Episode 6: From Consumer App to Location Data company with Josh Anton, CSO of DigitalEnvoy

Welcome to the Location Insights Podcast.
Guest: Josh Anton (Chief Strategy Officer, DigitalEnvoy)
Host: Kevin (Global Marketing Manager, unerry Inc.)

DigitalEnvoy: https://www.digitalenvoy.com
Outlogic: https://outlogic.io

Have feedback or like to be a guest on the show drop us a mail: [e-mail] 

In this episode I speak with Josh Anton about his entrepreneurial career and experience growing a startup, to extreme business challenges, leading sale of his company.

• An accidental start in location data: A college safety app called Drunk Mode grew to nearly two million users and unexpectedly launched Josh Anton’s career in location data.
• A failed SDK partnership sparked a new company: Poor experience as a client pushed the team to build its own location technology, laying the groundwork for X-Mode.
• Publishers powered the growth: X-Mode scaled by giving app developers a stronger way to monetize their apps without compromising technical performance.
• Hypergrowth came with hard lessons: Expanding from a small startup to more than 50 employees exposed the need for experienced leaders, tighter processes, and faster decision-making.
• The company nearly collapsed overnight: Platform restrictions, public controversy, lost investment, and mounting financial pressure put X-Mode’s future at risk.
• Relationships became the lifeline: Loyal employees, committed publishers, and a resilient technical team helped preserve the business through its toughest period.
• Digital Envoy becomes parent company: The acquisition gave X-Mode’s technology, team, and publisher network a path forward within a broader data-intelligence company.
• Privacy is reshaping the industry: Josh sees the future in explicit consent, first-party relationships, stronger regulation, and analytics that avoid moving precise location data.

Have questions or like to be a guest on the show? Drop us a mail: [e-mail] 

Creators and Guests

Host

Kevin

Global Marketing Manager at unerry

Guest

Josh

Is the Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at Digital Envoy (Growth / Corp Strategy / M&A)

What is Location Insights?

Welcome to the Location Insights Podcast
Where we bring you information, news, and insights from Partners, Clients, and Data Scientists about: Location marketing, Retail Media, POI, Data Analysis, and other interesting topics.

Kevin: Hi, and welcome to the Location Insights podcast.

Kevin: I am your host, Kevin, the Global Marketing Manager at unerry Inc.

Kevin: unerry is a location analytics platform and data insights company based in Tokyo, Japan.

Kevin: In today's episode, we'll be covering some interesting topics, including starting up a location marketing company to growth of that company, to acquisition of that company.

Kevin: And with me on that conversation today is Josh Anton.

Kevin: He's currently the Chief Strategy Officer at Digital Envoy.

Kevin: Welcome to the show.

Kevin: Thank you for joining us.

Kevin: Thank you for having me, Kevin.

Josh: I'm excited to be here.

Kevin: So, why don't we

Kevin: Just kind of jump in looking back at how you got into the location marketing industry.

Kevin: Story.

Kevin: What got you interested in location marketing?

Kevin: Where do you study in school?

Kevin: What was your background?

Kevin: You can talk a bit on that.

Josh: Yeah, I would probably say I accidentally fell into location marketing.

Josh: So a little bit about myself.

Josh: I went to the University of Virginia near the DC area, about two hours south of DC.

Josh: And I graduated with a bachelor's in commerce and I had track in IT and marketing 11 years ago at this point.

Josh: But when I was in college, right, I wanted to build an app.

Josh: And basically, a girl drunk dialed with me at a college party, and the rest was history.

Josh: And so we ended up building an app called Drunk Mode.

Josh: So I actually started in the consumer industry or as an app publisher.

Josh: And so we, God, we grew that app to about 2 million folks at its peak.

Josh: Basically, a lot of college students across the US, the UK, and Canada.

Josh: And what the app did was it stopped you from drunk dialing your friends.

Josh: I allowed you to find your drunk friends so you didn't lose them, and it showed you where you went last night.

Josh: So, this was built in 2013, and we ran that for a few years post-graduating college in 2014.

Josh: And essentially in 2016, this was kind of the early stages of the location industry, back in a day when Placed was a separate company, you know, prior to getting acquired by Snapchat, then to Foursquare and where they are today.

Josh: And so we had a few companies approach us and say, hey, we want to integrate our SDK into your app.

Josh: We'll pay you for your location data.

Josh: And so there was one company in particular that is called Hardcore Method.

Josh: And this company we integrated in 2016, they drained a third of our battery life a day and never paid us.

Josh: But it was probably one of the best lessons we learned.

Josh: Where essentially we lost a lot of our user base because of it.

Josh: This wasn't the heyday.

Josh: Basically, iPhone 4.

Josh: When SDKs, when you're integrated, it drives a ton of battery life and so forth.

Josh: And so one of my engineers, Gabriel Jensen, who's still with us today at Digital Envoy, was like, you know what?

Josh: Why don't we just take this thing out?

Josh: Let's just put Apple's SDK for location management basically on full drive and see what happens.

Josh: And it was taking up maybe 20% battery life.

Josh: So we had to grow to 2 million folks.

Josh: We had about 100 college reps across the U.

Josh: S.

Josh: in rural areas and cities.

Josh: And we just essentially had them test their SDK across the board.

Josh: We basically built out an SDK.

Josh: During that time, we got into AOL's incubator, and I met another one of my teammates.

Josh: I believe you know, Donnie Yancey.

Josh: He was just about to move to San Diego.

Josh: And when he saw our company in Incubator, and he was the former CEO of MapQuest, so he had built the early stage of location for them.

Josh: He was like, Josh, stop focusing on drunk mode.

Josh: You should go out and you should contact all of your app friends since you know a ton of apps in the industry, build out an SDK and integrate it into their apps.

Josh: And so, myself, Jamie, and a few others, Jamie was my COL, we did an entire retrospective, looked up 500 companies.

Josh: It was a very crowded industry back in the day: beacon companies, location companies, location tech.

Josh: And we were like,

Josh: There's a ton of location companies that are licensing data.

Josh: But we also realize there's probably only about two to four thousand apps that have above two thousand DAUs that run location.

Josh: So it seemed like everyone was selling data to themselves.

Josh: So when we entered as X mode in 2017, kind of accidental things, we needed to make money as an app.

Josh: We met the right people at the right time.

Josh: We were in AOL's incubator.

Josh: We were like, we're going to go up to all of the apps that we know, and we're going to have them sign basically two to three exclusivity as part of our business model.

Josh: We're going to pay them a fixed fee that was very high, where we can make up a 10% to 30% of their top line revenue, what we called a living wage for location data.

Josh: And we're going to help them grow.

Josh: And that was the start of X mode.

Josh: And it grew very quickly.

Josh: It went from so

Josh: We had raised about $1.

Josh: 5 million at the time.

Josh: We were making $5,000 a month, and I was barely.

Josh: And it wasn't for ads.

Josh: It was some random things.

Josh: We were selling like wine racks and stuff like that.

Josh: So 2016, we made about 60K.

Josh: 2017, we pivoted April 1st, 2017.

Josh: Made a million that year.

Josh: 2018, 3.

Josh: 6, 2019, 6.

Josh: 7.

Josh: And 2020, in the height of COVID, we basically made about 1314 that year and exited at a 1.

Josh: 25 million a month exit rate, so about 15.

Josh: So it was, and we went from seven people in AOL's incubator, most of us in our 20s, to about 55 people at our peak.

Josh: So it was a crazy

Josh: Incredible journey with its ups and downs.

Josh: Some things we did really well, some things that we ran into hitches along the way.

Josh: We accidentally found the location data industry.

Josh: This was not what I expected to be working on after college.

Josh: I thought we would build drunk mode out and sell it to Heineken, honestly.

Josh: So that was the initial goal that we went down a very different journey.

Kevin: Yeah, that's a wild ride.

Kevin: So drunkmode, to kind of recap, it was a lot of safety features.

Kevin: You're going out.

Kevin: Maybe you have a bit too much to drink.

Kevin: You have an app that

Kevin: Shares your location with your trusted friends or a couple of trusted contacts in case anything bad happens, they know where you were or where you are to get in touch.

Josh: Yep, mostly a lot of sororities and fraternities I used it actually, which we just found fascinating.

Josh: And so they would look at it to make sure their friends got home okay, essentially.

Kevin: Right.

Kevin: And then you pivoted to providing an SDK and acquiring first party data from other apps, location data, and that became your core business.

Kevin: And then you grew that through your strategic approach was outbid, outpay the other competitors of the market at the time.

Kevin: And then you would become the sole owner or the sole rights of having that data because you have that exclusivity with those apps.

Josh: That is correct.

Josh: Yeah.

Josh: And I think the things, the small things that I think made us great, I would say that having a really incredible CS process for managing the publishers

Josh: really ensuring our SDK was battle tested as well.

Josh: I like to joke that XMode and even OutLogic today is not really a data science company or data analyst company, but at our core, we're really good at data engineering and good at iOS and Android development.

Josh: And I think that helped as well with just retaining publishers.

Josh: And I think the last piece, and when we met back in the day, it's like meeting all of our publishers and building good relationships with them.

Josh: Because when it's good, it's great.

Josh: But when the going gets tough, those unique relationships breaking bread of the publisher, as I would say, really helps ensure that we still retain the people that we work with.

Kevin: Yeah, definitely.

Kevin: It's those connections you make with your clients, with your partners that really help you along the way.

Kevin: Especially in those challenging points where things outside of your control may affect your business in negative ways.

Kevin: And then you having that trust from your partners for the long term or at least for longer term into the future helps to keep those connections and those business alliances going.

Kevin: And so through the very fast growth process, what was your experience like?

Kevin: Are there any insights that you can share from

Kevin: going from like a one, two, three person company to a fifty plus person company and leading in the location marketing industry in the States.

Josh: Yeah, I mean, I'll say this very bluntly.

Josh: I didn't know what I was doing 90% of the time.

Josh: It was my first time in my late 20s, and I would say that for probably a large amount of our team.

Josh: But where we made up with lack of experience, we made it up in innovation and hustle.

Josh: There are some things that we did really well and some things that looking back, I think we could have done

Josh: Better.

Josh: Things we did really well.

Josh: I would say that we were pioneers in trying to build a business that wasn't just focused on ad tech and data licensing there.

Josh: By really pioneering use cases and working of companies outside AdTech and GovTech and FinTech and Cyber.

Josh: That was one

Josh: Two, we had an incredible team, and we got very fortunate with many of the engineers that we brought on sales as well.

Josh: It took us a little bit to find a really good CTO, and we

Josh: Being a young team, I'm going to make the joke adults in the room, but getting I think some of the best hires we made that really matured us was like Mike Colton, who was our CFO.

Josh: Who really got us to a point that we can predict when we're going to miss or beat our revenues each month?

Josh: The typical startup part of that, working with origin and

Josh: really nailing down our sales process for CS, what an MQL and SQL is, which for any startup person with SaaS gets it.

Josh: For everyone else, it's Greek.

Josh: So, those were things we did well.

Josh: I think that because we grew really quickly, some of the processes that we had could have been a little more improved because we went from

Josh: basically in three years, five to ten folks to 50 something and 60,000 in revenue to almost to 15.

Josh: And so there were growing pains that we had that I think we could have invested a little bit more.

Josh: I think we could have fired earlier and hired faster, as other examples.

Josh: But I think

Josh: for the circumstances that we had.

Josh: And honestly, being a very new industry, we did the best we could.

Josh: And I think the results for the most part showed for it.

Josh: And we had an incredible culture.

Josh: I think that we really focused on not only the culture, but how to make location interesting.

Josh: That may have bit us in the butt towards the end of that story, but Jake was.

Josh: Incredible at getting us out front and really branding us, our former CMO, as the leader in location.

Josh: In COVID, we were out front going viral with ironically spring breakers and

Josh: Where they were going in COVID.

Josh: We were on the front page, we were on CNN, we were on the Wall Street Journal front page, all through basically figuring out how to make

Josh: location analytics interesting and useful and relevant in the moment.

Josh: And I think we did a really good job on that.

Josh: I think we tried to be extremely transparent.

Josh: I would argue all the press that we ended up having towards the end maybe wasn't the best thing because it put a target on our back.

Josh: But I don't regret.

Josh: trying to at least follow our moral high ground and try to trying to be the leader in location and pushing the envelope.

Josh: I like the joke that we were the Napster of the location industry in some ways.

Josh: Where we pioneered many of the stuff that happened.

Josh: And obviously, we got bit in the butt from it a little bit.

Kevin: Yeah, I think that's a good analogy, the Napster analogy there.

Kevin: Early to the market.

Kevin: A huge growth, and then, let's say, legal challenges or challenges outside of your control.

Kevin: I think that transitions us into what ended up

Kevin: happening with the company in terms of the acquisition and the sale of your company.

Kevin: So can you share any insights in terms of what that process was like and that experience?

Kevin: You're at Digital Envoy today, and they are your parent company.

Kevin: And how was that for you?

Kevin: And what can you share on that?

Josh: Yeah, so

Josh: I will say, as someone who was kicked out as a senior in high school, I would have said, that was kicked out of my house as a senior in high school.

Josh: That would have been the worst part of my life.

Josh: This moment probably trumps that, actually.

Josh: So, some context, and you can research this online.

Josh: So we worked with an app called Bits Media.

Josh: That was the publisher name that people knew internally, but they owned an app called Muslim Pro.

Josh: And I think at the time, there were other players in the data industry that also worked with this app.

Josh: And we had basically signed our contract, started working with them in mid October.

Josh: So we had raised about $23 million at this time.

Josh: We had grown tremendously in that year.

Josh: It was a good time to raise money.

Josh: We had our series B on the table, which

Josh: It would have been nice, an 88 million pre, 100 million post Series B.

Josh: And they had signed that term sheet on November 18th.

Josh: So timeline in this.

Josh: Muslim Pro Bits Media, we ended up going live with them basically mid October of 2020.

Josh: Vice article comes out November 10th or somewhere in that second week of 2020.

Josh: We sign our term sheet November 18th, 2020 to close December 18th, 2020.

Josh: And at the time, no one was really like, all right, it's Vice, right?

Josh: You know, it's different than if the Wall Street Journal is publishing something or New York Times.

Josh: And Wall Street Journal publishes an article December 10th, 2020.

Josh: I remember this day.

Josh: Impressive, we got on the front page three times in our history: drunk mode, x-mode in COVID, and this one.

Josh: And Xmode is banned from the Apple and Google store.

Josh: Now, some background on why this occurred.

Josh: There was a little bit of politics that was going on.

Josh: There was a senator that didn't like that we were selling data into GovTech.

Josh: Particular US and EU data, or US data in this case, actually.

Josh: And they didn't like that.

Josh: And so they wanted us not to do that.

Josh: There was no law to say that we shouldn't.

Josh: It wasn't our primary business either.

Josh: It was mostly a global feed.

Josh: So, they decided to make an example out of us.

Josh: We had worked with muslimPro for about a month and a half.

Josh: PR moment happens

Josh: Banned from App Store, Series B falls apart December, basically right after the article comes out.

Josh: We've got a month of runway in the bank, and we've got to figure out how we're going to basically what we're going to do.

Josh: I took a week off that Christmas holiday, which is crazy to say with everything burning down.

Josh: I was like, I need a week to just kind of, I haven't taken a week off since I started a company, just figure out what we're going to do.

Josh: I called a bunch of different industry veterans.

Josh: And we got a term sheet from a player in the space for a million dollars for the company, which was a little ridiculous, but at least it gave me the ability to go to my board and say, hey.

Josh: We're going to go and we're going to put the company to market.

Josh: And our investor base was pretty divided.

Josh: We had about 150 investors.

Josh: A third of them wanted us to go and sue people, which is not wise.

Josh: Another third of us wanted to continue, right, and go crazy with this, right?

Josh: I feel like if we had gone that route, we would have had a down round.

Josh: And the other third were sensible of like, hey, we need, well, there were more panic, we need to get our money out now, right?

Josh: And so my board stepped off actually December 31st because we lost our D&O insurance at the time.

Josh: Basically, we had our SDK banned, so we're trying to figure out what we're going to do.

Josh: We ended up building a different type of solution to get back in the app store.

Josh: We ended up shutting off our US and EU GovTech business.

Josh: To make nice-nice with everyone.

Josh: And we ended up kicking off a process.

Josh: And so we were lucky.

Josh: The folks who led our acquisition process was an investment bank by the name of Eminence Capital.

Josh: They handled the Weatherbug acquisition.

Josh: Actually, which was also a little hairy with semantic.

Josh: So, January 6th, I basically go to all of my employees and I say, hey.

Josh: We're going to be putting the company to market.

Josh: This was the day, the afternoon or evening after we had laid off about a third of the workforce to kind of conserve burn.

Josh: One of the hardest things I had to do.

Josh: My brother was part of that process being let go as well.

Josh: So it was very like.

Josh: People we kept were the people we needed to get to the acquisition process.

Josh: When I said, hey, we've got a month of runway in the bank.

Josh: We're going to put the company up for sale.

Josh: We will also look at other investment options too.

Josh: But if you stay with us, and this company sells for above $25 a million equity in cash, we will guarantee four and a half months of pay for every employee, 18 months acceleration of stock.

Josh: And an extra three months if someone is laid off in the first 12 months post-acquisition.

Josh: And my bet, because honestly, this should have been a fire sale, right, of the company.

Josh: My bet was that

Josh: If the employees stayed, we had a chance to build a technology to get back in the App Store and clean up all the other stuff.

Josh: The team is what made XMode great.

Josh: The technology is what made XMode great.

Josh: And the published relationships made XMode great.

Josh: And those three things, if we keep those, we'll keep our clients and we'll be able to softland the company.

Josh: We only had one person leave.

Josh: All 34 other people stayed, which did not know how that hour call was going to go.

Josh: And we kicked off the process.

Josh: I had to figure out how to extend runway, so I convinced a client at the time who was paying us $300,000 a year for US data in the fintech space.

Josh: To write me five years of data up front, or I would sell to their competitor.

Josh: They did at zero interest, which was good.

Josh: One of the best negotiated deals I ever did.

Josh: They ended up selling their company, so they're happy too.

Josh: That got us through the process, and we ended up getting basically seven indications of interest, three letters of intent that were serious.

Josh: And Digital Envoy was the first folks that we ended up going with.

Josh: We really liked compared to some of the other folks that they were not, they don't sell data.

Josh: So, some context of my parent company, I guess, never explained that.

Josh: They've been around for 25, well, 26 years at this point.

Josh: They are the leaders in GeoIP.

Josh: Essentially, think IP to zip code for three use cases.

Josh: For ad yield optimization and zip code-based targeting, digital rights management, and basically cybersecurity, ensuring that someone is not accessing content or other things they're not supposed to.

Josh: They don't sell precise lat lons.

Josh: They don't sell device IDs in that way, right?

Josh: It was a great business.

Josh: And if we had raised our Series B, we ironically would have probably gone the placer route, which is outside the location industry.

Josh: So, Digital Envoy was a great fit.

Josh: They were a customer of ours, and they were just really great folks to work with.

Josh: And then the week we signed our letter of intent.

Josh: We got our letters from the FTC and a few others.

Josh: So, you know, extended the process by another three months for them to figure out

Josh: Well, is there a fire under here?

Josh: And so I ended up taking a million-dollar loan.

Josh: I tell my wife this all the time.

Josh: We were not dating at the time, but

Josh: I didn't even know her.

Josh: And I said this story.

Josh: She jokes and thinks I borrowed from the mafia, but I basically took a million-dollar loan at a 50% interest rate.

Josh: For the year, because any other person would loan me money is going to completely consolidate our cap table, or basically be or they're not going to loan me money was risky.

Josh: And that got us through the last two and a half months of diligence to softland a company in May of 2021, where Digital Envoy became our owners.

Josh: I'm surprised to this day.

Josh: Like I'm five years actually, as of two days ago.

Josh: They've been an incredible company to work with.

Josh: They've allowed us to still be startupy and innovate and grow, which is pretty rare for a mature company acquiring a company.

Josh: And they've been good to our people and just very fair.

Josh: Even in the acquisition process, they could have beat us up on the FTC letter that we got.

Josh: But they were really fair with us where they were like, we just want to make sure we're not buying fire, but providing we're not, but we're going to continue working together and being great partners.

Josh: I had just turned 30 that year, never gone through an acquisition presses before.

Josh: The level of stress, and this was at the tail end of COVID.

Josh: Worked out six times a week, sometimes two times a day, just to basically relieve stress.

Josh: It was one of the most maturing, but also stressful experiences that I've ever gone through.

Josh: Honestly.

Josh: And hopefully, we'll never have to go through again.

Josh: So, very long story, but that was our journey.

Kevin: That's a wild one.

Kevin: And it's nice that it's a happy ending.

Kevin: It's great that you found a parent company that

Kevin: Was invested in the technology and in your team, and you're still with them today as the chief strategy officer.

Kevin: On Digital Envoy's services.

Kevin: High level, I understand there's three core either companies or services, there's digital element, digital resolve and outlogic.

Kevin: What are those and how do they break down?

Kevin: What are the different services Digital Envoy provides?

Josh: Yeah, 100%.

Josh: And I'll probably focus more on Digital Envoy and Outlogic being more the lion's share from a product perspective.

Josh: Leading with outlogic and going up to Digital Envoy.

Josh: What we found out later, post-acquisition, was Digital Envoy was very invested in owning the relationship for first-party data.

Josh: As we know, there's a lot of aggregator data in the ecosystem, right?

Josh: And there's not a lot of first-party data sources.

Josh: At that point, the space has consolidated pretty heavily, even then, right?

Josh: And so their bet was: if they own the technology and the people, even if they get hit and it goes away again.

Josh: they can reinvest and build out a really robust and resilient location supply panel that is first party where they control the consent and all of those fun things and the method of collection.

Josh: And they look at that and today it's a huge competitive advantage for their products and services.

Josh: OutLogic is in a similar business that it was with XMode, with some caveats.

Josh: We do not have a US and EU GovTech business.

Josh: We get affirmative and expressed consent for every publisher and app that we work with.

Josh: We have a data ethics policy to ensure we don't work with any religious apps, health apps, racial based apps, any apps in that category.

Josh: And finally, a very robust privacy program.

Josh: And this has kept us playing nice-nice with everybody over the past several years, honestly.

Josh: And again, that's what comes from maturity, right?

Josh: When you were going so fast, it's hard to think through all of those things that you need to do, right?

Josh: So that was great.

Josh: Outlogic over the next year or two is going to be transitioning into not just the licensing of data, but helping people run their algorithms on top of our data and our publishers' buckets.

Josh: Where there is no sale of data happening, but the analytics are basically essentially companies can run their algorithms, data engineering, data science companies can run their algorithms on top of publishers.

Josh: And pull out the counts, the reports, the analytics they need without the transfer of a precise lat lon being exfiltrated from the publisher's buckets.

Josh: Which we think is a huge disruption for the industry and a way to future-proof not only the location companies that we work with, but our publishers' sources of revenues as well and their technology.

Josh: For Digital Element or Digital envoy, their primary business is basically truncating precise lat lon to a two decimal or a zip code tied to an IP address.

Josh: where folks can essentially do cohort based audiences, ad yield optimization.

Josh: So we work with most of the SSPs.

Josh: And DSPs is an ecosystem where they're using us to essentially ensure they're resolving an IP in the right way.

Josh: For digital rights management and content, when you work with a streaming provider, it's just ensuring that the content's being shown and accessed in the right country.

Josh: Because we know if an IP is a VPN, a dark web, a Tor.

Josh: That's very important.

Josh: And then that ties very well for banks and cybersecurity companies where they want to use our net acuity and notify product.

Josh: To understand if an IP address is a VPN, a darkweb, a Tor, or if tens of thousands of people are on that IP address and they shouldn't be, to block them from accessing certain systems.

Josh: And this has been Digital Envoy's core business for the past 26, 27 years.

Josh: So I'm 35, so they started this business when I was eight.

Josh: But that's what we do.

Josh: It's simple on the surface, but the inner workings of how it is extremely complex.

Josh: And I don't think I really understood the gravity of how complex it is to resolute where an IP may be at a certain point in time.

Josh: Until joining Digital Envoy.

Josh: And then my role, which is the last thing that you've asked me.

Josh: I have quite a few different hats at digital envoy, but my primary responsibilities are

Josh: They fall in a few buckets.

Josh: One, basically, what we call supply independence or supply resilience.

Josh: So source all the data for the organization.

Josh: But also ensuring that we're pushing to sourcing as much, if not everything, from first-party data sources where we can.

Josh: Two, I am now a steward of the commercial part of the OutLogic business.

Josh: And then three, I'm co-product owner with my colleague David on our FTP product, which is the transition of where OutLogic is going.

Josh: And then four, I do work with our publishers to ensure with our legal team to ensure that on the commercial side that they are compliant.

Josh: And basically, I'm the person who yells at them to make sure they're showing every consent screen in the right way.

Josh: Plus, general corporate strategy and a little bit of M&A as it comes up.

Josh: So keeps me busy.

Kevin: That's a lot of hats and a lot of balls to juggle.

Josh: I'm a little ADHD, so I probably would be bored if I was working on one specific thing only.

Kevin: One other thing I wanted to pick your brain on, and a lot of listeners would be interested in, is

Kevin: Where do you see the industry going?

Kevin: What kind of changes and trends are you seeing within the location marketing industry?

Kevin: You've been in this over ten years now, right?

Kevin: Where do you see things in the near or even far future?

Josh: Yeah, I would say every two to four years, I feel like the location industry has a new disruption.

Josh: But I feel like we're hitting a bit of a maturity point where

Josh: You have companies who are consolidating, which I think is good because it's needed at this point for much of the change that's happening.

Josh: I also see that we're coming to a maturity point when it comes to legislation.

Josh: as well as new ways to be able to access the location analytics.

Josh: So I would say that it depends on the region.

Josh: Obviously, Apple and Google are going to continue being what's the word for it

Josh: They're going to continue to make it harder and harder to collect location data and do all of those things.

Josh: That's a prerogative that makes sense.

Josh: I would say that in the U.

Josh: S.

Josh: , we already have three states that have passed ban on sale.

Josh: Sorry, four now that have passed ban on sale, two that are live.

Josh: Bano Sale location, Maryland and Oregon.

Josh: Virginia goes live in July.

Josh: Connecticut goes live in October.

Josh: And the California bill just made it out of appropriations.

Josh: And so this is a huge disruption because it means that you can't sell location data over 17-50 feet.

Josh: Maryland's a little more restrictive.

Josh: And if California makes it out of appropriations, as it probably will by the end of the year, or the governor vetoes it, that's going to probably either create a firestorm for federal legislation, which would be very welcome, I think, for the industry.

Josh: or much more states following on and copying that law.

Josh: And that is going to massively impact U.

Josh: S.

Josh: companies' ability to access precise location data for their products.

Josh: I think we have a very good solution for FTP product.

Josh: But just for analytics, it will heavily impact targeting, which is something you can't really do with a clean room type concept.

Josh: And that's a huge disruption that is unclear how that's going to shape in the U.

Josh: S.

Josh: market.

Josh: I would say Europe and most other places, you have the occasional countries that are passing consent legislation, but it's been very GDPR flavor.

Josh: I think that

Josh: There hasn't been as much enforcement on those companies in those regions.

Josh: And it will be interesting to see what happens as more countries pass consent legislation and how they may interact with other location companies in the space.

Josh: I'm not pessimistic.

Josh: I would say that I'm cautiously optimistic about the ecosystem that even though these changes are disruptive to business models, may put companies out of business and make other companies' business models harder.

Josh: I think with that is going to lead to a world where there is a nice equilibrium between what a consumer feels like their data or their analytics should be used for.

Josh: And the companies that are providing value to access that type of information.

Josh: And I think that the reason why I say maturity is I think once we go for this kind of

Josh: Bout of legislation, as I would call it, it would be very clear what the rules of the road are.

Josh: And I think that's actually much better than where we were in 2020, where there weren't really any rules of the road to say to speak, right?

Josh: And

Josh: Most companies, not just us, were inventing those rules self-regulating.

Josh: And I think that the advent of regulation

Josh: while it may make some business models harder, it will stabilize the location industry to grow in the long term.

Kevin: Yeah, I would agree with a lot of what you said.

Kevin: There's likely continued new privacy laws.

Kevin: Right now, it's very much

Kevin: state by state, very fragmented.

Kevin: Overall, the industry and companies would appreciate a more federal, let's say, or big picture

Kevin: Law just to make things simpler.

Kevin: Because right now, oh, if you're in one state, the law is this.

Kevin: If you walk across the border to another state, the law is that.

Josh: I am supportive, and I think consent legislation is good.

Josh: I don't want people on our panel that don't want to be there, to be candid, right?

Josh: People who want to use the products and consent to sharing their location to build analytics and cool products, I would love to have more of them and continue to have the people we have.

Josh: I'm very supportive of that because that transparency up front

Josh: ensures that you don't have crazy press moments and a lot of hubba boo essentially, making everybody's life harder and distracting companies from building great products.

Kevin: Yes, it will make business models and companies more able to predict the future in terms of their outcomes.

Kevin: Where these laws come into effect and when they come into effect, certainly.

Kevin: So thanks a lot for your insights, Josh.

Kevin: I think it's been a

Kevin: A wonderful discussion.

Kevin: In closing, where are some of the best places that people can find out more about you, about Digital Envoy?

Kevin: Or reach you.

Josh: So, obviously, our sites at Digital Envoy, OutLogic are easy to find.

Josh: If people have questions or just want to talk shop about the location industry or fun stories, you can just find me on LinkedIn at Joshua Anton.

Kevin: Super easy.

Kevin: Awesome.

Kevin: And thanks, everybody, listening at home.

Kevin: This has been the Location Insights podcast.

Kevin: Subscribe in the podcast app that you're listening to now so you don't miss a future episode.

Kevin: And thanks again for listening.

Josh: Thank you for having me.