes out. Really like.
For Harding delivery or buy online, pick up in store.
Either role buy, buy online, pick up in store.
Although we do work with some delivery tracking platforms as
well and and and power their location tracking.
So Long story short you know wide range of use cases we can
solve. Sometimes folks come to us with
a very clear set of needs or business objectives in mind.
Sometimes they don't, but in either case, we're we're happy
to write them. Two final questions.
Yeah, location jacking. Is that a thing like where one
retailer would try and grab should location and is that an
actual thing? Yeah, we've we've, we've heard
the phrase competitive conquesting, OK use, but you
know, certainly you can set up geofences around your own
stores, you can set up geofences around your competitor stores.
You could imagine potentially running a campaign, but
honestly, I think even learning, you know, how folks are using
the app in your own stores, Yeah, you're gonna learn a lot,
right? And Big Sporting Goods is a good
example of a customer that didn't have a super clear
understanding of of how often people were opening the app in
store. Yeah, they installed Radar and
they started to realise that 20% of app opens were happening in
store. Oh wow, that's interesting.
What are they doing? Maybe they're trying to search
for an item that's out of stock. Maybe they're, you know, Paris
and shopping or something like that.
So whether it's in in your own source or understanding app
opens in your competitor stores that's that's all very possible.
I think at the end of the day you want to be mindful of
customer experience and privacy and and kind of the volume and
type of data that you're collecting.
But yeah, that's definitely, definitely a thing.
Final question. Yeah.
What did you say the what is the future in in location based how
do, because there's so many areas in terms of autonomy
autonomous vehicles, drones. Yeah, I'm curious someone who's
in the industry. Yeah.
I mean, you know, I would say that we're still very early.
One big trend that we're seeing this year is folks looking for
cost savings with their maps provider.
So maybe you built your store locator, you use Google Maps
platform, you haven't touched it in a while.
Your costs have slowly risen. We're actually now working with
a lot of customers where we'll help them cut their Google Maps
bill in half and then unlock some savings which they can use
to invest in GFS thing. So I mean you know I think we're
still early. A lot of retail apps, if you
open the app, it still doesn't really understand if you're in
store at home, on your couch or in the parking lot, you know to
to do a curbside pickup. So I would say the vast majority
of retail apps still have yet to fully realised.
We're not. Even really there, yeah, with
the with the normal use cases to to be thinking so further.
Out I think there's a lot more to do.
What I will say in terms of new use cases we're excited about,
you know I I would highlight to one is indoor location.
So you know not just understanding if somebody's in
the store, but where in the store are they.
Maybe you're showing you know scan and pay features near the
register or you're showing your virtual assistant feature in one
of the departments. So that's potentially
interesting. And then you know we think about
our company mission is connecting the digital and
physical worlds. I don't know if you saw Apples
vision grow announcement, they're pretty bulky.
I think people are going to be using those at home for a while.
But you could imagine a future where you wear a lightweight
version of that into the store, and how are you helping people
find their way to specific items or maybe see kind of relevant
information about the store and and that's fundamentally A
geofencing use case. As well, yeah.
I mean when you look at what Google have done with Live View,
I think that's that's the wonderful use case where people
should be able to imagine what the possibility is in store,
right, in, in terms of doing that.
And I I guess do you guys help the retailer on full stack with
delegation? Are you just about the sort of
the infrastructure for geolocation?
Yeah. And we oftentimes call ourselves
location infrastructure. That being said, we solve
technical challenges at different parts of the stack.
So we have SDK's, you install your iOS, Android app.
We have API's you can call from your website or maybe from your
back end. We really do think of ourselves
as as a full stack infrastructure provider.
So all the way kind of down on the client side collecting the
location data to storing it, helping you do analysis or
segmentation on it, maybe piping that to other system.
So SDK's and API's, but we really think of ourselves as
also platform. Yeah, that's really well.
If you're ever in the in Europe, drop by.
Say hi, we have there's there's a great customer we work with
the big deals app, OK out of Italy and we have a lot of EU
based customers. So we're we're over there a
bunch I'll getting sure to say, hey, nice.
Lovely meeting you. Thank you.
Thanks so much. Thanks.