AI's Last-Mile Problem, Premium Positioning & the Human Touch with Joseph Choi

Sure. My name’s Joseph, and I’m the director of marketing at BlackboxMyCar. We’re an e-commerce store that sells dash cams and high-end vehicle accessories across North America.

I joined BlackboxMyCar about ten to twelve years ago. I met the owner, Alex, at a party. At that time I had just gotten out of another startup. I was building a startup in the crypto space with a bunch of friends, and it didn’t really pan out. Alex was starting up BlackboxMyCar around then and was looking for someone who could help with marketing. We got to talking and it just made sense for me to join. I started off as a freelancer, because I was looking for a new client for my own agency, and eventually it became more of a full-time thing.
It made sense because I saw a lot of growth opportunities for dash cams. They were fairly new in the market, and there weren’t a lot of Korean dash cams available at that time, so there was a lot of growth potential.

I think the advantage of living in an environment where there are terrible drivers everywhere really helped. We see tons of people on the road, and I feel like drivers have gotten more terrible these days. So let’s be honest, everyone needs a dash cam. That’s what we sell. We sell peace of mind, we sell safety on the road, and we believe everyone needs it, so it made sense for us to push that.
As for how we differentiate from the dash cams you see on Amazon, you can get a very cheap fifty- to hundred-dollar dash cam there. We don’t cater to that. We’re more on the mid to high end, because we want to sell something reliable. A lot of customers come to us because they bought something really cheap off Amazon and it screwed up on them. They find out that it wasn’t actually recording after they get into an accident, and let me stress that, after the accident, when they realize their dash cam wasn’t recording. They come to us because of that incident, because they want something reliable. They’re not price sensitive at that point. They’re looking for something to protect them in those moments.

We have a variety of targets. There are people who are less price sensitive and looking for something that just works in their car, something reliable. Often it’s people who just bought a new car and want to protect their baby, or want to protect their friends and family members, or saw something on the road and realized, “Man, I need something.” We’ve also had customers come to us because they want to catch neighbors who vandalized their property, or they suspect their neighbors are doing something to them and want something in their car to protect them in those instances.

I think the beauty of AI is that it can gather data from all sorts of data points. It does the legwork of gathering all that data and consolidating it into one. Here’s the thing, though. I think what we misunderstand about AI is how to properly use it, and that’s what I call the last-mile problem. In transportation, the last-mile problem is about how you get products from the warehouse to the various customers. Amazon has largely figured that out. You bring the products into a warehouse, and the last-mile problem is how to efficiently optimize the route to get everything from the warehouse directly to customers, because every customer lives in a different place.
It’s the same idea with AI. AI is great at pulling data from the various APIs and data points into one consolidated answer. Any time you ask AI a question, it’s always going to spit out an answer for you, and it’s going to sound coherent. But you always need someone who can get through that last mile, making sure the answer it gives you actually applies to your business. That’s why you need a human in that loop, and that’s the part I excel at. I use ChatGPT specifically to gather as much data into one warehouse as possible, and it’s my job to make sure it makes sense and is actually usable for what we’re working on at BlackboxMyCar.

Let’s be honest, AI has democratized everything. Anybody can start using AI and sound really smart. The concern I have is that we’re living in a bubble, where we feel AI is always going to give us the answers we need, and it’s not. What AI is looking to replace is the human connection, the human relationships that are out there. We as business owners need to avoid that trap. We need to physically go out there and build those connections, and that’s something I’d say definitely don’t forget.

Largely, BlackboxMyCar to date has been a reseller. We’re a distributor for various high-end Korean brands: VIOFO, Thinkware and BlackVue are the three we specifically work with. But we also have our own lineup of BlackboxMyCar products, and we’ll be releasing a few products under our own private label very soon.
The best-selling product so far has been the BlackboxMyCar PowerCell 8 battery pack. It’s an accessory that powers your dash cam while you’re on and off the road, to give you extended parking mode. Parking mode is a feature that lets your dash cam keep recording after your car’s ignition is off. Without a battery pack, when you’ve hardwired the dash cam into your car, parking mode typically only lasts under an hour. After that, the dash cam shuts off because it doesn’t have enough power, so if something happens to your car, it’s not recording. With a battery pack, parking mode extends to twenty to twenty-five hours, because the dash cam has more power to draw on, and that keeps you protected. So we always recommend a dash cam battery pack.

We market heavily on Google Ads and Meta ads, which is our top of funnel and middle of funnel. We use remarketing to convert users after they click and come back. We also use email marketing on our website to present offers and do the educational piece. So users come in at the top or middle of the funnel, come over to our website, and sign up for the mailing list, and we remarket to them, with cart abandonment and all that, to get as many touch points as possible to bring them back to the website to close their purchase.
We’re also pretty heavy on social media: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. We try to post educational content as well as marketing content constantly to give value to our customers. That’s very top of funnel.

Great question. That’s the one thing I’ve been heavily trying to do, reduce the amount of AI on our social media. There are a lot of tools out there that heavily push the message of using AI to automate your marketing and your social media. Let’s be honest, it’s easy to use one of those tools to create content. But similar to what I was saying about building human relationships, you need to seem genuine and authentic through your social media, because it’s the closest thing customers have to an interaction with you before they reach out and talk to you. If you’re using AI for all of that, I call it garbage in, garbage out. There’s so much content out there, and it’s very easy to build something, but you really need that human touch to connect with your audience.

That’s right. I was going through a phase because I’d just had my daughter, and I was trying to relate the lessons I teach my daughter to business.

It’s to leverage your team. You’ve got to make sure there’s work-life balance, and to be honest, I think AI has really helped with that. You have to understand where your priorities lie. I learned a lot from realizing that my work is not necessarily my top priority. My daughter and my family are. So how do I make sure their needs are being met while running a business at the same time? I spent the last year really understanding where my priorities lie so that I can give both work and them equal attention. I’ve done so much reprioritizing in my life over the last four years, even after my daughter was born.

Don’t forget the human touch. You’re going to learn more from interacting with a customer than you can find by scraping through AI, because people have needs. The whole job of running a business is addressing those needs, those pain points. You can get some data from using AI to scrape Reddit and social media, but the meat of the value is ultimately going to come from an actual interaction with customers. You can’t forget about them. You’ve got to talk to them.

At BlackboxMyCar, we’re launching our own private label brand very soon, in about a month. It’s called Appaluka, and we’re going all in. The very first dash cam we’re launching is the Appaluka AP9, coming next month. I don’t want to unveil too much, because we’re still working on our marketing strategy, but it’s going to be big. We’re entering the dash cam field with our own private label dash cam. It’s a very value-driven brand, and it’s going to stand out from the rest of the competition.

Thank you for having me, Stephen. I really enjoyed our chat. It was fun.