Adam Torres and Lucas Judice discuss Freatz.
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Show Notes:
Why have statistics suddenly become so important in CX analysis? In this episode, Adam Torres and Lucas Judice, Founder & CEO at Freatz, explore the Freatz story and assessing the “wowness” factor.
About Lucas Judice
Throughout his life, Lucas been driven by a relentless pursuit of challenges and personal growth. From his early days selling lemonade at my parent’s beach house in Brazil at 5 years old to his initial foray into the legal world, and now Lucas transition into the tech entrepreneurial space, his journey has been marked by determination, adaptability, and a keen sense for business opportunities.
Today, with experience on the Board of Directors for 20 companies and a rich history in international ventures and conferences, Lucas leads as the CEO of Freatz / AlmoçoGrátis in both Brazil and the United States. His journey from the legal realm to the tech world underscores my adaptability, cross-cultural management skills, and global business strategy expertise.
About Freatz
AI Tech that maps the consumer experience through direct research, at no net cost, channeling a very large amount of data through proprietary AI algorithm to support businesses in making the most accurate Executive decision combining Customer Satisfaction and Revenue Growth.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest of the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so on the show today, we have Lucas Judas, who is founder and CEO over at Freets.
Lucas, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Adam, for having me. Pleasure to be here. Great to have you and large entrepreneur, audience, business owners, executives that listen to this show. And I love your topic that was proposed today. So how to wow customers that wildness factor and really the importance of wowing customers.
So I’m all in on that, but before we get into what you’re doing at free towel, we’re going to get into CX analysis, some statistics, like why that’s such a hot topic nowadays, or even what does that mean for those that are listening? They’re like, huh? What they just say, we’ll get into that a bit too. But just to get us kicked off, , you’re a founder.
Frietze were you always an entrepreneur? Where did that start for you? I would say so, even though I worked as a lawyer for 12 years, I had my own law office and even if I go back, my. And I was, I don’t know, four or five, six years old. I had my things, you know, or to go to the beach house, my family’s beach house, and then go sell jars and everything.
And so I think that that was always with me. But then what was the first small hustle? Well, you said it was jars. Like what kind of jars I’m always into my first one that I remember. I’m sure there was probably something before, but baseball cards is the first one where I was like, man, I made a hundred dollars.
Like that was my first. Three figure win . Not in one time, but you know, over time I was like, whoa, this is cool. , what was your, your first like, small hustle? You said jars or was it something else? Yeah, so basically I was really young, so I was five, six years old. Yeah. And then my family, they had, my family had that beach house back in Brazil.
I grew up in Brazil. But anyways, and then. I would go to the beach with my parents I would take many jars at the time was all glass, wasn’t plastic. And then I would collect shell shells and then sand and go back home, , hold that. Anyways, make the ugliest jar possible, but , with sand and then all the shells and then try to make like a decoration on that.
And then I would go to the porch to the front side. And then I would just sell it. I don’t remember making money off of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was funny. How’d you get that, like these ideas? Do you come from like an entrepreneurial family or like, do you remember that? Not really. Not really. My whole family is within the law sector.
Lawyers, judge, justice, and everything. So I don’t know. I think that was the only, I don’t know, that was awesome. I was just curious. I was just curious. I’m like, man, where’d you get that one from? I know when I was a kid, I know my dad was always trying to like, he, I think he definitely led me into things like, and just showed me the, like, okay, do this.
This is how you earn money kind of thing. But he was a small business owner, but I don’t know if he was the one. Provoking my baseball card selling so well, I don’t know but It’s funny because I don’t I don’t even remember, going to the you know, beach and then to the front Salad, but then I I saw a couple years ago.
Let’s say maybe 10 seven ten years ago I found a letter that my sister wrote to me when we were young. And then she was complaining, Oh, you get all the attention because of this and that, and then you’re selling this. And then she had a picture of the jar. So that’s how I, I, I kind of was reminded of that.
Get out! That’s insane! Yeah, that’s funny. So now fast forward. Forwarding quite a bit. Of course, you mentioned you were in law and and practice law. And then at some point did you give up practicing law to go into entrepreneurship and launch free? So, or do you still practice?
Like, give us a flavor for , how that transition took place. No, yeah. I don’t practice anymore, but it was an interesting transition to be honest, because I came back to the last to the masters at USC here in LA and then my master’s in middle was business law was way more business than law.
And then it got me back into that, you know, venture capital thing into a balance sheet that as a lawyer, you don’t see quite often or international transactions. So a lot of more business related topics, but not law law law. And then there was maybe one of the things that happened. And then the second thing was, you know, I had , my own law office back then and then the agreement that I had with my partner was that I would come to the US, stay one year and then go back to Brazil.
But that one year during the masters away from the office, that was the realization for me. You know what? Yeah. I don’t think I want to be a lawyer anymore. So the transition was, man, did the family, like , you come from the family lineage where you like excommunicated, where they like, whoa, whoa, that’s not my son.
Like how did that, how did that happen? I don’t know. I don’t know. Yeah, at that point I had my office, so I think it was a little different because in the beginning, maybe, , my, my, my father, he thought that I would just succeed and then take over his office, but then I understand from my own.
So when I decided to transition to, you know, just being an interpreter more, I think there was , the Like the moment that where you break the expectations, maybe there was you’re jumping off the ledge. That’s what I like to say. You’re jumping off the cliff. It’s done kind of exactly.
And but then that transition was kind of interesting because, I was already investing in startup companies that was working as a lawyer. So I decided to publish two books about startup law. And then that was kind of the transition to move from, , the lawyer side to the entrepreneurial side.
And then as of 2018, I believe there was a hundred percent focus on, on the growing my company. How’d you get the idea for free? It’s like, where’d that come from? I should say. Wasn’t just one day though, out of the blue. Oh, that’s a great idea. I’m going to pursue that.
I think it was a combination of, you know, a few friends of mine that became, , the founding team back then that one was a a PhD in customer satisfaction or consumer behavior. Sorry. Another one. Had her thesis in customer satisfaction and then I think , just , as a person, , I’m very curious about , people’s understanding of things or, , it’s kind of understanding the why behind people.
And then and that’s somewhat the, the base idea of the company, which is, okay, how can we understand people, but on a data perspective, how can we collect as much data as you can in terms of people understanding about, you know X, Y, and Z place and kind of transform that into business management recommendations, do’s and don’ts to have to help these businesses grow.
So I think the idea came from that combination of. My perspective or , my the way I am actually , just trying to be curious about people and then, , their perspective as well. And then,, we were talking, we were at a restaurant and then service was awful. And then,, you know what?
How can we, what can we do to make this better? How can we help them? And then that all goes back to, okay, how can we understand consumers? How can we help operators restaurant operators kind of bet best see the path moving forward in order to increase, more customers, more revenue and et cetera.
So. I think, again, a lot of, you know, things here and there, a lot of specific the moment in my life as well back then was a little different. I wanted to transition to make that transition, so I was kind of looking for different opportunities. Anyways, I think That goes back to , what drivers what, moves forward , and then that’s , that’s my reason.
Who’s your target market with this? Like who are you serving with free? It’s like, , who’s your, your avatar? I would say any B2C. Business to consumer business or type of entity that really needs to wow their customers. Yeah. When I say that, I mean, there are a lot of businesses that they don’t really need to wow customers, even though they should be, , trying to.
But especially, let’s say restaurants, a restaurant is, if you’re not wowing customers, basically you’re, , you’re gonna be that in a few months or, yeah. Yeah. So any business that really needs to understand consumers and instead of going only on the automatic or, you know, filling out boxes that someone tell them to do.
So you have to understand your consumers and you have to kind of apply do’s and don’ts in order to, to give more, to give back to your consumers, , to achieve the level expectation that they have. So again, any B2C business that needs to understand their consumers, but. Right now and then just, , to give a step back, we launched the company initially in Latin America, five countries there, and then in Latin America, we have different industries any B2C industry, but in the U.
S. as we moved and expanded to the U. S. in 2023, we’re only doing restaurants right now, so again, restaurant is the best example of a type of business that really needs to Wow, customers. And so you mentioned something earlier and I want to maybe unpack that a little bit more. You’re talking about the idea of like of analytics and how important that’s become.
And statistics maybe go a little bit further in that light. Like, how? So I don’t want to assume everybody knows that piece of it. Yeah. So It’s interesting. So we were able to find a way to use algorithm to kind of understand people’s thinking or mindset or how people interact with businesses. And to bring this to a more like day to day example, let’s say if you go to a restaurant and then you go with your X, Y, and Z expectation.
So let’s say you know the place and then you’ve been there many times. So you set that level of expectation for that specific place. But while you are there, and then you’re kind of, you know, You’re not realizing, but you, you are paying attention to everything. Is it too cold? Is it too hot? Is it too warm?
Is it warm? Is it are the waiters being friendly enough? What about the cleaners? And so you’re kind of paying attention to everything, even though you don’t realize you are, until that is a problem. Oh, it’s really dirty, that table, so you need to wipe that. So you kind of, you see the problems and that will either reflect your expectation or will not reflect your expectation.
So that’s one side, , which are things that are happening while you are there at a place, and then you are, or you may not be realizing that you’re paying attention to these little things. The other part of that is that everyone needs to be wowed by that experience. So there is an emotional connection between clients.
And they’re and the businesses. So do I want to go back , to ask for an axe? Maybe do I like it? Am I wowed by the experience? Is it helping my day? Is it, or maybe it’s quite the opposite. Whenever I go there, I’m super mad. So I just spoiled my whole day. So the point is, how can we find a relationship on, on data analysis?
Let’s say, how can we find the correlation between everything that I experienced in that restaurant? And the level of satisfaction that I have, was it the temperature? Was it, how comfortable were the seats is it , the friendliness, is it the product? So after we analyze so many different people for each one specific for each specific location, we’re able to use AI machine learning, a lot of data analysis tools to kind of understand, okay, what’s the cause and effect relationship, how can we increase the ability of someone to wow people with Any business to all their customers by understanding.
Okay. What are the most recurring problems? What are the most recurring strengths that everyone’s talking about? How can you highlight the strength and how can you fix the problems for your average consumer? Not the outlier. When you go to, again Google review or maybe Yelp or maybe any other platform, you’re seeing the outliers.
You’re seeing the super positive, the super negative. That’s not wowing people. That’s not hospitality. That is just, you know, super happy, super mad people. So you have to understand that they, what’s your average consumer, the 99 percent of people that will not go online to say whatever they want to say about your place.
And that’s, that’s what we do, which is basically. Using that AI perspective, using the algorithm to understand consumer behavior, to understand humans, to understand human relationship, to understand again, the person behind the persona, just to find the interest, the needs and desires of consumers in in that relationship they have with, with the businesses, no matter if it is a restaurant, which we’re doing in the U.
S. now, but could be a hotel, Could be airline, could be, you know, any type of business. If they need to, all their customers, they also need to understand what’s the best path, what’s the best course of action to keeping, to keep increasing that ability to all their consumers. When we, I want to, I want to go a little bit further.
Further into the platform. Cause at the end of this, I definitely want my, my audience to go check it out. So it’s just freets. com. Like you can see it. It’s pretty beautiful website and you can see how it works, but I want it for everybody driving in their car right now. They’re like, okay, but let’s relate it to maybe something, just the platform in general to jump around a bit that’s related to something that maybe some others have used either maybe like a Yelp or I don’t even know, like a Google review or something like that.
Like, how would you kind of like compare and contrast like use cases for that? As you mentioned, Yelp and, and, and other platforms. Let’s call them public forums. There you go. Absolute Mm-Hmm. I like that. You have your, you, you have your experience and then you like, I mean, extremely like that. And then you, you, you go praise that, or maybe really bad experience, and then you go, you just go.
And yell at someone at, sorry, at everyone online. But that’s not, as I mentioned, that’s not what we’re looking for. We want to survey, let’s call it this way. We want to assess, we want to talk to. Real consumers and we do this once again, let’s use the word survey. So we survey a lot of people and since we are trying to get their real perspective of everything that happened again, from product, many KPIs and products, service, physical environment, a lot of things.
We need to survey them in a lot of a lot of points. So it’s a kind of long survey. It’s a long, a little longer survey. Let’s say, you know, it seems like to me, the data just right there before we go a little bit further, I do want you to go further, but just like, so it seems like right there, the data, whether somebody was really, Happy about it or whether they’re really not feeling good about it.
Like when those yelp things that come up That’s a very emotional At that moment thing normally like when people are going to write that in my experience Nobody’s like taking time to think about a survey. They’re not being prompted with any intelligent question It’s like just come on throw up on me.
Tell me I guess well, that’s a bad pun. No pun intended with that one for But but especially talking about food and restaurants not didn’t mean to say that one. But It’s just very emotional and done like versus like you’re being proactive with surveys. It seems like the quality of the data would be better.
Am I, am I off on that? No, no, it’s correct. And then usually whenever someone says survey, people will think of old school markets, research companies, and that’s not the case. The point is when you get only one side of one perspective again, you know, the super positive or the super negative, or maybe, you know, the extremes, You’re not getting the real perspective.
No restaurant is made out of only super extreme, super you know, the super positive and super negative. Most of the consumers, I would say maybe in a good operation would say 97, 98 percent of the consumers, they are. The average consumer is that they may be a four star reviewers or maybe five stars and maybe three stars.
And then what, what’s a three star review? What, what does that mean? I mean, is it, is it good? Is it bad? I don’t care. Is it could be better? Is it could, you know, we don’t know, but the point is we need to track that all and then kind of understand, okay, what’s the reality of that place? What’s really happening in that place?
And then since we need these many KPIs, many, many indicators that we are understanding again, within product service, physical environment and everything we needed to make sure that we have the right users taking their time to answer a somewhat long questionnaire. And we do this by incentivizing their free time.
So basically reimbursement or cashback. So the way it works with the consumers is we’ll send the right consumers to that right place, which meaning the right demographics, and then they go, they live the experience, they do whatever they want to do, they buy whatever they want to buy, they eat whatever they want to eat they pay with their money, go back to the website, fill out the survey, and as soon as that survey is approved, we’ll reimburse X, Y, and Z dollars of that of that experience.
And it’s usually it’s the amount of reimbursement is usually enough to pay for an average experience. So let’s say 20, 25, 30, 35, 50, depending on the, on the restaurant. But I mean, we are somewhat, you know, just incentivizing their free time. They would be doing, you know, potentially nothing at some time, at some point, and then they would just, okay, let me answer these 20, 25, 30 questions, which are super easy to answer.
And then they get, boom, 25 here, and then another restaurant, another 40, another, another. So, at the end of the month, we have had, and sometimes we still do, users that, At the end of the month, they save like 3, 000 that they would be spending anyways outside because they have to dine out, but now they are just reimbursed getting that reimbursement.
And it’s almost an added extra revenue for them. So that’s the consumer side, which is, we need to incentivize real consumers to help the restaurants right. They, they are opinion leaders. They want to share their opinion. They want to be heard. They want to be important. They want to participate in that restaurant’s growth and that’s that’s what we provide to them.
Not only we give them a platform to be heard But also we incentivize with you know money that that time they are spending That makes, that makes so much sense. And it seems like the quality of the data, like everything else, the experience, like the, like all of that is going to be really a game changer and is a game changer for, for restaurants and for other businesses like that, how do so how do people get involved?
Like, let’s go into that piece of it. Like how, whether it’s a business looking to use freezes on the, on the business side of it. On the B2C side, or if it’s somebody that wants to, they’re like, what, wait a minute. I can, I can, you know, I can participate in this possibly through the survey process and otherwise, like, like how do people get involved?
Yeah. I mean, for for both business or our consumers freets. com, and then they’ll have all the information. They’ll be able to talk to us. But also on the, on the business side, it’s important for them to understand, okay, what am I getting from that? Am I getting a spreadsheet with a lot of numbers, a lot of percentage, or am I getting actual insights, usable data?
And that’s an important component of this because you have so many companies out there that are collecting data in different matters, in different ways, but they’re not necessarily making the data set usable, understandable, easy, easy to be implemented. And then that’s one of our mission as well, which is, okay, how can we get the most complex That is really, really accurate because we have a lot of cons, lots of consumers, a lot of KPIs every month and et cetera, and how can we transform that really complex dataset into beautiful and usable piece of content, really, you know, bite size, only one, two slides, extremely objective and, and, and showing exactly what are the actions they should take in order to improve that, While perception that will then improve revenue retention and et cetera.
So if, if a business operator is into understanding consumers, if they see how important that is, and if they are also willing to take, you know, some of the time to invest in, in going on a dashboard, going on PDF that understands that shows X, actually. What’s the best course of action? Etcetera. I mean, that’s the beginning of a relationship with us.
The reason why I’m saying this is because if there is a, let’s say an operator that it isn’t a business person that it isn’t necessarily into data or doesn’t really care about consumers opinion, that’s not a good match. But, you know, conversely, if they are into that, and then, of course that’s the beginning of a really nice relationship that we can build moving forward with them.
Amazing. And best way for people to follow up is at freets. com. Exactly. And we’ll, we’ll put that information in the, in the show notes and otherwise so that, and I looked at the website. It’s really cool. There’s a nice little button there. How it works. Click here to eat for free, eat, survey, get reimbursed, repeat.
I highly recommend everybody listening to this. Go, go check out the website and and participate, whether you’re the business owners out there and you value that type of feedback and everything that that was mentioned in today’s interview or, you know, if you’re on the other side and there’s opportunity and you want to figure that piece out too that that can work too.
So Lucas, it has been, I’m glad that we finally got, I know we’ve been trying to make this happen for a while. I’m glad that I could finally get you on the show and get more into what you’re doing over at Vox. And to the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters or listening to an episode, this is a daily show.
Each and every day we’re bringing new content, new guests, new business owners, new entrepreneurs and really hopefully new inspiration to help you along in your journey as well. So if, if you haven’t done it yet, I highly encourage you hit that subscribe button, hit that follow button, hit whatever button you have to hit to to get those notifications going forward.
Cause again, this is a daily show each and every day, new content and Lucas, thanks so much for making time for us, man. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Adam. And then, as I always say that is not just numbers. It tells a story about human behavior and desires. And you are really good at, you know, giving that opportunity for other people, other human, other, you know, business people to tell their story, to their, to tell their, you know, human side and then behind the company and their desires as entrepreneurs as well.
So thank you very much for inviting me and then hopefully we’ll be live swimming off.