You can find part one of our interview here.

In Part 2 of 3, Drew talks about:
- the reinvention of ecommerce resulting from the explosion of new email commerce sites like Groupon, LivingSocial and Jetsetter.
- the synergies JetSetter is able to leverage from Gilt.com, from which JetSetter was spun.

SEAN: And I can’t help but think of Groupon, and obviously there’s some big differences, but how do you guys think about the sort of explosion, I guess, of those types that seem similar in a lot of ways.

DREW: I think at some high levels there are similarities, but I supposed the similarities are a part of this reinvention of e-commerce. And I think it’s interesting to look across the models and to see how people are thinking about e-commerce totally differently today than they have in the past, probably, decade. I don’t know that they’re all that similar. I think there are a lot of ways, there are a lot of critical ways in which what we do is different from what Groupon does, or what many of these kind of member-based triggered events. You know, I think, at least what we’ve tried to do is focus very specifically on the way consumers think about purchasing high-end, leisure vacations, and thought process, and the discovery process that goes on around that as opposed to something like Groupon which is, you know, in my estimation is very powerful for global services and things that are quite impulsive, but not necessarily well-suited to the category we play in.

SEAN: Sure, yeah. No, I was thinking more like the infrastructure of the model itself as opposed to the specifics. It’s like, you have, this small business that’s very local oriented, but this idea you have this one-day opportunity, you know, to act upon something. They, just almost like curate it, but to a less, much less extent. I agree.

DREW: Well, I mean, yeah, to that degree, to that extent I agree that there are similarities in that the idea of e-commerce players should be having a conversation with the consumer. That’s a different sort of frame of reference when people are thinking about e-commerce than, you know, Ebay, you know, Orbitz, Expedia, on down the line.  I mean, these sort of traditional e-commerce players, I think, didn’t really view themselves in dialogue, or having some kind of ongoing relationship with consumers.  It was much more purely transactional. I think, as you say, Groupon, JetSetter, Gilt, on down the line are much more about the relationship that they have with their members.

SEAN: Yeah. So, between, you know, besides the basic model being very similar and a spin-off from Gilt, what other synergies are you able to leverage? Are you able to float that user base in automatic?

DREW: You know, we will market some of our offers to the Gilt membership base so that’s one of the ways that they’ve helped us [coughs] excuse me… build an audience and gain scale pretty quickly.

SEAN: Yeah. So is the other main way from, sort of,  your background being…you were head of internet marketing at Kayak[.com], right? So it was all more about going out to the web and, you know, the search engines is that sort of, kind of, how you see finding people that you’re looking for? Is that what you have been doing?

DREW: I think we play a little bit of a different game, you know. In some of the same ways things like Kayak are very mass market and they’re very focused around, sort of, to find any customer at the right price. You know for us the audience that we’re going after is critically important. And one of the nice things about, sort of, the social aspects of our business is that you keep getting… the social graph, in a sense, ensures that you get customers that are like one another. Like, when I invite you I’m much more likely to get people who are like you. So we start from the same core audience of sophisticated, affluent, interesting consumer base.

SEAN: I see, I’m sure you guys see things like FaceBook as just another to… I’m sure somebody’s booking a great vacation on it to Venice, Italy, which was one of the sales today, and puts it on their FaceBook account. I’m sure all their friends are going, “Oh. That sounds really interesting.”

DREW: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s interesting we’ve gotten really great dialogue on our FaceBook page where members are writing in with questions or asking for more information or suggesting things we might want to think about. So it’s become a pretty vibrant community, and I think there’s a way in which what we do is a very social experience and as you say, I invited many of my friends to become members and I say I want to hear where they’re going and share what I’m doing with them.

SEAN: So if you think about, I don’t know, now as compared to two to three years from now, what would your top three sources of users? Would it be referrals, social networks, and something else?

DREW: You know, one of the other things we’ve done is put together some partnerships that have been pretty powerful.  We have a relationship with Conde Nast Traveler, for example, where their publisher has put together some of the sales and one of the ideas that we had is we curate the sales. We, you know, introduce the travelers to things that might be interesting. They have contacted us about curating some of our sales and also introducing their readership to what we’re doing.  So partnerships like that where we’ve got strong, great affinity, where the voice and interests match up well is a good way for us to expand our audience.