From Likes to Loyalty: Vince Wang on the Future of Influencer Marketing for Restaurants

Vince: I think influencer marketing is going to be a lot more performance driven. Uh, it's not just about the hype or aesthetics anymore. It's really, really about real business impact.

Chris: Welcome to We Built this brand, the podcast where we talk to the creators and collaborators behind brands, and provide you with practical insights that you can use in growing your business.

Now, today we're talking with Vince Wang, chief Marketing Officer at Mustard An. That brings local restaurants and influencers together in a unique ecosystem with measurable results. Now Vince and I met at the Power Forward Conference in Los Angeles, and while I didn't get a chance to interview him there, he graciously agreed to talk to me a little bit later in the week.

And we had a lot of fun catching up and, uh, learning about his business. And after learning about it, I'll be honest, and I wanna be clear, I'm not getting paid to say this. I think that Muster may be one of the best solutions for local restaurants. Who want to connect with influencers to grow awareness for their business, and of course build their brand.

Now, without further ado, here's my conversation with Vince Wang of Mustard.

Alright, well welcome to WebU this brand. I'm your host, as always, Chris I, and with me today is Vince Wang. Vince, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. Happy to be chatting to you today. Really excited to talk to you about and the company that you're the chief marketing officer at Mustard Love.

But before we dive into that, I always love to just hear the story of how people got to where they are. This doesn't have to be a long drawn out everything in my life story, but just if you could real quickly tell us about where you got your start.

Vince: Yeah. I actually got into marketing because of the TV show, mad Men.

I remember watching it and thinking, wow, that looks exciting. Working at an ad ad agency pitching big ideas and sipping old fashioned in the office, and I just thought that's something you could create and go out into the world and shape how people think or act. That really stuck with me, so I'm pretty sure that show single handedly created a new wave of whiskey drinkers.

But what I didn't really. Expect was really how the field had evolved. By the time I actually got started in marketing, my first real role was an analyst at Webtrends, uh, which was at the time the leading enterprise analytics platform before Google Analytics really took over. I was part of their agency arm helping clients launch ROI driven paid ad campaigns and we had some wow clients while I was there.

Everything from Dan Supply stores to online printers to DUI lawyers. It was a crash course in marketing across very different business models.

Chris: Yeah, I bet.

Vince: Yeah. The real differentiator was really the data. Because we were in an Alex company, we had incredible visibility into what was really working. We weren't just launching campaigns, we were tying every single click, every dollar.

Directly to business outcomes. And that was my first real exposure to performance marketing for our clients. Not just getting traffic, but really driving real results. And that mindset measurability, outcome focused marketing has really guided everything I've done since then.

Chris: Yeah, I think performance marketing is one of those things that can be really, really good if used well, but it can also be a very challenging tool to use because.

You gotta tie everything together and connect all the dots in the right way. I've seen some shady uses of it in the past, and I'm, I'm not at all saying you're doing that, but I've seen some situations where people are like, well, that's not a lead because of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you know, the, just the way that it can be used.

I love being able to make that one-to-one connection of your marketing dollars went here and they made this happen. So that's, that's really cool that you're, that's kind of your background and everything. So what brought you to Mustard Love?

Vince: Yeah, mustard. I was brought in because of my previous startup experience, so I was with a real estate company that was doing marketplace.

Matching like with real estate agents to home sellers and buyers. A company was called Ness. I was there for over seven years and we had an exit. So as a part of the exit, I had free time and the CEO approached me and said, Hey, do you want to continue to build another two-sided marketplace with Mustard love?

And I said, yes. Why not? Let's continue the run. And so I came into the company. The company was founded by David in 2020. At that time, it was a different business model than what it is now. Um, they were really focused on monetizing their content by leaking to deliver apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash. But here's the thing we learned.

Very quickly that influencers don't want to pay to create content. They want to get paid, and that model just didn't click. The real turning point came when we flipped the model and started helping restaurants bring in influencers. Instead, that pivot from creator focus to restaurant focus is when the business really took off.

It gave us clarity, product market fit, and a huge opportunity. To actually solve a pain point that restaurant owners deal with every day.

Chris: I mean, it's a big challenge. We'll, we'll dive into it a little bit more, but first, why the name Mustard Love?

Vince: Yeah. We were looking for a name that felt approachable, a little bit playful, and clearly tied to food, but had some warmth to it.

Mustard just felt right. It's bold, familiar. It brings different flavors together, and in a way, what we're doing connecting restaurants and local creators. To make something meaningful. Makes sense. The love part. Well that was intentional. Food is something people generally love. It brings people together and creates a shared experience.

We want the name to reflect that spirit.

Chris: Yeah, and it definitely, definitely sounds like it does. I've mentioned Muster love a few times to folks around me and they've been like. I know it has something to do with food, but I don't think I know what it is. And I'm like, exactly. I mean, you're, you're already part of the way there when you, you've got 'em caught with, oh, it's about food.

Like that's a very definitive part of the name. So that's cool. We've talked to the high level, what it is, but exactly what is Mustard love today? Like if I were, why would I come and use Mustard Love as a service?

Vince: Yeah, so Mustard Love is really. About bringing influencers to restaurants, and what we're trying to really do is create the overall diner experience by reducing the friction and churn related to offloading With restaurant operators, what we're trying to really do is a lot of restaurant owners don't, don't have time to figure out their influencer strategies.

They don't have time to vet creators or negotiate deals or track. ROI. And so we built the platform to really run the entire influencer campaign in minutes. Think of it as, as a platform similar to Uber. One click you go in and give us your creative brief, and we handle everything from influencer vetting to.

Uh, influencers showing up, posting and really tracking results.

Chris: I mean, that's taking a lot of weight off of the, off of the restaurant. And I'm sure you know, and I speak with some experience on this 'cause I used to host a craft beer podcast, so I used to probably be one of the people you would consider an influencer in this space to an extent because I had craft beer.

We were influential. People knew that. We were gonna talk about the beer and whether it was good or bad or not. So that's probably who in the past, the restaurant owners had to go to directly and invite them in or wait for them to Dan themselves worthy of, you know, being brought into the situation. Right.

So. I'm sure that's a huge help for, for the business owners. Oh, huge.

Vince: We've had in, uh, one of our clients, sushi Babu in New York, they ran a campaign with us, uh, $26,000, and within 90 days they were, they saw a three x return. We, we've been running a campaign with them for about a year now and. They gave us the latest update one year, and they saw 12 XROI.

Chris: Tell me more about the influencer piece too, because it, it's really interesting, I mean, influencers are interesting to begin with, but are these big name influencers you all, all are working with? Is that why it's working so well? It's

Vince: actually not, uh, what we see is that. It's all about engagement. We did many tasks.

We've had bay influencers come in and we've asked nano or micro influencers as the trending way of influencers coming, and what we see is that. Sometimes the local micro influencers are a lot more effective because their audience are more localized to where the local restaurants are located. So if you can imagine Kim Kardashian talking about your local restaurants, probably a small percentage of the audience from their follower pool is actually from Knoxville.

In this case, if there's a Knoxville. So you just spent a million dollars getting. Kim Kardashian to promote your restaurant, but only a very small percentage will actually show up. And at the end of the day, that's what we're trying to solve, is we wanna work with micro nano influencers that are actually local, with local followers that will actually drive, ultimately drive diners to the restaurants themselves.

Chris: Something I've always been fascinated by. Is the micro markets that exist. These smaller audiences, these smaller markets where, you know, it doesn't take a big person to really influence a lot of people to make a decision. It just takes the right people to do it. Right. And so I think that's, it sounds like a lot of what you all are really addressing.

So. When you say micro-influencer, like how small do you have to be to start doing this and how, how big do you typically see people max out at?

Vince: Yeah, so generally the rule of thumb we see is dependent on market, right? I mean, if you're talking about an Ville versus a Los Angeles, the population size is, varies.

Wide widely. So when we talk about a, a micro influencers of a hundred K is, is probably a celebrity in Knoxville at that point, but in LA it's, it's generally a pretty standard size influencers there. So it really depends on metro and when people ask us, oh, uh, I only want more than a hundred K followers, but if they're in the middle of nowhere, it's not a really.

Economical ask for us to do so. So a lot of times it is, it's, we have to work at, look at the population pool and we standardize the benchmark against it. And what we see is at a minimum, I, I believe 2000 is the lowest we've seen where they are quite influential in a small town. Um, and the standard size we've seen is about 40,000 followers across nationally.

Chris: Level. That's good to know. My day business works a lot with, you know, creators and influencers and things like that, and I always try to encourage people, especially if they're starting out in that journey of the, like it takes a while, but like you can be influential even with less than a hundred thousand followers.

So it's cool to hear you say that. That's what you're seeing in the numbers too.

Vince: Yeah, it is a very interesting case. In San Francisco, there was influencers that had. 15,000 followers and the restaurant owner complained that they didn't have enough followers and it went viral. That unfortunately it went viral the wrong way.

So that restaurant is now closed. And the chef was fired.

Chris: Oh my gosh. 'cause they were, they were upset that they were getting too small of influencers in.

Vince: Yeah. And the influencers post complained about how they were demeaning, uh, to the influencers themself. And the influencers post got way more than 50,000 views.

And it was very influential, especially around the local community.

Chris: Yeah. Well those are the things you gotta watch out for when you're interfacing with influencers, right?

Vince: Yes. You have to treat them like any food critic. Uh, it can make and break your business regardless of how, how big they are.

Chris: So if I was a small business coming to you and wanted to, I'm starting to count.

Like how does that process work?

Vince: Yeah, it's fairly easy. Uh, we're trying to automate. As much as we can. So, uh, if you think of how easy it is to find an Uber ride, we're trying to get to that point is you go on our platform, you onboard, even the onboarding is automated. You answer a couple questions about the type of influencers you're looking for, type of cuisine, ethnicity, the type of campaign, uh.

What sort of, uh, shots you want them to do and fill out this creative brief. The creative brief goes out to all of the influencers around the network and similar to a job application, the influencers will apply, say, I'm interested, they're not interested, and raise their hand. Then the restaurant owners themselves can either decide to choose themselves or let AI decide to pick, uh, which influencers match the best based on the creative brief and everything's automates a after that just like Uber ride, you don't have to call the taxi cab driver where to meet you.

Uh, where I'm getting dropped off. All of that is completely automated.

Chris: That's cool. So even, even on the influencer side, then I guess they have an account they log into and they can see what opportunities come their way. But all that's automated, there's no real need for like a middleman in the process.

Want to launch a podcast without the hassle? Humble pod makes podcasting easy from concept to launch. We'll help you create a professional engaging show. Already have a podcast. We handle editing, show notes, transcriptions, and even video production so you can focus on your content With our tailored services, you get high quality production, seamless publishing, and expert support at every step.

Whether you're starting fresh or leveling up, humble pod ensures your podcast sounds amazing and reaches the right audience. Visit humble pod.com to get started today.

Vince: Exactly. You know, there's, there's a contract that an influencer sees of all the restaurants that want to have influencers come in. They, they would apply all of his on mag show up here. Here's the food credit that you would get. Uh, here's the cash comp if there's any for your time. Once they eat, um, it will ping the food influencer about here's when your due date for your content is going to be posted.

And for the restaurant, they see all of the tracking performance of how they're posted

Chris: for, for some influencer wanting to do that, that's great because not all, especially smaller influencers don't have agents. They don't have people to do that work for them either. So you're really taking care of both sides of the, um, the equation for people.

Vince: For sure. Yeah.

Chris: So when it comes to, when it comes to marketing mustard love, like how do you, how do you get out and stand out in the field? I mean, you, you do an excellent job, it sounds like, for the influencers and connecting them with brands, but how do you do your own marketing and branding?

Vince: Yeah, generally, I think it's starts with trying to solve restaurant problems.

Number one is once you solve the problem, restaurants tend to. Have word of mouth about, Hey, I know about this great platform. Uh, what I find is that a lot of times restaurant owners are, have been burned in the past. Either they're doing it themselves or influencers not showing up and eating for free and not, not posting for one, or even agencies, uh, agencies coming in, promising celebrities and not seeing results.

So word of mouth is huge for us. Uh, we. Generally take a mindset of if we can solve a restaurant problem and drive diners, they will pass us along and, and, and spread the word. Well, a lot of times we rely on testimonials and reviews. That's

Chris: cool. So it's a lot of word of mouth, it sounds like. Getting the marketing spread.

Cool. So what have you learned in this process of helping Mustard love grow to where it is today?

Vince: Yeah, I, I think a lot of times is one thing we learned is, uh. Another marketing strategy we did was offer a free trial. I think that's the easiest way for a lot of restaurants to come in. But we, we, what we find is that doesn't work because what ended up happening was the restaurants would come in and try us, but the influencers would apply, but the restaurants did not have skin in the game.

They didn't really engaged with our platform or try to get the influencers to come in. And what happened was the, in a lot of the influencers were burned. Like, Hey, what's happening? I applied and I didn't get sus selected. It's like, it's like going to a job interview and, and, and what happened with my application?

Am I gonna interview or not? So it was very one sided and, and less engagement on the restaurant side. So what we learned is we no longer offer a free trial because of that. I feel like. In a marketplace, it needs to be balanced. The restaurants needs to have engagement on both, um, mentally engaged as well to to be really, um, focused on, on balancing.

And then the influencers there, the, they're to promote their own content, but also make new content with the restaurants in the area.

Chris: I mean, to me that makes sense because you wanna have skin in the game. And you want people to know you, like you're not just doing this, you know, outta the goodness of your heart to connect people, right?

Like there's, there's a reason you exist, there's a reason your service has value. You know, if you provide free trial to everybody, that I, I would imagine that that has its own cost to begin with too. So, like, I understand how that could be on both sides, but that's an interesting idea of like not having the free trial as opposed to having it be the thing that, you know, saves, saves the day.

As you know, some people might say,

Vince: yeah, we thought the free trial would really, uh, work, but it, it's a balance. The restaurants didn't have engagement then.

Chris: Yeah, I mean from what I noticed too of the pricing, it seemed to be pretty fair. I think for a starting a starting restaurant, it takes away from what their normal marketing ad budget would be, but it's nothing so significant that from working with you all, I'm sure they make up that revenue pretty efficiently.

Vince: Yeah, I, I mean our current plan start at just 2 99, which honestly is just a few delivery orders if they ever do Uber Reads or DoorDash. And instead of just sending out food, you're bringing in new customers. And, and, and ultimately it's one of our most cost effective, um, marketing channels. 'cause when we compare.

Our costs are CPMs at $3.40 versus doing ad or, or commercials where it can go into the double digits.

Chris: So that's cool. It's a really unique way to reach people, to reach restaurants and for folks in that industry, I'm sure it's a huge boon for them. So. That's awesome. Well, let's, let's talk a little bit more, I always like to pick the brand of the person I'm interviewing and uh, would love to just learn a little bit more from you.

Like, where are you right now? Just like what is top of mind for you as we look at the, the future of say, this influencer market and, and where things are today with that?

Vince: Yeah, I think influencer marketing is. Going to be a lot more performance driven. Uh, it's not just about the hype or aesthetics anymore.

It's really, really about real business impact. Restaurants, especially are looking for growth channels that don't involve giving up 30% of their revenue to deliver apps and influencer marketing. When done right, it is one of the most efficient ways to drive new customers at Mustard. We're shaping that model.

You know, start startups are living and breathing things. One of the biggest thing that. Aside from that is we're trying to launch an AI powered influencer selector tool where imagine if a restaurant can just log in, uh, look at a creator, and we can project the ROI, uh, for that restaurant based on all the data points that we have.

Once they click on it, there's no back and forth involved and the influencer to show, and we can see like how close they are to hitting the ROI for them.

Chris: That would be crazy. Now, would that be based on like, I guess the data and analytics that you have from other customers in the region and past performances as well?

Or, I'm just curious how that's calculated.

Vince: Yeah, that's exactly right. So one of the benefits of a marketplace is that we have a lot of data to work with in the area. We can look at the cuisine type and break, break down a lot of these different data points and be able to project a pretty accurate ROI plus we have influencer data, right?

We know exactly the past performance of each of these influencers with that specific type of cuisine. So, I mean, it, it's not a hundred percent, nothing in life is guaranteed, but similar to, I mean similar how, how people do financial modeling for stock market or project, uh, how, how a stock will do. Uh, we do it for here.

The reason we're doing this is my background is also my last startup with real estate agents we're pretty accurate in predicting how well an A top agent performs versus other agents in the area.

Chris: You know, in the real estate industry, which we have a hot real estate market here, a lot of people from, uh, California moving into our neighborhood.

But you know, that said, like there's a lot of, a lot of things there that I'm fascinated with personally just because I feel like for the small podcast or that, that we deal with on a day-to-day basis, like there's always what's in it for me. How can I get to a point where I'm getting a return on what I am doing in the content?

I'm. Creating. And I think as you all go further into those analytics, you're gonna be able to see more and have probably a deeper level of analytics on influencers more so than just on how effective they are with food. It may not look like the way at first, but I can see there being a lot of implications to that kind of analytics and AI that you're doing.

Vince: That's the future of, of us internally, but also I think, uh, as we're one of the earlier companies to focus on really using data within certain marketing, we have more data to work with.

Chris: And that's, that's a huge advantage to have too. There was a, there was a company years ago that was trying to do this thing of like ranking influencers and everybody had a social rank in a number.

What, what you're talking about kind of reminds me of that similar concept of like, Hey, if you have, you know, a score of this, then all of a sudden all these offers were available to you to be able to participate in or do, or you might get free tickets somewhere. As a result of having a score at a certain level and things like that.

So yeah, that's a fascinating thing to be doing and tracking, so I, I'm sure that data will be very valuable in addition to everything else you're doing too.

Vince: Oh, of course. That's just one data point. There's also a lot of, there's the restaurant side of things too.

Chris: And like as you think about the future of Mustard Love, I mean if you can speak to it like is there plans to use that kind of data and analytics as that side of it grows?

Vince: I, I think that's one of the main value propositions of a tech company is that we can utilize all of these data points from both sides of the marketplace. Both influencers and restaurant. And when you look at, uh, as a whole, once we can combine this and go after new restaurants, for example, we get mom and pops shops that are coming in, or even agencies that are looking to do this, and they say, oh, well, I, I don't, I don't really, I'm already on a budget.

Uh, why should I do this? Um, it's, we have a lot of data points to alleviate some of the risks involved in getting started. And plus our, our, right now it's our platform is relatively low barrier of entry, like $300 a month is not a, it's not gonna break the bank. At least, I hope so for most restaurants.

Chris: I mean, that's like an add or two in a paper even.

I mean, I know we're talking digital, but for a local advertiser or a local restaurant, they may be even just thinking like, how can I get in the paper? Not just how can I be visible online

Vince: and compared to the local newspaper? I think, uh, influencer marketing is gonna be a lot more effective. You're getting a video, you're getting someone local talking about it, and who already has an existing followership.

Chris: And we talk about this all the time in our indu in our industry too, but like, you want to get people where they're at. And you wanna get people that are into food and who were those people looking to? The other people that are into food in their social media market and their social media channels. And the more you can get to them, that's actually a more effective avenue than trying to spend all your time and dollars just running Facebook and LinkedIn.

And you probably wouldn't run LinkedIn for food, but you know, Facebook and, uh, Twitter and, and wherever else you wanna put your money. Like there's, um, there are better uses of it. And I think this. Definitely sounds like one of them

Vince: for sure. Yeah.

Chris: That's what we see. Excellent. Well, Vince, thank you so much.

This has been fascinating to learn a little bit more about Mustard love. Before we go, I always ask, like to ask this question. I mean, this is, we built this brand, we're talking about branding and marketing. Um, what would you say is a brand that you most admire? Right now.

Vince: Yeah. So my background is in marketplaces and one of the biggest marketplace is Uber.

They built not just the product, but completely changed the industry. They understood the complexity of the transportation industry and made it effortless. Uh, and that's what we@must.love, strive to is that how can we make it super seamless for the con, for both the influencers and the restaurant side to connect with one another?

Chris: Well, very cool. And yeah, Uber's a great company. Um, I've used them plenty when I travel like I did to la but then I got choked. Um, I mean, Uber's a great company. They're definitely, you know, a huge part of how I get around when I travel. So. Um, yeah, I can definitely see that. It definitely has kept me from even having to rent a car like that.

Hassle's just not even in my purview anymore, unless I'm going somewhere really far out of the location where I fly into it. It's quite useful, so, yeah. Well, Vince, thank you so much. Where can people connect with you? Where can people connect with mustard.love and get to know you all better?

Vince: Uh, you can connect with us on, on our website, our mustard love.

Uh, we just in the name itself. And, uh, if anyone wants to get in touch with me, feel free to shoot me an email at Vince at Mustard Love.

Chris: All right, Vince. Well thank you so much for your time today. I do appreciate it. I appreciate it. Thanks Chris. Thanks for checking out this episode of We Built This Brand.

Don't forget to like and subscribe on your player of choice. You can also keep up with the podcast on we built this brand.com. If you like this episode, please give the podcast a five star review and make sure to tell all your friends about it so we can continue to build this brand.