(Final Video) Makoto Rheault-Kihara, VP of Growth at Hopper, Take a Trip with Hopper

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Daniel: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the You Should Talk to Podcast. I am Daniel Wiener, your host. You should talk to pairs, brands and marketers for free with vetted agencies and or freelancers because finding great agencies as well as freelancers is a pain. Super excited today to be joined by Makoto Row Kihara, who is the VP of Growth at Hopper Makoto.

Thank you for joining. Yeah, thanks for having me. We'll kick off first, but for, for those who don't know, I'm, I'm well aware of Hopper, but what is Hopper for the, uh, the Uninformed Listener? 

Makoto: Yeah, so Hopper is a travel booking platform for booking hotels, flights, car rentals as well. And we do that both through the Hopper app, which has just over 120 million downloads today.

And also through B2B partnerships with companies like Capital One, where we power their travel booking experience. So we work with. Capital One along with like banks like [00:02:00] Newbank and CommBank and Australia as well as like airlines, uh, like Air Canada or spirits that use our ancillary products on their websites.

So we've kind of gone into like a hybrid B2B and B2C approach, but all around making travel, booking better. 

Daniel: Well, it's a very relevant time of year for us to be talking about, uh, about travel. Um, I'm curious, the, the first question I ask everybody, uh, just about marketing in general, what's an unpopular opinion you have or a, a hot take of sorts?

Makoto: I'd say my hot take would be that there is such a thing as being too data-driven within marketing, and I love it. What I've seen marketing teams do sometimes is. You can kind of get into AB testing to the point where you're not opinionated in any way and that you don't apply any taste. And what I've noticed is that the best marketing strategies aren't the result or the sum of just a bunch of AB tests.

It's a strategy that is thought up and then tested to kind of find the [00:03:00] answers to specific questions. But you need to combine a degree of. Subjectivity and taste with with data. So the split that we tried to kind of land on within Hopper is like 80% data driven, but 20% of the time you just have to make the call.

And I think that lands into a place where you kind of combine the best of both worlds. 

Daniel: Yeah, I think it's super relevant now. Uh, more than ever. I think the brand first performance debate, uh, has been around, uh, forever in marketing, but becoming a little more, uh, prominent these days. I had somebody else on the podcast a couple months ago, Steph, uh, hoppy, who is, uh, VP of Marketing at Casey's, a very large pizza franchise group out of the Midwest and stuff, and she went into great.

Detail about how they actually went against, uh, data on a campaign that they were launching, you know, based on just, I don't know, gut vibes, whatever you want to call it. But yeah, I think, uh, a lot of what I see there comes back to good leadership and, you know, folks feeling like they have the, uh, [00:04:00] the bandwidth and ability to, to make a judgment call where maybe data doesn't point them in that direction and, you know, not be, uh, too scared to do that.

I think, uh, that's a lot of what goes into those decisions while the data said this. So we kind of have to do this. 

Makoto: Yeah, I think there's two sides to it where one of which is you need to recognize that some things are really hard to measure. So a lot of long-term impacts of marketing are, you know, there are ways to measure kind of long-term brand impacts, but I think you need to recognize that whatever measurement capabilities you have only give you a part of the story.

So you have to kind of use your intuition to figure out the rest. And the other piece is that I think it's easy to use data as a way to kind of mask indecisiveness, essentially. Where you're afraid to commit to a direction, so you just say like, let's just test both, and you end up testing every single little thing.

And at some point you have to pick a lane and, and have some conviction around the products that you build and the marketing that you do. And you know, testing specific variables sometimes makes sense, but [00:05:00] sometimes you just gotta make the call as well. 

Daniel: I like it. You've worked in travel most of your career from what I can tell.

Can you talk a little bit, just in general, like what have you seen? I'll, I'll give it to you in the, in the vein of post COVID since, you know, I say that was a, a big moment in probably travel, uh, universally, but what's something you've seen around consumer behavior around, I dunno call it online travel habits and just how people are using the internet for travel these days.

Makoto: I think COVID was definitely a major moment for travel, where one of the big things that we saw is that the needs around flexibility in travel really changed. So a lot of our growth coming out of COVID came from the fact that we had built FinTech products in house that essentially allow you to de-risk your trip, whether it's like making flights cancelable, or making the dates flexible or refunding you if you had any delays or disruptions in your flight process.

Both on the Hopper app and now through B2B partnerships, we've been distributing that very successfully because [00:06:00] people have kind of realized, uh, how valuable it is just to kind of hedge some of the travel decisions you make. And so the needs around flexibility have really increased. The other thing that we've noticed is that there's a much higher need, and I think consumers in general have higher expectations today around.

How well they expect their full trip to be coordinated between their flight, their hotel, their car rentals, the activities they book. They're increasingly expecting that if I book one thing on my app and another on my website and then go to the hotel and you know, book an activity, like all of that should be sort of doable and accessible through the same platforms.

And so the need for. Cross device and kind of cross product travel companies has become a lot more important. 'cause the ability to sort of string that whole trip together has become like a baseline customer expectation. And I think that's one of the reasons why the golden goose right now in travel [00:07:00] is really who can figure out how to use AI to significantly improve the trip planning process.

And so far it's been mostly unsuccessful attempts at just using kind of Chad GBT wrappers, you know, gimme a seven day itinerary for Japan type products. Sure. but whoever kind of figures out first, like, how do I actually string together a whole trip for you and make it bookable in a way that's convenient and materially better than the current booking experience is gonna be really successful.

And that's sort of what everyone's chasing right now. 

Daniel: Yeah, I've used chat GPT for, um, you know, call it the, the zero to one portion of, you know, getting some recommendations and starting research for travel. I think what I still don't have, I guess just when I think of the, the, the crux of it is trust, right?

Like. Yeah, I still feel better. I don't know why, you know, going directly to, um, either a hotel or a flight website often to, to book directly through that. So I think, yeah. I'm, I'm curious if, if you're allowed to talk about any of it, is there anything you're [00:08:00] particularly excited about at Hopper? New, new features, new, uh, you know, use cases for AI that you're able to, uh, speak to or anything new?

Makoto: Yeah, we're thinking about discovery in general, both through AI and social media and kind of the underlying thesis. About a lot of the ways that we're thinking about discoveries that like 10 years ago, the people, the way that people came up with their trip itineraries was they started their search on Google, right?

So you open up Google Flight from New York to Tokyo and then you start kind of planning from there and you Google hotels in Tokyo afterwards, and you Google activities in Tokyo afterwards. So the current generation of kind of travel incumbents are very search focused generally, and that's, you know, they've.

Played that strategy very successfully. Um, a lot of younger consumers today use TikTok and Instagram as their primary way of discovering, uh, travel. And increasingly people are doing your use case of discovering travel through JGBT and no one's really bridged the gap yet. [00:09:00] And like making those bookable in a way that is better than I asked Chad GPT about itineraries and then I.

Go and Google those things and then go through the regular booking flow. Right? 

Daniel: Right. 

Makoto: So a lot of the products that we're building now in Hopper, especially in the app, is just like, how do we bridge the gap between a social media video or like a collection of tiktoks that you liked and like building a trip and how do we actually make those Chad GBT recommendations consumable in a way that's better than just like a paragraph of text that it shows you, but also bookable.

So that you don't just like use that output to go back to the original booking process, that you can actually book through a, through almost as if you could book on chat GBT, you know? 

Daniel: No, I love it. That would be awesome. Uh, I'll, I'll expect that by, uh, you know, uh, in, in the next couple weeks from you and your team over there.

Uh, I'm curious. 2025 In my world at least, you know, my, my corner of the internet, uh, has been, [00:10:00] you know, weird. I talk to a ton of brands. Uh, there's scary headlines out there. Um, you know, there's, you know, AI's taking everybody's job, all that sort of stuff. What's your best piece of advice to other marketing leaders or growth leaders out there in 2025 about surviving as well as thriving in the, you know, the current landscape?

Makoto: I'd say. I think marketer, marketers and marketing teams in general should be leaning into engineering a lot more, and I think this has been like a continuation of a trend where as much as AI is going to change marketing a lot, I think there's been this like broader narrative around automation that's been hitting marketing for the last few years that we'll just continue to see the trend of marketing teams getting smaller, the data requirements around marketing, getting a bit more complex.

And so what I think great performance marketing teams especially need to do is like really lean on automation and you know, having an [00:11:00] engineering team is like a core part of your marketing strategy. 'cause if you aren't able to get leverage on your marketing team by building both like pre ai, basic automation, that allows you to just really elevate what one person can do within your team, but also now leverage all the new AI tools around.

Managing span, creating new ads. I think it'll just be really hard to compete with the marketing teams that do have that. But it creates this really interesting team structure where our marketing team was always like 50 50 engineers to marketers. 

Daniel: Interesting. 

Makoto: And the reason we did that is I, if you don't build the tooling, or if you don't build a team that allows you to leverage existing tooling, you end up having to do everything manually and you end up with these like larger, more bloated teams.

And I think deciding from the beginning that like we are going to try to keep marketing headcount really tight and instead focus on elevating the impact of that marketing team. With engineering, you end up with what ends up being a much [00:12:00] more competitive team. And so I think it used to be kind of a competitive advantage and now it's turning into just like a necessity for marketing teams.

Daniel: I like it. Yeah. I saw something the other day, like 70% or 50 to 70% of folks, uh, you know, globally have not even opened chat EPT or have, you know, never tried any sort of prompt. And I think on the marketing side, even in my, it still feels early, at least for me. I don't know if you see the same, um, it still feels like a ton of folks have not leaned in or are kind of like waiting on the sidelines to see what happens.

But yeah, I think. Presumably, uh, that would be my advice, at least to folks coming outta college is to your point, either engineering or just, uh, knowing AI tools as they exist and come out, um, better than anything, I would say. 

Makoto: Yeah, absolutely. 

Daniel: Uh, most VPs, which is your title or CMOs that I speak to, basically anybody over a director at any sort of, uh, brand.

And I particularly am [00:13:00] interested in this because I'm such a heavy LinkedIn user, which is how we got connected. Uh, is your inbox inundated there? Text, email, everything from agencies, vendors trying to work with you and Hopper? 

Makoto: Yeah. It's pretty much a constant barrage of agency and, and, and vendor especially messages.

Daniel: I'm always curious, is there anything that, if you are not in market for an agency or a vendor, is there anything an agency or a vendor can say to break through and potentially get you to take, you know, just a general call? 

Makoto: I think the number one thing is like trying to think of what are you pitching me that you're, I haven't heard a hundred times before, so I probably get at least once a day a kind of.

We will guarantee you a three to one ROAS on our CPA network and like we grew these 10 apps and, uh, you know, you can easily spend hundreds of thousands of dollars with us with guaranteed roas. And I hear that every day. And it's both not believable in the sense that like, if, if that [00:14:00] were true, then I, you know, I probably would've heard of your ad network before if you were delivering guaranteed three to one returns to everyone.

Sure. But it's also, you know, I get that pitch every day, so I'm not gonna respond to you for the same reason. I didn't respond to every other person that I've, that has pitched that to me. I've gotten a few unique vendor pitches or agency pitches where they had some like really interesting kind of single use case that would be relevant to what we're doing, or like a particularly well researched pitch where they actually knew what I was thinking about or what we were trying to do, and.

I've seen a lot of sales team kind of fake that by saying like, oh, I saw in the news that you guys just signed this big partnership. Have you thought of using a CPA guaranteed RY performance at network and it's kind of that fake relevance or chat GBT sales emails? 

Daniel: Well, I think a long time ago, somebody, uh, came out with, you know, the, the notion that as soon as somebody.

Has a new feature, or most likely they take investment that like they're just ready to spend like with [00:15:00] anybody in the next, you know, uh, two weeks or something like that, which may have been the case back in the day, but I don't see it working exactly like that. Yeah. 

Makoto: And it maybe performs incrementally better, but it's, it's not, it's still not compelling at all.

So one of the best pitches I actually got once was a guy sent me a video of himself and the thumbnail was him holding my name on a whiteboard. And he was just like, Hey, Makoto, uh, look, I heard you guys are really thinking about this. I listened to this like talk that you did. It sounds like this is a challenge for you.

That problem is exactly what my company solves. Let me know if you want to chat. I would love to give you like a demo or just like even get your feedback. And one, the fact that he went through the pain of like recording a video and like, you know, writing my name on a whiteboard and everything. Yeah. Like basically got him the call immediately, but also.

Um, the pitch was actually relevant to what we were thinking about. 

Daniel: Now, if you get that today, you're gonna think it's ai. 

Makoto: Yeah, yeah, that's true. Actually. I 

Daniel: actually had, uh, I wanna say it was, I [00:16:00] forget, we've had, this is episode, I don't know, 54 or something like that early on. Uh, one of the CMOs who was on, answered this question.

They, somebody sent them an iPad in the mail, and when they opened the iPad, it was programmed to not be able to do anything until they pushed play on the video and it was a video. They found it to be a little over the top. That's almost 

Makoto: a little scary. That's what I'm 

Daniel: saying. It was a little bit creepy to them.

So I think, you know, I, I end up coaching the agencies at least that I work with, you know, to a degree. And one of my thing is knowing your audience, you know, so like for some folks they may think that's incredible, others may think it's super creepy. So yeah, it's a little, I feel, feel way about gifts 

Makoto: also, like I know some marketers who like the gifts, I'm not a big fan of just.

Hey, like, here's a $50 gift card. Can I get you on a call for an hour? And the kind of implication that, like, I'm willing to do that for a $50 Starbucks gift card is, 

Daniel: yeah, those are, it's not 

Makoto: that it's insulting, it's just that like, that's not what's gonna convince me. You know? Like, 

Daniel: yeah. It's also a little insulting if it's, I think so.

I [00:17:00] do a, a good amount of gifting, but never generic. Actually, you, I, I should be sponsored by them at this point. Uh, a platform called Thanks, which allows me to send, you know, gifts could be as small as a coffee over email and stuff. But I'll do it, you know, uh, not at scale generally, you know, smaller stuff, but super, super relevant.

You know, I'll make a note if a CMO or VP of marketing I'm working with tells me gin as their favorite liquor was one recently, and I sent them a bottle of gin when they told me they were having a, you know, a shitty week. Um, stuff like that. I'm curious if it was, even if it was less than 50 bucks, 10 bucks, but hyper target, I don't know if you're a, a latte guy or something like that and somebody sends you a latte to me that's.

Nice. And that's the type of gifting that actually works. Yeah. I think it's a little insulting to do the, the Amazon gift card type deal. I think it's 

Makoto: like the generic gifts where it's just like I'm sending this to 500 people and hoping that 50 of them will take it is, it just doesn't work. But a personal gift, I think especially the existing clients, but even to new clients, like a personal gift that speaks to something they actually want.[00:18:00] 

It is just like, that's just like classic business at that point, right. Of like almost old school technique that I think just will work forever. Um, so we've had a few agencies or partners do that in a way where it's, it's like the thought behind it that counts at the end of the day. Yeah. With gifts in general, I think.

And, and it was the case for that one too. 

Daniel: Well, you gotta work in some of your interests into the rest of this interview so people know what to, uh, know, what to send you when they listen. Post my 

Makoto: Amazon wishlist in the show notes. That's 

Daniel: what I'm saying. You know, gotta be, gotta be shameless here. Um, I'm curious, how does Hopper, before I get into like the agency stuff, how does Hopper look at their agency landscape?

It's a, you know, um. AOL or you use hyper-specific? I'm especially curious 'cause I've seen since COVID, especially a little bit before when I was at an agency, but in the context of what I do now of brands moving away from like big, uh, full service groups and wanting more hyper-specific agencies that specialize in say, one to two things.

How do you view kind of like the agency [00:19:00] landscape at Hopper? 

Makoto: The way that I think about agencies is, you know, growth is always gonna be a core competency for. Hopper because we're a consumer company, uh, and especially on like the B2C side of the company, like marketing is too important to outsource. So we've never kind of had like an overarching marketing agency or an agency on record.

The way we think about agencies is kind of like, how can we supplement the skills that we have within the team or how can we get someone to teach us the skill that we want, uh, in a much faster way than kind of going through the trial and error ourselves. So we've worked with agencies sometimes on very specific channels like out of home or affiliates where there's like a a lot of very kind of channel specific domain knowledge that we just didn't have within the team that we essentially wanted to bring in by hiring an agency that specialized only in that one thing [00:20:00] and tended to have pretty good results with that model.

We've also used creative agencies. To supplement our internal creative team, where for the same reasons we don't outsource marketing, we've never really outsourced creative because creative is the biggest lever into marketing performance. And so it doesn't make sense to outsource for us at all. But, uh, what I did like to do is bring in usually like pretty boutique ad creative agencies that were focused on verticals that were very different from the ones that we had experienced in.

Daniel: Oh, I love to hear that. It's so interesting, so interesting. 

Makoto: One of my favorite agencies we worked with was a gaming creative agencies, and they had never like worked on a non-gaming client before, but basically we brought them on, on a performance model was like a percentage of spend. So there was no retainer or anything that we had to take on where they essentially had ideas around ads that were just so different from the things that we were coming up with because the [00:21:00] competitors, they were looking at, the space, they were looking at, the way they thought about ads was.

Very gaming based and very different from what we were coming up with. And so it was a really strong supplement to what we were doing. Similarly, we worked with like a e-commerce, uh, creative agency. E-commerce brands in general I find tend to have very strong, like product centric advertising, which makes sense.

So they never combined, took more than like maybe 20, 25% share of the spend that we had. But what they allowed us to do is kind of get like a much wider view into what are leading brands in general doing on the creative side outside of sort of the purview and the scope that we can see to really improve, like the rate at which we were coming up with better ideas in our internal creative team and just the overall performance of our ads.

So that kind of like very targeted, specific approach to agencies is what I've found has worked really well for us. 

Daniel: It's interesting, it's [00:22:00] so, at least, you know, with the brands I help, it's so counter and I actually agree a ton with what you said. Uh, I unintentionally work a lot in, uh, big franchise food, helping those brands find agencies.

I work with hundreds of agencies. Creative in particular is always a unique ask, I would say, where in my opinion. I, I don't think this way for every service line, but for creative to me, if you are a strong creative team, particularly say the creative director, like really understands what you're doing and insight driven, creative and all that sort of stuff, it translates across hypothetically all industries, in my opinion, right?

If you can tell a good story, you can tell a good story for, you know, brand A versus brand B and stuff like that. And I think what I find, I always use the franchise food, uh. You know, analogy is when I talk to those brands and I'm asking what they're looking for in the creative front, in that vertical particularly, it's always, we want an agency who has a ton of franchise food experience, right?

Uh, I particularly do not engage with agencies who are vertical [00:23:00] specific. I know there's a ton out there, but I think everything starts looking the same. Like there's, uh, which is why I think brands who are open to agencies of varying experiences and you know, who have case studies outside of their own industry are, uh.

Super interesting to get some new perspective and new ideas. 

Makoto: Yeah, I think there are a lot of common patterns across verticals that lead to good ad performance, and that's, that's what makes it so interesting to work with these agencies sometimes is they have the view of like, you know, this theme of ads is working really well in the gaming space right now.

Like, how would we make an ad about Hopper with that theme? And there's almost always a way to do that. And so it's. There are some kind of flavors I've noticed that different verticals tend to trend towards. So like gaming agencies are very good at kind of most, A lot of gaming ads are very gameplay heavy, right?

So the gaming agencies always made very good app demo ads of like showing app interactions and like how to [00:24:00] kind of present that in a way that's compelling in an ad because they're used to using screen recordings of the game and making ads around that. Whereas the e-commerce agencies were very good at like holding the product in hand and showing how it's used.

So kind of similar to the gaming side, but more tactile because they're used to like showing a shoe or showing jewelry or something. And so just like the ways they would film, the ways they would take on ads were different in in flavor in a way that was very interesting. And whereas we had like a very kind of talking to the camera style of creative a lot of the time.

But getting to know the different approaches they had ended up like really diversifying the type of creatives our in-house team made. And now I'd say we're more like 80, 90% in-house. Uh, but working with them was like a really good learning experience for the creative team too. 

Daniel: I'm curious how you think about that if you have an opinion there.

You know how, uh, the, the. The thought process or breakdown of how much to show the [00:25:00] actual product for Hopper versus, uh, trying to, I don't know, uh, tap into, for me personally, you know, my, my desire to travel and showing me, uh, trying to, you know, put that in my brain of, oh, I should take a trip. Like, how do you think of that in terms of your purview of growth?

Makoto: We've done a lot of like trying more inspirational content. We've found that the challenge with inspirational style travel content is that it. Drives a lot of engagement, but it's not, it doesn't sell the product. And I think the, the magic combo that you need for any high performing ad on, on paid social is like, it needs to be engaging enough that you'll watch and then it needs to sell the product.

And the ads that I've seen fail, usually fail on one of those two dimensions. It's either too boring and doesn't engage the u the the user or doesn't hook you to watch. Or it does hook you to watch, but it doesn't sell the product to the point where you're actually gonna engage and [00:26:00] convert and like buy something.

And the challenge with the inspirational content is it gets you to the point of watching the video, but then you'll just keep scrolling because there's no real call to action around like inspirational travel videos. And so the kind of visual moments we focus on instead is like. There are a lot of cues in the product that allow you to like really quickly understand what Hopper is and what the value you can get out of it is.

One of the reasons those cues are so clear is that we've designed the products in a way that is intentionally very easily marketable and easily understandable and an ad, and so we try to focus on like showing those moments. We also, some, we do use travel content where we'll show footage of a hotel or like.

Footage of someone in a flight, but it's always kind of with the narrative that like, oh, hopper allowed me to book this trip for only this price, for example, because the underlying message there is, look how nice this trip is, and look how [00:27:00] low that price is. This app allows you to do that more so than just like, you know, the Maldives is a really nice place to go.

Daniel: Sure. No, I like it. Uh, you shared a bunch of great agency experiences. I'm curious if you can think of either at Hopper or in the past without, you know, naming names and, and throwing people under the bus. Can you think of a negative agency experience that you've had and what made it, you know, not so great?

Makoto: I think we've had this twice and the classic negative agency experience is s. Usually more boutique. I haven't really worked with like very large agencies, honestly, just because there was never, it just never was a fit. But it was always some kind of boutique agency where the founder is like a very impressive person or has a background that I'm very interested in and want to work with that person for.

And we have a chat. They have like really interesting insights. Um, they have experience in like a very specific problem that we're trying to solve. Enough to convince us to sign on. And then we get switched [00:28:00] over to some super junior account manager. Sure. Or someone like three levels under them that manages the account and just isn't that good.

And then you end up in this spot where you're essentially having to manage this like junior employee who's sort of doing what you want, but not in a way that's compelling and it ends up being a pretty big waste of time because I spend as much time. Managing that relationship and trying to get the outcomes that I want as I would've just doing it myself or hiring someone to do it.

And at the end of the day, you also don't really get any real idea of whether that channel's valuable or not, where a lot of the times we'd engage agencies to say like, should we do channel? Should we do this new channel? Let's work with an agency that's an expert in it and we'll prove definitively is this channel gonna work for us or not?

The conclusion after like a bad agency experiences, I don't know if the channel works or not, because this agency wasn't good enough to, to [00:29:00] actually put in a good try. So it ends up just wasting a bunch of time. And that's happened to us once or twice. And it's almost always when like you get switched over to some account manager after you sign that it's just not that competent.

Daniel: That's supposed to happen at the big agencies, not at the, not at the boutique independent agency. Yeah's surprising at 

Makoto: the small ones, right? 'cause that's. Kind of what you'd ex expect, but even sometimes the founder will kind of be in the call but clearly doing something else or something. And Sure. You end up basically having an account managed by someone you wouldn't have hired in the first place.

Daniel: No, that makes total sense. Uh, what are you most excited about in the marketing space at the moment? I'll, I'll, I'll say outside of AI, since we've, we've talked about it a decent amount. 

Makoto: I do, I mean, I do think it's, it's kind of AI adjacent, what I'm very excited about in the marketing space, and it's that.

There's, there's kind of this very interesting dynamic that is happening right now and, and kind of an interesting squeeze that I think is gonna happen where you have, on one side, [00:30:00] automation and AI I think is gonna continue shrinking marketing teams and there are a lot of roles within performance marketing especially that are just gonna be a lot less valuable than they were five years ago.

I especially think about like channel specialists, so. If you're like an expert in just like Facebook ad buying, I think the value of that will decrease over time just because so much of the on platform stuff has already gotten automated. And you know, when I started at Hopper, we had a hundred, 200 campaigns.

We're running like thousands of ad sets with like super complex automation across all of it. Now it's just like, uh. Couple campaigns with like a couple really good creatives and you just let the algorithm figure it out, you know, and that just outperforms us trying to fiddle the kns ourselves. 

Daniel: Do you think, to that point, I'm curious, uh, is there a, you know, if you're spending $50 million annually as a brand versus somebody spending a million annually is one, you know, [00:31:00] if you're spending 50, do you think it's just too much of an investment to not have a little bit of a bigger.

Team or maybe have channel specialists and stuff like that. I know there's nuance to both sides, but I'm curious, do you think, do you weigh it like that in any capacity? 

Makoto: Yeah, I mean, I think it's more that like the spend that a single marketer can deploy is increasing every year and very quickly, and so I think like a single person now can handle multimillion dollar monthly budgets across the core channels.

Just because the platform level automation has gotten so strong, and if you go back to what I described around like if you have a really strong engineering team on marketing too, you've built the right infrastructure that allows your marketers to have strong visibility and strong ability to control multimillion dollars per month.

But the corollary of that is that, you know, there's only so much marketing spend out there, and if fewer and fewer marketers are needed to manage that spend, marketing teams will just get smaller. [00:32:00] 

Daniel: Sure. 

Makoto: The flip side is what's ai, what AI is kind of creating that I think is really interesting is one, there's this huge new generation of like AI powered consumer companies that are growing insanely fast.

And that's leading to like a huge influx of funding of companies that are now gonna have to grow really fast to be able to meet the valuations and the growth expectations that have been put on them. And you also have this dynamic where building a product. And building apps especially has gotten so much easier over the last five years that I think we're gonna see this like explosion in just a sheer number of apps and number of products that are available because, you know, a 16-year-old kid now can release a mobile app with very basic code knowledge.

The result of that is the saturation and just number of products puts a lot of importance back on the growth team. To be able to cut through the noise and grow [00:33:00] both for these like new highly funded VC companies and also the more like indie apps that are trying to break through. It makes the growth role that much more important because you are now sort of the differentiator where everyone can build an app of very few companies can grow and scale an app.

And so it's gonna create this really interesting dynamic where you'll have much smaller marketing teams than before, but that are in. A very important seat within the company. And so I think the way that marketers need to really be thinking about their careers is like, how do you get into what is now like maybe 30% of the roles that used to exist, but that'll be two or three times more valuable than they used to be.

And how do you become the type of marketer that fits into that world? Because I do think like a lot of the overly narrow, especially marketing roles. Are gonna get eliminated in the last, in the next five years. 

Daniel: Yeah. I think that's how I think [00:34:00] about creative with all this. At least in my mind, I'm not the first person to say this.

I've seen several with the take, but. As everybody as AI becomes, uh, increases higher adoption rates and you know, hypothetically in the next, I don't know, a decade, everybody has access to some of these tools that creative and, you know, the ideas behind some of this stuff, you know, go back to being the thing.

You know, the only thing that AI maybe cannot, you know, uh, you know, steal from agency land and stuff like that is the, the creative idea around it. Execution will change. But yeah, I think I see, uh, what you described happening on creative as well. 

Makoto: Yeah, I think creative execution will change a lot. I'm kind of, it'll be really interesting to see whether AI can, can come up with great ads because I haven't seen the tools so far kind of successfully do that, aside from just kind of basic copy testing, which I think is.

A much easier use case. Um, but at Hopper we always kept like a very small creative team because we built [00:35:00] a lot of infrastructure that allowed, you know, one creative to make dozens or even hundreds of ads in a week just using automation. 

Daniel: Sure. 

Makoto: And like really good templating. And I, I think it'll just sort of be a continuation of that trend where individual creatives now will be able to produce tons of ads and like multiply the, the impact of the creative work they're doing and it'll.

Bring a lot of the value back into like your ability to think of great ads and, and sort of design great ads more so than actually do the work of producing it. Um, but I do think we'll see like a similar dynamic where creative teams will likely get smaller, where it's very unlikely I think that you'll have like a dedicated copywriter and many teams I agree that aren't, you know, a lot of large brands that are like very brand heavy will still need copywriters, but your average app, I think just like won't need it anymore.

So. I think there's gonna be a consolidation there too. But similarly, like it'll put a lot of importance on the creative teams. 'cause any team or growth is important. Creative [00:36:00] is also very important 'cause it's the biggest lever into performance marketing. So it'll be a really interesting time, I think for marketers where if you're on the right side of that shift, you'll be more empowered than marketers ever have been.

But it's, it's also I think, a reality that like. Yeah. Marketers need to be cognizant that a lot of these rules will be eliminated and if you don't make it to the other side, it's gonna be like a really difficult job market for those people. 

Daniel: Yeah. My next question, uh, may be the same answer then. I was gonna say, what keeps you up at night and stresses you out from a marketing or business standpoint?

Makoto: I think, I mean, hopper's like a constant bat. I wanna say like, Trav travel's a very competitive industry, so there's always things to worry about and, you know, new challenges to build around. Um, I would say like the bigger thing that, I don't know if it keeps me up at night that, but something I've been thinking about a lot is I don't feel that marketing teams today have figured out how to [00:37:00] use AI tools to the degree that engineering teams have.

So, you know, using Co violet or cursor is just like pretty, I, I'd say not standard, but it's still probably in the macro sense, like early adopters. But. Yeah, definitely not that special to be using AI to be writing a substantial portion of your code, and most of the engineers I know who are even slightly ahead of the curve tell me 30, 40, 50% improvements in the amount of code they can write and produce using ai.

Ai. I haven't really met a lot of marketing teams that are at that level of impact yet, where it's not just kind of some internal process is now better because of an agent or you know. We use AI to generate copy or like one of those tools or just like come up with a tagline for my Google ad or something.

So we've been trying to think about a lot, like how do we, how do we use AI to have that level of impact? Because it's, it's helping, but it's, today it's more of like an [00:38:00] optimization, I would say, to our team. And it feels like there has to be use cases that would take it to the level that engineering teams have been able to take it.

Daniel: No, I like it. It makes total sense. Uh, we'll finish with a couple fun questions here. What was your very first job? 

Makoto: So it depends how you count it. My, my first job that I was hired for was, um, back when I was in high school, my friend and I had like built this music blog and that was kind of my first intro into digital marketing in the first place.

And, um, what'd 

Daniel: you build it on? 

Makoto: It was first on Blog Spot. Okay. And then it was on, uh, WordPress. And that basically got me into like learning about SEO and like how to grow a blog. And that's essentially how I got introduced to the world of digital marketing in general. And I bought the book Digital Marketing for Dummies and just was like amazed at like, oh, this is like a job.

This, you know, people get paid to do this. 

Daniel: I started in social media, so I, I feel the same. I couldn't believe people were paying me to hang out on [00:39:00] Facebook. 

Makoto: Yeah. And eventually, so what I did, um. It was like the summer before my last year of high school was, I went around to a bunch of businesses in Ottawa, my hometown, and I just like asked them like, can I build your website?

If they didn't have a website already? 'cause we'd learn. My friend and I had learned like web design and how to do basic SEO and things like that. And uh, this like frozen yogurt place. In downtown Ottawa. Agreed. And we got the, at the time, just amazing rate of, I think it was $11 an hour. 

Daniel: You probably felt like a millionaire back then.

Makoto: Well, that it, I remember he pitched it to me as, I'll pay you a dollar above minimum wage. And I was like, wow. I am, I am gonna be rolling in cash. Yeah. You know, it's, that's a dollar more than all my friends are making. Um, so my friend and I built this website, uh. We sent him an invoice for $730, which was the total amount.

And it was, honestly, to this day, it was a pretty decent website. We, you know, [00:40:00] we, that's awesome. Did the photography, we built the whole thing, 

Daniel: a bargain for them. 

Makoto: And then he didn't pay me. 

Daniel: Oh no. So still never, 

Makoto: he never paid us. 

Daniel: I think you should name and shame him on this podcast. Maybe we get you that.

What's that worth today with, uh, inflation and Yeah. And all that. 

Makoto: It just, you know, so I. I kept texting him following up and I showed up to the restaurant a couple times, but he was never there 'cause he was the owner and. I remember telling my parents and they're like, okay, well did you sign a contract?

And I was like, no, I didn't. And they're like, well, that's your first lesson in business is don't do the work before you sign a contract. Yeah. 

Daniel: You got an early lesson in entrepreneurship. 

Makoto: It, it just, at that age, it just didn't occur to me that that could happen. That they would just tell me they were gonna pay me and then not pay me.

So it depends if you count that as a job. 'cause I never got paid my first job where I did get paid was You got paid. Yeah, 

Daniel: that'd be good. 

Makoto: One of the. Places that I pitched on building a website, the owner called me back and he is like, I, your name's Koda, right? Are you Japanese? And I said, yes. And it was, it was a [00:41:00] ramen restaurant.

Said, Hey, I, I don't need a website, but do you wanna just work here as a chef? And I thought you, and I was like, you know what? Yeah, sure. I, I think that was 

Daniel: a little more, uh, you know, okay. Back then in 2025, I don't know if that pause. 

Makoto: Presumptive. And I told him, I was like, I, I don't know how to cook. And he is like, it's fine.

You'll learn. Just come in. It's in your 

Daniel: DNA, just come on in. Yeah, that's great. 

Makoto: Come in tomorrow. And so that summer I did a part-time Ramen cooking. 

Daniel: I love it. To both of those, I hope whoever didn't pay you $730, here's this podcast and settles up. 

Makoto: The froyo place went under. So there's some karma kind.

That's karma. Karma there. 

Daniel: Yeah. That's karma. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. What would your final meal be? 

Makoto: Maybe Ramen honestly was still to this day, one of my favorite foods. That's one of the reasons I took the job, is I got one free bowl of ramen every shift. And for my high school self, that was pretty prime. And I just had like an insane metabolism at that time too.

So that was, 

Daniel: that's great. Yeah, bowl of Ramen would put [00:42:00] me out for the rest of the day right now. Uh, I'll give you a bonus question. Since you're in travel, what's either the best trip you've been on or what's on the, what's number one on the bucket list? 

Makoto: I'd say, uh. Pro my favorite destination was probably Bueno Aires.

Okay. Um, I spent about six weeks there in 2023 and just had like a really good time with a couple friends. We worked remotely from there and it was just like a, a really fun trip and a really great city for a lot of reasons, both food wise and the, the people are really nice and it's a really fun city with lots to do.

Um. Bucket list is I need to do like some kind of safari that's like been on, you're, 

Daniel: let's go. I tell my girlfriend every 12 seconds, send her number one TikTok videos of them. 

Makoto: It's just like, um, it, it, it's probably like the biggest kind of travel bucket list thing I haven't done. And so, um, I've been trying to [00:43:00] figure out when I could go do that and how 

Daniel: All right.

Let me know. I'll pop over. 

Makoto: Yeah. And 

Daniel: then my final question for you, who is somebody who inspires you personally, professionally, or both? 

Makoto: I'm a big fan of people who have profiles where they went through kind of a traditional tech career and then did some, like insanely ambitious company afterwards. And I was thinking of some examples in like, Blake Shool from, um, boom Supersonic comes across as an example.

Mm-hmm. Where? Mm-hmm. So he, he was like a PM at Groupon and did, uh, SEM for Groupon also, and then he quit Groupon and then started a supersonic jet company that's basically trying to bring the Concord back. 

Daniel: Yeah. 

Makoto: And it was like making it work. Nine years later, he is, I think it's raised so much money.

They built a prototype. They just hit like Mach one with one of their latest models. I think it's, it's a [00:44:00] very. Kind of inspiring career path to go from like the traditional work in a tech company or like build tech, but then like go really deep on something that is incredibly ambitious and very hard to build.

And, um, I think about those entrepreneurs as kind of like the, the ideal life story basically. Yeah. 

Daniel: Awesome. Yeah, I'm, uh, enamored by p for whatever reason. Not necessarily e-commerce in general, but just anything tangible that is like, uh, involves a formula and being manufactured and QA and all of that sort of stuff.

And then being able to figure out how to ship that globally. Like I hang out on the internet and, you know, use brain. Yeah, there's something about hardware, right? That's 

Makoto: like, it's so, it's tactile and it's tangible in a way that I think is very. Satisfying. And a lot of the times I envy hard tech founders when I was at a event recently for New York [00:45:00] Tech Week where a bunch of like, um, national security and defense startups were there.

And one woman I met was starting a company that was essentially making like. Lasers that you can shoot up into space so that they dissolve cloud cover in like a very pinpointed way so that you can send optical like signals through clouds. Which she was like, you know, obviously everyone knows today, like optical signals don't make it through cloud cover.

I was like, yeah, of course. Yeah. Everybody knows that classic problem. Yeah. Uh, but it some like super powerful laser that basically prevents that from happening. So you can send signals to satellites like 10 times faster. And I envy them in just sort of how cool that is and the, the engineering behind it and how tangible that is.

But then when I hear about how hard it is to like, get these companies to do anything in terms of revenue or go to market, sometimes I do appreciate that I have an app that I can buy a Facebook ad for, you know, 

Daniel: that is, uh, that is the truth. Uh, to that end, no, I appreciate you joining. This was awesome.

What do you wanna leave the [00:46:00] viewers with, uh, the listeners with, with hopper head to hopper.com. Anything in particular you want them to, uh, want them to do? 

Makoto: Yeah, download the Hopper app. Try to let me know if you have any feedback or ideas for things that we could build that you think would be cool. And um, I'm on Twitter at makoto rk if you have any feedback there and be curious to hear.

Daniel: Awesome. Well I appreciate you joining and, uh, yeah, look forward to seeing what, uh, Hopper's got for the, for the back half of the year. 

Makoto: Awesome. Well thanks a lot Daniel. Appreciate you having me.

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