The Importance of Storytelling in the World of Subscriptions with GoodTrust’s Daniel Sieberg

 

The ability to tell a good story is valuable—and not only when the story is the product, as it is in journalism. Stories can build understanding, trust and connection with members, prospects and investors alike. Storytelling is an important skill in the Membership Economy, and GoodTrust Co-founder Daniel Sieberg is a fantastic storyteller.

Daniel Sieberg started his career as a journalist, and writer, working for the likes of CNN and CBS News. He went on to work at the intersection of news and technology at Google, where he was a senior leader in the Google Newslab.

As a journalist and a technologist, Daniel knows how to tell and share stories—he has used these skills well at GoodTrust, the subscription-based company he cofounded to help people safeguard their digital assets and share them with loved ones today or after they pass away.

Daniel has an interesting title– he currently serves as Chief Storyteller. He uses his experience in journalism to build trust, understanding and connection with GoodTrust stakeholders—members, investors and partners alike. I recently interviewed Daniel for the inaugural D2C Summit, a new conference I cocreated with Global Media Association FIPP, and want to share that conversation with you here on the podcast. In our conversation, we talk about how to launch a new company in an undefined space, the power of transparency in storytelling, and how to use a journalistic lens to turbocharge your market research strategy.

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Listen to the podcast here:

The Importance of Storytelling in the World of Subscriptions with GoodTrust’s Daniel Sieberg

The ability to tell a good story is valuable and not only when the story is the product like it is in journalism. Stories can build understanding, trust, and connection with members, prospects and investors alike. Storytelling is an important skill in the Membership Economy and Daniel Sieberg is a fantastic storyteller. Daniel started his career as a journalist and writer, working for the likes of CNN and CBS News. He went on to work at the intersection of news and technology at Google, where he was a Senior Leader in the Google News Lab.

As a journalist and a technologist, Daniel knows how to tell and share stories. He has used these skills well at GoodTrust, the subscription-based company he cofounded to help people safeguard their digital assets and share them with loved ones now or after they pass away. Daniel has an interesting title. He serves as Chief Storyteller. He uses his experience in journalism to build trust, understanding, and connection with GoodTrust stakeholders, members, investors and partners.

I interviewed Daniel for the inaugural D2C Summit, a new conference I Cocreated with the Global Media Association FIPP. I want to share that conversation with you here on the show. In our conversation, we talked about how to launch a new company in an undefined space, the power of transparency and storytelling, and how to use a journalistic lens to turbocharge your market research strategy.

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Welcome, Daniel.

Thank you, Robbie. That’s a kind introduction. It’s great to be with you.

Can you explain what GoodTrust is and the mission of GoodTrust?

At a high level, GoodTrust is a digital legacy platform. To unpack that a little bit, our mission is to allow anyone to preserve, share or even possibly delete anything they have ever done in a digital sense, the digital story of you. That could mean all the photos and videos you have ever created. Emails, text messages, social media profiles, banking and financial information, different accounts, everything that represents what you have done in an online sense with your smartphone, laptop and any other device.

We have all been connected in some capacity for the better part of twenty years. We have built up this personal legacy, that digital story of us. GoodTrust’s mission is to allow you to have choice and control over what it is that happens to all of that. We are also offering ways for people to create that digital legacy using new technologies like AI and facial recognition. It’s a bit of new space but it’s also something that has been around for a long time in many ways. We believe the opportunity is to help people to sort it out.

Before you even launched the company of GoodTrust with Rikard Steiber, you wrote a book about digital legacy. Why did you do that?

Rikard and I both worked at Google. We didn’t know each other when we were there but we were introduced by a fellow former Googler. We started talking in 2020. This was right around the time that the pandemic was accelerating and people were fearful of what was happening. There were a lot of unknowns. Rikard personally encountered a situation where a good friend of his had passed away during COVID. His widow had reached out to him and asked Rikard to try to solve this issue of getting access to his digital stuff and digital assets.

Some of what we are talking about are more on the pragmatic or the logical side, whether it’s accounts or information data. On the other hand, it’s all of the emotional stories and memories that are wrapped up in all of this. She couldn’t figure out what to do and it struck Rikard as an opportunity to empower others to do this themselves. We thought that a book would allow us to dig into this issue and understand it ourselves but more importantly, to help to generate awareness around something that we saw is increasingly important.

While the book was started, it’s around the same time the GoodTrust was founded, it’s quite untethered from GoodTrust as a company. We went about it as a journalistic enterprise. We want it to be as independent as possible in putting it together and look at the facts, research, help to highlight some of the challenges and opportunities within the whole digital legacy space, which is still a relatively new term for many people.

Digital legacy is a new term. I know Apple used that term, which shows at least some increasing awareness in the popular culture.

At the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced that they are making it possible for people to assign essentially a legacy contact, somebody who you would designate to have access to your iCloud and iCloud plus, your information that’s stored within Apple and ensure that that’s passed on in a way that feels respectful to the person who is involved.

We were excited in a way to hear that Apple is thinking about this so much. It was a small mention and the grand scheme of a lot of stuff that Apple is doing. For a company like Apple to come out, address this publicly, to say that we believe that this is important, and we want to allow people to figure this out, we saw as a signal that this is becoming a much more mainstream issue and something that people need to think about.

Google has something called Inactive Account Manager, which probably 95% of people who use Google products, which are on the order of billions of people, are unaware that it even exists. Facebook has a Legacy Contact that has been there for a while but there are still a lot of work to be done. What we see is GoodTrust is this holistic opportunity for people to take care of their entire digital legacy and, importantly, to plan ahead.

For example, we are also going to be offering the ability for people to create a will or medical directives, funeral directives, all the ways that you can feel like your entire end of life is taken care of. The average person spends close to seven hours or more connected in some capacity. The reality is that so much of what means anything to us is either in the cloud, on our devices, in places where it may be difficult to pass on to people but is incredibly meaningful and priceless.

All the research that you did early on in GoodTrust’s existence for the book, this independent research project that you took on, how did that inform the way that you entered the market with your business?

It was a combination of the research that we did for the book, which included talking to a lot of experts, people who are more on the technology side and the human psychology side, so what does this mean to all of us and what does it represent about our identity on the legal side? There are a lot of different inroads to this whole concept of digital legacy that helped to inform what we were thinking about with GoodTrust.

Also, we created a Google Survey that we sent out to people to get a sense of what they know or don’t know about this entire subject. What we found is that 90% of people had no idea what happens to their digital stuff when they die. In tandem with that, we learned that about 80% of the people who responded to that survey would be willing to sign up for and pay for a service that would allow them to do that. It helped to allow us to create this framework of what we were going to put together.

GoodTrust started as an idea as any entrepreneurial enterprise does and it allowed us to get some early indicators of what was important to people. We have continued to think about surveys as a way to inform a lot of our direct-to-consumer marketing and campaigns that we put together. There aren’t many other ways to get that pulse of what people are thinking about, what’s on the minds of everyone, and how they are feeling about something. It can be difficult to get to the truth of what people are feeling and, particularly, what they are willing to pay for or spend their time with. We relied on that early data to help to shape what we were doing.

You made me think of something. One of the other guests at the conference, Ariel Zirulnick of The Membership Puzzle Project, was saying that one of the biggest strategies that she advises news organizations to do when they are trying to build membership is to look at your customers through your journalist’s eyes, be curious and understand them. I’m thinking that’s exactly what you did, both with the book and with the ongoing surveying, to try to understand what the market looks like, and also how your prospective customers and existing members feel about the area where you are helping them.

There’s that empathic way of putting yourself in the shoes of the customer and remembering that the likelihood that you know more about whatever it is that you think is a good idea, good story or something that people are interested in. You have had the time and opportunity to dig into all of that. They may not have had all of that.

We are asking a lot of people to trust us with their choices and, in some cases, their data and information. We have to take this incredibly seriously. - Daniel Sieberg Click To Tweet

To learn where they are in their journey of understanding this, being interested in it, devoting themselves to it, committing to it, signing up for it or whatever it is, there’s a real opportunity to connect with that audience and ensure that you are meeting them where they are but also helping them to level up, pulling them into something that you think they could benefit from.

That’s the opportunity with any journalistic story. You are hoping that this is going to help them to learn something, educate them and stay informed. The same is true of any product or company that you are promoting. Ideally, it feels like it has a net benefit to people’s lives. Otherwise, it tends to run out of steam at a certain point if it doesn’t feel like it’s in service of others and helping others, which is something that Rikard, me and others on the team talked about early on.

The term “technology for good” may have been a little overused over time. People feel like that’s a bit tired but we believe in the opportunity. The irony is that, in a way, technology helped to create the challenge or problem of the fact that we are all so connected in this wonderful way. It allows for many remote communications and what would we have done without it during the pandemic and so on, but then the harsh reality that we all need to accept is that we all do pass away and die. Those stories and memories can be locked up in a way that we can’t get access to them.

I would say that companies like Ancestry and 23andMe were the early-ish ways. They have been around for a while now but to get people to think about their genealogy, their family tree, how important that connective tissue is of those human stories, and why it’s so critical to retain them, pass them on and learn from them. What we are hoping is that GoodTrust is the evolution of all of that.

We are still relatively early but there are all kinds of stuff that we are thinking about, that I get excited about and I know Rikard does. Others in the space are thinking of ways to make this feel in service of a scalable company that reaches people all over the world. It’s a universal issue. It’s not something unique to where you live.

We all die and most of us are on Google, Facebook, or any one of the many other online digital experiences.

We joke that people say that the certainties are death and taxes. We might layer on the internet in there. Connectivity is a certainty in life where the vast majority of people on this planet have the opportunity to travel to close to 70 countries. Everywhere I go, I’m amazed but also, not that surprised that that’s how people stay informed, get their information and news. All the ways that we know that connectivity has helped the planet to feel a little smaller and closer together. Now, it’s time for us to think about, “What does this mean for future generations? How do we do this responsibly?”

You brought up something about wanting to meet people where they are, and then be with them on their journey. When I think about your business, there’s the journey of building out their digital footprint and there’s also the journey of realizing that one day you won’t be here anymore. When I work with organizations that are building an ongoing relationship directly with their customers, one of the big challenges in getting started is, “Who do you aim for first? Who is your ideal initial audience?”

Often, it helps to think about where they are in their journey. How do you think about, especially when you were getting started, who to reach out to first that was most likely to be receptive to the message since, theoretically, anybody on Earth could be interested? How did you decide where in the journey and where in the world to start?

In a way, as we were saying, it does affect everybody. On the other hand, I remember when I was at Google, there was a Senior Marketing Leader there who led the Creative Lab, Andy Berndt. When we were building out the News Lab, he would say, “Who is the audience for this newsletter? Who are you thinking about with this?” We said, “It’s mostly journalists. It could be, by extension, consumers that might be interested in what we are up to. We have a fairly targeted audience with what we are thinking about.”

He said, “That’s great because so many times I hear at Google that what we are launching is for everybody and anybody. It can be so hard to think about how it’s received and what it is that you are doing exactly for different audiences.” The coin of the realm in a lot of ways that people think about direct-to-consumer these days is hyper-targeting, reaching unique audiences with a message that’s going to resonate with them because we all have a unique journey through life. We are not all at the same point and thinking about the same stuff.

 

What we started to do in addition to the survey data, which with Google Surveys, you can segment it out by different age groups or demographics, and start to understand a little bit of what people are interested in. We also worked with a great marketing agency called Neil Patel Digital. They have been helping us put together these personas of people who we would all think based on survey data, what we have learned in the media, and where people are in their life, these kinds of personas that help to identify who these people are.

For us, broadly speaking, it has to do with people who probably have a family. You have started a family. You have children. Maybe you are married. There are these seminal life events that have happened in your life and they’ve got you thinking a little bit about your own mortality. Right through to people who are, let’s say, in their 40 and 50s, they spent a lot of time connected in some way. They have built up all this digital legacy and they are at a point now where they are thinking about what to do with it. They are creating a will and assigning people to be those beneficiaries or the people they want to have this passed onto.

That helped us to inform at least some of our messaging in direct-to-consumer marketing. It’s not the entire way that we look at it because we also see that some survey data came out. Younger people, for example, in the Millennial category, particularly because of COVID, were more apt to create a will. The simple fact is that, especially during the most intense periods of COVID, we were all surrounded by the idea of death. We couldn’t go or look anywhere without hearing about it.

It triggered a sense of, “Anyone needs to be prepared. We need to think about this stuff even at a younger age, when historically, that may not have even entered people’s minds.” There are also reasons that we think that younger audiences might want to start to plan ahead with their digital legacy now. Maybe it starts to represent their digital identity, so it’s something that they can see reflected back to them. Some of us have no idea where all of our digital stuff is, which profiles we have, and what does it represent about us. Maybe those younger audiences can see an opportunity to get in early.

There’s a timeline that we think about with all of this but we have to think about with that direct-to-consumer message, “What are we saying to those audiences? Where do we meet where they are in that way and help them to see the opportunity?” By extension, the products that we offer, the ways that we create that content, and think about those stories that are going to resonate with those audiences.

I know that you have your direct-to-consumer piece but I also wanted to touch on the fact that you are also working with a lot of business partners. I’m interested in the role of those business partners, either B2C so where you are selling to a business that is, in turn, making your offerings successful or whether you have direct products that specifically help those businesses in working with a similar shared customer. How do you think about the role of B2B? How do you layer that into your business model?

A lot of our direct-to-consumer marketing and outreach is through social media. A bunch of it is paid. It’s almost impossible to think of building a huge organic following on social media these days. If nobody knows about you, it’s a bit like shouting into the ether. We needed to think about the right page strategy, whether it’s Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, or other platforms, to get our message out. We do a lot of content creation with blogs and email one-to-ones to our subscribers and users. We would love to be able to get this out into the media and talk about it in all the ways that people know the direct-to-consumer channels.

On the B2B2C side, what we have seen is those estate planners, funeral homes, and life insurance companies all have clients and customers who are already in this headspace of thinking about the afterlife or what it is that they are leaving behind. What we see is that they can either create this as an add-on, something that’s a value-add to their existing products or something that they might offer at a discounted rate. Maybe we create a partnership where there’s a revenue share. They come in through that door and enter us through a different door or vice versa.

We want to make it so that there’s a mutually beneficial way to get this message out to people at the right time. What we have learned is that, for example, with a funeral home. People might sign up to create or think about what their funeral looks like before they are going to die. They may have said, “We are getting up in age a little bit. We were healthy and everything seems fine but we want to take care of this now and choose exactly how we would like to go out with a blaze of glory,” or whatever it is that people want to do for their funeral. That’s the pre-care moment.

There’s the aftercare moment when a funeral has happened. Maybe they have a family member, who then they realized, “What about all of their accounts and everything they have ever created? Those photos that are on their computer, how do I get access to that?” There’s a spectrum of where people fall with those B2C partners of ours. We want to also think about how to get them. Sometimes those are through direct-to-consumer channels that they have any way that we can bring them into the mix or this broader ecosystem.

Do you have specific features and benefits for those businesses to support them in their efforts or are they serving more as a marketing channel or both?

It’s a bit of both. In some cases, it depends on the partner with who we are working with. If it’s a funeral home provider, they might be more interested in offering what we call our white-glove or VIP service, where we can take care of somebody’s digital legacy on behalf of a family member. The reality is that if any of us want to take on trying to get access to all of this on behalf of somebody who has died, it can be complex, tedious and confusing.

Stories will always be something that is critical to companies to think about. - Daniel Sieberg Click To Tweet

It’s not a simple process. This is something that we went through with countless sites to learn what that’s like. We want to create this bespoke offering for some partners who can offer that. On the other hand, if you are an estate planner or a financial planner, the idea of planning ahead is maybe what’s more interesting to them.

We launched something called GoodTrust Memories, which is all about animating still photos, bringing to life pictures from the past or even from the recent past, and turning them into an animation of some kind, a video essentially with AI and facial recognition. That can appeal to all different audiences. Whatever it is that we can help to pull people into this holistic way of looking at end-of-life planning, the will creation that we are going to be launching soon is something that we can see adding value to some of those other partners as well.

We all know this inherently. We are our time pie if we think about it as a pie. The slivers of time that we have to devote to anything in life get smaller and smaller all the time. We want to have enough time for our children, the work that we do, the activities that we enjoy or whatever it is we want to do with entertainment. For journalists, media companies or any business that’s trying to wedge themselves into those tiny slivers of time, you have to think about what’s most valuable to that audience.

Come up with a story or message that feels like it’s authentic and in service of that time, even if it’s only 10 seconds or 2 minutes of a video or whatever it is, that it feels like you are respecting that person and that you can communicate effectively in that narrow window and be able to pull them into something. We have to think strategically about what those partners want, what their audiences want, and then the goals and objectives of our company as well and how do those fit together.

An important takeaway is when you are expanding beyond the direct-to-consumer audience and working with businesses that are going to represent you, to recognize that they have slightly different objectives and they might have different needs, that might mean new features, new stories or new ways of communicating that it needs to be thought about discreetly. I appreciate you sharing that.

I wanted to ask you. You have had an interesting career. You have had jobs both in tech, notably with Google and with news media, CBS News and CNN. What are the skills that you learned in those two places that are most helpful to you in this entrepreneurial role with GoodTrust? What are the most important skills that you have gained?

I apologize for diverging a little bit here. I promise I’m answering your question. My dad is an electronics technician or essentially an engineer and spent 30 years going to the Arctic to study climate change with researchers in the Arctic. My mom had a dream of becoming a nurse. She ended up working in academia for her career. I’m the by-product of somebody who is passionate about healthcare and learning, and somebody who focuses on technology and discovery. What I ended up doing in my life was to try to capture those stories and share them with a wider audience. If I learned anything, it’s that you need to be yourself and that can feel difficult, oddly.

I was a daily reporter at the Vancouver Sun and I went to CNN to work for CNN.com. I never imagined myself being on television. I was asked to go on television out of the blue. To spare you the long story, there’s still a picture online of how shocked and scared I looked the first time I went on CNN live to talk about something. What maybe the producers liked about it was that I didn’t know anything other than just to be me, as scary as that was.

The same is true of when I went to work at Google. I left the news business to work at a technology company. I had covered science and technology. I did a Master’s in Journalism focused on technology. It has always been my passion, science, technology, space and environment. When I went to Google, I didn’t know what it was going to be like to work at a company like Google. I had no sense of what that meant. It seemed like everybody else knew more than I did. There was some amount of impostor syndrome when I went in to work at Google. All I could think of was to just be me, which sounds a little cliché.

What that taught me is that I can connect with people. I’m going to call it vulnerability and I hope that’s not an overused word in 2021. That kind of vulnerability, I would argue, helps to create trust with an audience when you are particularly a national audience if you are telling a story to people but, even when you are representing a company like Google. As a spokesperson, I would go on the Today Show or these other high-profile broadcasts. Some part of me would stress out and think, “I’m representing Google, this massive iconic company,” and then I would think, “What can I do but be me and talk about it in a way that felt real.”

I hope that extends into GoodTrust because, with a name like GoodTrust, we have no choice but to be a trusted company. We are asking a lot of people to trust us with their choices and, in some cases, their data and information. There are all sorts of privacy issues wrapped up and these legal issues. We have to take this incredibly seriously. That’s my hope.

 

For any company out there, whether it’s a media company or any other company, that can feel oddly hard to be that transparent self in the way that you communicate with consumers and customers. That’s what people want and crave. That’s what resonates and works but it can be a little scary to push through that membrane of feeling buttoned-up, it’s going to be perfect, it’s going to be this or that.

I have made countless mistakes in my life. I have lost track of how many mistakes I have made in my life. The only way you can maybe feel okay with all of that is you say, “I learned from them over time.” You start to become a little more comfortable with the fact that you will always make mistakes. If you can admit that, hold yourself accountable and ensure that people can see that transparency. The reality is that, is what can convey a message clearly and in a way that people go, “I’m going to take a second and listen to what this person is saying, what they are sharing or read a little bit more about it.”

It goes back to the idea of respecting people. Everybody has so many different demands on their time and stuff that they are worried and thinking about in their life. What is it that we are offering that we think people should pay attention to? That can go back to news or it’s about business but I certainly was humbled throughout this entire process. I would like to say that I have come out the other side but life isn’t over until it’s over. Let’s see where it goes from here.

I love the transparency and the bringing your full self. The quirkiness from a storytelling and communication perspective, people connect to that, not by trying to be quirky but by saying, “This is who I am. I’m a guy who is interested in news, science and climate. That’s not what we are talking about now but that’s something that I bring with me.” A) It makes it easier for people to connect and, B) “I have been doing this for a long time. I have a lot of years racked up. Sometimes, different random experiences that I have had come to bear in what I do every day.”

That’s so important, too. You are willing to bring your whole self in. Even if you are intimidated or you said this impostor syndrome of, “I’m a guy at Google and I’m representing this huge company,” then you say, “I have my own perspective and that’s all I’ve got. Maybe that’s more interesting to people than if I was a hoodie, in the case of Google if I were a hoodie, reading our three top media messages, which isn’t interesting at all.” I want to segue into your title, Chief Storyteller. What does that mean? Is that a job of the future?

I had the opportunity to create that title. To me, I hope it represents a focus and an emphasis on both the story of GoodTrust. In a business sense, what is our marketing saying? What are our communications, PR, blogs and products? How has that thread woven throughout everything that GoodTrust represents? What is the story of GoodTrust? On the other hand, it’s also about taking care of other people’s stories. That’s what we want to be is a place where we can be this hub or nexus of where people share, store, preserve and decide what happens to all these.

In a sense, I like to think that it comes with a great deal of responsibility, both on behalf of GoodTrust but on behalf of our users and people who are placing their trust in us. In terms of how other companies view the concept of a storyteller, it’s probably one of the oldest job descriptions in the history of humanity. We have all been telling stories or listening to stories since we huddled around campfires and could listen to others or see what they were telling us.

The earliest storytellers were also journalists. They would come from another part of the village, region or wherever they were and share those stories. People would learn. These were the early seeds of journalism. This was how people heard about anything that was beyond their immediate sphere of understanding. Stories will always be critical to companies to think about, “What is the story of your company? What is it exactly? Why should people think about what you are doing or even care about what you are doing? What is the story of you?”

That’s something that we want people to think about in a digital sense when it comes to GoodTrust. There are a lot of that wrapped up in that direct-to-consumer market. One of the things that we have seen and probably most people would agree if they have come across is there’s often this sense of like, “We’ve got to create some viral content.” I have heard companies, “We’ve got to create viral content. We are going to make it. Everybody has got to see it.”

The reality is that the authenticity of a human experience is incredibly hard to create but we know it when we see it. We know when it’s real. We know when people react. For example, there’s a video that was circulating online. It was about a former World War II veteran. He still is alive. He is fondly referred to as Papa Jake. He is in his 90s and his granddaughter or daughter put in front of him an animated photo of his wife who had passed away, Lola. The reaction of him seeing this photo come to life, his widow, the love of his life, in his 90s. I’m going to get emotional thinking about it now. He is sitting in his chair and the way that he reacts to this absolutely went viral. Why? You can’t make this stuff up.

It’s part of the DNA of who we are as human beings. Can you create a marketing material or direct messaging that mirrors that or maps to that? Kind of. Sort of. You can certainly respect what that’s like and dig into that. The more the companies can adopt this orientation of openness of, “This is who we are. We haven’t figured everything out but we are getting there. Here’s what we think.” We all know the value of user testimonials and profiles of people who are using it, that stuff that we all gravitate to see those reactions. We also know when we see it and we are like, “That’s probably an actor.” We know this inherently when we see it on TV, an ad or wherever it is.

That emotional authenticity is hard to recreate. When you can just be yourself as much as possible and we all want to present our best selves, it’s not that you let yourself turn into a hot mess or something but to allow people into that. To think about that within communications is increasingly important, particularly in a connected world where we have visibility into other communities and to other people in how they live their life. It could be wildly different than us but there is that universal humanity that we need to remember.

The authenticity of a human experience is incredibly hard to create, but we know it when we see it. - Daniel Sieberg Click To Tweet

The way you framed the role of storytelling and how that ties in with authenticity is so important for people to remember. This isn’t a complicated marketing strategy. This is about telling the truth and bringing your audience along with you on the journey. That’s what I think is at the heart of direct-to-consumer and the heart of what we are trying to talk about at this conference. I appreciate your insights there. Are you up for doing a speed round?

Absolutely. Let’s do it.

Top of your mind, ten seconds per question, here we go. What advice do you have for other people launching D2C companies in undefined spaces?

Two words, which I heard in the midst of all of my entrepreneurial ups and downs, keep swimming.

What is the first subscription you remember having?

The first subscription I can remember having was probably to a local newspaper in Victoria, British Columbia where I grew up. It was the Times Colonist.

Favorite subscription?

Favorite subscription and one that I probably use the most would be either Netflix or The New York Times.

Finally, a time you felt like you belonged, that you were connected with a company and felt like they understood you and were solving your ongoing problems or helping you achieve your ongoing goals?

I have to say it’s hard not to think of Google in that way because so much of what Google offers addresses the needs that so many of us have. It’s why a company like Google is so successful. It had so much utility to people’s lives that it’s hard to ignore in that way. I hope that we can offer something similar to people’s lives with GoodTrust.

Thank you so much, Daniel. It has been a real pleasure talking to you.

It’s my pleasure. Thank you.

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That was GoodTrust’s Daniel Sieberg. For more about Daniel and GoodTrust, go to GoodTrust.com. For more about the summit and to access the other interviews with stories from The Economist, Tesla, and Nike, among others, go to D2C.global. If you like what you heard, please go over to Apple Podcasts or Apple iTunes and leave a review. Mention this episode if you especially enjoyed it. We read all the reviews because we want your feedback. Thanks for your support and thanks for reading.

Important Links:

• GoodTrust
• Daniel Sieberg, Co-founder, Chief Storyteller at GoodTrust
• CNN
• CBS News
• Google News Lab
• Daniel Sieberg Interview on D2C Summit
• D2C Summit
• Rikard Steiber, CEO GoodTrust
• FIPP
• Google
• Apple
• Worldwide Developers Conference
• Membership Puzzle Project
• Facebook
• Ancestry
• 23andMe
• Andy Berndt on CapitalG
• Neil Patel Digital
• LinkedIn
• GoodTrust Memories
• Today Show
• Papa Jake viral video on TikTok
• Times Colonist
• Netflix
• The New York Times
• The Economist
• Tesla
• Nike
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About Daniel Sieberg

Daniel Sieberg is a co-founder of GoodTrust and Chief Storyteller. He previously spent six years as an executive at Google and 12 years in news across ABC News, CBS News and CNN as an Emmy-nominated science and technology correspondent. Daniel is the author of The Digital Diet: the four-step plan to break your tech addiction and regain balance in your life (Three Rivers, 2011) and co-author of Digital Legacy: Take Control of Your Online Afterlife (Stonesong, 2020).

 

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